Reporte #143
A new way to store thermal energy
MIT News – Engineering
MIT researchers create material for a chemical heat “battery” that could release its energy on demand.
IBM Edges Closer to Quantum Supremacy with 50-Qubit Processor
IEEE Spectrum Recent Content
“We have successfully built a 20-qubit and a 50-qubit quantum processor that works,” Dario Gil, IBM’s vice president of science and solutions, told engineers and computer scientists at IEEE Rebooting Computing’s Industry Forum last Friday. The development both ups the size of commercially available quantum computing resources and brings computer science closer to the point where it might prove definitively whether quantum computers can do something classical computers can’t.
Drones Distribute Swarms of Sterile Mosquitoes to Stop Zika and Other Diseases
IEEE Spectrum Recent Content
The deadliest animal on Earth, by far, is the mosquito. Each year, mosquitoes infect about 700 million people with diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus, and Zika. Millions of people die annually from mosquito-borne illnesses, and many of those diseases can’t be cured with drugs. It’s best to avoid being bitten in the first place, but this is becoming more difficult as the insects expand their range, migrating north with warming climates.
WebAssembly Will Finally Let You Run High-Performance Applications in Your Browser
IEEE Spectrum Recent Content
What if you could share a computer-aided design (CAD) model and even allow a colleague to manipulate it from afar? “Click on this link, check out my design, and feel free to add more holes or fill some in,” you might say. You wouldn’t have to instruct your distant coworker to install special software or worry about whether her operating system could run it. Imagine that all your programs and data were stored in the cloud and that even computationally intensive applications like multimedia editing ran just as well in your browser as they would if they had been installed locally.
A Big Hydro Project in Big Sky Country
IEEE Spectrum Recent Content
A pumped hydro project in southcentral Montana could provide electric utilities in the Pacific Northwest with a US billion-dollar, 400-megawatt facility that mimics both a battery and a fast-start natural gas-fired plant.
Peeling Away Memory Chips
IEEE Spectrum Recent Content
As consumers demand smaller memory chips with greater capacity, engineers optimize the manufacturing process to ensure the chips will hold up.
Awash in Artificial Light, the World Gets 2 Percent Brighter Each Year
IEEE Spectrum Recent Content
Around the world, more lights keep being switched on. A new analysis of satellite data from the past four years shows that the total acreage lit by artificial light at night increased by an average of 2.2 percent a year. The brightness of the areas lit at the start of the study also increased by the same rate—2.2 percent annually—around the globe.
Nanoscale Magnetic Circuits Expand Into Three Dimensions
IEEE Spectrum Recent Content
Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK have broken the paradigm of two-dimensional circuits used to store and transmit data and created a nanoscale magnetic circuit that can send along bits of information in three dimensions.
Gearing up for the internet of things
MIT News – Engineering
Workshop brings together academia and industry to explore how to prepare next-generation wireless for machine-to-machine communication.
Wanted: AI That Can Spy
IEEE Spectrum Recent Content
Spy satellites and their commercial cousins orbit Earth like a swarm of space paparazzi, capturing tens of terabytes of images every day. The deluge of satellite imagery leaves U.S. intelligence agencies with the world’s biggest case of FOMO—“fear of missing out”—because human analysts can sift through only so many images to spot a new nuclear enrichment facility or missiles being trucked to different locations. That’s why U.S. intelligence officials have sponsored an artificial-intelligence challenge to automatically identify objects of interest in satellite images.