Manu Prakash, an Indian-American scientist who amazed the world by building a paper microscope last year, has now developed a computer that works by moving water droplets.
Prakash was born in Meerut India. Currently he is an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University and two of his students Jim Cybulski and Georgios Katsikis helped him to develop this computer.
Prakash devised a system in which tiny water droplets are trapped in a magnetic field. The droplets move in precise direction and distance when the field is rotated or flipped. This is the basis of the computer clock, which is an essential component of any computer.
For nearly every modern convenience Computer clocks are essential. Without a clock Smartphones, DVRs, airplanes nothing can operate without frequent and serious complications. Every computer program needs some operations which should be happen in a perfect step-by-step manner. Only clock makes it sure that these operations start and stop with the perfect timing.
The results will be awful if a clock isn’t present. Prakash explain it in this way – It’s like soldiers marching in formation: If one person falls dramatically out of time, it won’t be long before the whole group falls apart. The same will be applicable to multiple simultaneous computer operations run without a clock to synchronize them.
The droplets are smaller than poppy seeds and the current chips are about half the size of a postage stamp, but Katsikis said that the physics of the system suggests that chips can be made even smaller. One of the fact is that magnetic field can control millions of droplets simultaneously, this makes the system extensible.
Jim Cybulski added that we can keep making it smaller and smaller so that it can do more operations per time.
Prakash said that most immediate application might involve turning the computer into a high-throughput chemistry and biology laboratory. Instead of running reactions in bulk test tubes, each droplet can carry some chemicals and become its own test tube, and the droplet computer offers unprecedented control over these interactions.
According to Prakash the work is so exciting and it opens up a new way of thinking of computation in the physical world. Although the physics of computation has been previously applied to understand the limits of computation, the physical aspects of bits of information has never been exploited as a new way to manipulate matter at the mesoscale.
sources - savethedemocracy
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