Hidden away at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory‘s National Ignition Facility is a terrifying 10-story laser. Recently scientists have finally started using it in anger, and now they’ve even smashed previous records to fire the most powerful laser shot ever recorded. More »
Spintronics? Not exactly a new term ’round these parts, but University of Utah physicists are applying it in a unique way that may eventually make TVs look even sharper than they do today. The entity is trumpeting a new “spintronic” organic light-emitting diode (that’s OLED, for short) that’s said to be “cheaper and more environmentally friendly than the kinds of LEDs now used in television and computer displays, lighting, traffic lights and numerous electronic devices.” Z. Valy Vardeny is even going so far as to call it a “completely different technology,” and better still, a prototype has already been made. The professor expects that the newfangled tech — which produces an orange glow today — will be able to product red, blue and white spin OLEDs within a few years. It’s a lot to wade through, but here’s our question: will these things make the Galaxy S XI impeccably visible in outdoor sunlight? (Please say “yes.”)
Filed under: Displays, Science
Utah researchers create ‘Spintronic’ LED, claim it’s ‘brighter, cheaper’ and eco-friendly originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 Jul 2012 18:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Higgs boson discovery is a good excuse to learn a bit (and just a bit) about why it was so damn important in the first place. By now, you’ve probably heard that the Higgs is the final piece of the standard model of physics. But what does that actually mean? More »
There seems to be little that graphene can’t do. While previous studies have shown that it can repair itself, with a little assistance from heat or pressure, new research suggests that it can actually fix holes in its structure entirely unaided. More »
Considering there’s nothing anyone can really do with the Higgs boson discovery data right now besides dive back into theoretical research, we’ll have to settle for weird abstractions of the data gleaned from the Large Hadron Collider. Naturally, someone took that data and translated it into music. More »
Think your cute little Minecraft schematics are the bomb? Well, a group of international researchers sees your quaint, little 3D masterpiece and raises you the blueprint for a 4D space-time crystal. Building on an idea floated earlier this year by theoretical physics guru and Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek of MIT, a team led by UC Berkeley researcher Tongcang Li has created a schematic for a crystal with a fourth dimension — movement in time. The resulting space-time crystal is being described as something akin to an infinitely running clock that does not require any additional energy once it starts going. The researchers also claim that the crystal can be built in just a few years — provided that the necessary funding is available to the team that decides to take on the project, of course. Unfortunately, the crystal is still a long way from the Mr. Fusion-powered, time-traveling DeLorean that we truly desire. In the meantime, brainy types can feel free to click on the source link for more nuggets of wisdom about the research.
Filed under: Science
Researchers create space-time crystal schematic, still won’t undo those ill-advised high school photos originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jul 2012 05:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Beyond the rock stars like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and multi-billion dollar, cutting-edge facilities like CERN, a lot of physics (especially the theoretical sort) is still done the same way it was at the turn of the last century—by hand, on blackboards. Our friends at Oobject have assembled a gallery of history’s brightest minds leveraging old-school tech to do what they do best. More »
In 1933, Fritz Zwicky—a Swiss astronomer working at CalTech—had an amazing revelation. He realized that the amount of matter that we can see through our telescopes doesn’t match the behavior of the Universe. There had to be something else that we couldn’t see. Something that accounts for an astonishing 83 percent of all existing matter but is invisible to us. More »
I imagine physicists all over the world must have been titillated by the news that broke out yesterday: scientists at the CERN laboratory have discovered what they think is the Higgs Boson particle. If you want to join in their merrymaking, Jorge Cham, the creator of PhD Comics has created a – wait for it – comic that explains in pretty simple terms what the fuss is all about.
Cham gives us a primer not just of the Higgs boson particle itself but about quantum physics and the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider in general. The strip itself – or rather the time lapse of Cham creating the strip – starts at 0:40 into the video.
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Now you know. I for one definitely still don’t. But the drawings were pretty.
[via Laughing Squid]
So while you were out drinking beer and shooting guns at hamburgers yesterday, science found “the God particle.” But, uh, if you didn’t already know what that was, you were probably too drunk or are too hungover to read anything too in-depth about the new boson. No problem. Here’s part one of the MinutePhysics rundown, for the drunkards, dullards, and otherwise uninformed. [YouTube] More »
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