Category Archives: STEM

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

See What’s Inside the PlayStation 4 With These Exclusive Photos

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What we see is a hardware architecture that’s both simple and powerful. With longtime game designer Mark Cerny leading the way, lending his software-minded expertise to Ootori and the rest of the hardware engineering team, Sony abandoned the overly complex Cell microprocessor that drove the PlayStation 3, building the PS4 around an “x86″ chip similar to the processors that have driven most of our personal computers for the last three decades. The idea was to make it that much easier for developers to build games for the new console, to create the things that will ultimately capture our attention.

via See What’s Inside the PlayStation 4 With These Exclusive Photos | Game|Life | Wired.com.

Sensor Fusion: High Speed Robots

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In this research we develop a janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot with 100% winning rate as one example of human-machine cooperation systems. Human being plays one of rock, paper and scissors at the timing of one, two, three. According to the timing, the robot hand plays one of three kinds so as to beat the human being.

Recognition of human hand can be performed at 1ms with a high-speed vision, and the position and the shape of the human hand are recognized. The wrist joint angle of the robot hand is controlled based on the position of the human hand. The vision recognizes one of rock, paper and scissors based on the shape of the human hand. After that, the robot hand plays one of rock, paper and scissors so as to beat the human being in 1ms.

via Sensor Fusion: High Speed Robots.

The Status of Moore’s Law: It’s Complicated

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Kahng says chipmakers may face a more immediate struggle with wiring in just a few years as they attempt to push chip density down past the 10-nm generation. Each copper wire requires a sheath containing barrier material to prevent the metal from leaching into surrounding material, as well as insulation to prevent it from interacting with neighboring wires. To perform effectively, this sheath must be fairly thick. This thickness limits how closely wires can be pushed together and forces the copper wires to shrink instead, dramatically driving up the resistance and delays and drastically lowering performance. Although researchers are exploring alternative materials, it’s unclear, Kahng says, whether they will be ready in time to keep up with Moore’s Law’s steady pace.

via The Status of Moore’s Law: It’s Complicated – IEEE Spectrum.

Persuading light to mix it up with matter

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Their findings suggest that it’s possible to alter the electronic properties of a material — for example, changing it from a conductor to a semiconductor — just by changing the laser beam’s polarization. Normally, to produce such dramatic changes in a material’s properties, “you have to do something violent to it,” Gedik says. “But in this case, it may be possible to do this just by shining light on it. That actually modifies how electrons move in this system. And when we do this, the light does not even get absorbed.”

via Persuading light to mix it up with matter – MIT News Office.

It will take some time to assess possible applications, Gedik says. But, he suggests, this could be a way of engineering materials for specific functions. “Suppose you want a material to do something — to conduct electricity, or to be transparent, for example. We usually do this by chemical means. With this new method, it may be possible to do this by simply shining light on the materials.”

New device stores electricity on silicon chips

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When the researchers tested the coated material they found that it had chemically stabilized the silicon surface. When they used it to make supercapacitors, they found that the graphene coating improved energy densities by over two orders of magnitude compared to those made from uncoated porous silicon and significantly better than commercial supercapacitors.

via New device stores electricity on silicon chips | Research News @ Vanderbilt | Vanderbilt University.

U.S. flips switch on massive solar power array that also stores electricity

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Abengoa Solar described the array as the world´s largest parabolic trough plant. The solar arrays use parabolic shaped mirrors mounted on moving structures that track the sun and concentrate its heat. That heat is used to heat water into steam, which is then used to power a conventional steam turbine. Being able to store the power allows the plant to continue distributing energy when the sun goes down or is blocked by poor weather.

via U.S. flips switch on massive solar power array that also stores electricity – Computerworld.

10% of Amplify Tablets Broke in Their First Month, One North Carolina School District Reports

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This tablet was always intended to go into schools, and that is why it was supposed to have been built with a layer of Gorilla Glass over the screen. This was in the contract that GCS signed, and it was also mentioned prominently in the early news coverage of this tablet. According to the school district, none of the Amplify tablets that they bought had that protective layer, which might help explain why so many tablets broke.

Or to put it another way, the absence of Gorilla Glass is a sign that someone cut corners on the build quality for this production run. Given that there were also complaints about misfitted cases and defective power supplies,  I am not terribly surprised.

via 10% of Amplify Tablets Broke in Their First Month, One North Carolina School District Reports – The Digital Reader.

As I reported when the Amplify tablet debuted in March of this year, this tablet is NewsCorp’s “solution” to the “problem” of education:

Scientific Data Has Become So Complex, We Have to Invent New Math to Deal With It

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Scientists like DeDeo and Vespignani make good use of this piecemeal approach to big data analysis, but Yale University mathematician Ronald Coifman says that what is really needed is the big data equivalent of a Newtonian revolution, on par with the 17th century invention of calculus, which he believes is already underway. It is not sufficient, he argues, to simply collect and store massive amounts of data; they must be intelligently curated, and that requires a global framework.

via Scientific Data Has Become So Complex, We Have to Invent New Math to Deal With It – Wired Science.

Among the most notable insights Euler gleaned from the puzzle was that the exact positions of the bridges were irrelevant to the solution; all that mattered was the number of bridges and how they were connected. Mathematicians now recognize in this the seeds of the modern field of topology.

Scientists who took chemistry into cyberspace win Nobel Prize

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Chemical reactions occur at lightning speed as electrons jump between atomic nuclei, making it virtually impossible to map every separate step in chemical processes involving large molecules like proteins.

Powerful computer models, first developed by the three scientists in 1970s, offer a new window onto such reactions and have become a mainstay for researchers in thousands of academic and industrial laboratories around the world.

via Scientists who took chemistry into cyberspace win Nobel Prize – chicagotribune.com.

Text Analyser Reveals Emotional Temperature of Novels and Fairy Tales

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Beyond that, once an entire corpus of work has been analysed in this way, it becomes possible to compare them in unprecedented depth and detail. For example, Mohammad has analysed all of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales and arranged them in order of negative word density. The darkest turns out to be a tale called Gambling Hansel.

via Text Analyser Reveals Emotional Temperature of Novels and Fairy Tales  — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium.