Who doesn’t love lasers? You can be annoying at the movies with it, attach them to the heads of sharks and obtain fusion with it. Sadly it seems that the scientists over at Rochester University are only interested in the last prospect, but it’s still pretty neat.

According to a press-release from the University of Rochester, they now have a laser capable of focusing a petawatt of power, onto a target only a millimeter wide. Now the prefix Peta isn’t something we get to use often, as it’s a HUGE number, we’re not even close to measuring harddrives in that range yet, we’re barely up to terabytes there,, but Peta(bytes) comes right after that. So that’s 1.000.000.000.000.000 Watts of power output. In comparison, a normal red laser pointer typically has the power output on the order of milli-watts (0.001 Watts).

Now for me, just being able to throw those numbers around would be reason enough to build the laser, but it’s actually got practical use. It’s purpose is to try out a new concept known as fast-igntion fusion, that offers much more energy efficient way of obtaining fusion. Fusion has long been a holy-grail of sorts in the energy sector, as it would create no enviromently unfriendly gases, and much less radioactive waste compared to nuclear reactors (that work on using the concept of Fission (splitting atoms)). Although fusion has been done before, it has never been done in a way where you actually get more energy out then you put in (correct me if i’m wrong), and the fast-ignition scheme of achieving fusion is one suggestion to make it more economically viable.

Here’s a short article on fusion, explaining both the shortcomings of traditional fusion, and how the fast-ignition scheme might improve it.

Well i guess that “working on” is a bit of an understatement, as they already have a working hand-held device capable of identifying various bacteria and fungi already in use at the international space station. They are however still working on getting it even better. You see, the current version can detect some bacteria, and a recent upgrade to it allows it to detect some fungus as well (which is good, as it can damage equipment). They are working on getting even more capabilities on it (detecting more types of bacteria), and hoping that the end-product will actually perform much like a medical tri-corder from Star Trek, capable of detecting what ails a crewman who has fallen ill and such. If you look at the picture to the left here, you can even see that it kind-of looks like a tri-corder (post-original series anyway).

Now don’t get me wrong, i don’t have anything against health/medicine or anything (in fact i rather enjoy my own), but if you’re trying to copy star trek you could’ve picked something cooler then a medical tri-corder. Be that as it may, more Star Trek inspired technology can never be bad, although I’m sure we’d all prefer the holo-suite for some depraved fun.

If you’re interested in reading the whole story, head over to NASA’s website.

Scientists from the University of Konstanz and the National Institute of Standards (NIST) have succeeded in producing a very powerful laser that also produces short pulses at very high speeds (press release here). While this may sound like something that doesn’t really concern us a whole lot (aren’t lasers for DVD players?) it turns out that this could actually have a big impact on finding earth-like planets in orbit of other stars.

To start with let me wow you with some numbers, the laser can produce 40 billion pulses per second and each one of those lasts only 40 femtoseconds, with the average power being 650milliWatts. Those may all be very impressive numbers (and trust me, they are), but let me tell you why this is something to be excited about aside from being the equivalent of porn for engineers. Well it turns out that lasers with these properties, can be used as so-called frequency comb’s, which is more or-less a measuring stick of sorts for light. You can think of this one as having a lot more notches on it and can therefore differentiate between much finer frequencies than it’s predecessors. For a great article on frequency combs, check out an article on NIST’s website, although long, it is not riddled with math and tries to explain it in a way so everyone can follow.

Now i said before that this could help with finding planets, and if you are a regular reader of ReducedMass.com, this may not surprise you. One of the most successful methods of finding exo-planets (planets orbiting other suns) is to detect a slight wobble in the light of a sun that is caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet (Henrik wrote a great article about it a few weeks ago). Obviously, a bigger planet has a stronger pull, causing more severe wobbles that are easier to detect, but small planets, like ours, would make very small pulls on the sun, and therefore require a very precise measurement of light in order to detect it. Current technology does not allow for this, but they claim that this laser just might do the trick.

One thing that made me pause a bit though is the claim that it will improve the accuracy of detection 100-fold, which certainly seems like a tall order. I’m not really basing that on anything scientific (and the fact that the press-release comes from NIST probably means that my concerns are unfounded), but an improvement by two orders of magnitude is not something seen every-day.

This video is damn cool, and combines the ever popular high-speed camera, with so-called Schlieren pictures.

The basic idea here is quite intuitive and in fact you’ve probably seen these effects many times in your life. What’s happening is that although we can not see shock waves directly, they create different densities in in the air, which then in turn has a different index of refraction (which means that light that hits low density air is bent in a different way from light that hits the high density). The result is that you get a sort of shadow-picture, that then shows how the air is reacting. An example of this that you’ve probably seen, is the shadow of hot air rising from a candle. If you place a light behind the candle, and look at the shadow hitting the table, you’ll see how hot air is moving around the candle, even though it is naked to the visible eye invisible to the naked eye. This is more or less what they are doing in this video, although they obviously have a very refined technique to get great videos like these.

Back in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan demolished a couple of Buddha statues that had been standing there for around 1500 years, behind them were some caves that were adorned with paintings from a similar era (around 5-900 AD). Now don’t worry, i have no intentions on touching on politics here (something we steer clear of here at reducedmass), but the point is, although the caves are now gone, pieces of them have been tested at a European lab and have lead to some surprising discoveries.

It turns out, after having examined fragments from the paintings (a cross-section of a painting piece can be seen in the picture to the left), they reached the conclusion that they were made with oil! Why is this exciting you may ask? Well until now, it was believed that oil painting was first developed in the 15th century, and by Europeans. Now this isn’t exactly a scientific breakthrough or anything, but i think it illustrates nicely how science is involved in almost everything.

To figure out what the paintings were composed of, they used so-called synchrotron radiation, which is more-or-less just a machine that accelerates electrons around in a big circle, producing x-rays. These x-rays are very strong and focused, and can be used to decipher the structure of materials using a variety of techniques, and they actually had to use a good many of them on this project to get a full picture of all the layers. Other materials found in the pictures include natural resins, proteins, gums, and in some cases, a varnish-like layer.

If you want to read more about the Buddha statues and the caves that contained these oil paintings, I suggest reading the wikipedia page on it, and eventually branching out from their sources.

Transistors are an electronic component used in all digital computing today, and the amount of transistors on a CPU chip has grown exponentially since it’s advent. Check out this video below made by Gizmodo to celebrate the latest Intel chipset. It shows how the number of transistors has grown through the years (also known as Moores law). Note that the symbol that looks like a “u” is the greek lower-case letter “mu” that stands for micrometers, which is 1000 nanometers (nm), or 0.000001 meters. It refers to the size of the transistors.

So silicon is what’s used to make these badboys of computing, and they are believed to break down and become unusable if you go below 10nm. This roadblock has not been met yet, but it is not far off as intels latest chipset, as you can see in the video, is at 45nm. This is where the researchers from the University of Manchester come in, as they claim to have created a transistor out of a material called graphene that is about one molecule thick, or around a single nanometer. This could lead to a technology that would be able to replace the silicon transistors once they reach their limit, and keep the rising speed of computers going.

It should be said though, that this is not something that’s about to hit the market anytime soon. They have no viable way of creating these transistors, as they have no way of controlling how the graphene forms. To make the transistor they already have, it was basically just left to chance to get the shape they needed, as there is no known way yet to cut the graphene. Obviously this method can not be used in mass-production, but at least they now know of a material that is capable of functioning beyond the size threshold of silicon.

Researchers from University of Maryland and the California Institute of Technology have found a new compound that can apparently pack hydrogen very densely (more densely then a solid clump of hydrogen) and make for a great material to store hydrogen in an eventual hydrogen vehicle (press release here). One of the big engineering problems of a hydrogen car is the actual gas-tank (and how to store reasonable amounts of hydrogen), and the claim with this new research is that tanking up a hydrogen vehicle could be as easy as tanking up on a normal vehicle.

It’s of course not without drawbacks. The material seems to have these properties at liquid nitrogen temperatures, 77°K (-196°C), so it’s not really something that could be thrown into a car in it’s present form. But it’s definitely a step up, and hopefully it is a stepping stone to better things.

Hydrogen cars are not just hypothetical either. My home country of Iceland actually has buses running on Hydrogen and the emission from them is basically just water vapor. It kinda smells like walking past a laundromat when they drive by. But there are many more obstacles on the way to a cost-viable hydrogen vehicle, you can read about some of the problems in wikipedia’s article. One of them is that it costs energy to make hydrogen. Energy that is usually made from fossil fuels, so it is not a completely carbon emission free source (unless of course the energy to create the hydrogen comes from non-fossil fuel sources like wind generators or dams).

You may remember from about a week back when we reported on a new device that could deliver on the promise of quiet laptops. If you don’t, it was basically a small device that could create an air-flow (like a mechanical fan) without any moving parts (and therefore be almost completely silent).

In that article we raised a couple of questions, both regarding the safety of the device. First one was about a spark that we saw in the video that they provided (check out the old article to see the video with the actual spark, at around 19 seconds). Obviously sparks and electronics are not friends so this was of some concern to us. The second question was a bit more complicated. The thing is, the device operates on a principle of ionizing air molecules (thereby also oxygen molecules), but when you do that, there is a certain probability that the oxygen creates ozone. You see, the oxygen that we breathe has two oxygen atoms connected, but ozone has three. That one atom makes a huge difference as Ozone is actually toxic to us. And although not lethal in small doses, it could cause irritation, so this was definately a concern.

So what did we do? Why we asked the creators of the device of course. They were nice enough to get back to us with some answers to our concerns. In fact, we got a response from Dan Schlitz himself, the man you see in the video, explaining how they have addressed these two problems. I’ll just quote the answers directly here.

If there was a spark, it was probably due to the thick, soapy fog that was being used for visualization purposes. It’s not a safety issue, because there is very little energy in the spark – the power supply is very low wattage. I’ve accidentally shocked myself several times, it feels similar to the shock you get from rubbing your feet on a carpet in winter.

We minimize ozone production and coat the heatsink with a catalyst that destroys the ozone.

Although looking at the video, the time you see the spark there does not appear to be any soapy smoke around, he explains that it shouldn’t be a problem either way. I’d imagine as well that the actual device would be placed far enough away from the motherboard so that it wouldn’t be able to produce sparks (like in the video).

The second answer is comforting as well. They are obviously well aware of the danger of creating ozone and appear to have taken an active stance in preventing that from happening.

This is really the article that I was going to write yesterday, but it got dominated by the Google part and I didn’t want to clutter it anymore. So as promised in yesterdays google post, I’ll do my best to explain why these two types of monitors are so different. Even if you’re not interested in the power saving part of it, at least you can now take pride in that you know some the physics of how porn is projected on a screen.

What you saw in that post, when i wasn’t bashingly accusing Google of hating planet earth, is that on average, LCD’s (Liquid Crystal displays, basically flat-screens) appear to save no energy at all on a black background (even do the opposite sometimes), while the CRT’s (Cathode Ray Tube, the old chunky monitors) did. But why is this? Well to start with, lets look at what white light and black light is in general.

First off, saying black “light” is a bit misleading, as black is the absence of light (or at least visible light). The night sky is black is because there is no light reaching you. Black t-shirts appear black because they reflect little visible light (also why black t-shirts get so hot in the sun). White light is pretty much the exact opposite. White light is a mix of all colors of light. Therefore, you’ll need an approximately equal dose of all three primary colors (red blue and green) to get white, as you can see here to the left. So obviously, having to create all 3 primary colors in equal dosage (white light) should take a lot more energy then creating no light at all (black).

As we learned yesterday, this energy saving is indeed seen in CRT’s. The reason is that CRT’s have 3 electron guns, each one responsible for hitting one of the primary colors. As you see when looking at the close-up picture of a mouse-arrow to my left, taken on a CRT-screen, the screen is made from a huge number of red, blue and green dots stacked in neat triangles, this is where the color is mixed. When the corresponding electron-gun shoots an electron to hit one of those specific dots, it lights up. In order to create white light, you need to light up all 3 dots at once, but if you want to create black “light”, you don’t shoot any of the electron guns, and thus you save energy.

Ok, this explains why the CRT DOES save power, but why won’t the LCD follow the same principles? Well the mechanics of an LCD are really a lot more complicated, and thus more difficult to explain in an equally intuitive way. I suggest reading the wikipedia article on it for a more precise explanation, but a simple one would be that by far the largest part of the energy use of an LCD screen is the back-light, which stays on at the same intensity regardless of what colors you render.

As you can read about in the press-release from MIT, they have finally succeeded in successfully testing a new approach to containing fusion fuel in a reactor. The project which started in 1998 is called the Levitated Dipole Experiment, or LDX, and aims at (like many other experiments i should add) to contain the fusion-fuel in the form of a plasma, using a strong magnet, but they added a little twist.

Fusion is “simply” the process of taking two atoms and fusing them into a new one. For example taking two hydrogen atoms (one proton) and fusing it into one helium atom (two protons). This is obviously not as easy as it sounds (we’d be building these things like crazy if it was), and research has gone on for the past 50 years to harness the power of nuclear fusion. I should clarify before i start, that this is nuclear fusion, which is NOT what happens inside a classic Homer Simpson nuclear plant. They use nuclear fission, which is the process of taking a large heavy element with multiple protons (like Uranium) and splitting it up into smaller atoms. Fusion would be a clean no-carbon-emission energy source that we would be able to produce in abundance (there’s plenty of hydrogen to go around!), assuming we can figure it out. To date no-one has been able to “break even” with a fusion process, that is to say, get as much energy out as they put in to making it happen.

The basic idea behind getting a fusion to happen, is to somehow give the hydrogen enough energy to overcome the so-called Coulomb barrier. This barrier stems from the fact that both atom-cores are positively charged, and therefore they produce electric fields that repel each other, so you need to get the two cores very close to each other before the attractive nuclear force takes over, and combines the two. This requires a lot of energy, and one of the most promising and most researched ways to do this, is to have the fuel (that is, the hydrogen), in a very hot plasma state. That is, the hydrogen is in a gas-state, where part of it is ionized (electrons separated from the core). Since positive and negative charges react to magnetic fields, this allows for scientists to construct magnetic fields that can contain the hydrogen for a given amount of time, and compress/heat it enough to facilitate fusion.

So this is all very cool, but it’s not really anything new. People have been trying to contain plasma with magnets for quite some time. But what the MIT scientists did was take a more novel approach to it. They levitated a huge (as in truck-tire sized and donut shaped) superconducting magnet to create the magnetic field. How does this help at all? Well today plasma is confined using so-called Tokamaks, which are more intricate and less stable then this new approach. Using the donut-shaped magnet you create a rather simple (compared to the tokamak anyway) north/south magnet, not unlike the magnetic field that our own mother-Earth creates, which leads to a more stable confinement of plasma. You may here be thinking: “Why not just hold the damn magnet up, the levitation seems excessive”. Well, they did actually do that as well, but the support structure actually causes a significant loss in plasma, hence levitation.

This is of course only one step on the way, but lets hope that this is the beginning of something great.

If you are interested in learning a bit more about this, i highly recommend reading the MIT press-release, although a bit dry, it does really do a great job of explaining the whole process and why this is great news. Also, as always, wikipedia is a great research, check out their article on Nuclear Fusion.