Faster Computer Chips, Robot Hands and things to do over the summer/winter break

December 23

It is the end of the year so this week we will catch up on the progress made on a couple of subjects that we have previously examined. We look at developments in computer chip speed, robots hands and an installation of autonomous forklifts. We also explore a range of activities and things to tinker with over the end of year break. There is something for all the family.

Vertically Stacked Computer Chips

We have spoken before about the race to develop smaller and faster computer chips. In May, TSMC (from Taiwan), MIT and National Taiwan University created a 1 nanometer chip (the previous best was 3 nanometers).

Now IBM and Samsung claim a breakthrough in semiconductor design by stacking transistors vertically on a chip. The transistors lie perpendicular to each other with the current flowing vertically. Currently chips lie flat on a surface, side by side. This new design will provide twice the performance or use 85% less power than current chips.

This will be great for applications such as cell phones which one day may go weeks without charging.

Robot Hands

We have spoken about the development of Robot Hands previously. In particular the Johns Hopkins project with the US Department of Defense. A team from a range of institutions in Korea have now developed a robot hand with abilities similar to human hands.

Typically robot hands are created by featuring some attributes and discarding others. Creating a robot hand with the dexterity, strength and flexibility of a human hand is very difficult. The team overcame these difficulties by developing a new integrated, linkage driven mechanism.

The hand is called ILDA (integrated, linkage driven dexterous anthropomorphic robotic hand). It has 4 fingers and a thumb, each finger has 3 joints and fingertip sensors to enable adaptive griping. The hand weighs 1.1kgs and is self contained so it can be attached to a wide range of robot arms. The hand is likely to be used in areas that need fine motor skills such as computer chip manufacture.

Robotic Forklifts

DHL has just completed its’ largest ever single implementation of autonomous forklifts. They have embedded 15 into the warehouse operations at Tyrefort in the UK.

The forklifts have taken over picking, put-away and replenishment of products and empty media in the warehouse. The robots work safely up to 11.5 meters high easily handling a range of pallets and waste cages. Safety features include LIDAR and camera obstacle detection, bumper tip sensors and side bumper bars.

Working 24/7 a dozen autonomous forklifts can move more than a million pallets a year in a single facility.

Some things to look out for over the break

It is the annual summer break in Australia where not much happens till end January. Whilst the rest of the world shivers in the snow, we play cricket on the beach. Here are a few things that you can look out for during the break between overs at the beach or between cutting wood for the fire in the Northern Hemisphere.

Leonard

Leonard is a comet that last visited our skies 80,000 years ago when the Neanderthals roamed the earth. It is now visible in our night skies. This however is the last visit that Leonard will make to our skies. It is now speeding along at 44 miles per second which is enough for escape velocity from its’ current orbit. After this visit Leonard will continue into interstellar space and in a few millions years may fall into an orbit around another star somewhere in the milky way. This photo of Leonard was taken by @AstroKirsten in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney this week on her smartphone.

BTW, Kirsten is an Astrophysics influencer on Twitter and well worth following for lots of interesting stuff.

Leonard was closest to the Earth on December 12 when it was 21 million miles away. To see Leonard you will need to look out for Venus in the night sky. Leonard is flying close enough to Venus that it may cause a meteor shower on our near neighbor. Venus is the first star visible in the sky after sunset. By Christmas night Leonard will be just left of Jupiter (in the Southern Sky). You should be able to see Leonard with a good pair of binoculars.

Webb Space Telescope

We have spoken about the James Webb Space Telescope before here. It is a US$10Billion project that will allow us to look way back into the early history of the Universe. After many delays, the Telescope will be launched into space on Christmas Eve (US Time, Christmas Day in Australia).

A European Ariane Rocket will take off from French Guiana in South America with the Telescope on board for the 1,000,000 mile trip to its’ orbit. We will receive the first pictures from Webb in mid 2022.

Synthetic Videos

We have spoken several times about deep fake videos. To date they have been fairly specialized however Synthesia has just raised US$50m in a series B round. Their first product, Synthesia Studio was released in mid 2020. To date they have made over 6,000,000 videos for 4,000 clients.

You can create a free synthetic video on their website here. Free fun for the kids over the holidays.

The Tree of Life

One Zoom have created an interactive (free) Tree of Life. The tree shows how all life on earth is related. Each leaf on the tree represents a different species. The branches show how each species evolved from common ancestors over the past few billion years. The tree features 2,235,322 species. Here is a sample of what to expect.

You can find the full tree here. Let me know if you manage to investigate all 2 million living things on the tree.

Paying it Forward

This is the last newsletter for 2021. I will restart again in January. All the best to everyone for 2022. Let us hope that 2022 also becomes known as 1AC (i.e. the first year After Covid).

If you have a start-up or know of a start-up that has a product ready for market please let me know. I would be happy to have a look and feature the startup in this newsletter. Also if any startups need introductions please get in touch and I will help where I can.

If you have any questions or comments please email me via my website craigcarlyon.com or comment below.

I would also appreciate it if you could forward this newsletter to anyone that you think might be interested.

Till next year.