"Colossal" Magnetoresistance to further revolutionise storage

Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) revolutionised storage since its discovery some 20 years ago, winning the Nobel prize and allowing devices like the iPod to store massive amounts of data in tiny spaces. June 12th edition of Phys Rev Letters published a paper by Yang Ding and team of the Carnegie Institution’s High Pressure Synergetic Center (HPSync) describing a new approach yielding an effect 1000 times more powerful than GMR, dubbed Colossal Magnetoresistance (CMR).

The researchers found that when manganite was subjected to 230,000 times atmospheric pressure it underwent a transition from a ferromagnetic type (electron spins aligned) to an antiferromagnetic type (electron spins opposed). This transition was accompanied by a non-uniform structural Jahn-Teller effect distortion.

There's a long way to go before simple applications of the approach, but what were considered fundamental magnetic reading limits using magnetoresistance effects are again evaporating.

See Carnegie Institution for Science.

Wolfram|Alpha does intelligent answering

A new breed of search system designed to answer questions, rather than simply list websites, is gaining a lot of momentum in technology and science. Developed by Wolfram, the company responsible for Mathematica, it's a fun system to play with and has some real utility for fast answers to mathematics, scientific formulae and technical queries. Check out these physics example:

See Wolfram|Alpha Physics.

Holographic storage puts 100 DVDs on a single disc

General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs. The storage technique, which G.E. is detailing next Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices. The holographic process consists of data encoded in light patterns that are stored in light-sensitive material.

Holographic storage has the potential to pack data far more densely than conventional optical technology, used in DVDs and the newer, high-capacity Blu-ray discs, in which information is stored as a pattern of marks across the surface of a disc. The potential of holographic technology has long been known. The first research papers were published in the early 1960s.

See New York Times.

Cheap balloon approach to focus solar energy

Cool Earth Solar of California has come up with a cheap and novel idea for focussing the sun's rays on small solar cells that might tackle the cost efficiency ratio issue for solar cells in quite a different way - metalised balloons.

"Anyone who has children will be familiar with aluminised party balloons. Such balloons are made from metal-coated plastic. Cool Earth’s insight was that if you coat only one half of a balloon, leaving the other transparent, the inner surface of the coated half will act as a concave mirror. Put a solar cell at the focus of that mirror and you have an inexpensive solar-energy collector."

See Economist Technology Quarterly.

Phoenix Mars Lander live info page

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander touched down today and a live feed of information is now available on NASA websites.

See thetext.

"Hairy" solar cells make better photovoltaics?

Materials scientists in the USA and in Germany have come up with methods of growing silicon nanowires in upright fashion on for example an indium tin oxide conductive layer. The wires, coated with either polymer or spun glass, are used as a series of channels to bring electrons more efficiently from the solar cell surface to the electrode.

The technique is one of many being investigated to increase the efficiency of solar cell energy collection that holds the promise of cheap permanent power.

See ecotech daily. Also, Science Daily.

Science 2.0 - a new way of doing research?

Web 2.0 as a platform has begun to transform the web and already divides users into first generation and second generation internet users. Certainly in the online travel arena, which I know well, for many younger people, there is increasing evidence that email and static web content is no longer being used, with dynamic content, interactive websites, chat forums and instant messaging the norm for this second generation - in particular social networking is becoming the dominant form of web traffic through the popularity of review sites for travel and purchasing like Tripadvisor, social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo and social contribution sites like wikipedia.

There is now a move online to take science research into the social networking category also, with research publications being released into the wild for instant review in the form of online commentary from the science community rather than peer review prior to publication as happens most often now. Science 2.0 could bring information on stream much more quickly, but of course does so with a caveat that the work has yet to be tested. A project that began in MIT is set to go more mainstream - OpenNetWare in the biological sciences. The approach is likely to proliferate among younger scientists in the coming years. Scientific American discusses whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing for science.

See Scientific American.

IBM chips at 32nm using High-K/Metal Gate Materials

As you might remember, Intel announced in 01/2007 a new technique for increasing conductivity and transistor isolation using high-k materials. This was curiously followed on the same day by a similar breakthrough announcement from IBM/AMD alliance. Intel is using the high-k technology to improve speed and lower power consumption in its 45nm chips now.

IBM, along with its manufacturing partners, has just demonstrated chips that it says show that high-k/metal gate technology down at typical dimensions of 32nm "can result in performance gains up to 30% and power savings up to 50%", compared to the 45nm process. IBM expects to be manufacturing 32nm systems by the end of 2009

See IBM Press Release.

Graphene may replace silicon in large scale integration

University of Maryland physicists have shown that in graphene the intrinsic limit to the mobility, a measure of how well a material conducts electricity, is higher than any other known material at room temperature.

See U Maryland.

New Scanning Microscope identifies atoms as it scans

A new type of scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) incorporating new aberration-correction technology focuses a beam of electrons on a spot smaller than a single atom -- more sharply and with greater intensity than previously possible. The STEM shoots an electron beam through a thin-film sample and scans the beam across the sample in subatomic steps. The microscope can actually identify atoms using electron energy-loss spectrometry as it scans. Atoms in the path of the beam absorb energy from some of its electrons to kick their own electrons into higher orbits. The amount of energy this takes is different for each kind of atom giving a unique fingerprint.

See Science Daily.

Self healing polymer rebonds after cutting

A new material can rebond itself when cut and retain elasticity. Rubbersied materials gets their elasticity from long chains of polymer molecules that are crosslinked in three different ways: through covalent, ionic, and hydrogen bonding between molecules. Of these three bond types, only the hydrogen bonds can be remade once a material is fractured, although normally there are not enough hydrogen bonds available to re-couple in this way. Rebonding can be achieved after breaking or cutting by devising a material that gets rid of the ionic and covalent bonds in faour of hydrogenic only.

See New Scientist.
and on YouTube: video of cutting and mending

10 emerging technologies

Technology Review publishes its list of 10 emerging technologies that its editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, and more.

See Technology Review.

Anticipated Technology Innovation in the next 25 years

This is an interesting one for possible future course development!

In an interesting "futurology" experiment, Social Technology's Technology Foresight program convened a "group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy from the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, and Oxford University, among others." What emerged was a list of top 12 areas for technology innovation between now and 2025.

To put this in context, would you have foreseen what you do now with technology 25 years ago?? Mobile Phones and iPods? You'd have expected Windows to be a bit more advanced though, that's for sure.

See Change Waves.

RF-STM speeds probe scanning enormously

Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STM) are capable of imaging lateral distances as small as 1 angstrom and can measure changes in height as small as 0.1 angstrom.

Researchers have found that by adding an external radio frequency (RF) source to the STM setup that they could measure the resistance at the tunneling junction by examining the characteristics of the wave that gets reflected back to the RF source. With knowledge of the junction resistance, the researchers can much more easily deduce the distance between the tip and the surface allowing for 100 to 1000 fold increase in measurement speeds. The researchers who developed this technique have dubbed their modified method as RF-STM.

See arstechnica, original research article in Nature.

LHC Cools Down

As the Large Hadron Collider at CERN nears operational status, the cooling process of detection equipment begins. Hamish Johnston of Physics World desribes the monumental task and cost that this involves.

See Physics World.

Ultrasound from the inside out

Scientists in New Mexico and Taiwan are testing an ultrasound probe about the size of a grain of rice that could offer panoramic views from inside the human body.

The silicon-based device could ultimately be sent through blood vessels in the brain or swallowed like a pill for localised diagnosis.

See NewScientist.

Hitachi perpendicular GMR drive heads to yield terabit drives

Hitachi have developed a new current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magneto-resistive head (CPP-GMR) which will allow drive makers to develop up to 4 terabyte computer drives by 2011 and/or 1 terabyte notebook drives.

The CPP-GMR heads will be capable of reading media where the tracks are 50 nanometers apart or smaller. Fifty nanometer tracks hit in 2009, and 30 nanometer tracks are expected to hit in 2011.

See news.com.

UC Berkeley launches YouTube lectures

UC Berkeley announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on YouTube, the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.

Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available.

See UC Berkeley Physics Lectures.

The calculator is 40 years old

The handheld calculator is 40 years old this year - and models are now part of the IT collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. The museum in fact has the "original 1967 prototype from Texas Instruments, which weighed 3 pounds, was encased in aluminum and ran on batteries. At the time the calculator was developed, existing models were heavy desktop devices -- not handhelds."

The development team included TI engineer Jack Kilby who died in 2005. Kilby invented the integrated circuit at TI in 1958 and later won the Nobel Prize for his work.

See Computerworld.

Imaging the Lungs using Vibration Response Imaging (VRI)

A technological replacement for the stethoscope draws a 3D picture by gauging lung vibrations.

The process, which uses no radiation, works by analyzing acoustic vibrations given off by the lungs. As a patient breathes normally for several seconds, sensors placed on the back—in effect, electronic stethoscopes—pick up these lung vibrations and feed them to a computer, where they're processed and turned into vivid images. Conditions such as asthma, emphysema, and pneumonia each produce distinct and definable images.

See Business Week.