Hey guys, you may remember a few days ago i posted about a story that researchers from Cornell were venturing into a new way of creating X-Rays called Energy Recovery Linac (ERL), which should result in much more powerful x-rays.

Well i was slightly skeptical to the claim that things being examined using the ERL, did not have to be in crystalline form, so i decided to talk to a professor at my school that teaches the x-ray physics course and he did indeed confirm that this could well be the case if they were able to focus a strong beam on a single structure (like a protein for example). This is something that will definitely please many in the field when/if the ERL comes, because today when you intend to look at the structure of a protein you must first make it into a crystalline material before it can be probed using the x-ray. That is to say you need to have a lot of proteins arranged in a static symmetric way, which can be quite a hassle.

Also something he pointed out to me as he read the article, that i hadn’t really noticed was that the projected cost of building an ERL is not that high compared to Synchrotrons (which is the source most commonly used to create high powered x-ray beams). The ERL is projected to cost around 300-400 million$, which seems to be about the same they are projecting the new Synchrotron MAX-IV is going to cost (source). However if you compare it to another exciting project that also aims at creating very high powered x-ray beams, the free electron x-ray laser (FEL), their cost is a projected one billion euro, or about 1.5 billion US dollars. Although, i do think that the free electron one will create much better x-rays (i couldn’t find any hard numbers for the ERL to compare to the FEL), the ERL does seem to perform much better then a normal synchrotron, at what appears to be practically the same price.

On a more personal note, i may not be able to write terribly frequently in the coming week, i have an exam coming up, my last one ever in fact, so i’ll have to study pretty hard to try and pass it. Quantum Information certainly is not easy stuff (Quantum computers/encryption/etc), but if i manage to get a decent handle on it and pass the exam, i might just write a short roundup about it, it’s quite fascinating really.

According to a press release from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Cornell researchers are working on completing a device called an Energy Recovery Linac, or ERL, that promises to provide a much brighter source of X-Rays then are known today.

Today, X-Rays in physics research are mainly created using so called Synchrotrons, where electrons are accelerated around in a circle, and eventually undulated left and right using strong bar-magnets to produce x-rays (accelerating electrons produce light). The beam size of these synchrotrons are however limited, and that is where the Cornell team comes in. As far as i cant tell, it is more or less the same principle, they will also send the electrons through a circle and undulate it with strong bar-magnets to produce the x-rays, but the big difference is that in synchrotrons the same electrons are accelerated through the chamber again and again, but the ERL will only send them around once before slowing them down again and sending out a new batch of electrons. This process is suppose to make it possible to make much smaller beams, all the way down to the micron regime.

Now to me, the most exciting thing about this press-release is that they say that using this new better x-ray source, there is the potential of looking at much smaller things, that do not have to be in a crystalline form. Basically, today, everything we want to determine the structure of (at such small levels) needs to be in a crystal, that is to say, the molecules are arranged in an organized repeating pattern, which obviously strongly limits what things we can look at. In addition to that, they also compare the data that the new source can get, to the difference between a photograph and a video (the photograph being current technology). I must admit that i am not entirely sure of the physics that are involved in these ultra bright x-rays, but seeing as how the NSF and Cornell are releasing this, I’ll take their word for it..

I can highly recommend actually reading their press-release, it’s not as dry and boring as press-releases tend to be, and they also discuss possible uses for it (although it all seems a bit sensational to me). Also, there is a video there (access it here) with an interview with one of the scientists involved in the project.

Once again it is news from MIT (it would appear that their extravagant tuition fees are paying off), this time around carbon nanotubes (buzzwords ahoy!) engineered to detect deadly gases such as sarin, mustard gas and VX nerve agents.

Sarin is probably best known for the terrorist attack on the subway system in Tokyo back in the mid 90’s, and it can kill at very low concentrations, so very sensitive detectors are needed if they are to be effective, and it would appear that MIT has delivered. They use a device to rapidly separate the different gases present in the air, before feeding it through the nano-tubes. The gas molecules can then attach themselves to the nanotubes, which changes the way electricity flows through them, thus creating a way to detect specific gases in the air (different molecules will effect the electrical-resistivity of the nanotubes differently).

They had to go one step further though, because as you might imagine, this would pretty much be a one-shot-wonder if the molecules just stayed attached to the nanotubes, needing a fresh batch for every measurement. So they coated the nanotubes with amine type molecules which drastically reduces the time they are attached to the them, releasing the gas molecules within milliseconds. This, coupled with the fact that it only requires 0.0003 Watts to operate, means that you essentially have a continuous detector of deadly gases, that can basically run forever on a basic battery. Not too shabby.

Hey guys, if you read my original post from a few days ago about a breakthrough in how to take fingerprints, you’ll remember that i found a site claiming to do the same thing (seemingly anyway). Well i contacted the researcher involved, and he was kind enough to answer the questions i had, clearing up everything.

Just a quick recap of the original story to start with. They have basically found out that a fingerprint corrodes metal, etching into it the fingerprint itself, and devised a way to image the fingerprint despite the fact that the original fingerprint residue had been completely removed. This is massively useful in cases where for example there might be a fingerprint on a used bullet casing, where the original fingerprint would have been destroyed by the heat of firing the bullet. Only problem was, doing some research for the post, i found other research groups in the UK that seemingly had already done this , raising some questions.

Well i got in contact with the researcher from the (new) study, Dr. John W. Bond, and he answered me promptly and concisely. Turns out, the other group had mainly been working on taking the fingerprint with the fingerprint residue still present, and in their latest paper, they also said they had been able to measure it despite having wiped it down with a tissue. In the case of Dr. Bond’s method however, they thoroughly cleaned their casing using hot soapy water, getting rid of any residue, and were still able to measure a fingerprint. In addition to that (as we predicted) it is also much cheaper then the other method. He did add though that as their results hinge completely on how much the casings (or any other metals) were corroded, they are less consistent then the method used by Swansea.

So, there you have it! Big thanks to Dr. Bond for taking the time to clarify everything, and lets hope that their predictions of many cold cases being reopened due to this new technique holds true.

I’m always a big fan of stories that show science being used in real world examples that concern us all, so a newspiece on how researchers have found a new method of uncovering fingerprints on used bullet casings, is obviously very exciting to me.

Using fingerprints to identify people is clearly nothing new, according to wikipedia, even back in the 9th century it was used as a means of identification on loan agreements, although they were not used as a forensic tool until the late 19th century. But the various methods of extracting said fingerprints have been steadily improving through the years, and now there is one more for the CSI toolbox.

Researchers over at the University of Leicester, have been working with the Northamptonshire police department to create a new method to extract fingerprints from bullet casings that have already been fired. Any trace of an original fingerprint is usually destroyed when a bullet is fired, due to the extreme heat created, but what these guys did, was find out that the fingerprint corrodes the metal casing, and leaves a fingerprint etched into the metal, even after the original fingerprint has been obliterated by the heat.

The actual procedure of getting the fingerprint sounds quite simple. They apply an electric charge to the metal (bullet casing, or any metal really) that is coated in a very fine powder that can conduct electricity. The powder is then attracted to the etchings left by the criminals fingers, thus giving a fingerprint for them to test. So it sounds like it won’t require any crazy expensive equipment to work, so hopefully policemen can start putting it to good work without too much hassle.

Original press release.

Late addition:

I was done writing this article when i came across this webpage from Swansea University, which seems to suggest that this is not exactly a new concept. They even have pretty pictures and 3D visualizations of it all there (the picture in this article is from that experiment). From what i can tell though (and i may well be wrong), the method they are using at Swansea uses something called a Scanning Kelvin Probe, which appears to require much more expensive equipment then the method from the Leicester group do. So maybe THAT is the breakthrough, although that is not how i first interpreted their press-release.

I’m going to contact the guy that wrote this article (the original one i wrote about that is) and see what he has to say, so there might be a followup post in the next few days.

MIT always seems to be pumping out cool new things, and this time it’s environmentally friendly to boot. We’ve all seen pictures (or at least Simpsons episodes) involving oil spills and have some idea of just how hard it is to clean up thousands of gallons of oil in water. But hopefully this new invention from MIT is a step towards handling these disasters better.

What they have done is create a material that does not absorb water at all, but it does absorb oil (and other hydrophobic fluids). It is also possible to recycle it for additional uses, that is, removing the oil from the towel and use it again, moreover the removed oil can actually be extracted and used again. Given the fact that over 200.000 tons of oil have already been spilled in oceans since 2000, this is sure to be a welcome tool to those in the business of cleaning up after the spills. It should be noted that this is NOT the first material of this kind, this is however, according to the MIT press-release anyway, the most effective one (that is, the other materials absorb water along with the oil, this one doesn’t).

Given the fact that they say that the production method used to make this material is pretty much the same as used to make normal paper towels, I’d imagine that the production costs aren’t that high and that this could be put to use fairly quickly, lets hope. The picture on top here (courtesy of MIT) shows water with oil in it before and after being introduced to the material, you can also check out this ultra-short video at the MIT site, showing it in action.

Scientists from the Department of Energy’s lab at Argonne, have devised a way to have a gas-cloud of molecules align itself in the same way (press release here). This is very significant as it allows scientists to decipher the structure of said molecules without having to crystallize them.

You see, the major way to figure out the structure of molecules and such, is by a technique called x-ray diffraction. It basically shoots in a very powerful x-ray beam (from a source called a synchrotron), and causes it to diffract off it, creating a pattern image. You can think of it kind of like shining light at an object and then looking at it’s shadow to figure out what it looks like (a simplification of course, but you get the idea). The problem with this though, is that each atom will diffract (cast a shadow) in a different way depending on how it is aligned, and unless they are all set in a periodic lattice (also called crystal), it is impossible to understand the diffraction picture and gain any information from it (for an example of a periodic lattice check out the picture for this article). So for example while you would be able to do x-ray diffraction on a crystal, you could not perform it on a gas-cloud, as the distance between atoms there is random and they do not align themselves in any periodic way.

Because of this, scientists have had to crystallize proteins and such that they wanted to investigate (in fact x-ray diffraction was heavily used to investigate DNA when it was found, that’s how they found out it was helical), but there is one major problem, many proteins, including many in drug interaction, can’t be crystallized, and that is where this new technique comes in. Using a laser, they claim to be able to align the molecules in a gas in a periodic way so that it can be used in x-ray diffraction. This would obviously be a huge thing as there are so many proteins (in the human body among other places) that have not yet been investigated.

It should be noted though, that they say they have achieved alignment and theoretically shown that it could be used for x-ray diffraction. They have only achieved the laser periodicity, not actually performed x-ray diffraction on it. On a slightly more personal note, i got to witness the x-ray diffraction of a crystallized molecule a few months ago, and frankly it seemed like a huge hassle, they had to keep it on liquid nitrogen, fish out a tiny sample and mount it in front of the beam. In the end, the sample we saw her (the scientist) image ended up having to be discarded because there was some water vapor that had set on the crystal (if i remember correctly), meaning she had to do it all over again. So I’m sure this is something that will be welcomed with open arms in that community.

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.

Sadly this is not the publication of research already done, but what was being talked about in a presentation at the American Chemical Societies 235 national meeting. Basically what they say is that there could be another “Island of stability” where artificial super-heavy elements could exist.

The period table, as you probably know, consists of all the atoms in the universe, with 92 of them being naturally found, while the rest is created by smashing atoms together, and they are usually very unstable, falling apart within tiny fractions of a second. There are however artificial elements that are stable, and even very practical, such as Americium, which is used in smoke detectors among other things.

As you can see in this picture below, there is a so called “Island of stability”, a sweet spot if you will, where the atoms will stay stable. They are now predicting that another one of these Islands could exist even further away (a guess in the report says that it might be at around 164 (118 is the biggest atom created so far).

So what does this give us? We have no idea really. At the moment it’s just exciting research, but as you can see with Americium it is possible that these heavy, artificially created elements can be very useful.