By combining 3D-stack-architecture of multiple cores with hair-thin, liquid-cooled microchannels, IBM and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich hope to extend Moore's law for another decade or more. 3D chip stacks with interlayer cooling overcome the bandwidth bottleneck between core and cache memory and allow for systems with a much higher efficiency, so supercomputers won't consume too much energy to be affordable. To solve the cooling challenge, the team is developing Aquasar, a first-of-a-kind, water-cooled supercomputer. The team plans to design microchannels with single-phase liquid and two-phase cooling systems using nano-surfaces that pipe coolants within a few millimeters of the chip to absorb the heat. More info: IBM Zurich (Source: )

High-quality, intense sound can be generated when vertical arrays of nanotubes ("forests") are struck with laser light modulated by sound, University of Texas At Dallas researchers have discovered. The nanotubes absorb energy from the laser light, inducing variations in the pressure of the air around the nanotubes, which are perceived as sound (the thermo-acoustic effect). No electrical contact with the nanotube speaker is required, making them wireless. "Speakers made with carbon nanotube sheets are extremely thin, light and almost transparent," said Dr. Mikhail Kozlov, a research scientist and the study's lead author. "They have no moving parts and can be attached to any surface, which makes the surface acoustically active. They can be concealed in television and computer screens, apartment walls, or in the windows of buildings and cars. The almost invisible strands form films that can 'talk.'" The technology can also be used for noise cancellation. More info: University of Texas At Dallas (Source: )

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have created a molecular image of a system that moves electrons between proteins in cells, obtained using x-ray crystallography. The study could provide insights to minimize energy loss in other systems, from shrinking electronic circuitry to a more efficient electrical grid. More info: University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences (Source: )

Past events leave unique "memory traces" in the hippocampus of the brain that can be distinguished from one another in fMRI brain scans, a study at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London has found. While inside an fMRI scanner, volunteers were asked to recall each of three films they had just seen. A computer algorithm then identified which film the volunteer was recalling purely by looking at the pattern of their brain activity. Stills from the films used in the study (Professor Eleanor Maguire) More info: Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (Source: )