a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
Earlier this week I heard a quick piece on NPR's Marketplace called "75 years ago, the transistor ignited the fire of modern innovation," about how the transistor was "born" exactly 75 years ago today: December 16, 1947. It reminded me of a blog post written by CSN graduate student Diamond Jones (now Dr. Diamond Jones!) …
Continue reading "Happy 75th Birthday to the Transistor!"
Hearing of the fire at Notre Dame de Paris a year ago broke my heart. I have only been there once in my life, but that visit is one of my most cherished memories. Before studying chemistry and joining the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, I earned a music education degree, with a major in voice …
Continue reading "Molecular music: Patterns of vibrations at the quantum level"
Imagine you work at a grocery store and you need to figure out how many shopping carts will fit in a certain space. You know that each shopping cart is 33 inches long, but you might decide to round that up to 36 inches (3 feet) for your estimation: That rounding is just one example …
Did you know that the worldās first computers filled entire rooms? Now we can carry even more computing power than those early machines in the palm of our hands, thanks to advancements in nano- and transistor technology. Transistors are the components in a computer that control the flow of electricity and therefore allow the computer …
Continue reading "Are transistors getting too small? (How small is too small?)"
When I talk about artificial intelligence (AI), the usual images that come to mind are from fiction: Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the cyborg from The Terminator, or perhaps the gloomy world ofĀ The Matrix. Since March 2016, however, the poster child for real-world AI has become AlphaGo, the computer program developed by Google Deepmind …
Sustainable Nano 