A team of international scientists, without the help of a time-traveling Scott and a 512k Mac, have discovered a transparent metal. Unfortunately, we’re talking sodium, and not aluminum. And it’s at a pressure of about 2 million atmospheres.
The team, led by Artem Oganov, Professor of Theoretical Crystallography at Stony Brook University, and Yanming Ma, the lead author and professor of physics at Jilin University in China, was able to demonstrate that sodium turns transparent under pressure.
Typically, elements turn metallic at high pressure—forming a lattice of positive ions surrounded by electrons. Metallic elements are magnetic and conductive. It even happens to hydrogen, in the highly pressurized center of gas giants like Saturn and Pluto. Sodium does just the opposite, first becoming an insulator, then transparent like glass.
Ma and Oganav used mathematical models to predict sodium’s surprising response under pressure, but hadn’t tested them. Mikhail Eremets, the leader of an experimental group at Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, engineered several experiments to test the theories.
The discovery will help scientists study the chemistry found at the center of gas giants and stars.
Link to ScienceDaily article
The lonely dark windows of shuttered shops could soon glow with the frenetic energy of advertising, thanks to new ViVid projection screens. LinkEarth Corp has developed a flexible, cuttable window film full of LCD crystals that turns opaque when a current is applied. Project some video on the film and voila, your dormant storefront comes alive to advertise the latest neuro-implant upgrade or holographic porn.
To achieve this miraculous feat, LinkEarth Corp houses the LCD layer in a spongy polymer acrylic. The acrylic-laced layer can be bent, folded, punctured, or chopped into odd shapes without losing its ability to go opaque. The film is going on sale soon: Expect a 40-inch “screen” to cost about $1500. Projector sold separately, of course.
Link to Gizmodo article
“It’s evolving. It’s doing what we designed it to do.” That sentence isn’t from the chilling trailer for the next Michael Chrichton adaptation. It’s the words of an honest-to-goodness biochemist describing his creation, a synthetic self-replicating jumble of chemicals called AEGIS—Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System.
AEGIS is an experiment devised by biochemist Steve Benner at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution that aims to get at the roots of life itself by creating artificial self-replicating chemicals that are capable of evolution. And it works. Benner has AEGIS happily replicating and evolving in a beaker in his Florida lab. What makes AEGIS different than everyday life? For starters, it has 12 base pairs instead of four. Beyond that, information is sketchy, but Benner assured Discover News that AEGIS is thriving. In fact, it’s the first synthetic genetic system capable of Darwinian evolution.
Now all we have to do is wait for it to escape and consume us all.
I plan to contact Benner in the coming weeks to get more info about AGIS—how it was created, what he’s learned. Look for an update.
And thanks to Matt Chisholm for the tip!
Link to MSNBC article
Want to get 130 horsepower out of a 750cc engine? Blast it with compressed air. Researchers at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich school of engineering have rigged a tank of compressed air to a tiny 750cc two-cylinder, blasting it with boost right off idle. A turbo takes over at higher RPMs, providing boost for rolling acceleration. The engine puts out as much power as a 2-liter four cylinder, but consumes 30 percent less fuel.
When the engine decelerates, its cylinders pump air back into the tank. The system completely eliminates turbo lag and manages to wring more power out of smaller displacement engines. The ultimate goal? A 1-liter two-cylinder that puts out as much power as a 3-liter V6.
And the technology is cheap. The researchers say that compressed air hybrid engines would cost about 20 percent more than traditional engines, but provide vastly improved fuel economy. Compare that to gas-electric drivetrains, which are about three times more expensive than regular gasoline setups, and you have a clear winner for developing nations like India and China.
The same setup could be applied to diesel engines, which are inherently more efficient than gasoline engines.
Link to Wards article
UPDATE: It seems that in my zeal to report such a high-output, small-displacement engine, I failed to do my research. Weber Automotive GmbH is making a four-stroke 750cc two-cylinder turbo-charged engine that puts out 100 kW or about 135 horsepower. It’s called the MPE 750 (Multipurpose Engine, 750cc)and the German company is making it as a sort of drop-in power plant for anything from snowmobiles to small autos. It was used in the Rinspeed eXasis concept car, a translucent plastic buggy-like sports car. No info on the 750 MPE’s fuel consumption, but more info on the engine can be found on the Weber Motor site.
