To help you keep things straight, we’ve assembled this handy guide that will walk you through the basics of how an SoC is put together. It will also serve as a guide to most of the current (and future, where applicable) chips available from the big players making SoCs today: Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Intel, and AMD.
via The PC inside your phone: A guide to the system-on-a-chip | Ars Technica.
SoC=System on a Chip
In recent years, quantum physicists have successfully teleported entangled photons over a free-space distance of 143 kilometers (89 miles) using lasers, and 250 kilometers (155 miles) over optical fiber in the lab. In the past year we have also seen the first ground-to-air network, between a base station and an airplane flying 20 kilometers (12 miles) above. These were impressive feats, but to prove the possibility of a worldwide, satellite-based quantum network, larger distances are needed — something like the 400 kilometers (248 miles) to the ISS.
via European scientists propose world’s largest quantum network, between Earth and the ISS | ExtremeTech.
EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.
via New Test for Computers – Grading Essays at College Level – NYTimes.com.
Instead of personally composing the pieces, Schwencke developed a set of step-by-step instructions that can take a stream of data — this particular algorithm works with earthquake statistics, since he lives in California — compile the data into a pre-determined structure, then format it for publication.
via ‘Robo-reporter’ computer program raises questions about future of journalists.
The Europa Clipper mission would place a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter in order to perform a detailed investigation of the giant planet’s moon Europa — a world that shows strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust and which could host conditions favorable for life. The Europa Clipper mission would send a highly capable, radiation-tolerant spacecraft into a long, looping orbit around Jupiter to perform repeated close flybys of Europa.
What’s particularly neat about this new approach is that it can be used with any kind of sensor without modification; CMOS, CCD, or BSI. And the filters can be produced using the same materials and manufacturing processes in place today. Which means we’ll probably be seeing this technology implemented on cameras sooner rather than later. [DigInfo TV]
via Panasonic’s Developed a Simple Sensor Tweak That Vastly Improves Low Light Photography.
Once the oxide materials, which are innately insulating, are transformed into a conducting state, the IBM experiments showed that the materials maintain a stable metallic state even when power to the device is removed. This non-volatile property means that chips using devices that operate using this novel phenomenon could be used to store and transport data in a more efficient, event-driven manner instead of requiring the state of the devices to be maintained by constant electrical currents.
Sound lasers work on a similar principle. For Mahboob and his team’s phaser, a mechanical oscillator jiggles and excites a bunch of phonons, which relax and release their energy back into the device. The confined energy causes the phaser to vibrate at its fundamental frequency but with at a very narrow wavelength. The sound laser produces phonons at 170 kilohertz, far above human hearing range, which peters out around 20 kilohertz. The entire device is etched onto an integrated circuit that’s about 1 cm by 0.5 cm.
via Pew Pew! Scientists Build Lasers Out of Sound, Call Them Phasers | Wired Science | Wired.com.
Its existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be.
via Physicists Say They Have Found a Higgs Boson – NYTimes.com.
The new reactor design, which so far exists only on paper, produces 20 times as much power for its size as Oak Ridge’s technology. That means relatively small, yet powerful, reactors could be built less expensively in factories and shipped by rail instead of being built on site like conventional ones. Transatomic also modified the original molten-salt design to allow it to run on nuclear waste.
via A New Molten-Salt Reactor Could Halve the Cost of Nuclear Power | MIT Technology Review.
In the event of a power outage, a stopper at the bottom of the reactor melts and the fuel and salt flow into a holding tank, where the fuel spreads out enough for the reactions to stop. The salt then cools and solidifies, encapsulating the radioactive materials. “It’s walk-away safe,” says Dewan, the company’s chief science officer. “If you lose electricity, even if there are no operators on site to pull levers, it will coast to a stop.”