Category Technology/Electronics

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and their collaborators from the University of California, Irvine have created fundamental electronic building blocks out of tiny structures known as quantum dots and used them to assemble functional logic circuits. The innovation promises a cheaper and manufacturing-friendly approach to complex electronic devices that can be fabricated in a chemistry laboratory via simple, solution-based techniques, and offer long-sought components for a host of innovative devices.

“Potential applications of the new approach to electronic devices based on non-toxic ...

With a training technique commonly used to teach dogs to sit and stay, Johns Hopkins University computer scientists showed a robot how to teach itself several new tricks, including stacking blocks. With the method, the robot, named Spot, was able to learn in days what typically takes a month.

By using positive reinforcement, an approach familiar to anyone who’s used treats to change a dog’s behavior, the team dramatically improved the robot’s skills and did it quickly enough to make training robots for real-world work a more feasible enterprise. The findings are newly published in a paper called, “Good Robot!”

“The question here was how ...

POSTECH Professor Byoungwoo Kang’s research team uncovers a new Li-ion battery electrode material that can achieve high-energy density and high power capability per volume without reducing particle size.

With Telsa in the lead, the electric vehicle market is growing around the world. Unlike conventional cars that use internal combustion engines, electric cars are solely powered by lithium ion batteries, so the battery performance defines the car’s overall performance...

Researchers have demonstrated a new technique for carrying out sensitive quantum operations on atoms. In this technique, the control laser light is delivered directly inside a chip. This should make it possible to build large-scale quantum computers based on trapped atoms.

Hitting a specific point on a screen with a laser pointer during a presentation isn’t easy — even the tiniest nervous shaking of the hand becomes one big scrawl at a distance. Now imagine having to do that with several laser pointers at once. That is exactly the problem faced by physicists who try to build quantum computers using individual trapped atoms...