Category Technology/Electronics

Rahim Esfandyarpour helped to develop a way to create a diagnostic “lab on a chip” for just a penny. Inset: The lab on a chip comprises a clear silicone microfluidic chamber for housing cells and a reusable electronic strip — a flexible sheet of polyester with commercially available conductive nanoparticle ink.
Zahra Koochak

Stanford University School of Medicine has developed a way to produce a cheap and reusable diagnostic “lab on a chip” with the help of an inkjet printer. At a cost of as little as 1 cent per chip, the new technology could usher in a medical diagnostics revolution like the kind brought on by low-cost genome sequencing. The inexpensive lab-on-a-chip technology has the potential to enhance diagnostic capabilities around the world, especially in developing countries...

1. How to make ceramic foam ink 2. Close up image of one node of the triangular honeycomb. The structure, which consists of air surrounded by ceramic, can be designed with specific porosity. (Image courtesy of James Weaver/Wyss Institute)

Nature does amazing things with limited design materials. Grass, for example, can support its own weight, resist strong wind loads, and recover after being compressed. The plant’s hardiness comes from a combination of its hollow, tubular macrostructure and porous, or cellular, microstructure. These architectural features work together to give grass its robust mechanical properties. Harvard SEAS, Wyss Institute and MIT have developed a new method to 3D print materials with independently tunable macro-and microscale porosity using a ceramic foam ink...

Terahertz wireless links to spaceborne satellites could make gigabit-per-second connection speeds available to anyone anytime, anywhere on the face of the earth, on the ground or in flight.

A Terahertz (THz) transmitter capable of transmitting digital data at a rate >100 gigabits (= 0.1 terabit) per second over a single channel using the 300-GHz band has been developed. This technology enables data rates 10X or more, faster than that offered by the fifth-generation mobile networks (5G), expected to appear around 2020. The THz band is a new and vast frequency resource expected to be used for future ultrahigh-speed wireless communications.

The research group has developed a transmitter that achieves a communication speed of 10Gb/s using the frequency range from 290 – 315 GHz...

Professor Ebrahim Karimi, a member of uOttawa’s Department of Physics and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Structured Light, and doctoral student Frédéric Bouchard observe the setup they used to clone the photons that transmit information, called qudits.

As we saw during the 2016 US election, protecting traditional computer systems from hackers is not a perfect science. University of Ottawa have uncovered clues that could help administrators protect quantum computing networks from external attacks. “Our team has built the first high-dimensional quantum cloning machine capable of performing quantum hacking to intercept a secure quantum message,” said University of Ottawa Department of Physics professor Ebrahim Karimi, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Structured Light...