Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts

The Great Filter...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 11, 2015 at 7:37am

Image Source: Week in Weird, Chris Silva

Topics: Drake Equation, Fermi Paradox, Entropy, Space Exploration, SETI

There seems to be a strong inclination for Eschatology, or literally the study of "end things." A great deal of ink is devoted to it in books, blogs and Internet memes.

The Apostle Paul - the sub after Judas - et al believed they would see the end of things in their own lifetimes. The Jehovah's Witnesses' founder Charles Taze Russell devoted a great deal of thought to the subject. Millerites - derived from former Baptist preacher William Miller set a date for the end-of-the-age as October 22, 1844. This became known as the "Great Disappointment." Even Jesus hedged his bets in ancient tradition (seems to have been more a matter of business than romance), and there's an ever-growing list of predictions that (spoiler alert) weren't quite accurate.

Filters do a tremendous work, especially in fermentation. For anyone with inkjet printers, Subtractive Color Mixing employs the primary colors cyan, magenta and yellow. You can even do a lab on it.

The Great Filter is a post I saw on Facebook from io9 that looks at the Fermi Paradox and tries to answer it with the likely possibility that evolved intelligence is its own Entropy as I've stated in previous posts. We may well be past that, and capable of becoming a space faring species with a lot of real estate to explore.

It's an admittedly positive spin. In light of the current xenophobia and the delicate balance of income inequality, strained resources; domestic and international terrorism, it is my hope we all are past the filter and get to an advanced level of maturity...quickly.

io9:
The Great Filter theory suggests humans have already conquered the threat of extinction
George Dvorsky

Seeing The Light...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 10, 2015 at 7:45am

Drawing illustrates how tiny changes in wavy images scattered from lines in a grid-like array can be reconstructed when paired with advanced optical and computational techniques. Lines are 15 nanometers wide, 30 times smaller than the wavelength used to “see” them. The pattern depicts estimated uncertainties in the experimental data. Coloring corresponds to the magnitude of the variance for specific data points.

Topics: Carbon Nanotubes, Consumer Electronics, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers are seeing the light, but in an altogether different way. And how they are doing it just might be the semiconductor industry's ticket for extending its use of optical microscopes to measure computer chip features that are approaching 10 nanometers, tiny fractions of the wavelength of light.

Using a novel microscope that combines standard through-the-lens viewing with a technique called scatterfield imaging, the NIST team accurately measured patterned features on a silicon wafer that were 30 times smaller than the wavelength of light (450 nanometers) used to examine them. They report* that measurements of the etched lines—as thin as 16 nanometers wide—on the SEMATECH-fabricated wafer were accurate to one nanometer. With the technique, they spotted variations in feature dimensions amounting to differences of a few atoms.

"Historically, we would ignore this scattered light because it did not yield sufficient resolution," explains Richard Silver, the physicist who initiated NIST's scatterfield imaging effort. "Now we know it contains helpful information that provides signatures telling us something about where the light came from."

With scatterfield imaging, Silver and colleagues methodically illuminate a sample with polarized light from different angles. From this collection of scattered light—nothing more than a sea of wiggly lines to the untrained eye—the NIST team can extract characteristics of the bounced lightwaves that, together, reveal the geometry of features on the specimen.

NIST: Measuring Nanoscale Features with Fractions of Light, Mark Bello

Comeback Kid...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 9, 2015 at 7:23am

Scientists have now turned their attention to what would be needed after 2030 to meet a 2 C goal: an energy system transformation that emits less carbon. For this, all technology options need to be on the table, including nuclear, the scientists said.

Credit: ©iStock

Topics: Alternative Energy, Climate Change, Green Tech, Nuclear Power

I post this with uneasiness: having grown up in the era of "duck and cover" in all its feckless utility. Remembering instances of crisis like Chernobyl (proud I can still SPELL it) and Three Mile Island. There's that whole thing about the waste produced, half-life; where/in WHOSE neighborhoods will you STORE such waste? And the latest zeitgeist, terrorism - currently Christian and Muslim - both aberrant extremist cases that take extraordinary means to make their "points" while managing to be poor representatives of their particular faiths. Hopefully updated safety and security protocols reflecting the times and technology are also being considered. The most positive aspect are jobs that reviving the industry would invariably generate. Education could start preparing a 21st Century workforce instead of testing ouut students like lab rats. My preference, as I'm assuming is Green Peace mentioned in the article is solar, wind and nuclear fusion, all on par as equally clean; all likely as aggressively opposed by fossil fuel interests. I would embrace this then as an interim step that could only see defeat in moneyed interests and their lobbyist - case-in-point, terrorists on no-fly list still with the ability to purchase firearms after San Bernardino. Our national cognitive dissonance is quite breathtaking.

In contrast to last week's Cynicism post, I do want to leave a viable planet after I'm gone. As part of the human species, I think we're unique and special; all witness to the Cosmos and its wonders; such than cannot be appreciated or studied...in our absence.

James Hansen, former NASA climate scientist, and three other prominent climate scientists are calling for an enlarged focus on nuclear energy in the ongoing Paris climate negotiations.

"Nuclear, especially next-generation nuclear, has tremendous potential to be part of the solution to climate change," Hansen said during a panel discussion yesterday. "The dangers of fossil fuels are staring us in the face. So for us to say we won't use all the tools [such as nuclear energy] to solve the problem is crazy."

He was joined by Tom Wigley, a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide; Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science; and Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Their stance clashes with those of environmental groups such as Greenpeace that advocate against nuclear energy.

As nations have proposed emissions curbs in Paris up to 2030, scientists have computed that there is a 1-in-2 chance that their collective ambition would raise temperatures in 2100 by between 2.7 to 3.7 degrees Celsius. Nations would like to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, and stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at 450 parts per million (ppm).

There is 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere at present.

Scientific American: Nuclear Power Must Make a Comeback for Climate's Sake
Gayathri Vaidyanathan, ClimateWire

AI and LHC...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 8, 2015 at 7:13am

A section of the LHC.
alpinethread/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Higgs Boson, High Energy Physics, LHC, Particle Physics

Driven by an eagerness to make discoveries and the knowledge that they will be hit with unmanageable volumes of data in ten years’ time, physicists who work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland, are enlisting the help of AI experts.

On November 9-13, leading lights from both communities attended a workshop—the first of its kind—at which they discussed how advanced AI techniques could speed discoveries at the LHC. Particle physicists have “realized that they cannot do it alone”, says Cécile Germain, a computer scientist at the University of Paris South in Orsay, who spoke at the workshop at CERN, the particle-physics lab that hosts the LHC.

Computer scientists are responding in droves. Last year, Germain helped to organize a competition to write programs that could ‘discover’ traces of the Higgs boson in a set of simulated data; it attracted submissions from more than 1,700 teams.

Scientific American: Artificial Intelligence Called In to Tackle LHC Data Deluge
Davide Castelvecchi, Nature magazine

FRBs...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 7, 2015 at 7:19am

This artist's impression of a fast radio burst (FRB) reaching Earth illustrates the telltale smearing of radio waves that indicates the FRB's long journey through deep space. The colors represent different radio wavelengths, with longer (red) wavelengths arriving after shorter (blue) ones. This effect occurs when radio waves travel through plasma-rich regions of interstellar and intergalactic space.

Credit: Jingchuan Yu, Beijing Planetarium

Topics: Astrophysics, Radio Astronomy, Research, Space Exploration

What shines brighter than the Sun, appears for only a split second and lights up Earth’s skies thousands of times each day?

If you’re stumped, don’t worry—experts are too. For nearly a decade, astrophysicists have been struggling to explain perplexing millisecond chirps of radio waves pinging through the heavens. Now, several new studies are bringing researchers closer to solving the mystery by narrowing the search for the radio flashes’ origins to youthful stellar outbursts in distant galaxies.

Dubbed “fast radio bursts,” or FRBs, the first of these bright, brief events was announced in 2007 by the West Virginia University astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer and colleagues, based on data from the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. The radio signal that streamed into the Parkes dish was curiously smeared out, with its high-frequency waves arriving a fraction of a second earlier than its low-frequency counterparts—an effect attributed to scattering by diffuse plasmas that fill interstellar and intergalactic space. The more smeared a radio signal is, the more plasma it has passed through, and the farther it has presumably traveled through space. Analyzing the smear, Lorimer and his collaborators made a rough estimate that the burst could’ve come from up to a few billion light-years away. If they were in fact coming from so far away, and if more could be found, FRBs offered a way for astronomers to better measure vast cosmological distances and to probe deeper into the dark spaces between stars and galaxies. The search was on.

Scientific American: Fast Radio Bursts Mystify Experts—for Now, Lee Billings

Orbital WALL-E...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 4, 2015 at 7:23am

Image Source: Figure 3 Debris engine, see link below

Topics: Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Space, Space Junk, Taikonaut

I am always glad when good science is proposed and achieved. This is mostly a thorough application of Kepler and Newtonian physics as well as engineering rocketry. I give the poignant observation with some exception, this is happening LESS in the country of my birth, currently known for carnival barkers and xenophobes as presidential front runners, and some of my fellow citizens thinking "The Flintstones" instead of a parody of "The Honeymooners" was a documentary.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: At 16:56 UTC on August 29, 2009, an Iridium communications satellite suddenly fell silent. In the hours that followed, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network reported that it was tracking two large clouds of debris—one from the Iridium and another from a defunct Russian military satellite called Cosmos 2251.

The debris was the result of a high-speed collision, the first time this is known to have happened between orbiting satellites. The impact created over 1,000 fragments greater than 10 centimeters in size and a much larger number of smaller pieces. This debris spread out around the planet in a deadly cloud.

Space debris is a pressing problem for Earth-orbiting spacecraft, and it could get significantly worse. When the density of space debris reaches a certain threshold, analysts predict that the fragmentation caused by collisions will trigger a runaway chain reaction that will fill the skies with ever increasing numbers of fragments. By some estimates that process could already be underway.

An obvious solution is to find a way to remove this debris. One option is to zap the larger pieces with a laser, vaporizing them in parts and causing the leftovers to deorbit. However, smaller pieces of debris cannot be dealt with in this way because they are difficult to locate and track.

Another option is send up a spacecraft capable of mopping up debris with a net or some other capture process. But these missions are severely limited by the amount of fuel they can carry.

Today, Lei Lan and pals from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, propose a different solution. Their idea is to build an engine that converts space debris into propellant and so can maneuver itself almost indefinitely as it mops up the junk.

Physics arXiv: Debris Engine: A Potential Thruster for Space Debris Removal
Lei Lan, Jingyang Li, Hexi Baoyin

#P4TC WALL-E mentions:
Predicted, but still kind of gross when you think of it...
NASA Going Green...

US Asylum...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 3, 2015 at 7:00am

Previously unpublished poem by Carl Sandburg

Topics: Commentary, Politics, Sandy Hook

A departure from physics and society...for a moment.

The physics of bullets has now killed more people with the San Bernardino shooting than we have days in the year. Another one happened simultaneously in Georgia - one woman died, but still someone's one. A third one at a Target. San Bernardino is second only to Sandy Hook, and once we got over that as I've said, "it was a wrap!"*

The NRA (not responsible anytime) will respond with their usual: crickets, hunkered down under their moist rock until our news feeding frenzy blows over. This will "not be a time" to discuss a change in laws or even keeping statistics to study. We're afraid of Syrian refugees, yet the armed, short-phallic members of the NRA and their lobby have INSURED terrorists can legally purchase firearms. Black Friday when Mr. Dear shot up Planned Parenthood in Colorado, there was a massive purchase of guns. Perhaps the ones used yesterday in California. Anyone that hasn't committed a crime can pass a background check that doesn't ask if you're on Valium or Xanax.

We have 20X the gun rate murders than any similarly developed nation. An Australian baseball player lost his life in Texas...here on SCHOLARSHIP to bored teens!

There is no doubt about it: we are the United Sanitarium Asylum. We're not "states" except the state of mental illness, paranoia, misogyny, racism, sexism; xenophobia. Conspiracy carnival barkers will howl at the moon. Counting down until Alex Jones invariably calls this a "false flag operation." He'll sell a lot of hurriedly produced DVDs (we didn't have to wait long). Flaccid, feckless, impotent lawmakers not worthy of the oath they took to "protect and defend" The Constitution against all enemies, foreign and DOMESTIC will simultaneously Tweet their "thoughts and prayers" and call for less gun-free zones as their financiers/benefactors have scripted them to say. They'll otherwise do NOTHING since their gated neighborhoods have tactical guards armed-to-the-teeth to protect them and their families. Yours and mine are cannon fodder.

I think...we need a fence. Not just a Trump fence on the Texas-Mexico border, but across the Northern Canadian border.

We need a UN naval blockade on the East Coast and as far out as Hawaii and as north as Alaska.

We need to broadcast a travel advisory to the planet:

DANGER! The USA is hazardous to your health. A worldwide quarantine is ordered. Travel to America AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Lastly, we need to offer Visas to the sane of us that just want out.

Time, their own arsenals and Darwin will take care of the idiots left!

*#P4TC: Fait Accompli...

Cynicism...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 2, 2015 at 7:07am

Haze from coal and other fossil fuels dims the sky in Changchun, China. WANG ZHE - IMAGINECHINA
Image Source: Science Mag Link Below

Topics: Climate Change, Economy, Global Warming, Green Energy, Jobs, STEM

Our record-hated congress spent the early part of November putting legislation in place to block any climate actions currently being decided by the rest of the planet in Paris, France. They've had a blithe record of "do-nothing" for quite some time now. It's the political equivalent of cutting one's index finger off to cause a heart attack in an opponent. Voodoo without the economics...

Here's my cynicism, if I think purely of myself:

- I'll likely not be alive when the United States becomes a majority-minority (read: non-white) nation. Neither will the people who spend their addled time on Xanax in chat rooms and conspiracy provocateur meetings that consume salted potato chips and BTUs in naval gazing. We'll all be dust.

- I definitely won't be alive in the year 2100 when the climate you-know-what quite literally "hits the fan."

So, why should I care?

I honestly think this is the meditation of deniers. They won't be here. None of us will.

Here's the growth formula: N = N₀ * e^rt.

Humans, animals and bacteria are remarkable in their similar modeling.

Let N₀ = 7 billion; r (growth rate) = 0.01; t = 35 years, I get: 9,933.472,840.15. Round up to 10 billion in the year 2050.

Eighty-five years from now you get 16,377,527,963.48 in 2100. More than double; the planet doesn't get any bigger. That's a lot of mouths to feed; a lot of carbon dioxide exhaled; less trees and more poop to dispose of (methane is another greenhouse gas).

I don't care. Really I can't. I won't be here. That's three generations from now.

China's air will be just as ducky as it was today if not more so. The current haze prematurely kills 350,000 to 500,000 persons, and I'm sure by 2050 they will "improve" on those numbers.

The Dodo is no longer here. Neither are a lot of other species. Neither will eventually be any of us...maybe all of us.

Eventually the weather will be too extreme to have predictable planting seasons, agriculture for better or worse being the bedrock of modern civilization. Swaths of the planet will not be able to feed themselves. You may be able to "trim the fat" (which I suspect a lot will not have in the bodily sense), or "reduce the herd." Weapons manufacturers will do what they do in poor countries with the resources to buy their wares to invade even poorer countries; "Peace on Earth" obviously not in the business model. There will be liberty, freedom and sectarian conflicts. Mansions in gated communities will have to become fortresses with ye olden moats and maybe a few crocodiles to keep out the riffraff, or as the Statue of Liberty currently describes "the huddled masses," yearning in this instance to eat anything...or, anyone. They could all 1 and 99% take a whiff of the thick, rancid air.

But hey! Join me. We'll be atomized and this struggle will be for our great grandchildren. They could discover "warp drive"...or have a warped end.

MIT Technology Review
Wealthy Investors Target Dramatic Increase in Clean-Energy Funding, Richard Martin
Why Solar Power Could Hit a Ceiling, Mike Orcutt

#P4TC: Ragnarok...

Science Mag: Choosing a climate future in Paris, Eli Kintisch

Qubits @ Room...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 1, 2015 at 7:28am

Physicists create many entangled states of electrons ("e") and nuclei ("n") in the industrially important semiconductor silicon carbide, all at ambient conditions. (Courtesy: Paul Klimov, University of Chicago)

Topics: Entanglement, Semiconductor Technology, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics

The quantum entanglement of a large ensemble of spins in a semiconductor has been carried out at room temperature for the first time, by researchers in the US. The team entangled more than 10,000 copies of two-qubit entangled states in a commercial silicon-carbide (SiC) wafer at ambient conditions. SiC is widely used in electronics, so this latest achievement could be an important step towards the creation of sophisticated quantum devices that harness entanglement.

Entanglement is a purely quantum-mechanical phenomenon that allows two or more particles to have a much closer relationship than is allowed by classical physics, no matter how far apart they may be. The states of entangled particles are inextricably linked such that any change made to one particle instantly influences the state of the other. Entangled particles are seen as a key component of quantum computers, but for entanglement to be truly utilized in practical applications, researchers must be able to entangle quantum bits (qubits) at room temperature and preserve the entangled state.

Physics World: Physicists entangle qubits in a semiconductor at room temperature
Tushna Commissariat

Luddites...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 30, 2015 at 7:13am

Image Source: Smithsonian.com. Ludd, drawn here in 1812, was the fictitious leader of numerous real protests. (Granger Collection, New York)

Topics: Alternative Energy, Climate Change, Economy, Jobs, Politics, Research, STEM

Researching the term Luddite was quite revealing. Ned Lud (or Ludd/Ludham) appears to have been a fiction concocted to coincide with the legend Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest and the "righteousness" of the protesters' cause ¹. First of all, they weren't so opposed to technology as most have defined them over time. Their opposition to the technology of the stocking frame appeared to be what is angering swaths of humanity now: increased productivity that has not been - especially lately - proportional to increased wages or employment.

Thus everyone is taken aback at the impotence of self-governance, which is the hallmark of democratic republics. We do not salute a king, we essentially elect our leaders to do the will of the people who sent them to office, leaders often swayed more by the uber class that invest in their election campaigns; less by their "neighbors" they haven't lived next to in quite some time.

Free trade: most of them have been bandied as cause De Jure by some politicians and ignored by others. "Bring the jobs back" seems a simple solution that begs two questions: 1. Even if the jobs came back, would Americans line up and apply for them? 2. What if our modern "stocking frame" of convenient technology and mobile apps doesn't allow the previous jobs to come back?

I receive as member of the American Physics Society its newsletter. In the print issue of Inside the Beltway I read ², Michael S. Lubell posits the question: "Does Science Bear Any Responsibility for Today’s Political Discontent?" He points out through science there's been an increase in productivity that up until recent history tracked well with wages and jobs. However, from the article:

A new Economic Policy Institute report provides a possible clue. Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, the report’s authors, took a hard look at the impact of productivity, defined as economic output per unit input (e.g., labor and capital); on a typical worker’s compensation. What they detail is profoundly disturbing.

Bivens and Mishel trace the history of productivity and compensation from 1948 to the present. During the first 25 years, hourly compensation fairly tracked gains in productivity, rising 91.3 percent during that period while productivity, driven in large part by technological advances, rose 96.7 percent. But from 1973 through 2014, while productivity continued to soar, rising another 72.2 percent, compensation grew by a paltry 9.2 percent.

In short, during those four decades, the average worker stopped benefiting from science and technology’s largess. But corporations did not: their profits rose dramatically, and their stock prices soared. Between the beginning of 1973 and the end of 2014, for example, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, adjusted for inflation, rose 216 percent.

I do have concerns. Again from APS, the latest new report in the under-representation of African Americans in the Physical Sciences ³. There's concern with women ⁴ being in a fluctuating but representative small number. Both and other groups has to do with exposure and family income: if your parents are in STEM, you're more likely to follow them; in most cases, you are more likely to run experiments in your room if you can afford them and your neighborhood environment feels safe to do so.

We've gone from "Rosie the Riveter" to "Rosie the Robot Maintainer"; "Rosie the IT expert." We've gone from "I'm not college material," and that person joining a manufacturing firm and earning a living though out a lifetime to raise a family to that option no longer existing. The moribund testing industrial complex is only stressing out teachers and students alike at the K-12 levels, and is not preparing those students for more rigorous collegiate-level work, merely maintaining the inequality status quo ^5,6,7. We have an opportunity to construct a future based on alternative energy solutions that could - generate a new level of employment that the nation could educate and prepare a future workforce to fulfill. Such gainful employment would relieve a host of - not ALL - social pressures that are in essence a competition for resources and an artificial, socially inequitable sequester/squandering of the same. We could lead on climate emissions reduction and reduce in-kind, stresses that are currently plaguing our society; that may have built a grievous foundation to the two spectacular attacks in Paris this calendar year, where current climate talks are happening this week.

What essentially are we going to do with swaths of humanity not prepared for the jobs of the future...or now? Why aren't our elected representatives answering these substantive questions beyond soundbites, sloganeering and talking points or any science-based questions to "inherit the wind" of nuclear codes to possible species extinction?

Perhaps we need to ask them.

1. Smithsonian Institution: What the Luddites Really Fought Against, Richard Conniff

APS News Links
2. Does Science Bear Any Responsibility for Today’s Political Discontent? Michael S. Lubell
3. Underrepresentation of African Americans Persists in Physical Sciences, Emily Conover
4. Women in Physics Statistics
5. Fighting the Gender Gap:Standardized Tests Are Poor Indicators of Ability in Physics
6. Session L5. COM & CSWP: GRE/SAT Predictors of Graduate/Undergradute Performance for Women and Minorities.
7. Abstract: H12.00002 : Allocation of Wealth and Emergence of Inequality

SpaceX Crewed Mission...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 27, 2015 at 8:49am

SpaceX is modifying Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to adapt it to the needs of the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which are slated to lift off from the historic pad in the near future. Credit: SpaceX

Topics: International Space Station, NASA, Space Exploration, Spaceflight

It's official: SpaceX will fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station a few years from now.

California-based SpaceX has secured its first astronaut taxi order under its Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract with NASA, agency officials announced Friday (Nov. 20).

"It's really exciting to see SpaceX and Boeing with hardware in flow for their first crew rotation missions," Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said in a statement. "It is important to have at least two healthy and robust capabilities from U.S. companies to deliver crew and critical scientific experiments from American soil to the space station throughout its life span."

Space.com: NASA Orders 1st Crewed Mission from SpaceX, Mike Wall

Cyborg Roses...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 26, 2015 at 9:24am

Researchers in Sweden have used roses to create a number of basic electronic devices. (Courtesy: Eliot Gomez/Linköping University)

Topics: Bioengineering, Biology, Electrical Engineering, Photosynthesis

I have to admit: this would have been a better post around Valentine's Day! Enjoy your turkey, pheasant, Cornish hen (in my case) or vegan meal.

Researchers in Sweden have created electronic circuits and devices that are integrated within living plant material. The team introduced a conductive polymer into the vascular system of plants, which allowed the researchers to create the key components of an electrical circuit. They were also able to demonstrate transistor modulation, digital logic function and elements of a digital display. Plant-integrated electronics could enable us to monitor and regulate plant physiology and harvest energy from photosynthesis, the team says.

Organic electronic materials are polymers and molecules that can conduct and process both electronic and ionic signals. They can be shaped into almost any form and used to build devices that can convert electronic signals into chemical processes, and vice versa. The resulting electrochemical devices can then be used to regulate and monitor biological and chemical processes. Such technologies are currently being exploited in various medical settings, such as drug delivery, regenerative medicine, neuronal interconnects, and diagnostics.

Physics World: Cyborg roses become transistors and logic gates, Michael Allen

Finding Field Equations...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 25, 2015 at 7:21am

Figure 1. Albert Einstein (1879–1955), in this 1916 photograph, poses in his study at Wittelsbacherstraße 13 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.)
Citation: Phys. Today 68, 11, 30 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2979

Topics: Einstein, History, General Relativity, Research

In his later years, Einstein often claimed that he had obtained the field equations of general relativity by choosing the mathematically most natural candidate. His writings during the period in which he developed general relativity tell a different story.

This month marks the centenary of the Einstein field equations, the capstone on the general theory of relativity and the highlight of Albert Einstein’s scientific career.¹ The equations, which relate spacetime curvature to the energy and momentum of matter, made their first appearance in a four-page paper submitted on 25 November 1915 to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and reprinted in TheCollected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE),² volume 6, document 21. How did Einstein, shown in figure 1, arrive at those equations? He later insisted that the gravitational equations “could only be found by a purely formal principle (general covariance).”³ Such statements mainly served to justify his strategy in the search for a unified field theory during the second half of his career. As a description of how he found the field equations of general relativity, they are highly misleading.

The 25 November paper was the last in a series of short communications submitted to the Berlin Academy on four consecutive Thursdays that month (CPAE 6; 21, 22, 24, 25). In the first paper, Einstein replaced the field equations that he had published in 1913 with equations that retain their form under a much broader class of coordinate transformations (see figure 2). In the second, a highly speculative hypothesis he adopted about the nature of matter allowed him to change those equations to equations that are generally covariant—that is, retain their form under arbitrary coordinate transformations. In the fourth, he achieved the same end by changing the field equations of the first paper in a different and more convincing way, as shown in figure 3. In the third, based on the field equations of the second paper but unaffected by the modification of the fourth, he accounted for the 43 seconds of arc per century missing in the Newtonian account of the perihelion motion of Mercury.

Physics Today: Arch and scaffold: How Einstein found his field equations
Michel Janssen and Jürgen Renn

Alpha Centauri Dreams...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 24, 2015 at 6:16pm

Image Source: NASA - Imagine The Universe!

Topics: Exoplanets, NASA, Planets, Planetary Science, Space Exploration, Research

Physics Database: The famous alpha Centauri system — one of our nearest neighbors in space — happens to be one of the best targets for exoplanet search. In this talk Michael Endl, a research scientist at the University of Texas, will review past and current planet search efforts that targeted the alpha Centauri system. In addition, he will focus on his team’s program, an intensive multi-year observing campaign carried out at Mt John University Observatory in New Zealand. As always, for more high quality videos check out the links below.

Post title derived from the excellent site Centauri-Dreams.org

Neighbors...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 23, 2015 at 7:30am

Image source: MIT News

Topics: Exoplanets, NASA, Planets, Planetary Science, Space Exploration

It's a scant 39 light years away, but even if we developed a propulsion system to get us there in a human lifetime, the inhospitable weather would make me select another destination. Good candidate for LONG distance study...

Scientists have discovered a new exoplanet that, in the language of “Star Wars,” would be the polar opposite of frigid Hoth, and even more inhospitable than the deserts of Tatooine. But instead of residing in a galaxy far, far away, this new world is, galactically speaking, practically next door.

The new planet, named GJ 1132b, is Earth-sized and rocky, orbiting a small star located a mere 39 light-years from Earth, making it the closest Earth-sized exoplanet yet discovered. Astrophysicists from MIT and elsewhere have published these findings today in the journal Nature.

Based on their measurements, the scientists have determined that the planet is a roasting 500 degrees Fahrenheit, and is likely tidally locked, meaning that it has a permanent day and night side, presenting the same face to its star, much like our moon is locked to the Earth.

MIT News: New exoplanet in our neighborhood, Jennifer Chu

Sole Power...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 20, 2015 at 7:54am

Image GIF source: MIT Technology Review

Topics: Economy, Jobs, Materials Science, Metamaterials, STEM

Considering the obesity rate in the country and the FitBit craze, this could be a win-win for all of us.

Children have been harnessing energy from their steps ever since 1992, when L.A. Gear introduced sneakers that light up. For most adults, however, the ambient energy created by the simple act of walking is forever lost. Considering that the average person takes around 216 million steps in a lifetime, it’s a significant waste.

Inventor Laurence Kemball-Cook hopes to harness the lost energy at two points of contact: the shoe and the floor. In 2009, Kemball-Cook founded Pavegen, a company whose floor tiles can capture the power of footsteps. The technology uses compression to skim a tiny fraction of the energy created when a human steps on the tile. It’s been installed in more than 100 projects around the world, including a football stadium in Rio de Janeiro and a terminal in Heathrow Airport. The energy is stored in batteries inside the tiles, where it can then be used to power lighting, advertisements, and way-finding solutions, which guide people through an environment via directional arrows.

Now Kemball-Cook and his R&D team have turned their attention to the shoe itself, hoping to apply the same principles used in the tiles as a way to harness personal energy. “The idea is that the energy source would be readily available to the shoe wearer,” explains Kemball-Cook, who has been in discussions with major footwear manufacturers such as Nike and Reebok about ways the technology could be incorporated into consumer products. “You could walk from work and charge your phone en route instead of waiting to use a charger at home. Runners could charge their music players during a jog.”

MIT Technology Review: The Quest to Make Your Shoe a Power Source, Simon Parkin

MAGLEV @ Home...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 19, 2015 at 7:19am

Image Source: BBC - Leeds - K-T Picture Galleries

Topics: Materials Science, Quantum Mechanics, Semiconductor Technology, Superconductivity

I might do this at home, but I think this is already a neat demo done for many a high school or even college introductory physics class.

I disagree on one point in the video: we do use superconducting magnets specifically for levitation in the semiconductor industry in a few of our processes that require it. There are also several bullet trains that use this feature of super-cooled metal, thereby inducing superconductivity. You are welcome to invent other uses. Source: Scientific American, How to Do Quantum Magnetic Levitation at Home, November 17, 2015

Musing Crichton...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 18, 2015 at 10:51am

Star Trek Wiki Memory Alpha: Nanite

Topics: Diversity in Science, Nanotechnology, Philosophy, Science Fiction, Star Trek, Women in Science

From Physics Database:

Dr. Amanda Barnard is an Office of the Chief Executive (OCE) Science leader, and head of the Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory at CSIRO. She received her PhD in 2003, followed by a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory (USA), and the prestigious senior research position as Violette & Samuel Glasstone Fellow at the University of Oxford (UK) with an Extraordinary Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College.

In this talk Dr Amanda Barnard will take us through the latest advances in nanotechnology and answer the fantastic question: ‘Are nanoparticles alive?’ In the world of science fiction, nanotechnology is often shown as swarms of micro-machines that act without the need for human supervision. Much like their biological counterparts, these imagined devices even sometimes possess their own intelligence. The imagination of science fiction writers has taken this high tech fantasy beyond the reality. But scientists have imagination too, and increasingly they are taking nanomaterials to remarkable places with properties that sound stranger than fiction.

Wearable Biosensors...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 17, 2015 at 7:31pm

A conformally contacted device on an artificial eye for glucose sensing in tears. Courtesy: YS Rim

Topics: Materials Science, Optical Physics, Semiconductor Technology, Nanotechnology, Thin Films

Okay, I have to admit: the bionic eye freaked me out. I'm trying to get used to it...

Researchers at the California NanoSystems Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed ultrathin, flexible, metal oxide semiconducting thin films for use in wearable or implantable biosensors. The devices, which are made using a straightforward printing technique, could be used as sensors in non-invasive health monitoring applications like smart contact lenses that monitor a person’s glucose levels, for example.

Nanotechweb: Metal oxide thin films make wearable biosensors

Power To Pluto...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 16, 2015 at 10:31am

Image Source: Wired

Topics: Electrical Engineering, Humor, Planetary Science, Space Exploration

This was a rather tongue-in-cheek article, I say that because all solutions point to the company web site and the products it produces or allegedly can produce. It does raise the issue of interplanetary and interstellar travel: charging your cell phone for selfies is kinda low on the scale of concerns once you fly beyond the "Goldilocks Zone" we currently inhabit. Like "The Martian," you're probably going to have to subsist on a lot of veggies even if you didn't like them as a kid since a burger and fries would be well...several billion miles away!

Imagine this. You have just parked your private space ship on Pluto, intrigued by all the recent NASA photos of the not-a-planet small wannabe-could-be-planet, and you realize your cell phone is on its last legs. Power-wise, that is. Not because you skipped the last two upgrades.

What to do? For sure, here on Pluto, a zillion miles away from the sun, rigging up some sort of solar screen recharger thing is out of the question. Not that you can't do that and not because it wouldn't work (eventually) but because you need power fast. There are Pluto selfies to take and tweets to be tweeted.

Mouser Electronics: Portable Power: Especially Useful on Pluto, Arden Henderson