Alfred Nobel and several recipients of his namesake Peace Prize alike contributed to warfare and violence in numerous ways—a fact that some find ironic. Yet, Nobel lived at a time when scientists didn’t consider themselves responsible for how others used their inventions, and he held a view of destructive-weaponry-as-deterrent that presaged the Cold War philosophy of Mutually Assured Destruction, so perhaps there was a method to his M.A.D.-ness. As for the others I discuss in my article below, only history can judge.
Category Archives: Engineering
Nanoionic memory: Vive la resistance
For some time now, conventional computer memory has been heading toward a crunch—a physical limit of how much storage can be crammed into a space before it is overwhelmed by heat and power problems. Generally, researchers have tried to avert this heat death in two ways: leapfrogging to the next generation of memory or refining current memory.
Researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for Applied Nanoionics (CANi) have combined the two approaches to create new memory that amps up performance while remaining compatible with today’s devices. CANi also used nanoionics (a technique for moving tiny bits of matter around on a chip) to overcome the limitations of conventional electronics: Instead of moving electrons among ions, nanoionics moves the ions themselves.