#nanowire

#nanowire

Nano Flag: The Smallest US Flag is Just a Couple of Nanometers WideWhen researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas were heating a material of molybdenum ditelluride, they accidentally created the tiniest US flag ever.At just a couple of nanometers wide (thousands of times thinner than a human hair), the Old Glory's stars were actually nanowires composed of six atoms of molybdenum surrounded by six atoms of tellurium, which were created from the parent molybdenum-tellurium 2D layer.From UT Dallas:“We wanted to understand the thermal stability of this particular material,” Kim said. “We thought it was a good candidate for next-generation nanoelectronics. Out of curiosity, we set out to see whether it would be stable above room temperature.”When they increased the temperature to above 450 degrees Celsius, two things happened.“First, we saw a new pattern begin to emerge that was aesthetically pleasing to the eye,” Kim said. Across the surface of the sample, the repeating rows, or stripes, of molybdenum ditelluride layers began to transform into shapes that looked like tiny six-pointed stars, or flowers with six petals.The material was transitioning into hexa-molybdenum hexa-telluride, a one-dimensional wire-like structure. The cross section of the new material is a structure consisting of six central atoms of molybdenum surrounded by six atoms of tellurium.As the phase transition progressed, part of the sample was still “stripes” and part had become “stars.” The team thought the pattern looked like a United States flag. They made a false-color version with a blue field behind the stars and half of the stripes colored red, to make a “nanoflag.”#flag #USflag #microscopy #nanowire #tellurium

Is Operating at the Edge of Chaos the Key to Developing Artificial Intelligence?A team of scientists from the University of Sydney discovered that the key to developing artificial intelligence may be to mimic the human brain, which some neuroscientists think operates in a critical state at the edge of chaos.From Science Alert:The team used varying levels of electricity on a nanowire simulation, finding a balance when the electric signal was too low when the signal was too high. If the signal was too low, the network's outputs weren't complex enough to be useful; if the signal was too high, the outputs were a mess and also useless....For now, the scientists have shown that nanowire networks can do their best problem solving right on the line between order and chaos, much like our brain is thought to be able to, and that puts us a step closer to AI that thinks as we do.#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #brain #nanowire #chaosImage: Adrian Diaz-Alvarez/NIMS Japan