The world of manufacturing is faster and more flexible than ever because of cheap human labor in Chinese factory.

Need to have your factory assemble a new phone? You can train human employees in a day.

Maybe your supplier ran out of LCD screens, so you buy an order from another supplier but it comes loaded differently into a differently size box, or maybe it has a different connector. Time to call in your robot consultant to reprogram the purpose-built industrial bot so it can handle this new form factor. Oh wait, you have human labor? Just show him how to do it slightly differently and away you go.

If you had read the articles you would see that this robot is designed to be quickly configured to perform new tasks with a minimum of technical skills required. There will obviously still be a role for purpose-built bots that have better economy of scale, as that will be cheaper for extremely high quantity long production runs. A lot of manufacturing is meant to be fast and flexible with production or assembly lines being set up in days rather than weeks/months, maybe to handle the initial burst of demand as a new product is launched, then set up to produce a new product a month later. This robot is designed to enable US labor to compete with cheap Chinese labor in the world of fast and flexible manufacturing with less of a cost bump for the US product.

Even though oil does seep into the ocean naturally in some locations, human-caused oil spills are still bad news. Life will find a way, eventually, but in the meantime there is significant damage to the local ecosystem which was caused by humans, and resulting damage to human livelihoods. Even if you don't care about the ecological damage for its own sake do you not sympathize with the damage to human livelihoods?

To compare it to another scenario: floods sometimes happen naturally, but are sometimes caused by dams bursting, maybe due to human negligence. Does the fact that it can happen naturally make it okay if a burst dam destroys a town?

Is it actually common for TA's to deliver lectures? At my school professors are not allowed to require their TAs to lecture - any professor who made a habit of it would find themselves in hot water from the labor union. Maybe it's different at other schools.

Sometimes grad students can teach courses as a lecturer but it's difficult to get approval for this, and it is a higher pay grade than TA because it's more work and skill. Introductory language courses are often taught by grad students, usually with one professor creating the lesson plan, teaching one class, and supervising a number of grad student instructors who teach the remaining classes in a given semester.

Just because you personally and possibly your industry are overworked doesn't mean you should belittle how hard teachers work. Why are you putting in so many hours anyway? In a school the (good) teachers put in extra time out of the love of teaching and their desire to see their students succeed and the teachers are overworked because there's not enough money to hire extra teachers.

Is IT really an important enough job to be putting in 100 hours per week? That's 14 hours/day 7 days/week during crunch time!! Are you at least getting OT or ST for those extra hours? You might be doing it out of love for your job but your manager and company are doing it because they love you putting in ~1.5 people's worth of work for 1 person's pay.

Minewolf machines do support remote control operation, which is clearly stated on the Minewolf website. The operator cabs are also armored and physically removed from the tiller where mines will generally explode and they are specified up to a particular blast size.

I use an Aeropress which makes espresso-like coffee. I typically combine this with either some hot water for an Americano or some warmed milk for a latte.

Why the Aeropress? Because it's extremely compact and great for single cups of coffee, plus very easy to clean. My entire array of coffee equipment including beans and (hand) grinder easily fits into one small shelf in my small kitchen.

You want a nurse doing it, not a doctor. Doctors are usually too busy to do most of the injections they prescribe, and they're not the ones in clinics around flu season. For the best injection you want somebody who has experience, that's generally the nurse. A good one is so fast, precise, and good at distracting you that you might not even realize when they did it.

With an experienced administrator injections are not too bad, just a very brief very small prick, though they injection site can ache a bit for several hours sometimes.

Anyway, you have probably worked up this fear of injections over and over in your head to the point that you remember it as worse than it is. I'm also a bit nervous about getting injections, but I always go anyway and it's never as bad as I think it's going to be. Try getting one around flu season just to see what all of the fuss is about. When you make the appointment or show up at the clinic let them know that you're uncomfortable about injections and ask for the best person they have to do it - unless they're in a bad mood or super busy they'll help you out. And remember to relax, tense muscles will make it hurt more.

Range is a problem with THz partly because of the atmospheric loss but also in large part because the achievable transmit powers are so low. The benefit of THz is that it can penetrate things like dust, good for radar imaging in the desert, and it can also penetrate clothing, good for imaging you in the airport ;)

What DARPA is building now is not going to be a field-ready unit, it will be a demonstration piece that pushes the state of the art forward to inform future work in the area.

The purpose of the DARPA program is to build a SAR, this LNA will likely be the frontend. There already exist diode mixers which can coherently downconvert 850GHz but the noise figure is bad. With this LNA at the frontend they should be able to mix it down with existing diode mixers or with fancier mixers without too much trouble.

I'm wondering of course how they'll be getting their transmit power - power at 850GHz does not come cheaply.

Nope, DARPA press release clearly states "gain at 0.85THz". The purpose of this program is to push ahead the maximum frequency to enable terahertz radar, so they're shooting for frequency more than GBP.

Anyway, GBP's of over 1THz have already been achieved in the fiber optic communication arena but at frequencies up to ~50GHz, not 850GHz.

You're incorrect sir. The Slashdot summary misquotes the linked DARPA press release which clearly states "gain at 0.85THz".

Gain-bandwidth product is mostly used for opamps because a given opamp could be put into an amplifier circuit with negative feedback which is either low gain and high bandwidth, or high gain and low bandwidth, and each circuit would have the same gain bandwidth product. For microwave/mm-wave amplifiers where 10dB of gain might be a luxury and most circuits don't make use of negative feedback it doesn't make nearly as much sense to discuss GBP.

The exciting part of this circuit is that it works at all at 0.85THz. The gain is probably very low which is why they went with a huge 10-stage LNA. Transistor current gain cutoff frequencies are probably in the 1-2THz range so gain per stage is very small and throwing gain away with negative feedback would not make sense here.

The summary and linked press releases are light on details so here is what I gleaned from the photograph of the chip based on some experience in the area of microwave/mm-wave device and circuit work. There will probably be much more technical information in upcoming papers in the research literature.

Based on the photo of the chip on the linked DARPA page this is not a receiver, but a low-noise amplifier (LNA) which would be used as the front-end for an imaging sensor or communications/radar receiver. It would be straightforward to turn this into an imaging detector at this point by adding a detector after the LNA though I don't think this has one. For a synthetic aperture radar more circuits will be required, especially a mixer to downconvert the frequency.

The slashdot summary misquotes the article saying that the circuit has "gain of 0.85 THz" but should say "gain at 0.85 THz". The LNA appears to have 10 amplifications stages which is very large for a LNA, which suggests that the gain per stage is still quite low at 0.85THz. This is to be expected as the best per-transistor gain cutoff frequencies are not too far 1THz that I'm aware of. The circuit also appears to be built in coplanar waveguide (a metallized signal strip in the middle surrounded by two ground strips) which is easy to fabricate and good for a research environment but it has a higher loss than microstrip (a signal line above a ground plane).

Anyway that's my 2 cents.

It's a SiC MESFET with graphene gate. It's interesting in that the SiC is the source of C for the graphene, and they use two different growth methods to form a schottky barrier contact for the gate and an ohmic contact for the source and drain. But that's all the graphene is doing is making contacts. Maybe these are really good contacts, but it will still be limited in performance in terms of the gate length and SiC channel material parameters, which are actually pretty good but it's not a graphene transistor at all.

These hype articles about Graphene fail to mention that conventional highly scaled CMOS processes have cutoff frequencies in the 100's of GHz already, but that's not a metric that relates well to the clock speed of a large digital chip, although it helps. Other very important factors include how tightly you can pack things, getting low-resistance low-capacitance interconnet, and managing FET to FET variability over millions/billions of transistors. These latter factors have a bigger impact on clock speed than the transistors themselves.

I haven't read much of the latest on graphene transistors but the last ones I saw didn't come close to state of the art silicon, and their off-state current is very high because of the bandgap issue. You can make a bandgap in various ways such as sandwiching the graphene in various materials or making it into small strips but these tend to reduce the high mobility that made graphene so fascinating. I'm sure we'll see some interesting stuff come out of it but most of the press on graphene is the hype that researchers have to do to get funding.

Resonance isn't necessarily involved and certainly isn't required. Given that they will want a brief but high energy electrical pulse they much more likely are using a Marx Generator than any type of resonant transformer (e.g. Tesla Coil). This is supported by the fact that Marx Generators are one of Applied Energetics specialties. Otherwise it may simply be a single pulse cap possible with PFN or pulse transformer.