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Scientists create first carbon nanotube computer
Someday we may look back on today’s iPhones and laptops as huge, clunky devices with outdated chips made of silicon that was long ago replaced by carbon nanotubes. Tens of thousands of the tiny tubelike structures can fit inside a human hair, and now scientists have created the first carbon nanotube computer — a big step toward miniaturizing our electronics even further.
While it pales in comparison to today’s computers, the bare-bones machine works. It runs a basic operating system and can freely switch between two programs — one that counts in a loop and another that sorts numbers.
“This is not a computer you would buy off the shelf at Best Buy,” said lead author and Stanford electrical engineering graduate student Max Shulaker. “But the functionality is still a complete computer.” The study was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Shulaker gave the computer the pet name Cedric, a rough acronym for “carbon nanotube digital integrated circuit.”
The achievement by Stanford engineers marks the most complex electronic device ever built from carbon nanotubes, a man-made tubelike structure created from a one-atom-thick, rolled-up sheet of carbon. Their remarkable electrical and mechanical properties have led researchers to explore their potential applications in bulletproofclothing, cancer therapy and electronics.
Currently, silicon is the standard material for manufacturing the chips used in computers and phones. But as our devices keep shrinking, silicon circuits are reaching their limit.
“Silicon is great. It’s very hard to beat,” said senior author and Stanford electrical engineer Subhasish Mitra. “But when everything gets so small, it’s not clear you can get high performance and energy efficiency from silicon transistors.”
Like nerve cells to the “brain” of a computer, transistors are the key active component in practically all modern electronics, and a single chip can contain billions of transistors. Using the minuscule carbon nanotube instead of silicon could mean smaller, faster and more efficient transistors.
Carbon nanotubes can be a single nanometer wide in diameter. In comparison, a strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter and your fingernail grows about a nanometer every second.
Ever since the first carbon nanotube transistor was built in 1998, “there was a dream in people’s minds that we would have a new era of digital electronics using these carbon nanotubes,” said Mitra.
But researchers ran into a brick wall. They found it extremely difficult to manufacture nanotubes without glaring imperfections that would render any transistor made from them dead.
A common way to make carbon nanotubes is to grow a forest of them on a semiconducting wafer baked in a high-temperature chamber.
“Fancy chemical reactions will happen and, as a result, carbon nanotubes will sprout,” Mitra said.
An ideal batch would sprout with the carbon nanotubes parallel to one another and without imperfections. But Mother Nature often intervenes, he said, and many a time they ended up with a bowl of nanotube spaghetti. They improved their technique, but still wound up with a few defective structures.
Mitra and Wong had their breakthrough when they stopped trying to make flawless batches of nanotubes and instead focused on designing computer circuits immune to imperfections. Using clever algorithms, they arranged their circuit in such a way that, even if a few nanotubes were misaligned, their computer would still function.
In total, the computer contains 178 transistors, each composed of 10 to 200 nanotubes. The device’s footprint is only 6.5 square millimeters, meaning you could fit about 40 on the head of a dime. But like modern-day computers, the memory is “off-chip” and not made up of nanotubes, said Shulaker.
He said that the computer could be faster, more powerful and smaller if it was built in an industrial facility rather than in an academic lab. Shulaker cited this as one reason they built a more primitive, no-frills computer.
Kim is a freelance science journalist based in Philadelphia.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientists-create-first-carbon-nanotube-computer/2013/09/25/74e631cc-25fb-11e3-ad0d-b7c8d2a594b9_story.html
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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