Category: Mean machines
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Quamputing with atoms and photons
What kinda stuff is best at hosting ghostly bits of quantum information? It’s an important question cos we can’t tell what the next generation of quamputers will be like until we know what they gonna be made of. Photons are one option cos they can store qubits for relatively long periods (unlike ions and electrons…
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Why the Phoenix lander could miss life on Mars
What a balls up. When NASA sent Viking to look for life on Mars more than 30 years ago, the one experiment that could identify lil green bugs came up trumps: it produced an overwhelmingly positive result. That’s when the trouble started. Another experiment had found no evidence for organic molecules so, with the eggheads…
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The ball at the end of the solar system
I know ya’ll think of Pluto as a barren, godforsaken excuse of a planet that ought to be reclassified as a lump of sawdust n’ spit. But that could change when the New Horizons spacecraft arrives at the solar system’s most distant minor second class could-do-better planet (or whatever Pluto is these days) sometime in…
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The world’s first visible light invisibility cloak
Last year, the world went bonkers when scientists at Duke University in North Carolina unveiled the world’s first invisibility cloak. There weren’t no let up in the wall-to-wall media coverage it generate. And impressive though it was, what many reporters forgot to mention was that the cloak works only for microwaves at a single frequency…
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Sensor fusion improves onboard navigation
Sensor fusion is the tricky task of combining different data streams to give an output that is better than the sum of the parts. Let me tell ya, it ain’t easy. Too often, too much data just confuses things. So hats off to Cherif “Very” Smaili at The French Institute for Research in Computer Science…
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The incredible tongue balancing act
About ten years ago, some electrical engineers showed how ya can see with yer tongue. They built an array of electrostimulators and connected it up to a camera. Put the array on your tongue and it provides a pattern of stimulation that matches the pattern of light hittin the camera. This Tongue Display Unit turned…
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The great gravity wave affair
Gravity waves do one helluva job a-squeezin and a-squashin everything in their path. Plonk a big aluminum bar in the way and gravity waves will squash it in one direction while stretchin it in another. With careful measurements yer should be able to spot this. In fact in the 1960s, Joseph “Big foot” Weber at…
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Human breath analysis
Beware the early mornin’ kiss. Yep, Jun “Eggy” Ye at JILA in Colorado has certainly taken this advice to heart. He’s gone and built himself a giant optical frequency comb laser capable zapping the bejesus out of any molecules found in human breath. When that happens the molecules absorb light producing a characteristic spectrum that…
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Nano-electromechanical devices
Ya’ll heard of MEMs (micro-electromechanical devices), right? So it was never gonna be long before we got the lowdown on NEMS nano-electromechanical devices. They’re a-comin atcha. The problem is that to make anything move on the nano scale, ya gotta yank it with an electric field and that means having a metallic conducting layer in…