It may not look nice, but maybe it can help prevent accidents. 😃
It’s generally good to watch where you’re going while out walking around, but if you’re someone who just can’t resist a glance at your phone – or a full scrolling session – then this industrial design student’s third eye is for you.
Created as part of his Innovation Design Engineering degree at London’s Royal College of Art and Imperial College, student Minwook Paeng came up with the impressive piece of tech to help out all the ‘phono-sapiens’ out there.
These clever semiconductors make our internet-connected world go round. In addition to iPhones and PlayStations, they underpin key national infrastructure and sophisticated weaponry.
But recently there haven’t been enough of them to meet demand.
The reasons for the ongoing global chip shortage, which is set to last into 2022 and possibly 2023, are complex and multifaceted. However, nations are planning to pump billions of dollars into semiconductors over the coming years as part of an effort to sure up supply chains and become more self-reliant, with money going toward new chip plants, as well as research and development.
Marilyn Monroe famously sang that diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but they are also very popular with quantum scientists—with two new research breakthroughs poised to accelerate the development of synthetic diamond-based quantum technology, improve scalability, and dramatically reduce manufacturing costs.
While silicon is traditionally used for computer and mobile phone hardware, diamond has unique properties that make it particularly useful as a base for emerging quantum technologies such as quantum supercomputers, secure communications and sensors.
However there are two key problems; cost, and difficulty in fabricating the single crystal diamond layer, which is smaller than one millionth of a meter.
ETH Computer scientists have developed a new AI solution that enables touchscreens to sense with eight times higher resolution than current devices. Thanks to AI, their solution can infer much more precisely where fingers touch the screen.
Quickly typing a message on a smartphone sometimes results in hitting the wrong letters on the small keyboard or on other input buttons in an app. The touch sensors that detect finger input on the touch screen have not changed much since they were first released in mobile phones in the mid-2000s.
In contrast, the screens of smartphones and tablets are now providing unprecedented visual quality, which is even more evident with each new generation of devices: higher color fidelity, higher resolution, crisper contrast. A latest-generation iPhone, for example, has a display resolution of 2532×1170 pixels. But the touch sensor it integrates can only detect input with a resolution of around 32×15 pixels—that’s almost 80 times lower than the display resolution: “And here we are, wondering why we make so many typing errors on the small keyboard? We think that we should be able to select objects with pixel accuracy through touch, but that’s certainly not the case,” says Christian Holz, ETH computer science professor from the Sensing, Interaction & Perception Lab (SIPLAB) in an interview in the ETH Computer Science Department’s “Spotlights” series.
Paralysed from the neck down, the man stares intently at a screen. As he imagines handwriting letters, they appear before him as typed text thanks to a new brain implant.
The 65-year-old is “typing” at a speed similar to his peers tapping on a smartphone, using a device that could one day help paralysed people communicate quickly and easily.
Researchers in Singapore have found a way of controlling a Venus flytrap using electric signals from a smartphone, an innovation they hope will have a range of uses from robotics to employing the plants as environmental sensors.
Luo Yifei, a researcher at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), showed in a demonstration how a signal from a smartphone app sent to tiny electrodes attached to the plant could make its trap close as it does when catching a fly.
“Plants are like humans, they generate electric signals, like the ECG (electrocardiogram) from our hearts,” said Luo, who works at NTU’s School of Materials Science and Engineering.
The findings could lead to faster, more secure memory storage, in the form of antiferromagnetic bits.
When you save an image to your smartphone, those data are written onto tiny transistors that are electrically switched on or off in a pattern of “bits” to represent and encode that image. Most transistors today are made from silicon, an element that scientists have managed to switch at ever-smaller scales, enabling billions of bits, and therefore large libraries of images and other files, to be packed onto a single memory chip.
But growing demand for data, and the means to store them, is driving scientists to search beyond silicon for materials that can push memory devices to higher densities, speeds, and security.
