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They can’t extract secret terrorist plots yet, but Utah bioengineers have implanted a brain chip in human test subjects that enables researchers to download brain data onto hard drives. The team working with the chip is hoping to make immediate improvements in the lives of people with epilepsy, paralysis or blindness, but say the chips may one day enable brain-native Internet browsing or most any other function currently possible with a computer.

The Utah Electrode Array’s purpose is analogous to a modem: It relays data from the brain to a computer, and vice-versa. It may soon enable thought control of bionic limbs like Luke Skywalker’s in Star Wars and, further in the future, may help the blind to see.

Neural Engineering Lab supervisor and University of Utah assistant professor Bradley Greger describes the chip as “a platform technology that is going to enable many, many new things.” With a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Greger and dozens of other scientists are pioneering brain-computing technology.

Source: http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-9318-brain-chip-may-help-the-blind-see.html

A team of Yale University researchers has discovered a "repulsive" light force that can be used to control components on silicon microchips, meaning future nanodevices could be controlled by light rather than electricity.

The team previously discovered an "attractive" force of light and showed how it could be manipulated to move components in semiconducting micro- and nano-electrical systems—tiny mechanical switches on a chip. The scientists have now uncovered a complementary repulsive force. Researchers had theorized the existence of both the attractive and repulsive forces since 2005, but the latter had remained unproven until now.

The attractive and repulsive light forces Tang's team discovered are separate from the force created by light's radiation pressure, which pushes against an object as light shines on it. Instead, they push out or pull in sideways from the direction the light travels.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news166711942.html

A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time. Their findings will appear in Nature's advanced online publication June 28.

"Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms and photons," said Robert Schoelkopf, the William A. Norton Professor of Applied Physics & Physics at Yale. "But this is the first time they've been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor."

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news165418586.html

Most chemical elements become superconducting at low temperatures or high pressures, but until now, copper, silver, gold, and the semiconductor germanium, for example, have all refused superconductivity. Scientists at the Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (FZD) research center were now able to produce superconducting germanium for the first time. Furthermore, they could unravel a few of the mysteries which come along with superconducting semiconductors.

Superconductors are substances that conduct electricity without losses when cooled down to very low temperatures. Pure semiconductors, like silicon or germanium, are almost non-conducting at low temperatures, but transform into conducting materials after doping with foreign atoms. An established method of doping is ion implantation (ions = charged atoms) by which foreign ions are embedded into the crystal lattice of a semiconductor.

To produce a superconducting semiconductor, an extreme amount of foreign atoms are necessary, even more than the substance would usually be able to absorb. At the FZD, germanium samples were doped with about six gallium atoms per 100 germanium atoms. With these experiments, the scientists could prove indeed that the doped germanium layer of only sixty nanometers thickness became superconducting, and not just the clusters of foreign atoms which could easily form during extreme doping .

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090528092520.htm

An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.

Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.

The hope is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers, says Meier.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22339/?a=f