Hi Tech & Innovation
A Silicon Valley startup has completed what appears to be the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck, which finished a 2,800-mile-run from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania for Land ...
Dec 13, 2019
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Internet
Facebook on Thursday said it was ready for a data privacy law that will go into effect in its home state of California at the start of next year.
Dec 12, 2019
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Engineering
Researchers in Korea have found an effective and inexpensive strategy to transform solar cells from opaque to transparent. Existing transparent solar cells tend to have a reddish hue and lower efficiency, but by punching ...
Dec 11, 2019
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42
Business
Google's co-founders are relinquishing their executive positions just as state and federal regulators, not to mention the Department of Justice and Congress, are taking a keen interest in possible abuse of its privacy practices ...
Dec 3, 2019
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Engineering
Artificial neurons on silicon chips that behave just like the real thing have been invented by scientists—a first-of-its-kind achievement with enormous scope for medical devices to cure chronic diseases, such as heart failure, ...
Dec 3, 2019
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Hardware
A company called Cerebras offers up some dizzying superlatives that need some time to sift through. The world's biggest chip? And 56x larger than any other chip? At the heart of the fastest AI supercomputer in the world?
Engineering
Silicon photodiodes are semiconductor devices commonly used to detect visible light and measure its intensity, color and position. The fact that these devices are made of silicon has both advantages and disadvantages.
Electronics & Semiconductors
Silicon integrated circuits, which are used in computer processors, are approaching the maximum feasible density of transistors on a single chip—at least, in two-dimensional arrays.
Nov 19, 2019
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Business
Nine privacy, social justice and consumer groups are calling for the U.S. government to block Google's $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness-gadget maker Fitbit, citing antitrust and privacy concerns.
Nov 13, 2019
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Business
A trio of former Google employees who were drawn to the promise of Silicon Valley have founded a company that will pay Bay Area residents $10,000 to move away.
Nov 13, 2019
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Silicon (pronounced /ˈsɪlɨkən/ or /ˈsɪlɨkɒn/, Latin: silicium) is the most common metalloid. It is a chemical element, which has the symbol Si and atomic number 14. The atomic mass is 28.0855. A tetravalent metalloid, silicon is less reactive than its chemical analog carbon. As the eighth most common element in the universe by mass, silicon very rarely occurs as the pure free element in nature, but is more widely distributed in dusts, planetoids and planets as various forms of silicon dioxide (silica) or silicates. On Earth, silicon is the second most abundant element (after oxygen) in the crust, making up 25.7% of the crust by mass.
Silicon has many industrial uses. It is the principal component of most semiconductor devices, most importantly integrated circuits or microchips. Silicon is widely used in semiconductors because it remains a semiconductor at higher temperatures than the semiconductor germanium and because its native oxide is easily grown in a furnace and forms a better semiconductor/dielectric interface than any other material.
In the form of silica and silicates, silicon forms useful glasses, cements, and ceramics. It is also a constituent of silicones, a class-name for various synthetic plastic substances made of silicon, oxygen, carbon and hydrogen, often confused with silicon itself.
Silicon is an essential element in biology, although only tiny traces of it appear to be required by animals. It is much more important to the metabolism of plants, particularly many grasses, and silicic acid (a type of silica) forms the basis of the striking array of protective shells of the microscopic diatoms.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
