The material is a boron nitride “nanocomposite.” This means that, rather than consisting of one large continuous crystal, it is made of crystalline boron-nitride grains that are each a few to several nanometers in size. Although research groups have previously reported boron carbonitride materials, claimed to be the second and third hardest materials after diamond, …
This latest development from Henri Lezec and co-workers at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, US, could lead to a ‘superlens’ capable of producing optical images with detail to rival electron microscopes. The bolt on microscope resolution booster could be out to the top 1000 labs within 2 years. The target of 1 nanometer resolution for …
Institute Director S. Richard Turner and doctoral candidate Min Mao reported the synthesis of a new family of charged, rod-like block copolymers. The tiny rods can be either positive or negative, or can have alternating positive and negative charges along the backbone. The rods self-assemble and the aggregated structures are remarkable stable in saline solution, …
Making a negative-index material that works for visible light is more difficult, because the building blocks have to be much smaller–no bigger than 10 to 20 nanometers. That’s now very possible to achieve, however, and several groups are working on it. If it can be done, these metamaterials could be used to increase the amount …
From MIT Technology Review, researchers have learned how to design the nanoscale features of materials to make them four times stronger without making them brittle. The new insight is the result of a significant improvement to an existing computer model that allowed researchers to, for the first time, simulate the complex mechanical behavior of nanostructures …
Although these are some words of support, the issues will not be decided until next year when Dwave’s larger systems show that they provide speedup over classical systems for commercially interesting problems. NASA provides some validation of Dwave Systems quantum computer claims The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed Thursday that it built a …
University of Colorado have now obtained the first 3D visualisation of a complete eukaryotic cell at a resolution high enough to resolve the cytoskeleton’s precise architectural plan in fission yeast. The site has a 2MB downloadable picture. Yeast cells are 2-20 microns in size. The resolution is probably down to about 5-10 nanometers. The electron …
Different materials for solar sails with wide variation in capability are all in development. The lighter the sail then the faster it will accelerate. This link has a table which shows the different speeds possible with different accelerations. The carbon nanotube sail has the highest potential. 1 square kilometer 30 kg or 0.03 grams per …
Some more reactions and comments from blogs about the event. Scott aronson has his comments and quotes Lawrence Ip who was at the live event Dave Bacon the quantum pontiff has collected some links and comments no the news As noted by the Lawrence Ip summary, the goal and plan that Geordi Rose described is …
An item related to my port security article, as we get better at catching a larger fraction of the illegal traffic in nuclear materials and dual use materials like beryllium and zirconium a computer model can piece together the partial information on traffic flows to determine who is working on a nuclear bomb and where …
A robotic exoskeleton controlled by the wearer’s own nervous system could help users regain limb function, which is encouraging news for people with partial nervous system impairment, say University of Michigan researchers. The ankle exoskeleton developed at U-M was worn by healthy subjects to measure how the device affected ankle function. The U-M team has …