Category: Mean machines
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Rule breakers make traffic jams less likely
Rules are a good thing when it comes to road traffic: drive on the wrong side of the highway and you’ll cause chaos, if you live. If that seems forehead-smackingly obvious, then an analysis by Seung Ki Baek at Umea University in Sweden and pals my come as a surprise. They say that a small…
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Electronic nose spots anthrax bacteria by smell alone
In the last ten years or so electronic noses have become commercially available, based on a detection device known as a Taguchi sensor. These are heated semiconductor oxide films that change their resistance when they absorb gases. The gases break down inside the film and the various molecular species gather at grain boundaries within the…
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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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Harvesting energy from the airwaves
Antennae are the most fundamental energy harvesting devices that we know, says Sung Nae Cho at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in south Korea. So why aren’t they more widely used? Turns out that helical antennae are already used to harvest energy and most of us probably own one already in the form of…
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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…
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How to decelerate a molecule
When it comes to shuttling individual atoms about, physicists have made giant strides in cooling, trapping and even collimating them into matter wave beams. These kinds of tricks are already being used for matter-wave interferometry on chips. But if you want to do the same kinds of things with molecules, you’re out of luck. There…
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Silicon ribbons pave the way for graphene-like sheets
Graphene is the hottest property in materials science these days. Its extraordinary electronic, thermal and physical properties make it the most heavily studied substance on the plant right now. But there is one thing that graphene can’t do and that is to fit easily into the silicon-based electronics industry. And while graphene based chips hold…
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Quantum cloaking makes molecules invisible
Cloaking is surely the zeitgeist topic of the moment and for proof, you need look no further than the work of Jessica Fransson from the University of Upssala in Sweden and colleagues. This is a group who have who have applied the ideas of cloaking to the quantum world and come up trumps. the result…
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Cloaking objects at a distance
One of the disadvantages of invisibility cloaks is that anything placed inside one is automatically blinded, since no light can get in. Now Yun Lai and colleagues from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have come up with a way round this using the remarkable idea of cloaking at a distance. This involves…
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Here come the quantum robots
Quantum robots were first investigated in the late 1990s by Paul Benioff, a remarkably original thinker at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Benioff is currently occupied in holding a candle for a theory of everything based on quantum numbers (more or less single handedly). So a team of Chinese physicists led by Daoyi Dong at…