Emergent Futures Tumblelog
This is the Tumblelog of Paul Higgins and Sandy Teagle - Futurists from Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia. Go to Emergent Futures to see more or follow on Twitter at
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Forget Graphene, Silicene Is Here to Blow Your Mind | Gizmodo
Reblogged from smarterplanet|26 notes |# Comments
Remember how graphene, the single-atom thick layer of carbon was so slick it was
going to change everything? Well it looks like silicene is here to steal the spotlight. Researchers have just made the first sheet of single-atom thick silicon.
Silicene has been a work in progress for years, but they think they’ve finally got it down now, and it represents a tremendous breakthrough. Graphene is awesome, but it’s proven a bit tricky to work it into components. Because silicene is made of silicon, which most chips are already made of, the integration process could be much simpler.
Patrick Vogt of Berlin’s Technical University in Germany, along side researchers at Aix-Marseille University in France managed to create silicene by condensing silicon vapor onto a silver plate to form a single layer of atoms. They then tested the sheet and found that it closely matched the properties silicene was theorized to exhibit. The next (challenging) step will be to grow silicene on insulating substrates so that it can be fully tested and evaluated for potential future uses in electronics. Looking forward to see what they do with this stuff. [New Scientist]
Image Credit: WikiCommons/Ayandata
Computer modeled using swarms of soldier crabs
Computer scientists at Kobe University in Japan have built a computer that draws inspiration from the swarming behavior of soldier crabs.
The computer is based on theories from the early 1980s that examined the possibility of building a computer out of billiard balls. Proposed by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli, the mechanical computer was based on Newtonian dynamics and relied on the motion of billiard balls in an idealized, friction-free environment instead of electronic signals like a conventional computer.
Full Story: ArsTechnica
Reblogged from iamdanw|20 notes |# Comments
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Now Yukio-Pegio Gunji from Kobe University in Japan and a couple of pals have built what is essentially billiard ball computer using soldier crabs. “We demonstrate that swarms of soldier crabs can implement logical gates when placed in a geometrically constrained environment,” they say.
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The Computing Trend that Will Change Everything
Computing isn’t just getting cheaper. It’s becoming more energy efficient. That means a world populated by ubiquitous sensors and streams of nanodata.
Full Story: Technology Review
Tiny $35 Raspberry Pi computer causes big stir on launch day
Reblogged from futuramb|39 notes |# Comments
The tiny $35 Raspberry Pi computer went on sale today, crashing its distributors’ websites on the way to selling out within hours of launch.
Reblogged from smarterplanet|128 notes |# Comments
Holy Holey Optochip! IBM hits a terabit of info per second | Geek Gestalt - CNET News
Big Blue’s new prototype chip surpasses major milestone, thanks to unlikely innovation: tiny holes in a quarter-inch chip, boosting data transfer.
A Smarter Planet: The Raspberry Pi computer goes on general sale | BBC
Reblogged from smarterplanet|40 notes |# Comments
A credit-card sized computer designed to help teach children to code has gone on sale for the first time.
The Raspberry Pi is a bare-bones, low-cost computer created by volunteers mostly drawn from academia and the UK tech industry.
Sold uncased without keyboard or monitor, the Pi has drawn…
Metatronic chip replaces electricity with light, swaps resistors with nanorods
Reblogged from unexpectedtech-deactivated20130|44 notes |# Comments
Optical engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have created the first computer circuit where logic is performed with light instead of electricity. Dubbed “metatronics,” this light-based logic could enable smaller, faster, and more energy efficient computer chips.
The team, led by Nader Engheta, demonstrated that it’s possible to make resistors, inductors, and capacitors that act on light. By creating a chip that has a comb-like array of nanorods — tiny pillars of silicon nitride (pictured below) — the flow of light can be controlled in such a way that the “voltage” and “current” of the optical signal can be altered. By changing the height and width of the nanorods, and by altering their arrangement, different effects can be achieved. For example, if light has to pass by a short rod and then a tall rod, it might create a resistor-like effect — but a square of four short rods might act as an optical capacitor. The metatronic name comes from the fact that these nanorods are a metamaterial; a material that has has properties that can’t be found in nature.
Because Engheta and co are working with light instead of electricity, their metatronic chip has some very odd properties. For example, light’s polarization — whether the light wave undulates left/right or up/down — affects how it moves through the nanorods. When the light is aligned with the nanorods (pictured above), the circuit fires in parallel; but when light is perpendicular, the circuit is serial. In effect, one set of nanorods can act as two different circuits, which Engheta calls “stereo-circuitry.”
Furthermore, if you rotate the circuit itself through 45 degrees, the light wave would hit the nanorods obliquely, creating a circuit that is neither series or parallel — a setup that doesn’t occur in regular electronics. Eventually — and be careful, this might make your brain explode — you could even build 3D arrays of nanorods, where a single arrangement could act as dozens of different circuits.
Reblogged from courtenaybird|30 notes |# Comments
Marc Benioff | Marc Benioff Is Thinking Bigger (via courtenaybird)
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This is the renaissance! This is the great time of the cloud! We’ve all changed how we’re using computers and there needs to be an enterprise company that can deliver this at scale.
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Reblogged from arielwaldman|38 notes |# Comments