IBM Moves Molecules To Make World’s Smallest Movie
Back in the eighties, IBM created the "world's tiniest billboard," writing "IBM" in letters 5 nanometers high, made of a few atoms. Now they've made a movie in that scale.
Joel
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RAM and Intel processors through the years (click for full width)
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Carl Machover 1927-2012
I always thought Carl preceded me in the world of computer graphics consulting. But when we met, in the seventies, he pointed out that he was actually a vendor executive for a few years after I became a consultant, in 1974.
Nevertheless, his entry into the world of CG long predated mine. He was into radar screens, the precessors of computer graphics displays, and his knowledge of both the surrounding technologies and their historical progression was unpretentious but authoritative.
In our time together in the NCGA (National Computer Graphics Association), and through our occasional platform-sharing at Frost & Sulivan events, I learned a great deal from Carl--about presenting, about researching, about writing, and about running a good meeting.
I'll miss him. I hope Wilma and the kids take comfort from the wonderful legacy of good will and caring that Carl leaves.
Here's a great summary, courtesy of Andy Van Dam: http://web.media.mit.edu/~tod/media/pdfs/Andy-CM-g4inm-proof3-good.pdf
NASA tests inflatable heat shield
My grandson, Nathanael Miller, is a team leader on this project. You can see him in the foreground of the control room picture, and standing behind the device in the other one. (Am I a proud grandpa? Oh, yes!)
For more info click here.
The most flexible, fascinating robotic gripper!
Check out this video, then click here to read more at the Cornell site.
Extremetech.com: Amazing bandwidth achieved using vortices
Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second
- By Sebastian Anthony on June 25, 2012 at 7:41 am
- 23 Comments
American and Israeli researchers have used twisted, vortex beams to transmit data at 2.5 terabits per second. As far as we can discern, this is the fastest wireless network ever created — by some margin. This technique is likely to be used in the next few years to vastly increase the throughput of both wireless and fiber-optic networks.
These twisted signals use orbital angular momentum (OAM) to cram much more data into a single stream. In current state-of-the-art transmission protocols (WiFi, LTE, COFDM), we only modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) of radio waves, not the OAM. If you picture the Earth, SAM is our planet spinning on its axis, while OAM is our movement around the Sun. Basically, the breakthrough here is that researchers have created a wireless network protocol that uses both OAM and SAM.
In this case, Alan Willner and fellow researchers from the University of Southern California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, twisted together eight ~300Gbps visible light data streams using OAM. Each of the eight beams has a different level of OAM twist. The beams are bundled into two groups of four, which are passed through different polarization filters. One bundle of four is transmitted as a thin stream, like a screw thread, while the other four are transmitted around the outside, like a sheathe. The beam is then transmitted over open space (just one meter in this case), and untwisted and processed by the receiving end. 2.5 terabits per second is equivalent to 320 gigabytes per second, or around seven full Blu-ray movies per second.