To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

A nanoscale vacuum-channel transistor (NVCT) is a theoretically visioned transistor in which the electron transport medium is a vacuum. In a traditional solid-state transistor, a semiconductor channel exists between the source and the drain, and the current flows through the semiconductor. However, in a nanoscale vacuum-channel transistor, no material exists between the source and the drain, and therefore, the current flows through the vacuum. However, experimental realization of such a transistor has not been demonstrated.

Theoretically, a vacuum-channel transistor is expected to operate faster than a traditional solid-state transistor, and have higher power output. Moreover, vacuum-channel transistors are expected to operate at higher temperature and radiation level than a traditional transistor making them suitable for space application.

The development of vacuum-channel transistors is still at a very early research stage, and there are only limited study in recent literature such as vertical field-emitter vacuum-channel transistor, gate-insulated planar electrodes vacuum-channel transistor, vertical vacuum-channel transistor, and all-around gate vacuum-channel transistor.

In the theatre of ancient Greece, the eirôn (Ancient Greek: εἴρων) was one of three stock characters in comedy. The eirôn usually succeeded in bringing down his braggart opponent (the alazôn) by understating his own abilities.

The Baghdad Battery or Parthian Battery is a set of three artifacts which were found together: a ceramic pot, a tube of copper, and a rod of iron. It was discovered in modern Khujut Rabu, Iraq, close to the metropolis of Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian (150 BC – 223 AD) and Sasanian (224–650 AD) empires of Persia, and it is considered to date from either of these periods.

Its origin and purpose remain unclear. It was hypothesized by some researchers that the object functioned as a galvanic cell, possibly used for electroplating, or some kind of electrotherapy, but there is no electroplated object known from this period. An alternative explanation is that it functioned as a storage vessel for sacred scrolls.

In mathematics, a combinatorial explosion is the rapid growth of the complexity of a problem due to how the combinatorics of the problem is affected by the input, constraints, and bounds of the problem. Combinatorial explosion is sometimes used to justify the intractability of certain problems. Examples of such problems include certain mathematical functions, the analysis of some puzzles and games, and some pathological examples which can be modelled as the Ackermann function.

Ark II is an American live-action science fiction television series, aimed at children, that aired on CBS from September 11 to December 18, 1976 (with reruns continuing through November 13, 1977) as part of its weekend line-up. It returned again in rerun from September 16, 1978 through August 25, 1979. Only 15 half-hour episodes were ever produced. The program's central characters were created by Martin Roth; Ted Post helped Roth develop its core format.

Janet, sometimes called Janet Airlines, is the unofficial name given to a highly classified fleet of passenger aircraft operated for the United States Department of the Air Force as an employee shuttle to transport military and contractor employees. The purpose is to pick up the employees at their home airport, and take them to their place of work. Then, in the afternoon, they take the employees back to their home airports. The airline mainly serves the Nevada National Security Site (most notably Area 51 and the Tonopah Test Range), from a private terminal at Las Vegas's McCarran International Airport.

The airline's aircraft are generally unmarked, but do have a red paint strip along the windows of the aircraft, which gives some sort of hint at Janet being the operator.

The computus (Latin for 'computation') is a calculation that determines the calendar date of Easter. Easter is traditionally celebrated on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which is the first full moon on or after 21 March (an approximation of the March equinox). Determining this date in advance requires a correlation between the lunar months and the solar year, while also accounting for the month, date, and weekday of the calendar. The calculations produce different results depending on whether the Julian calendar or the Gregorian calendar is used.

In late antiquity, it was feasible for the entire Christian church to receive the date of Easter each year through an annual announcement from the Pope. By the early third century, however, communications had deteriorated to the point that the church put great value in a system that would allow the clergy to independently and consistently determine the date for themselves. Additionally, the church wished to eliminate dependencies on the Hebrew calendar, by deriving Easter directly from the vernal equinox.

In The Reckoning of Time (725), Bede uses computus as a general term for any sort of calculation, although he refers to the Easter cycles of Theophilus as a "Paschal computus." By the end of the 8th century, computus came to refer specifically to the calculation of time.

Utility fog (coined by Dr. John Storrs Hall in 1989) is a hypothetical collection of tiny robots that can replicate a physical structure. As such, it is a form of self-reconfiguring modular robotics.

The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (Chinese: 施氏食獅史; pinyin: Shī-shì shí shī shǐ) is a short narrative poem written in Classical Chinese that is composed of 92 characters in which every word is pronounced shi ([ʂɻ̩]) when read in present-day Standard Mandarin, with only the tones differing.

The poem was written in the 1930s by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao as a linguistic demonstration. The poem is coherent and grammatical in Classical Chinese, but the loss of older sound combinations in Chinese over the centuries has greatly increased the number of Chinese homophones, making Classical Chinese difficult to understand in oral speech. In Mandarin, the poem is incomprehensible when read aloud, since only four syllables cover the entire 92 words of the poem. The poem is less incomprehensible—but still not very intelligible—when read in other varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese, in which it has 22 different syllables, or Hokkien Chinese, in which it has 15 different syllables.

The poem is an example of a one-syllable article, a form of constrained writing possible in tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, where tonal contours expand the range of meaning for a single syllable.

Extreme learning machines are feedforward neural networks for classification, regression, clustering, sparse approximation, compression and feature learning with a single layer or multiple layers of hidden nodes, where the parameters of hidden nodes (not just the weights connecting inputs to hidden nodes) need not be tuned. These hidden nodes can be randomly assigned and never updated (i.e. they are random projection but with nonlinear transforms), or can be inherited from their ancestors without being changed. In most cases, the output weights of hidden nodes are usually learned in a single step, which essentially amounts to learning a linear model. The name "extreme learning machine" (ELM) was given to such models by its main inventor Guang-Bin Huang.

According to their creators, these models are able to produce good generalization performance and learn thousands of times faster than networks trained using backpropagation. In literature, it also shows that these models can outperform support vector machines (SVM) and SVM provides suboptimal solutions in both classification and regression applications.