Category: Mean machines
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The waves beneath the sea
Dead water is the curious phenomenon when ships become sluggish and difficult to control in stratified waters in which a fresh layer sits on top of salty water. Such conditions often occur in arctic regions where water run off from melting glaciers or ice flows can float on top of denser salty water. The effect…
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The first printed plastic magnetic field sensors
Conducting polymers just keep getting better. This week, Sayani Majumdar at Åbo Akademi University in Finland and pals say they’ve used using an inkjet printer to print a plastic circuit onto a plastic substrate that clearly shows magnetoresistance at room temperature. That means they can print plastic microchips capable of sensing magnetic fields. Cool,…
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Forget black holes, could the LHC trigger a “Bose supernova”?
The fellas at CERN have gone to great lengths to reassure us all that they won’t destroy the planet (who says physicists are cold hearted?). The worry was that the collision of particles at the LHC’s high energies could create a black hole that would swallow the planet. We appear to be safe on that…
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The fine line between the visible and invisible
The man who built the world’s first invisibility cloak is back and this time he’s got an even better idea. His first design was a triumph for headline writers and Harry Potter fans alike, although most glossed over the fact that this first cloak worked only for microwave-sensitive eyes and even then only at a…
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The incredible climbing droplets
Here’s a curious finding from the University of Bristol in the UK. Place a droplet onto an inclined plexiglass sheet and shake it up and down. I know what you’re thinking: even without the shaking the drop should dribble down the plate due to gravity unless it is pinned in place by surface tension. Vertical…
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Nanotube springboard is world’s most sensitive weighing scales
Vibrating springboards have long been the darlings of nanomechanics wanting to measure the mass of small things. Their thinking goes like this: a springboard vibrates at a specific resonant frequency that depends on its stiffness and mass. So you can work out the mass of anything that becomes stuck to the springboard by measuring any…
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First printed graphene circuits
The world of solid state electronics is in awe of graphene. This single layer of carbon chickenwire has the potential to revolutionise electronics (and much else) because it has enviable electronic, mechanical and thermal properties that no other material can match. The news today is that Ellen Williams and buddies at the University of Maryland…
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The LHC: let the lead fly
There’s no doubt that protons will be the stars of the show when the LHC switches on this morning. But in all the fuss it’s easy to forget that the machine is designed to carry other particles too. So Paolo Giubellino at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Turin, Italy, outlines what to…
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The amazing powers of silicon carbide
Silicon carbide is one of those workhorse materials that can do almost anything. Because it has a high melting point, it is used in high performance brake discs, as a the matrix for particulate filters in engines, and because it is a semiconductor in high temperature and high voltage applications. Come to think of it,…
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Why aluminum should replace cesium as the standard of time
The second is defined as 9,192,631,770 vibrations of a cesium atom and measured in a device known as a fountain clock. These work by cooling a tiny cloud of cesium atoms to a temperature close to zero, tossing it up in the air and zapping it with microwaves as it falls. Then you watch the…