Category Technology/Electronics

Universal Declaration of Human Rights recorded into 5D optical data storage. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southampton

Scientists at the Uni of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years. Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of 5D digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving...

University of Utah materials science and engineering associate professor Ashutosh Tiwari holds up a substrate layered with a newly discovered 2-D material made of tin and oxygen. Tiwari and his team have discovered this new material, tin monoxide, which allows electrical charges to move through it much faster than common 3-D material such as silicon. This breakthrough in semiconductor material could lead to much faster computers and mobile devices such as smartphones that also run on less power and with less heat. Credit: Dan Hixson/University of Utah College of Engineering

The semiconductor, made of tin monoxide (SnO), is a layer of 2D material only 1 atom thick, allowing electrical charges to move through it much faster than conventional 3D materials such as silicon...

Heliafilm – superior low light and high temperature energy harvesting performance.

Note that number, 13.2%. Heliatek, in its research for new organic absorber materials, said it set a new organic photovoltaic (OPV) world record for the direct conversion of sunlight into electricity using OPV multi-junction (using more than one material) cell, thanks to the “excellent low light and high temperature behavior of the organic semiconductor.”

Heliatek said they had a small molecule, vacuum deposition process on a plastic film substrate. The cell is a multi-junction cell combining 3 absorbers. Each of them is dedicated to convert green-, red- or near-infrared light of the wavelength range between 450 and 950 nm into electricity...

Robots at the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US Warren Stamping Plant are seen in Michigan

Advances in artificial intelligence will soon lead to robots that are capable of nearly everything humans do, threatening tens of millions of jobs in the coming 30 years, experts warned Saturday.

“We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task,” said Moshe Vardi, director of the Institute for Information Technology at Rice University in Texas.

“I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?” he asked at a panel discussion on artificial intelligence at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Vardi said there w...