Tag: physics

This could be big!…er…small!

Spintronics+plasmonics=spinplasmonics: A University of Alberta research team has combined two fields of study in nanotechnology to create a third field that the researchers believe will lead to revolutionary advances in computer electronics, among many other areas. Dr. Abdulhakem Elezzabi and his colleagues have applied plasmonics principles to spintronics technology and created a novel way to …

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WiTricity? Why not?

Unless it’s your smoke alarm saving your life, mysterious electronic beeping in the middle of the night is highly annoying. It certainly annoyed Marin Soljacic a few years ago when he found himself standing in his kitchen in his pajamas in the middle of the night for about the sixth time in a month, staring …

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Wi-Fi is so last year…

…are you ready for wireless electricity?

Rotating skyscrapers

Not just a great name for a rock band, rotating skyscrapers (that’s a video link, by the way) are an interesting new form of architecture that would drastically change the skyline of any city where they were built (because each floor can be slowly rotated independently) and improve that city’s energy efficiency (because the wind …

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A big step toward the hydrogen economy?

It sounds promising, at least: A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline. The method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen – two major challenges in …

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SCORE one for efficiency

This being hockey playoff season, everyone is talking about scores. In the hope I might be taken as something other than a science geek, I thought I would, too. So let me tell you what the score is regarding SCORE–the Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity. SCORE is a joint research project by four U.K. …

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"Solid light will help us build the technology of this century."

Solid light? Apparently: “Solid light photons repel each other as electrons do. This means we can control photons, opening the door to new kinds of faster computers,” says Dr Greentree. “Many real-world problems in quantum physics are too hard to solve with today’s computers. Our discovery shows how to replicate these hard problems in a …

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Remember cold fusion?

Remember how it became a joke? How there was nothing to it at all? Think again: However, a recently published academic paper from the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego throws cold water on skeptics of cold fusion. Appearing in the respected journal Naturwissenschaften, which counts Albert Einstein among its …

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One step closer to a cloaking device…

A computer model developed at Liverpool University has shown that it’s possible to make objects appear invisible at close range: Dr Guenneau, at the University’s Department of Mathematical Science, explains: “A cloak, such as the one worn by the Harry Potter character for example, is not yet possible but it is a good example of …

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Is it real, or is it ElectroStrad?

Very few violinists ever get to play a Stradivarius, but maybe they can still get the sound: Researchers at Manchester University claim to have a solution for all those string players who wish their cheap violins could sound like a Strad. According to an article in the London Guardian, the researchers have developed an electronic …

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My waveform collapsed, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt

In view of the fact that quantum physics seems to suggest that reality doesn’t exist until it is observed, and since great portions of the universe are currently unobservable by humans, I’m thinking of creating a T-shirt with the slogan: GOD: Observing reality so you don’t have to. What do you think?

Science fiction headline of the day:

“Star Trek shields will protect man in space.” From the TimesOnline story: “It’s no accident that Star Trek featured this sort of technology, as it had advisers who work for Nasa and it’s feasible,” Dr Bamford said. “The shields seem to be some sort of invisible barrier, which energy bounces off, and that sort of …

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