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Issue no. 41, 2010
Published: Dec 17, 2010 |
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 Nuclear fusion finance plan rejected by EU Parliament | | European Commission paves way for unitary EU patent system | | Google's 'fossil record' digitises 5 million books | | Tobacco virus could boost battery life tenfold | | Microchip powers itself with solar cells | | Less is more when measuring fragile atomic bonds | | Invisibility rug hides 'large' objects | | How to walk through walls |
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| Nuclear fusion finance plan rejected by EU Parliament |
A plan to rescue European financing of the ITER nuclear fusion reactor
project has been rejected at the final hurdle. The facility, which is
already under construction in France, will attempt to harvest energy by
exploiting the same nuclear processes that power the Sun.
Member states had wanted to reallocate EUR 1.4bn from the existing
Brussels budget to cover a shortfall in building costs in 2012-13. But
the European Parliament has refused to approve the plan. Member states
will now have to table a new proposal for early next year but access to
the EU's 2010 budget is now closed.
Under the plan agreed by member states in July, the EU was to have met a
critical short-term hole in ITER financing of EUR 1.4bn. Funds to cover
this shortfall were to have been drawn from unspent funds and from its
current research budget (FP7). But closure of the 2010 budget means this
financing plan will have to be revised if and when a new proposal is
tabled next year.
The original plan for ITER, construction of which began in 2008, was to
build the experiment within 10 years, at a budget of EUR 5bn. But a
range of issues, from technical to personnel matters, have conspired to
inflate ITER's final price. Many commentators now expect it to be in the
region of EUR 15bn. |
| BBC News
Dec 16, 2010 |
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| European Commission paves way for unitary EU patent system |
The European Commission (EC) has given its backing to the creation of a
single patent system within the EU that any member state can sign up to.
The move is based on the ethos of 'enhanced co-operation', which means
ratification of the law is not required by all member states but instead
those that wish to adhere to the system can do so, while other nations
are able to join in the future if they wish. Michel Barnier, the
European commissioner for internal markets and services, has announced
that the EC will be putting forward a proposal in 2011 outlining why
such a system is needed and how it might be implemented.
The unitary patent will be based in one of the existing official
languages of the European Patent Office - English, French or German -
with any firm requiring translation from a verified EU language to these
languages eligible for compensation. Use of the enhanced co-operation
method for instigating a unitary patent system requires the backing of
the EU's council of ministers and the European Parliament before it can
be used. |
| VNUnet UK
Dec 15, 2010 |
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| Google's 'fossil record' digitises 5 million books |
For the first time, humanities scholars can crunch numbers with the best
of their natural-science colleagues, thanks to Google's 'fossil record'
of 5 million books, spanning 500 years.
Until now, scholars in the humanities have tended to read a relatively
small number of texts in detail, just hundreds or thousands at the most.
This let them form a subjective picture that does not lend itself to
statistical analysis. However, in recent years Google has set out to
create digitised versions of the full text of millions of books.
From the more than 15 million books digitised to date, researchers from
Google and Harvard selected the 5.2 million with the most reliable data.
Then the researchers counted up the number of times each word appeared
in the dataset during each year from 1800 to 2000. This let them follow
changes in word use over this period, as the total number of English
words in use rose from 544,000 in 1900 to more than 1 million in 2000,
with the vast majority of that increase coming after 1950.
Similarly, they tracked the mention of people's names, a crude measure
of fame, and found that people today become famous earlier in life than
they used to - an average age of 29 in the mid-20th century, down from
43 in the early 19th century. However, fame today is more fleeting. The
data also show clear evidence of censorship, as certain taboo names
disappear from use in certain countries: 'Tiananmen Square' in China
after 1989, for example. Likewise, 'Leon Trotsky' declined sharply in
use in Russian books around 1940, and the names of blacklisted Hollywood
actors got fewer mentions during anti-communist hysteria in the US. |
| New Scientist / Science
Dec 16, 2010 |
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| Tobacco virus could boost battery life tenfold |
Researchers at the University of Maryland have used a virus that attacks
plants to build a new type of lithium-ion battery which promises a
tenfold increase in efficiency.
The tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) was chosen because it reproduces quickly
and can bond to metal. The team tweaked its genetic structure so that it
could be coated with metals, then grew the new virus on metal plates and
coated the plates with conductive metals to make highly efficient
electrodes.
The virus itself is killed in the coating process so there is no risk of
it spreading. The process is also much more efficient since the virus
bonds itself to the electrode base plate naturally, eliminating the need
for an industrial fixative.
The team also reports that the technique is highly scalable, and could
be used on conventional laptops and tablets but also to build tiny,
nanoscale batteries for use in sensors and implanted devices. |
| VNUnet UK
Dec 10, 2010 |
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| Microchip powers itself with solar cells |
Scientists at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have developed
microchips capable of running without batteries or electricity, instead
harvesting energy using tiny solar cells placed on the chip's
microelectronics. Researchers from presented the autonomous chip at this
month's International Electron Device Meeting in San Francisco, along
with partners from the universities of Nankai and Utrecht.
The development could improve wireless technologies, with the potential
for producing sensor chips that could even have small antennas. Although
there would be no reliance on external electricity sources or batteries,
the researchers said the chip's energy use must be under 1 milliwatt.
The chip can collect enough energy to operate indoors, researchers said.
To minimize production costs, scientists suggested the chips could be
used as a base, with the solar cell layers applied to it later. This
process would use fewer materials and increase energy production. The
solar cells could be manufactured from materials such as amorphous
silicon, which would produce power in low light without interfering with
the electronics. |
| CBC News
Dec 15, 2010 |
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| Less is more when measuring fragile atomic bonds |
If you want to look at individual atoms, it helps to have a powerful
microscope. But for delicate situations such as a lone atom on the edge
of a sheet of carbon atoms, a high-energy beam can disturb the bonds
that hold such atoms in place, making them difficult to study. Now, for
the first time, a low-energy beam has been used to count these bonds.
Researchers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, wanted to make measurements on carbon
atoms clinging to the edge of a sample of graphene - a sheet of carbon
atoms arranged in a hexagonal mesh. In particular, they were interested
in the number of bonds holding these edge atoms in place, as this can
affect the graphene sheet's electrical and chemical properties.
Energy spectra of electrons scattered off an edge atom can be used to
count the bonds. However, a high-energy electron beam can also rearrange
the edge atoms, changing the very property we want to measure. The
researchers took advantage of a new electron microscope that was capable
of precisely resolving the spectra of scattered electrons, even if they
were of relatively low energy. Using beams of electrons with around 40%
less energy than those in previous studies, the team were able to
resolve the spectra of electrons scattered by individual graphene edge
atoms before any disruption to the bonds occurred.
They found that these spectra were consistent with those produced in
simulations of dangling carbon atoms linked to the sheet by either one,
two or three bonds. They used this to deduce how many bonds linked the
individual edge atoms in their sample to the sheet. |
| New Scientist / Nature
Dec 15, 2010 |
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| Invisibility rug hides 'large' objects |
Objects large enough to be seen with the naked eye have been swept under
an 'invisibility carpet' for the first time. Invisibility cloaks that
can shield objects for certain wavelengths of light have already been
built. However, until now, physicists have been unable to fabricate a
cloak that could hide macroscopic items at visible wavelengths. Two
independent groups have now achieved this feat, by building transparent
'carpet cloaks', made from calcite crystals.
Carpet cloaks render covered objects invisible by bending light rays as
they enter the cloak and then when they exit it - after they have
bounced off the hidden object. The light is deviated in such a way that
the rays seem to have been reflected directly from the ground underneath
the object - as though the object was not there.
To build such a cloak you need a material that will bend the incoming
and outgoing light rays by different amounts - determined by the
dimensions of the object underneath. Calcite is perfect for the job
because the speed at which polarised light passes through it depends on
the crystal's orientation. So by sticking together two pieces of
crystal, it is possible to create a cloak that bends incoming and
outgoing light by the desired amount.
Researchers at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology
Centre have built a calcite carpet-cloak that can shield a steel wedge
that is 38mm long and 2mm high from red, green and blue visible light.
By contrast, an independent group at the University of Birmingham and
Imperial College London has built a calcite cloak that can work in air,
hiding objects a few centimetres high. The team were unable to comment
as their research has been submitted for publication and is under
embargo. |
| Scientific American / Nature
Dec 15, 2010 |
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| How to walk through walls |
Imagine being able to walk through a solid wall. That sort of trick
might sound far-fetched, but it is a little closer to reality now that
researchers at Soochow University in China have created what they call
an 'invisible gateway'.
The effect is a bit like platform nine and three-quarters - the
fictional area of King's Cross railway station in the Harry Potter books
that is only accessible through a secret, illusionary wall. Although the
researchers' current demonstration is based on an electrical circuit for
radio waves, the team claim that it could also work for visible light.
The idea for the invisible gateway stems from so-called transformation
optics, which gave us the first invisibility cloak back in 2006. Yet the
invisible gateway is almost the opposite of a cloak: rather than bend
light round an object to make the object invisible, the device makes an
object - a wall - appear that is not really there. It is the first
demonstration of illusion optics, the researchers say.
They created the invisible gateway using a network of capacitors and
inductors. The network forms a channel that separates two electric
conductors - the walls - one of which contains a slab of material with a
negative index of permittivity and refraction. The combination of these
two materials allows collective waves of electron, called plasmons, to
form on the surface. The plasmons prevent electromagnetic waves from
passing through the channel. To an observer, the channel looks like a
continuation of the walls - so long as they are looking at
electromagnetic radiation between 45 and 60 MHz. |
| Physics World / Phys. Rev. Lett.
Dec 13, 2010 |
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