Tag Archives: smart phones

Zoo Polar Bear Sports High-Tech Neckwear for Conservation

Study will help biologists track wild polar bears’ response to climate change

PORTLAND, Ore. — Tasul, an Oregon Zoo polar bear, recently landed her first white-collar job: research assistant for the U.S. Geological Survey. Her assignment: wearing a high-tech collar to help solve a climate change mystery. 

“Scientists and wildlife managers need to understand how polar bears are responding as sea ice retreats,” said Amy Cutting, Oregon Zoo curator. “But polar bears are notoriously difficult to study in the wild. Direct behavioral observations are nearly impossible.”

Enter Tasul.  (more…)

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Flawed Diamonds Promise Sensory Perfection

Berkeley Lab researchers and their colleagues extend electron spin in diamond for incredibly tiny magnetic detectors

From brain to heart to stomach, the bodies of humans and animals generate weak magnetic fields that a supersensitive detector could use to pinpoint illnesses, trace drugs – and maybe even read minds. Sensors no bigger than a thumbnail could map gas deposits underground, analyze chemicals, and pinpoint explosives that hide from other probes.

Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley, working with colleagues from Harvard University, have improved the performance of one of the most potent possible sensors of magnetic fields on the nanoscale – a diamond defect no bigger than a pair of atoms, called a nitrogen vacancy (NV) center. (more…)

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Buying ad time just got easier

Today’s consumers switch between media forms so often – from TV to laptops to smart phones – that capturing their attention with advertising has gone, as one CEO explained, from shooting fish in a barrel to shooting minnows. (more…)

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UCLA Engineers Develop New Energy-Efficient Computer Memory Using Magnetic Materials

MeRAM is up to 1,000 times more energy-efficient than current technologies

By using electric voltage instead of a flowing electric current, researchers from UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have made major improvements to an ultra-fast, high-capacity class of computer memory known as magnetoresistive random access memory, or MRAM.

The UCLA team’s improved memory, which they call MeRAM for magnetoelectric random access memory, has great potential to be used in future memory chips for almost all electronic applications, including smart-phones, tablets, computers and microprocessors, as well as for data storage, like the solid-state disks used in computers and large data centers. (more…)

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Made in IBM Labs: Researchers Unveil Nanotechnology Circuits for Wireless Devices

*Scientists Build the First Wafer-Scale Graphene Integrated Circuit Smaller than a Pinhead*

Yorktown Heights, NY – 10 Jun 2011: Today, IBM Research scientists announced that they have achieved a milestone in creating a building block for the future of wireless devices. In a paper published yesterday in the magazine Science, IBM researchers announced the first integrated circuit fabricated from wafer-size graphene, and demonstrated a broadband frequency mixer operating at frequencies up to 10 gigahertz (10 billion cycles/second).

Designed for wireless communications, this graphene-based analog integrated circuit could improve today’s wireless devices and points to the potential for a new set of appli-cations. At today’s conventional frequencies, cell phone and transceiver signals could be improved, potentially allowing phones to work where they can’t today while, at much higher frequencies, military and medical personnel could see concealed weapons or conduct medical imaging without the same radiation dangers of X-rays. (more…)

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Made in IBM Labs: New Chip Technology Paves the Way to a Faster Internet

*Helps networks to keep pace with exploding number of internet users — from people to machines*

ARMONK, N.Y., – 09 Nov 2010: IBM today announced a new chip-making technology that can be used to create advanced semiconductors that can keep pace with the exploding number of internet-connected devices and the tidal wave of data they are generating.

The Cu-32 Custom Logic offering employs unique IBM technology — designed by IBM Research — to dramatically increase the memory capacity and processing speeds of chips used in fiber-optic and wireless networks, and in such gear as routers and switches. The technology can help manufacturers and network operators handle the data deluge driven by consumers’ appetites for smart phones and other Web-connected devices. (more…)

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