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A team of researchers at the University of Illinois has created the world's first acoustic "superlens," an innovation that could have practical implications for high-resolution ultrasound imaging, non-destructive structural testing of buildings and bridges, and novel underwater stealth technology.

The team, led by Nicholas X. Fang, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at Illinois, successfully focused ultrasound waves through a flat metamaterial lens on a spot roughly half the width of a wavelength at 60.5 kHz using a network of fluid-filled Helmholtz resonators.

According to the results, published in the May 15 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, the acoustic system is analogous to an inductor-capacitor circuit. The transmission channels act as a series of inductors, and the Helmholtz resonators, which Fang describes as cavities that house resonating waves and oscillate at certain sonic frequencies almost as a musical instrument would, act as capacitors.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news165064464.html

A network of artificial cells that work together to act as an AC/DC converter has been built. Demonstrating that synthetic cells can team up to achieve such feats is a step towards building synthetic tissues to interface biology with electronics, says the team of chemists behind the work.

Synthetic biologists have show they can reprogram living cells to make them produce drug compounds, and are even working towards building cells from scratch to create artificial life.

But that work focuses on only individual cells, says Hagan Bayley at the University of Oxford. He's more interested in making artificial tissue in which individual synthetic cells work together.

Bayley's group, working with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, has made a step towards that goal by connecting together multiple artificial "protocells" so that they share electrical signals.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17325-synthetic-cells-get-together-to-make-electronics.html

Recently, Intel researchers demonstrated 45 research projects, ranging from ray-tracing algorithms for better animation to organic photovoltaics for flexible solar cells, at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, CA. But the project that received the most attention by far was the demo of a wirelessly charged iPod speaker. The speaker was attached to a copper coil with a 30-centimeter diameter, and it was powered by magnetic fields produced from a second coil, with double the diameter, nearly a meter away.

Intel's wireless power project, first announced at the company's developer forum last August, bears a strong resemblance to a project announced by researchers at MIT in 2007, which was featured as one of the TR10 top emerging technologies of 2008. Similar to the MIT project led by Marin Soljacic and the prototypes developed by the spinoff startup WiTricity, the Intel project uses magnetic fields to transfer energy; the type of radiation shared between the two coils is nonradiative, which means that it's confined to a short distance of less than two meters.

The idea of wireless power transfer is, of course, not new. Physicist Nikola Tesla proposed it in the late 19th century.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22906/

Electronic devices of the future could be smaller, faster, more powerful and consume less energy because of a discovery by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The key to the finding, published in Science, involves a method to measure intrinsic conducting properties of ferroelectric materials, which for decades have held tremendous promise but have eluded experimental proof. Now, however, ORNL Wigner Fellow Peter Maksymovych and co-authors Stephen Jesse, Art Baddorf and Sergei Kalinin at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences believe they may be on a path that will see barriers tumble.

"For years, the challenge has been to develop a nanoscale material that can act as a switch to store binary information," Maksymovych said. "We are excited by our discovery and the prospect of finally being able to exploit the long-conjectured bi-stable electrical conductivity of ferroelectric materials.

"Harnessing this functionality will ultimately enable smart and ultra-dense memory technology."

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/drnl-ofc061709.php

What if we gave scientists machines that dwarf today’s most powerful supercomputers? What could they tell us about the nature of, say, a nuclear explosion? Indeed, what else could they discover about the world? This is the story of the quest for an exascale computer – and how it might change our lives.

One exaflop is 1,000 times faster than a petaflop. The fastest computer in the world is currently the IBM-based Roadrunner, which is located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Roadrunner runs at an astounding one petaflop, which equates to more than 1,000 trillion operations per second. The supercomputer has 129,600 processing cores and takes up more room than a small house, yet it’s still not quite fast enough to run some of the most intense global weather simulations, nuclear tests and brain modelling tasks that modern science demands.

However, when exascale calculations become a reality in the future, the lab could step up to running tests on ocean and atmosphere interactions. These are not currently possible because the data streams involved are simply too large. The move to exascale is therefore critical, because researchers require increasingly fast results from their experiments.

Source: http://www.pcplus.co.uk/node/3072/