Secretary of Defense Ash Carter spoke at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, technology forum, Wait, What? in St. Louis, Mo., on Sept. 9, 2015. Carter had lunch and met with the DARPA Risers and took a tour of the Wait, What? demo room. Wait, What? is a forum on future technologies — on their potential to radically change how people live and work, and on the opportunities and challenges these technologies will raise within the broadly defined domain of national security. Photo by Sun L. Vega
By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
There are 54 of them and DARPA calls them Risers — the next generation of smart scientists and engineers who are driven to do big things in technology. To find them, DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar asked her program managers to look for bright stars in their communities — those early in their careers, graduate students or postdocs, within five years of their final degrees. Yesterday, from among the 54, the DARPA technical team chose three to offer at the forum their visions for the future.
Alex Bataller from the University of California-Los Angeles is working to harness the benefits of a new state of matter he calls a dense plasma condensate. The work was done in the UCLA Physics Department and funded by DARPA.
Bataller and his team first found the dense plasma condensate in what is known as sonoluminescence, a phenomenon called “a star in a jar.” Bataller explained: A bubble trapped in an acoustic field is made to oscillate in a fluid. The bubble grows slowly at first, then rapidly and violently collapses, and at that moment it emits a brilliant flash of light.
“That flash of light comes from what is known as a dense plasma condensate,” he says. “It is an extreme state of matter that occurs when you reach near-liquid-density plasmas and temperatures of over three times the surface of the sun.”
The phenomenon is robust and not that difficult to create, leading Bataller to believe his team could make the condensate outside its liquid confines and try to use it for different technological applications. So he removed the star from the jar and studied it. Such a powerful light source, he adds, is “just begging for applications.
The broadband light could be used in absorption spectroscopy for chemical detection, or potentially as an optical switch or ultimately to protect imaging systems from harmful laser attacks, or in plasma thruster applications like those used to move spacecraft.
“This started as a simple scientific curiosity,” Bataller said, “but it has evolved into this new technological application that we can use for all sorts of wonderful new ideas.”
In the Shapiro lab at the California Institute of Technology, graduate student Anupama Lakshmanan is working to develop cellular agents for simultaneous and non-invasive diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and traumatic brain injury.
State-of-the-art diagnostics and drugs for these disorders are inadequate and inconclusive. They treat symptoms not causes and have side effects with long-term use. Many of them can’t even cross the blood-brain barrier to treat conditions in the brain.
The work focuses on a cellular-agent-based genetically engineered platform from which a patient can be simultaneously and noninvasively diagnosed, monitored and treated. The engineered immune cells, preferably from the patient’s own body, will express certain proteins to help the immune cells hone in on the injury or disease site in the brain.
“Then,” Lakshmanan said, “we harness the intrinsic capability of the cell to serve as a molecular robot and sense its local microenvironment and produce signaling molecules such as contrast agents that can be noninvasively visualized” using ultrasound or MRI. Ideally the engineered immune cells will be able to self destruct at the end of therapy to eliminate long-term side effects.
The cellular agents will potentially be safer, noninvasive and enable deep-brain imaging with molecular precision, she said, and be substantially more effective in real-time diagnosis and therapy.
At Stanford University, Max Shulaker is working to revolutionize information technology by achieving the next 1000x gain in computing performance.
The exponentially growing availability of big abundant data combined with, for instance, a trillion sensors that will soon be connected to the Internet of things or the cloud, he said.
Electronics can have a dramatic impact on people’s lives, he added, with applications ranging from genomics for personalized health care to the military to science and research and security.
A major obstacle is that computational demand for future applications far outweighs the capability of today’s electronics.
The answer to achieving 1000x gains in computing performance lies in realizing new nanosystems. These incorporate emerging nanotechnologies that enable new devices, new fabrication techniques and new types of sensors, Shulaker said, and combining these benefits to realize revolutionary system architecture, which in turn enables us to realize a whole new class of abundant data applications.
He showed the audience an image of a two-dimensional computer chip, and then a new three-dimensional nanosystem with multiple layers of computing logic stacked one on the other. Interleaving layers of memory storage with ultradense vertical connections link the layers, embodying computation finely immersed in memory, Shulaker said.
Such a chip would be impossible to build with today’s technologies and with today’s conventional thinking and approaches, he added.
The combination of these new nanotechnologies coupled with the new system architectures that these new technologies naturally enable allows the achievement of the massive 1000x gain in computing performance.
Shulaker said his lab can build nanosystems today and introduced the lab’s most advanced nanosystem, 3-D smart sense, which has interwoven sensing, memory and computation.
“On the top layer of 3-D smart sense we build over 1 million sensors from carbon nanotubes. In this instance,” he said, “the gas sensors feed their data directly into a layer of memory built directly underneath, which is then computed on with a layer of logic that is built directly underneath that.”
Because of the ultradense integration among sensing, memory and logic, Shulaker said 3-D smart sense can capture a terabyte of information every second from the outside world and output useful information such as extensive, accurate classification of gases 3-D smart sense “smells” in the atmosphere.
(Follow Cheryl Pellerin on Twitter @PellerinDoDNews)
from Armed with Science http://ift.tt/1LanMSD
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter spoke at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, technology forum, Wait, What? in St. Louis, Mo., on Sept. 9, 2015. Carter had lunch and met with the DARPA Risers and took a tour of the Wait, What? demo room. Wait, What? is a forum on future technologies — on their potential to radically change how people live and work, and on the opportunities and challenges these technologies will raise within the broadly defined domain of national security. Photo by Sun L. Vega
By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
There are 54 of them and DARPA calls them Risers — the next generation of smart scientists and engineers who are driven to do big things in technology. To find them, DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar asked her program managers to look for bright stars in their communities — those early in their careers, graduate students or postdocs, within five years of their final degrees. Yesterday, from among the 54, the DARPA technical team chose three to offer at the forum their visions for the future.
Alex Bataller from the University of California-Los Angeles is working to harness the benefits of a new state of matter he calls a dense plasma condensate. The work was done in the UCLA Physics Department and funded by DARPA.
Bataller and his team first found the dense plasma condensate in what is known as sonoluminescence, a phenomenon called “a star in a jar.” Bataller explained: A bubble trapped in an acoustic field is made to oscillate in a fluid. The bubble grows slowly at first, then rapidly and violently collapses, and at that moment it emits a brilliant flash of light.
“That flash of light comes from what is known as a dense plasma condensate,” he says. “It is an extreme state of matter that occurs when you reach near-liquid-density plasmas and temperatures of over three times the surface of the sun.”
The phenomenon is robust and not that difficult to create, leading Bataller to believe his team could make the condensate outside its liquid confines and try to use it for different technological applications. So he removed the star from the jar and studied it. Such a powerful light source, he adds, is “just begging for applications.
The broadband light could be used in absorption spectroscopy for chemical detection, or potentially as an optical switch or ultimately to protect imaging systems from harmful laser attacks, or in plasma thruster applications like those used to move spacecraft.
“This started as a simple scientific curiosity,” Bataller said, “but it has evolved into this new technological application that we can use for all sorts of wonderful new ideas.”
In the Shapiro lab at the California Institute of Technology, graduate student Anupama Lakshmanan is working to develop cellular agents for simultaneous and non-invasive diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and traumatic brain injury.
State-of-the-art diagnostics and drugs for these disorders are inadequate and inconclusive. They treat symptoms not causes and have side effects with long-term use. Many of them can’t even cross the blood-brain barrier to treat conditions in the brain.
The work focuses on a cellular-agent-based genetically engineered platform from which a patient can be simultaneously and noninvasively diagnosed, monitored and treated. The engineered immune cells, preferably from the patient’s own body, will express certain proteins to help the immune cells hone in on the injury or disease site in the brain.
“Then,” Lakshmanan said, “we harness the intrinsic capability of the cell to serve as a molecular robot and sense its local microenvironment and produce signaling molecules such as contrast agents that can be noninvasively visualized” using ultrasound or MRI. Ideally the engineered immune cells will be able to self destruct at the end of therapy to eliminate long-term side effects.
The cellular agents will potentially be safer, noninvasive and enable deep-brain imaging with molecular precision, she said, and be substantially more effective in real-time diagnosis and therapy.
At Stanford University, Max Shulaker is working to revolutionize information technology by achieving the next 1000x gain in computing performance.
The exponentially growing availability of big abundant data combined with, for instance, a trillion sensors that will soon be connected to the Internet of things or the cloud, he said.
Electronics can have a dramatic impact on people’s lives, he added, with applications ranging from genomics for personalized health care to the military to science and research and security.
A major obstacle is that computational demand for future applications far outweighs the capability of today’s electronics.
The answer to achieving 1000x gains in computing performance lies in realizing new nanosystems. These incorporate emerging nanotechnologies that enable new devices, new fabrication techniques and new types of sensors, Shulaker said, and combining these benefits to realize revolutionary system architecture, which in turn enables us to realize a whole new class of abundant data applications.
He showed the audience an image of a two-dimensional computer chip, and then a new three-dimensional nanosystem with multiple layers of computing logic stacked one on the other. Interleaving layers of memory storage with ultradense vertical connections link the layers, embodying computation finely immersed in memory, Shulaker said.
Such a chip would be impossible to build with today’s technologies and with today’s conventional thinking and approaches, he added.
The combination of these new nanotechnologies coupled with the new system architectures that these new technologies naturally enable allows the achievement of the massive 1000x gain in computing performance.
Shulaker said his lab can build nanosystems today and introduced the lab’s most advanced nanosystem, 3-D smart sense, which has interwoven sensing, memory and computation.
“On the top layer of 3-D smart sense we build over 1 million sensors from carbon nanotubes. In this instance,” he said, “the gas sensors feed their data directly into a layer of memory built directly underneath, which is then computed on with a layer of logic that is built directly underneath that.”
Because of the ultradense integration among sensing, memory and logic, Shulaker said 3-D smart sense can capture a terabyte of information every second from the outside world and output useful information such as extensive, accurate classification of gases 3-D smart sense “smells” in the atmosphere.
(Follow Cheryl Pellerin on Twitter @PellerinDoDNews)
from Armed with Science http://ift.tt/1LanMSD
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