A superconducting sheet of lead only two atoms thick, the thinnest superconducting metal layer ever created, has been developed by physicists at The University of Texas at Austin.

This is a scanning tunneling microscope image of the 2-atom thick lead film. The inset is a zoomed view showing the atomic structure. (Image: Dr. Ken Shih, The University of Texas at Austin)
Dr. Ken Shih and colleagues report the properties of their superconducting film in the June 5 issue of Science.
Superconductors are unique because they can maintain an electrical current indefinitely with no power source. They are used in MRI machines, particle accelerators, quantum interference devices and other applications.
The development of the thin superconducting sheets of lead lays the groundwork for future advancements in superconductor technologies.
"To be able to control this material—to shape it into new geometries—and explore what happens is very exciting," says Shih, the Jane and Roland Blumberg Professor in Physics. "My hope is that this superconductive surface will enable one to build devices and study new properties of superconductivity."
In superconductors, electrons move through the material together in pairs, called Cooper pairs.
One of the innovative properties of Shih's ultra-thin lead is that it confines the electrons to move in two dimensions, or one "quantum channel," like ballroom dancers gliding across the floor. Uniquely, the lead remains a good superconductor despite the constrained movement of the electrons through the metal.
Shih and his colleagues used advanced materials synthesis techniques to lay the two-atom thick sheet of lead atop a thin silicon surface. The lead sheets are highly uniform with no impurities.
"We can make this film, and it has perfect crystalline structure—more perfect than most thin films made of other materials," Shih says

A revolutionary new technology may allow future warfighters to command their equipment to physically change itself to meet new operational needs or to form spare parts or tools. Researchers are developing techniques to order materials to self-assemble or alter their shape, perform a function and then disassemble themselves. These capabilities offer the possibility for morphing objects. The goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) Programmable Matter program is to create a new type of matter that can assemble itself into complex three-dimensional objects on command, explains program manager Dr. Mitchell R. Zakin. Zakin envisions programmable matter in this way: In the future a soldier will have something that looks like a paint can in the back of his vehicle. The can is filled with particles of varying sizes, shapes and capabilities. These individual bits can be small computers, ceramics, biological systems—potentially anything the user wants them to be. The soldier needs a wrench of a specific size. He broadcasts a message to the container, which causes the particles to automatically form the wrench. After the wrench has been used, the soldier realizes that he needs a hammer. He puts the wrench back into the can where it disassembles itself back into its components and re-forms into a hammer. “That is the essence of programmable matter,” he says.
Although the concept of self-forming matter smacks of science fiction, Zakin says that considerable progress has been made in proving the technology’s underlying science. Developing programmable matter is also its own new field of study: infochemistry, which blends several different sciences such as chemistry, information theory and control engineering to build information directly into materials.
Zakin explains that materials are “dumb,” in that they do not have much fluidity or plasticity in their properties. There are shape memory alloys that can slightly alter their shape when heated by an electric current, but he notes that their range of motion and capabilities are limited. To build truly changeable, plastic materials, the information to do so must be directly integrated into the material itself. The exact composition of the material can vary—it can be a chemical or a microchip, or a larger structure with computers embedded in it. The goal is to distribute processing capabilities throughout the material. “You’re blurring the distinction between materials and machines. Materials act like computers and communications systems, and communications systems and computers act like materials,” he says.
An important part of infochemistry is what Zakin describes as mesomatter, the particles needed to build structures. Ranging in size from 100 microns to a centimeter, these pieces are large enough to have machinery built into them. A key function behind mesomatter is separability. Zakin notes that a particular particle’s shape determines how it fits together with other particles, but its internal structure carries its function and data sharing capabilities. Not only does this combination of data and material allow for dynamic flexibility in creating structures, but he says that it can potentially create new states of matter. Conventional materials can transition from liquids to solids, but these new “infomaterials” can have infosolids, where the matter is solid and its information is localized; “infoliquids” where both the material and information are flowing, and any number of combinations in between.
The Programmable Matter program is now approximately five months into its second phase, which is scheduled to last about 15 months. The first phase of the effort involved five teams, two from Harvard University, two from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and one from Cornell University. Zakin notes that all of the teams successfully met their goals and are all now working on phase two. The teams are made up of experts from a range of disciplines such as computer scientists, roboticists, biologists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, physicists and artists. Zakin describes the research on programmable matter as “the ultimate interdisciplinary endeavor.” Another important part of the program is that the five teams are collaborating with each other, not competing. This is because each team has its own strengths and weaknesses and they share information. The teams meet on a regular basis and present their results to each other to help facilitate the information sharing.

IBM and five leading universities have been awarded $4.9 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal is to create computing systems that will emulate the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivaling its low power consumption and compact size.
The amount of digital data is growing at a mind-boggling 60 percent each year. But without the ability to monitor, analyze and react to this information in real-time, the majority of its value may be lost. Cognitive computing offers the promise of systems that can integrate and analyze vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye, allowing businesses or individuals to make rapid decisions in time to have a significant impact. A cognitive computer, emulating a brain, could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of relevant information and help people make good decisions rapidly.
By seeking inspiration from the structure, dynamics, function, and behavior of the brain, the researchers aim to break the conventional programmable machine paradigm. Ultimately, they hope to rival the brain's low power consumption and small size by using nanoscale devices for synapses and neurons. This technology stands to bring about entirely new computing architectures and programming paradigms. The end goal: ubiquitously deployed computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action and cognition in complex, real-world environments.
This research project is the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative. Initial research will focus on demonstrating nanoscale, low power synapse-like devices and on uncovering the functional microcircuits of the brain. The long-term mission is to demonstrate low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence.

Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have demonstrated that they can simulate the intelligence of a four year old child. The Second Life environment and a 100 teraflop supercomputer were used to perform the demonstration. They named the child Eddie and he behaves like a typical young boy. The child is a product of logic-based artificial intelligence and complex modelling techniques. Eddie has his own set of beliefs, and the ability to reason about his beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age.



"Our technologies can be applied to any digital environment, and indeed we are specifically aiming, with IBM, at environments in which the physical and the virtual directly interact." said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. Eventually, more advanced versions of the artificial intelligence technology will be put to use in entertainment and gaming, as well as immersive training and education scenarios.

"The applications are endless," Bringsjord said. "Imagine being able to step into a simulation environment in which you interact with synthetic characters as sophisticated as those seen in Star Trek's holodeck. Imagine a hostage situation: How do you prepare for negotiating with a terrorist holding a hostage? Now, it's textbook and playacting. But what if you could enter the holodeck and match wits with a synthetic character that has the ability to reason in earnest about your mind, and about what you're trying to do? This is actually a demo we're considering trying to engineer," he said.

As Eddie operates entirely on formal logic and well-defined theorems, reasoning is not automatically fast, Bringsjord said, explaining the need for clever engineering and high-performance hardware.

This research is supported by IBM and other outside sponsors, and requires the use of Rensselaer's Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), which provides more than 100 teraflops of computing power through massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters.

Anthony van den Pol, professor of neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine and his team engineered a virus that can find its way through the vascular system and kill deadly brain tumors.

Each year 200,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with a brain tumor, and metastatic tumors and glioblastomas make up a large part of these tumors. There currently is no cure for these types of tumors, and they generally result in death within months.

Current treatments include chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, which can prolong life for a few months, but generally fail because they don’t eliminate all of the cancer cells.

To test their tumor-targeting virus, van den Pol and his team transplanted tumor tissue from human or mouse brains into the brains of mice. They then inoculated the mice with a lab-created vesicular stomatitis virus, a replicating virus distantly related to the rabies virus.

“Three days after inoculation, the tumors were completely or almost completely infected with the virus and the tumor cells were dying or dead,” van den Pol said. “We were able to target different types of cancer cells. Within the same time frame, normal mouse brain cells or normal human brain cells transplanted into mice were spared. This underlines the virus’ potential therapeutic value against multiple types of brain cancers.”

The team also tested targeting brain tumors with the virus through the olfactory nerve and found it led to complete infection of the tumor. After infection, the tumor cells disappeared from the olfactory bulb, van den Pol said.