Sensors That Beat Lidar and Radar

The Boston startup Tarador has developed a sensor that co-founder Matt Carey says beats the performance of radar and lidar. The sensors are solid-state, meaning no moving parts, and use the terahertz band of spectrum that sits between microwaves and infrared light.

The spectrum band allows the sensors to easily pierce rain and fog. The use of higher terahertz frequencies improves the resolution of images by twenty times compared to radar. The sensors have a range of 325 yards. One of the sales points for the new sensors is a target cost to be far less than lidar. This would make the sensors a great solution for driver-assisted and self-driving cars.

Laser Cooling for Data Centers

Sandia Labs, the federally funded energy research lab, has found a way to use lasers to cool things. It’s anti-intuitive since lasers generally generate heat when they hit an object. Scientists at the lab have been working with Maxwell Labs from Minneapolis to develop the technology.

Lasers can create a cooling effect, and this has been used in the past to chill antimatter and to study quantum phenomena. How does this work? Lasers tuned to a specific frequency and targeted at a small area on the surface of a certain element can cool it instead of heating it. Small means an area in the order of hundreds of microns. The technology would utilize a photonic cold plate with components a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair that would channel the cooling lasers. The cold plate would be composed of a millimeter-thick plate of pure gallium arsenide. The scientists believe this can bring as much cooling as the current method of circulating water close to chips. This would be a huge breakthrough since 30% to 40% of the cost of operating a data center is used for cooling. This could also extend the life of chips, which tend to burn out in two years under data center loads.

A Chip that Can Stream Thoughts

A team from Columbia University, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania has collaborated to create a tiny brain implant that could significantly change how people interact with computers.

The brain implant is called a Biological Interface System to Cortex (BISC). The power of this technology is the small size, since the BISC is thinner than a human hair, along with the ability to transmit large amount of data. The implant is a big improvement over current technologies because it is controlled by a single small chip that can be easily implanted inside the skull.

One of the benefits of the BISC implant is the ability to treat conditions like epilepsy, spinal cord injuries, ALS, strokes, and blindness. The chip can hopefully create a communication pathway to the brain to help restore motor, speech, and visual abilities.

Like all new technologies, this could also power other uses, like creating an interface between humans and computers. This team was not focused on that goal, but this is another technology step forward in brain/computer interfaces, a goal of scientists over the last decade.