Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve all assumed that anything’s possible when dabbling in the elusive realm of spintronics, and it seems as if a team at NC State University is out to prove just that. While using their newfound free time on Saturdays (you know, given that the football team has quit mid-season), Dr. Jagdish Narayan and company have utilized the process of selective doping in order to construct a new type of metallic ceramic that could be used to create a “fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.” The material could also be used (in theory, anyway) to create a new generation of ceramic engines that could withstand twice the heat of normal engines and hit MPG ratings of 80. Granted, this all sounds like wishful thinking at the moment, but we wouldn’t put it past the whiz kids in Raleigh to bring this stuff to market. Too bad the athletic director doesn’t posses the same type of initiative.

[Thanks, Joel]

Filed under: Storage, Science

NC State gurus develop new material to boost data storage, conserve energy originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Get ready to duck (again). The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, has now reached an operating temperature of 1.9K–colder than outer space itself, according to Ars Technica.

That means the LHC will soon be ready to begin crashing particles together, after a catastrophic failure and series of repairs over the past year took the accelerator out of commission.

The current prognosis is that the LHC will begin operations sometime in the next five weeks. It will accelerate particles at speeds very close to the speed of light. In effect, they’d run around the 16.7-mile length of the accelerator over 11,000 times per second, the report said. That necessitates the accelerator contain a vacuum that’s an order of magnitude less dense than the moon’s atmosphere. In other words, this is tough stuff, so let’s give those guys a break about that whole catastrophic failure thing. (Image credit: CERN)

Hold onto your phasers: a new rocket, designed jointly by NASA, Ad Astra, and Canadian firm Nautel, could potentially slash trip times to Mars to as little as 39 days. And yep, it uses ion propulsion–just like Star Trek taught us.

Ion propulsion, via the new plasma-based VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) engine, is now close to the point where it could be tested on a flight to the moon, according to Canada.com. The rocket works by turning electrical power into thrust in order to harness solar energy.

The 39 day time compares to six months using current rocket technology. Actually, a round-trip ticket to Mars would take far longer than even six months. Since Mars and Earth only pass close to each other every two years, engineers assume a crew would go one way, wait a year, and then fly back the next time the planets passed each other by, according to the report.

The ion drive would enable astronauts to shoot there and back during a single close approach. (Image credit: Ad Astra) (Via Slashdot)

Large Hadron Collider staying cool at just a hair above absolute zero temperatures originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve certainly seen our fair share of crackpot theories regarding the Large Hadron Collider, and quite frankly the whole thing is becoming rather old hat. That said, when the New York Times comes up with something as far out as this, we most certainly have to share it with you. It seems that way back in July, 2007 two theoretical physicists (Danish string theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen and the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya), proposed an unlikely explanation as to why the LHC and the Superconducting Supercollider before it seem to be particularly accident prone. According to science writer Dennis Overbye, the Higgs boson (which the collider has been designed to observe) “might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.” Makes sense, right? Of course, we don’t have any idea how these elementary particles might actually conduct the business of destroying equipment, but that hasn’t stopped the duo from proposing a novel way to test this theory.

According to a paper published earlier this month, a simple deck of cards could be made, either out of construction paper or, if you’re feeling high tech, simulated on a computer. The deck would have one card indicating that the LHC should be shut down, and a much larger number of cards (maybe 100 million or so) that indicate that everything is good to go. If you draw the death card, as it were, you can bet that the shadowy hand of the Higgs boson is stretching back in time, telling you to halt the operation. Between all this and the proposed hyperdrive propulsion tests we came across a couple days ago, things are starting to get very Philip K. Dick over at CERN. Can we make one suggestion? Instead of a random number generator, why not Tarot cards? Or a Ouija board? You know, go for a Halloween vibe.

[Via New Scientist]

Filed under: Science

Might Higgs boson be a time-traveling ne’er do well out to destroy the LHC? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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