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Diamond chips to make meaner, greener electronics
TECHNOLOGY hasso plattner institute
For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology
Next step for touchscreens IMAGINE entering your living room and sliding your foot purposefully over a particular stretch of floor. Suddenly your hi-fi system springs into life and begins playing your favourite CD. Floors you can use like a giant touchscreen could one day be commonplace thanks to a “touch floor” developed by Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. His prototype, named Multi-toe, is made up of thin layers of silicone and clear acrylic on top of a rigid glass sheet. Light beams shone into the acrylic layer bounce around inside until pressure from above allows them to escape. A camera below captures the light and registers an image of whatever has pressed down upon the floor. Some touchscreens already employ this technique, but the new version offers greater resolution, allowing the
pattern of the tread on someone’s shoes to be detected. Baudisch has already adapted it for the video game Unreal Tournament, with players leaning in different directions to move on screen, and tapping their toes to shoot. A virtual keyboard on the floor can also be activated with the feet.
“The ‘touch floor’ allows the pattern of the tread on someone’s shoes to be detected” Baudisch presented the work at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, Georgia, this week. He admits the system cannot easily be used on existing floors due to the need for underfloor cavities to house the cameras, but says future versions will address this.
–Vote with your feet–
Prolific posters are top of the blogs
Gem of an idea for cooler computing
WHEN it comes to making friends online it is the quantity, not quality, of your blog posts that counts. Susan Jamison-Powell at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK studied the popularity of 75 bloggers on the site Livejournal. com. She looked at the number of friends each blogger had, the number of posts they made, the total number of words written and the overall tone of the posts. She then asked the bloggers to rate how attractive they found each of their peer’s blogs. She found that the more words a blogger posted, the more friends they had and the higher their attractiveness rating. The tone of their posts – whether they contained mostly positive or negative comments – had no effect. The findings were presented at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference this week.
DIAMONDS could be an electronic engineer’s best friend, thanks to a new technique that uses slivers of synthetic gems as the basis for superior microchips. Pure diamond is an electrical insulator, but given the right impurities it becomes a semiconductor. Crucially, it is also the best heat conductor on Earth, so synthetic diamond could make microchips that handle highpower signals but do not require power-hungry cooling systems. “Diamond-based control modules in electric cars and industrial machinery could lead
18.6
kilometres is the altitude reached by NASA’s uncrewed Global Hawk aircraft as it studied the air over the Pacific Ocean
to considerable energy savings,” says Hideaki Yamada of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan. Yamada’s team used a technique called chemical vapour deposition to “clone” synthetic diamonds. Yamada’s clones all have the same crystal lattice structure, so when bonded together they form a monocrystalline mosaic. The team have so far created 25-millimetre-square wafers from six smaller clones and hope to make them big enough for microchip manufacture. The work was presented at a meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics at Tokai University in March.
“Opposition to killing Constellation is growing” Texan congressman Pete Olson insists that there is still a chance to push for NASA’s at-risk Constellation programme, which aims to return astronauts to the moon, as the agency’s budget is yet to be finalised (usatoday.com, 9 April)
17 April 2010 | NewScientist | 17
For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology
Next step for touchscreens IMAGINE entering your living room and sliding your foot purposefully over a particular stretch of floor. Suddenly your hi-fi system springs into life and begins playing your favourite CD. Floors you can use like a giant touchscreen could one day be commonplace thanks to a “touch floor” developed by Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. His prototype, named Multi-toe, is made up of thin layers of silicone and clear acrylic on top of a rigid glass sheet. Light beams shone into the acrylic layer bounce around inside until pressure from above allows them to escape. A camera below captures the light and registers an image of whatever has pressed down upon the floor. Some touchscreens already employ this technique, but the new version offers greater resolution, allowing the
pattern of the tread on someone’s shoes to be detected. Baudisch has already adapted it for the video game Unreal Tournament, with players leaning in different directions to move on screen, and tapping their toes to shoot. A virtual keyboard on the floor can also be activated with the feet.
“The ‘touch floor’ allows the pattern of the tread on someone’s shoes to be detected” Baudisch presented the work at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, Georgia, this week. He admits the system cannot easily be used on existing floors due to the need for underfloor cavities to house the cameras, but says future versions will address this.
–Vote with your feet–
Prolific posters are top of the blogs
Gem of an idea for cooler computing
WHEN it comes to making friends online it is the quantity, not quality, of your blog posts that counts. Susan Jamison-Powell at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK studied the popularity of 75 bloggers on the site Livejournal. com. She looked at the number of friends each blogger had, the number of posts they made, the total number of words written and the overall tone of the posts. She then asked the bloggers to rate how attractive they found each of their peer’s blogs. She found that the more words a blogger posted, the more friends they had and the higher their attractiveness rating. The tone of their posts – whether they contained mostly positive or negative comments – had no effect. The findings were presented at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference this week.
DIAMONDS could be an electronic engineer’s best friend, thanks to a new technique that uses slivers of synthetic gems as the basis for superior microchips. Pure diamond is an electrical insulator, but given the right impurities it becomes a semiconductor. Crucially, it is also the best heat conductor on Earth, so synthetic diamond could make microchips that handle highpower signals but do not require power-hungry cooling systems. “Diamond-based control modules in electric cars and industrial machinery could lead
18.6
kilometres is the altitude reached by NASA’s uncrewed Global Hawk aircraft as it studied the air over the Pacific Ocean
to considerable energy savings,” says Hideaki Yamada of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan. Yamada’s team used a technique called chemical vapour deposition to “clone” synthetic diamonds. Yamada’s clones all have the same crystal lattice structure, so when bonded together they form a monocrystalline mosaic. The team have so far created 25-millimetre-square wafers from six smaller clones and hope to make them big enough for microchip manufacture. The work was presented at a meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics at Tokai University in March.
“Opposition to killing Constellation is growing” Texan congressman Pete Olson insists that there is still a chance to push for NASA’s at-risk Constellation programme, which aims to return astronauts to the moon, as the agency’s budget is yet to be finalised (usatoday.com, 9 April)
17 April 2010 | NewScientist | 17