The LIFE Project to Create a Mini Star on Earth with 192 Lasers [Science]

Well, this is crazy. The LIFE project at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has plans to create a mini sun in the lab, one that could create more energy than it takes to create.


Yes, we're talking about fusion here. By focusing 192 huge laser beams at one 2mm ball of frozen hydrogen gas, they hope to create nearly limitless free energy. Oh, and it gets better:

In addition, the LIFE engine design can be 'charged' with fission fuel. The resulting fission reactions will produce additional energy that can be harvested for electricity production. Moreover, by using depleted uranium or spent nuclear fuel from existing nuclear power plants in the blanket, a LIFE engine will be capable of burning the by-products of the current nuclear fuel cycle. Because the fusion neutrons are produced independently of the fission process, the fission fuel could be used without reprocessing. In this way, LIFE may be able to consume nuclear waste as fuel, mitigate against further nuclear proliferation, and provide long-term sustainability of carbon-free energy. A LIFE engine, via pure fusion or through the combination of fusion and fission, will generate the steady heat required to drive turbines for generating from 1,000 to 2,500 MW of safe, environmentally attractive electric power 24 hours a day for decades.

So wait, not only will it create free, limitless energy, but it will also do so while getting rid of harmful nuclear waste? OK, I guess I'm on board.


[Gizmodo via The LIFE Project via Kottke]

It's Happened: The First Full Face Transplant [Medicine]

The operation took 22 hours and 30 doctors, but the world's first full facial transplant has been deemed 'a success'.

In a clandestine operation that took place almost a month ago in Barcelona, a man who'd lost his much of his face in a shooting accident received an entire face—skin and muscles, and as the BBC clarified, even "cheekbones, nose, lips and teeth"—from a donor.

Apparently the patient, who'd formerly been unable to swallow or breathe, has since seen himself in a mirror and was 'calm and satisfied.' It's unclear just how much function he's regained, and just like for any organ transplant, he'll be on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life.

But...I mean...wow.


[Gizmodo via BBC]

Scientists Measure Atomic Nudge [Physics]

By pushing a cluster of just 60 ions with a tiny electric field, researchers have measured the most minuscule force ever.

The result, measuring mere yoctonewtons (10^-24 newtons), beats previous record lows by several orders of magnitude. The group behind the measurements, based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, hopes that the technique can eventually lead to new tools for measuring the minuscule features of materials' surfaces.

Tiny force measurements are crucial for imaging atomic surfaces and detecting nuclear spins, but they are difficult to make because of the tiny dimensions involved.

To date, researchers have successfully measured around an attonewton (10^-18 N) of force by giving small pushes to microscopic paddles or wires and then watching them vibrate. These systems work well, but are limited by factors such as their relatively large size.

The new technique eschews the paddle-type systems in favor of just 60 beryllium-9 ions. The group flattened the ions into a tiny "pancake" and suspended this in mid-air using magnetic fields. They then fired a laser at the ions, lead author Michael Biercuk, now at the University of Sydney in Australia, writes in a paper on the physics preprint server arXiv.org.

By carefully tuning the laser, they extracted energy from the atomic pancake until it reached a temperature of just 0.5 millikelvins.

The team then nudged their pancake with a small electric field. The nudge shook the ions and caused a discernible change in the reflected laser light. On the basis of the size of the change, the team estimates that it has measured a force as small as 174 yoctonewtons--about a thousand times smaller than previous measurements.

Tiny force shunts tiny mass"What makes it work is that the system is so light," says Chris Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved in the research.

Newton's second law of motion states that force is equal to the product of mass and acceleration, so a tiny mass is sensitive to a tiny force. Weighing in at around 0.1 yoctokilograms, 60 beryllium-9 ions make one of the lightest force probes possible.

There is nothing particularly new about the technique, Monroe adds. Clusters of ultracold atoms are already the focus of many studies in their own right. The team's insight was that the ultracold ions would make for supersensitive force detectors. In their paper, the researchers say that even more sensitive detections might be possible with fewer ions.

Monroe says that he agrees in principle, but notes that as the number of ions shrinks, so will the laser signal crucial to the measurement. The team behind the work says that a single ion could detect an even smaller force. True enough, says Monroe, assuming the ion itself can be accurately measured.

Ultimately, the team hopes that beryllium ions could be used as tiny force detectors in all sorts of measurement. "In principle, you could try to use this for fundamental force measurements," says Konrad Lehnert, a researcher at JILA in Boulder, who held the previous measurement record for work using a vibrating wire. In particular, it might be possible to test gravity and quantum effects at ultra-short scales.

But Monroe cautions that the technique should not be oversold. The ions must be kept isolated in a vacuum chamber in order to work, he notes, making actual applications tricky.

"It's not going to be used to find oil tomorrow or anything," he says. But he adds that it may well be possible to develop the atomic pancakes into something more practical.

[By Geoff Brumfiel at Scientific American]

Quantum Mechanics Observed by the Human Eye [Quantum Mechanics]

Remember when, just the other day, we were talking about the future of storage, and how quantum mechanics is on the pipe dream, it's totally magic list for now? Yeah. Me too. Thing is, shit just got real:
Real, and more importantly observable. Observable is important because until this week when one talked about quantum mechanics they were either spouting a lot of unproven theory about things way too tiny to be measured or they were Lt. Cmdr. Geordi LaForge on the engineering deck of the Enterprise D.

No longer!

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Bwah? It reads like science fiction, to me, but apparently science guy Andrew Cleland and his team, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, were able to cool a tiny 30-micrometer metal paddle to the point where it reached a quantum mechanical ground state. Or, as my limited understand calls it, the place where nature starts to get all freaky deaky.

After the cooling process was complete, Cleland and company were able to 'simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still.' Again: The metal paddle was both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time, and in a way that was observable by the naked eye.

Are you freaking out yet? Because I know a few cats in dark boxes that are right now.

[Gizmodo via Nature via Kottke]

In Case Self-Assembling Machinery Didn't Scare You Before... [Chips]

When chipmakers slim down their silicon, they need finer and finer tools to organize all that circuitry. With MIT's latest self-assembling chips, the detail work is handled by molecular strands that, freakishly, just know where to go.

Self-assembling chips aren't new, but up till now, people have used electron-beam rays to carve grooves where molecules get cozy. Electron-beam guns are damn expensive and damn slow. This breakthrough—which relies more than ever on molecules doing their own thing—will lead to a cheaper way to make the smallest physically possible microchips, and probably increase hard drive capacity and current chip performance in the meantime.

The news, published this week by MIT researchers Caroline Ross and Karl Berggren, is that they can now use an electron gun just to make "hitchin' posts" for the molecules to identify then wrap around. The trick? Using two separate kinds of molecule strands—described by Ross as spaghetti and tagliatelle, and by Berggren as DeNiro and Grodin in Midnight Run—that keep each other in line. Once the molecules are in place, a plasma charge dissolves one set, and turns the other set into glass crucial to processing. Berggren and Ross have shown they can fake a chip; their next step is to make a pattern that actually functions as a genuine circuit.

We've reached the limits of my understanding, but not my appreciation. This stuff will one day be used for making ever smaller microprocessors, but in the meantime can be used to streamline current chipmaking methods, and also to pack hard drive data in tighter. I'm relieved to hear there's still a need for someone to say where the posts go, but let's face it, with self-assembling chips like these, who needs ham-handed humans anyway? Queue the excitement—and paranoia.
[Gizmodo via MIT]

Connecting the Quantum Dots to More Than Double Hard Drive Capacity [Science]

Scientists have developed a new type of semiconductor structure—using microscopic crystals called magnetic quantum dots—that could more than double current hard drive storage capacity. That's just for starters.

The crystals themselves aren't new; they've been around for over a decade in computer chips, solar cells, and LEDs, according to CBC News. This particular application, though, is unprecedented:

The new work, reported today in the journal Nature Materials, describes a class of quantum dots that not only control electrons, but also have good magnetic properties allowing them to read the electron's spin.
The research team claims it's the first successful synthesis of magnetic quantum dots above room temperature.
The breakthrough came after two years of research, when the team was able to get the right concentration of manganese combined with the germanium matrix of the quantum dot. Makes perfect sense! But however high-level the science, the end result is clear: a new breed of semiconductor could be on the way, bringing with it speed, efficiency, and storage increases bordering on the exponential. The only question now is how long?

[Gizmodo via CBC News]

Engineers Solve 80-Year Old Puzzle to Make Computer Modeling 100,000 Times Faster [Science]

A quantum physics breakthrough that can predict the kinetic energy of electrons in simple metals—and semiconductors—will enable computers to simulate the behavior of new materials up to 100,000 times faster than they currently can. That's huge.

Princeton engineer Emily Carter led the project, which took an equation by Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas and Enrico Fermi that calculates how many electrons are distributed in a theoretical gas with evenly distributed electrons and figured out how to apply it to real, imperfect materials:

'The equation scientists were using before was inefficient and consumed huge amounts of computing power, so we were limited to modeling only a few hundred atoms of a perfect material,' said Emily Carter, Princeton engineer who led the project.

'Important properties are actually determined by the flaws, but to understand those you need to look at thousands or tens of thousands of atoms so the defects are included. Using this new equation, we've been able to model up to a million atoms, so we get closer to the real properties of a substance.'

The results of that effort mean that principles of quantum mechanics, previously limited to small bits of matierals, can now be applied on a large scale. Modeling, then, for anything from fuel-efficient cars to electronic devices, will happen exponentially faster than it does today. Innovation just got an upgrade.
[Gizmodo via Princeton via PopSci]

The Real Colors of a Dinosaur Revealed for the First Time [True Color]

Readers, meet Anchiornis huxleyi in its true colors. Anchiornis huxleyi, here are some readers. And no, you can't eat them, you oversized chicken, you.

The paleontologists team—who published the results of their study in last issue of Science—obtained 29 melanosome samples from all over the body of the Anchiornis, comparing them to the feathers of modern birds. The result was an accurate map of the animal's colors, the first true-to-life picture of a dinosaur.

Now, I only wonder how you taste like, Anchiornis, properly brined and cooked slowly in a thick pan, with some carrots, potatoes, and shallots.
[Gizmodo via National Geographic]

Investigators Reveal Folding Principles of the Human Genome

Scientists have long been speculating on how DNA gets packaged inside chromosomes while remaining readable and easily accessible. In a paper just published in Science, researchers from Harvard and MIT have discovered that sections of the DNA bunch together into 'fractal globule, a knot-free, polymer conformation that enables maximally dense packing while preserving the ability to easily fold and unfold any genomic locus.' The image on the side shows the 'equilibrium globule' configuration that was thought to be the structure (left) and the actual configuration (right) that was identified by the team.

Key to deciphering the genome's structure was the development of the new Hi-C technique, which permits genome-wide analysis of the proximity of individual genes. The scientists first used formaldehyde to link together DNA strands that are nearby in the cell's nucleus. They then determined the identity of the neighboring segments by shredding the DNA into many tiny pieces, attaching the linked DNA into small loops, and performing massively parallel DNA sequencing.

Lieberman-Aiden observed that the data suggest a fractal globule. He then teamed up with Mirny and Mirny's student Maxim Imakaev to confirm his hypothesis and demonstrate conclusively that the Hi-C data matched fractal globule behavior. Computer simulations further helped to reveal biologically important features of such a DNA architecture.

In future experiments, the researchers hope to follow the development of stem cells into mature cell types such as kidney cells, says Lieberman-Aiden. 'We want to understand how that process takes place, because it clearly involves some 3-D remodeling of the nucleus.'

Press release: A new dimension for genome studies...

Abstract in Science: Comprehensive Mapping of Long-Range Interactions Reveals Folding Principles of the Human Genome

[Medgadget]

Madagascar Institute’s Jet-powered Merry-go-round

The sign next to Madagascar Institute’s jet-powered merry-go-round says, “Caution: this may kill you” and with both speed and flames involved, it looks like it just may.
[The Uber-Review via BBG]

Water On The Moon

For all you space buffs who like to keep track of where the water is, it looks like you can add our very own moon to your list. Because according to a trio of papers appearing in the journal Science , the lunar surface is wetter than we realized. [More]

[Scientific American]

NASA's 2009 Cryosphere Video Is Really Cool, Literally [Data Visualization]

Did you know that there is something called 'cryosphere' on this little blue gem called Earth? I didn't. And I didn't know that seeing it animated from thousands of satellite high definition photographs could look so cool.

The cryosphere are the parts of the Earth's surface which are covered with water in solid form. It could be snow and ice in glaciers, permafrost, ice sheets, icebergs, and—I hope—glasses full of bourbon. Apparently, scientists are now discovering that the cryosphere plays a fundamental role in regulating Earth's temperature. But then again, we are still so clueless about how this whole Earth weather business works, that [NASA]