A new smartphone chip prototype under development at the University of California, San Diego will improve smartphone efficiency by making use of "dark silicon" -- the underused transistors in modern microprocessors. On August 23, UC San Diego computer scientists presented GreenDroid, the new smartphone chip prototype at the HotChips symposium* in Palo Alto, CA.Dark silicon refers to the huge swaths of silicon transistors on today's chips that are underused because there is not enough power to utilize all the transistors at the same time. The new GreenDroid chip prototype from computer scientists at UC San Diego will deliver improved performance through specialized processors fashioned from dark silicon. These processors are designed to run heavily used chunks of code, called "hot code," in Google's Android smartphone platform.Computer science professors Michael Taylor and Steven Swanson from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering are leading the project."This is an exciting time for UCSD. Our students are designing a real multicore processing chip, in an advanced technology, that is simultaneously advancing the state-of-the art in both smartphone and processor design. This marks the first of what I hope is many such chips that will come out of the UCSD research community," said Taylor.The GreenDroid presentation at HotChips caught the attention of IEEE Spectrum, EETimes and LightReading, which all ran stories. »

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created "quantum cats" made of photons (particles of light), boosting prospects for manipulating light in new ways to enhance precision measurements as well as computing and communications based on quantum physics.The NIST experiments, described in a forthcoming paper, repeatedly produced light pulses that each possessed two exactly opposite properties -- specifically, opposite phases, as if the peaks of the light waves were superimposed on the troughs. Physicists call this an optical Schrödinger's cat. NIST's quantum cat is the first to be made by detecting three photons at once and is one of the largest and most well-defined cat states ever made from light. (Larger cat states have been created in different systems by other research groups, including one at NIST.)A "cat state" is a curiosity of the quantum world, where particles can exist in "superpositions" of two opposite properties simultaneously. Cat state is a reference to German physicist Erwin Schrödinger's famed 1935 theoretical notion of a cat that is both alive and dead simultaneously."This is a new state of light, predicted in quantum optics for a long time," says NIST research associate Thomas Gerrits, lead author of the paper. "The technologies that enable us to get these really good results are ultrafast lasers, knowledge of the type of light needed to create the cat state, and photon detectors that can actually count individual photons." »

Microrobots could be used for search and rescue, agriculture, environmental monitoringEngineers at Harvard University have created a millionth-scale automobile differential to govern the flight of minuscule aerial robots that could someday be used to probe environmental hazards, forest fires, and other places too perilous for people.Their new approach is the first to passively balance the aerodynamic forces encountered by these miniature flying devices, letting their wings flap asymmetrically in response to gusts of wind, wing damage, and other real-world impediments."The drivetrain for an aerial microrobot shares many characteristics with a two-wheel-drive automobile," says lead author Pratheev S. Sreetharan, a graduate student in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "Both deliver power from a single source to a pair of wheels or wings. But our PARITy differential generates torques up to 10 million times smaller than in a car, is 5 millimeters long, and weighs about one-hundredth of a gram -- a millionth the mass of an automobile differential."High-performance aerial microrobots, such as those the Harvard scientists describe in the Journal of Mechanical Design, could ultimately be used to investigate areas deemed too dangerous for people. Scientists at institutions including the University of California, Berkeley, University of Delaware, University of Tokyo, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands are exploring aerial microrobots as cheap, disposable tools that might someday be deployed in search and rescue operations, agriculture, environmental monitoring, and exploration of hazardous environments. »

Sugar, salt, alcohol and a little serendipity led a Northwestern University research team to discover a new class of nanostructures that could be used for gas storage and food and medical technologies. And the compounds are edible.The porous crystals are the first known all-natural metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that are simple to make. Most other MOFs are made from petroleum-based ingredients, but the Northwestern MOFs you can pop into your mouth and eat, and the researchers have."They taste kind of bitter, like a Saltine cracker, starchy and bland," said Ronald A. Smaldone, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern. "But the beauty is that all the starting materials are nontoxic, biorenewable and widely available, offering a green approach to storing hydrogen to power vehicles."Smaldone is co-first author of a paper about the edible MOFs published by Angewandte Chemie. The study is slated to appear on the cover of one of the journal's November issues."With our accidental discovery, chemistry in the kitchen has taken on a whole new meaning," said Sir Fraser Stoddart, Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. The implications of what Sir Fraser refers to as "Bob's your uncle chemistry" go all the way from cleaner air to healthier living, and it all comes from a product that can be washed down the sink. »

In a step toward more efficient, smaller and higher-definition display screens, a University of Michigan professor has developed a new type of color filter made of nano-thin sheets of metal with precisely spaced gratings.The gratings, sliced into metal-dielectric-metal stacks, act as resonators. They trap and transmit light of a particular color, or wavelength, said Jay Guo, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. A dielectric is a material that does not conduct electricity."Simply by changing the space between the slits, we can generate different colors," Guo said. "Through nanostructuring, we can render white light any color."A paper on the research is published Aug. 24 in Nature Communications.His team used this technique to make what they believes is the smallest color U-M logo. At about 12-by-9 microns, it's about 1/6 the width of a human hair.Conventional LCDs, or liquid crystal displays, are inefficient and manufacturing-intensive to produce. Only about 5 percent of their back-light travels through them and reaches our eyes, Guo said. They contain two layers of polarizers, a color filter sheet, and two layers of electrode-laced glass in addition to the liquid crystal layer. Chemical colorants for red, green and blue pixel components must be patterned in different regions on the screen in separate steps. »

The integration of single-spin magnetoelectronics into standard silicon technology may soon be possible, if experiments confirm a new theoretical prediction by physicists at the Naval Research Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The researchers predict that a family of well-known silicon surfaces, stabilized by small amounts of gold atoms, is intrinsically magnetic despite having no magnetic elements. None of these surfaces has yet been investigated experimentally for magnetism, but the new predictions are already supported indirectly by existing data.The complete findings of the study are published in the August 24, 2010, issue of the journal Nature Communications.Silicon provides a unique entry point for combining magnetoelectronics based on single spins with standard electronics technology. If a single-spin device can be built on a silicon wafer, input and output electronics can be directly integrated with the magnetic part of the device. This has been an obstacle for current spintronics approaches. For example, spin injection from a metal into silicon is very inefficient unless the metal/semiconductor interface is carefully optimized.These latest results have the advantage that nature itself guides, by a self-assembly process, the formation of long chains of polarized electron spins with atomically precise structural order. "This integration of structural and magnetic order is crucial for future technologies based on single spins at the atomic level" said Dr. Steven Erwin, a physicist at NRL and lead theorist on the project. »

Arizona State University researchers have demonstrated a way to dramatically simplify testing patients for infectious diseases and unhealthy protein levels.New testing instrumentation developed by Antonia Garcia and John Schneider promises to make the procedure less costly and produce results in less time.Current testing is slow and expensive because of the complications of working with blood, saliva, urine and other biological fluids, said Garcia, a professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, one of ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.Such samples "are complex mixtures that require sophisticated instruments capable of mixing a sample with antibodies or other biological reactants to produce an accurate positive or negative reaction," Garcia said. »

Nanoscale simulations and theoretical research performed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are bringing scientists closer to realizing graphene's potential in electronic applications.A research team led by ORNL's Bobby Sumpter, Vincent Meunier and Eduardo Cruz-Silva has discovered how loops develop in graphene, an electrically conductive high-strength low-weight material that resembles an atomic-scale honeycomb.Structural loops that sometimes form during a graphene cleaning process can render the material unsuitable for electronic applications. Overcoming these types of problems is of great interest to the electronics industry."Graphene is a rising star in the materials world, given its potential for use in precise electronic components like transistors or other semiconductors," said Bobby Sumpter, a staff scientist at ORNL.The team used quantum molecular dynamics to simulate an experimental graphene cleaning process, as discussed in a paper published in Physical Review Letters. Calculations performed on ORNL supercomputers pointed the researchers to an overlooked intermediate step during processing. »

Less noise, less exhaust, less refuse -- air travel of the future is expected to be quieter, cleaner and more environmentally friendly. To achieve this goal, new structural concepts and aerodynamic profiles have to be engineered, along with better drive concepts as well as adapted logistical designs, and then put to use. In the EU project Clean Sky, Fraunhofer researchers want to make their contribution to solving this Herculean task.They present their initial findings at ILA, the international aerospace trade show in Berlin, from June 8 to 13, 2010.Flying can become considerably more environmentally friendly -- the aviation experts from the "Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe" ACARE are certain of this. In the guidelines that they compiled for the European aviation industry, the experts are calling for a 50 percent reduction in carbon dioxide and noise emissions by 2020; nitrogen oxide output should be reduced by 80 percent.The goals are ambitious, Professor Holger Hanselka thinks -- but achievable. Since 2008, the head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF in Darmstadt has been a member of the Governing Board, the decision-making body of the EU's "Clean Sky" project, one of the most expansive and complex research projects in Europe, with a subsidy volume of 1.6 billion euro. The goal of the 86 participating industry and research partners from 16 nations is not only to develop unique technologies for specific applications, but also to evaluate and advance the entire aeronautics system. »

The concentrations of toxic nitrogen oxide that are present in German cities regularly exceed the maximum permitted levels. That's now about to change, as innovative paving slabs that will help protect the environment are being introduced. Coated in titanium dioxide nanoparticles, they reduce the amount of nitrogen oxide in the air.In Germany, ambient air quality is not always as good as it might be -- data from the federal environment ministry makes this all too clear. In 2009, the amounts of toxic nitrogen oxide in the atmosphere exceeded the maximum permitted levels at no fewer than 55 percent of air monitoring stations in urban areas. The ministry reports that road traffic is one of the primary sources of these emissions. In light of this fact, the Baroque city of Fulda is currently embarking on new ways to combat air pollution.Special paving slabs that will clean the air are to be laid the length of Petersberger Straße, where recorded pollution levels topped the annual mean limit of 40 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3) last year. These paving slabs are coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2), which converts harmful substances such as nitrogen oxides into nitrates. Titanium dioxide is a photocatalyst; it uses sunlight to accelerate a naturallyoccurring chemical reaction, the speed of which changes with exposure to light. The "Air Clean" nitrogen oxide-reducing paving slabs were developed by F. C. Nüdling Betonelemente. Proof of their effectiveness has subsequently been provided by the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in Schmallenberg, where researchers also determined the risk to the environment posed by the resulting nitrates. Their work was funded by the German Environment Foundation. »