Items tagged with nanotechnology
Remember when a 1TB hard drive seemed enormous? There was also a time when the idea of having even 8GB of memory in our personal computers seemed like extreme overkill. Today, that's basically the starting point for most PCs. As time goes on, and tech improves, even today's storage types and sizes are bound to seem hilariously lacking. For storage and memory companies, the challenge is to shrink dies ever smaller, or increase the amount of data that can be crammed into mechanical storage. Both methods need to continue progressing at a smooth enough rate so as to not bottleneck the other. Just as mechanical storage used to be the biggest bottleneck in our desktops, today's solutions are proving...
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IBM scientists have created a realllllly small 3D map of the world. (How small IS it?) Well, it's so small that 1,000 could fit on one grain of salt (if you take for granted that the diameter of a grain of salt is three-tenths of a millimeter). Of course, this begs the question: how would one measure the distance between New York and Los Angeles? Seriously, though, the technology opens the doors for all sorts of miniaturized objects with tremendous detail. One thousand meters of altitude in the real world corresponded to about eight nanometers on the teensy globe. It took 2 minutes and 23 seconds to carve out. "Advances in nanotechnology are intimately linked to the existence of high-quality...
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This week brought news of two advances in nanotechnology that could bring us ever-smaller devices with ever-increasing capacity.One brought us transistors a mere fraction of the size of most the advanced currently used on silicon chips. The other gave us the ability to store 250 DVDs worth of data on the area the size of a U.S. quarter.First, the transistors:A team from the University of Pittsburgh, led by Jeremy Levy, "created its nanotech transistors using two ceramic crystal materials known as lanthanum aluminate and strontium titanate. When sandwiched together, these natural insulators conduct electricity as a positive charge is passed across them."The big deal is that this is the first time...
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