Category Technology/Electronics

Battery-like Computer Memory Keeps Working Above 1,000°F

Battery-like computer memory keeps working above 1,000°F

The memory devices fabricated using tantalum oxide on this chip can store data for both conventional memory and in-memory computing above 1,000°F. Credit: Brenda Ahearn, Michigan Engineering

Computer memory could one day withstand the blazing temperatures in fusion reactors, jet engines, geothermal wells and sweltering planets using a new solid-state memory device developed by a team of engineers led by the University of Michigan.

Unlike conventional silicon-based memory, the new device can store and rewrite information at temperatures over 1,100°F (600°C)—hotter than the surface of Venus and the melting temperature of lead. It was developed in collaboration with researchers at Sandia National Laboratory.

“It could enable electronic devices that didn’t exist for high-tempera...

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AI infiltrates the rat world: New Robot can Interact Socially with Real Lab Rats

A robot rat that interreacts socially with real lab rats
Robot–rat social interaction paradigm: a rat-like robot plays the role of a rat conspecific to interact with another rat via multiple interaction patterns.Nature Machine Intelligence (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-024-00939-y

A team of roboticists at the Beijing Institute of Technology, working with a pair of colleagues from the Technical University of Munich, has created a new kind of rat robot—one that was designed to interact in social ways with real rats.

In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the group describes how they used artificial intelligence to train their robot rat to behave like a real rat...

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Experiment verifies a Connection between Quantum Theory and Information Theory

A connection between quantum theory and information theory proved
With the help of a new experiment, researchers at Linköping University, among others, have succeeded in confirming a 10-year-old theoretical study that connects one of the most fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics—the complementarity principle—with information theory. Credit: Magnus Johansson

Researchers from Linköping University together with colleagues from Poland and Chile have confirmed a theory that proposes a connection between the complementarity principle and entropic uncertainty. Their study is published in the journal Science Advances.

“Our results have no clear or direct application right now. It’s basic research that lays the foundation for future technologies in quantum information and quantum computers...

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Why Timekeeping is Now on the Verge of a Giant Leap Forward in Accuracy

The equipment to precisely measure the energy needed to excite the thorium-229 nucleus, which is the core of a future nuclear clock.
The equipment to precisely measure the energy needed to excite the thorium-229 nucleus, which is the core of a future nuclear clock. Chuankun Zhang/JILA

Time is vital to the functioning of our everyday lives: from the watches on our wrists to the GPS systems in our phones. Communication systems, power grids, and financial transactions all rely on precision timing. Seconds are the vital units of measurement in timekeeping.

Surprisingly, there is still debate over the definition of the second. But recent advances in the world’s most accurate forms of timekeeping may have just changed the game.

Accurate timekeeping has always been part of humankind’s social evolution...

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