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Monday, 13 May 2013 16:42 |
 Yesterday was the 95th anniversary of the birth of Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. An excuse for an unusual party.
This evening BBC2 will show a documentary by Chris Riley about a remarkable man; Richard Feynman. Yesterday, on the 95th anniversary of Feynman's birth, Riley showed some clips and discussed the programme, and the man, with Robin Ince, Christopher Sykes and an audience at the Bloomsbury Theatre. Sykes met Feynman several times, and made three films with him starting with "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". Riley expressed envy of Sykes, for having met Feynman. I felt the same.
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Read more... [Feynman: his birthday, his diagrams and his lectures]
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Friday, 10 May 2013 15:50 |
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 From powerful computers to super-sensitive medical and environmental detectors that are faster, smaller and use less energy — yes, we want them, but how do we get them?
In research that is helping to lay the groundwork for the electronics of the future, University of Delaware scientists have confirmed the presence of a magnetic field generated by electrons which scientists had theorized existed, but that had never been proven until now.
The finding, which is reported in the journal Nature Communications, expands the potential for harnessing the "spin" or magnetic properties of electrons — adding a fundamental new building block to the pioneering field of spintronics.
John Xiao, Unidel Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UD, is the lead author of the study. His co-authors include research associate Xin Fan, graduate students Jun Wu and Yunpeng Chen, and undergraduate student Matthew Jerry from UD, and Huaiwu Zhang from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.
Today's semiconductors, which are essential to the operation of a broad array of electronics, carry along the electrical charge of electrons, but make no use of the magnetic or "spin" properties of these subatomic particles. Xiao and his team are working to unveil those properties in UD's Center for Spintronics and Biodetection.
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Friday, 10 May 2013 15:35 |
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Amazon.com Inc. is expanding beyond its range of Kindle devices as it aims to compete more directly with Google Inc. and Apple Inc.
The Seattle e-commerce giant has recently been developing a wide-ranging lineup of gadgets—including two smartphones and an audio-only streaming device—to expand its reach beyond its Kindle Fire line of tablet computers, said people familiar with the company's plans.
One of the devices is a high-end smartphone featuring a screen that allows for three-dimensional images without glasses, these people said. Using retina-tracking technology, images on the smartphone would seem to float above the screen like a hologram and appear three-dimensional at all angles, they said. Users may be able to navigate through content using just their eyes, two of the people said.
Some elements of Amazon's hardware push have previously become public. Last year, news surfaced about Amazon developing one smartphone. And last month, The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported that Amazon also was developing a set-top box for streaming movies and TV shows.
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Tuesday, 12 March 2013 16:55 |
 Can nanotechnology help the economy of Edmonton become less dependent on oil?
On the flight to Edmonton, I sat next to Ted, a friendly giant with a pronounced Dutch/Irish accent. He told me how, unable to find work in Ireland, he was flying to Canada with the promise of a job. With the ice beginning to melt, he and thousands of others will work for the summer, cleaning up oil refineries before moving on to the next opportunity.
This story happens to be true. But fans of Thomas "world is flat" Friedman will recognise its type from his New York Times OpEds. Friedman is fond of such globalisation parables, often snatched from receptionists or taxi drivers. As Richard Florida (pdf) and others have pointed out, we should not overlook the world's spikiness. Geography matters, even, or perhaps especially, when it comes to science and innovation. This is why we are so fascinated by Silicon Valley. If we follow Friedman, Silicon Valley could be anywhere, and yet the businesses and universities that populate it show no signs of upping sticks.
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Read more... [Making sense of nanotechnology in northern Canada]
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Tuesday, 12 March 2013 16:46 |
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 A new section in Lockheed Martin’s LM Tomorrow, a free app for iPad users, explores quantum physics in an interactive, easy-to-understand format. The LM Tomorrow app received the gold-level “W3 Award” in 2012 for creative excellence on the web.
The Quantum Theory section draws on expanding research into the potential of quantum computing to solve challenges ranging from designing lifesaving new drugs to instantaneously debugging millions of lines of software code.
In partnership with the University of Southern California, the Corporation has founded the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computation Center (QCC), home of D-Wave One, the world’s first commercial adiabatic quantum optimizer and by far the largest functional quantum information processor ever built.
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Monday, 25 February 2013 15:31 |
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 On 15 February at 0920 local time, a huge fireball raced across the skies above the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. This meteorite then exploded creating a shockwave that injured more than 1000 peopl
The incident was captured on numerous webcams, security cameras and dashcams in the region and these videos were widely distributed on the web.
The following day, Stefen Geens, who writes the Ogle Earth blog, pointed out that these cameras formed an ad-hoc sensing network that had gathered significant data about the trajectory and speed of the meteorite. He used this data and Google Earth to reconstruct the path of the rock as it entered the atmosphere and showed that it matched an image of the trajectory taken by the geostationary Meteosat-9 weather satellite.
Today, Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin at the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, take this approach a step further by reconstructing the meteorite’s original orbit around the Sun.
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Read more... [Astronomers Calculate Orbit of Chelyabinsk Meteorite]
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