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.

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).

As you may remember, yesterday we did a quick post on a team of international researchers that were being reported as having found a material that could superconduct at room-temperature (which is more or less the holy-grail of superconductors). As i mentioned in that article, there seemed to be some discrepancies between what was being reported in some places (like nextenergynews, where i originally found the report), and the press-release from Dr.John Tse’s (the lead researcher) University.

Basically the press-release seemed to say that they had achieved superconductivity in a material that could potentially lead to superconductors at room-temp, while other sources were claiming outright that there had been an actual room-temp superconductor. To get to the bottom of it, i contacted Dr. Tse directly and here is what he’s told me.

He was apparently originally misquoted misinterpreted in EETimes (who have since corrected it), which then lead to the other misquotes and subsequent wrong reporting of a new superconductor at room-temperature.

Here is how Dr. Tse explained to me what they DID do in their research:

What they did was follow up on a suggestion made in 2004 by Prof. Ashcroft of Cornell, that suggested that if high enough density of hydrogen could be prepared in a solid, it might exhibit superconducting properties. He suggested using Hydrogen rich compounds, which is exactly what they did (Silane). They did indeed achieve this high density hydrogen state in silane, and subsequently detected superconductivity. The temperature they found it to superconduct at was actually 16K (around 280K would be room-temperature), at a pressure of 120 Giga-Pascal, and as Dr. Tse said, ” A good understanding of the mechanism may lead to the design of materials with even higher T_c”.

So there you have it! Not a room-temp superconducting material, but it may pave the way for it.

I don’t mean to be link-whoring here, but i would really appreciate a Digg/Reddit vote, which can be done at the top of this page, as both websites did report the misquotes as truth, and it would be nice to have it corrected.

Damn, it’s been 3 days in a row with superconductor news. As you may remember from my first article, the holy grail so to say, is to find a superconductor that would operate at room temperature which would reduced the energy expenditure on a LOT of things as we would no longer have to worry about energy being lost when transporting electricity (which can only be a good thing at a time when a barrel of oil will cost you your firstborn). Well it turns out, that just a few days ago, an international team of scientists took a giant step towards it, with some impressive experimental verification of superconducting Hydrogen.

The trick? Put the hydrogen under very high pressure. Here’s what the lead-researchers, Dr. John Tse had to say:

“We can show that if you put hydrogen in a molecular compound and apply high pressure, you can get superconductivity,” . “Validation of this hypothesis and understanding of the mechanism are initial steps for design of better super-conducting materials.”

“Our research in this area is aimed at improving the critical temperature for superconductivity so that new superconductors can be operated at higher temperatures, perhaps without a refrigerant,” said Tse.

“It has long been hypothesized that hydrogen, the simplest of the elements, may be able to conduct electricity without creating friction or heat loss (superconductive behavior) if it’s compressed into a very dense solid form. Though many researchers have tried using pure hydrogen, they have not been able to achieve the necessary hydrogen density to produce superconductivity.”

I originally found the story over at nextenergynews.com (the article was also popular on Digg and Reddit), where they claim that they have in fact found a superconductor at room-temperature. But to be honest, to me it sounds more like they have given a proof of concept in regards to compressed Hydrogen superconductors, and hypothesize that this should lead to a superconductor at room-temperature. I was not able to find the actual article to read it through and find out, all i had to go on was the press-release from Dr.Tse’s University .

It would also be interesting to know more about the feasibility of producing a stable material at a pressure that high. It looks like they used a synchrotron (a large machine that accelerates electrons in circles at high energies) to test their theory this time around, so you can’t help but wonder if this is something that is actually commercially viable. [see coments below] I will try and get in contact with Dr.Tse, maybe he can spare a few minutes and explain if they have in fact made a superconductor at room-temperature and what the commercial feasibility of this is.

Since i managed to mess up a bit in my last superconductor article by claiming that superconductors would bring the holy grail of quiet laptops to the world (I’m still sad i was wrong, mostly because my laptop is loud as hell), I figured I’d try and redeem myself with a bit by writing about superconductors some more. Although my grade in solid-state physics suggests that i will make another gaffe here.

In the last article i just kinda sprung the picture of a magnet being levitated on you, mostly because it looked cool and, i know that at least I am too simple to ever read anything without pictures. But it is in fact a demonstration of a remarkable effect that superconductors have. Check out the video for a more dynamic demonstration of it.

It’s called the Meissner effect, and it basically means that if you have a sample, and you cool it down to superconduct, it will expel all magnetic fields fields out (meaning that there is no magnetic field inside a superconductor). In technical terms, this means that superconductors are perfect diamagnets. A diamagnet is basically something that if put inside a magnetic field, it will create a new magnetic field that points in the opposite direction of the original magnetic field. This allows for fun things such as levitating frogs. A frog only creates a very small opposite magnetic field, however a perfect diamagnet, like a supercondutor is, would create the exact same field as it was experiencing, in the opposite direction.

Ok that’s all probably a bit confusing, with me saying “Magnetic” 10 times in one paragraph, so I’ll take it step by step, here’s what’s happening:

1) You cool a material down far enough so that it becomes a superconductor.

2) You place a normal magnet on top of the superconductor, this makes the superconductor feel a magnetic field, that we will call B.

3) The superconductor wants to have zero magnetic field inside itself, and so it creates a magnetic field (created by moving electrons), that is exactly enough to cancel out B inside the conductor.

4) The field created by the superconductor now interacts with the magnet and is strong enough to counteract gravity and levitate it.

Bonus video! A frog being levitated. It’s the same principle, BUT the frog is not a perfect diamagnet, so you need a VERY high magnetic field for it to create a strong enough opposite magnetic field to overcome gravity. Note that in this video the diamagnet and the magnet have switched places. Before the diamagnet was on bottom (the superconductor) and the magnet was being levitated, now the magnet is on bottom, and the diamagnet (the frog) is being levitated.

Sadly this is not a story of a pimping professor that created the ultimate condom for one of his many boot-calls, but a much more mundane one at that. He originally created the material with golf-balls in mind. Yes that’s right, golf-balls.

What Dr. Martin (a professor at the University of Queensland) has done, is create a new polyurethane that is thinner and stronger then the ones in use today. It was of course created with nano-technology, just like all things seem to be these days, and promises stronger golf balls, better skin-tight lycra and more sensitive condoms.

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