LinkNotes

Photonic Crystals Material More Insulating than the Vacuum

2009-12-16T19:46:00.002+01:00

Scientists Create Material More Insulating than the Vacuum

(PhysOrg.com) -- With its complete lack of atoms, a vacuum is often considered to be the best known insulator. For this reason, vacuums are regularly used to reduce heat transfer, such as in the lining of a thermos to keep beverages hot or cold. However, in a recent study scientists have found a material even less able to conduct heat: a stack of photonic crystals layered within a vacuum can create a material with a thermal conductance just half that of empty space alone.

clipped from focus.aps.org

Photonic Thermos

Not the best. A complete theoretical analysis shows why a photonic crystal should insulate better than the vacuum jacket of a thermos. The photonic crystal would insulate by blocking much of the infrared radiation a warm object emits--radiation that can cool the object even when it's surrounded by vacuum.

clipped from www.smartplanet.com

Scientists create material more insulating than a vacuum; smart windows on horizon

A new material made of photonic crystals may be more insulating than a vacuum that completely lacks atoms.

Led by Shanhui Fan, the researchers set out to create a material that addressed that pesky third source of heat transfer: infrared radiation. Photonic crystals, which consist of bands of nanostructures that affect how light travels through them, were the solution.

So what’s the importance of a better vacuum? As I mentioned above, smarter windows on cars, homes and offices is a start. With photonic crystals, smart windows could capture the sun’s heat for use as an energy source while allowing visible light to pass through uninterrupted.

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'Micro-ants' -- Moving tiny particles using magnetic fields

2009-12-15T19:39:00.000+01:00

clipped from web.mit.edu

‘Micro-ants’: Tiny conveyor belts for the 21st century

clipped from www.physorg.com

A new kind of micro-mobility: Moving tiny particles using magnetic fields (w/ Video)

Alfredo Alexander-Katz, the Toyota Career Development Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and his doctoral student Charles Sing and other researchers, devised a system that uses tiny beads made of polymers with specks of magnetic material in them. With these beads suspended in a liquid, they applied a rotating magnetic field, which caused the beads to spontaneously form short chains which began spinning, creating currents that could then carry along surrounding particles — even particles as much as 100 times larger than the beads themselves.

clipped from web.mit.edu

Chains of superparamagnetic colloidal particles rotate to produce flows on length scales much larger than the chain dimensions, allowing them to behave like "micro-ants" that can move large particles.
Photo - Image: Charles Sing

clipped from web.mit.edu

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Batteries of paper with nanotubes and nanowires

2009-12-14T16:23:00.002+01:00

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk

Battery made of paper charges up

Batteries made from plain copier paper could make for future energy storage that is truly paper thin.

clipped from www.eetimes.com

Paper battery said to outperform lithium ion

PORTLAND, Ore. — A paper battery based on carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires could store an electric charge in a mobile device. Researchers also claim the new battery is disposable and that its shape could conform to the shape of different devices.

Bing Hu, a Stanford Univeristy post-doctoral fellow, applies special ink to ordinary paper, depositing nanotubes on the surface that can then be charged to create a battery.

clipped from www.stanford.edu

clipped from news.stanford.edu

At Stanford, nanotubes + ink + paper = instant battery

Dip an ordinary piece of paper into ink infused with carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires, and it turns into a battery or supercapacitor. Crumple the piece of paper, and it still works. Stanford researcher Yi Cui sees many uses for this new way of storing electricity.

clipped from www.stanford.edu

Nanomaterials Science and Engineering

7th of December 2009
Liangbing's paper on conductive paper battery and supercap was published in PNAS, and has been highlighted in the press, including in New York Times, Technology Review, Stanford Report, EE Times, and Scientific American.

clipped from www.youtube.com

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A Single-Atom Transistor

2009-12-13T14:38:00.004+01:00

clipped from www.sciencedaily.com

clipped from www.tkk.fi

Single-atom transistor discovered

Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters.

clipped from www.gizmag.com

Single-atom transistor promises new quantum computing breakthroughs

For the first time, the researchers were able to observe "spin up" and "spin down" states — which will be translated into a "1" and a "0" respectively — for a single phosphorus atom. This is another crucial step towards the control of these states and, ultimately, the realization of a small and stable quantum bit that can be read, written and stored quickly and consistently.

clipped from www.tkk.fi

Teknillinen korkeakoulu TKK
Tekniska högskolan TKK
Helsinki University of Technology TKK

clipped from www.unsw.edu.au

clipped from marc.ph.unimelb.edu.au

Micro-Analytical Research Centre (MARC)

A University of Melbourne Research Centre

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Global Warming Visualizations

2009-12-12T11:26:00.002+01:00

clipped from www.youtube.com

Google Earth Climate Introductory Tour (short version)

clipped from vimeo.com

Global Climate Change Visualisation

This is a data visualisation showing the change in temperature across the world over the last 200+ years. It is based on the data released by the UK's Met Office in Dec 2009.

More information regarding this, along with the source code to the visualisation is available at flinklabs.com/projects/climatedata

clipped from www.youtube.com

NASA | Taking Earth's Temperature

For more information visit http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/ClimateEssen...

clipped from www.dailymotion.com

5-Year Average Global Temperature Anomalies - 1880 to 2008

clipped from vimeo.com

Climate Change ... Global Warming ... Global Cooling

A history of climate change and the IPCC, including:

a) IPCC admits that the world is emerging from the Little Ice Age.
b) IPCC claims that recent data can be used to validate its models ... 10 years of cooling shows that the IPCC models are wrong.
c) Data is presented showing that claims of recent "unprecedented" warming are wrong.

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Intel's Single-chip Cloud Computer

2009-12-08T14:11:00.001+01:00

clipped from techresearch.intel.com

clipped from www.examiner.com

Intel working on a 48-core computer

Intel recently announced a single-chip computer that will hold 48 cores. The chip is called a single-chip cloud computer (SCC) because it resembles cloud datacenters.

clipped from techresearch.intel.com

Tera-scale Computing Research Program

The Intel® Tera-scale Computing Research Program is a worldwide effort to advance computing technology for the next decade. future applications more compelling and immersive.

"Tera" means 1 trillion, or 1,000,000,000,000. Our vision is to create platforms capable performing of trillions of calculations per second (teraflops) on trillions of bytes of data (terabytes).

Tera-scale Computing architectural vision animation
View Animation >

clipped from techresearch.intel.com

Single-chip Cloud Computer

Inside the Single-chip Cloud Computer

The name “Single-chip Cloud Computer” reflects the fact that the architecture resembles a scalable cluster of computers such as you would find in a cloud, integrated into silicon.
The research chip features:

24 “tiles” with two IA cores per tile
A 24-router mesh network with 256 GB/s bisection bandwidth
4 integrated DDR3 memory controllers
Hardware support for message-passing

In a sense, the SCC is a microcosm of cloud datacenter. Each core can run a separate OS and software stack and act like an individual compute node that communicates with other compute nodes over a packet-based network.

clipped from www.youtube.com

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LinkNotes

Photonic Crystals Material More Insulating than the Vacuum

Scientists Create Material More Insulating than the Vacuum

Photonic Thermos

Scientists create material more insulating than a vacuum; smart windows on horizon

'Micro-ants' -- Moving tiny particles using magnetic fields

‘Micro-ants’: Tiny conveyor belts for the 21st century

A new kind of micro-mobility: Moving tiny particles using magnetic fields (w/ Video)

Batteries of paper with nanotubes and nanowires

Battery made of paper charges up

At Stanford, nanotubes + ink + paper = instant battery

A Single-Atom Transistor

Single-atom transistor discovered

Single-atom transistor promises new quantum computing breakthroughs

Teknillinen korkeakoulu TKK

Tekniska högskolan TKKHelsinki University of Technology TKK

Micro-Analytical Research Centre (MARC)

Global Warming Visualizations

Google Earth Climate Introductory Tour (short version)

NASA | Taking Earth's Temperature

5-Year Average Global Temperature Anomalies - 1880 to 2008

Intel's Single-chip Cloud Computer

Intel working on a 48-core computer

Tekniska högskolan TKK
Helsinki University of Technology TKK