new scientific discoveries

[Humodour]

Oh, yeah, Ivy Bridge. My bad.

 

Hey, check this out: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/05/04/intel...ical-footprint/

 

Pretty neat feat of engineering.

[Wrath of Dagon]

OK, 28 nm, not .28. They're never as advanced as I think they are. So the hard disk link says the insulator thickness needs to be a few nanometers, which is deposited, not lithographed. I was thinking only about lithography, that's why I was skeptical. Edit: Btw, that diagram is a little confusing, the green part is actually the gate, the drain is on the other side. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-effect_transistor

 

Edit2: Btw, the C60 molecule the graphene link mentions was discovered by one of my chemistry profs.

Edited May 9, 2011 by Wrath of Dagon

[Humodour]

New research published by the University of California, Berkeley, shows that graphene -- an incredibly thin and flexible form of carbon -- can be used to boost the transmission and switching speed of optical modulators, the building blocks of routers that form the backbone of the internet.

 

Scientists at UC Berkeley, led by professor Xiang Zhang, have found that one-atom-thick layers of graphene can switch light on and off incredibly quickly. With just the right amount of positive voltage, graphene turns opaque, stopping any light from passing through -- and with a negative voltage, graphene can be turned transparent again. The team then successfully shrunk a graphene optical modulator down to 25 square microns in size -- small enough to include in silicon circuitry -- and modulated it at a speed of 1GHz. The researchers say that modulation speeds of up to 500GHz are theoretically possible, though -- and for comparison, the modulators found in 40Gbit switches are measured in centimeters and operate at just 40GHz.

 

It doesn't end with faster switching speeds, though. Graphene, unlike current modulators, can absorb -- and thus modulate -- an incredibly broad spectrum of light, from ultraviolet through to infrared. In other words, with every on/off pulse, a graphene modulator can transmit a huge amount of data using spectral bandwidth that conventional modulators can only dream of. Professor Xiang Zhang, in an attempt to boil his group's new findings into consumer-speak, puts it this way: "Instead of broadband, we will have 'extremeband.'" -- if graphene modulators can actually operate at 500GHz, we could soon see networks that are capable of petabit or exabit transmission speeds, rather than megabits and gigabits.

 

Graphene, if you haven't heard of it before, is a crystallized form of carbon that is something of a "wonder material." It's incredibly cheap to make, and it also happens to be the thinnest and strongest crystalline material in the known universe. It can be easily extracted from graphite, the substance used in pencil lead, and, to top it all off, graphene is a good conductor of heat and electricity. All of these factors combine to make graphene not only an excellent optical modulator, but also a prime candidate for future advances in silicon chip lithography.

 

These graphene optical modulators are the real deal -- they're not some flash in the pan research project that will fizzle into the digital ether. We could see graphene-powered core routers within a few years, and after that, it won't be long until graphene modulated communications find a place in just about every kind of digital interconnect.

 

Graphene makes me drool.

 

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2385134,00.asp

[Raithe]

More engineering then pure science.. but still thought it might be worth a mention.

 

 

Solar-Powered Plane makes International Flight

 

 

Of course, with a top speed of around 44mph it took about 13 hours to fly from Switzerland to Brussels so it's not exactly racing to kill off passenger jets.

[Humodour]

Oi you silly Brit, you're not a silly Yank, so use metric!

 

For those interested, 44 miles per hour = about 71 km/h

 

I do like how often I hear about solar power and solar powered machines. PV and related solar power techs are awesome pieces of engineering.

[Raithe]

Oi you silly Brit, you're not a silly Yank, so use metric!

 

Interesting quirk, but us Brits use mph for our vehicles more then km/hour.. We might be metric for most things, but road sign speed limits are all in mph..

[Raithe]

Slightly random natural science..

 

Tarantula's eject silk from their feet

 

Thus.. Spiderman makes a lot more sense..

[Walsingham]

Oi you silly Brit, you're not a silly Yank, so use metric!

 

Yeah, and you're not French, so use Imperial.

[Humodour]

Oi you silly Brit, you're not a silly Yank, so use metric!

 

Yeah, and you're not French, so use Imperial.

 

Metric is scientifically standardised, Imperial isn't. It's got nothing to do with historical origin.

Edited May 16, 2011 by Krezack

[Walsingham]

Oi you silly Brit, you're not a silly Yank, so use metric!

 

Yeah, and you're not French, so use Imperial.

 

Metric is scientifically standardised, Imperial isn't. It's got nothing to do with historical origin.

 

Try saying that again, not smelling of garlic.

[Humodour]

Oi you silly Brit, you're not a silly Yank, so use metric!

 

Yeah, and you're not French, so use Imperial.

 

Metric is scientifically standardised, Imperial isn't. It's got nothing to do with historical origin.

 

Try saying that again, not smelling of garlic.

 

Up yours you dirty bogan!

[Moose]

Oi you silly Brit, you're not a silly Yank, so use metric!

 

Yeah, and you're not French, so use Imperial.

 

Metric is scientifically standardised, Imperial isn't. It's got nothing to do with historical origin.

 

Imperial is also scientifically standardised, it's simply not internationally recognised. That's why you hear amusing stories about Mars probes crashing because one Nasa scientist was using miles, the other kilometres (doh).

 

It's sad that we adopted a French system really. Personally I find it easy to visualise an inch, or a foot - what on Earth is a metre other than "about 3 feet"

Edited May 17, 2011 by Moose

[Pidesco]

Imperial is also scientifically standardised, it's simply not internationally recognised. That's why hear amusing stories about Mars probes crashing because one Nasa scientist was using miles, the other kilometres (doh).

 

A scientist not using metric is, quite frankly, incredible.

 

The problem wasn't one using imperial and the other one using metric, the problem was a scientist using imperial at all.

[Humodour]

what on Earth is a metre other than "about 3 feet"

 

The distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/c seconds.

[Pidesco]

what on Earth is a metre other than "about 3 feet"

 

The distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/c seconds.

 

My shoe size is a 43(10

[Walsingham]

what on Earth is a metre other than "about 3 feet"

 

The distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/c seconds.

 

My shoe size is a 43(10

[Pidesco]

My feet are handsome, modelling worthy pieces of divine sculpture, thankyouverymuch.

[Walsingham]

My feet are handsome, modelling worthy pieces of divine sculpture, thankyouverymuch.

 

Henry Moore sculpture, more like.

 

[Moose]

Suppose there's only a few things people will universally agree on, like how awesome the 1986 Transformers movie theme was.

[Raithe]

Suppose there's only a few things people will universally agree on, like how awesome the 1986 Transformers movie theme was.

 

There was just so much that was awesome about that movie in total.

 

I mean, c'mon... Eric Idle, Leonard Nimoy, Orson Welles and Judd Nelson in one film... Throw in some Weird Al Yankovic music..

Edited May 17, 2011 by Raithe

[Walsingham]

Concrete inflata-house. Just add water.

[Raithe]

The old bionic hand trick..

[ShadySands]

Go Go Gadget Legs!

[Humodour]

Go Go Gadget Legs!

 

I want people to comprehend the full magnitude of this breakthrough, so to that end it is more worthwhile reading this more technically accurate summary of the breakthrough: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-impl...oluntarily.html

 

The amazing thing is that the researchers discovered that the neural nets in the spinal cord could still control the legs (make them walk, take steps, etc) even without direction from the brain!

 

So you've got a situation where the spinal cord is autonomously controlling bipedal movement. It's kind of similar to how the brain inside the gut (called the enteric nervous system) is its own neural net which acts independently of the brain, with many of the same functions, neurotransmitters, of the brain (even a blood-brain barrier). In fact the enteric nervous system has almost as many neurons as the brain (about 10% as many, which believe me is huge). This is because during the early stages of life, the neural cells split into two groups and some went to the brain and some went to the stomach.

 

Anyway, I find it fascinating that even the spinal cord has some of its own independent neural nets. Strongly reinforces the concept that the human machine is not controlled by a single processing centre, but many different distributed neural nets which work together redundantly and in parallel (this applies even to the brain, which is comprised of many dozens of different processing centres, including the evolutionarily newer executive functions and the older emotional processing centre).

 

Even more curiously, the brain's own magnetic field resulting from all the electrical activity from neurons has been shown to feed back into itself to become ANOTHER part of the collective neural net. It is not merely a side product of the brain's function, it is an actual part of that function.

[Guest The Architect]

So when a piano drops on someone's head and kills them but their leg twitches they're not really dead?