Category: Mean machines
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Graphite valley
Them chemists have been bewitched by carbon in recent years. Ya can’t move in chemistry departments without being abused ‘n’ bombarded with nanotubes, buckyballs and all mannner of carbononsense. But in all their hurry to blow their own carbon nanotrumpets, it loooks as if they missed a wonder material staring them in the face. Now…
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Why MHD propulsion won’t work
Them space engineers are always looking for promising new ways of a-jettin’ and a-zoomin’ around the solar system. They’ve looked at conventional rockets, ion propulsion and even solar sails and nuclear drives. But nobody has spent much time dreamin about magnetohydrodynamics. The principle is relatively straightforward–shoot a charged particle through a conducting ring and the…
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How atom lasers are coming of age
Atom lasers are gonna be mighty useful for testing quantum mechanics to its limits. But ain’t nobody built one that can operate continuously, which is what yerl need for these kindsa experiments. We’ve had pulsed atom lasers for about a decade and it looks as if a continuous version may be close. Atom lasers work…
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Bent on plastic electronics
Ain’t we expecting alot from organic transistors: flexible electronics, inkjet-printed microchips and so on. But one reason that they’ve yet to hit the market big time is that their electronic behavior is hard to pin down and, even worse, seems to change with time. What’s going on? Bertram Batlogg and buddies from the Swiss Federal…
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The hunt for a repulsive Casimir force
Place a couple of infinite metal plates just a few micrometers apart and ya can measure the so-called Casimir force pushing them together. The thinkin is that virtual particles are constantly a-popping and a-peaking in and outta existence. When the particles bang into the plate, they exert a force which is normally balanced out by…
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The first brain image taken with an ultra low field MRI
Ya’ll know that MRI machines are great hulking lumps o’ metal filled with pulsing tubes of liquid helium and evil superconducting magnets that’ll rip yer fillings out if ya as much as smile at ’em. All that bulk is necessary to create the fantastic magnetic fields of several Tesla needed make the protons in yer…
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Studying the tunnel of death
The Lefortovo Tunnel runs underground for 3 kilometres on the outskirts of Moscow. The deep tunnel has three lanes which are equipped with traffic sensors every 60 metres. These have provided a rich vein of traffic data for Boris Livshits and pals at Moscow Technical University who have been a-mining and a-crunchin it. B Livshits…
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A wishlist of experiments to do in space
What should we do in space? NASA has bet the farm on the International Space Station, a giant orbiting Lego set where astronauts can play Mommies and Daddies, practice sharing and become zero-g toilet trained. Almost everyone else wants to do something useful. So a bunch of chief eggheads from the world of physics have…
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Lake Baikal’s neutrino dreams
When a neutrino smashes into matter it generates light, lots of it. So stare into the dark night for long enough and you’ll see ’em flash as they pass by. The problem is that neutrino hits are rare events. So you need a big volume of dark and whole lot of time to sit back…
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Particle physicists build time machine
Back to the future, here we come. A couple a eggheads over at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, Russia, reckon that the boys at CERN have a surprise up their sleeves. They’ve gone and built themselves a time machine. Yep, ya’ll heard right: a time machine. The fellas at the world’s largest particle physics…