Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

Carbon nanotubes are pretty amazing things. They’re the strongest and stiffest material on Earth: a 1 millimeter diameter thread of them can support a weight of about 7 tons. The problem is that they’re expensive (and tricky) to produce, especially in any quantity that isn’t just broken bits of tubes. The journal Science is reporting that researchers at the NanoTech Institute of the University of Texas at Dallas have come up with a way of cheaply and quickly manufacturing large sheets (we’re talking meters) of long nanotube strands that are completely transparent and stronger than steel. The sheets are “spun” out of a self-assembled nanotube forest, and can be created with fairly simple machinery at a rate of up to 10 meters per minute. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why the sheets couldn’t be made as long or wide as you wanted. The last picture in the series above shows a nanotube sheet supporting droplets of water and juice that weigh about 50,000 times more than the sheet itself… Pretty cool. No information on cost, though. Read the paper here (PDF).

Laptop batteries that recharge to 90% in 10 minutes, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By Evan Ackerman

This electron micrograph of long finned squid suckers is one of National Geographic’s Best Science Images of 2008. Have a look at the entire gallery here, or see the first place winner (a picture of diatoms on an invertebrate) after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By Andrew Liszewski

Well technically, I guess stargazing isn’t all that difficult, all you have to do is look up at night. But knowing what all those dots of light are called? Now that’s the tricky part. You could visit your local observatory and have an astronomer explain what you’re looking at, or you could pick up this nifty software/hardware combo called StellarWindow and stargaze from the comfort of your own backyard. It was developed by a group of Waseda University students in Japan, and it relies on a special USB dongle that features tilt sensors and an electronic compass. You just install the software on your laptop or tablet PC and attach the dongle, and once your position is calibrated, the StellarWindow program will provide a detailed explanation of the night sky you see before you. It even features voice recognition so all you have to do is ask it to find a particular heavenly body and the software will tell you what direction to look. The student’s startup company, Fairy Devices Inc., is expected to release StellarWindow before 2009 for about $244.

[ Fairy Devices StellarWindow ] VIA [ HobbyMedia.it ]

By Andrew Liszewski

While National Geographic can easily be considered the place to go if you’re looking for photos of life on Earth, if you’re interested in what’s happening away from our planet you’ll have to turn to NASA. And thanks to a partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive, accessing NASA’s image and video libraries just got a whole lot easier. The NASA Images website went live this past week, and features 21 NASA image collections merged into a massive and easily searchable online resource.

Over the next 5 years the partnership will see millions of photos and thousands of hours of video added to the site including imagery from the Apollo missions, the Hubble Space Telescope and experimental aircraft and spacecraft spanning NASA’s history. Unfortunately while the site appears to be getting hit pretty hard at the moment (in other words it’s almost unusably slow) it does appear to be well laid out and will most likely end up occupying a good chunk of my weekend.

[ NASA Images ] VIA [ PC Authority ]

By Andrew Liszewski

According to the BBC, Cern’s Large Hadron Collider is in the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, which is about -456°F or -271°C. In order for the collider’s thousands of magnets to maintain a high magnetic field with minimal power consumption they’re required to be superconducting, so liquid helium is currently being used to cool them down.

Roberto Saban, the LHC’s head of hardware commissioning, said that in order to obtain high magnetic fields without consuming too much power, the magnets were required to be “superconducting”.

This is the property, exhibited by some materials at very low temperatures, to channel electrical current with zero resistance and very little power loss.

Helium exhibits spectacular properties at 2.2 Kelvin – becoming “superfluid”. This allows it to conduct heat very rapidly, making it an extremely efficient refrigerant.

For comparison, while the LHC is being lowered to 1.9 Kelvin, the temperature in remote regions of outer space is a balmy 2.7 Kelvin, and my cold, cold heart comes in at around 3.2 Kelvin. That’s why I originally suggested that the Cern team should use years and years of sarcasm to bring the collider’s temperature down, but they felt the emotional toll on their staff would be too high. And if you want to keep track of how the LHC’s cool-down is coming along, you can check out their website from 1997 which features an updated graphic showing the temperature of various sections.

[ Cern lab goes 'colder than space' ] VIA [ Slashdot ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If you work in a laboratory setting and are tired of all the constant fighting about who gets to look in the microscope next, this video screen version will allow a handful of people to see the magnified images at the same time. Instead of a standard eyepiece, the microscope uses a built-in 2MP digital camera to capture stills or videos which are displayed on a 3 1/2 inch LCD with a resolution of just 320×240. Fortunately though the images and videos can also be downloaded to a PC using the microscope’s USB port or a removable SD card allowing you to see them at their full resolution.

The microscope features 3 switchable objective lenses (4X, 10X or 40X) that provide magnification from 40X to 400X, but you also have the option of switching on a digital zoom feature which boosts magnification up to 1600X. (But we all know that digital zoom is never that great.) The objects you’re viewing can also be illuminated from the top or bottom thanks to 2 separate 6-watt LED lights that can be adjusted with an exposure knob. There’s even a filter wheel with 6 selectable colors allowing you to block out certain wavelengths to make objects clearer.

With a price tag of $299.95 from Hammacher Schlemmer I’m pretty sure this model isn’t exactly the choice of professionals, but if you’ve got a budding scientist at home it would probably make for a great first microscope.

[ Video Screen Microscope ] VIA [ The Green Head ]

By Jonathan Kimak

Dan Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, along with a team of students, has developed a microscope attachment for the digital cameras on cell phones. The CellScope as it is named, attaches over the camera lens of the phone and has a clip that can hold sample slides.

It’s good enough to be able to see individual blood cells up close and has been tested to diagnose malaria. Dan Fletcher’s hope is that the microscope can be a cheap(estimated cost $100) and fast method of providing diagnosis of diseases in remote areas of the world.

A doctor (or really anyone who took high school science) can make a sample slide of blood, insert it into the microscope, snap a picture of it and send it to anyone in the world, provided they can pull themselves away from texting their buddies about the latest gadgets.

Saving the world from diseases is a fine and noble cause, but they shouldn’t forget about the market of college guys who would buy this so they could determine what exactly is growing on top of the food in the back of their fridge.

[ The Economist ] VIA [ Popgadget ] AND [ Ubergizmo ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Ok, this is officially the coolest image I’ve ever seen. What you see on the right is a pulse of light that is 2.5 billionths of a millionth of a second long. The image was captured by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and the flash of laser light that made it possible lasted just 80 attoseconds. (An attosecond is one billionth of one billionth of a second.) The previous record for the shortest light pulse was 130 attoseconds set in 2007, and almost halving that number a year later is an impressive feat

But don’t expect your Nikon or Canon DSLR to pull off a cool shot like this. The team responsible for it used a laser firing extremely short pulses into a cloud of neon gas which ionized the neon atoms. This then releases electrons which the researchers were able to measure in order to produce this side-profile shot of the laser pulse.

The light pulses are produced by firing longer, but still very short laser pulses into a cloud of neon gas. The laser gives a kick of energy to the neon atoms, which then release this energy in the form of brief pulses of extreme ultraviolet light.

The trigger pulses contained only one or two oscillations of a light wave so that they packed a compact energy punch when they reached the neon cloud. To do this, the researchers had to corral the trigger-pulse photons into a tightly packed bunch using a device called a chirped mirror. These multilayered mirrors make the photons at the front of a pulse travel further than the slower photons at the rear do. That gives the back markers time to catch up, in this case producing a tight pack of photons that hit the neon atoms at roughly the same time.

To find out how short the light flashes from the neon atoms were, Goulielmakis and colleagues directed them onto a second neon gas cloud. As each flash is intense enough to completely ionise a neon atom and release an electron, the researchers could use those electrons like a flashgun, to illuminate some of the original 2.5 femtosecond trigger pulses of laser light.

Since the microscopic world is still a big mystery to us, this method might eventually allow researches to visualize the movements of electrons around atoms, or even ’see’ nuclear particles like protons.

[ Fastest-ever flashgun captures image of light wave ] VIA [ Slashdot ]

By Andrew Liszewski

The days of having to decide between paper, plastic or cast iron bags at the grocery store are numbered thanks to the development of a new type of extremely tough nanopaper. The paper is made from nanosized (oh I get it!) cellulose fibers making it both stronger and lighter than traditional papers.

Conventional paper is made from cellulose, a crystalline polymer of glucose that’s the primary component of plant cell walls. At the nanoscale level, cellulose can be extremely strong, with individual fibers capable of withstanding more stress than glass fibers or steel wire. But paper processing generates relatively large cellulose microfibers riddled with defects that can break apart under stress. That leaves most commercial paper with a tensile strength that tops out at about 30 megapascals (MPa), says Lars Berglund, a lightweight structures engineering expert at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

To toughen paper up, Berglund and his colleagues kept the cellulose fibers small. They did this by breaking down wood pulp in water with a combination of enzymes and mechanically beating it further. The result: defect-free nanofibers about 1000 times smaller than typical cellulose fibers. As a final step, the researchers treated their nanofibers with carboxymethanol, which coated the fibers in carboxyl groups. These groups readily form hydrogen bonds that helped the fibers make tight contacts with one another, further strengthening the material. The final result–published in the current issue of Biomacromolecules–was a paper with a tensile strength of 214 MPa, far above the 130 MPa of cast iron and the previous record of 103 MPa for a high-strength paper.

Besides allowing you to pack a grocery bag full of canned food without the worry of it tearing, the nanopaper also has the potential to replace other expensive but strong and lightweight materials like carbon fiber or even carbon nanotubes. Maybe these researchers should hook up with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency who are trying to launch that paper airplane from space.

[ Say Goodbye to Wimpy Paper ] VIA [ Slashdot ]