Firstly, it's probably going to be 50 years before this turns into an actual medical procedure rather than a proof-of-concept experiment. Let's just get that out of the way.
So what they're doing is taking people with a defective retina, and adding a synthetic one. The retina normally receives photons and sends a signal along the optic nerve. What they're doing is implanting a silicon photoreceptor behind the retina of people whose retinas aren't doing the job. The chip receives the photons and sends an electrical signal, serving the same function as a "healthy" retina to some fidelity. The results are sort of low-fi since (a) it's just a proof of concept trial, and (b) the retina is a horrendously complex photodetector so it will take a lot of work to approach that in an implantable device. But dude, blind people. Seeing. Go, science!
Money means production, production means process integration, process integration means it's available to anyone making a foundry order. Less interesting but profitable applications work fine for me.
The insulator is generally treated silicon, e.g. silicon nitride.
Also, metals are something you find pockets of in the Earth's crust. The majority ended up in the core by virtue of its greater density. Silicon, on the other hand, is a key ingredient in the crust itself, and tends to be present in the minerals which you would have to find, extract, and process to get the metals involved in circuit-on-silicon fabrication.
Also, the amount of material in the silicon wafer itself is far, far more than the entirety of all surface features comprising the integrated circuit.
If anything, you would want to be comparing the relative scarcity or value of the metals involved versus the dopants involved, the relative ease of fabrication, and the particulars of what you can fabricate like minimum feature size, chip area per circuit element, and compatibility with other things you want to do on your wafer.
Mainly, most immediately, it gives you an additional way to make a diode or diode-based structure when you're designing your fabrication sequence. Fabrication on the foundry / mass-production level occurs through processes which give you pretty much a set sequence of layers (deposited materials, treatments, patterning, etching, etc.). You can make anything you can design within that process...and most anything else usually stays in a research lab.
The extraordinarily common CMOS process involves numerous metal layers "high" above the wafer (numerous layers intervene). These are separated by insulators. Normally, you make diodes at the wafer layer where you're doing your doping.
MiM means you can put diodes in regions of your chip where they couldn't practically be fabricated before without a lot of time doing a one-off chip in a lab. With "a lot" often being several months to a year, assuming everything turns out perfectly, assuming your lab even HAS all the necessary equipment, and assuming you don't have something better to do - which is rare if you're not still a grad student.
* You have to buy a new system and probably sign a support contract for it
* It ties up personnel with deployment
* It doesn't work any better than the old system
* It raises significant privacy issues not present in the old system
* It raises huge data security and disposal issues not present in the old system
* Adding a new student is more invasive and time consuming than in the old system
* Fingerprint biometrics can track an arbitrarily large set of individuals...but they can only distinguish a few hundred
Yep, that sounds like a textbook example of educational bureaucracy.
All the research on the subject points to this being an idea that isn't anywhere near ready for the prime time. Even if you use high-quality PDFs and assume people are reading on a laptop rather than a dedicated reader (to get around technical issues that reduce usability like lack of color, small size, lack of diagram support, etc.)...you still have one giant learning-related problem which no one has really done anything to solve yet.
When you study in a textbook, you unconsciously form a cognitive map of the material both in terms of where it is in the book and in terms of where it falls in relation to other topics and in relation to your study experience over the term.
When you study from an ebook, all of that goes away.
Actually, the abstract nails what the actual news here is.
You can't confine a Dirac electron electrostatically. They show that it can be done with magnetic fields. This is sort of cool because it has potential ramifications for incorporating nanotechnology into electronics.
After the wharrgarbl, it mutates into a headline about creating mass and using it to power FTL starships from video games.
More plausible option: there exist rich government officials.
The rest of this is a sociopolitical rant. Feel free to tl;dr at this point.
It would be interesting to see statistics on how the income and assets of politicians measure up to those of their constituents. But I don't know enough about finance to know the right terms to pin down a mostly honest answer. What are we looking for here, net worth? And how do you account for less substantial factors like political power and connections?
I can guess at this much...there are probably no homeless or unemployed congressmen. BLS.gov currently puts national unemployment at 9.6% - and remember, that's just people who fit a narrow criteria. There are numerous approaches taken to effectively hide people. It doesn't count people who have given up, or part-time students, or people flipping burgers 10 hours a week who can't get a better job or enough hours to live off of. It doesn't count the homeless, the indigent, the undocumented immigrant, the prisoner...there are countless ways to shrink this number. What's the real statistic, if the published version is 9.6%?
Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Persons who were not working and were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been temporarily laid off are also included as unemployed.
Hi, AC. Since 1000 gallons of water comes out to about 4.2 short tons (1000 gallons * 3785 cc per gallon * 1 g per cc of water / 907185 g per short ton), you would actually get about 29 tons in a week. If you want to round more, 4 x 7 is 28. Congratulations, you can mostly do basic unit conversions. What was your point? Filter cost and maintainability are still major unreported issues. Also, that $8000 doesn't count incidentals - getting the water there, personnel, transportation, distribution.
P.S. if you still think $8000 is a good deal on 7000 gallons, it may interest you to note that distilled water tends to be about $0.70 stateside, or about $4900 for that 29 tons of drinking water. Now, that doesn't get it to your disadvantaged disaster zone either...unless it's also stateside and you can hire a truck for under $2000 plus whatever it would have cost you to transport 7000 gallons of salt water to the site then operate and maintain the equipment for a week...or even rope in some volunteers...
MIT is a big school. You get all sorts of projects, really. You also get the usual fluff coverage in the media which tells you next to nothing about the actual project.
MAKE also has coverage ranging from some pretty serious projects to "The Most Useless Machine" and "PLCs: What the heck are they" so it might not be a great comparison against all research churned out by a major academic institution. It has great stuff and it usually does a good job of catering to its audience, but at the end of the day it's a magazine for popular consumption. You can easily find one-off examples where this article in MAKE is more compelling than this media piece about an MIT project...but that much is meaningless.
Pump-fed nanofilters are sort of an old idea at this point. The summary leaves off some critical points like how much it costs and how long the filter lasts.
According to the article, it costs $8000, which is a lot for some things but probably accessible for others. Let's just say it's not going to solve the world's water problem overnight, but it might be handy for relief efforts.
Surfing through to the parent MITnews article, we get a bit more information, but it's still lacking anything about how long the system can operate or what its maintenance costs and requirements are. Does it last a week then you're out most of another $8000? Does it require a lot of technical expertise to maintain? It doesn't say...
Unless you have a time machine up your other sleeve, cutting the Xbox group now won't magically make the money invested before it became profitable reappear.
If that's basic accounting, then basic accounting is fantasy math.
There won't be, it's a "we're fixing it, honest!" announcement. The problems that don't relate to the core design may get fixed within a year or two if it's still running and receiving enough funding / staff to do anything on that scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, it's probably going to be 50 years before this turns into an actual medical procedure rather than a proof-of-concept experiment. Let's just get that out of the way.
So what they're doing is taking people with a defective retina, and adding a synthetic one. The retina normally receives photons and sends a signal along the optic nerve. What they're doing is implanting a silicon photoreceptor behind the retina of people whose retinas aren't doing the job. The chip receives the photons and sends an electrical signal, serving the same function as a "healthy" retina to some fidelity. The results are sort of low-fi since (a) it's just a proof of concept trial, and (b) the retina is a horrendously complex photodetector so it will take a lot of work to approach that in an implantable device. But dude, blind people. Seeing. Go, science!
If someone else can come in remotely and change what you've got installed, it's not your system and it's not your software.
But we encourage you to think of it as your own - it makes the fees hurt less, and we can always straighten you out on the details of ownership later.
Money means production, production means process integration, process integration means it's available to anyone making a foundry order. Less interesting but profitable applications work fine for me.
If I use robots in a burglary, I'm good then? The crime polarity cancels?
You pay to use GMail. You just don't pay cash. You pay by letting them whore you to advertisers.
Google is an advertising company. The tech ventures are just the bait.
The insulator is generally treated silicon, e.g. silicon nitride.
Also, metals are something you find pockets of in the Earth's crust. The majority ended up in the core by virtue of its greater density. Silicon, on the other hand, is a key ingredient in the crust itself, and tends to be present in the minerals which you would have to find, extract, and process to get the metals involved in circuit-on-silicon fabrication.
Also, the amount of material in the silicon wafer itself is far, far more than the entirety of all surface features comprising the integrated circuit.
If anything, you would want to be comparing the relative scarcity or value of the metals involved versus the dopants involved, the relative ease of fabrication, and the particulars of what you can fabricate like minimum feature size, chip area per circuit element, and compatibility with other things you want to do on your wafer.
Silicon is not something we're going to run out of in the foreseeable future. If we do, it would probably be right after we ran out of nitrogen.
Mainly, most immediately, it gives you an additional way to make a diode or diode-based structure when you're designing your fabrication sequence. Fabrication on the foundry / mass-production level occurs through processes which give you pretty much a set sequence of layers (deposited materials, treatments, patterning, etching, etc.). You can make anything you can design within that process...and most anything else usually stays in a research lab.
The extraordinarily common CMOS process involves numerous metal layers "high" above the wafer (numerous layers intervene). These are separated by insulators. Normally, you make diodes at the wafer layer where you're doing your doping.
MiM means you can put diodes in regions of your chip where they couldn't practically be fabricated before without a lot of time doing a one-off chip in a lab. With "a lot" often being several months to a year, assuming everything turns out perfectly, assuming your lab even HAS all the necessary equipment, and assuming you don't have something better to do - which is rare if you're not still a grad student.
* You have to buy a new system and probably sign a support contract for it
* It ties up personnel with deployment
* It doesn't work any better than the old system
* It raises significant privacy issues not present in the old system
* It raises huge data security and disposal issues not present in the old system
* Adding a new student is more invasive and time consuming than in the old system
* Fingerprint biometrics can track an arbitrarily large set of individuals...but they can only distinguish a few hundred
Yep, that sounds like a textbook example of educational bureaucracy.
An analogous case:
In the event of a bomb threat, the President should be allowed to respond by carpet-bombing the city in question with nukes.
Man, that strain on the wireless network infrastructure has to suck. If only someone could invent some sort of bizarre laptop-tablet...
All the research on the subject points to this being an idea that isn't anywhere near ready for the prime time. Even if you use high-quality PDFs and assume people are reading on a laptop rather than a dedicated reader (to get around technical issues that reduce usability like lack of color, small size, lack of diagram support, etc.)...you still have one giant learning-related problem which no one has really done anything to solve yet.
When you study in a textbook, you unconsciously form a cognitive map of the material both in terms of where it is in the book and in terms of where it falls in relation to other topics and in relation to your study experience over the term.
When you study from an ebook, all of that goes away.
They're not making the tube one-dimensional. They're making the dimensionality of the problem of containing certain particles one-dimensional.
Does it have Linux on it? --no--> Install Linux. Is Linux installed? --no--> Modify Linux until you can install it. ----> Install Linux.
It's Linux. Installing it is always obvious.
Actually, the abstract nails what the actual news here is.
You can't confine a Dirac electron electrostatically. They show that it can be done with magnetic fields. This is sort of cool because it has potential ramifications for incorporating nanotechnology into electronics.
After the wharrgarbl, it mutates into a headline about creating mass and using it to power FTL starships from video games.
Wait, I get it now.
blame = attention
"Physicists say" - the ultimate idiot switch activator.
More plausible option: there exist rich government officials.
The rest of this is a sociopolitical rant. Feel free to tl;dr at this point.
It would be interesting to see statistics on how the income and assets of politicians measure up to those of their constituents. But I don't know enough about finance to know the right terms to pin down a mostly honest answer. What are we looking for here, net worth? And how do you account for less substantial factors like political power and connections?
I can guess at this much...there are probably no homeless or unemployed congressmen. BLS.gov currently puts national unemployment at 9.6% - and remember, that's just people who fit a narrow criteria. There are numerous approaches taken to effectively hide people. It doesn't count people who have given up, or part-time students, or people flipping burgers 10 hours a week who can't get a better job or enough hours to live off of. It doesn't count the homeless, the indigent, the undocumented immigrant, the prisoner...there are countless ways to shrink this number. What's the real statistic, if the published version is 9.6%?
Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Persons who were not working and were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been temporarily laid off are also included as unemployed.
Hi, AC. Since 1000 gallons of water comes out to about 4.2 short tons (1000 gallons * 3785 cc per gallon * 1 g per cc of water / 907185 g per short ton), you would actually get about 29 tons in a week. If you want to round more, 4 x 7 is 28. Congratulations, you can mostly do basic unit conversions. What was your point? Filter cost and maintainability are still major unreported issues. Also, that $8000 doesn't count incidentals - getting the water there, personnel, transportation, distribution.
P.S. if you still think $8000 is a good deal on 7000 gallons, it may interest you to note that distilled water tends to be about $0.70 stateside, or about $4900 for that 29 tons of drinking water. Now, that doesn't get it to your disadvantaged disaster zone either...unless it's also stateside and you can hire a truck for under $2000 plus whatever it would have cost you to transport 7000 gallons of salt water to the site then operate and maintain the equipment for a week...or even rope in some volunteers...
MIT is a big school. You get all sorts of projects, really. You also get the usual fluff coverage in the media which tells you next to nothing about the actual project.
MAKE also has coverage ranging from some pretty serious projects to "The Most Useless Machine" and "PLCs: What the heck are they" so it might not be a great comparison against all research churned out by a major academic institution. It has great stuff and it usually does a good job of catering to its audience, but at the end of the day it's a magazine for popular consumption. You can easily find one-off examples where this article in MAKE is more compelling than this media piece about an MIT project...but that much is meaningless.
Longer, if they don't like their kids much.
Pump-fed nanofilters are sort of an old idea at this point. The summary leaves off some critical points like how much it costs and how long the filter lasts.
According to the article, it costs $8000, which is a lot for some things but probably accessible for others. Let's just say it's not going to solve the world's water problem overnight, but it might be handy for relief efforts.
Surfing through to the parent MITnews article, we get a bit more information, but it's still lacking anything about how long the system can operate or what its maintenance costs and requirements are. Does it last a week then you're out most of another $8000? Does it require a lot of technical expertise to maintain? It doesn't say...
Unless you have a time machine up your other sleeve, cutting the Xbox group now won't magically make the money invested before it became profitable reappear.
If that's basic accounting, then basic accounting is fantasy math.
Which would explain a lot.
There won't be, it's a "we're fixing it, honest!" announcement. The problems that don't relate to the core design may get fixed within a year or two if it's still running and receiving enough funding / staff to do anything on that scale.
When someone uses a computer, it's not usually the hardware that spies on them. Won't this just give people false security? (If it does anything.)