Category Physics

Femtosecond pulsed lasers—which emit light in ultrafast bursts lasting a millionth of a billionth of a second—are powerful tools used in a range of applications from medicine and manufacturing, to sensing and precision measurements of space and time. Today, these lasers are typically expensive table-top systems, which limits their use in applications that have size and power consumption restrictions.

An on-chip femtosecond pulse source would unlock new applications in quantum and optical computing, astronomy, optical communications and beyond...

Responsive material changes its behavior based on earlier conditions
Inspired by living systems, researchers at Aalto University have developed a new material that changes its electrical behaviour based on previous experience, effectively giving it a basic form of adaptive memory. Such adaptive materials could play a vital role in the next generation of medical and environmental sensors, as well as in soft robots or active surfaces.

Responsive materials have become common in a range of applications, from glasses that darken in sunlight to drug delivery systems...

Solving the riddle can reduce electric car battery consumption and make life tougher for currency speculators in the future. The discovery has just won the award for best research article and was honored at the field’s most prestigious conference in the United States.

For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been struggling with an algorithmic problem known as “the single source shortest path problem.” The problem is essentially about how to devise a mathematical recipe that best finds the shortest route between a node and all other nodes in a network, where there may be connections with negative weights.

Sound complicated? Possibly...

Transforming bacterial cells into living artificial neural circuits; applications include biomanufacturing and therapeutics. Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, Technion and MIT scientists collaborated to produce cells engineered to compute sophisticated functions – “biocomputers” of sorts. Graduate students and researchers from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Professor Ramez Daniel’s Laboratory for Synthetic Biology & Bioelectronics worked together with Professor Ron Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create genetic “devices” designed to perform computations like artificial neural circuits...