A memristor true random-number generator

A memristor true random-number generator: ...However, with the CRRAM design, the memory cell conducts over a small area, so current flowing through it is especially sensitive to the capture and release of electrons that get temporarily trapped in the silicon dioxide film. This trapping and releasing is the random event that the new device relies on to produce random numbers.
“The natural fluctuation can’t be predicted..."

How To Steer Sound Using Light - Technology Review

How To Steer Sound Using Light - Technology Review: Zap an optical fibre with a couple of laser beams and the resulting interference pattern causes an interesting effect--it squeezes the material, an effect known as electrostriction...
Not to be outdone, phonons also influence light because they change the refractive index of the material. This bends light and alters its frequency, an effect known as Brillouin scattering...
They say that the light ends up guiding the phonons that it creates. In other words, it's possible to create and then steer sound using light. "The phonon wavepacket generated via [electrostriction] is naturally guided by the light that gave it birth," say Beugnot and Laude.

The Hidden Risk of a Meltdown in the Cloud

The Hidden Risk of a Meltdown in the Cloud: Now Ford imagines the scenario in which both load balancing programs operate with the same refresh period, say once a minute. When these periods coincide, the control loops start sending the load back and forth between the virtual servers in a positive feedback loop.

"The two controllers each compensate with a stronger action causing a larger swing the next minute," says Ford. Clearly, this is a process that must eventually spiral out of control and crash the system.

New Scientist TV: Born to be Viral: Robot octopus shakes your hand

New Scientist TV: Born to be Viral: Robot octopus shakes your hand: The team designed the tentacle by using computer models derived from measurements of real octopuses in the lab. Then they created the artificial limb from soft rubber embedded with artificial muscle fibres, allowing it to flex or stretch when an electric potential is applied. It's also equipped with contact sensors, placed under the surface, that detect an object in its reach...
The researchers also plan to improve the tentacle's sensing system by copying the way receptors in muscles detect the motion or position of a limb. By incorporating this feedback, the arm should grasp objects more precisely.

Ship in Bottle, Meet Rogue Wave in Tub - ScienceNOW

Ship in Bottle, Meet Rogue Wave in Tub - ScienceNOW: That equation has several weird solutions, including one with the basic properties of a rogue wave. Discovered in 1983, the so-called Peregrine solution consists of a single peak that suddenly emerges out of a smoothly varying wave train (a so-called sine wave) by sucking energy out of it, zipping along for a while, and then disappearing back into the sine wave. In October 2010, experimenters produced an optical version of that wave with light.

Now, mathematician Amin Chabchoub and physicist Norbert Hoffmann at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany and physicist Nail Akhmediev of Australian National University in Canberra have produced a Peregrine rogue wave in a water tank 15 meters long, 1.6 meters wide, and filled to a depth of 1 meter.

Robot arm improves performance of brain-controlled device

Robot arm improves performance of brain-controlled device: "Adding a robot arm that provided kinesthetic information about movement and position in space improved the performance of monkeys using a brain-machine interface in a study published today in The Journal of Neuroscience. Incorporating this sense may improve the design of 'wearable robots' to help patients with spinal cord injuries, researchers said."

Neural Feedback: Brain Influences Itself with Its Own Electric Field: Scientific American

Neural Feedback: Brain Influences Itself with Its Own Electric Field: Scientific American: In the study, Yale University neurobiologists David McCormick and Flavio Fröhlich surrounded a still-living slice of ferret brain tissue with an electric field that mimicked the field an intact ferret brain produces during slow-wave sleep. The applied field amplified and synchronized the existing neural activity in the brain slice. These results indicate that the electric field generated by the brain facilitates the same neural firing that created the field in the first place, just as the cloud of enthusiasm that envelops a cheering crowd at a sports stadium encourages the crowd to keep cheering. In other words, the brain’s electric field is not a by-product; it is a feedback loop.

Although researchers knew that periods of highly synchronized neural activity (such as that of deep sleep) are crucial for maintaining normal brain function, exactly how these stable phases are coordinated—and why they go awry in dis orders such as epilepsy—was never clear. The new study indicates scientists may find some answers in the surprisingly active role of the brain’s electric field.

How to Train Your Own Brain - Technology Review

How to Train Your Own Brain - Technology Review: "In addition, focusing on a limited region adds extra noise to the system—much like looking too closely at just one swatch of a Pointillist painting—the mix of odd colors doesn't make sense until you step back and see how the dots fit together. Psychologist Anna Rose Childress, Jeremy Magland, and their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have overcome this issue by designing a new system of whole-brain imaging and pairing it with an algorithm that let them determine which regions of the brain are most centrally involved in a certain thought process."

Cortical Call Out: The Brain's Electric Field Creates a Feedback Loop That Synchronizes Neural Activity: Scientific American

Cortical Call Out: The Brain's Electric Field Creates a Feedback Loop That Synchronizes Neural Activity: Scientific American: "Not only did the researchers show that this positive feedback facilitated the synchronous slow waves of electrical activity in the slice of ferret brain, they also showed that an electric field of the same strength, but opposite polarity, disrupted its synchronous neural activity. In other words, they showed that they could break the amplifying feedback loop with negative feedback. "Adding a positive feedback loop on top of what the slice produces itself increased synchronization," Paulsen explains, "but the clever bit was to demonstrate that negative feedback reduces synchronization. To me, it's the negative feedback experiment that is important here, and that really demonstrates that the endogenous [internally generated] fields are contributing to the synchronization.""