We will confess that the authors of the Applied Physics Letters article “Experimental Demonstration of Energy Harvesting from the Sky using the Negative Illumination Effect of a Semiconductor Photodiode” never used the acronym DAD or the phrase “dark absorbing diode.” But we thought it was too good to pass up. The research work uses a […]
Adversarial attacks are not something new to the world of Deep Networks used for image recognition. However, as the research with Deep Learning grows, more flaws are uncovered. The team at the University of KU Leuven in Belgium have demonstrated how, by simple using a colored photo held near the torso of a man can […]
Often it feels as if soldering is deemed to be more of an art form than something that’s underpinned by the cold, hard reality of physics and chemistry. From organic chemistry with rosin, to the material properties of fragile gold bond wires and silicon dies inside IC packages and the effects of thermal stress on […]
One of the things that makes us human is our ability to communicate. However, a stroke or other medical impairment can take that ability away without warning. Although Stephen Hawking managed to do great things with a computer-aided voice, it took a lot of patience and technology to get there. Composing an e-mail or an […]
It’s as if the go-to analogy these days for anything technical is, “It’s like a series of tubes.” Explanations thus based work better for some things than others, and even when the comparison is apt from a physics standpoint it often breaks down in the details. With microfluidics, the analogy is perfect because it literally […]
If you are a science fiction fan, you are probably aware of one of the genre’s oddest dichotomies. A lot of science fiction is concerned about if a robot, alien, or whatever is a person. However — sometimes in the same story — finding life is as easy as asking the science officer with a […]
It wasn’t long ago that graphene seemed to take the science and engineering communities by storm. You can make bits of it with a pencil and some sticky tape, yet it had all sorts of wonderful properties. The key, of course, is that it is a single layer of atoms. Now scientists have done the […]
I couldn’t decide between normal and decaffeinated coffee. So to eliminate delays in my morning routine, and decision fatigue, I’ve designed the Schrödinger Quantum Percolator — making the state of my coffee formally undecidable until I drink it. At its core, the Quantum Percolator contains a novel quantum event detector that uses electron tunneling to […]
When it comes to gathering environmental data in real-world settings, urban environments have to be the most challenging. Every city has nooks and crannies that create their own microenvironments, and placing enough sensors to get a decent picture of what’s going on in all of them is a tough job. But if these sensor-laden pigeons […]