The notorious degradation-proof plastic can now be broken down!
It was in 2016 that a group of Japanese researchers discovered a bacteria
strain that had naturally evolved to degrade polyethylene terephthalate
(common plastic known as PET or polyester.)
Later while studying the same bacteria, scientists from the the University of
Portsmouth in the U.K. and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National
Renewable Energy Laboratory, made a breakthrough, when they found out
that a particular enzyme in the bacteria was capable of breaking down plastic
completely in a few days.
(The researchers findings were published in Proceedings of National Academy
of Sciences.)
While investigating the enzyme’s structure a tweak was made to it which
ramped up its ability to degrade PET, also giving it the ability to degrade an
alternative form of PET known as PEF.
Imagine the group of researchers led by professor John McGeehan who only
wanted to tweak the enzyme to find out its origin but ended up finding a
substance that could efficiently breakdown plastic!
National Geographic reported in 2015 that eight million tons of plastic make it
into the ocean annually. Not only is plastic detrimental to wildlife, but also to
seabirds and other marine creatures who mistake it for food.
So, removing plastics from the environment could actually be a great thing, but
can the enzyme help is the question.
Simply breaking down large pieces of plastic into smaller pieces is not useful in
itself– rather it creates microplastics that can cause damage to marine
environments – the bacteria however can make plastic recycling far more
effective. Even then it is a long way to go for it to be usable in recycling
industries.
Although a small thing now, it proves that there is more room for development
in the field, and the future shows a promising solution for the garbage piling
around the world.
The author believes that everyone; not just scientists should perform their
roles to create a better future for the next gen. Of utmost priority should be
the objective that plastic doesn’t make it to the water bodies.
Less usage of it in our daily lives or simply saying NO to it, would really be a
giant step towards cleaning the world.

World is becoming advanced day by day and because of that we want such things which makes our work more easier in a better way and with less money and less time consuming.
For this,Technology plays a vital role to achieve this.
Opto-technology is one of the such kind of technology which plays a crucial role in building advanced world with high-tech technology..
Now the question arises what is opto-technology?
–if we split the word Opto into its meaning,it means light or photons…
yaa,photons-these are small packets of light,that everybody knows but I have wrote this article so that we can know what we doesn’t know about them and their specialities.
So,let us discuss their hidden facts and hidden properties:-
.light has its own energy and light travels in small packets form and these small packets transform their energy to another packet and in this way a chain of small packets is created which we call them a beam of light and which travels with the speed that everybody knows.
These photons have their own energy which can be converted into another form in a easier manner with less loss of energy,,that’s why in todays generation Opto technology is demanding.
OPTICAL LIGHT TECHNOLOGY is used in many fields such as in medical sciences,IT sector,automation,Artificial-intelligence and IOT.
IN this article we would mainly discuss on the OPTICAL COMPUTERS.so lets discuss them…
As the name suggests an optical computer is a device that uses photons rather than electric current to perform digital operations in it.
In todays world digitalization of everything is implemented,but digitalization can be implemented in a smarter way..
Smarter way means—LESS INPUT WITH MORE OUTPUT..
AS, WE USES ELECTRICITY FOR EVERYTHING TO BECOME DIGITALIZED WHICH IS VERY COSTLY AND NOT ECO-FRIENDLY.
In,our planet earth if we try to find out that everything on this planet has its own alternate ways,then we can easily solve big and advanced problems of this planet in easier manner..
Like,alternate way of producing electricity can be photons or infrared radiations.

WORKING:–
An optical computer can be constructed with the use of infrared poles(DIODES) that absorbs photons.Also,we need semi-conductor techniques to built infrared CPU AND ITS ATTRIBUTES…We need three things to build and to work it:–
1.OPTICAL PROCESSOR..
2.OPTICAL DATA TRNSFER..
3.OPTICAL STORAGE..
These can be achieved by building the Photonic chips which stored advanced data securely by occupying very little space and thus makes our work easier.
Optical computer are much faster than the normal computers as they are using photons to get starts which travels faster then the speed of current and thus we can do our work more effectively and easily.
Also,Optical computers are smaller in size as all the processors and internal devices are set-up inside the semi-conductor chips which uses photons as energy to get started..
The light can be delayed by passing it through an optical fibre of a certain length and also it can be split into multiple (sub)rays.These rays further passes through the chamber of diode which stores the absorbed photons and then these photons are converted into highly energetic photons with the help of small magnetic motors and these energetic photons when travels with high speed,they produces energy which is used by our optical computer to perform its digital and logical operations..

Also,this can also be achieved by concluding this below process:–

When an atom of the laser crystal is irradiated by the light from the pump source, it absorbs a photon and is excited. When a photon passes by an atom, the atom emits a photon witch has the same attributes(direction frequency and phase) as the passer-by photon. The atom backs to the ground state,and the new photon has a different polarization energy and this energy is further used to perform digital operations..

OPTICAL Technology is little bit similar to laser technology as both uses beam of photons to implement their work.
SO,AS DISCUSSED ABOVE LASER CAN also be the alternate way of optical technology..

Photons have no electrical charge, they are immune to electromagnetic interference.Thus, the combination of global interconnection between the photons and the chips, high level of parallelism in the processing, and potentially very high speed of photons could lead to very great computational power.

Thus,in the conclusion we can say that Technology and humans both are like the two phases of coin.
Like in the coin probability of finding two phases is equal,In the same way probability of finding new technology by humans is equally shared.. Thus, we should always try to find the new technologies in this new era so that our upcoming future generations would live a happier and prosper life.

A new type of Computer chip could allow computers to carry out operations that currently takes hours or days in a matter of minutes, “Imagine if you are a taxi driver but the town where you work is always changing, people are constantly swapping houses and the shops and services are forever disappearing and reappearing in different places. That’s similar to the way in which data is organized in existing chips,” said Peter Marosan, chief technology officer at Blueshift Memory.

“Our design is the equivalent of replacing that with a stable structured town where you already know where everything is and can find it much more quickly. It makes everything faster, easier and more effective.”
The design allows for drastically more efficient modelling of data, meaning it would be useful for weather forecasting and predicting climate change.
What does data Transfer mean?

Also known as data transmission, it is the process of using certain computing techniques and technologies movement of electronic or analog data from one computer node to another. Different standard communication medium formats are utilized to achieve the desired. Data is transferred in the form of bits and bytes over a digital or analog medium, and the process enables digital or analog communications between devices. Transferred data may be of any type, size and nature. Analog data transfer typically sends data in the form of analog signals, while digital data transfer converts data into digital bit streams.

Traditional data transfer speed

Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits) or megabytes (million bytes) per second. These are usually abbreviated as Mbps and Mbps, respectively. Another term for data transfer rate is throughput. Because there are eight bits in a byte, a sustained data transfer rate of 80 Mbps is only transferring 10MB per second. A hard drive may have a maximum data transfer rate of 480 Mbps, while a local ISP may offer an internet connection with a maximum data transfer rate of only 1.5 Mbps.

What is memory wall?

This theory was initially conceptualized by Wulf and McKee in 1994 and revolves around the idea that computer processing units are rapidly advancing at a fast enough pace to leave the memory (RAM) stagnant. This isn’t going to happen immediately, but considering current trends in CPU and RAM remaining the same, a memory wall could be hit in sometime in the near future.

A survey found that CPU speed increased at an average rate of 55% per year from 1986 to 2000, whereas RAM speed increased by just 10% per year. A similar study, however, showed just a maximum 12.5% annual increase in CPU performance from 2000 to 2014.

According to Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors in a circuit doubles every two years, CPUs will eventually become too fast to yield any noticeable difference in computing speed. Once we reach this so-called memory wall, program or application execution time will depend almost entirely on the speed at which RAM can send data to the CPU. So even if one has an incredibly fast processor in his computer, its function may be limited to the RAM speed.

The present day processor chip making companies also noted that certain applications have become less efficient as processors continue to evolve – this is known as the Von Neumann bottleneck effect. Hence delays in signal transmission continue to grow while feature sizes shrink, further stressing the problem of bottleneck.

But there are some solutions available to overcome the problem of memory wall. For example by delivering small amounts of high-speed memory on multiple levels of caching (to store data locally in order to speed up subsequent retrievals), computers can bridge the gap between RAM and CPU speed.

Von Neumann bottleneck effect

The von Neumann bottleneck looks at how to serve a faster CPU by allowing faster memory access. Part of the basis for the von Neumann bottleneck is the von Neumann architecture (here latency is unavoidable), in which a computer stores programming instructions along with actual data, versus a Harvard architecture where these two kinds of memory are stored separately. These types of setups became necessary as simpler, pre-programmed machines gave way to newer computers requiring better ways to control programming and information data.

Memory improvements have mostly been in density – the ability to store more data in less space, rather than transfer rates. As speeds have increased, the processor has spend an increasing amount of time idle, waiting for data to be fetched from memory. No matter how fast a given processor can work, in effect it is limited to the rate of transfer allowed by the bottleneck.
Often, a faster processor just means that it will spend more time idle which can be a major drawback for efficiency levels.
The von Neumann bottleneck has often been considered a problem that can only be overcome through significant changes to computer or processor architectures.

A new technology

A Cambridge-based startup has recently created a prototype for a memory chip that it believes could make data transfers in computers 1,000 times faster.
BLUESHIFT MEMORY says its prototype has a design that “reorganises” the way in which memory chips handle large scale operations where data transfers need to be rapid. The firm said the chip is structured to store data in readiness for these types of operation. Although still a prototype, Blueshift claims its model has already yielded impressive results. The company has technical experts who have built an FPGA card that emulates the chip’s effects and it is estimated that simulations using this chip could make searches on Google as much as 1,000 times faster. Blueshift said its design could also make it much easier to program some data operations because it would remove the need to include complex instructions about how to handle the vast quantities of data involved. Since the amount of data being generated each year is on an exponential incline, the developers of the new form of memory, believe their new technology will better cope with the increasing demands.
How they plan to work
The specific problem the chip is aiming to solve is von Neumann bottleneck, which are sometimes referred to as a ‘memory wall’ or data tailbacks. The start-up firm designed the memory to address the gap between rapidly developing central processing units and slower progress in computer memory chips.
The disparity creates a “tailback” when high-performance computers perform large-scale operations, like database searches with millions of possible outcomes. The troves of data effectively gets stuck in a slow moving queue data structure between the CPU and the less-efficient memory which reduces the speed at which computers can deliver results.
CPU performance doubles every 1.5 years, while memory performance doubles every 10, suggesting a performance gap between the two growing by about 50% every year. Blueshift said its design could also make it much easier to program some data operations because it would remove the need to include complex instructions about how to handle the vast quantities of data involved.

“It would make some big data programming as straightforward as the basic data searches that computing students learn to write in high school,” Peter Marosan added.
Computationally expensive operations such as drug discovery, DNA research, artificial intelligence design and the management of future smart cities could be made much faster on the new memory.

This idea will allow certain complex operations to take place in a matter of minutes compared to tasks that take hours today. However, it is not expected to have an impact on simpler operations such as word processing.

The chip’s designers stress that this is only part of a solution that will require greater collaboration between various companies who are working on the “data tailback” challenge. They have built a working model to emulate the chip’s effects, ahead of the more expensive task of creating the first chip.

In testing it was demonstrated that the algorithms used in weather forecasting and climate change modelling could run 100 times faster using the chip. It could also improve the speed of search engines and the processing speeds of virtual reality headsets by as much as 1,000 times.

Blueshift is now seeking funding to create a full first iteration of the chip. The company said that changing the way in which computer memory works could also help the artificial intelligence in autonomous vehicles like driverless cars, which need to process huge quantities of data quickly to make decisions.
They added that fast, real-time data processing on a large scale will be essential in a future in which objects and people are likely to be closely connected in smart cities, with technology used to manage traffic flows, utility supplies, and even evacuation procedures in times of danger.