… and watching them might be possible sooner than we can “dream of.” Uh oh, some of my dreams are cringeworthy and totally morbid. But I could create some crazy plots out of them. Hmm.
Could We Record Our Dreams?, AsapSCIENCE (via GIZMODO)
There are two glass containers, each containing a cloud of billions of caesium gas atoms. Both glass containers are enclosed in a chamber with a magnetic field. The two glass containers are not connected to each other, but information is teleported from the one glass cloud to the other by means of laser light. (Credit: Niels Bohr Institute)
For many years now, researchers have been successful in teleporting information from light to light at a quantum level. Now, a research group at Neils Bohr Institute has succeeded in teleporting information between two clouds of gas not just once or a few times, but every time. The results are published in Nature Physics.
“It is a very important step for quantum information research to have achieved such stable results that every attempt will succeed,” says Eugene Polzik, professor and head of the research center Quantop at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.The experiments are conducted in the laboratories of the research group in the basement under the Niels Bohr Institute. There are two glass containers, each containing a cloud of billions of caesium gas atoms.
The two glass containers are not connected to each other, but information is teleported from the one glass cloud to the other by means of laser light. The light is sent into the first glass container and then that strange quantum phenomenon takes place, the light and gas become entangled. The fact that they are entangled means that they have established a quantum link – they are synchronised.
Read the rest at Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen:
Quantum teleportation between atomic systems over long distances
In this jaw-dropping feat of engineering, a flying robot can now be steered just by using your thoughts. That’s right — you can now control a drone with your mind through a non-invasive brain-computer interface technology pioneered by University of Minnesota biomedical engineering professor Bin He. Brain waves are picked up by electrodes on the scalp and not by an implanted chip in your brain.
Read more at UM News: Mind Over Mechanics
A report on the technology has been published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.
Developed by CrazyLabo and the Kitakyushu National College of Technology in Japan, these sniffing robots will rudely make you aware of your bad smelling breath and feet. When you breathe into Kaori-chan’s face, the humanoid, she will analyze your breath and tell you straight up how she can’t stand it. Shuntaro-kun, on the other hand, will sniff your feet and lose consciousness if the stink is extremely bad.
(via Oh Gizmo!)
The graphic illustrates a high power battery technology from the University of Illinois. Ions flow between three-dimensional micro-electrodes in a lithium ion battery.(Image courtesy of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology).
Super small in size, but super big in power. This describes the microbatteries developed by the researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by William P. King, professor of mechanical science and engineering. These batteries are said to be the “most powerful batteries on the planet” yet measure just a few millimeters in size. A cellphone powered by these batteries could jump-start a dead car battery, and then recharge the phone in an instant. They out-power even the best super-capacitors.
Read the rest at News Bureau, Illinois: Small in size, big on power: New microbatteries a boost for electronics
Secrets From The Potato Chip Factory from Planet Money on Vimeo.
Fascinating video of how technology has made your favorite potato chips cheaper, easily available, and more uniformly colored.
(via i am bored)
This is mind blowing.
As demonstrated by Oxford University scientists, a custom-built programmable 3D printer can create cell-like materials that can carry out some functions of a living tissue. The new material is composed of connected water droplets encased within lipid films, much like a real cell membrane. Because it’s synthetic with no genetic material, it avoids some of the problems encountered, like controlling cell division or growth, in other approaches to creating artificial tissues such as those using stem cells. The special 3D printer was built by Gabriel Villar, a DPhil student in Professor Bayley’s group and the lead author of the paper reported in Science.
‘We aren’t trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues,’ said Professor Hagan Bayley of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, who led the research. ‘We’ve shown that it is possible to create networks of tens of thousands connected droplets. The droplets can be printed with protein pores to form pathways through the network that mimic nerves and are able to transmit electrical signals from one side of a network to the other.’
Read the rest at University of Oxford: 3D printer can build synthetic tissues
Journal Reference:
Villar, G., Graham, A.D., & Bayley, H. (2013). A tissue-like printed material. Science, 340(6128), 48-52. doi: 10.1126/science.1229495
(videos uploaded by Ed Yong, via Not Exactly Rocket Science)
Actual image (N from the NIST logo) extracted from the vapor. NIST has a brief animation of their entire logo stored within and extracted from the vapor.(Credit: NIST)
Storing data in a cloud? This one’s for real. Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have stored visual images, though for just 10 milliseconds, within an “ethereal memory device – a thin vapor of rubidium atoms.” This may prove useful in creating memory for quantum computers.
Read the rest at NIST: Don’t Call It Vaporware: Scientists Use Cloud of Atoms as Optical Memory Device
The journal reference:
Clark, J.B., Glorieux, Q., & Lett,P.D. (2013). Spatially addressable readout and erasure of an image in a gradient echo memory. New Journal of Physics, 15 (3), 035005. doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/15/3/035005
While Google Glass is not yet readily available for consumers with shallow pockets like me, let’s allow ourselves to be amused by its potential uses. The one above is a video of how guys will use it in dating. Hmmm, women are at a disadvantage here, because it would be more difficult (and more obvious) to take a picture of what’s “down there” especially since the table would be blocking the view most of the time. Or worse, it’s not bulky enough to merit a photograph and a post at Instagram. Tsk.
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Some of the damage CALTECH engineers intentionally inflicted on their self-healing power amplifier using a high-power laser. The chip was able to recover from complete transistor destruction. This image was captured using a scanning electron microscope.
Credit: Jeff Chang and Kaushik Dasgupta (via CalTech)
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Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.
Read the rest at CalTech News: Creating indestructible self-healing circuits
