As attentions turn to newer telescopes, Lick Observatory fights to stay relevant.
via New York Times
There are advances being made almost daily in the disciplines required to make space and its contents accessible. This blog brings together a lot of that info, as it is reported, tracking the small steps into space that will make it just another place we carry out normal human economic, leisure and living activities.
Darren Lipomi, a professor in the NanoEngineering Department at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, has made several new discoveries that could lead to electronics that can be stretched at the molecular level. Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego are asking what might be possible if semiconductor materials were flexible and stretchable without sacrificing electronic function? Today’s flexible electronics are already enabling a new generation of wearable sensors and other mobile electronic devices. But these flexible electronics, in which very thin semiconductor materials are applied to a thin, flexible substrate in wavy patterns and then applied to a deformable surface such as skin or fabric, are still built around hard composite materials that limit their elasticity. Writing in the journal Chemistry of Materials, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering professor Darren Lipomi reports on several new discoveries by his team that could lead to electronics that are “molecularly stretchable.” Lipomi compared the difference between flexible and stretchable electronics to what would happen if you tried to wrap a basketball with either a sheet of paper or a thin sheet of rubber. The paper would wrinkle, while the rubber would conform to the surface of the ball. “We
The post Nanoengineers develop basis for electronics that stretch at the molecular level has been published on Technology Org.
When monitoring nuclear reactors, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has to rely on input given by the operators. In the future, antineutrino detectors may provide an additional option for monitoring. However, heretofore the cumulative antineutrino spectrum of uranium 238 fission products was missing. Physicists at Technische Universität München (TUM) have now closed this gap using fast neutrons from the Heinz Maier Leibnitz Neutron Research Facility (FRM II). In addition to neutrons, the fission reaction of nuclear fuels like plutonium or uranium releases antineutrinos. These are also electrically neutral, but can pass matter very easily, which is why they can be discerned only in huge detectors. Recently, however, detectors on the scale of only one cubic meter have been developed. They can measure antineutrinos from a reactor core, which has generated great interest at the IAEA. Prototypes of these detectors already exist and collect data at distances of around 10 meters from a reactor core. Changes in the composition of nuclear fuels in the reactor – for example, when weapons-grade U-239 is removed – can be determined by analyzing the energy and rate of antineutrinos. This would free the IAEA from having to rely on representations of reactor operators. Antineutrino spectrum of
The post Using antineutrinos to monitor nuclear reactors has been published on Technology Org.
Experimental schematic. Silica spheres are levitated in a dual-beam optical tweezer inside a vacuum chamber. Light of wavelength 1,064 nm is coupled into lenses from single-mode optical fibres, creating an optical trap. The motion of the levitated sphere is monitored with a camera and a QPD. Credit: (c) Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2014.82 Temperature measurements in our daily life are typically performed by bringing a thermometer in contact with the object to be measured. However, measuring the temperature of nanoscale objects is a much more tricky task due to their size – up to a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. Pioneering research, published in Nature Nanotechnology, has now developed a method to accurately measure the surface temperature of nanoscale objects when they have a different temperature than their environment. A team led by Dr Janet Anders at the University of Exeter and Professor Peter Barker at University College London have discovered that the surface temperatures of nanoscale objects can be determined from analysing their jittery movement in air – known as Brownian motion. “This motion is caused by the collisions with the air molecules” said Dr Anders, a quantum information theorist and member of the Physics and Astronomy department at the University of Exeter. “We found
The post New method for measuring temperature of nanoscale objects discovered has been published on Technology Org.