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Image: MIT

Issue no. 40, 2011 Published: Nov 18, 2011
Scientists at MIT replicate brain activity with chip
Metallic hydrogen makes its debut, maybe
Liquid could power and cool mobile supercomputers
New material promises faster internet
Engineers boost battery strength with small holes
Sensor-laden dragonfly may help future robots soar

Scientists at MIT replicate brain activity with chip
Scientists are getting closer to the dream of creating computer systems that can replicate the brain. Researchers at MIT have designed a computer chip that mimics how the brain's neurons adapt in response to new information. Such chips could eventually enable communication between artificially created body parts and the brain. It could also pave the way for artificial intelligence devices. There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, each of which forms synapses - the connections between neurons that allow information to flow - with many other neurons. This process is known as plasticity and is believed to underpin many brain functions, such as learning and memory. The MIT team has been able to design a computer chip that can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse. Activity in the synapses relies on so-called ion channels which control the flow of charged atoms such as sodium, potassium and calcium. The 'brain chip' has about 400 transistors and is wired up to replicate the circuitry of the brain. Current flows through the transistors in the same way as ions flow through ion channels in a brain cell. The team plans to use their chip to build systems to model specific neural functions, such as visual processing. Such systems could be much faster than computers which take hours or even days to simulate a brain circuit. The chip could ultimately prove to be even faster than the biological process.
BBC News Nov 17, 2011	back to top

Metallic hydrogen makes its debut, maybe
Hydrogen gas squeezed at tremendous pressures has transformed into a metal, according to scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, whose bold claim is being met with scepticism. Many scientists have tried to make metallic hydrogen since its existence was first predicted in 1935. The substance is thought to form at high pressures, such as those in Jupiter's core. It may be a superconductor at room temperature, useful for making wires that carry electricity with little loss of current. And NASA hopes to one day put it to work as a rocket fuel that would be more powerful than anything around today. To see if hydrogen could be made to conduct electricity, the team squeezed a room temperature sample of the gas between two diamonds. At a pressures of more than 2.3 million times that of Earth's atmosphere, the hydrogen became opaque and reflective. Its resistance to the flow of current dropped to one ten-thousandth that of hydrogen at lower pressures. That is evidence that the gas changed into something else, say the researchers. To show that this new substance was a metal, they cooled it from room temperature to 30 kelvins. The resistance rose slightly, but the material remained conductive. However, other physicists aren't convinced that the hydrogen changed into the long-sought metal. 'People have thought they created metallic hydrogen before, and they turned out to be wrong,' says William Nellis, a physicist now at Harvard. In 1996 he and colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California used shock waves to make hydrogen that conducted electricity but survived only for a fraction of a second, not long enough to definitively prove that it was a metal. To satisfy the critics, the team plans to refine their experiment.
Science News / Nature Materials Nov 16, 2011	back to top

Liquid could power and cool mobile supercomputers
Getting microchips wet is normally best avoided. But a new type of chip that is both powered and cooled by fluid pumping through it could power the computers, smartphones and tablets of the future. If the design is successful, its inventors at IBM argue an entire supercomputer - like Watson, the firm's natural-language-processing trivia savant - could one day be squeezed onto mobile devices small enough to fit in your pocket. The team's idea is to stack hundreds of silicon wafers on top of each other to create three-dimensional processors. Between each layer is a pair of fluidic networks. One of these carries in charged fluid to power the chip, while the second carries away the same fluid after it has picked up heat from the active transistors - effectively creating a microscopic flow battery. Using this biologically inspired approach to combine the electrical and cooling systems into one should make it possible to reduce the power consumption considerably. The team say they have demonstrated that it is possible to use a liquid to transfer power via a network of fluidic channels, and they plan build a working prototype chip by 2014.
New Scientist Nov 16, 2011	back to top

New material promises faster internet
Arizona State University researchers have created a new material that they say can be used to develop next-generation computers, improve the internet, increase the efficiency of silicon-based photovoltaic cells and improve solid-state lighting and sensor technology. They have synthesised a single-crystal nanowire from a compound of erbium - used in doping optical fibres to amplify the signal. While erbium's importance is well-recognized, producing erbium materials of high quality has been challenging. The standard approach is to introduce erbium as a dopant into various host materials, such as silicon oxide, silicon, and many other crystals and glasses. What is unique about the new material is that erbium is no longer randomly introduced as a dopant. Instead, erbium is part of a uniform compound, meaning the number of erbium atoms is a thousand times more than the maximum amount that can be introduced in other erbium-doped materials. Increasing the number of erbium atoms provides more optical activity to produce stronger lighting. It also enhances the conversion of different colours of light into white light to produce higher-quality solid-state lighting and enables solar cells to more efficiently convert sunlight in electrical energy. In addition, since erbium atoms are organised in a periodic array, they do not cluster in this new compound. The fact that the material has been produced in a high-quality single-crystal form makes the optical quality superior to the other doped materials, according to the researchers. The team are now testing the new erbium compound for various applications, such as increasing silicon solar cell efficiency and making miniaturized optical amplifiers for chip-scale photonic systems for computers and high-speed internet.
TG Daily Nov 17, 2011	back to top

Engineers boost battery strength with small holes
Batteries for phones and laptops could soon recharge ten times faster and hold a charge ten times larger than current technology allows. Scientists at Northwestern University in the US have changed the materials in lithium-ion batteries to boost their abilities. A mobile phone battery built using the new techniques would charge from flat in 15 minutes and last a week before needing a recharge. The density and movement of lithium ions are key to the process. The team have found a way to cram more of the ions in and to speed up their movement by altering the materials used to manufacture a battery. They replaced sheets of silicon with tiny clusters of the substance to increase the amount of lithium ions a battery can hold on to. The recharging speed has been accelerated using a chemical oxidation process which drills small holes - just 20-40 nanometres wide - in the atom-thick sheets of graphene that batteries are made of. This helps lithium ions move and find a place to be stored much faster. The downside is that the recharging and power gains fall off sharply after a battery has been charged about 150 times. However, even after 150 charges, which would be one year or more of operation, the battery is still five times more effective than lithium-ion batteries on the market today, according to the researchers.
BBC News / Advanced Energy Materials Nov 15, 2011	back to top

Sensor-laden dragonfly may help future robots soar
It's not a bird! It's not a plane! It's a dragonfly, and researchers from Duke University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute are using a microchip attached to its belly to understand the complex mechanics of its flight. Dragonflies capture their prey mid-flight, requiring precise control of horizontal and vertical movement to line up their meal with their mouths. The microchip weighs just one-tenth what a dragonfly does, and doesn't interfere with its ability to fly and hunt. It's so light because it's powered wirelessly and can transmit data at the rate of five megabits per second - about the speed of a typical home internet connection. The team want to determine how dragonflies manoeuvre through the air, which may lead to advances in robotic flying vehicles of the future. Electrodes connected to 16 neurons in the dragonfly's nerve cord will transmit information that travels from the dragonfly's eyes as they spy their prey to their motor control system. High-speed video will be correlated with neural signals as the microchipped dragonflies capture fruit flies, giving researchers insight into flight-control laws that govern these winged wonders.
New Scientist Nov 15, 2011	back to top