World record set in data transmission

Dayou Qian of NEC managed a transmission rate of 101.7 terabits per second across 165 meters of fiber.
For a visual to ponder on that's equivalent to 250 double-sided Blu-ray discs or approximately three solid months of HD video. That's  a bit for sure. Current speeds between Washington DC and NY is only a few terabits per second currently.

      He did this by "squeezing" pulses of ligth from 370 lasers into the pulse received by the receiver. Each laser emitted it's own sliver of infrared that contained several phases, polarities, and amplitudes of light waves that was used to code the packets of information.

      Jun Sakaguchi of Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo, has his own version with a 7 light guiding cores in one length of fiber and each core carried 5.6 Tbps for a total of 109 Tbps total transfer.

      Both of these however are not especially practical currently with multi-core fibre being notoriously complicated to produce and amplifying the signals for long distance transmission for both. But data tranfer needs to ncrease witht he demand and this might be the answer, the first likely to adopt his technology would be the data servers in Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

MIT researches use M13 virus to increase solar cell efficiency

By adding a geniticaly modified version of the m13 virus to dye-sensitized solar cells to wrangle, position and coat carbon nanotubes in titanium dioxide. This will keep the tubes aligned and seperated for a boost in efficiency around 8-10.6% even though the virus' will be less than 0.1% of the weight of the finished cell.

      The virus' grab the nanotubes with thier peptides and can hold abotu 10 nanotubes with 300 pertides per virus.“It is likely that the virus template assembly has enabled the researchers to establish a better contact between the TiO2 nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes. Such close contact with TiO2 nanoparticles is essential to drive away the photo-generated electrons quickly and transport it efficiently to the collecting electrode surface.”

      The virus' also alow the process to be carried out in a water medium at room temprature. Since the virus' can be implemented in one simple step axisting amnufacturing should be able to easily adapt to the new process, keeping prices low.


Neat stuff again, more nanotubes, more soloar cells... good stuff.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/solar-virus-0425.html

Artificial synapse created useing nanotubes

Alice Parker and Chongwu Zhou of USC used carbon nanotubes to mimic synapses used in the human brain, they feel that while they are still decades away from true artificial brains that this is a big step in the right irection, the biggest problem is with scale, producing nanotubes on that scale is still not quite up to snuff.

      Artificial brains could be utilized for AI applications but the biggest problem is with the limited plasticity of the nanotubes, real synapses can adjust, multiply and die off as needed, as apposed o the inherently stactic nature of nanotube synapses.

      Mabye if they utilize some of the phase change materials being developed they could possibly create an artificial brain, but the technology is still ahead of us.


It was a pretty short article so there is not much else to say about it, but it is sort of neat to be up to date on the new breakthroughs in technology.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/25/researchers-build-synthetic-synapse-circuit-prosthetic-brains-s/

Triumph of the Nerds Pt. 3

The Macintosh launch put a big goofy grin on my face, it was geektastic =p.
Oracle guy( Larry Allison) predicted cloud computing future for Internet. You hear about vision and such but until you experience it for yourself it really doe snto sink in how neat it is. How today the things Allison said are coming to pass, how apt it is that he heads Oracle.

      I found that I do not like Steve Jobs as a person... and it is amazing how such personalities succeed in so many ways, despite even open distaste for the person. A little bit off topic but I think it is an interesting note anyway. You expect something more from people you hear about but they are just people, and not even likable ones at that.

      I always like when i can feel like the information I have is useful or at least able to be referenced, such as when he talked about Windows 95 and how it did away with DOS, I was thinking "Well it combined DOS and the previous Windows GUI into something new but similar, DOS was not really done away with until Windows 2000/NT (If I recall correctly). Sorta nice to feel smart =p.

      Such rampant piracy would seem like a bad thing but I think that short of the open source philosophy it is one of the major ways things can change and get better, you see something neat and think "I could do better" is the heart of what drives innovation in my opinion. Some would say well how would you feel if someone blatantly stole your idea and got rich off of it. Sure I would be frustrated maybe a little angry, but really who can I be mad at besides myself, if I failed to capitalize on something someone else did after I had the idea. I would try to take the enlightened approach to the topic and try to use it as either a way to get better (so it does not happen again) or to gain some small solace in the fact that my contribution, even though unrecognized maybe, would still go towards making things better overall, an I would like that.

      I really liked the movie overall, but then again I also like cheesy horror movies, and Farside comics, so take from that what you will =p.

I realize this post had a lot more emoticons in it, but thats just the mood i'm in at the moment and you should just be thankful that I did not use internet/game slang the 4-5 time I could have >=P. Also I would not do you (read: no one, because this blog will never get read, except mabye the teacher) the injustice of shielding you from the full force of my textual charisma.

Ja

Laser sparkplugs!

lasers are always better, but besides that it is more efficient, you get  a cleaner burn because lasers can ignite leaner fuel mixtures without wearing like standard electrical arc spark plugs. They also can be focused closer to the center of the piston to produce a more complete burn, and achieve more power, with less waste and byproduct.

      Japanese researchers from National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Japan, have designed a ceramic two beam laser small enough to fit into a cylinder. Besides more complete combustion the lasers Will also produce a quicker combustion; normal plugs take milliseconds, but laser plugs will take nanoseconds to do the same thing better! How neato is that, they haven't actually started producing these plugs yet but are working with a large, unnamed spark plug company and DENSO Corp.

      They say they can be produced economically in large quantities so if things work out we could soon have laser plugs in most car engines, as Ford is working on something similar to this for itself. More fuel economy is a welcome change in this market with gas prices how they are, plus it is just plain cool =p


As usual I left out the techobabble for various reasons but here is the link to the article I saw as well as the main article.


http://gizmodo.com/#!5794073/your-new-cars-engine-will-work-with-lasers-not-spark-plugs

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-laser-revolution-internal-combustion.html

LED droop souce discovered

Researchers found out that the droop in effeciency Nitrade based LEDs experience at the higher power levels, is caused by indirect auger recombination, which is where electrons fall out createing a hole which nearby electrons try to fill in or get knocked out of.

Basically what it means is that at higher levels of power use (such as for household lighting) LEDs receive a drop in effieciancy, nad scientisits knew it happend but never knew why, and now they do. This could mean more effecieint LED lighting could replace incandecent or CFL bulbs.

Neat stuff, a little heady but interesting none-the-less.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110419164211.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

Teleportation of Quantum data

Researchers at the university of south wales successfully "teleported" packets of light waves in a complex quantum data string.

"It opens the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via quantum communications networks."

it is a fairly brief article with a lot of technical data, I couldn't hope to explain it all here without making all involved in the process numb and reeling. Basically they transferred a complex string of linear equations with no actuall transfer. The subject was destroyed on the original end and created on the other. Since there is no real middle the data is duplicated with high fidelity at the other end. I really don;t know what else to do without spewing alot of jargon, so her eis the link and some wiki sites I used to try to figure out why this was a deal =p

 http://www.kurzweilai.net/beam-me-up-qantum-teleporter-breakthrough

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium