A new way of computing

Researchers from the Univ. of South Florida College of Engineering have proposed a new form of computing that uses circular nanomagnets to solve quadratic optimization problems orders of magnitude faster than that of a conventional computer.

A wide range of application domains can be potentially accelerated through this research such as finding patterns in social media, error-correcting codes to big data and biosciences.

In an article published in Nature Nanotechnology, authors Sanjukta Bhanja, D.K. Karunaratne, Ravi Panchumarthy, Srinath Rajaram and Sudeep Sarkar discuss how their work harnessed the energy-minimization nature of nanomagnetic systems to solve the quadratic optimization problems that arise in computer vision applications, which are computationally expensive.

According to the authors, magnets have been used as computer memory/data storage since as early as 1920; they even made an entry into common hardware terminology like multi-"core." The field of nanomagnetism has recently attracted tremendous attention as it can potentially deliver low-power, high speed and dense non-volatile memories. It is now possible to engineer the size, shape, spacing, orientation and composition of sub-100-nm magnetic structures. This has spurred the exploration of nanomagnets for unconventional computing paradigms.

Molecule self-assembles into flower-shaped crystalline patterns

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $1.2 million to three research groups at Indiana Univ. to advance research on self-assembling molecules and computer-aided design software required to create the next generation of solar cells, circuits, sensors and other technology.

This interdisciplinary team in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Dept. of Chemistry is led by Amar Flood, Steven Tait and Peter Ortoleva in collaboration with Mu-Hyun Baik of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, who previously served at IU.

Designing new materials at the molecular level is a key goal of the U.S. government's Materials Genome Initiative, a project launched in 2011 to reduce the cost, and speed the creation, of these materials. As recipients of funds from the NSF's Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future program, the IU scientists will contribute to this national initiative.

"There are more than 100 million known molecules, but in the vast majority of cases we cannot predict what sort of structure they will form when those molecules start packing together," said Amar Flood, James F. Jackson Professor of Chemistry and Luther Dana Waterman Professor in the IU Bloomington Dept. of Chemistry, who is the principal investigator on the grant. "We want to be able to predict, as well as design, those structures."

A new paradigm for cancer research

The $100 billion federal government investment in the “War on Cancer,” has produced only relatively modest progress in cancer research advances, according to Yale School of Medicine researcher Dr. Cary Gross, and his collaborator Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

The pair authored a recent viewpoint article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, tackling the issue of value in cancer research.

Gross and Emanuel recommend a new paradigm for research, one that focuses on improving efficacy and value, as well as ensuring population health impact and generating new knowledge. Specifically, they call for changes to the design of clinical trials, charging the cancer research community to set a target of reducing the cost of trials by more than 50%.

“Not only has the investment in cancer research been substantial, but the costs of conducting research are increasing, and the available funds are increasingly scarce, the pair write. “Considering the substantial investment to date, it is difficult to make a compelling argument that simply increasing research funding will produce a decline in cancer mortality.”

Light wave technique an advance for optical research

RMIT Univ. researchers have developed artificial microflowers that self-assemble in water and mimic the natural blooming process, an important step for advances in frontier-edge electronics.

Flower-shaped structures have been the focus of research because their distinctive surfaces offer exciting potential for applications in a range of fields - from optoelectronics and chemosensors to nanotechnology, biotechnology, biomedicine and organic electronics.

The team from the RMIT-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology Research Centre has for the first time developed microstructures shaped like flowers that build through self-repeating arrangement in water.

Lead investigator Dr Sheshanath Boshanale said the field of organic flower-shaped morphology was still in its infancy.

Popping microbubbles help focus light inside the body

A new technique developed at Caltech that uses gas-filled microbubbles for focusing light inside tissue could one day provide doctors with a minimally invasive way of destroying tumors with lasers, and lead to improved diagnostic medical imaging.

The primary challenge with focusing light inside the body is that biological tissue is optically opaque. Unlike transparent glass, the cells and proteins that make up tissue scatter and absorb light. "Our tissues behave very much like dense fog as far as light is concerned," says Changhuei Yang, professor of electrical engineering, bioengineering, and medical engineering. "Just like we cannot focus a car's headlight through fog, scientists have always had difficulty focusing light through tissues."

To get around this problem, Yang and his team turned to microbubbles, commonly used in medicine to enhance contrast in ultrasound imaging.