Category Archives: Research

Light to Matter to Light

Light and Matter United (includes videos) by William J. Cromie:

Lene Hau has already shaken scientists’ beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can’t be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

Two years later, she brought light to a complete halt in a cloud of ultracold atoms. Next, she restarted the stalled light without changing any of its characteristics, and sent it on its way. These highly successful experiments brought her a tenured professorship at Harvard University and a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation award to spend as she pleased.
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Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa.

International Linear Collider

Price of Next Big Thing in Physics: $6.7 Billion

At a news conference in Beijing an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.
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Physicists acknowledge it could be years before the world commits to building the ILC, although jockeying for the costly privilege of hosting the giant machine has already begun. For its purposes, the committee priced three different sites: near CERN in Switzerland, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill, and in the mountains of Japan, and found that the so-called site-specific costs, like digging tunnels and shafts and supplying water and electricity, were nearly the same in each case, about $1.8 billion.

The host country would be expected to shoulder these costs, the design collaboration said, while the remaining $4.9 billion, which covers high-tech things like magnets and control rooms, would be split among all the participants. Extras like auditoriums, cafeterias and living space for scientists were not included in the cost estimate, since at some places like Fermilab they already exist.

Nanotech Engine Research

Tiny engine boosts nanotech hopes:

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have created a tiny engine powered by light that can be made to sort molecules. The device may one day find a role in nano-scale machines. It emerged from research into similar tiny machines in nature that power well known processes such as photosynthesis.
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“We have a new motor mechanism for a nanomachine,” said Prof Leigh. “It is a machine mechanism that is going to take molecular machines a step forward to the realisation of the future world of nanotechnology,” he said. Because the rotaxane can be made to do useful work in a predictable fashion, ie sort particles, it could become a key component for anyone designing nano-scale device.

Biocomputing with Martyn Amos

The Jan 30th This Week in Science Podcast covers various topics including:

Today’s interview with Biocomputing expert, Martyn Amos, was a fascinating journey into the future of technology. What we consider computers today won’t be the computers of tomorrow, and computers will likely be integrated into all aspects of life using the miniaturization potential of DNA. While we are still far away from the realization of many aspects of biocomputing, it has come a long way from its humble beginnings.

Cancer Cure – Not so Fast

Follow up on Cheap, Safe Cancer Drug?: In which my words will be misinterpreted as “proof” that I am a “pharma shill”:

This drug has only been tested in cell culture and rats. Yes, the results were promising there, but that does not–I repeat, does not– mean the results will translate to humans. In fact, most likely, they will not. Those of us who’ve been in the cancer field a while know that all too common are drugs that kill tumors in the Petrie dish and in mice or rats but fail to be nearly as impressive when tested in humans.

Perhaps the blog post I quote above just resonates with me (see: confirmation bias). To me,it supports my contention in my “Cheap, Safe Cancer Drug?” post, though much more effectively and with supporting evidence. But this is my blog so I get to quote whoever I want, and it isn’t surprising I find those that share my thoughts to be the most compelling 🙂 Anyway the post I quote is definitely worth reading.

More Microchip Breakthroughs

Intel, IBM separately reveal transistor breakthrough

In dueling announcements, Intel Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. separately say they have solved a puzzle perplexing the semiconductor industry about how to reduce energy loss in microchip transistors as the technology shrinks to the atomic scale.

Each company said it has devised a way to replace problematic but vital materials in the transistors of computer chips that have begun leaking too much electric current as the circuitry on those chips gets smaller. Technology experts said it’s the most dramatic overhaul of transistor technology for computer chips since the 1960s
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The problem is that the silicon dioxide used for more than 40 years as an insulator inside transistors has been shaved so thin that an increasing amount of current is seeping through, wasting electricity and generating unnecessary heat. Intel and IBM said they have discovered a way to replace that material with various metals in parts called the gate, which turns the transistor on and off, and the gate dielectric, an insulating layer, which helps improve transistor performance and retain more energy.

The Future of the Scholarly Journal

Publishing Group Hires ‘Pit Bull of PR’:

Those groups, along with many members of Congress, want to make the published results of federally financed medical research freely available to the public whose taxes funded the work — results that today are typically available only to journal subscribers or to people willing to pay expensive per-page fees.

The publishing association, which includes among its members some of the world’s biggest and most profitable scientific journals, has argued that free Internet access to the publicly funded portion of their contents would undermine their subscription bases. Lacking that income, they claim, they would not be able to do the invisible, unsung but important, work of screening out bad science and publishing and archiving the very best.

As I have said before, this information should be publicly available. The funding mechanism for peer review needs to change. If the Journals want to stay in business they need to find a way to add value that doesn’t keep public funded information from the public.

How The Brain Rewires Itself

How The Brain Rewires Itself:

The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it. But Pascual-Leone did not stop there. He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil.

When the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups–those who actually tickled the ivories and those who only imagined doing so–they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter.

Slowing Down Light

Putting the Brakes on Light Speed:

The achievement is the latest in the fast-paced field of “slow light” — a discipline that barely existed a decade ago. While other researchers have dragged light to slower speeds than the Rochester scientists, who got it down to one-three-hundredth of its normal velocity, the new method is far simpler. That means the dream of domesticating one of nature’s most feral forces for use in computing, image processing and a host of military and homeland security applications could be nigh.

“This is a big step toward bringing slow-light technology into practical usage,” said Steve Harris, a professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Stanford University. As the fleetest form of energy in the universe, light has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of technologies. Pulses of light can substitute for the digital “ones” and “zeros” that are today conveyed by relatively massive electrons on silicon chips.

Science, Engineering and the Future of the American Economy

9 leaders (Craig Barrett, Charles Vest, Scott McNealy, Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, Judith Rodin, Rick Rashid, Nick Donofrio, Dr. Ralph Wyndrum Jr. and Lou Dobbs) share their thoughts in Keeping Research and Leadership at Home by Vivek Wadhwa:

[several] stress the need to improve K-12 education, encourage students to study more math and engineering, bring in the best and brightest talent from around the world, and up the ante in basic research.
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Craig Barrett, Intel chairman – Currently we have lost the race in K-12 education, we are losing our position as a top educator of science, technology, engineering and mathematics students, we are losing our lead in university research, and we have our head in the sand on government policy.
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Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, Sycamore Networks co-founder and chairman – We believe that all of this greatly increases the chances of a particular innovation having impact. Such sophisticated systems can only be developed in the U.S. because it is the only country with both flexible thinking and free markets.
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Charles Vest, former president of MIT, president-elect of the National Academy of Engineering – We’re on top, but our share of the world’s R&D spending, new patents, scientific publications, researchers, and BA and PhD. degrees in science and engineering are all dropping. We need to start right now to strengthen investment in basic research, get serious about K-12 education, especially in math and science, and attract more of our best and brightest young men and women into what will be crucial and exciting careers in engineering and science.

In previous posts I discuss my thoughts on the important topics of science, engineering and the economy: The Future is Engineering – Science and Engineering in Global Economics – Engineering the Future Economy – Diplomacy and Science Research – Economics and Science and Engineering – U.S. Slipping on Science
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