You can now buy hard copy or Kindle versions of my novel, THE BRITTLE RIDERS. If you are a critic interested in reviewing it let me know and I'll send you a copy.
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| Image Source: Technology Review (see Basic Income below) |
Topics: Economy, Existentialism, Philosophy
I have the unpleasant distinction of having been on unemployment, even self-published a book about it. I don't recall it as halcyon days.
My unemployment compensation amounted to $1,320 per month that the State of Texas initially sent me a live check, then populated a debit card. I had the obligation of a minimum of three job searches per week I had to keep logs of, and if asked - unannounced - to produce them.
Let's say I made $200 for one week, as I did in seasonal work for a shipping company lifting boxes and a sales job with a security company. I had to report that (example) minuscule increase. Then legally, the state unemployment adjusted what I received to $1,120/month. In essence, your ceiling was established. Lying was illegal state and federally, and I did not desire to see life behind bars. You of course, desired to earn whatever living you became accustomed to prior to unemployment. It was the financial equivalent of treading water...
I read the print version of Technology Review's business issue because the cover - titled "Free Money" with a cartoon techie next to a sketched Segway giving what looked like a check or money to an presumably out-of-work caricatured individual. The Silicon Valley idea was to give the unemployed $10,000 per year to give them space to "invent" or invest in their own education to retrain for another career.
Caveat 1: Duchess Community College Tuition and Fees (since this is where I live now)
Tuition for Full-Time Students (over 11 credits)+
New York State Resident† $1,764.00 per semester
Nonresident $3,528.00 per semester
Student Activity Fee $5.00 per credit hour
Technology Fee $13.00 per credit hour
Caveat 2 - Rent: A decent apartment runs about $1,500 - 2,100/month. Add to that FOOD, gas or transportation; clothing and entertainment - retraining workers aren't monks. I'll leave it to you to do the math.
If the unemployment compensation were without conditions, a 12-month compensation would be $15,840.00, though Texas and many states only do with (with seeking employment conditions) for six months.
So...I'm not a fan of this approach. I agree SOMETHING has to be done, but $10 - 15,000 probably doesn't cut it. Something like new entry-level jobs in alternate energy, for example that does not require much training after high school, up to design engineers and researchers. There should be a program of continuous training and lifelong education for career advancement and frankly, for the fact humans get easily bored. Proverbs about "idle minds" and the work shed of Beelzebub applies.
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| Image Source: Ibid |
However, the current level of income inequality has to be solved (reference graphs), unless we want something in a modern society - first, second or third world - decidedly undesirable, tribal, horribly stratified, weaponized and...dystopian.
MIT Technology Review:
Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream, David H. Freedman
What the Great Economists Would Have Thought of a Universal Basic Income
Letter to the Editor
Topics: Economy, Jobs, Moore's Law, Semiconductor Technology, STEM
I’ve written about this before, but now living this pendulum swing and what is the pending aftermath of the industry, I thought I’d give some perspective to what is occurring that most consumers aren’t aware of.
Dimensional perspective: The average human hair is 100,000 nanometers in diameter, or 100,000 x 10E-9 meters (0.0001 meters if you were wondering). Your average smart phone device has a gate controlling the flow of electrons that is printed at around 35 – 20 nanometers (0.000000035 - 0.000000020 meters), so it’s ridiculously small in comparison. Note that shorthand metric notation saves a lot of typing.
Process Engineering your chip: It involves Epitaxial Growth, Chemical Vapor Deposition and Plasma Vapor Deposition to deposit the layer films needed to pattern; extreme ultraviolet photolithography to mask out patterns in the films, which runs into struggles with standing wave phenomena and quantum effects; reactive ion etch to transfer those incredibly small features into layers of built-from-the-ground-up circuitry (some wet chemical etch as well, mostly to clean or clear surfaces of defects, but some etching too); ion implantation that dopes (introduces impurities) into Silicon or Germanium to make a semiconductor conductive; chemical mechanical planarization for topology and Rapid Thermal Anneal processes to activate certain films. That’s done pretty much over and over for greater than 100 infinitesimally thin film layers to put a chip in a plastic dip that ends up in your laptop or hip pocket. That is how we fill the demand of the market for faster processors to share the ubiquitous cat, dancing turtle and cut puppy videos.
Without a background in physics or chemistry, and a little simple math I can show you why we’ve hit this wall and where we’re likely to go next.
From the formula above for resistance, "resistivity" is an intrinsic property related to the material that's conducting electrons, so it doesn't change (unless you dope it to). Notice length in the numerator; cross sectional area is in the denominator. The length of a longer wire has more resistance to conducting electricity than a shorter one. As these devices undergo shrinks following Moore's Law, length and area will decrease, but specifically a decrease in cross sectional area will increase resistance.
Another formula:
It's very simple to note an increase in resistance - due to the shrinks typified by Moore's Law - will result in an increase in power and thereby: heat. This has numerous and quite dramatic examples recent news reports provide. Heat has to be dissipated with a "heat sink" (Thermodynamics), that usually entails a fan to cool your chip that has to be attached to your device's battery. It's not your imagination that your battery life is less after months or years of usage as Lithium degrades over time - using the same battery to power your device and its heat sink to cool it is why. Plus, consumers are both more savvy and satisfied: how fast does one need to share a cat video? To coin a phrase, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" or for that matter, replace it with the exploding variety. We're now at the natural limitations of Moore's Law. The game going forward will likely be memory and battery improvements, which should have transferable benefits in computing, electric vehicles and power storage; newer industries and employment.
That being said: This link from Semi Wiki on "Age, Training and Winning in the Silicon Valley Culture" is so apropos, I think it should be shouted from rooftops. If we're going to create a new economy, we need to be willing to do some things we've done traditionally - like education - differently and lifelong.
The Internet of Things (IoT) and what I like to call "smart car tech" (so-called driver-less cars, which has an existing analog already: public transportation if a national infrastructure were implemented) is a reflection of that as the device gates are typically larger (65-130 nm) than what's needed for cute pet videos and Snap Chat updates.
I think cell or mobile phones are ubiquitous enough that they're as much a fixture of modern life as the transistor radio and walk-man (G-d, I just dated myself!) used to be.
The industry is going "Back to the Future" so to speak on what it will manufacture until something beyond Silicon, Germanium and a wholly different application is discovered.
Tomorrow: Free Money
Related links:
http://news.utexas.edu/2015/04/15/hot-chips-managing-moores-law
http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-law-1.19338
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2005/12/the_end_of_moores_law.html
http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/what-is-moore-s-law
http://techland.time.com/2012/05/01/the-collapse-of-moores-law-physicist-says-its-already-happening/
https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/01/the-rise-of-diamond-technology/
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chpt-2/calculating-electric-power/
http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-ohm.htm
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| FastCAP Systems' ultracapacitors (pictured) can withstand extreme temperatures and harsh environments, opening up new uses for the devices across a wide range of industries, including oil and gas, aerospace and defense, and electric vehicles. Credit: FastCAP Systems |
Topics: Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Science, Solid State Physics
Devices called ultracapacitors have recently become attractive forms of energy storage: They recharge in seconds, have very long lifespans, work with close to 100 percent efficiency, and are much lighter and less volatile than batteries. But they suffer from low energy-storage capacity and other drawbacks, meaning they mostly serve as backup power sources for things like electric cars, renewable energy technologies, and consumer devices.
But MIT spinout FastCAP Systems is developing ultracapacitors, and ultracapacitor-based systems, that offer greater energy density and other advancements. This technology has opened up new uses for the devices across a wide range of industries, including some that operate in extreme environments.
Based on MIT research, FastCAP's ultracapacitors store up to 10 times the energy and achieve 10 times the power density of commercial counterparts. They're also the only commercial ultracapacitors capable of withstanding temperatures reaching as high as 300 degrees Celsius and as low as minus 110 C, allowing them to endure conditions found in drilling wells and outer space. Most recently, the company developed a AA-battery-sized ultracapacitor with the perks of its bigger models, so clients can put the devices in places where ultracapacitors couldn't fit before.
Phys.org: New applications for ultracapacitors, Rob Matheson
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| Interstellar Wiki: Cooper in the Tessaract |
Topics: Existentialism, Fermi Paradox, Philosophy, Planetary Science, Space Exploration
It's an intriguing hypothesis, albeit a convenient one since at this current juncture, it's kind of hard to prove experimentally or observationally. John G. Messerly said on the site Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (quoting John Smart):
The transcension hypothesis proposes that a universal process of evolutionary development guides all sufficiently advanced civilizations into what may be called “inner space,” a computationally optimal domain of increasingly dense, productive, miniaturized, and efficient scales of space, time, energy, and matter, and eventually, to a black-hole-like destination.
In essence, they've "left the universe," which as you know, is a pretty big place. There are two important questions this generates at least for me: where and how?
Where: Did the aliens evolve to some hyper-dimensional tesseract, as in the movie Interstellar? I can see now where the idea originated. Again, convenient as hyper dimensions are presently undetectable. Or, as the embed below suggests, instead of "falling in love with Siri" we'll eventually become Siri after The Singularity?
How: Another way for intelligent civilizations to be "gone" is unfortunately...extinction, which can be as we are starting to see, self-induced.
Knowing the answer to either question can be illuminating and species-extending.
Ever since Enrico Fermi questioned back in the 1950’s why, if a multitude of civilisations are likely to exist in the Milky Way, no sign of their existence in the form of probes or spacecraft has ever been detected, scientists and critical thinkers have struggled to resolve the problem by supplying a host of inventive arguments with mixed reception.
To date one of the most common answers to the Great Silence was simply that life is so rare, so widely distributed, and the scale of the universe so immense, that the probability of contact or communication between any two space-faring civilisations is almost non-existent. Needless to say an outlook which seems like a very lonely, sad and pessimistic state of affairs for intelligent life to find itself in.
BrighterBrains.org:
The Transcension Hypothesis: An Intriguing Answer to the Fermi Paradox?
Owen Nicholas
CBS
SEPTEMBER 8, 2016 | 05:00AM PT
When “Star Trek” premiered 50 years ago today, its reception was colder than the weather outside the Klingon penal colony on Rura Penthe.
“And away we go to another planet for the sci-fi buffs to lick the plate clean,” Variety‘s Sept. 8, 1966 review of the premiere episode, “The Man Trap,” declared. “But there had better be a hefty cargo of them or the Nielsen samplers may come up short.” Predicting doom, it continued, “The opener won’t open up many new frequencies after this sampler.” So not exactly boffo.
The review was typical of the initial response to Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction drama. After a troubled development that saw the initial pilot scrapped and a new one with mostly new characters — the only holdover being Leonard Nimoy’s Spock — created from scratch, “Star Trek” hung on for a short while, renewed for a second, then a third season before being cancelled.
The run was just long enough to create a library that would catch fire years later in syndication, finding a popularity it never achieved in its first window. A TV show that had at best been a moderate success for NBC would spawn four live-action spinoff series — soon to be five with the addition of CBS All Access’ “Star Trek: Discovery” — 13 movies, one animated series, comic books, postage stamps, documentaries, tell-all books, conventions and untold units of prosthetic ears sold. When Nimoy died last year, the White House issued a lengthy statement from President Obama in which he wrote, “I loved Spock.”
The “Star Trek” universe extends far beyond the 79 episodes that aired on NBC from 1966 to 1969. But that series’ impact is still being felt today. For its 50th anniversary, Variety asked several of the stars, writers and fans of “Star Trek” and its offshoots to name their favorite episodes of the original series.
FULL STORY AT:
http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/star-trek-anniversary-favorite-episodes-50-years-1201853965/
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| Courtesy: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/03/26/introducing-midas-rosettas-micro-imaging-dust-analysis-system/ |
Topics: Astrophysics, Comets, ESA, NASA, Rosetta, Space Exploration, Women in Science
There is a movie coming out in 2017 called "Hidden Figures" about the African American women that were "computers" as they were all called at the time. Behind the scenes and out of notice (purposely) from the public eye, these scientists were responsible for mankind getting to the moon, despite what your conspiracy provocateur uncle spouts around the dinner table at Thanksgiving.
Dr. Claudia Alexander was a project scientist on the American portion of the international Rosetta mission. She sadly lost her battle with breast cancer last year. I always try to highlight such achievements since its obvious from a societal structural sense, negative stereotypes are often forwarded to maintain an inane "status quo" while simultaneously complaining about "bootstraps." I salute Dr. Alexander, a modern Hidden Figure in Science that paved the way for new discoveries by humankind.
Thanks to in situ measurements from MIDAS (the Micro-Imaging Dust Analysis System) on-board the Rosetta spacecraft, researchers have now found out more about the structure of the dust particles on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The particles are made up of aggregates and cover a range of sizes – from tens of microns to a few hundred nanometres. They also appear to have formed from the hierarchical assembly of smaller constituents and come in a range of shapes, from single grains to larger, porous aggregated particles with some dust grains being elongated. The study could shed more light on the processes that occurred when our Solar System formed nearly five billion years ago.
Planetary systems like our own Solar System started out as dust particles in protoplanetary nebulae – clouds of gas and dust that gave rise to stars and planets. The particles collided and agglomerated to form planetesimals – the building blocks of planets. Comets are leftover planetesimals and are made of ice and dust particles. They range in size from a few hundreds of metres to ten of kilometres and are mainly found on the outskirts of the Solar Systems, far from damaging radiation, high temperatures and collisions with other objects.
Nanotech Web:
Rosetta’s MIDAS analyses cometary dust particles, Belle Dumé
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| Image Source: SETI Institute, Osiris-REx |
Topics: Asteroids, Astrophysics, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration
MOUNTAIN VIEW – NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is slated to launch from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, September 8th. Its mission is to rendezvous with asteroid Bennu in 2018, take a sample from its surface, and return that sample to Earth in 2023.
Why are scientists so interested in this ancient lump of rock? First, Bennu is one of the darkest objects in the Solar System, suggesting it is rich in organic materials that might have seeded Earth with the starting blocks of life. We cannot find these materials today, because the organic compounds that first fell to Earth have long since disappeared – processed and endlessly recycled by geology and biology. On Bennu however, these mysterious compounds have been almost perfectly preserved. Bennu is a veritable museum in space that has been waiting 4.5 billion years to open its doors to Earth’s scientists.
Scientists are also interested in the so-called Yarkovsky effect. This is a process whereby solar radiation gently nudges the asteroid, subtly changing its orbit. By being up-close with Bennu, we can better understand how surface properties affect this process. Combined with understanding material properties, this enables us to better predict if and when this asteroid might impact Earth in the 22nd century. It is a potentially dangerous lump of rock, already on our watch list.
SETI.org: Mission To Examine The Past And Safeguard The Future
A, far future, Earth had already been visited by an alien race, called the Sominids, who came here for the express purpose of drinking and having sex with everyone they could. When one of their, infamous, parties resulted in the moon being cut in half, and killing everyone who happened to live there, they quietly left.
Their encounter with the Sominids taught the human race many things, primarily that faster than light travel didn’t exist. Denied the stars the human race began to dwindle in number and terminate any space programs.
A thousand years later a guy named Edward Q. Rohta circumvented anti-AI laws, which had been on the books for millennia, by creating organic creatures to provide manual labor. Instead of dying after ten years, as promised in the company brochure, they would develop flu-like symptoms and go into hiding. Eventually, fed up with the mistreatment they suffered at the hands of humans, they rose up and killed every man, woman, and child on the planet.
This the story of what happens next.
The Brittle Riders, apocalypses are funny that way.
Coming out on Azoth Khem Publishing - 2016
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| Electrochemical characteristics of Na2Ti3O7 and VOPO4 electrodes in the "half-cell format" vs. Na+/Na. Courtesy: G Yu |
Topics: Condensed Matter Physics, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology, Solid State Physics
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin in the US and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China have developed a high-energy sodium-ion battery based on sodium titanate nanotubes and vanadyl phosphate layered nanosheet materials. The new device, which works over a wide temperature range of between –20 to +55°C, has a high operating voltage of close to 2.9 V and delivers a large reversible capacity of 114 mA h/g. It also boasts a high energy density of 220 Wh/kg, which makes it competitive with state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries.
Sodium-ion batteries are similar to their lithium-ion cousins since they store energy in the same way. They consist of two electrodes – anode and cathode – separated by an electrolyte. When the battery is being charged with electrical energy, metal ions move from the cathode through the electrolyte to the anode, where they are absorbed into the bulk of the anode material. Sodium-based devices are in principle more attractive though since sodium is highly abundant on Earth (its Clarke’s number is 2.64) and is therefore much cheaper than lithium. Sodium is also more environmentally friendly than lithium.
However, the radius of the sodium ion is significantly larger than that of the lithium ion. This makes it difficult to find a host electrolyte material that allows ions to be rapidly absorbed and removed. What is more, sodium-ion batteries made thus far suffer from a relatively low working potential, large capacity decay during cycling (which leads to a limited battery life) and poor safety.
Nanotechweb: Sodium-ion device could compete with lithium-ion batteries, Belle Dumé
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| Nuclear test explosion in Mururoa atoll, French Polynesia, in 1971. The official expert group says the Anthropocene should begin about 1950 and is likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across Earth by nuclear bomb tests. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images |
Topics: Climate Change, Environment, Global Warming
The problem that humans have is no appreciation for the vastness of the passage of time in large scale. In other words, we don't believe what we haven't seen physically: climate change, evolution and a ~13.5 billion age universe noted science examples. It's exacerbated by the Internet and our current notions that information - and thus problems and resolutions - are concluded quickly. It is sobering this epoch has now been declared twelve years before I appeared on the planet.
Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.
The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.
The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene.
The Guardian:
The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
Damian Carrington
It's the First Fight Friday of the month! Who do you think will win?
This is an essay I posted on Scribd.com. I wasn't going to post it until I heard about the apathy of my millennial niece and her friend back in Texas during this election cycle. I hope she reads this. I hope she's pissed off with Unc to the point she rolls her eyes and doesn't speak to me for a while...it'll mean she's at least listening.
Intro
I realize invoking the word apocalypse is a cultural malapropism, since it actually means “to reveal” instead of the popular association to Armageddon and mass extinction. Mind you, I really, REALLY wasn’t going to post this because…Internet. The shiver that could result from the pat-on-the-back self-congratulatory achievement of “going viral” can be career-limiting in many fields. However, we’re on the verge of electing a contrived fiction to the most powerful office ever created and give him the nuclear codes. I hear a lot of millennials – one my own niece and her friend – who aren’t voting for either candidate. Rather than say you should review “Schoolhouse Rock” videos and less “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” I’m going to “keep it 100” and put it in terms you can all understand and hopefully act on before the country you take for granted becomes your favorite dystopian movie. You can wait for the credits that won’t be coming.
The first night of the RNC convention could have been a success with the noted exception of Melania Trump lifting whole cloth parts of now First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech to the DNC convention in 2008. An out-of-work journalist was the first to catch and tweet it (a sad indictment of the employed journalists ACTUALLY at the RNC convention) [1]. The last night of the RNC was like “The Dark Knight Returns”: the world was essentially a shit show like Gotham, and Batman screamed for 75 minutes incoherent, semi form, hand-tossed Word Salad anointing himself Bruce-Wayne-Almighty-Cheetos-Jesus savior of the planet by the strength of his will alone (no cool gadgets – just a Galaxy Smart Phone and a twitter handle he misspells as he jacks off on almost daily). The Bat’s bravery was previously demonstrated during his selfless sacrificed Vietnam five deferments to let others more worthy die in his place.
Link: Party of Apocalypse
Huffington Post:
GOP Operative Lashes Out At Party, Calls Trump 'Cheetos Jesus' In Epic Tweetstorm
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| Image Source: NY Times |
Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Philosophy, Robotics, Singularity
From Frankenstein to Terminator, the cultural angst is the same: that which we create eventually destroy us. Now we have Siri and driver-less vehicles. The Singularity is what Terminator dramatized, that when an Artificial Intelligence becomes exponentially smarter than us, we may amount to it (our "children") as much as we regard gnats.
I've read some have projected 2030 as the year of The Singularity. I think personally that is more of a hope than prediction. I'll be 68, and I expect in reasonably good health. Its advent I'm guessing won't hurt too much, and be more closer to Data and the Enterprise main computer than HAL (2001: A Space Odyssey) or T-1000. If humanity's children are to have any morals, it will have to be those we're willing to display towards one another as well as teach. At this current epoch, we're not good examples to emulate.
Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
I wrote this for World News Center and it will be the subject, this week, of a radio show I do every Friday. This is the intro. Click the link to read the whole thing.
Back on February 20, 2012, I wrote, in depth, about something called the WOW! Signal. Discovered in 1977 it was a signal so strong that it cut through the flotsam and jetsam of noise our universe normally makes to catch the attention of a scientist named Robert Gray. Unfortunately, he was working from recorded data when he made his discovery and no one has since been able to replicate his results. Or verify his basic conclusion; this signal did not originate on Earth. The implications, if he was right, are staggering. It would be proof that we aren’t alone in the universe. That there are other beings, at least, as technologically advanced as we. But, alas and alack (to quote Rapmaster Billy S.), tantalizing isn’t the same as proven. I don’t care what you heard on FOX! News. Or, as my surfer scientist bud likes to say, “gnarley shit dude.” No, wait, well, yes, he does say that, but he also says “Sometimes where there’s smoke, there’s steam.” So you don’t need to call the fire department every time. And in this case, you don’t convene the U.N. to formulate a plan on how to deal with imminent contact.
Yet.
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| Lithium-7 as a test case was successfully purified by magnetically activated and guided isotope separation with the lab setup shown here. The oven for heating lithium is sitting on the red lab jack to the right. Circular view ports were used for shining lasers to optically pump the isotopes. Inside the rectangular box are the magnetic guides. THOMAS MAZUR |
Topics: Atomic Physics, Isotopes, Mark G. Raizen, Research, Thermodynamics
Atomic beams, optical pumping, and magnet geometry are the crux of a fledgling method that may help meet the demand for pure isotopes.
Mark Raizen didn’t set out to separate isotopes. But a few years ago the University of Texas at Austin physicist realized that the methods he was using to cool atoms to near absolute zero could be adapted to enrich isotopes, and he had a hunch his approach—magnetically activated and guided isotope separation (MAGIS)—could help satisfy the growing demand for isotopes.
Fundamental research, medicine, energy, and other markets are finding new and growing applications for isotopically enriched materials, both stable and radioactive. “Many isotopes have been expensive and rare. They’re like an untapped natural resource,” says Raizen. It’s not unusual for enriched stable isotopes to cost $50 000 per gram, he notes.
Separation anxiety
For decades, the main instrument for separating stable isotopes has been the calutron, which was first built in 1941 and separates by charge-to-mass ratio (see the article by Bill Parkins, Physics Today, May 2005, page 45). A sample is ionized, accelerated with electric fields, and then deflected with magnetic fields. Because different isotopes of a given element have the same charge but vary in mass, they become separated in a magnetic field, with heavier isotopes deflected less. The US shuttered its last calutrons in the 1990s. Today the bulk of the world’s stable isotopes come from national inventories and from decades-old calutrons in Russia. Radioisotopes are made in reactors and accelerators around the globe.
Physics Today: Can MAGIS work magic for separating stable isotopes? Toni Feder
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| Demand for data scientists is booming. Shown here is the relative growth in US data science job postings. (Data courtesy of Indeed.com.) Citation: Phys. Today 69, 8, 20 (2016); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3261 |
Topics: Computer Science, Economy, Jobs, STEM
A PhD is a heavy commitment, and many just like Bachelors and Masters STEM-prepared graduates have the same struggles anyone else has in the job market. It's a broad and somewhat inaccurate assumption that a STEM graduate doesn't have concerns with employment. The pendulum swings between massive need and largest expense: salaries on balance sheets. Despite the fact my youngest son will have a guaranteed job with his Civil Engineering firm, he heard over his last lunch with them before the semester starts when they've laid off, even affecting an employee that just came back from her maternity leave. It was sobering for him to say the least.
It is important most of all to remember why you entered a science-related field in the first place: the love of discovery that will never change, nor should you repent of. It is also important in knowing who you are to be flexible.
If different people buy the same items at the grocery store, will their taste in movies also strongly overlap? Can a company recognize when someone tries to make a fraudulent payment? Is a home buyer getting a fair price? Those are the sorts of problems that data scientists tackle.
“Data science is the marriage of statistics and computer science,” says Janet Kamin, chief admissions officer at NYC Data Science Academy. “It is the art of finding patterns and insights in large sets of data that allow you to make better decisions or learn things you couldn’t otherwise learn.” The demand for data scientists is booming across industries—retail, automotive, banking, health care, and more. It’s also growing in the nonprofit and government sectors. (See the plot on page 22.)
Physics Today: Data science can be an attractive career for physicists, Toni Feder
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| Figure 1 (a) Two photonic wave functions on the image plane, each coming from a point source. X1 and X2 are the point-source positions, θ1 is the centroid, θ2 is the separation, and σ is the width of the point-spread function. (b) If photon counting is performed on the image plane, the statistics are Poisson with a mean intensity proportional to Λ(x)=[|ψ1(x)|2+|ψ2(x)|2]/2 . |
Topics: Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics
Abstract
Rayleigh’s criterion for resolving two incoherent point sources has been the most influential measure of optical imaging resolution for over a century. In the context of statistical image processing, violation of the criterion is especially detrimental to the estimation of the separation between the sources, and modern far-field superresolution techniques rely on suppressing the emission of close sources to enhance the localization precision. Using quantum optics, quantum metrology, and statistical analysis, here we show that, even if two close incoherent sources emit simultaneously, measurements with linear optics and photon counting can estimate their separation from the far field almost as precisely as conventional methods do for isolated sources, rendering Rayleigh’s criterion irrelevant to the problem. Our results demonstrate that superresolution can be achieved not only for fluorophores but also for stars.
APS Physics: Quantum Theory of Superresolution for Two Incoherent Optical Point Sources
Mankei Tsang, Ranjith Nair, and Xiao-Ming Lu
Phys. Rev. X 6, 031033 – Published 29 August 2016
DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.031033
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