Oh, nerdy humor…

…how you complete me, so:

The exponential growth of tech

Multiverse

Cool tech watch: transparent solar cells for windows

Wow! Very cool. This makes worrying about the aesthetics of solar panels a non-issue once it hits the market.

Guilty pleasures

Liam Neeson narrating nerdy NOVA specials:

LiFePO4 battery

This is cool… mostly because that “University of Texas professor” is who I’ll be doing research with in the fall:

“It’s a revolutionary battery because it is made from non-toxic materials abundant in the Earth’s crust. Plus, it’s not expensive,’” says Michel Gauthier, an invited professor at the Université de Montréal Department of Chemistry and co-founder of Phostech Lithium, the company that makes the battery material. “This battery could eventually make the electric car very profitable.”

The theory will soon be tested, since the 100 percent electric Microcar that’s set to debut in Europe this year will be and powered by the LifePO4 battery.

Phostech Lithium’s production plant in St. Bruno, Quebec, produces the black LifePO4 powder, which is shipped across the world in tightly sealed barrels.

“The theoretical principle behind the battery was patented by a University of Texas professor in 1995. However, without the work of local chemists such as Nathalie Ravet, we couldn’t have developed it,” says Phostech Lithium engineer Denis Geoffroy.

Star Trek in real life

Warp speed Mr. Scott!

Two Baylor University physicists believe they have an idea that can turn traveling at the speed of light from science fiction to science, and their idea does not break any laws of physics.

Dr. Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Dr. Richard Obousy, a Baylor post-doctoral student, theorize that by manipulating the space-time dimensions around the spaceship with a massive amount of energy, it would create a “bubble” that could push the ship faster than the speed of light. To create this bubble, the Baylor physicists believe manipulating the 11-dimension would create dark energy. Cleaver said positive dark energy is responsible for speeding up the universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

“Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,” said Cleaver, who co-authored the paper with Obousy about the new method. “The ship would be pushed by the bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light.”

CERN: an update

They’re going rogue!

No, not the moderate Republicans: the black holes! And we could be next! AAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh……………

This artist's conception shows a rogue black hole floating near a globular star cluster on the outskirts of the Milky Way. New calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way. Fortunately, the closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years from Earth. (Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA))

It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by Ryan O’Leary and Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way.

J/k:

Good news, however: Earth is safe. The closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years away. Astronomers are eager to locate them, though, for the clues they will provide to the formation of the Milky Way.

God I’m a nerd

"Urgent Mission" by xkcd

Do you grok?

There’s salt water on Mars:

Droplets on a leg of the Mars Phoenix lander are seen to darken and coalesce. Nilton Renno, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences says this is evidence that they are made of liquid water. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute)

Photos of one of the lander’s legs show droplets that grew during the polar summer. Based on the temperature of the leg and the presence of large amounts of “perchlorate” salts detected in the soil, scientists believe the droplets were most likely salty liquid water and mud that splashed on the spacecraft when it touched down. The lander was guided down by rockets whose exhaust melted the top layer of ice below a thin sheet of soil.

Some of the mud droplets that splashed on the lander’s leg appear to have grown by absorbing water from the atmosphere, Renno says. Images suggest that some of the droplets darkened, then moved and merged—physical evidence that they were liquid.

At some point we’re going to send the Envoy and say, “Hi,” to the Martians, right?

Nanocups collect light

Individual nanocup plasmon resonances, magnetic field enhancement and far field-angular scattering (red) for different nanocup orientations relative to the incident light. (A) High-energy axial electroinductive resonance with no incident light redirection. (B) Low-energy transverse magnetoinductive resonance with directional scattering and intensity dependent upon angle of incidence for the case of p-polarization. (Credit: Image courtesy of Rice University)

New in the world of solar energy collection and James Bond style espionage (my emphasis):

Researchers at Rice University have created a metamaterial that could light the way toward high-powered optics, ultra-efficient solar cells and even cloaking devices.

Naomi Halas, an award-winning pioneer in nanophotonics, and graduate student Nikolay Mirin created a material that collects light from any direction and emits it in a single direction. The material uses very tiny, cup-shaped particles called nanocups. [...]

In earlier research, Mirin had been trying to make a thin gold film with nano-sized holes when it occurred to him the knocked-out bits were worth investigating. Previous work on gold nanocups gave researchers a sense of their properties, but until Mirin’s revelation, nobody had found a way to lock ensembles of isolated nanocups to preserve their matching orientation.

“The truth is a lot of exciting science actually does fall in your lap by accident,” said Halas, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering. “The big breakthrough here was being able to lift the nanocups off of a structure and preserve their orientation. Then we could look specifically at the properties of these oriented nanostructures.”

Photos at CERN, continued

Xavier – Atlas Experiment, CERN LHC

Originally uploaded by strobist

Ok… so update: After making my own official Flickr account and fiddling with my profile, it’s possible to mark settings for whether your photos are “bloggable” (if that’s a word). Since it possible to click “blog this” on David’s photo, I’m assuming it’s ok. Of course, all rights are reserved to him.

Photos at CERN

David, the Strobist, takes some stunning photos at CERN. I’ve recently begun trying to be more aware about copywrite stuff… and I’m not really sure what I am and am not allowed to reproduce on a blog… so in the meantime, I’ll just link you there. Photos here. Blog post here. Enjoy.

The next step towards quantum computing

The “quantum spin Hall effect” has now been directly measured. This is really cool because of some of the things associated with this measurement:

Astonishingly, the spin currents flow without any external stimulus as a result of the internal structure of the material. The flow of information is loss-free, even for slight irregularities. This paves the way towards fault-tolerant quantum computers and towards a source of spin currents.

(My emphasis.) Basically, it opens up the possibility of allowing for slight errors without incurring any loss of information. That is incredibly powerful. A little more:

“We were able to show for the first time that two spin currents flow in opposite directions in the edge region of an alloy of bismuth and antimony. An external energy supply is not required; losses cannot occur,” explained Dr. Gustav Bihlmayer from the Jülich Institute of Solid State Research. The causes of this astonishing phenomenon are interactions within the material. Of particular interest to materials scientists is the fact that imperfections in the material do not impair the spin currents. “This means that materials known as topological materials have spin currents that can be manipulated electrically and are therefore suitable for use as spin sources. They could even pave the way towards fault-tolerant quantum computers,” said Bihlmayer. “Our process will make it possible to test the suitability of materials for this purpose in the future.”

It’s amazing how quickly this is all progressing now.