We’re so used to seeing megapixels these days that we don’t appreciate how even a few can make the difference between ‘seeing’ and being blind. I recently got the chance to try a tongue display—a device that literally displays images to the tongue using small currents—at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and at Wicab Inc.. If you experimented when you were a kid (!) it’s a little like putting a 9V battery on your tongue: or rather, 100 9V batteries. Read More …
Author: Sunny Bains
First? No. Breakthrough? Maybe.
Last week’s announcement of the “World’s first hybrid silicon laser,” made me both excited and annoyed. I’ve been following the promise of optical interconnect technology for almost two decades, and have written a few reviews of the technology over the years. Researchers have come up with many interesting schemes for routing light around chips, boards, and computers: these include integrated silicon waveguides, planar waveguides, free-space interconnects, and photonic crystal pathways (I haven’t written about these but know people working on them). These all have tremendous potential in terms of improving on-chip, chip-chip, or board-board communication. Apart from the obvious, applications include one that I am passionate about: full interconnection of brainlike artificial neural networks. Read More …
Probably the best job in the world
Tom Schnell (I just love nominative determinism) is a pilot and a flight instructor who runs a research lab where he gets to grapple with fundamental issues related to human perception and behavior. As Director of the Operator Performance Laboratory at the University of Iowa his job is to understand how pilots react while performing tasks in different sets of circumstances, which he does by hooking them up to many different sensors, including an electroencephalography (EEG) net to measure brain activity. (Will say more on this in a later blog.) Read More …