Category: Changin’ the world
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Best of 2018
The most popular arXivblog stories of 2018
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Centimetre scale models could compute Casimir forces
The Casimir force is notoriously difficult to measure. So tricky is it, that the first accurate measurements weren’t made until 1997 and even today only a handful of labs around the world of capable of taking its measure. Of course there are various ways of modelling what goes on theoretically but even the most powerful…
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Liquid film motors finally explained
Last year, a group of Iranian physicists made the extraordinary discovery that motors can be made of nothing more than a thin film of water sitting in a cell bathed in two perpendicular electric fields. The unexpected result of this set up is that the water begins to rotate. Divide the water into smaller cells…
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Human eye could detect spooky action at a distance
It’s almost a year since Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva announced that they had calculated that a human eye ought to be able to detect entangled photons. “Entanglement in principle could be seen,” they concluded. That’s extraordinary because it would mean that the humans involved in such an experiment would become…
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Trick of the light boosts atom interferometer sensitivity
While preparing for the job of US Secretary of Energy in the incoming Obama administration (and being director of one the top labs in the US and Nobel Prize winner to boot), Steven Chu has somehow found time to post the results of his latest experiment on the arXiv. And it’s an impressive piece of…
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How the credit crisis spread
Where did the credit crunch start? According to Reginald Smith at the Bouchet-Franklin Research Institute in Rochester, it began in the property markets of California and Florida in early 2007 and is still going strong. To help understand how the crisis has evolved, Smith has mapped the way it has spread as reflected in the…
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How to spot vegetation on Earth-like planets
In December 1990, scientists analysing data from the Galileo spacecraft found compelling evidence for the existence of life in space. The data famously came from the craft’s first fly by of Earth, a planet on which life seemed a definite possibility. The exercise led to the establishment of a number of criteria that if found…
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Memristors made into low cost, high density RRAM (Resistive Random Access Memory)
The four passive components of electronics are the resistor, capacitor, inductor and the memristor, which was discovered only a few months ago. Memristors (from memory-resistors, geddit?) are resistors whose resistance depends on their past. In that sense they remember the past or, as an electronics engineer might put it, they store information. So new are…
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How bacterial colonies could drive rotors
E coli bacteria use motors called flagella to generate a force that pushes them along at a rate of up to 10 body lengths per second. That’s a fair rate of knots and in recent years several groups have used this force to turn microrotors. Their approach is to bond the bacteria to a rotor…
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Graphene transistors clocked at 26GHz
IBM has seen the future of computing and it may not involve silicon. Instead the company has been looking at graphene, the single atom-thick sheets of carbon that has materials scientists entranced by its dazzling array of amazing properties. If graphene ever becomes the material of choice for a new generation of superfast chips, then…