Computer chips have stopped getting faster. For the past 10 years, chips' performance improvements have come from the addition of processing units known as cores.
In theory, a program on a 64-core machine would be 64 times as fast as it would be on a single-core machine. But it rarely works out that way. Most computer programs are sequential, and splitting them up so that chunks of them can run in parallel causes all kinds of complications.
Nowadays, our world is in search of cleaner energy sources to power our increasing industrial and economical needs. Solar energy is becoming an alternative source to fossil fuels, however, due to the accelerating pace at which we are consuming energy, we need to develop ubiquitous PV technologies that can be employed everywhere: on buildings, clothes, consumer electronics and wearables. This necessitates ultra-thin film, low-cost and ideally flexible solar cells without compromising the environment during production, use, or disposal.
WHAT:
Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have developed a free online platform that uses a crowdsourcing approach to make public gene expression data more accessible to biomedical researchers without computational expertise. They describe the platform, called OMics Compendia Commons (OMiCC), in the June 20 online issue of Nature Biotechnology.
A meta-analysis of retail return policies led by a University of Texas at Arlington College of Business professor may lead businesses to modify their policies to increase sales and reduce returns.
Narayanan Janakiraman, an assistant professor of marketing who specializes in consumer behavior, UTA doctoral candidate Holly Syrdal and University of Texas at Dallas doctoral candidate Ryan Freling recently published their conclusions in The Journal of Retailing.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered a new way to optimize electron transfer in semi-conductors used in solar fuel solutions.
The finding, published today in Nature Chemistry, could have a big impact on devices that convert sunlight into electricity and fuel.
China has an opportunity to massively increase its use of wind power -- if it properly integrates wind into its existing power system, according to a newly published MIT study.
The study forecasts that wind power could provide 26 percent of China's projected electricity demand by 2030, up from 3 percent in 2015. Such a change would be a substantial gain in the global transition to renewable energy, since China produces the most total greenhouse gas emissions of any country in the world.
Researchers of Aalto University have developed surfaces where oil transports itself to desired directions. Researchers' oleophobic surfaces are microtextured with radial arrays of undercut stripes. When oil drops fall on surfaces, drops move away from the landing point to the direction set by asymmetric geometrical patterning of the surface. The surfaces open up new avenues for power-free liquid transportation and oil contamination self-removal applications in analytical and fluidic devices.
A Stanford University research lab has developed new technologies to tackle two of the world's biggest energy challenges - clean fuel for transportation and grid-scale energy storage.
The researchers described their findings in two studies published this month in the journals Science Advances and Nature Communications.
Hydrogen fuel
An effective and less expensive tool for the inspection of food and drugs could soon be a reality. Scientists from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin have been working with national and international partners to develop a conceptually new source of terahertz radiation. The innovation makes it much easier to generate this radiation, which is well suited to the analysis of soft materials and could therefore be more widely used in the food and pharmaceutical industry in future.
A recent study has shown that emissions in major cities caused by restaurants such as pizzerias and steakhouses using wood burners can be damaging to the urban environment.
In collaboration with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Associate Professor Hiroyuki Ito and Professor Kazuya Masu, et al., of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, developed a new algorithm and circuit technology allowing high-frequency piezoelectric resonators to be used for phase locked loops (PLL). It was confirmed that these operate with low noise and have an excellent Figure of Merit (FoM) compared to conventional PLLs.
The development of photodetectors has been a matter of considerable interest in the past decades since their applications are essential to many different fields including cameras, medical devices, safety equipment, optical communication devices or even surveying instruments, among others.
New research from Northeastern University shows that what T-Mobile promises regarding its Binge On service is not what subscribers, or content providers, may actually get. In many cases, subscribers were left with lower quality videos and unexpected charges.
"At the time of our study, important details about the Binge On policy were not in public documents," says researcher David Choffnes. "They are available now, but much remains largely hidden to the average content provider and subscriber. Both can be misled."
These days, it may seem as if 3-D printers can spit out just about anything, from a full-sized sports car, to edible food, to human skin. But some things have defied the technology, including hair, fur, and other dense arrays of extremely fine features, which require a huge amount of computational time and power to first design, then print.
A microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The energy-efficient "KiloCore" chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors. The KiloCore was presented at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu on June 16.