Group items tagged

A nice article explaining the principle of quantum superposition from the double slits experience. Nothing new here but still interesting to read :)

I myself am quite a big fan of the one-electron universe paradigm :))) And of the cat cannon: http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/12/q-can-you-do-the-double-slit-experiment-with-a-cat-cannon/

Recharge in seconds and efficiently store power for weeks between charges. Added bonus is the cheap and abundant components needed. One of the applications they foresee is to attach such a super-capacitor to the back of solar panels to store the power and discharge this during the night

very nice indeed - is this already at a stage where we should have a closer look at it? what you think? With experience in growing carbon nanostructures, Pint's group decided to try to coat the porous silicon surface with carbon. "We had no idea what would happen," said Pint. "Typically, researchers grow graphene from silicon-carbide materials at temperatures in excess of 1400 degrees Celsius. But at lower temperatures - 600 to 700 degrees Celsius - we certainly didn't expect graphene-like material growth." When the researchers pulled the porous silicon out of the furnace, they found that it had turned from orange to purple or black. When they inspected it under a powerful scanning electron microscope they found that it looked nearly identical to the original material but it was coated by a layer of graphene a few nanometers thick. When the researchers tested the coated material they found that it had chemically stabilized the silicon surface. When they used it to make supercapacitors, they found that the graphene coating improved energy densities by over two orders of magnitude compared to those made from uncoated porous silicon and significantly better than commercial supercapacitors. Transmission electron microscope image of the surface of porous silicon coated with graphene. The coating consists of a thin layer of 5-10 layers of graphene which filled pores with diameters less than 2-3 nanometers and so did not alter the nanoscale architecture of the underlying silicon. (Cary Pint / Vanderbilt) The graphene layer acts as an atomically thin protective coating. Pint and his group argue that this approach isn't limited to graphene. "The ability to engineer surfaces with atomically thin layers of materials combined with the control achieved in designing porous materials opens opportunities for a number of different applications beyond energy storage," he said.

terahertz lasers controling the spin of electrons ....

(don't forget to turn your hype-filters on...) MoNETA (http://cns.bu.edu/nl/moneta.html) stands for "MOdular Neural Exploring Traveling Agent". It is one of projects participating in the DARPA-funded SyNAPSE project ("Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics"): http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/bio/biologically/synapse/index.htm http://www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/baa08-28.html

interesting portal ... though of limited use for ACT at first view ....

for Eduardo !

Smells awesome! Thanks dude...

Carrier multiplication (CM) is a process in which absorption of a single photon produces not just one but multiple electron-hole pairs. This effect is a potential enabler of next-generation, high-efficiency photovoltaic and photocatalytic systems.

n some semiconducting nanocrystals one photon can release two or three electrons, hence the term avalanche effect. This could theoretically lead to a maximum output of 44 percent in a solar cell comprising the correct semiconducting nanocrystals.

maybe this would be worth looking into along with our biomemetic idea

not sure how scientific this is since from the independent but ...

Next astronaut suit: Electronic systems that offer elastic mechanical responses to high-strain deformations are of growing interest because of their ability to enable new biomedical devices and other applications whose requirements are impossible to satis

An interesting research centre in California! Focus areas: Business Services Electronic Materials, Devices, & Systems Information & Communication Technologies Biomedical Systems Cleantech

XEROX PARC was definitely heavily involved in computer development: eg. mouse, GUI, ethernet, OO programming, all came out of PARC, and all that without focusing on computers but printers...

aaah its the XEROX centre, didn't know. Yep they made the mouse and then handed it over nicely to Apple after IBM thought it was useless

impressive: use of human body for communication between electronic devices

i saw once a similar system that would automatically transfer your business card when you shake hands ... funny ..

Anna, Sante, some Christmas reading! Real theoretical physicists never sleep ;)

A personal interest of mine that I want to explore a bit more in the future. I just bought a ZigBee electricity monitor and I am wondering whether from the signal of the mains one could detect (reliably) the oven turning on, lights, etc. Probably requires Neural Network training. The idea would be to make a simple device which basically saves you money by telling you how much electricity you are wasting. Then again, its probably already done by Google...

Randomly I found this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/consumer-electronics/gadgets/curb-startup-home-electricity-tracking Isn't it a similar kind of stuff Thijs?

haha, yep, that's it... but we can do better than that right! :)

From the article: By the end of September 2014, Jason Budinoff, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD), is expected to complete the first imaging telescopes ever assembled almost exclusively from 3D-manufactured components. The devices' optics and electronics will be fabricated using conventional methods. "As far as I know, we are the first to attempt to build an entire instrument with 3D printing," says Budinoff. He is building a fully functional 50 mm camera whose outer tube, baffles, and optical mounts are all printed as a single structure. The instrument is appropriately sized for a CubeSat (a small satellite made of individual units each about 100 mm on a side). 

In a work published on Nature (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7536/full/nature14090.html#affil-auth) a new DFT based simulation of convection in Earth's Core iron shows that electron-electron scattering has a similar contribution to electron's thermal vibration. The outcome is that using the old dynamo theory the simulation matches the Earth magnetic field experimental results, solving an 80 years old puzzle.

Yay to science! I'm always intrigued by related experiments that try to measure material properties at the GPa range. Especially, the efforts of reaching 'metallic hydrogen' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen), requiring pressures above 25GPa at which hydrogen becomes conductive. It is thought that gas giant planets could have such a core, but no-one has been able to produce/verify this theory as off yet.