yek567 - Science and Fiction

Ultra-Thin Wires Could Revolutionize Computers

2012-01-09T22:51:00.000-06:00

Atom-sized wires could lead to extremely small electronics and quantum computers.

Scientists said Thursday they have designed tiny wires, 10,000 times thinner than a human hair but with the same electrical capacity as copper, in a major step toward building smaller, more potent computers.

The advance, described in the US journal Science, shows for the first time that wires one atom tall and four atoms wide can carry a charge as well as conventional wires.

NEWS: Scientists Build Self-Replicating Robots

Scientists forged atom-sized wires in silicon using a technique called scanning tunneling microscopy.
Simmons et al., University of New South Wales
That could lead to even tinier electronic devices in the future as well as new steps toward quantum computing, an industry still in its infancy, which would create powerful computers that could sift through massive amounts of data faster than current digital computers which use binary code.

"Driven by the semiconductor industry, computer chip components continuously shrink in size allowing ever smaller and more powerful computers," said researcher Michelle Simmons of the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia.

"We are on the threshold of making transistors out of individual atoms. But to build a practical quantum computer we have recognized that the interconnecting wiring and circuitry also needs to shrink to the atomic scale."

Scientists were able to forge atom-sized wires in silicon using a technique called scanning tunneling microscopy, whereby they placed chains of phosphorus atoms within a silicon crystal.

"This technique not only allows us to image individual atoms but also to manipulate them and place them in position," said researcher Bent Weber, the lead author of the study.

BLOG: How to Make Nano-Origami

The nano-wires they built this way ranged from 1.5 to 11 nanometers thick.

But even though the circuits were smaller, scientists observed no increased difficulty in coaxing an electric charge through them -- what has previously been considered a major obstacle to quantum computing.

In an accompanying Perspective article, David Ferry of the School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University called the findings "good news for the semiconductor industry."

A Nanotech Teabag Delivers Potable Water for Less than a Cent

2012-01-09T22:47:00.001-06:00

My hat goes off to the researchers at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, who developed this nano-fiber-filled tea bag. It can safely filter a liter of water, and it costs less than a cent.

The filter itself isn't reusable—or ready for mass production—and even at a fraction of a cent, it could be too expensive for those who need it most. However, it does have the potential to help deliver potable water in a scalable way.

In the following video you can see how it would work in conjunction with a reusable water bottle.

Creating Artificial Muscles More Powerful Than Anything In Nature

2012-01-09T22:44:00.000-06:00

By observing the inner workings of an octopus's leg or an elephant's trunk, scientists have created muscles from carbon nanotubes that could one day power machines.
“Nature has been developing her technologies for many hundreds of millions of years," said Ray Baughman. “By looking at the way in which nature has solved problems like muscles, we can advance our own technologies.” Baughman is Director of the NanoTech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas. His lab creates very tiny artificial muscles by spinning filaments of invisibly small carbon nanotubes into an extraordinary yarn. Pound per pound, this nano-yarn is stronger than steel, yet is so light it almost floats in air.

Penn Physicists Observe “Campfire Effect” in Blinking Nanorod Semiconductors

2012-01-09T22:39:00.002-06:00

PHILADELPHIA — When semiconductor nanorods are exposed to light, they blink in a seemingly random pattern. By clustering nanorods together, physicists at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that their combined “on” time is increased dramatically providing new insight into this mysterious blinking behavior.

The research was conducted by associate professor Marija Drndic’s group, including graduate student Siying Wang and postdoctorial fellows Claudia Querner and Tali Dadosh, all of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences. They collaborated with Catherine Crouch of Swarthmore College and Dmitry Novikov of New York University’s School of Medicine.

Their research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

When provided with energy, whether in the form of light, electricity or certain chemicals, many semiconductors emit light. This principle is at work in light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, which are found in any number of consumer electronics.

At the macro scale, this electroluminescence is consistent; LED light bulbs, for example, can shine for years with a fraction of the energy used by even compact-fluorescent bulbs. But when semiconductors are shrunk down to nanometer size, instead of shining steadily, they turn “on” and “off” in an unpredictable fashion, switching between emitting light and being dark for variable lengths of time. For the decade since this was observed, many research groups around the world have sought to uncover the mechanism of this phenomenon, which is still not completely understood.

“Blinking has been studied in many different nanoscale materials for over a decade, as it is surprising and intriguing, but it’s the statistics of the blinking that are so unusual,” Drndic said. “These nanorods can be ‘on’ and ‘off’ for all scales of time, from a microsecond to hours. That’s why we worked with Dmitry Novikov, who studies stochastic phenomena in physical and biological systems. These unusual Levi statistics arise when many factors compete with each other at different time scales, resulting in a rather complex behavior, with examples ranging from earthquakes to biological processes to stock market fluctuations.”

Drndic and her research team, through a combination of imaging techniques, have shown that clustering these nanorod semiconductors greatly increases their total “on” time in a kind of “campfire effect.” Adding a rod to the cluster has a multiplying effect on the “on” period of the group.

“If you put nanorods together, if each one blinks in rare short bursts, you would think the maximum ‘on’ time for the group will not be much bigger than that for one nanorod, since their bursts mostly don’t overlap,” Novikov said. “What we see are greatly prolonged ‘on’ bursts when nanorods are very close together, as if they help each other to keep shining, or ‘burning.’”

Drndic’s group demonstrated this by depositing cadmium selenide nanorods onto a substrate, shining a blue laser on them, then taking video under an optical microscope to observe the red light the nanorods then emitted. While that technique provided data on how long each cluster was “on,” the team needed to use transmission electron microscopy, or TEM, to distinguish each individual, 5-nanometer rod and measure the size of each cluster.

A set of gold gridlines allowed the researchers to label and locate individual nanorod clusters. Wang then accurately overlaid about a thousand stitched-together TEM images with the luminescence data that she took with the optical microscope. The researchers observed the “campfire effect” in clusters as small as two and as large as 110, when the cluster effectively took on macroscale properties and stopped blinking entirely.

While the exact mechanism that causes this prolonged luminescence can’t yet be pinpointed, Drndic’s team’s findings support the idea that interactions between electrons in the cluster are at the root of the effect.

“By moving from one end of a nanorod to the other, or otherwise changing position, we hypothesize that electrons in one rod can influence those in neighboring rods in ways that enhance the other rods’ ability to give off light,” Crouch said. “We hope our findings will give insight into these nanoscale interactions, as well as helping guide future work to understand blinking in single nanoparticles.”

As nanorods can be an order of magnitude smaller than a cell, but can emit a signal that can be relatively easily seen under a microscope, they have been long considered as potential biomarkers. Their inconsistent pattern of illumination, however, has limited their usefulness.

“Biologists use semiconductor nanocrystals as fluorescent labels. One significant disadvantage is that they blink,” Drndic said. “If the emission time could be extended to many minutes it makes them much more usable. With further development of the synthesis, perhaps clusters could be designed as improved labels.”

Future research will use more ordered nanorod assemblies and controlled inter-particle separations to further study the details of particle interactions.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Evan Lerner | elerner@upenn.edu | 215-573-6604
June 22, 2011

Speed of Light Lingers in Face of New Camera - Işık Hızında Çalışan Bir Fotoğraf Makinesi

2012-01-05T17:49:00.000-06:00

More than 70 years ago, the M.I.T. electrical engineer Harold (Doc) Edgerton began using strobe lights to create remarkable photographs: a bullet stopped in flight as it pierced an apple, the coronet created by the splash of a drop of milk.

Di Wu and Andreas Velten, MIT Media Lab

SLOW DOWN M.I.T.'s camera captures light particles seemingly in motion by using repeated exposures, creating a “movie” of a nanosecond-long event.

Now scientists at M.I.T.’s Media Lab are using an ultrafast imaging systemto capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than two-trillionths of a second.

The project began as a whimsical effort to literally see around corners — by capturing reflected light and then computing the paths of the returning light, thereby building images coming from rooms that would otherwise not be directly visible.

“When I said I wanted to build a camera that looks around corners, my colleagues said, ‘Pick something that is more safe for your tenure,’ ” said Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Media Lab. “Now I have tenure, so I can say this is not so crazy.”

Dr. Raskar enlisted colleagues from the chemistry department to modify a “streak tube,” a supersensitive piece of laboratory equipment that scans and captures light. Streak tubes are generally used to intensify streams of photons into streams of electrons. They are fast enough to record the progress of packets of laser light fired repeatedly into a bottle filled with a cloudy fluid.

The instrument is normally used to measure laboratory phenomena that take place in an ultra-short timeframe. Typically, it offers researchers information on intensity, position and wavelength in the form of data, not an image.

By modifying the equipment, the researchers were able to create slow-motion movies, showing what appears to be a bullet of light that moves from one end of the bottle to the other. The pulses of laser light enter through the bottom and travel to the cap, generating a conical shock wave that bounces off the sides of the bottle as the bullet passes.

The streak tube scans and captures light in much the same way a cathode ray tube emits and paints an image on the inside of a computer monitor. Each horizontal line is exposed for just 1.71 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, Dr. Raskar said — enough time for the laser beam to travel less than half a millimeter through the fluid inside the bottle.

To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. Because each individual movie has a very narrow field of view, they repeat the process a number of times, scanning it vertically to build a complete scene that shows the beam moving from one end of the bottle, bouncing off the cap and then scattering back through the fluid. If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years.

“You can think of it as slow motion,” Andreas Velten, a postdoctoral researcher who is a member of the design team, said during a recent technical presentation. “It is so much slow motion you can see the light itself move. This is the speed of light: there’s nothing in the universe that moves faster.”

Dr. Raskar says the technology has a variety of promising commercial applications. Last year, for example, one of his graduate students, Jaewon Kim, published a thesis envisioning portable CAT-scanning devices.

Dr. Raskar said he could also envision smartphone software that would capture and interpret reflections from, say, fruit. “Imagine if you have this in your phone about 10 years from now,” he said. “You will be able to go to your supermarket and tell if your fruit is ripe.”

Until now, picosecond speeds have largely been the province of an elite group of scientists clustered at the nation’s weapons laboratories.

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Gary Jones is an optical physicist who builds ultrafast imaging systems that help characterize the first microseconds of events like laser fusion and nuclear explosions. “To get a two-dimensional image within a picosecond means you have to have a lot of electronics moving really fast,” he said.

For Dr. Raskar — who optimistically calls the project “femto photography,” using the term for quadrillionths of a second — it is about more than just engineering or science. “We were inspired by looking at the world in a unique way just because we could,” he said.

The system allows the naked eye to see information that has until now been rendered as data and charts. The proper analogy is to the way astronomers use instruments like radiotelescopes to create images with “fake” colors to see things in new ways — or to the original inspiration of Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century British photographer who achieved a new understanding of a horse’s gait by creating a camera array with electromagnetic shutters set off by tripwires.

“We’re still trying to get our heads around what this means,” Dr. Raskar said, “because no one has been able to see the world in this way before.”

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: December 12, 2011

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Massachusetts Teknoloji Enstitüsü'nün Medya Laboratuarındaki araştırmacılar, ışığı sıvıların ve objelerin içinden geçerken yakalamak için ultra hızlı bir görüntüleme sistemi kullanıyor. Bu teknikle saniyenin trilyonda ikisinden az bir sürede resim çekebiliyorlar. Proje aslında "görülemeyeni görmek" yönünde tuhaf bir çaba olarak başladı. Amaç, yansıyan ışığı yakalamak ve ardından ışığın geri dönüş yollarını hesaplayıp başka türlü görülemeyecek odalarda bulunanları görüntülemekti. Medya Laboratuarı'nda medya sanatları ve bilimleri doçenti Ramesh Raskar, "Görülemeyeni gören bir kamera yapmak istediğimi söylediğimde, meslektaşlarım 'Üniversitede sürekli bir pozisyon istiyorsan başka bir konu seç' dediler. Şimdi sürekli bir pozisyonum var ve bu yüzden yaptığımın o kadar da çılgınca olmadığını söyleyebilirim" diyor. Raskar ışığı tarayıp yakalayan süper hassas bir laboratuar gereci olan "ışın tüpü"nü modifiye etmek için kimya bölümünden yardım aldı. Işın tüpleri, genelde foton akımlarını elektron akımları halinde yoğunlaştırmak için kullanılıyor. Bu tüpler, bulanık bir sıvıyla doldurulmuş bir şişenin içine tekrar tekrar verilen lazer ışığının ilerlemesini kaydedecek kadar hızlı. Söz konusu gereç normalde, çok kısa bir zaman aralığında gerçekleşen laboratuar deneylerini ölçmek için kullanılıyor.

Tipik olarak, araştırmacılara yoğunluk, konum ve dalga boyuna dair veri sunuyor ancak görüntü sunmuyor. Araştırmacılar ısın tüpünü modifiye ederek şişenin bir ucundan diğer ucuna hareket eden bir ışık atımının nasıl göründüğünü gösteren ağır çekim filmler oluşturmayı başardılar. Lazer ışığı atımları şişenin içinden geçerek uca doğru ilerliyor, bu da atım geçerken şişenin yanlarına çarpıp seken konik bir şok dalgası üretiyor. Işın tüpü ışığı, bir katot ışın tüpünün görüntüyü çıkarıp bilgisayar ekranına çizmesiyle hemen hemen benzer şekilde tarıyor ve yakalıyor. Her bir yatay ışık çizgisi sadece 1.71 pikosaniye (saniyenin trilyonda biri) beliriyor. Raskar'a göre bu, lazer ışınının sıvı boyunca yarım milimetre gitmesi için yeterli zaman. Olayı görüntülemek için araştırmacılar bir nanosaniyenin (veya saniyenin milyarda birinin) biraz altında 500'e yakın kareyi kaydediyor.

Her filmin dar bir görüntü alanı olduğu için, süreci belli sayıda tekrarlayarak, ışının şişenin bir ucundan hareket ettiğini, diğer uca çarptığını ve gerisin geri sıvının içinde dağıldığını gösteren bütünlüklü bir sahne oluşturacak şekilde süreci şişe boyunca tekrarlıyorlar. Bir atım, sıvı boyunca hareket ederken takip edilseydi, ortaya çıkan film üç yıl uzunluğunda olurdu. Tasarım ekibinin üyesi olan Yardımcı Doçent Andreas Velten, "Bunu bir ağır çekim olarak düşünebilirsiniz. O kadar ağır bir çekim ki, bizzat ışığın hareketini görebiliyorsunuz. Evrende daha hızlı hareket eden başka bir şey yok" diyor.

Raskar teknolojinin potansiyeli olan ticari uygulamaları olduğunu söylüyor. Sözgelimi geçen yıl yüksek lisans öğrencilerinden biri taşınabilir CAT tarama aygıtları tasarlayan bir tez yayınlamış. R askar, meyvelerden gelen yansımaları yakalayıp yorumlayacak akıllı telefon yazılımı da tasarlanabileceğini söylüyor. "10 yıl sonra telefonunuzda böyle bir şey olduğunu düşünün. Süpermarketinize gidip meyvenin olgun olup olmadığını anlayabileceksiniz."

Bugüne kadar pikosaniye hızları büyük oranda ülkenin silah laboratuarlarında çalışan seçkin bir bilim insanları grubunun alanıydı. Raskar için (ki projeyi, saniyenin kuadrilyonda biri için kullanılan terim üzerinden "femto fotoğrafçılık" diye adlandırıyor) bu mühendislikten veya bilimden öte bir konu. "Dünyaya eşi benzeri olmayan bir şekilde bakmak bize ilham verdi. Bu deneyi sadece yapabildiğimiz i çin y aptık" d iyor v e ekliyor: "Hâlâ bunun ne anlama geldiğini idrak etmeye çalışıyoruz, çünkü kimse daha önce dünyayı bu şekilde görebilme şansına sahip olmadı."

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting suburbia

2012-01-05T04:12:00.000-06:00

What About the Suburbs?

History is full of examples of shrinking cities — from collapsed empires to abandoned rural towns that failed to maintain adequate infrastructure, diversify their economy or adjust to changing demographics. The popular suburbs that ring Detroit’s hollowed center are but an extreme example of how our society relied on cheap oil to fuel leapfrog growth, instead of reinvesting in existing places. What’s perhaps more remarkable today are shrinking suburbs — and the specter of the end of cheap oil.

Courtesy of Toledo-Lucas County Public LibraryToledo, Ohio, circa 1949.

Vacancies have proliferated along aging commercial strip corridors and new “zombie” subdivisions at the foreclosure fringes. The oversupply of platted vacant lots in states like Arizona, Florida and Idaho that may never be developed prompts us to ask: Will planned shrinkage become the new normal? Planned growth — such as the resilient 1811 Commissioners Plan to grid Manhattan with walkable blocks — is a necessary strategy for rapidly urbanizing areas, but in the U.S. today we must move quickly to design plans to better utilize already urbanized land and reduce car-dependency.

Rising oil prices contributed to escalated foreclosure rates and the Great Recession. How will they affect American households over the long term? New research reveals that in 2008 a median income household living in a location-efficient neighborhood spent 12.6 percent of their income on transportation, versus 35.8 percent for those stuck far from jobs and transit. “Drive ‘til you qualify” affordability is no longer sustainable. Instead, we need to use cheap land for food and energy production, redirect growth inward, ease the production of affordable infill housing and retrofit our shrinking suburbs.

Ellen Dunham-Jones and June WilliamsonAmes Lake in the Phalen neighborhood of St. Paul.

Failed commercial properties could be regreened into parks to help increase adjacent property values, like the former City Center mall in Columbus, Ohio, or into reconstructed wetlands to mitigate flooding and restore ecological habitat, as at Ames Lake in St. Paul, site of the former Phalen Shopping Center. Transit-served properties could be targeted for redevelopment into mixed-use, walkable nodes and corridors, as near Northgate Mall in Seattle and along Columbia Pike in northern Virginia. More modest revitalization can occur through the re-inhabitation of former strip malls with libraries, schools and other community-serving uses like the Jackson Medical Mall in Jackson, Miss.

Incentives for filling in and re-using urban land must be balanced with more robust disincentives to urbanize additional land at the fringes. First steps include revising local zoning and subdivision regulations and conducting greyfield audits of underused parking lots and vacant land. More systemic changes include a combination of large-scale land acquisition strategies, incentives like place-based underwriting protocols and targeted infrastructure spending, and regulatory changes like complete streets standards and eliminating Freddie, Fannie, FHA and HUD restrictions on mixed-use development.

In recognizing shrinkage as the new normal we not only prepare for the end of cheap oil by better managing our metropolitan fringes, but also boost opportunities for improved quality of life in existing communities and encourage the retrofitting of our most auto-dependent suburban properties into more healthy and sustaining places.

How to Fix That Ugly Strip

Which automobile-dependent landscapes in the U.S. are the most forsaken? Where would the pedestrian-oriented European strategies seem most out of place and yet potentially have the greatest impact on increasing affordability, health and livability while reducing greenhouse gases and re-using existing infrastructure? Commercial strip corridors.

Top of the list of unloved, underperforming and ubiquitous places, they were engineered for the single purpose of swiftly moving cars. But overzoned for commercial uses, they are now clogged with cars on both local and through trips. They provide access to cheaper land and “drive till you qualify” affordable housing – but then eat up the savings as transportation costs have risen to 20 to 40 percent of household budgets. They are aging with little prospect of funding for maintenance. And their high vacancy rates just add to the dispiritedness of a failed public realm.

Can they be retrofitted into attractive, transit boulevards lined with trees, sidewalks and affordable housing and anchored by mixed-use centers with a public life to be proud of? June Williamson and I are tracking over 35 North American corridors that are being redesigned not to make driving miserable, but to recognize the multiple social, environmental, economic and transportation purposes that great streets serve. Their integration was highlighted in the grassroots-led temporary re-striping of Ross Avenue as “Ross Ramblas” in Dallas this week at Build a Better Boulevard. Participants employed several techniques of Tactical Urbanism, including pop-up shops, chairbombing and dumpster pools.

More typical is the ongoing 10-year revitalization of a five-mile stretch of Columbia Pike in Arlington County, Va. It exemplifies the intelligent use of tight form-based codes to grow from one-story strip buildings in parking lots to mid-rise mixed-use buildings fronting tree-lined sidewalks at nodes on major intersections. The site-specific code quickly tapers heights where the new development faces the existing neighborhoods and new bike lanes on the less busy streets. This strategy retains the existing affordable housing in between the nodes while the tax revenue from the new density goes toward supporting a streetcar.

Cambie Corridor in Vancouver is employing similar techniques but has upped the ante with some stunning modern mixed-use buildings and a highly efficient district energy system that balances out daytime commercial energy demands with the residential night-time peak loads.

Aiding these efforts is the new street design manual for walkable urban thoroughfares. It is the first officially recommended practice that does not refer to sidewalks as “vehicle recovery zones”! El Paso recently adopted the manual to connect its implementation of Bus Rapid Transit with redevelopment of outdated properties along five major corridors. Imagine if all 50 DOTs followed suit and revised their Level of Service Standards accordingly! We might see more transformations of urban highways to boulevards and Complete Streets.

Funding remains an obstacle and demand for Sustainable Communities Partnershipfederal planning grants far outstrips supply. Can private real estate developers fund streetcars as they did early in the 20th century? Can the public again support public sector investments in infrastructure, as it did mid-century? How else can we provide an alternative to our broken system of “drive till you qualify” affordable housing, accommodate changing demographics and markets and make our least sustainable landscapes into places worth caring more about?

Ellen Dunham-Jones is a professor in the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. June Williamson is an associate professor at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York. They are co-authors of "Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs."

UPDATED JUNE 27, 2011, 4:58 PM

http://www.ted.com/speakers/ellen_dunham_jones.html

Car Clash: Europe vs. the U.S.

The notion that European cities are different from American cities because they discourage automobile use in certain places obscures larger similarities.

It is true, for example, that because of policies favoring pedestrian streets, fewer parking spaces, resident-only permit zones and a battery of other measures, it is much more difficult to drive through central Madrid than it used to be. These measures have widespread support within this immediate area because central Madrid, like many European cities, has experienced a dramatic surge of gentrification.

The core, with its very high land prices, is increasingly home to affluent residents, high-end businesses, government officials and tourists who are willing to walk, use taxis and transit and forgo the use of their cars for short daily trips because any inconvenience is vastly outweighed by the benefits of restricting noise and pollution along old, narrow streets and, not incidentally, stemming the tide of automobiles owned by working class suburbanites who must commute into the central city.

However, central Madrid occupies only a small and diminishing part of the urban area. As is the case with virtually all European cities, as population at the core has dropped, population in the periphery has boomed. Between the censuses of 1991 and 2001, for example, the population of the central city dropped over 2% while the five suburban rings increased by 19% to 90%. Along with that shift toward lower densities and single family houses went a dramatic increase in automobile ownership and use. Between 1995 and 2001 alone car ownership rose from 372 automobiles per 1,000 residents to 478. Because of the construction of a vast new system of subways and superhighways, however, average vehicle speeds actually increased.

Concentrating on pedestrian zones at the center and ignoring the new freeways at the periphery obscures one of the real differences between American cities and European cities: the Europeans' willingness to pay for new public infrastructure of all kinds. Whether it has spent too much is another issue.

Robert Bruegmann is a professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of "Sprawl: A Compact History."

UPDATED JUNE 29, 2011, 10:52 AM

For Turkey, Lure of Tie to Europe Is Fading - Türkiye Artık Avrupa'ya Muhtaç Değil

2012-01-05T02:20:00.002-06:00

ISTANBUL — As economic contagion tarnishes the European Union, a newly assertive Turkey is increasingly looking east instead of west, and asking a vexing question: Should Turkey reject Europe before Europe rejects Turkey?

When Recep Tayyip Erdogan , the charismatic prime minister, first swept to power in 2002, he made Turkey’s entry into the European Union his overriding goal. Determined to anchor the country to the West, Mr. Erdogan’s Muslim-inspired Justice and Development Party tackled thorny issues like improving minority rights and easing restrictions on free speech to move Turkey closer to Western norms.

But Turkey’s bid was greeted with skepticism and even disdain by some members of the union, not least because of Turkey’s large, almost entirely Muslim population. The negotiations dragged on endlessly without ever yielding a clear pathway to membership.

Now it is Turkey that has soured on the idea, analysts here say. With Europe shaken by a spiraling credit crisis and the tumult of the Arab Spring creating opportunities for Turkey to wield new clout as a regional power, people here are weighing a step that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago: walking away from the European Union altogether.

“Prime Minister Erdogan wanted to be the first conservative Muslim leader who would bring Turkey to the West, but after Europe betrayed him, he abandoned those ambitions,” said Erol Yarar, the founder of a religiously conservative business group of 20,000 companies that is close to the prime minister. “Today, the E.U. has absolutely no influence over Turkey, and most Turks are asking themselves, ‘Why should we be part of such a mess?’ ”

Turkey’s increasingly muscular foreign policy in the Middle East was in evidence last week when it imposed tough sanctions on Syria and made preparations for possible military intervention. And Turkey has become a powerful voice of regional outrage over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, especially since it froze its ties with Israel over a commando raid on a vessel that tried to reach Gaza from Turkey.

Daniel Etter for The New York Times

A singer performing in the trendy rooftop restaurant and bar 360 in downtown Istanbul, which is an abidingly cosmopolitan city.

Meanwhile, Turkish officials say relations with the European Union have reached a state of hopeless disrepair, made worse by the prospect of Cyprus taking over the rotating presidency of the union next year.

Turkey has been locked in an intractable political fight with Cyprus since 1974, when it invaded the island to prevent a proposed union with Greece and set up a rival government in the ethnic Turkish part of Cyprus that only it recognizes. In London last month, President Abdullah Gul disparaged Cyprus as “half a country” that would lead a “miserable union,” Milliyet, a Turkish newspaper, reported. Then, when France took the unusual step last week of proposing that Turkey be invited to take part in a meeting of the union’s foreign ministers to discuss Syria, Cyprus vetoed the idea.

A century ago when the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, Turkey acquired the unwelcome nickname “the sick man of Europe.” Now many Turks cannot help but gloat that Turkey’s economy is forecast to grow at a 7.5 percent rate this year while Europe is sputtering.

“Those who called us ‘sick’ in the past are now ‘sick’ themselves,” Zafer Caglayan, Turkey’s minister of economy, said recently. “May God grant them recovery.”

Levent business district at night.

It is all but certain that Turkey’s membership talks, which have made scant progress in many areas since 2006, will make none at all when Cyprus takes over the union’s rotating presidency in July 2012, because the Turkish government has said it will boycott the presidency, effectively freezing negotiations. If the talks are still deadlocked in 2014, Turkish officials say privately, they could be abandoned.

Public opinion in Turkey has already turned away. According to surveys by the German Marshall Fund, 73 percent of Turks saw membership as a good thing in 2004, but only 38 percent felt that way by 2010.

The country’s minister for European Union affairs, Egemen Bagis, said in an interview that Turkey remained committed to joining. With its young and dynamic work force, large domestic market and growing regional role, he said, Turkey would be a bigger asset than ever to the teetering union.

“Hold on, Europe,” he said, “Turkey is coming to the rescue.”

But business people in Turkey, who have long supported membership, are finding it harder to make the case.

Mr. Yarar, the business group leader, owns 404, a chemical company, and Lezzo, a food company, which makes the country’s well-known apple tea. He noted that Turkey’s trade patterns were shifting eastward: though Europe still bought about 56 percent of Turkey’s exports in 2010, some 20 percent went to the Middle East, compared with 12.5 percent in 2004. “It may take 10 years, but the Arab Spring will make these markets even more attractive,” he said.

Cooler relations with Turkey are costing Europe influence in the Arab world, where Turkey, a NATO member bordered by Iran, Iraq and Syria, is fast becoming an important interlocutor for the West. For the first time in decades, analysts say, Europe needs Turkey more than Turkey needs Europe.

To the protesters in the streets of Cairo or Homs, Mr. Erdogan, a pious Muslim leading a prosperous country of 78 million, is a powerful symbol of the compatibility of democracy and Islam, while Europe’s perceived hostility to its Muslim residents undercuts its influence in the region.

Senior Turkish officials say that Mr. Erdogan has turned away from Europe and embraced Washington instead, a development signaled when Turkey announced sanctions against Syria. While Mr. Erdogan coordinated closely on the issue with President Obama, the officials said, Europe played only a supporting role.

The waning of European influence may also corrode Turkey’s ambition to be a model of democracy for the Arab world. Human rights advocates say that without the viable prospect of European Union membership to motivate restraint, the Turkish government’s authoritarian streak is growing unchecked. A report by the European Commission in November said that 64 journalists were in jail in Turkey, and one prominent media group that has criticized the ruling party was hit with a $2.5 billion tax fine.

In this abidingly cosmopolitan city, though, even ambitious and well-educated young people are fed up with the European Union. At a bustling cafe on the western side of the Bosporus, the strait that cuts through the city and separates Europe from Asia, Tugce Erbad, 19, a student of international finance, said her generation of Turks was not interested in joining a sinking European Union. Yet she insisted that she and her friends were still more drawn to Europe than to the Arab world.

“I would rather go to Paris than Beirut,” she said, before quickly adding: “Turkey is neither east or west. We are moving in our own direction.”

By DAN BILEFSKY

Published: December 4, 2011

----

Avrupa Birliği ekonomik bir salgınla boğuşurken Türkiye sesini giderek yükselten bir güç olarak yüzünü batıdan çok doğuya dönüyor ve kendine soruyor: Avrupa beni geri çevirmeden önce ben mi onu geri çevirmeliyim?

2002'de güçlü bir şekilde iktidara gelen karizmatik başbakan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, öncelikli hedef olarak Türkiye'nin AB'ye girmesini belirlemişti. Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi de Türkiye'yi Batılı normlara yaklaştırmak için azınlık haklarının geliştirilmesi ve ifade özgürlüğü üzerindeki sınırlamaların kaldırılması gibi tartışmalı sorunlara el atmıştı. Fakat Türkiye'nin çabaları bazı AB üyeleri tarafından şüphe, hatta küçümsemeyle karşılandı ve bunda elbette ki ülkenin neredeyse tümüyle Müslüman olan, kalabalık bir nüfusa sahip olmasının payı vardı. Sonuçta bitmek bilmeyen müzakereler kesin üyeliğe giden bir yola bile giremedi.

Şimdiyse Avrupa kısır döngüye giren bir kredi kriziyle sarsılıyor ve Arap Baharı'nın yarattığı fırsatlar Türkiye'ye bölgesel güç olarak yeni bir nüfuz kazandırıyor. Türkler ise birkaç yıl önce akla bile gelmeyen bir seçeneği, Avrupa Birliği'nden tamamen vazgeçmeyi değerlendiriyor.

20 bin şirketin üye olduğu, muhafazakâr bir işadamları derneğinin kurucusu olan Erol Yarar, "Başbakan Erdoğan Türkiye'yi Batı'ya yaklaştıran ilk Müslüman lider olmak istiyordu ama Avrupa ona ihanet ettikten sonra böyle bir arzusu kalmadı" diyor. "Bugün AB'nin Türkiye üzerinde hiçbir nüfuzu kalmadı ve Türklerin çoğu kendilerine, 'Böyle bir kargaşaya girmenin ne anlamı var?' diye soruyor."

Türkiye'nin Ortadoğu'da giderek güçlenen dış politikası, geçen ay Suriye'ye uygulanmaya başlayan sert yaptırımlar ve olası bir askeri müdahale hazırlıklarıyla kanıtlandı. İsrail'in Filistinlilere olan tutumuna karşı da Türkiye bölgede güçlü bir ses olarak doğdu. Bu arada Türk yetkililer, AB'yle ilişkilerin onulmaz bir noktaya ulaştığını, dönemsel başkanlığın 2012'de Kıbrıs'a geçecek olmasının durumu daha da güçleştirdiğini belirtiyorlar. Türkiye 1974'te adaya çıkarma yapmış ve etnik Türk olan kuzey kesiminde rakip bir hükümet kurmuştu. O günden beri de Kıbrıs'la siyasi bir kavga yaşanıyor.

Bir Türk gazetesinin haberine göre Cumhurbaşkanı Abdullah Gül, geçen ay Londra'da Kıbrıs'ı "yarım bir ülke", başkanlık edeceği birliği de "sefil bir birlik" olarak nitelemişti. Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nun dağıldığı yüz yıl önce Türkiye, "Avrupa'nın hasta adamı" olarak anılıyordu. Şimdiyse Türk ekonomisinin bu yıl yüzde 7,5 büyümesi bekleniyor ve Avrupa da tekliyor. Ekonomi Bakanı Zafer Çağlayan geçtiğimiz günlerde, "Eskiden bize 'hasta' diyenler şimdi kendileri 'hasta' oldu" dedi.

Türk yetkililer özel demeçlerinde üyelik müzakerelerinin 2014'te hâlâ önünün açılmaması halinde görüşmelerden çekilebileceklerini belirtiyor. Düşünce kuruluşu German Marshall Fund'un anketlerine göre 2004'te Türklerin yüzde 73'ü AB üyeliğine olumlu bakarken, 2010'da bu oran yüzde 38'e düştü. Bir röportajda, tam üyelik hedefine bağlı kaldıklarını ifade eden AB Bakanı Egemen Bağış, genç ve dinamik bir işgücüne, büyük bir iç pazara ve artan bir bölgesel nüfuza sahip olduklarını, dolayısıyla bocalayan birlik için her zamankinden daha çok değere bindiklerini belirtti. "Dayan, Avrupa" dedi. "Türkiye imdadınıza yetişiyor." Fakat üyeliği uzun süredir desteklemiş olan Türk işadamları artık bundan o kadar emin değil. 2010'da Türkiye ihracatının yüzde 56'sı Avrupa'ya, yüzde 20'sini de (2004'te bu oran yüzde 12'ydi) Ortadoğu'ya yaptı.

Yarar, "Belki 10 yıl alır ama Arap Baharı bu pazarları daha cazip bir hale getirecektir" diyor. Türkiye'yle ilişkilerin soğuması, Avrupa'nın Arap dünyasındaki nüfuzunu da etkiliyor. Oysa İran, Irak ve Suriye'ye sınırı olan NATO üyesi Türkiye'nin bir aracı olarak Batı için önemi hızla artıyor. Uzmanlar, onlarca y ıldır i lk k ez A vrupa'nın Türkiye'ye olan ihtiyacının, Türkiye'nin Avrupa'ya olan ihtiyacından daha fazla olduğunu belirtiyor. Üst düzey Türk yetkililer de Erdoğan'ın artık Avrupa yerine Washington'a öncelik verdiğine, Türkiye'nin Suriye'ye uyguladığı yaptırımların da bunu yansıttığına dikkat çekiyor.

Erdoğan konuyla ilgili olarak Başkan Obama'yla yakın temas halindeyken Avrupa'nın ancak yardımcı rolünde olduğunu ifade ediyorlar. İnsan hakları savunucularıysa somut bir AB üyeliği hedefi olmadan Türk hükümetindeki otoriter damarın denetimsiz kalacağından endişeleniyor. İstanbul'da, Avrupa'yla Asya'yı ayıran Boğaziçi'nin batı yakasındaki hareketli bir kafede oturan 19 yaşındaki uluslararası finans öğrencisi Tuğçe Erbad, kendi kuşağının iflas eden bir Avrupa Birliği'ne girmek istemediğini söylüyor. Fakat ısrarla belirttiğine göre o da, arkadaşları da kendilerini Arap dünyasından çok Avrupa'ya yakın hissediyor. Yine de, "Türkiye ne doğu, ne batıdır. Biz kendi yolumuzda ilerliyoruz" diyor.

Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light, According to One Experiment

2011-09-23T00:36:00.001-05:00

If it's true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein's theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light.

In fact, the result would be so revolutionary that it's sure to be met with skepticism all over the world. "I suspect that the bulk of the scientific community will not take this as a definitive result unless it can be reproduced by at least one and preferably several experiments," says V. Alan Kostelecky, a theorist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He adds, however, "I'd be delighted if it were true."

The data come from a 1300-metric-ton particle detector named Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA). Lurking in Italy's subterranean Gran Sasso National Laboratory, OPERA detects neutrinos that are fired through the earth from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. As the particles hardly interact at all with other matter, they stream right through the ground, with only a very few striking the material in the detector and making a noticeable shower of particles.

Fat lady singing? The OPERA particle detector may have spotted neutrinos traveling faster than light, which would bring down the curtain on special relativity as an exact theory. Credit: OPERA collaboration

Over 3 years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. "It's a straightforward time-of-flight measurement," says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. "We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school." Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds.

However, even Ereditato says it's way too early to declare relativity wrong. "I would never say that," he says. Rather, OPERA researchers are simply presenting a curious result that they cannot explain and asking the community to scrutinize it. "We are forced to say something," he says. "We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest." The results will be presented at a seminar tomorrow at CERN.

The big question is whether OPERA researchers have discovered particles going faster than light, or whether they have been misled by an unidentified "systematic error" in their experiment that's making the time look artificially short. Chang Kee Jung, a neutrino physicist at Stony Brook University in New York, says he'd wager that the result is the product of a systematic error. "I wouldn't bet my wife and kids because they'd get mad," he says. "But I'd bet my house."

Jung, who is U.S. spokesperson for a similar experiment in Japan called T2K, says the tricky part is accurately measuring the time between when the neutrinos are born by slamming a burst of protons into a solid target and when they actually reach the detector. That timing relies on the global positioning system, and the GPS measurements can have uncertainties of tens of nanoseconds. "I would be very interested in how they got a 10-nanosecond uncertainty, because from the systematics of GPS and the electronics, I think that's a very hard number to get."

No previous measurements obviously rule out the result, says Kostelecky, who has spent 25 years developing a theory, called the standard model extension, that accounts for all possible types of violations of special relativity in the context of particle physics. "If you had told me that there was a claim of faster-than-light electrons, I would be a lot more skeptical," he says. The possibilities for neutrinos are less constrained by previous measurements, he says.

Still, Kostelecky repeats the old adage: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Even Ereditato says that one measurement does not extraordinary evidence make.

by Adrian Cho on 22 September 2011, 2:28 PM

New Materials May Allow One-Way Light

2011-05-04T13:29:00.000-05:00

Normally, a glass window doesn’t care where a ray of light came from. But special kinds of glass or plastic could be a bit pickier.

Nonlinear materials could distinguish between two rays of light coming from opposite directions, say two Italian physicists. Blocking a ray from one direction and allowing in a ray from the other could be useful for making a one-way street for light.

Textbook optics prohibits this kind of directional discrimination. Everyday linear materials are governed by the reciprocity theorem, which says that a beam of light coming from the left will pass through and reflect off a material in the same way as a beam of light coming from the right.
But nonlinear materials, which can change as light passes through them, play by different rules.

“Without nonlinearity this asymmetry would not be possible,” says Giulio Casati, a physicist at the University of Insubria in Como, Italy.

A textbook pendulum, for instance, swings with a steady frequency that can be calculated from equations. But a nonlinear pendulum’s frequency changes over time in a way that can be worked out only with a computer.

Casati mathematically modeled the behavior of light passing through two layers of nonlinear material. The light changes the properties of the materials as it passes through, which in turn changes the behavior of light in complex ways.

Thanks to this back-and-forth dance, the frequency of light that can pass through these materials depends on the direction of the light, he reports in the April 22 Physical Review Letters.
“Other people have used nonlinearity, but they use it in a different way,” says Panayotis Kevrekidis, a mathematical physicist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who wasn’t involved in the research.
Previous attempts to break down the reversibility of light used photonic crystals. Those materials can only block a portion of the light that has been boosted to twice its original frequency.
Casati’s initial simulations describe a way to transmit about 80 percent of the light traveling in one direction while blocking about 70 percent of the light coming from the opposite direction.
This selectivity could be useful for making wave diodes. Just as a traditional diode allows electrical current to flow only one direction in a piece of electronics, a wave diode could guide the flow of light in quantum or optical computing.

“This simple model may also apply to more general situations, like acoustics or different kinds of waves,” says Stefano Lepri, a physicist at the Italian National Research Council Institute for Complex Systems in Florence and a coauthor of the study. Materials that respond to sound waves nonlinearly could, he suggests, be useful for one-directional soundproofing.

Image: A proposed wave diode would allow light coming from the left to pass through (image on left) but reflect light coming from the other direction (right). (Stefano Lepri/Physical Review Letters)

By Devin Powell, Science News
April 20, 2011

Bacterial Biofilms Beat Teflon in Repelling Liquids

2011-05-04T13:27:00.000-05:00

Slimy mats of bacteria called biofilms may be the most liquid-repellent materials in nature, researchers have discovered.

“There are a few man-made materials that can perform better, and they have to be made in clean rooms. They’re incredibly expensive and brittle,” said materials scientist Alexander Epstein of Harvard University, co-author of the new study. “Making biofilm is as easy as growing bacteria.”
The goo secreted by Bacillus subtilis bacteria not only deflects water like a lotus leaf, but also repels concentrated alcohol, acetone and even vaporized liquid, according to a study published Jan. 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Biofilms are communities of bacteria that stick together using a mixture of sugars and proteins called the extracellular matrix, which takes on a wrinkled form under powerful microscopes (see image below). Since the discovery of bacteria in the late 1600s, most research has covered individual cells. It’s only since the 1990s that scientists have begun to understand the pervasiveness and importance of biofilms.

“We’re realizing more and more that almost all bacteria in nature are found as biofilms,” Epstein said. “It offers a lot of advantages for them, including better protection and increased chances they’ll stick to sources of food. It’s crazy stuff.”

While trying to map the internal structure of B. subtilis biofilm using a vaporized radioactive tracer that would show up in x-ray photos, the researchers found it couldn’t get inside. They were frustrated at first, but Epstein said his team soon realized the significance of the stubborn biofilm.
“We started to put different liquids on it. Concentrated alcohols just [beaded up],” Epstein said. For comparison, the researchers also tried a non-stick Teflon surface. “We found the biofilms substantially superior to Teflon,” he said.

To analyze resistance to wetting, Epstein and his team measured the angle between droplets of liquid and the materials’ surfaces (right). At 10 percent alcohol, similar to wine’s concentration, Teflon started getting wet. Biofilms, however, balled up all concentrations of alcohol up to 80 percent (similar to Everclear). Liquids wetted biofilms only after sitting on them for minutes or hours.
Epstein isn’t suggesting we grow biofilms for frying pans or rain jackets, but thinks the research will inspire practical new applications. His team ultimately hopes to resolve biofilm’s molecular structure to develop new materials.
“We don’t fully understand it, but it’s broadly true that you need both protein and sugars for this repelling property,” Epstein wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Sugars absolutely have to be there, but we don’t know why. We’re doing some followup research on that now,” he said.

Images: Courtesy of PNAS/Alexander Epstein et al. 1) A bead of 50 percent ethanol rests on a biolfilm of B. subtilis bacteria sliced from a Petri dish. 2) Wetness of a surface is determined by the contact angle of liquid droplets, and increases sharply when a droplet’s inner contact angle is less than 90 degrees. 3) A scanning electron micrograph of a mutant B. subtilis strain’s extracellular matrix, or ECM.

By Dave Mosher
January 31, 2011

Scientists Create Material 10x Stronger than Steel, with Malleability

2011-05-04T13:21:00.000-05:00

An Australian university constructed graphene paper by milling graphite, and for the first time it was malleable, 10 times stronger than steel, 6 times lighter, and more rigid at the same time.

A UTS (University of Technology, Sydney) research team recently created strong graphene paper from graphite with a tensile strength ten times greater than that of steel. It is also six times lighter, two times harder, and exhibited thirteen times more resistance to bending than steel, and of course, it does not rust.

Graphene is a material consisting of carbon nanotubes which has very unique property combinations which composite materials do not, such as malleability, exceptional thermal and electrical conductivity, high strength, the ability to be rigid as well, very light weight, and the material required to construct it is not rare. Nothing on the planet has ever even come remotely close to these exceptional characteristic combinations.

The lead researcher Ali Reza Ranjbartoreh said: “No one else has used a similar production and heat testing method to find and carry out such exceptional mechanical properties for graphene paper. We are definitely well ahead of other research societies.”

Ali Reza Ranjbartoreh also added: “The exceptional mechanical properties of synthesised GP render it a promising material for commercial and engineering applications. Not only is it lighter, stronger, harder and more flexible than steel it is also a recyclable and sustainable manufacturable product that is eco-friendly and cost effective in its use.”

There are many implications of such a technological advancement. If affordable, it can:

Make significantly stronger, very efficient, more environmentally sound, and lighter vehicles, from economy cars, to trains, buses, ships, and passenger jets.
Extend the range and performance of electric vehicles due to its light weight, and reduce the required battery capacity due to less weight, because less weight requires less power, and power is provided by the batteries.
Make much stronger, lighter, and more efficient wind turbine blade designs possible. Blades could bend instead of break. It would be able to prevent damage to wind turbine blades caused by lightning strikes. Wind turbine blades are normally constructed with composite non-metals which do not conduct electricity well and therefore cannot safely channel lightning into the ground. When lightning strikes a composite wind turbine blade, the temperature of the air inside it can increase 30,000 degrees Celsius, causing it to expand rapidly (explode). The blades are equipped with lightning receptors at the tip which channel the current into the ground, and this is helpful, but not always enough. Like lightning rods, wind turbines need to be designed so that they attract lightning to conductive materials such as metals that channel them into the ground. In other words, they divert them into the ground so they don’t reach sensitive components, because electricity follows the path of least resistance.
All portable devices such as notebook computers, tablet PCs, cellphones, music players, could be stronger while still being lightweight.

Another key advantage of this material is that it is recyclable.
Australian mines happen to contain a large amount of graphite, meaning that the widespread use of such a material in the future could be very beneficial to Australia. This industry is likely to grow in the foreseeable future as it strides up a long path to becoming mainstream.

Mr Ranjbartoreh said that the results of this project promise significant benefits to the use of this material in the aviation and automotive industries.

Physorg
Images via University of Technology Sydney

Solar Cell Efficiency Could Be Boosted by Minimizing Defects

2011-05-04T13:15:00.000-05:00

Nano-cones could help neutralize manufacturing defects in solar cells

A new advance in solar cells that tips the surface with minuscule cone structures could neutralize manufacturing defects, boosting efficiency up to 80 percent.

In conventional solar panels, more than 50 percent of the charges generated by sunlight are lost due to defects, said Jun Xu, a researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The irregularities in the formation of the crystalline structure of solar cells can trap electrons and limit the transfer of sunlight to electrical energy.

SOLAR FLAWS: Manufacturing defects impair solar cells ability to turn sunlight into electricity, but a new technique might help minimize the flaws. Image: Stephan Kambor via Wikimedia Commons

This is why Xu and his team are looking at how nanocones -- cone-shaped structures one-millionth of a meter long -- can neutralize the burden of defects.

The negative-polarity nanocones are made of zinc oxide, and surrounded by a positive-polarity cadmium telluride semiconductor that absorbs sunlight. The three-dimensional cone structure acts as a junction between the zinc oxide and cadmium telluride, making for a smoother conversion of the solar charge to electricity.

The idea, said Xu, is not to "fix" the defects, but to make them irrelevant. With the nanocone structure, the team was able to increase the overall electric charge to overcome the pitfalls of defects.
"If [manufacturers] make a defect with no way to solve it, we make the defect less relevant," he said. "You need to increase the efficiency ... you need to be able to increase change of transport. With a nanocone structure, you can do that."

On a small level, the efficiency gains are relatively minor -- rising to 3.2 percent, compared to 1.8 percent for panels without the nanocones. But Xu believes this will pay off on a larger scale.
"Our efficiency is moderate in generation, but the difference between the two platforms is huge," he said, referring to the models with and without nanocones. In the real world, even a much smaller percentage increase would be an important achievement for solar.

"If we can reduce the defective material, and we can increase the efficiency about 15 or 10 percent," he said, "that would be a huge success."

Zinc oxide and cadmium telluride serve as relatively cheap materials to create nanocones, as well, said Xu, with the potential to reduce the cost of commercial solar panels if applied to silicon -- the most common material used for solar panels.

The research will be published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' IEEE Proceedings.

From Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

Snowflakes Under an Electron Microscope

2011-01-24T22:19:00.001-06:00

If you've ever wondered what snowflakes truly look like, spend a few moments with these images from the Electron Microscopy Unit of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland.

At the EMU, where other areas of focus include crop pathogens and livestock diseases, "studying the structure of snow is vital to several areas of science as well as to activities that affect our daily lives."
That's no doubt true. But for the rest of us, snow's structure is just beautiful. Enjoy!

The most complex snow-crystal classification system was devised in 1966 by Japanese meteorologists C. Magono and C.W. Lee. Entitled "Meteorological Classification of Natural Snow Crystals" (pdf), it describes more than 80 types of crystal. Above is P2b, or "stellar crystal with sectorlike ends."

The difference between what's seen under a light microscope — or would be seen by our eyes, were they a hundred times more powerful — and an electron microscope is shown in these two views of hoar crystals from a Wyoming snow pit.

For a near-instant, all-natural 3-D snowflake, cross your eyes and relax your vision until you can see three images. Then focus on the central image. Voila!

One more 3-D snowflake. If you dig this, there are six more available from the Electron Microscopy Unit.

Snow crystals often fall through supercooled cloud droplets, which can stay unfrozen down to -40 degrees Fahrenheit. The droplets coat snow crystals with still more crystals, and that frost is called rime.

Snowflake structure is visible at many levels, from a relatively coarse 100x magnification (top left) down to 1,800x (bottom right).

Falling snowflakes were collected at different temperatures on Bearden Mountain, West Virginia. At top left, 14 degrees Fahrenheit; top right, -4 degrees Fahrenheit; below, -22 degrees Fahrenheit.

Images : Electron and Confocal Microscopy Laboratory, Agricultural Research Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture.

http://emu.arsusda.gov/snowsite/default.html

The Emergence of Holographic Video

2010-12-20T14:46:00.000-06:00

Experimental networked display refreshes holograms every two seconds

An image of an F4 Phantom fighter jet created with the new 3D telepresence system.
Researchers at the University of Arizona (UA), Tucson, have developed a holographic system that can transmit a series of 3D images in near-real-time, a precursor to holographic videoconferencing.

The system incorporates a novel, photorefractive polymer--one that can rapidly refresh holographic images and is scalable for production--coupled to a unique system for recording and transmitting 3D images of individuals and objects via Ethernet.

Lead author Pierre-Alexandre Blanche and his colleagues from the university and Nitto Denko Technical Corp. of Oceanside, Calif., describe the breakthrough in the cover story of the Nov. 4, 2010, issue of Nature.

"This advance brings us a step closer to the ultimate goal of realistic holographic telepresence with high-resolution, full-color, human-size, 3D images that can be sent at video refresh rates from one part of the world to the other," says co-author and project lead Nasser Peyghambarian of UA and the Director of NSF's multi-institution Engineering Research Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN).

The researchers had previously demonstrated a refreshable polymer display system, but it could refresh images only once every four minutes. The new system can refresh images every two seconds; while not yet ideal for a display, the rate is more than one hundred times faster.

Additionally, using a single-laser system for writing the images onto the photorefractive polymer, the researchers can display visuals in color. While the current refresh rate for multi-color display is even slower than for monochromatic images, the development suggests a true 3D, multicolor system may be feasible.
"This breakthrough opens new opportunities for optics as a means to transport images in real time," says Lynn Preston, director of the NSF Engineering Research Centers program that supports CIAN. "Such a system can have an important impact on telepresence, telemedicine, engineering design and manufacturing, and other applications. This is an early and tremendously important outcome from this three-year old center."
More information is available in the UA press release.

Project lead Nasser Peyghambarian of the University of Arizona, who is also director of NSF's multi-institution Engineering Research Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN), explains the technology--a holographic system that can transmit a series of 3D images in near-real-time, a precursor to holographic videoconferencing.

Credit: National Science Foundation

A hologram of a member of Peyghambarian's lab appears in the photorefractive polymer screen. Moving the camera from side to side reveals what the researchers call parallax, one of the novelties of this research: The holographic image presents itself from different perspectives as the viewer moves his or her head from side to side or up and down.

Credit: N. Peyghambarian, University of Arizona

This holographic representation of a vase shows different colors capable with the new system and an effect known as parallax, which makes the image life-like: As the viewer moves his or her head from side to side or up and down, the holographic image presents itself from different perspectives.

Credit: N. Peyghambarian, University of Arizona

A pulsed 50-Hz Laser inscribes a holographic image of a F-4 fighter jet into the photo-refractive polymer screen.

Credit: N. Peyghambarian, University of Arizona

A laser inscribes a series of holograms into the photorefractive polymer screen. Each iteration of the writing process takes only two seconds.

Credit: N. Peyghambarian, University of Arizona

Study co-author and project lead Nasser Peyghambarian of the University of Arizona, Tucson, the director of NSF's multi-institution Engineering Research Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN).

Credit: University of Arizona

Team member Vivian Sieh holds up the photorefractive polymer that has enabled the new 3D telepresence system to achieve a two-second refresh rate.

Credit: University of Arizona

This material is based upon work supported by the Engineering Research Center Program of the National Science Foundation under NSF Cooperative Support Agreement Award No. EEC-0812072

-NSF-
November 3, 2010
Press Release 10-207

Carbon Nanotubes Boost Power of Lithium Battery

2010-12-20T14:32:00.000-06:00

A new battery demonstrated a power output 10 times higher, for its size, than what is expected of a conventional rechargeable lithium battery.
Imagine that the same rechargeable battery in your cell phone could power a device that requires 10 times the energy. That possibility may be closer than you think.

A battery created by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated an increased capacity for charge by roughly a third and a power output 10 times higher, for its size, than what is expected of a conventional rechargeable lithium battery. The results were published yesterday in Nature Nanotechnology.

The research team, led by Yang Shao-Horn, an associate professor of materials science and mechanical engineering, and Paula Hammond, professor of chemical engineering at MIT, achieved this by creating an entirely new kind of electrode -- in this case, by modifying the positive end of the conventional battery, which is called the cathode.

The collaboration began through graduate student Seung Woo Lee, studying fuel cells, who was advised by both Shao-Horn and Hammond. Lee defended his doctoral dissertation this spring.

Using commercially available carbon nanotubes -- hollow cylinders 50,000 times thinner than a human hair but composed of carbon atoms -- the team fabricated the cathode entirely out of the nanotubes put down in layers.

The large surface area of a nanotube allows it to store more charge than other types of carbon, such as graphite, but previous battery fabrication methods tended to obscure these surfaces.

Using the exposed surfaces allows more charge to be stored -- increasing capacity -- while also letting those charges migrate more easily -- increasing power.

The findings of this research challenge the conventional wisdom about what materials could be used in the cathode of a battery. It also stimulates discussion about what such powerful batteries could be used for.

Small scale experiments so far

Increased power output makes for a great capacitor as well, by efficiently storing charge and delivering that energy precisely when it is needed. Their work, Shao-Horn said, could "lead to a device with performance that bridges batteries and electrochemical capacitors."

So far, the thickest cathode the group has made for these experiments is only 3 micrometers -- 3 one-thousandths of a millimeter. This is tiny when compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries that have electrodes roughly 100 to 200 micrometers thick.

In their present form, Shao-Horn said, their cathode "could be ideal for microelectronic devices."
But these battery-capacitors are also useful in a number of other applications such as emergency power, "energy capture and power assist in cars, trucks and machinery requiring many start-stop cycles," said Shao-Horn. Successfully scaling up this design could dramatically reduce the inefficiencies in future lithium-ion batteries.

However, Shao-Horn preferred to err on the side of caution when peering into the future of this new technology, saying they are only just beginning to understand the underlying chemistry involved.
"Further work is required," said Shao-Horn, "to demonstrate that power and energy performance is maintained with thicker electrodes." A crucial next step of this research is to demonstrate an electrode with a thickness of 50 micrometers -- more than 10 times the size of what they made for their experiments.

The next phase is scaling it up

Doing so would allow the researchers to test whether the electrical properties of the carbon nanotubes can be successfully scaled up to greater and greater thicknesses. Potentially, Shao-Horn said, there is "no limit" on thickness. But in order to do this, Hammond's expertise in biomaterials will be essential.

The layer-by-layer fabrication technique used to make the 3-micrometer-thick carbon nanotube electrode described in the published paper was an extremely time-consuming process. For each layer of nanotubes, a sample had to be dipped into a solution awash with nanotubes.

Then, covered in the solution, the sample had to be left out for 15 to 20 minutes as gravity slowly pulled the nanotubes down through the liquid and onto the sample surface. This procedure had to be repeated about 400 times in order to pile up enough layers to reach a thickness of 3 micrometers.

To bring the layering process up to reasonable, commercially viable speeds, Hammond is appropriating an automatic spray technique she developed for producing layers of polymer materials.

"The spray method is 40 to 100 times faster," she said, taking only seconds to lay down each new layer of nanotubes rather than the 15 to 20 minutes it normally takes. The true test will come once much thicker electrodes are tested.
Other battery research from Shao-Horn's group has been highlighted in other ClimateWire stories.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
By Darius Dixon and Climatewire | June 22, 2010

NanoCamo Is the Next Small Thing in Fashion

2010-12-20T14:26:00.000-06:00

A new nanoassembly technique could make chameleon-like camouflage possible.

By using specially-designed proteins as nanomotors, Sandia National Laboratory researchers have created a system that can assemble quantum dots into bright, fluorescent rings. In this video, you can watch the formation of those rings, which are about five microns across, less than a tenth of the width of a human hair.
If these quantum dots were embedded on the surface of an object, the formation of the rings would cause the object to change color to the naked eye. Reverse the process and the color would change back. That raises the possibility of fast color changes of the sort that some animals use to blend in with their environments.
“Camouflage outfits that blend with a variety of environments without need of an outside power source — say, blue when at sea and then brown in a desert environment — is where this work could eventually lead,” George Bachand, the principal investigator at Sandia said in a press release.
But that’s probably a decade or more away, Bachand said.

Nobel Worthy: Best Graphene Close-Ups

2010-12-20T14:23:00.001-06:00

Sorry diamond lovers, but graphene is the most awesome form of carbon out there. Evidence: Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, the two scientists who isolated one-atom-thick sheets of the stuff in 2004, won the Nobel Prize this morning -- netting themselves a pot of 10 million Swedish kroner (about $1.49 million).
Despite its razor-thin makeup, graphene is one of the strongest, lightest and most conductive materials known to humankind. It’s also 97.3 percent transparent, but looks really cool under powerful microscopes. We’ve corralled some of the best shots here, with a bonus video of graphene being punished by an electron beam.

Mmmm... Graphene Cake

Theoretical physicist Philip Russell Wallace predicted graphene’s existence in 1947, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that scientists began looking for it in earnest. Forty years later, researchers practically wrote off isolating single-layer graphene. If the hexagonal layers didn’t roll up into buckeyballs or nanotubes, so the thinking went, they’d disintegrate entirely.
Geim and Novoselov persisted, however, and figured out how to isolate it using objects common to any office: Scotch tape and graphite, which is found in pencil leads.
At the top-right of this image is a 10-micron-wide, 30-layer-thick slice of graphene sheets.

Image: Science

Between the Graphene Sheets

The problem with seeing a single sheet of graphene is that it’s practically invisible.
To prove in 2004 that they’d isolated one using the tape-and-graphite method, Keim and Novoselov peeled off a single flake of graphene and stuck it onto silicon dioxide (the same stuff used to make semiconductors in electronics). Similar to how a sheen of oil becomes visible in a rainbow of colors on water, the combination of graphene on oxidized silicon revealed the flake in an electron microscope.

Image: Science

There's a Hole in My Graphene

Graphene may be the strongest carbon-based material, period, but it can’t stop a beam of electrons.
In this video, Berkeley Lab scientists subject an unsuspecting sheet of graphene to the punishment of a powerful electron beam. The beam punched a hole in the graphene, causing individual carbon atoms to scramble for a spot to stick at the hole's edge.

Video/image: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Pounding the Graphene Skins

Graphene drum? Check. Laser microphone? Check. Rock on.

In a 2007 test of graphene’s ability to resonate, researchers at Pomona College in California and Cornell University in New York stretched a 2-nanometer-wide ribbon of graphene over a silicon dioxide trench, then used an electrode to vibrate the sheet.

Image: Science

Graphene Bubble

Graphene is made up of carbon arranged into chicken-wire-like hexagonal rings, yet the bonds between any carbon atoms can stretch up to 20 percent. The arrangement may seem innocuous, yet it paves the way for quantum mechanical weirdness to manifest itself.

Case in point: When scientists sandwiched graphene onto platinum, then popped out a microscopic bubble, electrons in the graphene sheet behaved as if they were being punished by a magnetic field stronger than any ever produced in a laboratory. No magnetic field was in sight, so the effect was called (naturally) pseudo-magnetism.

Image: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Ribbons 'O Graphene

To say graphene conducts electricity well is a gross understatement. The electrons buzzing around graphene’s carbon atoms are unusually free to roam and behave more like massless pieces of light called photons. This allows graphene to be used like a high-performance transistor capable of operating at speeds 100 to 1,000 times faster than silicon-based transistors.

Trouble is, graphene moves electrons around a little too well. The threshold between graphene’s on/off state is exceedingly small, causing it to conduct electricity even in an “off” state. By growing micron-thin ribbons of graphene (above) instead of full sheets, however, chemists like Hongjie Dai at Stanford University have raised that threshold more than 10,000 times. Further improvements could lead to high-speed graphene-powered electronics.

Image: Hongjie Dai/Stanford University

Graphene Transistor

Capitalizing on graphene’s electrical awesomeness, HRL Laboratories (owned by Boeing and General Motors) built the world’s first functional radio frequency (RF) transistor using graphene in 2008. The tiny device, known as an RF field-effect transistor, can pick up radio frequencies while hardly gobbling any electrical power.

The company has since scaled up a full-size chip of the transistors, but alleged practical uses in imaging and communications remain to be seen.

Image: HRL Laboratories
By Dave Mosher October 5, 2010

New X-ray Camera Sees Through Melting Metal

2010-12-20T14:16:00.000-06:00

A new high-speed X-ray video camera, now the fastest in the world, can see through molten metal and watch weld-weakening flaws form in real-time.

The $670,000 device successfully captured X-ray footage on Nov. 23 at 5,000 frames-per-second (fps), or five times faster than previous X-ray cameras (and 83 times faster than a consumer camcorder). The high-speed video above shows a laser welding solid aluminum in visible light, followed by the new X-ray-light welding clips.

“With visible light, we could only see the surface of the welding process. You couldn’t see what was happening inside,” said Felix Abt, one of the camera’s designers at the University of Stuttgart. “The only way to see pores that weaken weld seams was to cut the metal into pieces.”

Automotive companies use robots equipped with high-powered lasers to seam cars together with extreme speed and precision. As laser welding continues to get “more powerful, move faster, go deeper” and increase in use, Abt says, it’s increasingly important to understand the dynamics involved.

“Laser welding creates very high-pressure, high-velocity, fluctuating environments. You’re boiling metal that’s cooling almost instantly,” Abt said. “This leads to instabilities that weaken your weld.”

To capture the welding process in action, Abt and his colleague Rudolph Weber use an industrial-strength 4-kilowatt laser, which is roughly 400,000 times more powerful than a DVD drive’s beam. As their laser pummels a hunk of metal moving on a track, a tube fires X-rays through the weld and toward a high-speed video camera.

As a frame of reference, the first clip shows 10,000 fps visible light footage zoomed in on a small 10-by-5-millimeter frame. The fuzzy 1,000 fps and 5,000 fps clips that follow are the new ones filmed in X-ray light.
“The white structure on left is where the laser hits. That’s a capillary of metallic steam,” Abt said, noting aluminum boils at 4,400 degrees Fahrenheit. Whitish globules that break off the capillary are weld-weakening pores that cool in a matter of microseconds.

The new X-ray footage isn’t pretty, Abt says, but in a few months he and Weber will tune the camera to increase its clarity. They also plan to imbue welding samples with tracer materials, such as tungsten carbide, that absorb X-rays and improve image contrast.
“This is really only the beginning, but we now have the ability to watch processes that lead to porosity in real time while we’re welding,” Abt said.

Video: A 4-kilowatt laser melts solid aluminum. The first clip is 10,000 fps in visible light, followed by 1,000 fps and 5,000 fps in X-ray light. Credit: Felix Abt, Rudolph Weber/University of Stuttgart
Image: The device Abt and Weber constructed to record laser welding in X-ray light. The laser hangs from the ceiling, the X-ray cathode is on the left (as the welding itself doesn’t produce X-rays) and the digital video camera is on the right. An exhaust vent pulls fumes away from the rig during welding and a track below moves a metal sample during recording. Credit: Felix Abt/University of Stuttgart

Navy’s Mach 8 Railgun Obliterates Record

2010-12-18T05:54:00.000-06:00

There wasn’t much left of the 23-pound bullet, just a scalded piece of squat metal. That’s what happens when an enormous electromagnetic gun sends its ammo rocketing 5,500 feet in a single second.

The gun that fired the bullet is the Navy’s experimental railgun. The gun has no moving parts or propellants — just a king-sized burst of energy that sends a projectile flying. And today its parents at the Office of Naval Research sent 33 megajoules through it, setting a new world record and making it the most powerful railgun ever developed.

Reporters were invited to watch the test at the Dalghren Naval Surface Warfare Center. A tangle of two-inch thick coaxial cables hooked up to stacks of refrigerator-sized capacitors took five minutes to power juice into a gun the size of a schoolbus built in a warehouse. With a 1.5-million-ampere spark of light and a boom audible in a room 50 feet away, the bullet left the gun at a speed of Mach 8.

All that energy was “dump[ed] in 10 milliseconds,” says Charles Garrett, project manager at Dahlgren for the railgun.

But since there no explosion powering the projectile, why should the railgun have made any noise at all? Answer: the bullet went so fast it released a sonic boom.

Since 2005, the Navy has spent $211 million testing whether it can harness electromagnetic energy into a gun. The ultimate goal is to fire the gun at 64 megajoules, making it capable of sending a bullet 200 miles in six minutes. That’s 10 times farther than the Navy’s already-powerful guns can fire, keeping its ships far out of range of enemy anti-ship systems.

The Navy wants to put the railgun on a ship and power it through the ship’s batteries, something that’ll take years to develop. And since the gun’s power can be adjusted — it depends only on the batteries and the capacitors on board a ship, railgun scientists explained — it could theoretically be used to stop cruise missiles or even ballistic missiles.

That’s still a long way off. The Office of Science and Technology will keep running tests until 2017, largely for “thermal management,” says program manager Roger Ellis, basically to ensure that the materials used for the gun don’t get as fried as the bullet under the intense power generated. The Navy guesstimates that it’ll be ready for shipboard defense between 2020 and 2025.

Oh, and the last record holder for most powerful railgun? The same gun when it fired off a shot using 10.64 megajoules two years ago.

By Spencer Ackerman December 10, 2010

75th Anniversary of the Plane That Changed Everything

2010-12-18T05:50:00.000-06:00

The aviation era started 107 years ago when the Wright brothers first took flight. But the era of the airlines for the flying public didn't really take off until 1935 when the venerable Douglas DC-3 first took to the skies.

Seventy-five years ago the DC-3 ushered in the era of utility flight, one that continues to this day. Oh sure, the DC-3 may not top a lot of people's list of their favorite planes. It's not sleek. It's not sexy. And it's not fast. But despite a production run of just 11 years, the DC-3 remains one of the most important airplanes in the history of aviation.

In the Beginning

The DC-3 first flew Dec. 17, 1935, 32 years to the day after the Wright brothers' first flight.
The DC-3 was a simple evolutionary advance from the DC-1 and DC-2. A pair of 1,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines allowed the plane to carry 21 passengers 1,480 miles at 195 mph. Within a few years airlines had bought more than 400 DC-3s. The government bought more than 10,000 of them as military transports, the C-47.

Photo: Boeing

United We Fly

Like most airliners, the DC-3 was developed at the request of an airline looking for a better way to carry passengers. American Airlines was flying its predecessor, the DC-2, but it wanted to carry more passengers farther and faster. It also wanted something with sleeper berths.
The answer was an evolutionary step forward in the DC line but a revolutionary leap forward in the transportation of people and cargoes. The DC-3 became a workhorse in almost every area. The venerable plane is still working hard today.
Before the DC-3 entered service, passengers could fly coast-to-coast, sort of. On aircraft such as the Boeing 247 and even the DC-2, passengers would usually fly shorter legs during the day, and often take a train at night. The increased range, and to some extent the speed, of the DC-3 allowed passengers to fly coast-to-coast with only three refueling stops, in a blazing 15 hours eastbound — the westbound headwinds added a few more hours.
Above: United Airlines snapped up DC-3s after airlines like American and TWA added them to their fleets. They were faster than the Boeing 247 and could carry more passengers, making them especially attractive to airlines. This DC-3 is owned by Clay Lacy and is still flown regularly.

Photo: KristaLAPrincess/Flickr

DC-3 x Military = C-47

The DC-3 is largely seen as the airplane to popularize air travel. It has also served with distinction with the military as well. The United States Army Air Forces used the military version, the C-47 (affectionately known as the Gooney Bird), for everything during World War II — from dropping paratroopers into France on D-Day to towing combat gliders and flying supplies "over the hump," better known as the Himalayas.
The C-47 remained a key part of the military's air fleet for years after the war, and the plane played a key role in the Berlin Airlift. It also saw duty in Korea.
More than 30 years after its introduction, the Gooney Bird flew missions in Vietnam, where as a heavily laden gunship it was known as "Puff the Magic Dragon." Updated versions of the DC-3 still fly in combat zones today, including Afghanistan, though usually under the auspices of other branches of the government.
Above: The C-47 is perhaps the best known military transport ever. More than 10,000 of them saw duty in the U.S. military, and thousands more were built under license in Russia and Japan over the years.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

Duggy the DC-3

Douglas stopped building the DC-3 in 1946, and the last one off the line was delivered to Belgium's Sabena Airlines. Although no one knows just how many DC-3s remain in service, the figure is widely pegged at around 400. Many old-timers have well above 60,000 hours of flight time, and one DC-3 based in Oregon has more than 91,000 hours on its sturdy airframe.
The surviving planes perform an impressive variety of tasks. The U.S. Forest Service uses them to fight fires. Several countries rely upon them to deliver cargo and people to research sites in Antarctica. And Buffalo Airlines, a tiny carrier in Canada, still uses them for scheduled flights.
Many more are flown by collectors who lovingly restore them and show them off at air shows.
Despite celebrating its 75th anniversary, the DC-3 is going strong. Modernized versions with turbine engines and modern avionics make it almost certain it will still be working hard on its 100th birthday as well.

Above: Duggy was built in 1939 and flew in Europe during World War II. At some point it was sold as surplus for $1,789. Nowadays it makes the rounds of air shows and even has its own website.

Observe the Banana/Flickr

Rosie the Riveter

Women throughout the country chipped in to help the war effort, and scores of them work for the Douglas Aircraft Company building planes like the C-47, the military version of the DC-3. The top photo is from 1942.

Below: Workers sort rivets at the Douglas factory in Long Beach, California.

Photos: Alfred T. Palmer/U.S. Office of War Information. Courtesy Library of Congress.

A Workhorse of the War

The C-47 flew countless missions during World War II, carrying troops and cargo and dropping paratroopers into battle. In this photo from 1942, paratroopers await orders to jump during maneuvers somewhere in England.
Among other missions, C-47s carried the men of Easy Company over occupied France on D-Day, a story chronicled in the book and TV series, Band of Brothers.

Below: A DC-3 flown by the United States Army carries Chinese soldiers to India in this photo from 1943.

Photos: U.S. Army. Courtesy Library of Congress.

C-47 Inspection

The C-47, the military version of the DC-3, was a workhorse during World War II. It ferried men and materiel vast distances, towed gliders and dropped paratroopers into battle. The plane's remarkable performance was due in part to its two radial engines producing up to 1,200 horsepower and its three-blade variable-pitch propellers. In this 1942 photo, a C-47 gets an inspection at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California.

Below: Lt. Mike Hunter, an Army pilot assigned to Douglas Aircraft Company, with a DC-3 in 1942.

Photos: Alfred T. Palmer/U.S. Office of War Information. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Super DC-3 1950

The Super DC-3 was a major modification of the DC-3 with new wings and empennage, redesigned landing gear, lengthened fuselage and more powerful engines. As a replacement for the DC-3, it had considerable appeal to the military, and a few were converted to airline use.

Photo: Boeing

At the Controls

The cockpit of the DC-3 is familiar to pilots of today. The familiar yoke sits in front of the pilot and co-pilot. The engine controls for propeller pitch, throttle and fuel mixture are in the middle.

Photo: NunoCardoso/Flickr

Still Working Hard

Several companies have updated the DC-3 over the years to keep the planes working hard. One firm, Basler Turbo Conversions rebuilds DC-3s and calls the turbine-powered planes the BT-67. They can carry more than 40 percent more cargo and fly more than 20 percent faster than an original DC-3. Granted, that still isn't terribly fast.
Outfitted with a pair of 1,600-horsepower Pratt & Whitney PT-6 turbines, Basler's airplanes serve around the world. In this photo, a BT-67 used by the U.S. Forest Service is touching down at a remote airstrip in Idaho.

Photo: Basler Turbo Conversions

Right at Home in Extreme Conditions

Basler BT-67s have served in both the Arctic and Antarctic for years. Here a trio of turbine converted DC-3s operated by Kenn Borek Air sit on skis near McMurdo Station. That's Mount Erebus in the background.

Photo: Basler Turbo Conversions

Book Your Flight Now

Buffalo Airlines of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, operates the last scheduled DC-3 passenger service. The company mostly hauls cargo, but there are seats available for flights between Hay River and Yellowknife if you find yourself in the neighborhood.

sahlgoode/Flickr

By Jason Paur December 17, 2010

Laser Light Can Lift Tiny Objects

2010-12-06T14:42:00.001-06:00

Light has been put to work generating the same force that makes airplanes fly, a study appearing online December 5 in Nature Photonics shows. With the right design, a uniform stream of light has pushed tiny objects in much the same way that an airplane wing hoists a 747 off the ground.

Researchers have known for a long time that blasting an object with light can push the object away. That’s the idea behind solar sails, which harness radiation for propulsion in space, for instance. “The ability of light to push on something is known,” says study coauthor Grover Swartzlander of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

Light’s new trick is fancier than a boring push: It created the more complicated force called lift, evident when a flow in one direction moves an object perpendicularly. Airfoils generate lift; as an engine propels a plane forward, its cambered wings cause it to rise.

Lightfoils aren’t about to keep an Airbus aloft for the time it takes to fly from JFK to LAX. But arrays of the tiny devices might be used to power micromachines, transport tiny particles or even enable better steering methods on solar sails.

Optical lift is “a really neat idea,” says physicist Miles Padgett of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, but it’s too early to say how the effect might be harnessed. “Maybe it’s useful, maybe it’s not. Time will tell.”
That light can have this unexpected lift effect started with a very simple question, Swartzlander says: “If we have something in the shape of a wing and we shine light through it, what happens?” Modeling experiments told the researchers that an asymmetrical deflection of light would create a surprisingly stable lift force. “So we thought we’d better do an experiment,” Swartzlander says. “Because this just looks too pretty.”

The researchers created tiny rods shaped kind of like airplane wings — flat on one side and rounded on the other. When these micron-sized lightfoils were immersed in water and hit with 130 milliwatts of light from the bottom of the chamber, they started to move up, as expected. But the rods also began moving to the side, a direction perpendicular to the incoming light. Tiny symmetrical spheres didn’t exhibit this lift effect, the team found.
Optical lift is different from the aerodynamic lift created by an airfoil. A plane flies because air flowing faster under its wing exerts more pressure than air flowing above. But in a lightfoil, the lift is created inside the object as the beam shines through. The shape of the transparent lightfoil causes light to be refracted differently depending on where it goes through, which causes a corresponding bending of the beam’s momentum that creates lift.

These lightfoils’ lift angles were about 60 degrees, the team found. “Most aerodynamic things take off at very gradual angles, but this has a very striking, very powerful lift angle,” Swartzlander says. “You can imagine what would happen if your airplane took off at 60 degrees — your stomach would be in your feet.”
As the rods lift, they shouldn’t stall out, the paper predicts. “The subtlety is that it actually self-stabilizes,” Padgett says. “It twists a little bit one way, and you think, ‘Oh dear, it’ll stop working,’ then the light rotates it back again.”
Swartzlander says he hopes to ultimately test the lightfoils in air, too, and try different shapes and materials with various refractive properties. In the study, the researchers used ultraviolet light to generate the lift, but other kinds of light would work just as well, Swartzlander says. “The beautiful thing about this is that it would work as long as you have light.”

Video: Riding a beam of light, a tiny particle thousandths of millimeters in size is pushed sideways by the same force that keeps airplanes aloft. Credit: Swartzlander et al.

Laura Sanders, Science News December 6, 2010 - Wired Mag.

See Also http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/67050/title/Light_can_generate_lift

Archive Gallery: How Science Made Movies Awesome

2010-12-06T14:37:00.000-06:00

Popular Science has been around for 138 years, which gives us a couple of decades on the first commercial motion pictures. After the use of narrative and orchestra music became integral to cinema, filmmakers devoted themselves to elevating movies from experimental form of entertainment into an art form. Not only were we there to break the news when movies finally played sound, but we were privileged enough to receive a couple of enlightening articles from Charles Francis Jenkins, who helped invent the television, and D.W. Griffith, who is credited for creating America's first feature film.

3-D Movies are Here: January 1923

Although Avatar heralded a new, oft-debated era of 3-D movies in late 2009, James Cameron's technology was actually predicated by that of DW Griffith, who previously created The Birth of a Nation, America's first blockbuster. In 1923, movies still lacked color and sound, but Griffith claimed to have developed stereoscopic movies that "would drive startled spectators from their seats." Here's how it'd work: a stereoscoping movie camera would exposes red and green, left and right films simultaneously while filming. Audiences would watch movies using an alternating shutter device, which would filter double-image pictures so that the viewer sees the "right" picture with his right eye, and then the reverse an instant later. How's that for a predecessor to 3-D glasses?

Future Movie Theater: April 1923

The 1920's saw a revolution in movie theater design. Before, people watched movies in five-cent nickelodeon theaters, but once full-length feature films became the norm, studios began building theater chains and movie palaces, which were renowned for their luxuriously large screens and spacious interiors. Samuel Lionel "Roxy" Rothafel, who went on to open New York's Radio City Music Hall in 1932, predicted that movie houses of the future would supplement screens would color-light paintings on curved walls. He envisioned auditoriums holding 5000 persons. While the movie played, hidden projectors would "paint" the walls with moving scenery, giving viewers the illusion that they were actually in the movie. Meanwhile, a hidden orchestra would provide music and sound effects. Although Rothafel's ideas ended up being more compatible with Broadway shows than with film, he is credited for the idea of synchronizing orchestral music with movie scenes.

Hooray, Live Sports Parties: May 1923

Earlier this year, millions of people around the globe gathered outdoors to watch live broadcasts of the FIFA World Cup. viewing parties are so ingrained in sports culture nowadays that it's difficult to imagine depending on newspapers or word-of-mouth to find out who won a big game.

In 1923, Charles Francis Jenkins, who helped invent the television, announced plans to broadcast motion pictures of world events and sporting games over radio airwaves. Although commercial radio had just begun airing live sports broadcasts, Jenkins was eager to take the technology further with an apparatus that could transmit one photograph every four minutes.His machine worked by using rapdily rotating circular prisms to cast lights and shadows onto a selenium cell in an electric circuit, which would convert the light into wireless waves. Admittedly, his invention needed work, but Jenkins was confident that with a little work, he would be able to broadcast live news events to far-off places. Since skeptics (okay, Popular Science) asked how the sun's glare would let them see outdoor broadcasts of baseball games, Norman Furber, a New York City inventor invented a special screen that could reflect images clearly as long as the sun didn't shine directly on it.

D.W. Griffith Explains Cinematic Technique: June 1926

Prior to The Birth of a Nation most films were merely recordings of subjects moving about: there were no close-ups, no experimental angles, and no use of shadows. Despite his controversial legacy as the creator of a highly racist film, D.W. Griffith is widely credited with pioneering the use of light and camera angles as a cinematic technique. In an article written specially for our publication, Griffith elaborated on how he manipulated light to heighten mood and tension. For instance, he used mirrors to replicate the effect of sunlight streaming through the trees. He also developed the reverse light technique, which placed light in front of the object in focus instead behind it, as was customary at the time. Much to the suprise of his colleagues, Griffiths' technique actually made subjects look much more natural. Moreover, he introduced the soft focus, or the gentle blurry effect achieved by photographing an image through multiple lenses.

Of course, there were plenty of light-related issues that continued to stump Griffith. Blonde hair and blue eyes did not register well in front of the camera, and actors struggled to film "ardent scenes" under the temperature of glaring lights. "I hope that cold light will soon replace the super-hot ones," Griffith said. "It will make action more effective."

How Talking Movies Work: November 1926

A year before The Jazz Singer premiered, audiences at a theater in New York watched in awe as images of a violinist, a vocalist, and an actor talked and played music from the movie screen. Engineers achieved this effect using the vitaphone, a new invention hailed as the long-awaited breakthrough in talking movies. As the diagram pictured left shows, the machine worked by recording sound on a master disk, while two electrically interlocked motors synchronized images with the sound. While filming, the camera would record images while a microphone on the ceiling would record sound and convert it to electrical impulses, which traveled through a vacuum tube to an amplifier. The impulses would then form groove formations on the sound disk. In the theater, an image projector and the sound disk operated from different ends of a motor. While the images played, a needle would translate the disk's impressions into electrical surges, thus creating amplified sound.

As you can see in the artist's diagram, one horn-shaped projector would transmit sounds recorded on the film, like the dialogue, while two other horns would transmit the orchestra accompaniment. Not long afterward, The Jazz Singer would use this very technology to become the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue.

Behind the Scenes at a Talkie Studios: April 1929

The rise of talkies not only revolutionized the movie-going experience, but it completely upended the acting industry. Actors with thick accents or weak vocal deliveries, like It Girl Mary Pickford, fell from stardom. Norman Foster, a former Broadway Stage actor who had transitioned to talking movies, contributed an article describing how producers recorded dialogue in the new "talking movie studios." He recalled how strict Paramount was was about noise level -- evidently, the soundproof technology weren't too effective, as producers were tasked with both refining sound and keeping out superfluous noises. To ensure the crispness of recordings, studios were built with terra cotta tile walls and double doors. Felt carpets and curtains made of monk's cloth deadened footsteps and echoes.

To record sound, studio engineers would hang stage microphones on set. The sound would travel through a wire to the monitor room, where the operator would make the sound more natural by tweaking the volume of transmissions. From the monitor room, the transmission would travel to the sound room, where it would be recorded and played back for the director after shooting finished.

The Advent of Newsreel Cinemas: August 1930

Back in the day, newsreels were a hallmark of the movie-going experience--since we hadn't quite reached the era of personal televisions yet, people watched the news in newsreel cinemas, which often aired entertainment programs in addition to actual news. At the time this article was written, newsreels were hailed as "talking newspapers" because people were in awe at how stories could appear in theaters before going to print. Moreover, being able to hear and see disasters -- buildings consumed by flame, soldiers dying on the battlefield -- made world events all the more harrowing. Viewers could barely get enough of it. Three companies, Fox, Paramount, and Pathe, distributed sound newsreels to 12,000 special news cinemas all of the country. The heart of the newsreel culture, was of course, in New York, where its Newsreel Theater presented hourly newsreels from 10 AM until midnight.

Thanks to the advent of newsreel cinemas, journalism changed practically overnight. Previously, gathering pictorial news required only a guy with a camera; now, companies needed a sound truck, cameras, microphones, and other expensive equipment to keep up.

How to Create Special Effects: March 1933

Much like today, up-and-coming independent filmmakers worked steadily in the shadows of their big-budget Hollywood counterparts. Curious to see how amateur filmmakers created special effects with limited equipment and finances, we paid a trip to the set of The Lunar Expedition, which was located in the garage of two Los Angeles filmmakers. While there, we were struck by the ingenuity of their meticulously constructed scale models and special effects. The illustration at left shows how they filmed a scene where the rocket flies through a storm. First, they built small model rocket out of metal and illuminated its insides with a tiny bulb. Cotton was used for the clouds, while water dripping down a glass panel served as the rain. Lamplight filtered through a cut-up photo of clouds blinked on and off to simulate lightning.

The First Drive-In Theater: August 1933

Nowadays, drive-in theaters seem like a cute relic of the past, but in the early 1930's, they were slated to be the next big trend in movie-going. For the next two decades, they entertained teenagers on dates and distressed parents who grew concerned about what their kids were doing in those filthy "passion pits." Back to the 1930's though--the drive-in debuted in Camden, N.J., where families were free to watch movies without worrying about their children's noisiness. A month after the theater opened, we reported that a new system of directional sound projection allowed audiences to hear dialogue as clearly in the back row as they could in the front. The pit could also occupy 400 cars, which were parked on levels inclined in a way so that vehicles didn't obstruct anyone's view.

Mobile Theater: April 1937

In 1937, New Jersey struck again: a local inventor unveiled a truck that doubled as a mobile movie theater. A projector mounted in the rear of the truck transmitted the film through an inclined mirrors and onto a translucent screen. The truck came equipped with twelve loudspeakers, six on each side, and a gasoline engine within the truck body for generating electricity. We predicted that politicians would one day use mobile theaters for campaigns.

By Denise Ngo Posted 12.03.2010 - Popular Science

Green Patriot Posters Reinvigorate Environmental Message

2010-11-27T15:28:00.000-06:00

Green Patriot Posters is an arty hangover cure for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that has become a national spasm of hyperconsumption.
Thumbing through the book's ecology-themed imagery, created by multimediators like Shepard Fairey and DJ Spooky, won't stab you in the gut with dogma — but it could tickle your conscience.

"Co-editor Dmitri Siegel and I started Green Patriot Posters because we felt the sustainability movement needs better images and messages to connect with people," co-editor Edward Morris told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. "It needs more positivity and urgency, and a better connection to values that aren't simply about nature and conservation, which not everybody cares about, but also jobs and a better future."
The visual meditations on sustainabili
ty and overload evoke World War II–era posters that inspired the campaign. The posters can be torn out of the book and plastered somewhere useful.
Click through the Green Patriot Posters gallery above for a taste of the book's alternately critical and cute graphics, along with comments from contributing artists.
"America is the child of the Enlightenment," Morris said. "Climate change is the ultimate challenge to that rationality. The risk of increased conflict, refugees, famine and economic failure are not debatable. Whatever country figures out newer, cheaper, safer forms of energy is the new economic superpower."
Do Green Patriot Posters' well-meaning media and urgent messages wake hearts and minds ready for a War on Terra? Fly your freak flag in the comments section below.

Keep Buying Shit

by Diego Gutiérrez

"To a graphic designer, there is no better reason to design than for a good cause," said Diego Gutiérrez. "At the same time, popular media and kitsch design have exhausted a cause like global warming. Since Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth came out, it has become popular for commercial design to take green to the masses. Although for a good cause, these sorts of commercial iterations are still very often designed with fluff for fluffy brains — there is no true statement of the urgency with which we must act to keep our lifestyle or even the world as we know it."&
nbsp;

Sow

by Ben Barnes

"'Sow Cultivate Thrive' is a poster series developed around the concept of the victory garden posters of World War II, with a modern interpretation," said Ben Barnes. "Stylistically I wanted them to have an American militaristic feel, with the idea of taking action to plant a garden."

Problem Me, Solution Me

by Steve Le

"For a problem that was caused by us, we have the ability to clean up our mess and solve global warming," said Steve Le. "It is our world: We should treat it with the utmost care."

Join the Revolution

by Adam Gray

"Both the bike and the heart icon seem to have currency at the moment," said Green Patriot Posters editor Edward Morris. "[Adam] Gray combined both in this design, which evokes a peaceful sort of revolutionary vigor."

Simplicity Is the Key to Successful Living

by Nick Dewar

"I hope that America is entering a post–'greed is good' period," said illustrator Nick Dewar of his design, which first appeared in ReadyMade magazine in 2009. "I can't think of a single step that would change the nature of our society more than everyone abandoning their automobiles and cycling instead. There would be less dependence on oil, obesity levels would drop dramatically, and reflective bike clips would replace fancy ladies' purses as the current must-have fashion accessory."

Dead End

by Noel Douglas

"Dead End is part of a body of work made for the street protests during the 2009 G20 Summit in London, Copenhagen during COP15 and Bolivia during the People's Summit," said Noel Douglas. "Graphic communication can foreground the contradictions of capitalism, or open windows onto new worlds. But they must serve human and not commercial needs."

Power Up Windmill

by Shepard Fairey

"I believe very strongly that green energy is the only way for the United States to achieve energy independence, create valuable technology and protect the environment," Fairey said about this 2009 design for MoveOn.org. "I created this windmill image as a patriotic symbol of the green-energy mission."

Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica

by DJ Spooky

"Antarctica has many faces," said Paul "DJ Spooky" Miller, who journeyed to Antarctica in 2007 and 2008 to shoot the multimedia meditation Terra Nova: Antarctica Sinfonia. "It's usually thought of as a huge pile of ice that somehow stays afloat at the bottom of the world. In different ages, before humanity had mapped out the world, it would have simply been beyond most maps and most ideas about what made up the geography of the world. Today, Antarctica persists as a symbol of the unknown, and possesses great symbolic strength."

Scott Thill November 25, 2010

Antimatter held for questioning

2010-11-18T13:28:00.000-06:00

Magnetically trapped atoms could test fundamental physics.
Eugenie Samuel Reich

For physicists, a bit of antimatter is a precious gift indeed. By comparing matter to its counterpart, they can test fundamental symmetries that lie at the heart of the standard model of particle physics, and look for hints of new physics beyond. Yet few gifts are as tricky to wrap. Bring a particle of antimatter into contact with its matter counterpart and the two annihilate in a flash of energy.

Now a research collaboration at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, has managed, 38 times, to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap for more than 170 milliseconds. The group reported the result in Nature online on 17 November¹. "We're ecstatic. This is five years of hard work," says Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman for the ALPHA collaboration at CERN.

The electrodes (gold) of the trap used to combine positrons and antiprotons to form antihydrogen. N. MADSEN, ALPHA/SWANSEA

An antihydrogen atom is made from a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron. The objective — both for ALPHA and for a competing CERN experiment called ATRAP — is to compare the energy levels in antihydrogen with those of hydrogen, to confirm that antimatter particles experience the same electromagnetic forces as matter particles, a key premise of the standard model. "The goal is to study antihydrogen and you can't do it without trapping it," says Cliff Surko, an antimatter researcher at the University of California, San Diego. "This is really a big deal."
The ALPHA claim is the first major advance since the creation of thousands of antihydrogen atoms in 2002 by a forerunner experiment called ATHENA² and by ATRAP³ (see 'A brief history of antimatter'). Both experiments combined decelerated antiprotons with positrons at CERN to produce antihydrogen atoms. But, within several milliseconds, the atoms annihilated with the ordinary matter in the walls of their containers.

To prevent that from happening, the ALPHA team formed antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap. Although not electrically charged like antiprotons and positrons, antihydrogen — like hydrogen — has a more subtle magnetic character that arises from the spins of its constituent particles. The ALPHA researchers used an octupole magnet, produced by the current flowing in eight wires, to create a magnetic field that was strongest near the walls of the trap, falling to a minimum at the centre, causing the atoms to collect there. To trap just 38 atoms, the group had to run the experiment 335 times. "This was ten thousand times more difficult" than creating untrapped antihydrogen atoms, says Hangst — ATHENA made an estimated 50,000 of them in one go in 2002. To do spectroscopic measurements, Surko estimates that up to 100 antihydrogen atoms may need to be trapped at once.

ATRAP still hopes to reach that goal first. In a paper due out in Physical Review Letters, the collaboration reports that it has efficiently separated antiprotons from the cold electrons that are used to cool them down, a step towards creating slower-moving antihydrogen atoms that might stay trapped for longer. "Rather than trying to demonstrate that we can confine 38 antihydrogen atoms for a small fraction of a second, we are working on new methods to produce and trap much larger numbers of colder atoms," says Gerald Gabrielse, ATRAP's spokesman. "We shall see which approach is more fruitful."

Two other collaborations aim to study antihydrogen. In 2003, the international ASACUSA experiment at CERN proposed a scheme to create a beam of antihydrogen atoms⁴. Yasunori Yamazaki, an atomic physicist at the Advanced Science Institute in Saitama, part of Japan's RIKEN network of research labs, now says the group has produced such a beam and may be able to use it to study the energy levels in antihydrogen without needing to trap the atoms. Another CERN experiment called AEgIS is starting to compare the effect of gravity on antihydrogen with that on ordinary hydrogen. Antimatter is almost certain to fall at the same rate as normal matter, but if it doesn't the results could help scientists to distinguish between alternative approaches to unifying quantum theory with general relativity.

Published online 17 November 2010 | Nature 468, 355 (2010) | doi:10.1038/468355a

As China Advances, Solar Start-Ups Strategize

2010-11-06T18:26:00.000-05:00

Over the last two years, Chinese solar panel makers like Suntech and Yingli Green Energy have moved aggressively into the United States and now supply about 40 percent of the California market, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research firm.

China’s growing dominance of the global solar market has been on display in Los Angeles this week at the Solar Power International conference, one of the industry’s biggest annual get-togethers. In a vast exhibition hall, the booth of one Silicon Valley start-up, Solyndra, is surrounded by a sea of Chinese solar companies offering their wares.

As prices for conventional silicon-based solar panels plummet, pressure has increased on Silicon Valley start-ups like Solyndra that make a type of photovoltaic cell called copper indium gallium selenide, or CIGS. Though less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, the promise of the technology was that it could be made cheaply – at least until the cost of conventional solar module prices fell 40 percent over the past year.
That led Solyndra to start production two months ahead of schedule at its new $733 million factory in Fremont, Calif., and to speed up development of its next-generation solar panel.

“It definitely puts more pressure on us to bring our costs down as quickly as possible by ramping up volume,” said Ben Bierman, Solyndra’s executive vice president for operations and engineering, as driverless carts shuttled stacks of photovoltaic parts to large orange robots at Fab 1, the company’s original factory.
Nathaniel Bullard, a solar analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance in San Francisco, said that success for high-tech Silicon Valley solar companies may depend on finding a big market niche they can dominate.
Solyndra, for instance, makes lightweight solar panels that snap together like Legos and can be installed on large commercial rooftops unable to support heavier conventional panels. On the roof of the company’s headquarters, Mr. Bierman recently gave me an advance look at its new solar panel, which is more powerful but requires far less labor to install.

Production started two months early at Solyndra’s solar panel factory in Fremont, Calif.

“We really took a lot of the cost out and accelerated development in response to the Chinese,” Mr. Bierman said.

China presents different challenges for SunPower, which was founded in 1985 and is the granddaddy of Silicon Valley solar companies.

SunPower makes conventional solar panels but has also pursued a high-technology strategy and says it produces the world’s most efficient photovoltaic modules. (Architects and fashion-forward homeowners also favor the company’s sleek jet-black panels.)

In recent years, SunPower has increasingly focused on building big photovoltaic power plants to supply electricity to utilities that put a premium on technological performance, reliability and a company’s ability to manage complex projects.

“In the old days, the saying was that nobody gets firedfor buying I.B.M.,” Thomas Werner, SunPower’s chief executive, said in an interview. “That’s what we want to be in solar, and we are in fact.”
He said that while SunPower competes on costs, it does not aim to be the lowest-cost manufacturer.
“We want to have the best technologies so that people buy us for the reasons they buy a company’s product like Apple,” Mr. Werner said. “I don’t want to be the iPhone without the apps.”

Çin'in Güneşi Amerika'yı Yakıyor

FREMONT, California - Silikon Vadisi girişimleri bir zamanlar güneş panelleri yapmak için kullanılan teknolojiyi yenileyip üretim maliyetlerini büyük ölçüde keserek güneş enerjisi sektörünü tepeden tırnağa değiştirmeyi hayal ediyordu. Yüksek teknoloji uzmanları tarafından kurulan şirketler sonunda seri üretime başlıyor ancak sektörün zaten değişmiş olduğunu fark ediyorlar.

Kendi hükümetleri tarafından sübvanse edilen Çinli şirketler, seri üretime geçip güneş panellerinin fiyatı düşürdü ve herkesi hayret ettirecek bir hızda pazarı ele geçirdi. Araştırma şirketi Bloomberg New Energy Finance'a göre, Çinli güneş paneli üreticileri ABD'nin en büyüğü olan California pazarının yaklaşık yüzde 40'ını ve Avrupa pazarlarının büyük bir kısmını ele geçirmiş durumda.

Şanghay'daki JA Solar'ın CEO'su Fang Peng, "Her geçen yıl büyüyoruz. Bu yıl sonunda 1,8 gigawattlık kapasitemiz olacak. Ayrıca yıl başında 4 bin olan çalışan sayımız yıl sonunda 11 bine çıkacak" diyor. Kıyaslamak gerekirse, Silikon Vadisi'nde bulunan Solyndra şirketi 2011 sonunda 300 megawattlık üretim kapasitesine ulaşmayı umut ediyor. MiaSolé'nin Başkanı Joseph Laia, "Güneş enerjisi piyasası o kadar değişti ki, ağlayacak gibi oluyorum. Maliyet konusuna beklediğimizden 1 veya 2 yıl önce odaklanmak zorunda kaldık" diyor. Geniş kamu ve özel sektör desteğine rağmen Solyndra büyük zorluklarla karşı karşıya. Sektörün en büyüklerinden olan şirket, yatırımcılardan 1 milyar dolardan fazla topladı. Federal hükümet, şirketin yeni güneş paneli fabrikası için 535 milyon dolarlık kredi temin etti. Ancak Solyndra'nın fabrikası inşa edilirken, ithal edilen Çin malları yüzünden güneş modüllerinin fiyatı yüzde 40 düştü. Bunun üzerine Solyndra planlanandan iki ay önce, 13 Eylül'de panelleri piyasaya sürdü. Ayrıca daha pahalı olan panellerinin kurulum maliyeti hesaba katılınca aslında Çin mallarına göre daha uygun olduğuna müşterileri ikna etmek için bir pazarlama kampanyası başlattı. Solyndra'nın operasyonlardan ve mühendislikten sorumlu başkan yardımcısı Ben Bierman, "Pazarın durumu maliyetleri düşürmemiz için bizim üzerimizde bir baskı unsuru oluşturuyor" diyor. Bir zamanlar Silikon Vadisi'nin yeni isminin "Güneş Vadisi" olacağını öngören yatırımcılar, artık şirketlere para aktarmak konusunda daha tedbirli davranıyor.

San Francisco merkezli araştırma şirketi Cleantech Group'a göre, 2010'un üçüncü çeyreğinde, güneş paneli şirketlerine yapılan girişim sermayesi yatırımı 144 milyon dolara indi. Bir önceki yıl aynı dönemde bu rakam 451 milyon dolardı. Solyndra ve MiaSolé gibi bakır indiyum galyum selenyum (CIGS) kullanarak fotovoltaik hücreler üreten şirketler, bilhassa zarar gördü. Silikon plakalardan yapılan geleneksel güneş panellerinin aksine, CIGS hücreleri, cam veya esnek malzemeler üzerine yerleştirilebiliyor.

"İnce filmli" güneş panellerinin avantajı, ucuza mal edilmeleri olmalıydı ancak CIGS hücrelerinin seri üretimi beklenenden daha zor oldu. Silikon Vadisi'ndeki şirketler sorunu çözmeye çalışırken, silikon fiyatları düştü ve hükümetlerinden destek alan Çinli şirketler geleneksel güneş panellerinin üretimini hızla artırdı. Eylül ayında Sharp tarafından satın alınan güneş paneli üreticisi Recurrent Energy'nin Başkanı Arno Harris, Çin hükümeti tarafından sübvanse edilen Yingli Green Energy ile tedarik anlaşması imzalandıklarını açıkladı. Çinli şirketin ucuz ve kaliteli ürün ve finansman sunduğunu söylüyor. Harris, "Bu anlaşma sayesinde verimli şekilde finanse edilmiş projeler üzerinden rekabet edebilir teklifler verebileceğimizi fark ettik" diyor.

Çin'den gelen rekabet yüzünden Silikon Vadisi şirketleri alternatif stratejiler üretmek zorunda kaldı. Girişim şirketi Innovalight, "silikon mürekkep" adı verdiği ve sürülünce silikondan yapılan standart güneş hücresinin verimliliğini arttıran bir ürün geliştirdi. Innovalight yöneticileri, Çinlilerle rekabet etmek için kendi fabrikalarını kurup yüz milyonlarca dolar harcamak ve yerine ürünü Çinlilere lisanslamaya karar verdi. Innovalight'ın Başkanı Conrad Burke, "Sübvansiyon, düşük faizli krediler, ucuz işgücü ve sizi güneş enerjisinde 1 numara yapmaya çalışan bir devlet stratejisiyle nasıl baş edebilirsiniz ki?" diye soruyor.

"Amerikan stratejisinin merkezinde inovasyon olacak. Bu Çin'deki ölçüde bir üretim sağlamayacak ancak Çin'e en son teknolojiyi satıyoruz ve burada iş olanakları yaratıyoruz" diye ekliyor. Yine de bir diğer Silikon Vadisi şirketi SolarCity'nin Başkanı Lyndon Rive, şirketinin perakende devi Wal-Mart için, çok sayıda geleneksel güneş paneli kuracağını söylüyor. Ancak bu panellerin neredeyse hepsi Çin'de üretilmiş olacak.

By TODD WOODY

The Great Deflation; Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened

2010-11-06T18:15:00.001-05:00

OSAKA, Japan — Like many members of Japan’s middle class, Masato Y. enjoyed a level of affluence two decades ago that was the envy of the world. Masato, a small-business owner, bought a $500,000 condominium, vacationed in Hawaii and drove a late-model Mercedes.

But his living standards slowly crumbled along with Japan’s overall economy. First, he was forced to reduce trips abroad and then eliminate them. Then he traded the Mercedes for a cheaper domestic model. Last year, he sold his condo — for a third of what he paid for it, and for less than what he still owed on the mortgage he took out 17 years ago.

“Japan used to be so flashy and upbeat, but now everyone must live in a dark and subdued way,” said Masato, 49, who asked that his full name not be used because he still cannot repay the $110,000 that he owes on the mortgage.

Few nations in recent history have seen such a striking reversal of economic fortune as Japan. The original Asian success story, Japan rode one of the great speculative stock and property bubbles of all time in the 1980s to become the first Asian country to challenge the long dominance of the West.

But the bubbles popped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Japan fell into a slow but relentless decline that neither enormous budget deficits nor a flood of easy money has reversed. For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation, in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy.
Now, as the United States and other Western nations struggle to recover from a debt and property bubble of their own, a growing number of economists are pointing to Japan as a dark vision of the future. Even as the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, prepares a fresh round of unconventional measures to stimulate the economy, there are growing fears that the United States and many European economies could face a prolonged period of slow growth or even, in the worst case, deflation, something not seen on a sustained basis outside Japan since the Great Depression.

Many economists remain confident that the United States will avoid the stagnation of Japan, largely because of the greater responsiveness of the American political system and Americans’ greater tolerance for capitalism’s creative destruction. Japanese leaders at first denied the severity of their nation’s problems and then spent heavily on job-creating public works projects that only postponed painful but necessary structural changes, economists say.

DISPIRITED Akiko Oka has worked part time in an Osaka clothing shop since her store closed in 2002. She said she lamented Japan’s loss of vigor.

“We’re not Japan,” said Robert E. Hall, a professor of economics at Stanford. “In America, the bet is still that we will somehow find ways to get people spending and investing again.”

Still, as political pressure builds to reduce federal spending and budget deficits, other economists are now warning of “Japanification” — of falling into the same deflationary trap of collapsed demand that occurs when consumers refuse to consume, corporations hold back on investments and banks sit on cash. It becomes a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle: as prices fall further and jobs disappear, consumers tighten their purse strings even more and companies cut back on spending and delay expansion plans.
“The U.S., the U.K., Spain, Ireland, they all are going through what Japan went through a decade or so ago,” said Richard Koo, chief economist at Nomura Securities who recently wrote a book about Japan’s lessons for the world. “Millions of individuals and companies see their balance sheets going underwater, so they are using their cash to pay down debt instead of borrowing and spending.”
Just as inflation scarred a generation of Americans, deflation has left a deep imprint on the Japanese, breeding generational tensions and a culture of pessimism, fatalism and reduced expectations. While Japan remains in many ways a prosperous society, it faces an increasingly grim situation, particularly outside the relative economic vibrancy of Tokyo, and its situation provides a possible glimpse into the future for the United States and Europe, should the most dire forecasts come to pass.

Scaled-Back Ambitions

The downsizing of Japan’s ambitions can be seen on the streets of Tokyo, where concrete “microhouses” have become popular among younger Japanese who cannot afford even the famously cramped housing of their parents, or lack the job security to take out a traditional multidecade loan.

These matchbox-size homes stand on plots of land barely large enough to park a sport utility vehicle, yet have three stories of closet-size bedrooms, suitcase-size closets and a tiny kitchen that properly belongs on a submarine.

Weddings in Osaka, Japan, now tend to be small, low-budget affairs, not the lavish celebrations once favored by couples.

“This is how to own a house even when you are uneasy about the future,” said Kimiyo Kondo, general manager at Zaus, a Tokyo-based company that builds microhouses.

For many people under 40, it is hard to grasp just how far this is from the 1980s, when a mighty — and threatening — “Japan Inc.” seemed ready to obliterate whole American industries, from automakers to supercomputers. With the Japanese stock market quadrupling and the yen rising to unimagined heights, Japan’s companies dominated global business, gobbling up trophy properties like Hollywood movie studios (Universal Studios and Columbia Pictures), famous golf courses (Pebble Beach) and iconic real estate (Rockefeller Center).

In 1991, economists were predicting that Japan would overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2010. In fact, Japan’s economy remains the same size it was then: a gross domestic product of $5.7 trillion at current exchange rates. During the same period, the United States economy doubled in size to $14.7 trillion, and this year China overtook Japan to become the world’s No. 2 economy.

China has so thoroughly eclipsed Japan that few American intellectuals seem to bother with Japan now, and once crowded Japanese-language classes at American universities have emptied. Even Clyde V. Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration trade negotiator whose writings in the 1980s about Japan’s threat to the United States once stirred alarm in Washington, said he was now studying Chinese. “I hardly go to Japan anymore,” Mr. Prestowitz said.

The decline has been painful for the Japanese, with companies and individuals like Masato having lost the equivalent of trillions of dollars in the stock market, which is now just a quarter of its value in 1989, and in real estate, where the average price of a home is the same as it was in 1983. And the future looks even bleaker, as Japan faces the world’s largest government debt — around 200 percent of gross domestic product — a shrinking population and rising rates of poverty and suicide.

But perhaps the most noticeable impact here has been Japan’s crisis of confidence. Just two decades ago, this was a vibrant nation filled with energy and ambition, proud to the point of arrogance and eager to create a new economic order in Asia based on the yen. Today, those high-flying ambitions have been shelved, replaced by weariness and fear of the future, and an almost stifling air of resignation. Japan seems to have pulled into a shell, content to accept its slow fade from the global stage.

Its once voracious manufacturers now seem prepared to surrender industry after industry to hungry South Korean and Chinese rivals. Japanese consumers, who once flew by the planeload on flashy shopping trips to Manhattan and Paris, stay home more often now, saving their money for an uncertain future or setting new trends in frugality with discount brands like Uniqlo.

As living standards in this still wealthy nation slowly erode, a new frugality is apparent among a generation of young Japanese, who have known nothing but economic stagnation and deflation. They refuse to buy big-ticket items like cars or televisions, and fewer choose to study abroad in America.

Japan’s loss of gumption is most visible among its young men, who are widely derided as “herbivores” for lacking their elders’ willingness to toil for endless hours at the office, or even to succeed in romance, which many here blame, only half jokingly, for their country’s shrinking birthrate. “The Japanese used to be called economic animals,” said Mitsuo Ohashi, former chief executive officer of the chemicals giant Showa Denko. “But somewhere along the way, Japan lost its animal spirits.”

When asked in dozens of interviews about their nation’s decline, Japanese, from policy makers and corporate chieftains to shoppers on the street, repeatedly mention this startling loss of vitality. While Japan suffers from many problems, most prominently the rapid graying of its society, it is this decline of a once wealthy and dynamic nation into a deep social and cultural rut that is perhaps Japan’s most ominous lesson for the world today.

The classic explanation of the evils of deflation is that it makes individuals and businesses less willing to use money, because the rational way to act when prices are falling is to hold onto cash, which gains in value. But in Japan, nearly a generation of deflation has had a much deeper effect, subconsciously coloring how the Japanese view the world. It has bred a deep pessimism about the future and a fear of taking risks that make people instinctively reluctant to spend or invest, driving down demand — and prices — even further.

VANISHING Over the past 15 years, the number of fancy clubs has declined sharply in Kitashinchi, Osaka's main entertainment district.
“A new common sense appears, in which consumers see it as irrational or even foolish to buy or borrow,” said Kazuhisa Takemura, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo who has studied the psychology of deflation.

A Deflated City

While the effects are felt across Japan’s economy, they are more apparent in regions like Osaka, the third-largest city, than in relatively prosperous Tokyo. In this proudly commercial city, merchants have gone to extremes to coax shell-shocked shoppers into spending again. But this often takes the shape of price wars that end up only feeding Japan’s deflationary spiral.
There are vending machines that sell canned drinks for 10 yen, or 12 cents; restaurants with 50-yen beer; apartments with the first month’s rent of just 100 yen, about $1.22. Even marriage ceremonies are on sale, with discount wedding halls offering weddings for $600 — less than a tenth of what ceremonies typically cost here just a decade ago.

On Senbayashi, an Osaka shopping street, merchants recently held a 100-yen day, offering much of their merchandise for that price. Even then, they said, the results were disappointing.
“It’s like Japanese have even lost the desire to look good,” said Akiko Oka, 63, who works part time in a small apparel shop, a job she has held since her own clothing store went bankrupt in 2002.
This loss of vigor is sometimes felt in unusual places. Kitashinchi is Osaka’s premier entertainment district, a three-centuries-old playground where the night is filled with neon signs and hostesses in tight dresses, where just taking a seat at a top club can cost $500.

But in the past 15 years, the number of fashionable clubs and lounges has shrunk to 480 from 1,200, replaced by discount bars and chain restaurants. Bartenders say the clientele these days is too cost-conscious to show the studied disregard for money that was long considered the height of refinement.
“A special culture might be vanishing,” said Takao Oda, who mixes perfectly crafted cocktails behind the glittering gold countertop at his Bar Oda.

After years of complacency, Japan appears to be waking up to its problems, as seen last year when disgruntled voters ended the virtual postwar monopoly on power of the Liberal Democratic Party. However, for many Japanese, it may be too late. Japan has already created an entire generation of young people who say they have given up on believing that they can ever enjoy the job stability or rising living standards that were once considered a birthright here.

Yukari Higaki, 24, said the only economic conditions she had ever known were ones in which prices and salaries seemed to be in permanent decline. She saves as much money as she can by buying her clothes at discount stores, making her own lunches and forgoing travel abroad. She said that while her generation still lived comfortably, she and her peers were always in a defensive crouch, ready for the worst.
“We are the survival generation,” said Ms. Higaki, who works part time at a furniture store.
Hisakazu Matsuda, president of Japan Consumer Marketing Research Institute, who has written several books on Japanese consumers, has a different name for Japanese in their 20s; he calls them the consumption-haters. He estimates that by the time this generation hits their 60s, their habits of frugality will have cost the Japanese economy $420 billion in lost consumption.
“There is no other generation like this in the world,” Mr. Matsuda said. “These guys think it’s stupid to spend.”
Deflation has also affected businesspeople by forcing them to invent new ways to survive in an economy where prices and profits only go down, not up.
Yoshinori Kaiami was a real estate agent in Osaka, where, like the rest of Japan, land prices have been falling for most of the past 19 years. Mr. Kaiami said business was tough. There were few buyers in a market that was virtually guaranteed to produce losses, and few sellers, because most homeowners were saddled with loans that were worth more than their homes.
Some years ago, he came up with an idea to break the gridlock. He created a company that guides homeowners through an elaborate legal subterfuge in which they erase the original loan by declaring personal bankruptcy, but continue to live in their home by “selling” it to a relative, who takes out a smaller loan to pay its greatly reduced price.
“If we only had inflation again, this sort of business would not be necessary,” said Mr. Kaiami, referring to the rising prices that are the opposite of deflation. “I feel like I’ve been waiting for 20 years for inflation to come back.”
One of his customers was Masato, the small-business owner, who sold his four-bedroom condo to a relative for about $185,000, 15 years after buying it for a bit more than $500,000. He said he was still deliberating about whether to expunge the $110,000 he still owed his bank by declaring personal bankruptcy.
Economists said one reason deflation became self-perpetuating was that it pushed companies and people like Masato to survive by cutting costs and selling what they already owned, instead of buying new goods or investing.
“Deflation destroys the risk-taking that capitalist economies need in order to grow,” said Shumpei Takemori, an economist at Keio University in Tokyo. “Creative destruction is replaced with what is just destructive destruction.”

Japonya'nın Suya Düşen Hayalleri

OSAKA, Japonya - Yakın tarihe bakınca, ekonomik talihi bu kadar çarpıcı bir şekilde dönen başka bir ülke herhalde yoktur. Uzakdoğu'nun ilk başarı öyküsüne imza atan Japonya, 1980'lerde tarihin en büyük hisse senedi ve emlak balonlarının birinden nemalanmış ve Batının uzun süren hegemonyasına meydan okuyan ilk Asya ülkesi olmuştu. Fakat balonlar patladı ve Japonya ağır ama kesin bir düşüşe geçti. Neredeyse bir kuşaktır ülke yavaş büyüme ve deflasyon (fiyatların tehlikeli bir ucuzlaması) kapanına kısılmış durumda. Bugün ABD ve diğer Batılı ülkeler de borç batağı ve emlak balonunun etkisinden sıyrılmaya çalışıyor. Ve Batılı ekonomistler "Japonlaşmaya" (yani tüketiciler tüketmediği, şirketler yatırım yapmadığı, bankaların da paranın üstüne oturduğu zaman çöken talebin yarattığı deflasyon kapanına) karşı uyarıyor. Çünkü ortada kendi kendini besleyen bir kısır döngü var. Buna göre, fiyatlar düşmeye ve işsizlik artmaya devam ettikçe tüketiciler kemerleri daha da sıkıyor ve şirketler harcamalarını kısıp büyüme planlarını erteliyor.

Nomura Menkul Değerler'in baş ekonomisti Richard Koo, "Japonya'nın on yıl kadar önce geçtiği yoldan şimdi ABD, İngiltere, İspanya, İrlanda ve diğerleri de geçiyor" diyor. Deflasyon Japonya'da derin bir iz bıraktı. Kuşak çatışmaları yaratarak bir karamsarlık, kadercilik ve beklentisizlik kültürü doğurdu. Ülke aslında birçok bakımdan refah içinde yüzmesine rağmen, karanlık bir tabloyla karşı karşıya. 40 yaşın altındaki birçok kişi, 1980'larda durumun nasıl olduğunu anlamakta zorlanıyor. Çünkü o yıllarda kudretli (ve tehditkâr) Japon A.Ş., arabalardan bilgisayarlara kadar tüm Amerikan endüstrisini yutacak gibi görünüyordu. Bugün Japon ekonomisi aşağı yukarı 1991'deki büyüklüğüne sahip. Yani mevcut döviz kuruyla 5,7 trilyon dolarlık bir gayrisafi yurtiçi hâsılası var. Oysa ABD ekonomisi aynı sürede ikiye katlanarak 14,7 trilyon dolarlık bir büyüklüğe ulaştı.

Çin de dünyanın en büyük ikinci ekonomisi olarak bu yıl Japonya'yı geçti. Şirketler ve bireyler, gerek 1989'daki değerinin yalnızca dörtte biri düzeyinde olan hisse senedi piyasasında, gerek ortalama bir evin 1983'teki fiyatına satıldığı emlak piyasasında trilyonlarca dolar kaybetti. Üstelik gelecek daha da karanlık görünüyor. Çünkü Japonya dünyanın en büyük hükümetiyle, küçülen bir nüfusla ve artan bir yoksulluk ve intihar oranıyla karşı karşıya.Fakat belki de en büyük darbeyi Japonların özgüveni aldı. Neredeyse kibre varan bir gururun yerini bir gelecek korkusu ve durağan bir kadercilik aldı. Japonya adeta kabuğuna çekildi. Bir zamanların yıldızlaşan üreticileri artık Güney Kore ve Çin'den iştahlı rakiplerine birer birer teslim oluyor. Vaktiyle alışveriş için Manhattan'a ve Paris'e uçan tüketiciler evlerinde kalıyor.

Paralarını belirsiz bir geleceğe saklıyorlar. Genç Japonlar arasında da belirgin bir tutumluluk var. Araba ve televizyon gibi pahalı malları almaya yanaşmıyor, yurtdışında okumayı daha az tercih ediyorlar. Karamsarlık en çok genç erkekler arasında görülüyor. Büyükleri gibi uzun saatler çalışmak, hatta aşkta bile kazanmak istemedikleri için "otobur" diye alay konusu oluyorlar. Kimya devi Showa Denko'nun eski başkanı Mitsuo Ohashi, "Japonlar 'ekonomik hayvan' diye nitelendirilirdi. Ama ülke o hayvansı ruhu bir yerde kaybetti" diyor. Deflasyonun ne kadar kötü bir şey olduğuna ilişkin klasik açıklamalarda, birey ve işletmelerin parayı harcamak istemedikleri belirtilir. Çünkü fiyatlar düşerken yapılacak en mantıklı şeyin, değeri artan nakde tutunmak olduğu söylenir. Oysa Japonya'da bir kuşaktır süren deflasyonun etkisi çok daha derin oldu. Ülkeyi geleceğe dair köklü bir karamsarlık ve bir risk alma korkusu sardı. Bu yüzden insanlar içgüdüsel olarak ne harcama ne de yatırım yapmak istiyor ve bu da talebi (dolayısıyla fiyatları) daha da aşağı çekiyor.

Deflasyon psikolojisini araştırmış olan Tokyo'daki Waseda Üniversitesi'nden Profesör Kazuhisa Takemura, "Yeni bir anlayış doğdu. Buna göre tüketiciler satın almayı ve borç almayı mantıksız, hatta aptalca buluyorlar" diyor. Ekonomistlere göre, deflasyonu bir kısır döngüye dönüştüren sebeplerden biri de, şirket ve bireylerin ayakta kalabilmek için (yeni mallar almak veya yatırım yapmak yerine) masrafları kısmak ve halihazırda sahip olduklarını satmak zorunda hissetmeleridir.
Tokyo'daki Keio Üniversitesi'nde görev yapan ekonomist Shumpei Takemori, "Deflasyon, kapitalist ekonomilerin büyümek için ihtiyaç duyduğu risk alma cesaretini yok ediyor. Yaratıcı yıkımın yerini yıkıcı yıkım alıyor" diyor. İşadamları, neye uğradığını şaşıran tüketicileri tekrar alışverişe ısındırmak için çeşitli yollar deniyor. Ancak bu da genellikle Japonya'nın deflasyon sarmalını besleyen bir damping savaşına dönüşüyor. Düğün törenleri bile ucuzluğa girdi. İndirim yapan düğün salonları fiyatlarını 600 dolara kadar düşürdü. Oysa daha on yıl önceki düğünler normalde bunun on katıydı. Japonya'nın üçüncü büyük kenti olan Osaka'da satıcılar daha geçenlerde büyük bir ucuzluk kampanyası düzenledi, ama hayal kırıklığına uğradılar. Küçük bir giyim mağazasında tezgâhtarlık yapan 63 yaşındaki Akiko Oka, "Japonlar iyi görünme hevesini bile yitirmiş gibiler" diyor. Yıllar süren bir umursamazlıktan sonra Japonya nasıl bir sorunla karşı karşıya olduğunu anlamaya başladı. Fakat birçok Japon için belki de artık çok geç. 24 yaşındaki Yukari Higaki, tüm giysilerini ucuzluktan alarak, yemeklerini kendi yaparak ve yurt dışında gezmeyerek olabildiğince tasarruf etmeye çalıştığını söylüyor. Dediğine göre, akranları hâlâ rahat yaşamakla beraber hem kendisi, hem de arkadaşları en kötü ihtimale karşı hep savunmadalar. Japonya Tüketici Piyasasını Araştırma Enstitüsü Başkanı Hisakazu Matsuda, genç Japonların tüketimden nefret ettiğini söylüyor. Yaptıkları hesaba göre, şimdiki kuşak 60'ına geldiğinde onların tutumluluğu yüzünden Japonya 420 milyar dolarlık bir tüketim kaybına uğramış olacak. "Dünyada bunun gibi başka bir nesil yok" diyor Matsuda. "Harcama yapmanın aptallık olduğunu sanıyorlar" diye ekliyor. Bir mobilya mağazasında yarı zamanlı çalışan Higaki ise, "Bizim kuşağımız azla yetinmeyi öğrendi" diyor.

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: October 16, 2010

World’s Most Powerful Laser on Target for Awesome Science

2010-10-13T06:48:00.000-05:00

Scientists recently pulled together the pieces of the world’s most powerful laser and, in a first-ever complete dry run, pulled the trigger on a peppercorn-sized pellet of nuclear fuel. The energy crushed the capsule instantly, causing it to spew a shower of neutrons. In short: It worked.
The firing of the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, located 40 or so miles east of San Francisco, wasn’t an earnest attempt at a more-energy-out-than-you-put-in “ignition” of fusion, the same process that merges atoms at the sun’s core — and the facility’s ultimate goal. Yet the staff and independent researchers working with the $3.5 billion machine have reason to be optimistic about achieving fusion within two years, even if much of the device’s time is earmarked for defense research and prospects of near-limitless and pollution-free energy aren’t certain.
“In my mind, to have accomplished this shot is an almost unfathomable scientific achievement,” Paul Drake, a physicist at the University of Michigan using NIF as a proving ground for studying supernova physics in the laboratory, told Wired.com. “I’ve had a lifetime of experience of big science facilities, and find myself in awe of [the NIF team] having made this thing work this fast.”

The research facility’s construction began in 1997 and spreads over an area nearly the size of three pro league football fields, most of the space occupied by equipment that revs up 192 laser beams. During the Sept. 29, 2010 firing of the laser, scientists and engineers funneled these beams into a 30-foot-diameter metal sphere at the end of the complex. At the center of this chamber, a tiny plastic pellet filled with heavier forms of hydrogen received a punishing 1 megajoule zap, similar to the instantaneous oomph of a car traveling 100 mph.
According to engineering physicist Edward Moses, who heads up the NIF team, the laser burst was about 75 percent of its full energy capacity. In addition, the cryogenically cooled pellet was filled with deliberately less-than-perfect fuel.
“The last thing we’d ever think about doing is playing cowboy with this thing,” Moses said. Throughout the next year or two leading up to an all-or-nothing firing, the facility will make similar integrated shots about once a month.
Richard Petrasso, a fusion scientist at MIT who works with the machine’s diagnostic equipment, said the tiptoeing is for a good reason.
“The facility is like a new car engine,” Petrasso said. “You don’t hit the pedal all the way down to the ground the first time. You have to tune it to get all of the conditions just right — the laser, the diagnostics and the surface of the capsule.”
About 10 trillion neutrons zoomed out of the capsule during the test shot, signaling the successful fusion of some tritium and deuterium atoms — the “heavy” hydrogen fuels in the pellet. Moses said 1,000 times more neutrons should fly out during the ultimate goal of a fusion chain reaction.
At that point, if the machine can actually do it, Drake said the scientific payoffs will be huge.
“We’re still proving we can do experiments we want, and also for the broader scientific community,” Drake said. “But without hesitation, I’d say NIF is on track for doing some pretty awesome science,” including simulating Jupiter’s oddly magnetic core, the innards of stars and other hot-and-dense environments around the universe.

At the end of the day, however, most of NIF’s operating time isn’t slated for doing fundamental science. Moses said about 10 percent of the machine’s time is dedicated to that now and will go up to 20 percent after 2013. Another 40 percent (by 2013) is hedged for more ignition research, and the remaining 40 percent chunk will be for gathering data about fusion physics for the government. In other words, it will simulate fusion bomb explosions without detonating them.
“Strategic security is also part of the mission,” Moses said. “We want to make sure we can build virtual test sites on computers, but we need good data to ground the models.” If NIF achieves fusion burn, he said it will be the only facility of its kind to safely create the conditions of active weapons.
Beyond NIF’s three-pronged mission, there’s also the promise of developing a safe fusion energy source that releases 30-40 times the energy put in. The only theorized “pollution” would be helium, which is the universe’s most pervasive and inert gas.
“The energy potential is there, for sure,” Petrasso said. “The question is about practical implementation. There are a lot of … issues that have to be dealt with to turn it into a reactor that makes energy.”

Images: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 1) Inside the National Ignition Facility’s 10-meter-diameter target chamber. 2) NIF’s laser bay. 2) The container of the tritium/deuterium fuel pellet, called a “hohlraum.” Video: Wired.com

How Modified Worms and Goats Can Mass-Produce Nature's Toughest Fiber

2010-10-13T06:38:00.000-05:00

After years of research, we may be close to full-scale production of super-strong spider silk
Mutant silkworms can produce miles of super-strong silk, in a new breakthrough that could lead to mass production of tough, flexible spider-silk material. Thanks to the efforts of these genetically modified spider-worms, along with spidergoats and spider-alfalfa, spider clothes may soon be upon us.
Randy Lewis, a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming, has been milking his spidergoats for a couple years now, and he’s been trying to improve yields of genetically engineered spider-silk alfalfa. He’s researching improved synthetic spider silk genes, and he hopes to start growing spider cotton in the near future. With his latest research, spider fabrics might only be a year away.

Last week, Lewis and Malcolm Fraser at the University of Notre Dame announced they bred silkworms that had been genetically engineered to produce spider silk.

“From our perspective, there are huge advantages to the fact that the fiber is already spun,” Lewis said. “You don’t have to purify the protein, you don’t have to take it and spin fibers.”
Lewis said the study, which has not yet been published, proves the concept of engineering and breeding transgenic silkworms.

Silkworm: A mature silkworm is pictured just before it starts spinning its transgenic silk. University of Notre Dame

“The real question is going to be, can we make the necessary improvements in the mechanical properties of the silkworm silk by incorporating the spider silk in it? If we can do that, then obviously it makes a whole lot of things possible in terms of the amount of material you can make.”
A single silkworm cocoon contains more than a half-mile of silk thread, so colonies of transgenic silkworms produce plenty of silk, said Fraser, a molecular biologist at Notre Dame. He believes industrial production of engineered spider silk could happen within a year.

Spider silk is one of the most valuable materials in nature. It could be used for a vast array of products, from artificial ligaments to super-strong wound dressings or even body armor. Lewis envisions spider-silk replacement tendons, parachute cords and more.

Silk could even be used to transport drugs or act as nanoscale transistor scaffolds. In a study last year, scientists at Legacy Clinical Research & Technology Center in Portland, Ore., demonstrated that silk-based brain implants containing adenosine can suppress seizures in rats. In a paper published in the journal Science in July, Tufts University researchers said silk could be used to build flexible and degradable displays or even implantable optical systems for medicine.

“There’s lots of things you can do with fibers that you can’t do with something that comes as an amorphous blob or a solid,” Lewis said.
Nano-fabrics could be even stronger than spider silk, but as of now they’re impossibly small. Last week, Canadian researchers reported building the longest-ever polyyne chain — polyyne carbon-carbon bonds are even stronger than those in graphene — but it was only 44 carbon atoms long.

Nano-sized fibers are still limited. “We can make textile quantities of the silkworm silks,” Fraser said. “Nanotechnology is certainly something that has some awesome potential, but I don’t know how soon that potential will be realized, and even if it is realized, I’m not sure that it would replace many of the medical applications of natural silk fibers, which are considerable.”

Lewis has been working on those applications for two decades. It’s been 12 years since he first isolated the genes that produce high-performance spider silk, and he garnered international attention for his transgenic goats, whose DNA has been altered to produce the proteins necessary to make spider silk. When the goats give birth and start lactating, they produce spider silk proteins in their milk, which is collected, purified and spun into silk, Lewis said.

It would be easier to milk spiders than mutant goats, if only spiders were not so murderous and territorial. As it is, spider farms have not proven a successful venture, whereas there are long traditions of farming both silkworms and goats. Scale makes a difference too: Lewis can get half an ounce of silk from every quart of milk. It would take 100 spiders to obtain that amount.

Transgenic silkworms could be even more productive. Breeding them involved some sneaky DNA, however. Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc., a Lansing, Mich., firm, partnered with Fraser, who discovered and patented a DNA transposon called “piggyBAC.” The transposon can insert itself into a cell’s genetic material. The researchers used piggyBAC to incorporate snippets of spider DNA into silkworm embryos, resulting in silkworms that spin a hybridized part-silkworm, part-spider silk.

The researchers wanted to be sure they could breed the spiderized silkworms, so they also added fluorescent protein to the spider DNA. The mutant silkworms had glowing red eyes, and their silk was fluorescent green.
Fraser said he is completing molecular analyses before submitting his study to a research journal. Meanwhile, he hopes to continue improving the snippets of spider DNA — especially if scientists obtain a sequence for a brand-new spider just discovered in Madagascar. The Darwin’s bark spider makes the largest webs in the world, spinning silk that is 10 times stronger than Kevlar.

Fraser also studies HIV and hepatitis, and he hinted that piggyBAC-hacked silkworms might be useful for other applications: “Silk isn’t the only protein that silkworms can produce,” he said.
Lewis said his highest priority is figuring out the fastest and most efficient way to produce large quantities of silk. He also hopes to continue isolating new spider silk genes and incorporating them into his formula. As of now, his formula is a blend of several different spider proteins, mainly from the golden orb weaver.
Lewis also hopes to start breeding cotton plants that contain the protein necessary to make spider silk. Cotton seeds already contain protein, and they’re considered a waste product, Lewis said.

“If we can take and use something that nobody is going to eat and that doesn’t have much value, and use that as a production system, then we have very little impact on food and fiber, and we can use the methods that are already out there,” he said.

Then spider clothes might not be far off at all.

In New Attempt to Build a Practical Military Laser Weapon, Lockheed Inverts a Prism

2010-10-13T06:35:00.000-05:00

Lasers can be powerful weapons — they can take down an aircraft at long ranges and in unstable conditions, for instance. But they are hampered by power and size limits, so they’re not widely used by the military (yet).
Lockheed Martin has a solution: a fiber laser that basically works like a backward prism.

Laser-Powered Warfare Lockheed's RELI laser, developed under a DARPA contract, works like an inverse prism to focus several different wavelengths of laser light. Lockheed Martin

Lockheed is among three firms recently awarded contracts to develop a laser for the military’s Robust Electric Laser Initiative, which seeks to improve the power of electric lasers. Fiber lasers are efficient and compact, but until now they have been weaker than other types, like chemical lasers. The RELI program seeks to improve laser strength while reducing power and cooling, so systems can be small enough to install on ships or airplanes.

A Lockheed subsidiary developed a first-of-its-kind high-powered fiber laser capable of producing 100 kilowatts or more, according to Lockheed. It uses fiber optics to produce near-perfect beams. The method also confines the laser light to the fiber’s glass structure without using mirrors or other optics.
John Wojnar, director of business development for the laser systems business, said in a September issue of Aviation Week that it works like a inverse prism: lasers with slightly different wavelengths enter a combiner, and the result is a single, focused beam. It’s called Spectral Beam Combining.
Lockheed won an initial $14 million contract from the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command to develop the system. Along with General Atomics and Raytheon, the firm must demonstrate a 25 kW system that can be scaled up to 100 kW within five years.
General Atomics will improve its Hellads distributed-gain laser approach to improve efficiency, while Raytheon will pursue a planar waveguide laser, according to Aviation Week.
Northrop Grumman is also expected to obtain a RELI contract.

Casimir effect put to work as a nano-switch

2010-10-13T06:22:00.002-05:00

A new technique that takes control of the Casimir effect – a strange quantum phenomenon that gums up nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) – may pave the way to a switch that could cut the power consumption of nanoscale gadgets.

The Casimir effect tends to force together two parallel conducting plates when they are a few micrometres apart or less. It arises because of the quantum electromagnetic fluctuations that always occur in a vacuum. The close proximity of the two plates constrains the fluctuations in the gap between them. This makes the fluctuation between the plates weaker than those in the surrounding space, so the plates are pushed together.

The effect was named after Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, who predicted its existence in 1948. Nanotechnologists are keen to tame it, because it gums up their nanoscopic machines.

A European research team has now done just that, using a material already used in rewritable CDs and Blu-ray discs. AIST, an alloy of silver, indium, antimony and tellurium, reversibly switches from a crystalline to an amorphous state when heated by a laser, allowing data to be written and rewritten onto a disc.

Golden ball

The team deposited AIST on an aluminium-coated silicon wafer and held it between 40 and 120 nanometres from a gold sphere in an ultra-high vacuum. When AIST was in an amorphous form, the Casimir force measured about 100 piconewtons, but it increased by 20 to 25 per cent when the AIST was in its crystalline form.

This is because the crystalline phase is more reflective, so it confines the electromagnetic fluctuations more effectively and so increases the Casimir force.

Group member George Palasantzas at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands says this phenomenon could be used to build a new type of low-power nanoswitch. The switch would be physically moved by altering the state of the AIST, and so changing the strength of the Casimir force.

"The state remains stable even when power is turned off, which is a unique feature," Palasantzas says – unlike existing nanoswitches, such as those used to switch the transmission frequency in mobile phones.

Davide Iannuzzi of the Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study, says it is "an important contribution", though he warns that in real applications, the build-up of electric charge between moving parts may have more of an effect on the nanoswitch than the Casimir force. "If one finds an easy way to control the [electric charge], then the Casimir force becomes indeed interesting – but that is quite a challenge," he says.

Palasantzas, however, predicts that ways will be found to minimise the electrostatic build-up, so that the Casimir force exceeds the electrostatic force for distances below about 100 nanometres.

Journal reference: Physical Review A, in press

Work light twice as hard to make cheap solar cells

2010-10-13T06:17:00.000-05:00

"Third-generation" solar cells that could shatter the efficiency limit of conventional cells have come a step closer. A proof-of-concept device is the first to generate twice the standard current produced from the most energetic photons in sunlight.

A photon arriving at a solar cell needs a certain amount of energy to break an electron free from its atom and generate current. However, photons with energy above that threshold still generally release only a single electron, generating no additional current even if they arrive with more than enough energy to free two electrons.

In 1961, semiconductor pioneers William Shockley and Hans Queisser showed that the these factors limited single solar cells to converting no more than 31 per cent of incident solar energy to electrical energy. But around a decade ago Martin Green of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, challenged that orthodoxy. He suggested the third generation of solar cells could break the 31 per cent barrier.

Breaking the limit

Earlier this year, a team from the universities of Texas and Minnesota offered one way to break through the barrier, by capturing extra energy lost as heat after the electrons escape their atoms. Now Bruce Parkinson and Justin Sambur at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and Thomas Novet of Voxtel in Beaverton, Oregon, have taken the first steps along another route to super-efficient solar cells. Their approach involves harnessing particularly energetic photons – those with more than twice the energy needed to free an electron – and using them to free two electrons rather than one, potentially doubling the current generated.

The process had already been seen in macroscopic semiconductors, but it has been extremely inefficient. Seeking better results, Parkinson and colleagues turned to quantum dots, tiny chunks of semiconductor that confine current carriers in nanometre-sized volumes.

Parkinson's team coated a smooth titanium dioxide electrode with a single layer of lead-sulphide quantum dots. The quantum dots chosen must absorb between 0.85 and 1.39 electronvolts to free up one electron.

The researchers illuminated the device with a variety of wavelengths of light. Using reddish light in which individual photons carry 1 to 2 electronvolts, 70 to 80 per cent of the relatively small number of photons absorbed by the device freed up an electron. But then the team switched to light from the blue end of the spectrum, where individual photons carry over 2.4 electronvolts, which is 2.7 times the threshold for freeing electrons. Now they collected an excess of electrons, up to about double the number of absorbed photons. This strongly suggests that many of the photons were generating two electrons.

Super-cheap cells

"It's very good science," says Michael Naughton of Boston College. The demonstration of collecting the electrons is an important step toward future solar cells, he says.

"This is a first step," Parkinson told New Scientist. The single layer of quantum dots used in the experiment is so thin that it absorbed only a little of the incident light and total efficiency was very low. But he expects others to refine the technique and boost total efficiency.

The quantum-dot solar cell technology could replace dyes in dye-sensitised solar cells. These cells presently have a peak production efficiency of around 11 per cent, but it is "cost per watt" that is the most important metric, says Parkinson, and quantum-dot sensitised solar cells could be very cheap to make. "What we need is a 12 to 15 per cent efficient solar cell that you can manufacture for a cost not much more than newsprint."

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1191462

Invisibility cloaks and how to use them

2010-10-13T06:11:00.000-05:00

The "invisibility cloaks" being made in labs today can hide objects when viewed from a wide range of directions and in visible light – both considered implausible developments when the first working invisibility cloak was demonstrated just four years ago. But the technology that makes objects vanish looks set to be more useful for the safety of offshore structures and for unlocking cosmological secrets than for would-be Harry Potter impersonators.

In 2006, John Pendry's team at Imperial College London made the news with a design for a cloak that could steer light around an object to render it invisible. Within months a team led by David Smith of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, had built such a device using exotic "metamaterials" – materials with unusual electromagnetic properties that are not found in nature.

But that first cloak could only hide two-dimensional objects viewed from specific directions – and only if they were "viewed" using one particular microwave frequency. Producing a cloak to hide objects from visible light, which has a wavelength several orders of magnitude smaller than microwaves – let alone cloaking objects when viewed from any direction – seemed a more remote possibility.

Just four years later that's no longer the case. "While full cloaking has not been achieved, it shows promises in the right direction," says Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews, UK.

Carpet trick

Last year, physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, independently built optical-frequency cloaks. These were so-called carpet cloaks, made from silicon, which were placed over the object to be cloaked. The object created a bump in the carpet, but the carpet appears flat when light arriving from a specific direction reflects off the surface.

For now, such technology can cloak only objects with a surface area of a few square micrometres and a few hundred nanometres deep. But "in principle, you can make the [cloaked] object larger and larger", says Thomas Zentgraf, a member of the Berkeley team.

Another limitation of the technology – that it works for specific viewing angles only – is already being overcome. Earlier this year, Tolga Ergin of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and colleagues demonstrated a version of the technology that could hide an object from view from a wider range of directions, bringing 3D cloaking a step closer. They arranged photonic crystals in a woodpile-like stack, filling the gaps between the crystals with varying amounts of a polymer to control the refractive index of the metamaterial. This changed the refractive index to a differing degree across the metamaterial, allowing it to mask a bump in a gold foil over a wide viewing angle of about 60 degrees.

"We are optimistic that we can do this [for any viewing angle] in a few years," says Zentgraf.

Waves and event horizons

But even 2D cloaking technology could have real-world uses. Stefan Enoch at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France, and colleagues have shown that metamaterials could guide waves around offshore structures, protecting them from storms or tsunamis.

Meanwhile, metamaterials could also shed light on black holes. In 2008, Leonhardt and his team showed how to mimic an event horizon in the lab.

If the medium through which an electromagnetic wave is propagating is moving as fast as the wave itself, the wave is effectively trapped and cannot escape the medium. This has the same effect as a black hole's event horizon, the point of no return for light: an observer outside an event horizon could see nothing inside, as no light can escape the black hole's gravity to cross the horizon to the universe outside.

To mimic this, Leonhardt's team fired laser pulses into a specially fabricated optical fibre. The pulses were designed to modify the fibre's optical properties, so as the laser pulse travelled along the fibre, the change in the fibre's properties moved along it at the same speed. It was as if a virtual fibre was moving at the speed of light, effectively trapping the light

A black hole emits so-called Hawking radiation, and theory says that Leonhardt's team laboratory analogue should do so too, albeit at levels too small to be easily detected yet. Even Harry Potter's cloak wouldn't be capable of that.

Journal references: The two optical frequency cloak papers: University of California, Berkeley study, Cornell University study; Ergin's 3D cloaking study: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1186351; Leonhardt's black hole study: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1153625

Sunrise boulevards could bring clean power

2010-10-13T06:04:00.000-05:00

With many governments now introducing feed-in tariffs – financial incentives for homeowners to install sources of renewable energy – some companies are even offering to install photovoltaic (PV) cells on house roofs for free. But although solar cells are destined to become a more common sight, are rooftops really the best place for them?

Even if the government inducements work, and PV cells end up adorning large portions of the urban skyline, by 2020 they are expected to account for a mere 2 per cent of electricity in the UK. There may, however, be another way to enable PV cells to make a greater contribution: stick them on our roads and drive on them.

New Scientist has been talking to electrical engineer Scott Brusaw, based in Sagle, Idaho, who believes that replacing asphalt with PV cells is the way forward for renewable energy.

With funding from the US Federal Highways Administration his firm, Solar Roadways, has been looking at how PV cells, normally perceived as relatively fragile devices, can be toughened up to withstand the relentless pounding that trucks and other traffic would throw at them.

Homeward bound

If successful the rewards could be handsome, says Brusaw. According to figures he has obtained from the American Geophysical Union, roads, highways and open-air parking lots in the lower 48 US states account for more than 100,000 square kilometres of surface area. If this asphalt and concrete were replaced with solar cells of moderate efficiency – around 15 per cent – they would not only generate a significant amount of energy but would also provide a backbone infrastructure to deliver the energy to our doors, he says.

Brusaw's plan is to create 3.7-metre square panels – the US interstate highway system standard lane width – that slot together, linking up through junction boxes lying beneath them. With a US national average of around 4 hours of sunlight a day, each of these panels would be capable of around 7.6 kilowatt-hours of energy a day, he says. This could either be fed into the grid or stored in super capacitors or flywheels within the panels to allow electric vehicles to recharge through roadside plug-in points, he says.

Brusaw estimates that the cost of each panel would be around $10,000, which – based on figures from the Idaho Transportation Department – he estimates to be roughly four times the current cost of laying asphalt. He hopes these panels can be made to last longer than conventional road surfaces, but that still makes them more expensive – until you factor in the electricity they would produce, says Brusaw. "Our panels are designed to pay for themselves," he says.

Tough cell

Perhaps, but can PV cells really be made tough enough for the job? Glass can be made to be as strong as steel, but the challenge here is to make it resistant to shattering. Brusaw is convinced it can be done, for example by borrowing tricks used to make bullet-proof and blast-proof glass.

One way is to deposit thin-film PV material onto flexible plastic and laminate it onto toughened glass, says materials scientist Carlo Pantano at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who Brusaw has been consulting.

However, that leaves the issue of tyre grip. "Smooth surfaces are the strongest for glass," Pantano says. That's not so great for driving on.

So some texture would need to be added, which in turn presents two problems, says Pantano. Any texturing or roughening will reduce both strength and the amount of light hitting the PV cells.

Road to nowhere?

These are issues Brusaw says he is currently trying to work out. So far, he has built only a single crude prototype, which houses the necessary electronic components, but is neither operational nor toughened.

One solution he is considering is to use thousands of tiny prisms built into the surface. These would allow tyres to grip and would also help to direct sunlight to the PV cells when the sun is low, he says.

While Brusaw seeks funding to build a functioning prototype, his hopes are pinned on winning a slice of the Ecomagination Challenge, a $200 million prize sponsored by multinational conglomerate GE for developing the next-generation power grid, which closes at the end of September.

Little wonder. Adding truck-proof technologies and microprism textures is likely to be costly. If Brusaw is to stand a chance of pulling this off he's going to need every penny he can get.

Extreme PowerPoint places you in 3D slide show

2010-10-13T06:01:00.000-05:00

IT WILL either revolutionise your presentations or make "death by PowerPoint" worse. One thing is certain: by allowing you to touch and play with light, Microsoft's LightSpace technology will make presenting more fun.

The LightSpace prototype projects slides, documents, photographs or video onto any surface, from a table to a door. Presenters can then touch and literally pick up a virtual item from a display and carry it across the room as a spot of light in the palm of their hand.

To perform commands – "play video", for example – you move your hand along a projected light beam that acts as the central control. Holding your hand in the right position on the menu for a few seconds activates the function.

"The aim is to bring the kind of multi-touch interaction you get with LCD surface displays to every surface in a room," says Andrew Wilson of the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, Washington.

On grid

LightSpace works by using projectors, motion-tracking sensors and depth-sensing cameras.

Based loosely on Kinect, Microsoft's gaming system that tracks body movement without the need for a handheld controller, the technology is due to be demonstrated at the User Interface and Software Technology conference in New York City this week.

With Kinect, a device called a "depth camera" bathes the gamer in an infrared grid pattern whose telltale distortion lets a computer work out the distance between a camera and every pixel in the image it observes. That way, it builds a 3D image of the gamer's movements in front of the TV set.

LightSpace uses three depth cameras to create a full 3D image of the area of the room in which a presentation is being made. Instead of looking for gaming cues such as kicks and punches, it identifies which projected media the user is interacting with.

Early stages

It's a compelling prospect, but Microsoft stresses it is still a prototype and far from being out on the market. "We're still exploring the interactions enabled by this kind of technology," says co-developer Hrvoje Benko. For example, it may be most effective when accessed by multiple presenters. In tests the system has successfully tracked six people simultaneously.

Wilson says the project may yet work in concert with another Microsoft project, Skinput, in which a user-worn microprojector casts touchscreen menus on the skin, with taps on the skin recognised acoustically.

If the LightSpace technology does come to market as a presentation tool, users would need to beware of the same issues that spoil so many PowerPoint presentations, says Max Atkinson, author of the book Lend Me Your Ears, a critique of computer-assisted slide-show presentations. He points out that an audience might struggle to concentrate in a presentation with multiple active surfaces. "I'm not against digital aids for presenters, but LightSpace sounds a massive distraction."

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime

2010-09-14T03:46:00.001-05:00

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.
As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.
Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.
The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.
At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.
The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.
“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”
At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.
Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.
“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.
Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.
Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”
Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.
“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.
Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.
“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”
Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.
He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.
“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.
For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.
But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.
“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”
Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.
“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”
But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”
Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.
A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.
At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.
“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”

Beyninizi Fazla Yormayın

SAN FRANCISCO - Bugünün akıllı telefonları ve dijital cihazları en ufak zaman dilimini bile eğlenceli ve üretken bir hale getirebiliyor. Ancak bilim insanları beklenmeyen bir yan etkiye de dikkat çekiyor. İnsanlar beyinlerini dijital verilerle meşgul ettiklerinde, aslında rahatlayacakları zamandan çalıyor ve bu yüzden algılama, öğrenme, hatırlama duyularına veya yaratıcılıklarına zarar veriyorlar. San Francisco'daki California Üniversitesi'nden araştırmacılar, farelerin yeni bir olayla karşılaştırdıklarında, mesela yeni bir bölgeyi keşfe çıktıklarında beyinlerinde yeni hareketlilikler gözlemlediler. Fareler keşiflerine ancak mola verdikleri zaman gördüklerini anlayıp hatırlayabiliyor. Araştırmacılar bu bulguların insanların öğrenme süreçlerine uygulanabileceğini düşünüyor. Aynı üniversitedeki Psikoloji Fakültesi'nden Doçent Loren Frank, "Atıl zaman neredeyse kesin bir şekilde beynin yaşadığı tecrübelerin üzerinden geçmesini, onları sağlamlaştırmasını ve uzun süreli kalıcı hatıralara dönüştürmesini sağlıyor" diyor. Beyin sürekli olarak uyarıldığında ise "Bu öğrenme sürecini engellemiş oluyorsunuz" diyor. Michigan Üniversitesi'nde yapılan bir çalışmaya göre, doğada yapılan yürüyüşün ardından insanların öğrenme kapasiteleri, kalabalık kent sokaklarında yapılan bir yürüyüşe göre çok daha yüksek. Araştırmada çok fazla bilgi yüklenmesinin insanları yorgun kıldığı iddia ediliyor. İnsanlar egzersiz yaparken veya otobüs durağında beklerken birden fazla iş yaparak eğlenip rahatlayabiliyorlar. Ancak bilim insanlarına göre bu beyni zorluyor. Michigan Üniversitesi'nden nöroloji uzmanı Dr. Marc Berman, "İnsanlar kafalarını tazelediklerini düşünüyor ancak aksine beyinlerini yoruyorlar" diyor. Ne olursa olsun artık zamanın en küçük bir anını bile doldurmak için birbiriyle rekabet eden büyük bir mobil yazılım geliştirme endüstrisi var. Endüstrinin devlerinden Electronic Arts'ın sahibi olduğu oyun şirketi PlayFish'in kurucu ortaklarından Sebastien de Halleux, "İki saatlik öğle yemeği gibi uzun dinlenme araları yerine, bir dolu mikro anlar yaşıyoruz" diyor. Oyun üreticilerinin "oyunları bu mikro zamanların içinde sığdırabilmek için yeniden yarattıklarını" söylüyor. Birçok iş adamının sürekli olarak telefonlarını kontrol etmesi gerekiyor. Ancak bu zihinsel bir yük haline gelebiliyor. San Francisco'daki 26 yaşındaki otomobil tamircisi Henry Chen'in BlackBerry alışkanlığı ile ilgili kafası biraz karışık. Chen, "Her boş zamanımda telefonumu kontrol ediyorum" diyor. Az önce fırında sırada beklerken arkadaşına bir SMS gönderiyordu. Kasadaki bayan onu uyarıp siparişini sorana kadar mesajlaşmaya devam etti. Kısa bir süre önce dükkânını açan Chen hiçbir potansiyel müşteriyi kaçırmak istemiyor. Bir yıl önce BlackBerry'e geçmiş ve sürekli iletişim halinde olmanın üzerinde bir baskı unsuru yarattığını söylüyor. "Bu bir takıntı haline geldi. Bunu talep eden müşterilerim değil, beynim. Kız arkadaşıma bu aleti aldıktan sonra kendimi daha yorgun hissettiğimi söyledim" diyor. Aynı anda fırının dışındaki otoparkta da birçok insan cep telefonuyla oynuyordu. Birçok insan günün çoğunu yoğun bir tempoda bilgisayar kullanarak geçiriyor ve boş zamanlarında da cep telefonlarıyla oynuyorlar. 40 yaşındaki Dianne Bates, sabahları daha yataktan çıkmadan iPhone'unu kontrol ediyor. Reklamcılık sektöründeki işinde bütün gününü dizüstü bilgisayarının başında geçiriyor. Ancak spor yaparken bile elektronik cihazlardan uzak duramıyor. Bir alette 55 dakika boyunca spor yaparken hiçbir şey yapmamak ona çok tuhaf geliyor. Spor yaparken iPod'undan şarkılar dinliyor, iPhone'undan e-mail gönderiyor ve sonra da yüksek çözünürlüklü televizyondan program izliyor. Ancak bazı araştırmacılar, beyni hiç dinlendirmemenin verdiği zararın, cihazların insanları meşgul tutup daha fazla spor yaptırması yüzünden dengelendiğini belirtiyor. "Egzersiz ve Beynin Devrim Yaratan Yeni Bilimi" isimli kitabın yazarı ve Harvard Tıp Fakültesi Psikiyatri Fakültesi'nden Doç. Dr. John J. Ratey, "İçinde bulunduğumuz bu hareketsiz dünyada spor hayatımızın bir parçası olmak zorunda. Bizi hareket ettirecek her şey yararlıdır" diyor. Ancak Ratley, diğer her şeyin eşit olması durumunda, insanların cihazlarından uzakta spor yapmasını tercih ettiğini söylüyor. "Moraliniz ve hafızanız için cihazlardan uzakta hareket etmek çok daha yararlı" diyor.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/02/technology/unplugged.html?ref=technology
MATT RICHTEL

Superbroke, Superfrugal, Superpower?

2010-09-14T03:42:00.001-05:00

In recent years, I have often said to European friends: So, you didn’t like a world of too much American power? See how you like a world of too little American power — because it is coming to a geopolitical theater near you. Yes, America has gone from being the supreme victor of World War II, with guns and butter for all, to one of two superpowers during the cold war, to the indispensable nation after winning the cold war, to “The Frugal Superpower” of today. Get used to it. That’s our new nickname. American pacifists need not worry any more about “wars of choice.” We’re not doing that again. We can’t afford to invade Grenada today.
Ever since the onset of the Great Recession of 2008, it has been clear that the nature of being a leader — political or corporate — was changing in America. During most of the post-World War II era, being a leader meant, on balance, giving things away to people. Today, and for the next decade at least, being a leader in America will mean, on balance, taking things away from people.
And there is simply no way that America’s leaders, as they have to take more things away from their own voters, are not going to look to save money on foreign policy and foreign wars. Foreign and defense policy is a lagging indicator. A lot of other things get cut first. But the cuts are coming — you can already hear the warnings from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. And a frugal American superpower is sure to have ripple effects around the globe.
“The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era” is actually the title of a very timely new book by my tutor and friend Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert. “In 2008,” Mandelbaum notes, “all forms of government-supplied pensions and health care (including Medicaid) constituted about 4 percent of total American output.” At present rates, and with the baby boomers soon starting to draw on Social Security and Medicare, by 2050 “they will account for a full 18 percent of everything the United States produces.”
This — on top of all the costs of bailing ourselves out of this recession — “will fundamentally transform the public life of the United States and therefore the country’s foreign policy.” For the past seven decades, in both foreign affairs and domestic policy, our defining watchword was “more,” argues Mandelbaum. “The defining fact of foreign policy in the second decade of the 21st century and beyond will be ‘less.’ ”
When the world’s only superpower gets weighed down with this much debt — to itself and other nations — everyone will feel it. How? Hard to predict. But all I know is that the most unique and important feature of U.S. foreign policy over the last century has been the degree to which America’s diplomats and naval, air and ground forces provided global public goods — from open seas to open trade and from containment to counterterrorism — that benefited many others besides us. U.S. power has been the key force maintaining global stability, and providing global governance, for the last 70 years. That role will not disappear, but it will almost certainly shrink.
Great powers have retrenched before: Britain for instance. But, as Mandelbaum notes, “When Britain could no longer provide global governance, the United States stepped in to replace it. No country now stands ready to replace the United States, so the loss to international peace and prosperity has the potential to be greater as America pulls back than when Britain did.”
After all, Europe is rich but wimpy. China is rich nationally but still dirt poor on a per capita basis and, therefore, will be compelled to remain focused inwardly and regionally. Russia, drunk on oil, can cause trouble but not project power. “Therefore, the world will be a more disorderly and dangerous place,” Mandelbaum predicts.
How to mitigate this trend? Mandelbaum argues for three things: First, we need to get ourselves back on a sustainable path to economic growth and reindustrialization, with whatever sacrifices, hard work and political consensus that requires. Second, we need to set priorities. We have enjoyed a century in which we could have, in foreign policy terms, both what is vital and what is desirable. For instance, I presume that with infinite men and money we can succeed in Afghanistan. But is it vital? I am sure it is desirable, but vital? Finally, we need to shore up our balance sheet and weaken that of our enemies, and the best way to do that in one move is with a much higher gasoline tax.
America is about to learn a very hard lesson: You can borrow your way to prosperity over the short run but not to geopolitical power over the long run. That requires a real and growing economic engine. And, for us, the short run is now over. There was a time when thinking seriously about American foreign policy did not require thinking seriously about economic policy. That time is also over.
An America in hock will have no hawks — or at least none that anyone will take seriously.

Süper Züğürt, Süper Tutumlu, Süper Güç

Son yıllarda Avrupalı arkadaşlarıma hep şunu söyledim: Demek ABD'nin çok güçlü olduğu bir dünyadan hoşlanmadınız? Amerikan gücünün çok az olduğu bir dünyayı sevip sevmeyeceğinizi de göreceğiz çünkü bu yanı başınızdaki bir jeopolitik sinemada gösterime giriyor. İkinci Dünya Savaşı'nda herkese hem savaş malzemesi hem de tüketim ürünleri sağlayan ABD, Soğuk Savaş sırasında iki süper güçten birisi, soğuk savaşı kazandıktan sonra vazgeçilmez ülke, şimdi ise "Tutumlu Süper Güç" oldu. Amerikalılar, buna alışsanız iyi olur. Yeni lakabımız bu. Amerikalı barış yanlılarının artık "seçme savaşlar" konusunda kaygılanması gereksiz. Bunu tekrar yapmayacağız. Artık Grenada'yı işgal etme lüksümüz yok. 2008'de Büyük Durgunluğun başlamasında bu yana, ABD siyasetinde ve iş yaşamında liderliğin doğası açıkça değişiyor. İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası dönemin büyük bölümünde, lider olmak genelde insanlara bir şey vermek demekti. Günümüzde ve en azından önümüzdeki on yılda, ABD'de lider olmak genelde insanlardan bir şey almak anlamına gelecek. Kendi seçmenlerinden daha fazla şey istemek zorunda kalan Amerikalı liderlerin, dış politikaya ve ülke dışındaki savaşlara harcanan parayı kısması kaçınılmaz. Dış politika ve savunma politikası, gecikmeli göstergelerdir. Birçok başka harcama kalemi, kesintilere en baştan maruz kalır. Ancak bu alanlardaki kesintiler de yolda. Savunma Bakanı Robert Gates'in uyarılarını şimdiden duyabilirsiniz. Tutumlu bir Amerikan süper gücünün etkileri, dünya çapında hissedilecektir. Aslında "Tutumlu Süper Güç: Amerika'nın Paraya Sıkıştığı Bir Dönemdeki Küresel Liderliği", öğretmenim ve arkadaşım olan Johns Hopkins Üniversitesi'nden dış politika uzmanı Michael Mandelbaum'un gündeme uygun kitabının başlığı. Mandelbaum, "Devletçe karşılanan her tür emeklilik ödemesi ve sağlık hizmeti (Medicaid dâhil), 2008'de Amerika'nın toplam hâsılasının yüzde 4'ü kadardı" diyor. Şu anki süreçler ile 1950'lerde doğan kuşağın yakında Sosyal Güvenlik ve Medicare'den yararlanacağı birlikte düşünülünce, "2050'de bu oran, ABD'nin toplam üretiminin yüzde 18'ini oluşturacak". Durgunluktan çıkmak için yapılan bütün masraflara ek olarak bu harcama kalemi, "ABD'deki kamu hayatını ve bunun sonucu olarak dış politikayı temelden değiştirecek". Mandelbaum'a göre, son 70 yılda hem dış politika hem de iç politikada temel sloganımız "daha fazla" idi. "21'inci yüzyılın ikinci on yılında ve sonrasında, dış politikanın temel sloganı 'daha az' olacak". Dünyanın tek süper gücü, kendisine ve diğer milletlere olan bu boyuttaki borcun altında ezilince, bunu herkes hissedecek. Nasıl? Bunu bilmek zor. Ancak tek bildiğim şu: Son yüzyılda ABD dış politikasının en benzersiz ve önemli özelliği Amerikalı diplomatlar ile kara, deniz ve hava kuvvetlerinin, bizden başka birçok kişinin de yararlandığı küresel kamu hizmetleri sağlamasıydı. Bunlar arasında, denizlerdeki güvenlikten serbest ticarete, çevreleme politikasından terörizmle savaşa kadar birçok şey vardı. ABD'nin gücü, son 70 yılda küresel istikrarın korunmasında ve küresel yönetimin sağlanmasında kilit rol oynadı. Bu rol kaybolmayacak ama neredeyse kesin olarak azalacak. Büyük güçler, örneğin Britanya, bundan önce de masraf azaltma yoluna gitti. Ancak Mandelbaum'un dediği gibi, "Britanya artık küresel yönetimi üstlenemez hale geldiğinde, nöbeti ABD devraldı. Şu anda hiçbir ülke ABD'nin yerini almaya hazır değil. Bu yüzden, ABD'nin geri çekilmesi nedeniyle uluslararası barış ve refah konusunda yaşanacak kayıplar, Britanya'nın çekilmesinden sonrakilere kıyasla muhtemelen daha ciddi olacak. Ne de olsa, Avrupa zengin ama etkisiz. Çin ülke olarak zengin ancak kişi başına gelir bakımından hâlâ çok yoksul olduğu için, ülke içi ve bölgesel konulara odaklanmak zorunda kalacak. Petrol geliriyle sarhoş olan Rusya sorun yaratabilse de güç uygulayamaz. Mandelbaum, "Bu yüzden, dünya daha düzensiz ve tehlikeli hale gelecek" öngörüsünde bulunuyor. Bu gidişi nasıl yavaşlatabiliriz? Mandelbaum üç öneri getiriyor. İlk olarak, Amerikalılar sanayiyi tekrar canlandırmayı ve ekonomik büyümeyi sağlamayı sürdürülebilir biçimde halletmeli. Bunun için gereken her tür fedakârlık, ağır iş ve siyasi uzlaşma sağlanmalı. İkincisi, önceliklerimizi belirlemeliyiz. Bir asır boyunca, dış politikada hem önemli olan hem de arzu edilen şeyleri elde etmenin tadını çıkardık. Örneğin, ABD bence sınırsız insan gücü ve parayla Afganistan'da başarılı olabilir. Peki, bu önemli mi? Arzu edilir olduğuna eminim, ancak önemli mi? Son olarak, bilançomuzu düzeltip düşmanlarımızı zayıflatmalıyız. Bunu bir hamlede yapmanın en iyi yolu, benzine daha yüksek vergi koymak. ABD acı bir ders almak üzere. Borçlanarak kısa vadede refaha kavuşabilirsin ama uzun vadede jeopolitik güç elde edemezsin. Bunun için, büyüyen gerçek bir ekonomi motoru lazım. Bizim için kısa vade artık doldu. Bir zamanlar ABD dış politikasını ciddi biçimde ele almak için ekonomi politikasını ele almak gerekmezdi. Artık o devir bitti. Borç içindeki bir ABD şahinleşemez ya da en azından, şahinleştiğinde kimse onu ciddiye almaz.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Some Doubt if Any King Is Still Fit for Sweden

2010-09-14T03:39:00.000-05:00

STOCKHOLM — Two dozen members of an association to abolish the monarchy were settled around a table in a spacious apartment in the north end of the capital when someone in the back of the room muttered, “Two hundred years since the French Revolution, and still we have a king.”

In other times and in other places, these would-be regicides might have been hounded by the king’s agents. But here in liberal Sweden, they are thriving.
Indeed, so fast has membership in the Swedish Republican Association grown in recent months, rising to more than 7,300 from 2,500 one year ago, that the meeting was called to discuss a number of ambitious proposals, including the opening of a permanent office, the founding of an antimonarchist newspaper and the formation of a pan-European antimonarchist movement.
The group envisions branches in the seven countries where kings or queens still reign, including Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbors, Denmark and Norway.
“Support for monarchy is falling across Europe,” said Mona Abou-Jeib Broshammar, the association’s secretary general.

To be sure, 7,300 members is not much in a country of nine million, yet the association’s growth is notable, given that Sweden is riding a monarchist high in the wake of the fairy-tale wedding in June of Crown Princess Victoria, 33, to her former fitness trainer.
For the wedding parade, thousands flocked to the capital; millions more watched on television. Stores across the country featured porcelain dishes and cups, wooden trays, dishtowels and aprons, postcards and fountain pens adorned with portraits of the smiling couple.
Yet amid the monarchic euphoria, doubts lingered. Although Sweden’s leading newspaper, Aftonbladet, established a team in February to cover the wedding, it supplemented bright photos and gushy coverage of the royal court with editorials and opinion pieces, even cartoons, critical of the monarchy. Then, last spring, a leading polling group, the SOM Institute, published results of a survey showing that support for the monarchy had dropped to 56 percent, from 68 percent six years earlier.
“It was important that there also be some critical pieces, too,” said Susanne Nylen, who led the team covering the wedding. “All this money was being spent; some were critical.”
The attitude of Ms. Nylen, who was the newspaper’s London correspondent before assuming the royal beat, is like that of many Swedes. “I can see that the monarchy is not in line with democracy, and I see why people are against it,” she said. “But they are good at representing Sweden; it’s hard to get publicity the same way with a president.”

Moreover, as the wedding date approached, less criticism was heard. Aftonbladet found that 74 percent of respondents in a survey supported the monarchy.
Anders Janeborn is one of those supporters. “I think it’s good; it’s a historic thing,” said Mr. Janeborn, whose company sells fitness equipment.
King Carl XVI Gustaf was expected this weekend in Mr. Janeborn’s village to celebrate its 900th anniversary “with a big party,” Mr. Janeborn said. To those who object that upkeep of the royal family costs about $16 million a year, he argued, “they bring in far more; they’re selling Sweden in a good way.”
Mr. Janeborn’s surety is not shared by Nina Hemmingsson. Early on, Aftonbladet invited Ms. Hemmingsson, 38, a cartoonist and kind of Swedish R.Crumb, to contribute cartoons commenting on the wedding. “I was always very skeptical of the royal family,” said Ms. Hemmingsson, who works out of a basement studio outside Stockholm.
“They are so special, people don’t even think they go to the toilet,” she said of the royalty. “Yet, they’re a symbol of a time in history that was not democratic, so they’re a bad symbol.”
At first, she said, Aftonbladet gave her a free hand. “Then they said, ‘Don’t call the princess in your cartoons ‘Victoria,’ just ‘the crown princess,’ ’ and then, ‘Just princess,’ ” she said. “And they said from the start, ‘No sex.’ ”

Lennart Nilsson of the SOM Institute said that confidence in the royal family has dropped year by year since the institute began measuring it in 1995. “It continues going down,” he said.
Yet he sees no urgency from society for making a change. In September, Swedes will vote in national elections, but the monarchy is not an issue. “Other issues” — like jobs, education and health care — “are much more urgent,” Mr. Nilsson said.
The Swedish Republican Association is in for the long haul, said Ms. Broshammar, its secretary general. Born in Lebanon to a Syrian father and Swedish mother, Ms. Broshammar, 32, is emblematic of the changes overtaking Sweden. She moved to Sweden when her family fled Lebanon because of war there. “I have seen how a country can fall apart for lack of democracy and human rights,” she said, adding that she has received hateful messages about her heritage — her father is Muslim and her mother Christian. “Because of my multiethnic background, they say I should leave the country. They’re racists, not monarchists.”
Still, she does not suggest that Sweden will end up like Lebanon. “My best friend is a monarchist; she loves the fashion, the marketing of the royal family,” she said. “On a rational level she agrees with me; on an emotional level she disagrees.”
The association has attracted some high-powered figures, including the minister for European affairs and leading members of several political parties. Most parties on the left include in their platform the establishment of a republic, but none pursue it actively. The leaders of all parties in Parliament were invited to Victoria’s wedding; only Lars Ohly, 53, leader of the Left Party, formerly Sweden’s Communists, stayed away.
The members discussed a name change for the Republican Association, so as not to be confused with the party of John McCain and Sarah Palin, Ms. Broshammar said. And if they ever succeed in deposing the monarchy, said Magnus Simonsson, a member of the Liberal Party and the association, they promise leniency to the king.
“He would be more free than he is today,” Mr. Simonsson said, grinning. “And of course he can stay in Sweden.”

İsveç'teki Masalsı Düğünler Kraliyet Ailesine Yetmiyor

Stokholm - Krallığı kaldırmak isteyen bir derneğin yirmi kadar üyesi Stokholm'de, geniş bir apartman dairesindeki bir masanın çevresine oturmuşlardı. Odanın köşesinden bir ses geldi. "Fransız İhtilali'nın üstünden iki yüz yıl geçti, ama bizim hâlâ bir kralımız var". Başka bir zamanda ve başka bir yerde olsa, bu muhalifler kralın ajanlarınca avlanırlardı. Oysa özgürlükler ülkesi İsveç'te onlar giderek çoğalıyorlar. Gerçekten de İsveç Cumhuriyetçi Derneği'nin üye sayısı son aylarda o kadar arttı ki (geçen yıl 2 bin 500'ken şimdi 7 bin 300'ün üstünde), artık bazı yüksek hedefleri tartışmaya başladılar. Örneğin, bir merkezin açılmasından, kraliyet karşıtı bir gazetenin kurulmasından ve Avrupa genelinde benzer bir hareketin oluşumundan söz ediyorlar. Dernek, hâlâ monarşinin olduğu yedi ülkede şube açmayı tasarlıyor ve buna İngiltere, Hollanda, İspanya ve komşu Danimarka'yla Norveç de dâhil. Derneğin Genel Sekreteri Mona Abou-Jeib Broshammar, "Avrupa genelinde monarşiye destek azalıyor" diyor. Dokuz milyonluk bir ülkede 7 bin 300 üye sayısının elbette ki pek bir ağırlığı yok. Fakat 33 yaşındaki Veliaht Prenses Victoria Haziran'da eski spor salonu antrenörüyle peri masallarına yakışan düğün yaparken ülkede sanki onların lehine bir rüzgâr esiyordu. Derneğin bunun hemen ertesinde büyümesi o yüzden dikkate değer. Düğün alayı için binlerce insan başkente akın etmiş, milyonlarcası da olayı televizyondan izlemişti. Ülkenin dört bir yanındaki dükkânlar yeni çiftin gülümseyen resimleriyle süslenmişti. Fakat bu coşkunun gerisinde bir kuşku da yatmıyor değildi. Ülkenin önde gelen gazetesi Aftonbladet, düğünü haber yapması için Şubat'ta bir ekip kurdu ve parlak fotoğraflarla, bol içerikle bunu desteklediyse de monarşiyi eleştiren başyazı ve yorum köşelerine, hatta karikatürlere de yer verdi. Sonra bahar aylarında, önemli bir kamuoyu araştırma kuruluşu olan SOM Enstitüsü, monarşiye desteğin son altı yılda yüzde 68'den yüzde 56'ya düştüğünü gösteren bir anketi yayınladı. Düğünü haber yapan ekibin başındaki Susanne Nylen, "Monarşinin demokrasiyle uyuşmadığını ve insanların buna niçin karşı olduklarını anlayabiliyorum. Fakat onlar İsveç'i iyi temsil ediyorlar. Bir devlet başkanının aynı şekilde tanıtım yapabilmesi zor" diyor. SOM Enstitüsü'nden Lennart Nilsson da, 1995'te ölçüm yapmaya başlamalarından beri kraliyet ailesine olan güvenin yıldan yıla düştüğünü belirtiyor. Nilsson, "Ve hâlâ düşmeye devam ediyor" diyor. Fakat toplum bu alanda bir değişim yapılması için acele etmiyor. İsveçliler bu Eylül'de genel seçime gidecek olsalar da monarşi gündemde değil. Nilsson, "Öncelikli olan başka sorunlar var" diyor, ve örnek olarak da iş, eğitim ve sağlık hizmetlerini veriyor. Hem Liberal Parti, hem de dernek üyesi olan Magnus Simonsson ise, İsveç Cumhuriyetçi Derneği'nin monarşiyi kaldırması halinde krala hoşgörülü davranacaklarına söz veriyor. Ve gülümseyerek, "Bugün olduğundan daha özgür olacak. İsterse İsveç'te bile yaşayabilecek" diyor.

JOHN TAGLIABUE

Piezoelectric Nanowires Turn Fabric Into Power Source

2010-09-05T11:36:00.000-05:00

Wouldn’t it be great if you could rock Kanye West’s outfit from the Grammys, but without the bulky battery pack? Power gadgets by plugging them into your collar? Or do as-yet-undreamed things with garments that produce their own electricity?

It could happen. In a paper published today in Nature, scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology grew zinc oxide nanowires around kevlar textile fibers. Then the researchers wove the fibers together; when the wires rubbed against each other, an electric charge built up and was channeled into a cathode output.

The fabric is the latest and most personalized form of piezoelectric power generation, in which mechanical stress is turned into electricity. Other piezoelectric garments have been proposed, but they involve polymer inserts rather than fundamentally charge-generating textiles.

The Georgia researchers say their fabric (modeled at right) could have military uses purposes in places where other types of power generation are impractical. That’s no doubt true, and invoking the military is a great way to get funding — but the civilian possibilities are endless! Just put Trevor Baylis on the case.
Microfibre–nanowire hybrid structure for energy
scavenging [Nature]

Video: Smart Metal Remembers its Shape Like the Terminator

2010-09-05T11:30:00.000-05:00

To anyone unfamiliar with materials science, nitinol objects may seem magical.
Squish them, twist them, or bend them — it doesn’t matter. Just add heat and the nickel-titanium blend will return to its original shape.
Apply a strong enough electrical current to a bent nitinol wire and the resulting warmth will cause it to flex like muscle.
Artists have used the curious alloy to make garments with moving parts and breathe life into felt gills and scales.
Engineers have tested it as an artificial muscle for animating robots

Make Like a Leaf: Next-Gen Paint Could Strike Lotus Pose

2010-09-02T10:59:00.000-05:00

Lotus leaves stay dry by using the natural vibrations of their environments to shake off water, and manmade materials should be able to mimic the water-repelling technique.

New research published today in Physical Review Letters by Duke materials scientist Chuan-Hua Chen has solved a long-standing puzzle: how lotus leaves stay dry in the wild, but not in the lab.

Chen, who grew up surrounded by lotus plants in his hometown of Honghu in central China, had an intuition that perhaps the leaves used the vibrations induced by the wind to stay dry, but that had never been shown in the lab.

So, Chen and his graduate student, Jonathan Boreyko, stuck lotus leaves, on which they’d condensed water, atop the woofer of a $20 Radio Shack speaker to vibrate the leaf at about 100 hertz — and recorded what happened with a very high-speed camera. Just as in their natural state, the leaves stayed dry.

“People have observed that condensation forms every night on the lotus leaf. When they come back in the morning the water is gone and the leaf is dry,” Chen said in a press release. “The speaker reproduced in the lab what happens every day in nature, which is full of subtle vibrations, especially for the lotus, which has large leaves atop long and slender stems.”

Lotus leaves are the canonical example of a hydrophobic, or water-hating, material. When drops of water fall on the plants, they roll off. They cannot be wet. At the microscopic level, the surfaces are actually quite rough: Tiny fiber-covered pillars hold up the water droplets, creating a cushion of air that prevents them from sticking to the leaves. If water gets into that air cavity though, the property of the material reverses and starts to love water.

Dew, which forms inside the air cavities presented a major problem for researchers looking for hydrophobic coatings for vehicles, say. They worried their materials would be ruined by actual field usage.
“Much remains to be done to achieve genuine antidew materials,” summarized French materials scientist David Quere, in a 2008 article in the Annual Review of Materials Research (.pdf).

The real problem, though, was that the leaves had not been allowed to move as they would in natural conditions. Now, with the discovery that simple vibration can force every drop of water off the leaf, a roadblock has been cleared for hydrophobic materials.

“This finding has direct applications because vibration is everywhere,” Chen told Wired.com. “Your computer has fans, it keeps vibrating. Your power plants, your automobile or your spacecraft all have vibrations.”
Materials, then, can be built to scavenge the tiny amounts of energy in their environments to dry themselves off.

You can watch the process at work in the video below. At first, the water molecules are subtly impaled on the tiny spikes of the lotus leaf. As the vibration commences about halfway through the video, the water droplets at first struggle to break free — and then actually do so. In the language of materials science, the leaf’s surface has gone from a Wenzel state, where it’s not hydrophobic, to a Cassie state, where it is. And that’s the very first time that’s ever been observed in the lab.

Alexis Madrigal
Image: flickr/tapperboy

Source: Wired Mag.

Making Nanomaterials Better, Faster And More Accessible

2010-09-02T10:57:00.000-05:00

Stephen Steiner wants to make nanotechnology more accessible to speed up the innovation process.

The inclination to think big goes back to Steiner’s teenage years when he vowed to never drive a car as motivation to solve the world’s energy problem. Now 26, he is a graduate student at MIT working to bring the world next-generation nanomaterials, like nanotubes that can make airplane wires lighter than copper, carbon aerogels that use electrolysis to pull hydrogen from water, and as announced yesterday, nanoparticles that can make super high density batteries.

Steiner’s first task at the MIT lab was to get the nanotube furnaces working manually, but he knew that to really get his lab breakthrough-ready, the furnaces needed to be automated. So he wrote a software program that automates a nanotube furnace using natural English syntax and fuzzy logic to help get us there faster.
"Just give it the instructions you would give an undergraduate and it can execute it," claimed Steiner, "Like ‘when the temperature gets to about 1000 degrees do X.’" This frees up his lab mates from having to spend hours next to the furnace making little tweaks and adjustments every few minutes and allows them to come back later to a batch of freshly baked nanotubes.

The intuitive, small footprint, English-syntax automation program will help the lab figure out how to make longer and more uniform nanotubes faster. Instead of having to babysit a high-maintenance process for hours, the researchers can actually leave the room and focus on other tasks, like analyzing data, or reading the latest literature.

Steiner calls the new program "Ansari" after private space explorer and X Prize sponsor Anousheh Ansari. Her work to open up space flight for all inspired Steiner to try to do the same for nanotech. He is working on a website that he calls "open source nanotech," where people will be able to download his automation software and learn about DIY nanotech.

The aerospace industry has already noticed the promise of nanomaterials and is sponsoring the MIT Nano-Engineered Composite aerospace STructures (NECST) lab. The lab is working to add carbon nanotubes to traditional carbon fiber composites to make them over a million times more conductive, which will save fuel by reducing an airplane’s weight. Seeing the 787 Dreamliner fly this winter with a carbon composite fuselage will be exciting. But seeing a plane that is made entirely of carbon fiber and nanotube-impregnated carbon fiber would be phenomenal.

CDT Systems, Inc. Invites Interest in Carbon Aerogel to Generate Hydrogen as Fuel for Small Engines [Market Watch- Wall Street Journal]

Flower-shaped Nanoparticles May Lead To Better Batteries For Portable Electronics [Science Daily]

Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides

Plastic That Heals Itself

2010-09-02T10:53:00.000-05:00

Researchers have developed a new material that can fill in its own surface cracks.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have made a polymer material that can heal itself repeatedly when it cracks. It's a significant advance toward self-healing medical implants and self-repairing materials for use in airplanes and spacecraft. It could also be used for cooling microprocessors and electronic circuits, and it could pave the way toward plastic coatings that regenerate themselves.

Modeled on human skin, a new material that heals itself multiple times is made of two layers. The polymer coating on top contains tiny catalyst pieces scattered throughout. The substrate contains a network of microchannels carrying a liquid healing agent. When the coating cracks, the cracks spread downward and reach the underlying channels, which ooze out healing agent. The agent mixes with the catalyst and forms a polymer, filling in the cracks. Credit: J. Hanlon, Univ. of Illinois Beckman Institute

The first self-healing material was reported by the UIUC researchers six years ago, and other research groups have created different versions of such materials since then, including polymers that mend themselves repeatedly when subject to heat or pressure. But this is the first time anyone has made a material that can repair itself multiple times without any external intervention, says Nancy Sottos, materials-science and engineering professor at UIUC and one of the researchers who led the work.
"It's essentially like giving life to a plastic," says Chris Bielawski, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The ultimate goal would be to create materials that mend themselves, he says, and "this is an amazing proof of concept."

Sottos and her colleagues have designed the new material, reported in this week's Nature Materials, to mimic human skin. If the skin's outer protective layer is cut, the inner layer, which is infused with a dense network of tiny blood vessels, rushes nutrients to the cut to help with healing. The self-healing material consists of an epoxy polymer layer deposited on a substrate that contains a three-dimensional network of microchannels. The epoxy coating contains tiny catalyst particles, while the channels in the substrate are filled with a liquid healing agent.

To test the material, the researchers bend it and crack the polymer coating. The crack spreads down through the coating and reaches the underlying microchannel. This prompts the healing agent to "whip through the channels and into the crack," Sottos says. There, it comes into contact with the catalyst and, in about 10 hours, becomes a polymer and fills in the crack. The system does not need any external pressure to push the healing agent into the crack. Instead, the liquid moves through the narrow channels just as water moves up a straw.

The researchers are able to crack and reheal the surface as many as seven times before the catalyst wears out and stops working. The next generation of the self-healing material should be able to heal itself many more times, according to the researchers. Sottos and her colleagues are designing it so that it will have a two-part system that injects both a healing agent and a catalyst into the crack.
The researchers could also increase the rehealing capacity of the material by hooking up the microchannel network to a little reservoir, Sottos says. If the material runs out of healing agent or catalyst, the reservoir could pump in more.

The material's microchannel design could be a solution to the increasing problem of heat buildup in microelectronics chips. Typically, microelectronic circuit chips sit on substrates that are designed to conduct heat away from the circuit. These heat regulators have their limits. Instead, Sottos says, "you could put a cooling fluid through a [microchannel] network like a little mini-heat exchanger."

Sottos says that researchers could use the same design with other resin and catalyst combinations that can form different polymers. This opens the door for many other applications. While practical self-healing materials might be years away, it's easy to imagine their applications in prosthetics and medical implants made from biocompatible self-healing materials. The cost of the materials might keep them limited, at least initially, to certain high-value, high-performance applications such as use in air- and spacecraft, says Ian Bond, aerospace engineering professor at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom.

In the future, different chemistries could lead to cheaper self-healing materials, according to Bielawski. "You could use cheap epoxies ... that you can buy at Home Depot ... as a healing agent," he says.

Prachi Patel - technologyreview.com

Polyurethane Coating Could Make Self-Healing Car Paint

2010-09-02T10:50:00.000-05:00

A few years down the road, you may be able to get that scratch out of your car’s bumper simply by parking in a sunny spot. Researchers have created a polyurethane coating that heals itself when exposed to ultraviolet light.

"This new material will have a lot of practical applications," said study co-author Marek Urban, a chemist at the University of Southern Mississippi. “It could coat anything that can be scratched—electronics, aircraft, cars, you name it."

Self-healing coatings could minimize upkeep and repair on a variety of products, saving consumers money and reducing waste.

“Your car would last for a long time, and it would look new for a long time,” Urban said.
The new compound is not the first man-made self-healing material. In 2001, researchers at the University of Illinois embedded tiny liquid-filled capsules in a polymer coating. When the coating cracked, the capsules ruptured, spilling healing agents into the damaged area and repairing it.

One of the Illinois scientists, Scott White, founded a company based on this technology in 2005. Autonomic Materials, Inc. could have self-healing coatings on the market in the next couple of months, according to a recent article in the MIT Technology Review.

Other researchers have devised different methods. In 2002, scientists from UCLA and USC created a compound that heals itself quickly when exposed to high temperatures. The new coating is similar in that it requires an external stimulus to work. But the stimulus—UV radiation—should not be difficult to introduce. A few minutes in the sun would do the trick.

“It’s a new healing chemistry for polyurethane,” said Nancy Sottos, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois who was not involved in the new study.

Urban and co-author Biswajit Ghosh, also of the University of Southern Mississippi, created the compound by mixing chitosan—a derivative of chitin, the main component of arthropod exoskeletons—into polyurethane. They made tiny nicks in the new material, then exposed it to UV light about as intense as that given off by the sun. The radiation set off a series of reactions, causing damaged molecules to link up with each other again. The cuts healed in about 30 minutes.

This repair process, described Thursday in the journal Science, is not moisture-sensitive, meaning it should work in all climates. And making the new coating won’t break the bank, according to Urban.
“It’s very economical,” he said. “You can get chitosan for almost nothing.”
The mending reactions don’t seem to work a second time, so each part of the coating can repair itself only once. But Urban doesn’t see this as much of a drawback in the real world.

“Even if you try to hit the same spot, within a couple of microns, statistically the chances of it happening are very small,” he said.
Citation: "Self-Repairing Oxetane-Substituted Chitosan Polyurethane Networks." By Biswajit Ghosh, Marek W. Urban. Science Vol. 323, 13 March 2009.

Image: Infrared (top) and optical views of a scratch after 0, 15, and 30 minutes of UV exposure. Courtesy of Marek Urban, via Science/AAAS.

Michael Wall

1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth

2010-09-02T10:48:00.000-05:00

A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on display today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.

“Spider silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong compared to steel or Kevlar,” said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. “There’s scientific research going on all over the world right now trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk and apply it to all sorts of areas in medicine and industry, but no one up until now has succeeded in replicating 100 percent of the properties of natural spider silk.”
Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.

“Simon managed to build a replica of this 24-spider-silking machine that was used at the turn of the century,” said Nicholas Godley, who co-led the project with Peers. As an experiment, the pair collected an initial batch of about 20 spiders. “When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-colored silk started coming out,” Godley said.

But to make a textile of any significant size, the silk experts had to drastically scale up their project. “Fourteen thousand spiders yields about an ounce of silk,” Godley said, “and the textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. The numbers are crazy.”

Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk, which is stronger than steel or Kevlar but far more flexible, stretching up to 40 percent of its normal length without breaking. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass produce: Unlike silk worms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other’s heads when housed together.

To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. “We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders,” Godley said, “because they bite.”

By the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden color of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and June.

Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. “We can go back and re-silk the same spiders,” he said. “It’s like the gift that never stops giving.”

Of course, spending four years to produce a single textile of spider silk isn’t very practical for scientists trying to study the properties of spider silk or companies that want to manufacture the fabric for use as a biomedical scaffold or an alternative to Kevlar armor. Several groups have tried inserting spider genes into bacteria (or even cows and goats) to produce silk, but so far, the attempts have been only moderately successful.
Part of the reason it’s so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s abdomen. Using their spinnerets, spiders apply a physical force to rearrange the protein’s molecular structure and turn it into solid silk.

“When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how the spider applies forces to produce a physical transformation from liquid to solid,” said spider silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, who was not involved in creating the textile. “Scientists simply can’t replicate that as well as a spider does it. Every year we’re getting closer and closer to being able to mass-produce it, but we’re not there yet.”
For now, it seems we’ll have to be content with one incredibly beautiful cloth, graciously provided by more than a million spiders.

Images: 1) AMNH/R. Mickens 2) Nicholas Godley and Simon Peers
Hadley Leggett

Can Miracle Material Stop Radiation?

2010-09-02T10:42:00.000-05:00

Gamma radiation is the most penetrating and energetic form of nuclear radiation.
To absorb half the incoming Gamma you need two and a half inches of concrete or almost half an inch of lead. So my eyebrows went up when I saw a press release for an organization called Radiation Shielding Technologies, or RST, selling protective clothing with this startling claim:

"DemronTM not only protects against particle ionizing/nuclear radiation (such as Beta and Alpha), but does what NO OTHER full body radiation protection can do: shield against X-ray and low-energy Gamma emissions."

This sounds like it merits either a Nobel Prize or an Ig Nobel, the award for bad science. Check their site and you’ll find details of an independent test claiming that their anti-radiation blanket really does stop a significant fraction of gamma (about 28 percent at a 90 degree angle).

What’s the secret? Well, the ‘blanket’ involved is 30 inches by 36 and weighs 60 pounds… So it’s basically equal to one-seventh of an inch of lead, and it works because it’s so dense. I checked with RST, and research scientist James Bradshaw agrees:

"You are correct in stating that in attenuation of gamma and x-ray radiation, cross-sectional density is the key parameter. A number of other much more minor effects are also at play, such as the role a supporting matrix has in excepting ejected electrons, etc. We do integrate heavy atomic absorbers into our material, though completely none toxic, that act as the primary attenuation component.
Our material meets or exceeds the absorption capabilities of lead by weight equivalent… Certainly, when it comes to high energy radiation, you can’t beat fundamental physics, but luckily you can get away from using lead."

The point of Demron is not that it has magical properties, but that it is more flexible and wearable than traditional lead-lined garments of the same weight; that blanket they tested might be easier to get over a radiation source than a lead one.
But in spite of RST’s fulsome press releases (including one which imaginatively likened the product to Iron Man’s armor), it’s not going to allow you to walk through heavily irradiated areas with impunity. As with many companies in the defense field, their science is fine but their marketing department may be prone to exaggeration.

New Material for Thinner, Lighter Body Armor

2010-09-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

A new material developed by Dutch scientists has made its way into soft body armor. Dyneema SB61 is a fiber made from an extremely high grade of the common plastic polyethylene.
Laundry baskets, grocery bags, and milk jugs are all made from polyethylene. It is the simplest of the plastics. Polyethylene molecules are long chains that can be branched or straight. The length and straightness of the chains and the purity of the plastic determines how strong it is. High grade polyethylene has been used to make bulletproof vests for years, but this new material is stronger pound for pound than everything else on the market.

The original Dynema material was developed at DSM in 1979. Five years ago, Jean Beugels, Koos Mencke, and Réné Steeman were given an award by the American Chemical Society for developing the world’s strongest synthetic fiber. That material, a newer grade of Dyneema, was put to use in bulletproof armor long before they won the award. Their company, DSM, decided that the strongest fiber was not good enough. Making good on a vow to never stop improving their product line, the company recently released SB61, the newest grade of the super-tough material that is vastly better at stopping bullets.

Since police officers are encouraged to wear a bulletproof vest under their uniform all day, they must be comfortable. For that reason, armor manufacturers have tried many different materials in an attempt to make body armor that is as light and flexible as possible. Several years ago, the thinnest and lightest bulletproof vests on the market were made from a material called Zylon. As it turned out, the high performance fabric was unstable when moist and would deteriorate gradually with exposure to sweat and humidity. This led to a massive recall of all vests containing the flawed material. Zylon can be destroyed by a chemical reaction called hydrolysis, which literally means "cut by water". Dyneema is not vulnerable to moisture damage because it has a particularly sturdy chemical backbone.

American Body Armor is the first company to begin using Dynema SB61 in armor. It is integrated into their TORQ line of vests, which are meant to be concealed beneath a layer of clothing. The thinnest mode of TORQ vest is only 5mm thick and can stop extremely fast bullets.

New Material Could Drop Cost of Carbon Capture

2010-09-02T10:37:00.001-05:00

Georgia Tech scientists have developed a new material that, combined with the right process, could become the cheapest way to separate the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, out of coal plants’ smokestacks.
"It’s pretty easy and cheap to make and it’s got a high capacity for CO2 under realistic conditions," said Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech.
Those conditions require a material that can trap CO2 out of a mixture of water vapor, nitrogen, and oxygen (among other things), and then release that carbon dioxide on-demand. Being able to do that cheaply remains a dream, and one that some say will always remain "vaporware."
But scientists are pushing on with the effort to develop the right systems to make coal plants outfitted with carbon capture and sequestration cost-competitive with other future power solutions like solar concentrating plants.
Jones’ research appears online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. (Update: Link Fixed. Thanks JMB.)

Two types of materials are seen to have special potential for carbon dioxide separation–zeolites, like Omar Yaghi’s ZIFs, and amines. Jones’ material is the new top-dog in the latter category because it captures CO2 better than other types of amines and can be used more times (like a longer-lasting sponge). And under real conditions, Jones believes his material could outperform zeolites.
The key challenge is that the material heats up as it traps CO2, then requires heat to release it. In order to be cost effective, he said the heat must be captured and then reused.
"Engineering a process that allows you to capture that heat is the key issue in making this process as cheap as possible," he said. To create a process, he’s enlisted fellow Georgia Tech researcher, Bill Koros, to design a new type of so-called filtering bed, which they hope will solve the heat transfer problem.
As we’ve noted in the past, well-meaning people disagree on whether supporting any sort of coal burning makes sense, but there are two reasons to support carbon capture and sequestration, or the separation and geological burying of carbon dioxide:

One, with China building two plants a week and a 1000 coal plants already online here in the US, we need a solution that can be "bolted-on" to existing plants, which aren’t going to disappear the minute that RE < C.
As Jones put it, "If you want to make an impact, you want to be able to develop something that can target the old dirty coal plants."

Two, biomass burning + sequestration could be a way to actually pull historical CO2 out of the atmosphere. I do, now, have new reservations about biomass, though. Ausra CEO, Bob Fishman, almost had me convinced that biomass was a bad idea. He maintains that you have to grow all the feedstock for the plant ultralocally (like within 50 miles of the plant) to keep the plant environmentally net positive. (And I’m ducking the general biofuel debate that is now raging.)

Image: Photo by Dmitry Pichugin

Scientists Make Blackest Material Ever

2010-09-02T10:34:00.000-05:00

Scientists have fashioned what may be the blackest material in the universe: a sheet of carbon nanotubes that captures nearly every last photon of every wavelength of light.

The substance absorbs between 97 percent and 99 percent of wavelengths that can be directly measured or extrapolated. It’s the closest that scientists have yet come to a black body, a theorized state of perfect absorption whose closest analogue is believed to be the opening of a deep hole.

The material, described Monday by Japanese nanotechnologists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is made from a flat array of vertically-aligned, single-walled carbon nanotubes. Photons that aren’t immediately absorbed by a single nanotube deflect off and are absorbed by its neighbors.
"This interaction," write the researchers, "repeats until the attenuated light is completely absorbed by the forest." To the naked eye, the substance appears perfectly flat; in effect, it’s a sheet of deep holes.
By comparison, the blackest paints and coatings absorb between 84 and 95 percent of all light. Researchers say the material would be useful in solar panels or to collect heat in the frigid vacuum of space.
Citation: "A black body absorber from vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes." By Kohei Mizuno, Juntaro Ishii, Hideo Kishida, Yuhei Hayamizu, Satoshi Yasuda, Don N. Futaba, Motoo Yumura, and Kenji Hata.

Images: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Source: Wired Mag.

Brilliant Back-to-School Cars

2010-08-31T18:32:00.002-05:00

It’s that time of year again when kids load their backpacks with rented textbooks, school-sanctioned laptops and iPhones crammed with podcasts of English Lit lectures. When your kid heads back to school, chances are they’ll need a way to get there.

While it would be great if every school system still ran bright yellow buses to every corner of the district and all colleges were near public transit, that’s not always the case. That’s why Kelley Blue Book released its yearly list of the best cars for going back to school.

Not surprisingly, their top five are pretty predictable. The 2006 Honda Civic tops the list, followed by the 2011 Ford Fiesta, 2010 Mazda3, 2008 Pontiac Vibe and 2010 Honda Fit. The slightly odder “Saabaru” 9-2X, the 2010 Kia Soul, 2006 Ford Crown Vic (huh?), 2008 Suzuki SX4 hatchback and the new Chevrolet Cruze round out the lineup.

It’s a nice list — the Crown Vic is the only Grandma hand-me-down — but most of the cars are compacts, and the newer ones are pretty pricey for the average family, especially after that first tuition bill arrives. That’s why we compiled our own list. If it proves that none of us are fit to be parents, so be it — but we assure you that we’d make some pretty fun uncles.

We know you’ll undoubtedly disagree with some or all of our choices. Not to worry — you’ll have your chance to sound off tomorrow.

Any Toyota Camry

You already know why the Camry’s on the list: It’s reliable, safe, gets decent gas mileage and makes Intro to Microeconomics homework seem thrilling by comparison. Finding a Camry for your son or daughter is easy. First, check your driveway, as you may have already purchased one and forgotten about it. If that fails, you’ll have to go to any used car dealership. Choose the color you want, make sure it runs (it will) and offer the dealer 80 percent of the amount posted in day-glo numbers on the top of the windshield. Congratulations: Your kids will have this car until they sell it or wreck it.

Triumph TR7 1975–81

OK, stay with us on this one, as it follows the same logic that we tried on our parents some years ago. Despite the lack of front airbags, side airbags and even a roof, this might be the safest car on the road. Here’s why.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the risk of a fatal car crash increases in proportion to the number of young people in the car. The TR7 only has two seats, ensuring that Junior will be able to ride straight home before curfew more safely than if he were behind the wheel of a Grand Caravan decked out with as many teenage passengers as airbags.
Not convinced? Well, consider that NHTSA also reports the deadliest time for teen drivers is between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. That’s after dark and before sunrise. With the double-whammy of pop-up lights and a Lucas electrical system from the Prince of Darkness himself, you can be sure that your kid’s TR7 won’t be leaving the driveway unless the sun is shining.

Volkswagen New Beetle 1998–2011

In the same vein as the TR7, this one is all about statistics. According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, two out of three crashes involving teen drivers occur when a male is behind the wheel. It only makes sense, then, that you’d want to give your kid the ride Tom and Ray over at Car Talk consider the ultimate chick car. Throw some petunias in the dashboard vase and Sarah McLachlan on the CD player, and you’ll be sure your son or daughter is safe and sound, free from the risk-taking impulses that come from years of playing GTA 4.

Subaru Outback 1998–2004

Headed to a small New England liberal arts college where the most competitive sport is ultimate Frisbee? You’ll need a Subaru Outback. Sure, the car carries some stereotypes, but whether you use the giant trunk to haul your gear to drum circles or cover over the faded Howard Dean sticker with a College Republicans decal, you’ll be thankful for the all-wheel drive when you’re headed home for winter break in blizzard conditions.

Volvo 240, 740 and 940 1974–1995

The clear winner in the sub-$2,000 category, the stalwart Swedes have been mainstays on college campuses for good reason: Their longevity means they’re the automotive equivalent of Abe Vigoda. While repairs can be pricey, and all but the newest 940s are older than the teenager behind the wheel, they’re still the safest, most reliable choice for families on a budget. Bonus: You’ll probably be able to find one with a still-valid campus parking permit. Extra credit if it’s for the faculty lot.

Mazda3 2004–present

We agree with Kelley Blue Book on this one. While the latest model’s been criticized for a front end that resembles a Cheshire Cat’s grin, any kid with keys to this car would have a similar smile on his or her face. Great gas mileage, sporty handling and safety features keep students and parents happy, while an optional stick shift might teach a nearly lost art to a generation raised on slush boxes.

Pontiac Vibe 2003–2010

Again, another Blue Book pick that we can get behind, though we prefer the redesigned 2009 model. The Vibe is a versatile hatch that was made in Fremont, California, alongside its sibling, the Toyota Matrix, in the famed Toyota-GM NUMMI plant. It wears a discontinued badge, but the Pontiac is nearly identical to the Toyota, and Kelley prices a used Vibe at nearly $2,000 less than a similarly equipped Matrix.

Buick LaCrosse 2005–present

Buick put a lot of effort into shedding their oldster image with the new LaCrosse, so why do we recommend the previous model? Simple: if you buy a used car from an elderly person, chances are it’s been waxed more times than it’s been driven on the highway. Plus, it boasts near-Lexus luxury, quality and handling with a comparatively low resale value. That means your kid will have the last laugh about driving Grandpa’s old car, when his friends find out he’s got heated leather seats. Hey — even Conan O’Brien likes ‘em.

2008 BMW 3-Series

If your parents are paying your tuition in cash, we know a good way to convince them to spend some of your inheritance on one of the best cars on the road. Tell them that a Certified Preowned BMW comes with six years or 100,000 miles worth of maintenance included in the already comprehensive warranty. If you get an '08, you’ll be graduating from college without having paid for so much as an oil change — as if you'd’ve paid for one yourself anyway.

Chad Conway’s Comutacar

Whether it’s a rebuilt electric car like the one that Chad Conway restored and rewired — a cherry 1964½ Mustang that was a father-son project — or a rat rod cobbled together during shop class, any back-to-school ride that its driver helped rebuild is an education in itself, and surely offered life lessons in patience, perseverance and changing brake pads. It might even get you an internship at Tesla.

Source: Wired Mag.

The 10 Greatest (Accidental) Inventions of All Time

2010-08-30T08:10:00.000-05:00

The Microwave - Percy L. Spencer

Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon after his WWI stint in the Navy, was known as an electronics genius. In 1945, Spencer was fiddling with a microwave-emitting magnetron—used in the guts of radar arrays—when he felt a strange sensation in his pants. A sizzling, even. Spencer paused and found that a chocolate bar in his pocket had started to melt. Figuring that the microwave radiation of the magnetron was to blame (or to credit, as it would turn out), Spencer immediately set out to realize the culinary potential at work. The end result was the microwave oven—savior of eager snackers and single dudes worldwide.

Saccharin - Ira Remsen, Constantin Fahlberg

In 1879, Ira Remsen and Constantin Fahlberg, at work in a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, paused to eat. Fahlberg had neglected to wash his hands before the meal—which usually leads to a quick death for most chemists, but led to him noticing an oddly sweet flavor during his meal. Artificial sweetener! The duo published their findings together, but it was only Fahlberg's name that made it onto the (incredibly lucrative) patent, now found in pink packets at tables everywhere. That is to say, Remsen got screwed—he later remarked, "Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him."

Slinky - Richard James

In 1943, Navy engineer Richard James was trying to figure out how to use springs to keep the sensitive instruments aboard ships from rocking themselves to death, when he knocked one of his prototypes over. Instead of crashing to the floor, it gracefully sprang downward, and then righted itself. So pointless—so nimble—so slinky. The spring became a goofy toy of many childhoods—that is before every kid inevitably gets theirs all twisted up and ruins it. 300 million sold worldwide!

Play-Doh - Kutol Products

Before being found ground into the rugs of child-rearing homes everywhere, Play-Doh was ironically created to be a cleaning product. The paste was first marketed as a treatment for filthy wallpaper—before the company that produced it began to go down the tubes. The discovery that saved Kutol Products—headed for bankruptcy—wasn't that their wall cleaner worked particularly well, but that schoolchildren were beginning to use it to create Christmas ornaments as arts and crafts projects. By removing the compound's cleanser and adding colors and a fresh scent, Kutol spun their wallpaper saver into one of the most iconic toys of all time—and brought mega-success to a company headed for destruction. Sometimes, you don't even know how brilliant you are until someone notices for you.

Super Glue - Harry Coover

In what have been a very messy moment of discovery in 1942, Dr. Harry Coover of Eastman-Kodak Laboratories found that a substance he created—cyanoacrylate—was a miserable failure. It was not, to his dismay, at all suited for a new precision gun sight as he had hoped—it infuriatingly stuck to everything it touched. So it was forgotten. Six years later, while overseeing an experimental new design for airplane canopies, Coover found himself stuck in the same gooey mess with a familiar foe—cyanacrylate was proving useless as ever. But this time, Coover observed that the stuff formed an incredibly strong bond without needing heat. Coover and his team tinkered with sticking various objects in their lab together, and realized they had finally stumbled upon a use for the maddening goop. Coover slapped a patent on his discovery, and in 1958, a full 16 years after he first got stuck, cyanoacrylate was being sold on shelves.

Teflon - Roy Plunkett

The next time you make a frustration-free omelette, thank chemist Roy Plunkett, whose experienced immense frustration while inadvertently inventing Teflon in 1938. Plunkett had hoped to create a new variety of chlorofluorocarbons (better known as universally-despised CFCs), when he came back to check on his experiment in a refrigeration chamber. When he inspected a canister that was supposed to be full of gas, he found that it appeared to have vanished—leaving behind only a few white flakes. Plunkett was intrigued by these mysterious chemical bits, and began at once to experiment with their properties. The new substance proved to be a fantastic lubricant with an extremely high melting point—perfect at first for military gear, and now the stuff found finely applied across your non-stick cookware.

Bakelite - Leo Baekeland

In 1907, shellac was commonly used to insulate the innards of early electronics—think radios and telephones. This was fine, aside from the fact that shellac is made from Asian beetle poop, and not exactly the cheapest or easiest way to insulate a wire. What Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland found in instead was—get ready—polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, the world's first synthetic plastic, commonly known as Bakelite. This pioneering plastic was moldable into virtually any shape, in any color, and could hold its form against high temperatures and daily wear—making it a star among manufacturers, jewelers, and industrial designers.

Pacemaker - Wilson Greatbatch

An assistant professor at the University of Buffalo thought he had ruined his project. Instead of picking a 10,000-ohm resistor out of a box to use on a heart-recording prototype, Wilson Greatbatch took the 1-megaohm variety. The resulting circuit produced a signal that sounded for 1.8 milliseconds, and then paused for a second—a dead ringer for the human heart. Greatbatch realized the precise current could regulate a pulse, overriding the imperfect heartbeat of the ill. Before this point, pacemakers were television-sized, cumbersome things that were temporarily attached to patients from the outside. But now the effect could be achieved with a small circuit, perfect to tuck into someone's chest.

Velcro - George de Mestral

A dog invented velcro.

Alright, that's something of an exaggeration, but a dog did play an instrumental role. Swiss engineer George de Mestral was out for a hunting trip with his pooch, and noticed the annoying tendency of burrs to stick to its fur (and his socks). Later, looking under a microscope, Mestral observed the tiny "hooks" that stuck burrs to fabrics and furs. Mestral experimented for years with a variety of textiles before arriving at the newly invented nylon—though it wasn't until two decades later that NASA's fondness for velcro popularized the tech.

X-Rays - Wilhelm Roentgen

Okay, yes, x-rays are a phenomenon of the natural world, and thus can't be created. But sshhh! The story of their discovery is a fascinating one of incredible chance. In 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen was performing a routine experiment involving cathode rays, when he noticed that a piece of fluorescent cardboard was lighting up from across the room. A thick screen had been placed between his cathode emitter and the radiated cardboard, proving that particles of light were passing through solid objects. Amazed, Roentgen quickly found that brilliant images could be produced with this incredible radiation—the first of their kind being a skeletal image of his wife's hand.