Hot technology is pretty cool, except when its so hot, that you need a pair of oven mitts to handle your laptop computer. Jairo Sinova, a Texas A&M University physics professor and several colleagues from Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, Institute of Physics ASCR, University of Cambridge and University of Nottingham may have found a solution to the problem of scorching laptops. Their research was published in the journal Nature Physics and reported in this online article on the ScienceDaily Web site. Here's a summary of the problem:

The crux of the problem is the way information is processed, Sinova notes. Laptops and some other devices use flows of electric charge to process information, but they also produce heat. Theoretically, excessive heat may melt the laptop, he adds. This also wastes a considerable amount of energy.

And here's a description of the solution:

The device we designed injects the electrons with spin pointing in a particular direction according to the information we want to process, and then we transmit the electrons to another place in the device but with the spin still surviving, and finally we are able to measure the spin direction via a voltage that they produce, Sinova explains. This new device, as the only all-semiconductor spin-based device for possible information processing, has a lot of real practical potential. One huge thing is that it is operational at room temperature, which nobody has been able to achieve until now. It may bring in a new and much more efficient way to process information.

It's good to know that scientists are continuing to search for solutions to the problems that have plagued users, because those remedies will also benefit techies, who devote much of their time to keeping users happy. --Don Willmott