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Secret Quantum Internet. The central principle of quantum mechanics--that the act of measuring a quantum object actually changes it--has some pretty amazing potential in the world of cryptography. And Los Alamos National Laboratory just revealed that it has been using a new design of quantum cryptography setup for more than two years. Quantum cryptography isn't new; the potential for completely secure transmission has been enough to attract lots of development efforts from banks and governments. You can even buy a fairly simple system right now.

And these are literally completely secure; any attempt to eavesdrop is necessarily obvious, because the mere act of eavesdropping physically changes the transmission. But that means that quantum encryption has, until now, been exclusively a one-to-one connection, as over a single line. Networks haven't been possible. But Los Alamos has pioneered what they're calling a "quantum internet. " But scalability becomes a problem as the network gets more and more complex. We've Finally Figured Out What Makes LED Bulbs So Inefficient. LEDs should be lighting the way to a greener future: They use 75 percent less energy and last 25 times longer than incandescent light bulbs, and they do so at a cooler temperature. But right now, we mostly use LEDs in electronics, because they have a bit of a drooping problem: at higher currents, the amount of light they produce takes a nose-dive. The efficiency droop has baffled scientists for years, but researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and France’s École Polytechnique say they’ve finally solved the mystery.

Their work, published in a forthcoming issue of the Physical Review Letters, identifies the source of the droop as a process called Auger recombination, a non-radiative process that produces heat. Previous research at UCSB theorized that Auger recombination might be the culprit, but this is the first study to measure the effect conclusively.

LED-based lights contain a microchip with a positive-type and a negative-type semiconductor made of gallium nitride. Consider a Career in Computing. Q&A: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired's Kevin Kelly | Wired Magazine. Video: Spring-Loaded MEMS-Driven Pixels Could Enable 3-D Holographic Video Displays. Holographic video is sort of the holy grail of video display technology right now. Stereoscopic 3-D is fine and everything, but it basically works by tricking the brain into seeing that 3-D depth via two offset 2-D images--hence the occasional headaches associated with current commercial 3-D displays. Holographic video, by contrast, creates images that are really three-dimensional, no glasses or headaches required.

And while high-quality holographic vid is still out of reach, researchers in Belgium think they can get us there via tiny MEMS-driven spring-loaded pixels. There's a quality explanation of how this would work in the video below, but briefly: researchers at Belgian firm Imec have already created a MEMS-free chip (MEMS stands for microelectrical mechanical systems; think very, very small machines) that provides a very clear holographic rendering of the company's headquarters.

They do this by taking a silicon wafer and growing a layer of silicon dioxide onto it. [IEEE Spectrum] Video: New Quantum Dot Tech Could Boost Current Optical Fiber Band Tenfold. Current optical communications schemes rely on a narrow 1.55 micron wavelength band of about 10 terahertz, a band in which optical signals can be well controlled and loss of signal/data is fairly low.

But to open up optical networks to the high data load of the future, we need to open up the span of available wavelength. And using a novel quantum dot technology, researchers at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan have done exactly that, to the tune of a roughly tenfold increase. They did so by creating a whole new process of quantum dot formation involving what's called a "sandwiched sub-nano separator structure. " Conventionally, crystalline quantum dot structures are grown directly on a silicon surface, which leads to a somewhat uneven, disordered layer of dots. [NICT via DigInfo News] The Transistor. Lists of Nobel Prizes and Laureates The Transistor Play the Transistor Recycler Game About the game A transistor is made of a solid piece of a semiconductor material and either used as switches, to turn electronic signals on or off – or, as amplifiers. Read More » The Nobel Prize The 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the invention of the transistor.

Readings Learn about how a transistor functions and try build a replica The Transistor in a Century of Electronics Share this: Share on facebook Share on google_plusone_share Share on twitter More Sharing Services7 Share on email To cite this pageMLA style: "The Transistor". Recommended: The Legacy of Alfred Nobel On 27 November 1895 Alfred Nobel signed his last will in Paris. Play the Blood Typing Game Try to save some patients and learn about human blood types! Unlocking the Secrets of Our Cells Discover the 2012 awarded research on stem cells and cell signalling. Contact E-mail us Press Sitemap A-Z Index Frequently Asked Questions Terms Follow Facebook.

How Transistors Work" If cells are the building blocks of life, transistors are the building blocks of the digital revolution. Without transistors, the technological wonders you use every day -- cell phones, computers, cars -- would be vastly different, if they existed at all. Before transistors, product engineers used vacuum tubes and electromechanical switches to complete electrical circuits. Tubes were far from ideal. They had to warm up before they worked (and sometimes overheated when they did), they were unreliable and bulky and they used too much energy.

In the late 1920's, Polish American physicist Julius Lilienfeld filed patents for a three-electrode device made from copper sulfide. Twenty years after Lilienfeld filed his patents, scientists were trying to put his ideas to practical use. In 1947, Shockley was director of transistor research at Bell Telephone Labs. The next year, Bell Labs announced to the world that it had invented working transistors.

A Tiny Transistor Hooks Up To Individual Proteins In Human Tears. Wiretapping an enzyme and listening as it unfolds could shed new light on the way proteins work, allowing researchers to monitor structural changes over a longer period of time than was previously possible. To do it, scientists tethered a nanoscale transistor to a molecule found in human tears. Understanding how proteins fold is a key challenge in biology — making synthetic versions is about much more than their molecular contents. Enzymes change their shapes when they bind their molecular targets, and the way in which this happens has some bearing on the way the proteins work.

Researchers have even turned to online games to look for novel folds and structures that could be used in drug discovery and other uses. Biochemists can glimpse these structural changes, but not over long enough time scales to really get a handle on the folding action. Tiny nanotube field-effect transistors have also been used to listen to cells in action. The Largest-Ever Quantum Calculation Uses 84 Qubits and Takes Just 270 Milliseconds. Vancouver-based quantum computer maker D-Wave Systems is the kind of company that often gets mixed reviews--either kudos for working on the very edge of a new and potentially groundbreaking technology, or dismissal for not exactly delivering the kind of Earth-shattering technology that people were perhaps expecting. Regardless, today D-Wave is marking one in the win column after announcing that it has achieved the world's largest quantum computation using 84 qubits. A quick quantum computing primer: qubits, or quantum bits, are the basic units of quantum information, comparable to (but quite different from) a classical bit.

The main benefit of qubits is that they can exploit the laws of quantum mechanics to exist in two states simultaneously. In comparison to classical computing, that means a single superconducting qubit can exist as both a "one" and a "zero" at the same time, whereas a classical bit can only be one or the other. This vastly improves speed and computing power. Cloud-Based Quantum Computing Will Allow Secure Calculation on Encrypted Bits. Double-blinded by the light Entangled Qubits Clusters of entangled qubits allow remote quantum computing to be performed on a remote server, while keeping the contents and results hidden. EQUINOX GRAPHICS When quantum computers eventually reach larger scales , they’ll probably remain pretty precious resources, locked away in research institutions just like our classical supercomputers.

So anyone who wants to perform quantum calculations will likely have to do it in the cloud, remotely accessing a quantum server somewhere else. A new double-blind cryptography method would ensure that these calculations remain secret. Imagine you’re a developer and you have some code you’d like to run on a quantum computer. Stefanie Barz and colleagues at the University of Vienna’s Center for Quantum Science and Technology prepared an experimental demonstration of a blind computing technique, and tested it with two well-known quantum computing algorithms.

Back to the entangled bits.