Photo: Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics
Source: IEEE.ORG
4 May 2010—Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, led by Gerhard Rempe, have created a system based on a single atom that they’re calling a ”quantum optical transistor.” The transistor could someday serve as part of a quantum computer or as a node of a quantum data network.
”We’re doing what people in the Bell Laboratories did in the 1950s,” says Eden Figueroa, one of the physicists involved in the project. ”They were inventing the transistor, and people thought they were crazy. But 50 years later, everyone is using a laptop.” Now, he says, ”we’re inventing the quantum transistor that may be used in computers 30 years from now.”
Their process relies on a complex light manipulation technique called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). In EIT, one beam of light controls the properties of another, much as the gate voltage controls current through a regular transistor. The researchers demonstrated EIT through the mediation of a single atom, which is a first; previously the technique was applied to hundreds of thousands of atoms in a gas.
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Internet, Sci/tech, Technology
Internet, Sci/tech, Technology
A Pentagon-sponsored project to control flying insects remotely has sent ripples of excitement across the scientific pond.
Part insect, part machine, the “cyborg beetle” has been tested successfully by its developers at the University of California, Berkeley.
Video footage shows a beetle being “flown” around a room by a man using a laptop.
At one point it is tethered to a transparent plastic plate, and its tiny limbs can be seen twitching in response to the operator’s joy stick.
The developers, Michel Maharbiz and Hirotaka Sato, “demonstrated the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radio-equipped miniature neural stimulating system”, they told the current edition of Frontiers in Neuroscience magazine.
Noel Sharkey, professor of robotics and artificial intelligence at the UK’s Sheffield University, says that while attempts to control insects such as cockroaches are not new, this is the first time man has managed to remotely control a flying insect.
What intrigues him is the Berkeley project’s ultimate military application. Read more…
Biotech, Sci/tech, Technology
Biotech, Sci/tech, Technology
from: NASA
Remember the LCROSS project, the one in which NASA plans to fire a huge exploding rocket into the moon? The goal is to eject debris from the surface of one of moon’s craters and discovering whether there’s frozen water there.
Well, the time to sit back, relax, grab some popcorn and watch the mission as it unfolds is drawing near. Early tomorrow, on October 9, 6:15 a.m. EDT/3:15 a.m. PDT, NASA will start a live TV broadcast that will include live footage from the spacecraft camera, real-time telemetry based animation, expert commentary, and possibly some live footage from the 88-inch telescope located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Sci/tech
Sci/tech
