Atom interferometry is the most sensitive known technique for measuring gravitational forces and inertial forces such as acceleration and rotation. It’s a mainstay of scientific research and is being commercialized as a means of location-tracking in environments where GPS is unavailable. It’s also extremely sensitive to electric fields and has been used to make minute…
Speedy Terahertz-Based System Could Detect Explosives
Terahertz spectroscopy, which uses the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and infrared light, is a promising security technology because it can extract the spectroscopic “fingerprints” of a wide range of materials, including chemicals used in explosives. But traditional terahertz spectroscopy requires a radiation source that’s heavy and about the size of a large suitcase,…
Hack-Proof RFID Chips
Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have developed a new type of radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that is virtually impossible to hack. If such chips were widely adopted, it could mean that an identity thief couldn’t steal your credit card number or key card information by sitting next to you at a café, and…
Untraceable Communication — Guaranteed
Anonymity networks, which sit on top of the public Internet, are designed to conceal people’s Web-browsing habits from prying eyes. The most popular of these, Tor, has been around for more than a decade and is used by millions of people every day. Recent research, however, has shown that adversaries can infer a great deal about the…
Toward Tiny, Solar-Powered Sensors
The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards “the Internet of things” — the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have their own embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks. Realizing that vision, however, will require extremely low-power…
New Law for Superconductors
Mathematical description of relationship between thickness, temperature, and resistivity could spur advances. MIT researchers have discovered a new mathematical relationship — between material thickness, temperature, and electrical resistance — that appears to hold in all superconductors. They describe their findings in the latest issue of Physical Review B. The result could shed light on the…
Superconducting Circuits, Simplified
New circuit design could unlock the power of experimental superconducting computer chips Computer chips with superconducting circuits — circuits with zero electrical resistance — would be 50 to 100 times as energy-efficient as today’s chips, an attractive trait given the increasing power consumption of the massive data centers that power the Internet’s most popular sites.…
Graphene Could Yield Cheaper Optical Chips
Researchers show that graphene — atom-thick sheets of carbon — could be used in photodetectors, devices that translate optical signals to electrical. Graphene — which consists of atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms arranged hexagonally — is the new wonder material: Flexible, lightweight and incredibly conductive electrically, it’s also the strongest material known to man. In…
New Hardware Design Protects Data in the Cloud
A new hardware design makes data encryption more secure by disguising cloud servers’ memory-access patterns. Cambridge, MA – Cloud computing – outsourcing computational tasks over the Internet – could give home-computer users unprecedented processing power and let small companies launch sophisticated Web services without building massive server farms. But it also raises privacy concerns. A…