Hasta La Gadget!

Two University of Manchester scientists were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their pioneering research on graphene, a one-atom-thick film of carbon whose strength, flexibility and electrical conductivity have opened up new horizons for pure physics research as well as high-tech applications.

It’s a worthy Nobel, for the simple reason that graphene may be one of the most promising and versatile materials ever discovered. It could hold the key to everything from supersmall computers to high-capacity batteries.

Graphene’s properties are attractive to materials scientists and electrical engineers for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it might be possible to build circuits that are smaller and faster than what you can build in silicon.

But first: What is it, exactly?

Imagine “crystals one atom or molecule thick, essentially two-dimensional planes of atoms shaved from conventional crystals,” said Nobel winner Andre Geim in New Scientist. “Graphene is stronger and stiffer than diamond, yet can be stretched by a quarter of its length, like rubber. Its surface area is the largest known for its weight.”

Geim and his colleague (and former postdoctoral assistant) Konstantin Novoselov first produced graphene in 2004 by repeatedly peeling away graphite strips with adhesive tape to isolate a single atomic plane. They analyzed its strength, transparency, and conductive properties in a paper for Science the same year.

Super-Small Transistors

The Manchester team in 2008 created a 1-nanometer graphene transistor, only one atom thick and 10 atoms across. This is not only smaller than the smallest possible silicon transistor; Novoselov claimed that it could very well represent the absolute physical limit of Moore’s Law governing the shrinking size and growing speed of computer processors.

“It’s about the smallest you can get,” Novoselov told Wired Science. “From the point of view of physics, graphene is a goldmine. You can study it for ages.”

Super-Dense Data Storage

Researchers around the world have already put graphene to work. A Rice University team In 2008 created a new type of graphene-based, flash-like storage memory, more dense and less lossy than any existing storage technology. Two University of South Florida researchers earlier this year reported techniques to enhance and direct its conductivity by creating wire-like defects to send current flowing through graphene strips.

Energy Storage

The energy applications of graphene are also extraordinarily rich. Texas’s Graphene Energy is using the film to create new ultracapacitators to store and transmit electrical power. Companies currently using carbon nanotubes to create wearable electronics — clothes that can power and charge electrical devices — are beginning to switch to graphene, which is thinner and potentially less expensive to produce. Much of the emerging research is devoted to devising more ways to produce graphene quickly, cheaply and in high quantities.

Optical Devices: Solar Cells and Flexible Touchscreens

A Cambridge University team argues in a paper in September’s Nature Photonicsthat the true potential of graphene lies in its ability to conduct light as well as electricity. Strong, flexible, light-sensitive graphene could improve the efficiency of solar cells and LEDs, as well as aiding in the production of next-generation devices like flexible touch screens, photodetectors and ultrafast lasers. In particular, graphene could replace rare and expensive metals like platinum and indium, performing the same tasks with greater efficiency at a fraction of the cost.

High-Energy Particle Physics

In pure science, according to Geim, graphene “makes possible experiments with high-speed quantum particles that researchers at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, can only dream of.” Because graphene is effectively only two-dimensional, electrons can move through its lattice structure with virtually no resistance. In fact, they behave like Heisenberg’s relative particles, with an effective resting mass of zero.

It’s slightly more complicated than this, but here’s a quick and dirty explanation. To have mass in the traditional sense, objects need to have volume; electrons squeezed through two-dimensional graphene have neither. In other words, the same properties that makes graphene such an efficient medium for storing and transmitting energy also demonstrate something fundamental about the nature of the subatomic universe.

In 2008, Geim and Novoselov handily won a Wired Science poll of that year’s Nobel Prize candidates. In 2010, Wired.com’s graphene fans finally got their wish.

See Also:

• Graphene Defects Could Lead to Smaller Electronics
• Graphene memory makes Flash looks huge and ungainly
• Scientists Build World’s Smallest Transistor, Gordon Moore Sighs
• Beyond Silicon Transistors: Switches Made of Carbon
• Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded: Fair or Foul?
• 10 Companies Reinventing Our Energy Infrastructure
• To Charge your iPod, Plug in Your Jeans
• Inexplicable Superconductor Fractals Hint at Higher Universal Laws
• IBM BISFET schematic

A 15-year-old Italian boy suffering from Duchenne syndrome, a rare degenerative muscle disease, was fitted with an artificial heart after he had been ruled ineligible for a transplant list. The surgery occurred in Rome’s Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital last week, after the teen was declared to be weeks away from death.

The operation, which took 10 hours, was the first surgery to permantely implant an artificial heart in a minor. According to the doctors, the heart could give the boy another 20-25 years.

The lead surgeon, Dr. Antonio Amodeo, told The Telegraph, “This surgery opens up new horizons as there are many children who need transplants but the number of donors is very small and there are some who like this patient cannot be transplant candidates because of illness.”

The boy will remain in intensive care for another two weeks, barring any complications.

The above, of course, is not the typical outcome of in vitro fertilization. No, it is, in fact, a comedy sketch from Canadian troupe the Kids in the Hall and should not, therefore, be taken as science fact–or even, for that matter, a proper cautionary tale.

No, in vitro fertilization has brought much joy to many parents since the first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born on July 25, 1978. Four million babies have been conceived through this method, all thanks to the work of Robert G. Edwards and Patrick Steptoe.

Edwards, a physiologist who worked at Cambridge University for much of his career, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine this year, thanks to his work in the field. His colleague, Steptoe, doed in 1988.

Edwards and Steptoe’s work was the subject of much criticism over the years, particularly from religious institutions. The Nobel committee addressed this concern in its write up of Edwards, “In retrospect, it is amazing that Edwards not only was able to respond to the continued criticism of in vitro fertilization, but that he also remained so persistent and unperturbed in fulfilling his scientific vision”

Chicago resident Matt Sallee’s life is a never-ending sprint that mostly takes place in his phone. At 5 in the morning the alarm goes off, and during his train commute the 29-year-old rolls through 50 e-mails he received overnight on his BlackBerry.

As a manager of global business development at an LED company, Sallee works in time zones spanning three continents.

“I love having 10 different things cooking at once, but for me it’s all moving in little pieces, and when it comes time that there are big deliverables needed, I don’t have to scramble at the last minute,” Sallee said. “It’s an hour of combining all the little pieces into one thing, and it’s done.”

It’s not news the “always-on network” is eradicating the borders between home and office, and changing the way people work and play. But how much distraction can one person take? Research is still in the early stages, and there is little hard evidence that 24/7 access to information is bad for you. But the image of frantic, distracted workers scrabbling harder than ever for ever-diminishing social and economic returns is an attractive target for critics.

Not only is it annoying to see people chatting on cellphones in the popcorn line at the cinema, these devices — and the multitasking they encourage — could be taking a massive toll on our psyches, and perhaps even fundamentally altering the way our brains are wired, some dystopian-minded critics suggest.

Is the smartphone –- like Google, TV, comics and the movies before it –- actually making us dumb?

Fractured Concentration?

Some of the latest arguments to critique this 24/7 online culture include the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, who argues that the internet is rewiring us into shallow, inattentive thinkers, along with a New York Times feature series by Matt Richtel titled “Your Brain on Computers,” a collection of stories examining the possible negative consequences of gadget overload.

(Disclosure: I’m currently writing a book called Always On that explores similar topics.)

Giving credence to such claims, an oft-cited Stanford study published last year found that people who were rated “heavy” multitaskers were less able to concentrate on a single task and also worse at switching between tasks than those who were “light” multitaskers.

“We have evidence that high multitaskers are worse at managing their short-term memory and worse at switching tasks,” said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University professor who led the study. He’s author of the upcoming book The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.

One test asked students to recall the briefly glimpsed orientations of red rectangles surrounded by blue rectangles. The students had to determine whether the red rectangles had shifted in position between different pictures. Those deemed heavy multitaskers struggled to keep track of the red rectangles, because they were having trouble ignoring the blue ones.

To measure task-switching ability, another test presented participants with a letter-and-number combination, like b6 or f9. Subjects were asked to do one of two tasks: One was to hit the left button if they saw an odd number and the right for an even; the other was to press the left for a vowel and the right for a consonant.

They were warned before each letter-number combination appeared what the task was to be, but high multitaskers responded on average half-a-second more slowly when the task was switched.

The Stanford study is hardly undisputed. A deep analysis recently published by Language Log’s Mark Liberman criticized the study for its small sample group: Only 19 of the students who took the tests were deemed “heavy multitaskers.”

He added that there also arises an issue of causality: Were these high multitaskers less able to filter out irrelevant information because their brains were damaged by media multitasking, or are they inclined to engage with a lot of media because they have easily distractable personalities to begin with?

“What’s at stake here is a set of major choices about social policy and personal lifestyle,” Liberman said. “If it’s really true that modern digital multitasking causes significant cognitive disability and even brain damage, as Matt Richtel claims, then many very serious social and individual changes are urgently needed.”

“Before starting down this path, we need better evidence that there’s a real connection between cognitive disability and media multitasking (as opposed to self-reports of media multitasking),” he added. “We need some evidence that the connection exists in representative samples of the population, not just a couple of dozen Stanford undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology.”

Other research also challenges the conclusions of the Stanford study. A University of Utah study published this year discovered some people who are excellent at multitasking, a class whom researchers dubbed “supertaskers.”

Researchers Jason Watson and David Strayer put 200 college undergrads through a driving simulator, where they were required to “drive” behind a virtual car and brake whenever its brake lights shone, while at the same time performing various tasks, such as memorizing and recalling items in the correct order and solving math problems.

Watson and Strayer analyzed the students based on their speed and accuracy in completing the tasks. The researchers discovered that an extremely small minority — just 2.5 percent (three men and two women) of the subjects — showed absolutely no performance loss when performing dual tasks versus single tasks. In other words, these few individuals excelled at multitasking.

Also in contrast with the results of the Stanford study, the supertaskers were better at task-switching and performing individual tasks than the rest of the group.

The rest of the group, on the other hand, did show overall degraded performance when handling dual tasks compared to a single task, suggesting that the vast majority of people might indeed be inadequate at processing multiple activities. But the discovery of supertaskers argues with the ever-popular notion that human brains are absolutely not meant to multitask, Watson and Strayer say, and it shows that this area of research is still very much unexplored.

“Our results suggest that there are supertaskers in our midst — rare but intriguing individuals with extraordinary multitasking ability,” Watson and Strayer wrote. “These individual differences are important, because they challenge current theory that postulates immutable bottlenecks in dual-task performance.”

I’m taking the last sip of home-brewed purple liquid. It’s sweet yet balanced, fizzy yet quenching, smooth yet these words look a bit blurry. It tastes like a dangerously well-mixed drink. And just 48 short hours ago, it was Welch’s. More »