Oh when the Saints …

… Go marching in.

Another step closer to quantum computers

Here’s the release from Friday:

Princeton scientist makes a leap in quantum computing

A major hurdle in the ambitious quest to design and construct a radically new kind of quantum computer has been finding a way to manipulate the single electrons that very likely will constitute the new machines’ processing components or “qubits.”

Princeton University’s Jason Petta has discovered how to do just that — demonstrating a method that alters the properties of a lone electron without disturbing the trillions of electrons in its immediate surroundings. The feat is essential to the development of future varieties of superfast computers with near-limitless capacities for data.

Petta, an assistant professor of physics, has fashioned a new method of trapping one or two electrons in microscopic corrals created by applying voltages to minuscule electrodes. Writing in the Feb. 5 edition of Science, he describes how electrons trapped in these corrals form “spin qubits,” quantum versions of classic computer information units known as bits. Other authors on the paper include Art Gossard and Hong Lu at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Previous experiments used a technique in which electrons in a sample were exposed to microwave radiation. However, because it affected all the electrons uniformly, the technique could not be used to manipulate single electrons in spin qubits. It also was slow. Petta’s method not only achieves control of single electrons, but it does so extremely rapidly — in one-billionth of a second.

“If you can take a small enough object like a single electron and isolate it well enough from external perturbations, then it will behave quantum mechanically for a long period of time,” said Petta. “All we want is for the electron to just sit there and do what we tell it to do. But the outside world is sort of poking at it, and that process of the outside world poking at it causes it to lose its quantum mechanical nature.”

When the electrons in Petta’s experiment are in what he calls their quantum state, they are “coherent,” following rules that are radically different from the world seen by the naked eye. Living for fractions of a second in the realm of quantum physics before they are rattled by external forces, the electrons obey a unique set of physical laws that govern the behavior of ultra-small objects.

Scientists like Petta are working in a field known as quantum control where they are learning how to manipulate materials under the influence of quantum mechanics so they can exploit those properties to power advanced technologies like quantum computing. Quantum computers will be designed to take advantage of these characteristics to enrich their capacities in many ways.

In addition to electrical charge, electrons possess rotational properties. In the quantum world, objects can turn in ways that are at odds with common experience. The Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945, proposed that an electron in a quantum state can assume one of two states — “spin-up” or “spin-down.” It can be imagined as behaving like a tiny bar magnet with spin-up corresponding to the north pole pointing up and spin-down corresponding to the north pole pointing down.

An electron in a quantum state can simultaneously be partially in the spin-up state and partially in the spin-down state or anywhere in between, a quantum mechanical property called “superposition of states.” A qubit based on the spin of an electron could have nearly limitless potential because it can be neither strictly on nor strictly off.

New designs could take advantage of a rich set of possibilities offered by harnessing this property to enhance computing power. In the past decade, theorists and mathematicians have designed algorithms that exploit this mysterious superposition to perform intricate calculations at speeds unmatched by supercomputers today.

Petta’s work is using electron spin to advantage.

“In the quest to build a quantum computer with electron spin qubits, nuclear spins are typically a nuisance,” said Guido Burkard, a theoretical physicist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. “Petta and coworkers demonstrate a new method that utilizes the nuclear spins for performing fast quantum operations. For solid-state quantum computing, their result is a big step forward.”

Petta’s spin qubits, which he envisions as the core of future quantum logic elements, are cooled to temperatures near absolute zero and trapped in two tiny corrals known as quantum wells on the surface of a high-purity, gallium arsenide chip. The depth of each well is controlled by varying the voltage on tiny electrodes or gates. Like a juggler tossing two balls between his hands, Petta can move the electrons from one well to the other by selectively toggling the gate voltages.

Prior to this experiment, it was not clear how experimenters could manipulate the spin of one electron without disturbing the spin of another in a closely packed space, according to Phuan Ong, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton and director of the Princeton Center for Complex Materials.

Other experts agree.

“They have managed to create a very exotic transient condition, in which the spin state of a pair of electrons is in that moment entangled with an almost macroscopic degree of freedom,” said David DiVencenzo, a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

Petta’s research also is part of the fledgling field of “spintronics” in which scientists are studying how to use an electron’s spin to create new types of electronic devices. Most electrical devices today operate on the basis of another key property of the electron — its charge.

There are many more challenges to face, Petta said.

“Our approach is really to look at the building blocks of the system, to think deeply about what the limitations are and what we can do to overcome them,” Petta said. “But we are still at the level of just manipulating one or two quantum bits, and you really need hundreds to do something useful.”

As excited as he is about present progress, long-term applications are still years away. “It’s a one-day-at-a-time approach,” Petta said.

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I’ll bet the GOP media machine …

… wished it’d never tried to co opt the Tea Party movement. And I also bet most Tea Partiers wish Joseph Farah didn’t consider himself an ally of the movement.

Reminds me of an old libertarian joke I blogged about a couple of years ago:

There’s really no libertarian blueprint. That much is clear if you take even a sidelong glance at the big-L Libertarian Party. It’s full of all manner of cranks, malcontents, isolationists, druggies, tax dodgers and then a whole lot of otherwise average people who just want the government to stay out of their way.

I don’t participate in any party activities for a variety of reasons, most importantly I don’t think the Libertarian Party is honestly serious enough to achieve any real policy goals.

Here is a paraphrase of a common joke among party participants — I’ve read this somewhere, but can’t recall where. Maybe on Wendy McElroy’s blog.

(This block quote is just the joke, not a quote from anyone’s blog)

First time Libertarian Party meeting participant, “Oh my god, look at that table of Nazis!”

Old vet, “Yep, there’s always at least one.”

First-timer, “What? Nazis?”

Vet, “Nope, someone who bitches about ‘em.”

The Tea Party …

… on a national level has jumped the proverbial shark. (And yes, using “jump the shark” is meant to be that snarky.)

On the other hand, I’m looking forward to an honest-to-goodness libertarian movement.

And to give my first linked post due, the charade in Nashville is not the entirety of the Tea Party movement, but it is the current brand. And that will be a stink that’s pretty hard to wash off.

White House looking to end LIFO

Ending last-in/first-out accounting would be a very, very bad idea and would punch businesses — particularly small businesses — in the gut at a time when a drastic tax hit is something no business needs. The economy is still rough sledding all around and unemployment isn’t abating. The Obama administration has been making good noises about helping Main Street. Ending LIFO would do anything but.

From the link:

House Ways and Means members crossed party lines in Feb. 3 budget hearings to criticize the Obama administration’s proposal to raise an additional $59 billion in tax revenues by eliminating firms’ ability to use the last-in, first-out accounting method.

“If we do this, if we end it, what’s going to happen is U.S. small businesses are going to take a big tax hit and their competitors overseas are going to have a terrific advantage over us in the marketplace,” Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. “There’re some industries that have to hold their inventory for a long time; this is a fair and reasonable way to recognize that and I would strongly urge you to go back and revisit that.”

The practice can reduce a business’s tax liability, particularly in times of rising inflation, because it takes into account the higher costs of replacing inventories. The LIFO method is especially important to companies that maintain large inventories over a period of years, such as wineries and distilleries that need to age their inventories. As a result, shifting to a first-in, first-out accounting practice would have the effect of giving those producers income on which they would have to pay taxes, even though the products they have put into inventory may not be available for sale for several years.

Is the Tea Party movement heading toward third party status?

Cato’s John Samples thinks so. To me the Tea Party movement feels much more nativist/conservative than it does libertarian. For some reason, for years now people seem to love to call themselves libertarian. Several years ago a friend of mine who is a pretty doctrinaire liberal — he once said at a gathering he felt he didn’t pay enough taxes (!!?!!) — considered himself a libertarian. So I think there’s a lot of confusion out there on just what makes one a libertarian. Particularly when separating Republicans from libertarians.

From everything I’ve read, the Tea Partiers talk a pretty good fiscal conservative line, but a great number also talk a very strong social conservative line as well. If that doesn’t define your basic small-tent GOPer, nothing does. And setting the Tea Party rhetoric aside there is quite the disconnect between what the movement purports to believe in, and what it seems to actually support.

The easiest example is government spending on health care: Tea Partiers are vehemently against health care reform, or what has been framed as “Obamacare,” but at the same time want Medicare — quite the “socialist” medical care program by Tea Party definition — left alone. Either you are against government involvement with health care or not. The existing hypocrisy sounds more like Baby Boomer-aged Tea Partiers who are just fine with government subsidized health care as long as they are the recipients of all that government largess.

Needless to say, Samples sees a purity in the Tea Party movement that just isn’t there.

Here’s Samples’ take from the link way up there in the first graf:

It is not Republican; it is not even conservative. It has no interest in debating the merits of No Child Left Behind, abstinence-only sex education or George W. Bush’s rationale for going to Iraq. Replacing a “spend and borrow” Democrat with a “spend and borrow” Republican is not the goal of the Tea Party movement.

This movement is simply saying: “We are fine without you, Washington. Now for the love of God, go attend a reception somewhere, and stop making health care and entrepreneurship more expensive than they already are.”

Machiavelli once said a republic stays healthy by returning to its first principles from time to time. The Tea Party movement is trying to get our nation back to its first principles to prevent our decline. For their trouble, they have been denounced by many in the media and the Obama administration.

But they will continue to fight. They still believe in the promise of America. That faith may spread as Election Day approaches in the second and perhaps final year of what is supposed to be the Age of Obama.

What began as angry town meetings and grew into a political movement may end as a third political party in 2012. Maybe then Washington will finally listen.

First they took the auto industry jobs …

… now they’re stealing childhood dreams.

Seriously though, the idea of highly functional humanoid robotics is a great idea for space travel. Of course Ellen Ripley might disagree.

Via KurzweilAI.net:

NASA, GM team up to build robotic astronauts

Computerworld, Feb. 4, 2010 NASA and General Motors (GM) are developing humanoid robots that can work side-by-side with humans to help astronauts during dangerous mission and to help GM build cars and automotive plants. Robonaut 2, aka R2, is designed to be a “faster, more dexterous and more technologically advanced” robot than Robonaut 1, using its hands to manipulate small parts, while also having exceptional strength. Video Read Original Article>>

Graphane the superconductor

Back-to-back single-atom layer sheets of carbon nanotech posts today. Graphene and now graphane. (Hit this link for all my graphene blogging and this one for graphane blogging.)

I’m just going to let this physics arXiv blog post do the explaining on this news:

New calculations reveal that p-doped graphane should superconduct at 90K, making possible an entirely new generation of devices cooled by liquid nitrogen.

There’s a problem with high temperature superconductors. It’s now more than two decades since the discovery that certain copper oxides can superconduct at temperatures above 30 K.

And:

The implications of all this are astounding. First up is the possibility of useful superconducting devices cooled only by liquid nitrogen. At last!

But there’s another, more exotic implication: by creating transistor-like gates out of graphane doped in different ways, it should be possible to create devices in which the superconductivity can be switched on and off. That’ll make possible an entirely new class of switch.

Before all of that, however, somebody has to make p-doped graphane. That will be hard. Graphane itself was made for the first time only last year at the University of Manchester. It should be entertaining to follow the race to make and test a p-doped version.

Graphene transistors are really fast

Fast like already an order of magnitude faster than the quickest silicon transistors. The IBM prototype graphene transistors run at 100 gigahertz.

From the link:

The transistors were created using processes that are compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing, and experts say they could be scaled up to produce transistors for high-performance imaging, radar, and communications devices within the next few years, and for zippy computer processors in a decade or so.

Researchers have previously made graphene transistors using laborious mechanical methods, for example by flaking off sheets of graphene from graphite; the fastest transistors made this way have reached speeds of up to 26 gigahertz. Transistors made using similar methods have not equaled these speeds.

Growing transistors on a wafer not only leads to better performance, it’s also more commercially feasible, says Phaedon Avouris, leader of the nanoscale science and technology group at the IBM Watson Research Center in Ossining, NY where the work was carried out.

Speedy switches: These arrays of transistors, printed on a silicon carbide wafer, operate at speeds of 100 gigahertz.

Credit: Science/AAAS

The recording industry, RIAA and intellectual property

In a Daily Dish post titled, “Copyright and Incentives, Ctd.,” which covers a much more broad concept behind copyright, intellectual property, patents and trademark issues, a Dish reader provided a very succinct view of how and why the RIAA and music industry have gone completely wrong in battling their customer base over digital recordings:

The record companies’ problem is that technology — the internet on the distribution side and the laptop and other personal recording technologies on the creation side — has made the record company’s traditional role as financer and distributor of works increasingly irrelevant.  They are using the intellectual property laws to protect a distribution model that is largely outdated.

I’d say you could even argue the RIAA is abusing intellectual property laws and slowly killing itself and the entire existing recording industry in the process.

Google Chrome 4.0 running slow?

After Google recently released the stable 4.0 version of Chrome I noticed a ridiculous amount of lag at times — scrolling was slowed to a crawl and typing into any text boxes (including creating blog posts in WordPress) was torture. The typed text was entering at something like a character per second or so. Just unacceptable.

The fix for me — at least so far so good — was pretty simple. I just cleared the browser cache. If your Chrome browser installation is feeling sluggish, I’d try this before doing anything else too drastic.

(Note: updated 7-2-10, the steps below apply to Chrome 5.0, update 9/11/10, same steps apply to Chrome 6.0. They still hold true for v.7.)

• Click on the wrench (top right of browser window) and choose “options”
• Click on “Under the Hood” (the right tab)
• Click on “Clear Browsing Data”
• From there you have a checklist of things you can delete — Clear Browsing History, Clear Download History, Empty the Cache, etc. — I unchecked everything but “Empty the Cache” and in the “Clear data from this period:” action menu I chose “Everything.”

Simple and has worked wonders. Chrome is back to its speedy browsing self again.

Demand Question Time!

A new idea bumping around the blogosphere, and a good idea at that. The concept is to set up some formal or semi-formal exchange between the executive and legislative branches of government. Politics in D.C. is so dysfunctional right now Question Time would go a long ways toward breaking up some of the ossified Capital ways, and very possibly get government back on the track of actually solving problems and not trying to win the latest four hour news cycle.

Hit the link and check out the initial signatories — a strongly bipartisan and mixed ideological group. This is an idea whose time has come. An idea that might even be necessary right now. Once you hit the link be sure to sign the petition.

Here’s a take on the concept from 538′s Nate Silver:

As you may be aware, I’ve teamed up with a group of about 50 other thinkers, bloggers, insiders and outsiders to help promote the idea of Question Time — a regularly held, televised and webcasted forum in which the President would take questions from Members of the Congress, much as President Obama did with the Republican House delegation on January 29th and members of the Democratic Senate yesterday. This is truly a bipartisan endeavor, with everyone from Markos Moulitsas to Grover Norquist on board.You can sign our petition to Demand Question Time here, and follow us on twitter here.

And here’s more from the first link:

We live in a world that increasingly demands more dialogue than monologue. President Obama’s January 29th question-and-answer session with Republican leaders gave the public a remarkable window into the state of our union and governing process. It was riveting and educational. The exchanges were substantive, civil and candid. And in a rare break from our modern politics, sharp differences between elected leaders were on full public display without rancor or ridicule.

This was one of the best national political debates in many years. Citizens who watched the event were impressed, by many accounts. Journalists and commentators immediately responded by continuing the conversation of the ideas put forward by the president and his opponents — even the cable news cycle was disrupted for a day.

America could use more of this — an unfettered and public airing of political differences by our elected representatives. So we call on President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader John Boehner to hold these sessions regularly — and allow them to be broadcast and webcast live and without commercial interruption, sponsorship or intermediaries. We also urge the President and the Republican Senate caucus to follow suit. And we ask the President and the House and Senate caucuses of his own party to consider mounting similar direct question-and-answer sessions. We will ask future Presidents and Congresses to do the same.

Is Amazon in an e-book panic?

Yes is a very fair answer. Last week it got into, and lost, a scrap with Macmillan, one of the largest English  language publishers. Possibly because of Apple’s iPad announcement and demo.

From the second link:

It all started last week when Apple CEO Steve Jobs trotted out the iPad, dubbed by some as a Kindle killer. Major publishers voiced their support for the iPad, including Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Group, and Macmillan.

Then Jobs showed off one of the iPad’s critical apps, the iBook e-reader, and flashed prices for e-books at around $15. It was a swipe at Amazon.com because publishers (Macmillan being one of them) had been trying to get Amazon.com to raise its e-book price from $10.

And:

On Friday, Amazon.com stunned the publishing world by pulling Macmillan books, both Kindle editions and printed books, from its shelves in an apparent strong-arm tactic to show Macmillan that Amazon.com continues to set the rules. At the very least, Amazon.com wanted to show that Macmillan, which is among the biggest publishers in the U.S., still needs Amazon.com.

One would have hoped that Amazon.com had spent considerable time weighing this decision. Instead, it looked like a giant company suddenly deciding to play chicken with another giant company—and Amazon.com flinched. On Sunday, only two days after pulling Macmillan books, Amazon.com relented.

Now there’s this news from the seemingly flailing e-tailer:

Is Amazon Building a Superkindle?

New York Times, Feb. 3, 2010 Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York start-up that was developing flexible, transparent, force-sensitive multitouch panels. The acquisition indicates what Amazon might try to do next in response to Apple’s iPad announcement: a future full-color, more-rugged multitouch Kindle. Read Original Article>>

Blogging is now a mature discipline …

… and it seems to be for, and about, mature people in the age of texting and Twitter. Looks like blogging is too long-form for youthful expression and communication.

Wonder what that says about serious long-form journalism, novels and feature-length cinema? Maybe short-short fiction will become a hot commodity. That’s a format I’ve deeply explored.

From the first link:

A new study has found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief, and mobile. Tech experts say it doesn’t mean blogging is going away. Rather, it’s gone the way of the telephone and e-mail — still useful, just not sexy.

“Remember when ‘You’ve got mail!’ used to produce a moment of enthusiasm and not dread?” asks Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Now when it comes to blogs, she says, “people focus on using them for what they’re good for and turning to other channels for more exciting things.”

Beautiful space image — NGC 3603

I’ll let the image do the talking here:

SO is releasing a magnificent VLT image of the giant stellar nursery surrounding NGC 3603, in which stars are continuously being born. Embedded in this scenic nebula is one of the most luminous and most compact clusters of young, massive stars in our Milky Way, which therefore serves as an excellent “local” analogue of very active star-forming regions in other galaxies. The cluster also hosts the most massive star to be “weighed” so far.

Hit the link above for more on this gorgeous space image.

Medical imaging and art forgery

A lesson on applying technology across entire disciplines. Usually the cutting edge of imaging tech is found in medicine for obvious reasons, but that same tech can be applied in other fields to sometimes startling effect.

The release:

Imaging method for eye disease used to eye art forgeries

		IMAGE: The oil painting on the left fluoresces to reveal hidden details (right) when exposed to a new noninvasive imaging technique that uses ultraviolet light. Click here for more information.

Scientists in Poland are describing how a medical imaging technique has taken on a second life in revealing forgery of an artist’s signature and changes in inscriptions on paintings that are hundreds of years old. A report on the technique, called optical coherence tomography (OCT), is in ACS’ Accounts of Chemical Research, a monthly journal.

Piotr Targowski notes that easel paintings prepared according to traditional techniques consist of multiple layers. The artist, for instance, first applies a glue sizing over the canvas to ensure proper adhesion of later layers. Those layers may include an outline of the painting, the painting itself, layers of semitransparent glazes, and finally transparent varnish. Art conservators and other experts resort to a variety of technologies to see below the surface and detect changes, including forged signatures and other alterations in a painting. But those approaches may damage artistic treasures or not be sensitive enough to detect finer details.

The scientists describe how OCT, used to produce three-dimensional images of the layers of the retina of the eye, overcomes those difficulties. They used OCT to analyze two oil paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries. In one, “Saint Leonard of Porto Maurizio,” OCT revealed evidence that the inscription “St. Leonard” was added approximately fifty years after completion of the painting. In the other, “Portrait of an unknown woman,” OCT found evidence of the possible of forgery of the artist’s signature.

###

ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“Structural Examination of Easel Paintings with Optical Coherence Tomography”

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE
http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ar900195d

Recycling TARP funds for small business loans

As much as I think the deficit is a significant issue, the ongoing credit crunch for small business is a much more pressing issue for the economy. Recycling money that bailed out Wall Street to give Main Street a leg up is probably good politics, but more importantly, it is good policy.

From the link:

President Obama called on Congress Tuesday to recycle $30 billion of the remaining Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds into a new government lending program offering super-cheap capital to community banks that boost their small business lending this year.

Touted last week in Obama’s State of the Union address, the plan is the latest incarnation of a proposal the president first floated in October. While credit conditions for large businesses have improved over the past year, small companies are still widely reporting problems finding the capital they need to fund their operations.

White House promotes nuclear plants

A very necessary — and belated for the Obama administration — move to start to wean the U.S. off foreign petroleum-based energy.

From the link:

President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget could provide a significant boost to the U.S. nuclear power industry, which has been stalled for decades. If approved by Congress, the budget would provide $36 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power plants, opening the way for around seven new nuclear power plants, depending on the final cost of each. The new guarantees are in addition to $18.5 billion in guarantees provided for in a 2005 energy bill.

The increased support for nuclear power marks a change for the Obama administration, which has opposed similar increases in the past. Some policy experts say it is part of a strategy to win Republican votes for a comprehensive climate and energy bill.

The latest in display tech — multitouch skin

Via KurzweilAI.net — Like almost all announcements of this type of product, I’ll  be much more interested when this is available on the open market with practical applications. Of course, it’s still pretty cool to contemplate.

Multitouch ‘Skin’ Transforms Surfaces Into Interactive Screens

Physorg.com, Feb. 2, 2010 A new large-format multi-touch technology launched today by DISPLAX will transform any non-conductive flat or curved surface, such as glass, plastic or wood, into a multitouch screen. DISPLAX Multitouch Technology uses a controller that works by processing multiple input signals it receives from a grid of nanowires embedded in the film attached to the enabled surface. Each time a finger is placed on the screen or a user blows on the surface, a small electrical disturbance is caused. The microprocessor controller analyzes this data and decodes the location of each input on that grid to track the finger and air-flow movements. Read Original Article>>

Cybercrime affiliate programs

Looks like malware purveyors have added affiliate programs to the business model. The upside of this activity is the longer the chain of unrelated participants — particularly with the paper trail of payments added to the mix — the more likely the chain breaks down somewhere and the legal system catches up with the entire bunch.

From the link:

Sites like Amazon offer affiliate programs that pay users for sending them new customers. And now, malware authors, always quick to adopt tactics that work elsewhere, have developed their own affiliate program, which was described in a talk given today at the Black Hat DC computer security conference in Washington, DC.

Kevin Stevens, an analyst at Atlanta-based security consulting company SecureWorks, says sites with names like “Earnings4U” offer to pay users for each file they can install on someone else’s PC; the practice is called “pay per install.” Stevens found sites offering rates ranging from $180 per 1,000 installs on PCs based in the U.S. to $6 per 1,000 installs on PCs based in Asian countries.

As he researched the practice, Stevens says he discovered a number of companies engaged in pay per install. These companies periodically change their names to dodge the authorities. He also found forums where users shared tips for making more money, and a variety of sophisticated tools developed to make it easier for them to install malware. “It’s almost like a real, legitimate business,” he said.

The latest miracle material — spray-on liquid glass

Sounds pretty amazing at first glance. Just read the lead graf below.

From the link:

Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.

The liquid glass spray (technically termed “SiO₂ ultra-thin layering”) consists of almost pure silicon dioxide (silica, the normal compound in glass) extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on the type of surface to be coated. There are no additives, and the nano-scale glass coating bonds to the surface because of the quantum forces involved. According to the manufacturers, liquid glass has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily.

Liquid glass was invented in Turkey and the patent is held by Nanopool, a family-owned German company. Research on the product was carried out at the Saarbrücken Institute for New Materials. Nanopool is already in negotiations in the UK with a number of companies and with the National Health Service, with a view to its widespread adoption.

The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.

Protecting knowledge

Via KurzweilAI.net – It’s not nearly as easy as it might seem at first blush. Do you still have any of those floppy discs a little over five inches and were actually “floppy” laying around? Do have a working drive that can read them handy? If the answers are, “yes I have a few of those discs, and no, I don’t have a drive handy,” then the knowledge on those discs is currently lost to you.

Think about how much human knowledge is stored on various media or on computer servers and how utterly inaccessible that knowledge becomes if technology is pushed back to a point all those devices become inoperable. Anyone else interested in retaining physical books?

Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

New Scientist Tech, Feb. 2, 2010 Even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinaryknowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilization runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive? Post-catastrophe, the lack of resources — of people, expertise, equipment — might be a far bigger obstacle than the physical loss of data. And resources are likely to be scarce. Restarting an industrial civilization might be a lot harder the second time around, because we have used up most of the easily available resources, from oil to high-grade ores. Read Original Article>>

Head-on asteroid crash — cool space image

This bit of interesting news is from this morning’s inbox. Very cool image

Suspected Asteroid Collision Leaves Trailing Debris

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

(Logo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)

Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.

“This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets,” said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. “The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies.”

Hubble shows the main nucleus of P/2010 A2 lies outside its own halo of dust. This has never been seen before in a comet-like object. The nucleus is estimated to be 460 feet in diameter.

Normal comets fall into the inner regions of the solar system from icy reservoirs in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. As comets near the sun and warm up, ice near the surface vaporizes and ejects material from the solid comet nucleus via jets. But P/2010 A2 may have a different origin. It orbits in the warm, inner regions of the asteroid belt where its nearest neighbors are dry rocky bodies lacking volatile materials.

This leaves open the possibility that the complex debris tail is the result of an impact between two bodies, rather than ice simply melting from a parent body.

“If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight,” Jewitt said.

The main nucleus of P/2010 A2 would be the surviving remnant of this so-called hypervelocity collision.

“The filamentary appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything seen in Hubble images of normal comets, consistent with the action of a different process,” Jewitt said. An impact origin also would be consistent with the absence of gas in spectra recorded using ground-based telescopes.

The asteroid belt contains abundant evidence of ancient collisions that have shattered precursor bodies into fragments. The orbit of P/2010 A2 is consistent with membership in the Flora asteroid family, produced by collisional shattering more than 100 million years ago. One fragment of that ancient smashup may have struck Earth 65 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. But, until now, no such asteroid-asteroid collision has been caught “in the act.”

At the time of the Hubble observations, the object was approximately 180 million miles from the sun and 90 million miles from Earth. The Hubble images were recorded with the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which is capable of detecting house-sized fragments at the distance of the asteroid belt.

For Hubble images and more information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

Photo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO
AP Archive:  http://photoarchive.ap.org/
PRN Photo Desk photodesk@prnewswire.com
Source: NASA

Web Site:  http://www.nasa.gov/

And to save a trip to the Hubble site, here’s the image:

Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (University of California, Los Angeles). Photo No. STScI-2010-07

Protecting your online reputation

Easier said than done if someone is hell-bent on trashing you. CIO.com ran two articles today on online reputation — the first covers the how-to in protecting yourself online and the second lists five tools to use to help track what’s being said about you and where it’s being said. With the current plethora of web 2.0 applications out there — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, YouTube, and many more — there’s a lot of online real estate to cover when searching for mentions of yourself or your company.

From the first link:

As social sites with user-generated content such as Facebook, Twitter and WordPress continue to grow in popularity, and with Google’s announcement of real-time search, you must be aware of and manage your online reputation carefully now. “Social media has made our lives very transparent,” Laratro says. “If you maintain a professional persona, this can be something positive, but if you’re unaware of comments or pictures online that that you wouldn’t even want your mother to see, it can be terrible.”

Several free tools can help you keep tabs on what’s being said about you online. One of the most popular tools is a Google Alert for your name, which will automatically inform you when you’re referenced on a website.

Spider man, spider man …

… does whatever a spider can.

I’ll just let the release from yesterday finish this thought process for me:

New adhesive device could let humans walk on walls

Could humans one day walk on walls, like Spider-Man? A palm-sized device invented at Cornell that uses water surface tension as an adhesive bond just might make it possible.

The rapid adhesion mechanism could lead to such applications as shoes or gloves that stick and unstick to walls, or Post-it-like notes that can bear loads, according to Paul Steen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, who invented the device with Michael Vogel, a former postdoctoral associate.

The device is the result of inspiration drawn from a beetle native to Florida, which can adhere to a leaf with a force 100 times its own weight, yet also instantly unstick itself. Research behind the device is published online Feb. 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The device consists of a flat plate patterned with holes, each on the order of microns (one-millionth of a meter). A bottom plate holds a liquid reservoir, and in the middle is another porous layer. An electric field applied by a common 9-volt battery pumps water through the device and causes droplets to squeeze through the top layer. The surface tension of the exposed droplets makes the device grip another surface – much the way two wet glass slides stick together.

“In our everyday experience, these forces are relatively weak,” Steen said. “But if you make a lot of them and can control them, like the beetle does, you can get strong adhesion forces.”

For example, one of the researchers’ prototypes was made with about 1,000 300-micron-sized holes, and it can hold about 30 grams – more than 70 paper clips. They found that as they scaled down the holes and packed more of them onto the device, the adhesion got stronger. They estimate, then, that a one-square-inch device with millions of 1-micron-sized holes could hold more than 15 pounds.

To turn the adhesion off, the electric field is simply reversed, and the water is pulled back through the pores, breaking the tiny “bridges” created between the device and the other surface by the individual droplets.

The research builds on previously published work that demonstrated the efficacy of what’s called electro-osmotic pumping between surface tension-held interfaces, first by using just two larger water droplets.

One of the biggest challenges in making these devices work, Steen said, was keeping the droplets from coalescing, as water droplets tend to do when they get close together. To solve this, they designed their pump to resist water flow while it’s turned off.

Steen envisions future prototypes on a grander scale, once the pump mechanism is perfected, and the adhesive bond can be made even stronger. He also imagines covering the droplets with thin membranes – thin enough to be controlled by the pump but thick enough to eliminate wetting. The encapsulated liquid could exert simultaneous forces, like tiny punches.

“You can think about making a credit card-sized device that you can put in a rock fissure or a door, and break it open with very little voltage,” Steen said. “It’s a fun thing to think about.”

###

The research was funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and also by the National Science Foundation.

The party of “no” is hard at work

Hard at work doing nothing productive in the midst this extremely challenging economic climate. These tactics might (yes, might — there’s no given that this electoral cycle will favor the GOP) work in November, but real long-term damage is still being done to the Republican brand. Going with all tactics of negativity with no strategy or vision for the future aside from attempting to harm Democratic plans will not lead to electoral success.

From the link:

I got this note from someone with many decades’ experience in national politics, about a discussion between two Congressmen over details of the stimulus bill:

“GOP member: ‘I’d like this in the bill.’

“Dem member response: ‘If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?’

“GOP member:  ‘You know I can’t vote for the bill.’

“Dem member:  ‘Then why should we put it in the bill?’

“I witnessed this myself.”

I wrote back saying, “Great story!” and got the response I quote below and after the jump. It is worth reading because its argument has the valuable quality of being obvious — once it is pointed out. The emphasis is mine rather than in the original; it is to highlight a basic structural reality that has escaped most recent analysis of the “bipartisanship” challenge.

Also:

As I have pointed out a time or two or a thousand, the structural failures of American government are the country’s main problem right now. In this installment, we see that the US now has the drawbacks of a parliamentary system — absolute party-line voting by the opposition, for instance — without any of the advantages, from comparable solidarity among the governing party to the principle of “majority rules.” If Democrats could find a way to talk about structural issues — if everyone can find a way to talk about them — that would be at least a step. And the Dems could talk about the simple impossibility of governing when the opposition is committed to “No” as a bloc.

Clean coal in Texas

Who’d a guessed this …

From the link:

Could Texas, whose governor dismisses global warming and opposes climate legislation, deliver the world’s first carbon-neutral coal-fired power plant? That looks increasingly likely thanks to a $1.75 billion project in West Texas that received a signed agreement last week for a $350 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The project, being developed by Bainbridge Island, WA-based Summit Power Group, combines carbon capture with domestic oil production, giving the plant something that few carbon capture and storage projects enjoy: demand for its greenhouse gas emissions. Summit plans to build a 400-megawatt power plant at its site in Penwell, TX, capture 90 percent of the emissions, and sell the nearly three million tons per year of carbon dioxide to oil fields across the Southwest. Oil and gas operators increasingly inject high-pressure carbon dioxide into their aging oil wells to reduce the oil’s viscosity and thus accelerate production, a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). “If we build this there won’t be any more dirty coal plants built,” says Laura Miller, the former Dallas mayor who leads the project for Summit.

Of course that last statement gives me a lot of pause on the entire endeavor. Laura Miller was the worst Dallas mayor in living memory by quite a long shot.

“Smart dust”

Via KurzweilAI.net — Not certain how I feel about this. Seems like a lot of potential for abuse.

Smart Dust? Not Quite, but We’re Getting There

New York Times, Jan. 30, 2010 While smart dust* is not here yet, smaller, faster and cheaper technology has reached the point where sensors may soon as powerful as tiny computers. One example: Intel is developing RFID technology that adds an accelerometer and programmable chip in a millimeter-sized package, powered by ambient radio power from television, FM radio and WiFi networks. * Tiny digital sensors, strewn around the globe, gathering information and communicating with powerful computer networks to monitor, measure and understand the physical world Read Original Article>>

Growing graphene

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about graphene so I was pleased to read this news at the physics arXiv blog on a method to produce the material at a substantially lower cost. The hype about graphene probably is a bit over-the-top, but it’s proving to be quite the miracle nanomaterial.

From the second link:

The world of materials science is aflutter with stories about graphene, a supermaterial that is capable of almost anything (if you believe the hype). This form of carbon chickenwire, they tell us, is stronger, faster and better than almost any other material you care to name.

But not cheaper. At least not yet. The big problem with graphene is making it. The only way to get it is to chip away at a bigger block of graphite and then hunt through the flakes looking for single layers of the stuff. That’s not a technique that’s going to revolutionise the electronics industry, regardless of how much cheap labour is available in China.

That’s why an announcement from Hirokazu Fukidome at Tohoku University in Japan and a few buddies is hugely important. These guys say they have found a way to grow graphene on a silicon substrate. To show off their technique they’ve combined it with conventional lithography to create a graphene-on-silicon field effect transistor–just the kind of device the electronics industry wants to build by the billion.

That’s a big deal for two reasons. First, being able to grow graphene from scratch is going to be a huge boost to the study of this stuff and its myriad amazing properties. Second, being able to grow it on silicon makes it compatible (in principle at least) with the vast silicon-based fabrication industry as it stands.