‘Miracle Material’ To Boost Internet Speed 100 times
Using ‘miracle material’ graphene in telecommunications could dramatically make the internet a hundred times faster, a new study has found.
Every day large amounts of information is transmitted and processed through optoelectronic devices such as optical fibres, photodetectors and lasers. Signals are sent by photons at infrared wavelengths and processed using optical switches.
Researchers from the Universities of Bath and Exeter have demonstrated for the first time incredibly short optical response rates using graphene, which could pave the way for a revolution in telecommunications.
Every day large amounts of information is transmitted and processed through optoelectronic devices such as optical fibres, photodetectors and lasers. Signals are sent by photons at infrared wavelengths and processed using optical switches, which convert signals into a series of light pulses.
Ordinarily optical switches respond at rate of a few picoseconds – around a trillionth of a second. Through this study physicists have observed the response rate of an optical switch using ‘few layer graphene’ to be around one hundred femtoseconds – nearly a hundred times quicker than current materials.
Graphene is just one atom thick, but remarkably strong. Scientists have suggested that it would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil to break through a single sheet.
Already dubbed a miracle material due to its strength, lightness, flexibility, conductivity and low cost, it could now enter the market to dramatically improve telecommunications, researchers said.
"We’ve seen an ultrafast optical response rate, using ‘few-layer graphene’, which has exciting applications for the development of high speed optoelectronic components based on graphene," lead researcher Dr Enrico Da Como said.
Windows 8 tip – Exploring Task Manager
The Windows 8 Task Manager has been significantly improved over previous versions of Windows. Some of the new changes include showing a total percent usage at the top of your Processes, which makes it easier to determine total memory and CPU usage, improved Performance graphs, a Startup tab to see startup processes and their impact to system performance, and the App history tab that gives you the total resources an app has used over a period of time.
Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to start exploring the Task Manager.
Body odour may be your new password
Researchers are developing a new biometric technique that would allow identification of people through their body odour.
Scientists at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in Spain and colleagues found that there are recognisable patterns of each person?s body odour that remain steady.
Therefore, every person has their own odour and this would allow their identification within a group of people at an accuracy rate of 85 per cent, researchers said.
The findings lead the way to improve personal identification that is less aggressive than other biometric techniques being used today. Several biometric techniques like the iris recognition and fingerprint recognition have a low error rate.
The development of new sensors that allow the capture of body odour can provide a less aggressive solution. The ability of police dogs to follow the trail of a person from a sample of their personal odour is well known and proves that using body odour is an effective biometric identifier.
New giant 3D printer can build a house in 24 hours
Scientists claim to have developed a revolutionary new giant 3D concrete printer that can build a 2,500-square-foot house in just 24 hours.
The 3D printer, developed by Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis from the University of Southern California, could be used to build a whole house, layer by layer, in a single day.
The giant robot replaces construction workers with a nozzle on a gantry, which squirts out concrete and can quickly build a home based on a computer pattern. It is basically scaling up 3D printing to the scale of building.
‘Contour Crafting’ is a layered fabrication technology and has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components.
Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.
PC first aid kit on your pen drive
Just every home has a First Aid Kit for medical emergencies, it pays to have something similar for your PC. What you need is a pen drive that’s loaded with essential, troubleshooting software. The tools listed in this piece are free, and run straight out of a USB stick, so you don’t even need to install them. And yes, it also means you can carry this ‘First Aid Kit’ along whenever you want to help friends with their computer problems.