Hasta La Gadget!

If you thought Kim Kardashian’s engagement ring was a ridiculous rock, you haven’t seen the ludicrously large diamond planet, J1719-1438. Scientists at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne recently spotted this celestial body that’s so dense, it’s believed to be crystalline carbon — i.e. a ginormous diamond similar in size to Jupiter. Since the ’60s, astrophysicists like Marc Kuchner have theorized that carbon-heavy stars can burn out, crystallize and form diamonds under the right pressure. Supporting the idea, a white dwarf star spotted in 1992, BPM 37093, had cooled and crystallized over the course of 12 years — even copping the nickname “Lucy” after the Beatles jam. Although astronomers in Australia, Britain and Hawaii have all identified the newly spotted precious planet J1719-1438, they are still unsure if the crystallized carbon rock will be all sparkly mountains up close — dashing the hopes and dreams of material girls everywhere.

Iced-out diamond planet catches astronomers’ eyes originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Aug 2011 00:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Only 3,500 Americans have died in hurricanes since the 1940s thanks to improved warning and evacuation systems. If you end up one of them, you were either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or you were stupid. More »

So, this is pretty… big. At this very moment, researchers at IBM are building the largest data drive ever — a 120 petabyte beast comprised of some 200,000 normal HDDs working in concert. To put that into perspective, 120 petabytes is the equivalent of 120 million gigabytes, (or enough space to hold about 24 billion, average-sized MP3’s), and significantly more spacious than the 15 petabyte capacity found in the biggest arrays currently in use. To achieve this, IBM aligned individual drives in horizontal drawers, as in most data centers, but made these spaces even wider, in order to accommodate more disks within smaller confines. Engineers also implemented a new data backup mechanism, whereby information from dying disks is slowly reproduced on a replacement drive, allowing the system to continue running without any slowdown. A system called GPFS, meanwhile, spreads stored files over multiple disks, allowing the machine to read or write different parts of a given file at once, while indexing its entire collection at breakneck speeds. The company developed this particular system for an unnamed client looking to conduct complex simulations, but Bruce Hillsberg, IBM’s director of storage research, says it may be only a matter of time before all cloud computing systems sport similar architectures. For the moment, however, he admits that his creation is still “on the lunatic fringe.”

IBM developing largest data drive ever, with 120 petabytes of bliss originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just what were you doing at 13 years old?

[UPDATE Aug 22 2011. All may not be as it seems. According to Gadget Lab reader and grown-up Patrick Theiner, Dwyer made several schoolboy errors when making his experiments. An article debunking the experiment and results appears on the UVdiv blog. Apparently Dwyer was measuring the open voltage on the circuit, which “is practically independent of power output,” and stays all but constant regardless of light falling on the cells.

This post also says that the theory is flawed, and that pointing the panels in different directions, most of which aren’t at the optimal angle to the incoming light, will yield less power than a flat panel. You can read the full math here. (Oddly, the post has itself disappeared, but you can read Google’s cache.]

13-year-old Aiden Dwyer has managed to do something that grown-up scientists haven’t. He has wrung up to 50% extra electricity from regular solar cells. How? Brains, trees, and a dash of math geekery.

Dwyer was hiking in the Catskill mountains when he started to see patterns in the mess of branches. Where you or I might see chaos, Dwyer saw spirals. Measuring the patterns, he found that the spiral forms of the leaves and branches were placed according to fractions that obey the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…).

Trees and plants are pretty good at capturing sunlight, right? So Dwyer took these numbers and built his own tree, only instead of leaves the tree has solar cells:

I designed and built my own test model, copying the Fibonacci pattern of an oak tree. I studied my results with the compass tool and figured out the branch angles. The pattern was about 137 degrees and the Fibonacci sequence was 2/5. Then I built a model using this pattern from PVC tubing.

In place of leaves, I used PV solar panels hooked up in series that produced up to 1/2 volt, so the peak output of the model was 5 volts. The entire design copied the pattern of an oak tree as closely as possible.

As a control, he also built a regular flat-panel solar array, familiar to eco-hippies everywhere (but mostly Californian eco-hippies).

Dwyer tested the two arrays side-by-side from October to December. Under the more plentiful October sun, his tree “made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day.” But in December, when light is scarce, “the tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight was up to 50% longer.”

Not bad, right? And Dwyer isn’t done yet. Currently he’s investigating the different Fibonacci patterns on different trees to find out which is most efficient. As it is, his invention tracks the Sun better, produces more power and takes up less space than a traditional flat cell array. Suck on that, adult scientists!

The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees [American Museum of Natural History via the Giz]

We’ve sure come a long way since frying ants with a magnifying glass. Researchers at the University of Southampton used nano-structures to create millimeter-sized “monolithic glass space-variant polarization converters,” which ultimately changes the way light travels through and is stored in glass. These “whirlpools” of light data can be read like information stored in optical fibers — allowing for “more precise laser material processing, optical manipulation of atom-sized objects, ultra-high resolution imaging and potentially, table-top particle accelerators.” (Does that mean we all get one of these on our desks?) This new five dimensional approach is reusable, twenty times cheaper and more compact compared to old methods of microscopy using a spatial light modulator, making it a win-win. Check out the full PR after the fold.

[Thanks, Adam]

Continue reading Nano-structured glass creates new type of computer memory

Nano-structured glass creates new type of computer memory originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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