Másképp működik az internetezők agya

Gyakran elfelejtkezünk arról, hogy az internetnek nem csak veszélyei vannak.

Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds. The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults. As the brain ages, a number of structural and functional changes occur, including atrophy, or decay, reductions in cell activity and increases in complex things like deposits of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, which can impact cognitive function. Research has shown that mental stimulation similar to the stimulation that occurs in individuals who frequently use the Internet may affect the efficiency of cognitive processing and alter the way the brain encodes new information.
"We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function," Dr. Gary Small, study author and professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, said in a statement.
Previous research by the UCLA team found that searching online resulted in a more than twofold increase in brain activation in older adults with prior experience, compared with those with little Internet experience. The new findings suggest that it may take only days for those with minimal experience to match the activity levels of those with years of experience, said Small.
Additional studies will be needed to address the impact of the Internet on younger individuals and help identify aspects of online searching that generate the greatest levels of brain activation.
The findings were presented Oct. 19 at the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, Illinois.

IT3 komment: Újabb bizonyítékát találták annak, hogy az internetezésnek nem csak káros hatásai vannak. Kutatási eredmények azt mutatják, hogy az internetes keresés képes olyan agyi területeket is aktiválni, amelyeket a könyvolvasás és a tévézés nem. A hatás ráadásul tartós, és már egy hetes, napi egy órás tréninggel is kiváltható.


Forrás: www.foxnews.com

Fényvezető áramkörök

Milyen lehetőségek rejlenek a nanoszintű plazmonika technológiában?

A team of European researchers has demonstrated some of the first commercially viable plasmonic devices, paving the way for a new era of high-speed communications and computing in which electronic and optical signals can be handled simultaneously. The pioneering devices, which are expected to lead to commercial applications within the next decade, make use of electron plasma oscillation to transmit optical and electronic signals along the same metal circuitry via waves of surface plasmon polaritons. In contrast, signals in electronic circuits are transmitted by electrons, while photons are used to carry data in optical systems. As an emerging nano-scale technology that is often referred to as “light on a wire,” plasmonics, as the field of research is known, shares the advantages of fibre optics, including ultra-high-speed data transfer, with the benefits of electronic components, particularly their small size. The technology holds the promise of all-optical computer chips operating at ultra-fast speeds, faster communications and a vast new range of sensing devices. “For the last five years or so it has been possible to build an optical computer chip, but with all-optical components it would have to measure something like half a metre by half a metre and would consume enormous power. With plasmonics, we can make the circuitry small enough to fit in a normal PC while maintaining optical speeds,” explains Anatoly Zayats, a researcher at The Queen's University of Belfast. Until now, however, plasmonic devices had been let down by the short distance over which plasmons could transmit data signals – a problem that Zayats and his team solved in the EU-funded Plasmocom project. Plasmonic data transmission functions on the basis of oscillations in the electron density at the boundary of two materials: a dielectic (non-conductive) plasma or polymer and a metal surface. By exciting the electrons with light it is possible to propagate high-frequency waves of plasmons along a metal wire or waveguide, thus transmitting a data signal. However, in many cases the signal dissipates after only a few micrometres – far too short to interconnect two computer chips, for example.The Plasmocom team took a novel approach. The researchers built a variety of plasmonic devices, including low-loss S bends, Y-splitters and a waveguide ring resonator, a crucial part of the add-drop multiplexers (ADM) in optical networks that combine and separate several streams of data into a single signal and vice versa. While current commercial optical ring resonators have a radius of up to 300 micrometres, the plasmonic demonstrator built by the Plasmocom team measured just five micrometres.

IT3 komment: A fotonika és elektronika előnyeit egyaránt ötvőző műszaki megoládsokkal kecsegtet csipgyártás területén a plazmonika. A plazmonika fő ígérete a THz-es sebességű optikai processzor nanométeres tartományban. A kutatási eredmények azt mutaják, hogy 10 éven belül lehetővé válik a "plazmoprocesszorok" létrehozása.

Forrás: cordis.europa.eu

Szuper sűrű adattároló

Egy új polimer könnyebbé teszi az adattároló rendszerek munkáját.

Engineers in Korea have created a material that could allow super-dense "millipede"-style data storage systems to work at room temperature. The discovery brings the technology closer to commercial reality. A decade ago, IBM engineers unveiled the ultra-high-density "millipede" data storage system. Now more than ever, people who want to store digital photos and video need this probe storage system – which can cram a terabit, or 125 gigabytes, into every square inch – but IBM's and other systems with similar designs remain frustratingly distant. Millipede and other similar systems work on a simple principle: an incredibly sharp needle – the probe – etches data as a series of nanoscale pits in a tough polymer surface, and the same probe feels for what's been written to read it back. But to punch a hole in the hard polymer surface the probe had to be hot enough to make the polymer temporarily pliable. Raising a probe to the 350 °C necessary for each digital 1 and 0 to be written makes the system power-hungry, and that is keeping probe storage from the market, says Jin Kon Kim at Pohang University of Science and Technology in Kyungbuk, Korea. His team has designed a probe storage system that doesn't need heat to function. Instead, it uses an unusual "baroplastic" – a hard polymer that becomes soft when placed under pressure. The first such materials were found a decade ago, but became soft only under high pressures of above 300 bar. Kim's team has created a new baroplastic that goes through the transition at the much lower pressure of 60 bar: "the lowest value among all block copolymers reported in the literature." The Korean team has shown that the tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) can etch the kind of tiny pits that store data in millipede-like systems simply by pressing on the new material. Lighter pressure can be used to feel for and read out the pits without altering them. It solves one issue but raises another, says David Wright, who co-ordinates Protem, a Europe-wide project to explore the potential of probe storage. "The forces needed are relatively high, and this is likely to lead to tip wear issues," he says. Even systems that use heat suffer such problems, and they would be worse if more force was being used, he says.

IT3 komment: Manapság a számítógépekben a nem felejtő adattárolók közül a legelterjedtebbek a mágneses adattárolók, ezek között is a merev lemezek a legnépszerűbbek. Az elmúlt 50 évben folyamatosan fel-felbukkantak ponteciális vetélytársak, de eddig egyetlen komoly ellenfél sem akadt. Az IBM által az ezeredfordulón kifejleszett "millipede" technológia, a holografikus és lézeres adattároló megoldások mellett, egyike lehet a jövőbeli trónkövetelőknek.

Forrás: www.newscientist.com