The soil beneath our feet is alive with electrical signals being sent from one plant to another, according to research in which a University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) distinguished professor emeritus in the Department ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 10, 2020
8
47926
(PhysOrg.com) -- The heart of the Internet is a network of high-capacity optical fibers that spans continents. But while optical signals transmit information much more efficiently than electrical signals, they?re harder to ...
Computer Sciences
Jun 28, 2010
16
0
The human body relies heavily on electrical charges. Lightning-like pulses of energy fly through the brain and nerves and most biological processes depend on electrical ions traveling across the membranes of each cell in ...
Biochemistry
Apr 28, 2023
3
9726
How fast can electronics be? When computer chips work with ever shorter signals and time intervals, at some point they come up against physical limits. The quantum-mechanical processes that enable the generation of electric ...
Quantum Physics
Mar 25, 2022
1
987
A team from UCF has developed the world's first optical oscilloscope, an instrument that is able to measure the electric field of light. The device converts light oscillations into electrical signals, much like hospital monitors ...
Optics & Photonics
Dec 13, 2021
0
800
While many of us worry about proteins aggregating in our brains as we age and potentially causing Alzheimer's disease or other types of neurodegeneration, we may not realize that some of the same proteins are aggregating ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Feb 21, 2020
3
1427
Scientists at the University of Sydney and Japan's National Institute for Material Science (NIMS) have discovered that an artificial network of nanowires can be tuned to respond in a brain-like way when electrically stimulated.
General Physics
Jun 29, 2021
0
799
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible ...
Computer Sciences
Aug 4, 2014
15
0
Engineers at Caltech have developed a switch—one of the most fundamental components of computing—using optical, rather than electronic, components. The development could aid efforts to achieve ultrafast all-optical signal ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 1, 2022
0
1464
(Phys.org)—Intruders of the break-in and snooping variety have their work cut out for them by just picking up wireless signals that are broadcast by utility meters, say researchers from the University of South Carolina ...
In the fields of communications, signal processing, and in electrical engineering more generally, a signal is any time-varying or spatial-varying quantity.
In the physical world, any quantity measurable through time or over space can be taken as a signal. Within a complex society, any set of human information or machine data can also be taken as a signal. Such information or machine data (for example, the dots on a screen, the ink making up text on a paper page, or the words now flowing into the reader's mind) must all be part of systems existing in the physical world – either living or non-living.
Despite the complexity of such systems, their outputs and inputs can often be represented as simple quantities measurable through time or across space. In the latter half of the 20th century, electrical engineering itself separated into several disciplines, specializing in the design and analysis of physical signals and systems, on the one hand, and in the functional behavior and conceptual structure of the complex human and machine systems, on the other. These engineering disciplines have led the way in the design, study, and implementation of systems that take advantage of signals as simple measurable quantities in order to facilitate the transmission, storage, and manipulation of information.
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