Behold the Ferrari 599 Hybrid! Despite its wicked metallic green paint, it’s not all that environmentally friendly. The V-12 rocket ship reportedly uses a variation of Ferrari’s KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) setup used on F-1 cars. No, Gambit has nothing to do with it. The system captures energy from braking in the form of electricity. That energy can then be released with the push of a button, powering an electric motor for extra boost. The motor is mated directly to the transmission and delivers 100 horsepower. The whole hybrid system weighs about 220 pounds.

This spy shot was taken during setup at this year’s Geneva Auto Show. It appeared on Autoblog and a few other sites, but was pulled at Ferrari’s request. Because only seven people read this blog and I think the photo is damn pretty, I’m posting it anyway. Really, the 599 just looks luscious in that green, doesn’t it?

Link to Autoblog article.

Ocean currents never stop flowing. They’re a ceaseless source of energy—if you can harness them. They’re too slow to spin turbines and the ocean tends to wreak havoc on steel and concrete. A team of engineers led by professor Michael Bernitsas at the University of Michigan, however, have discovered a way nab the energy in ocean currents despite these problems.

Their new system, called VIVACE (Vortex Induced Vibrations Aquatic Clean Energy), exploits vibrations that can tear man-made structures apart.

It all has to do with Aeolian Tones. Originally described by Leonardo da Vinci, they’re the ghostly resonating sounds that strings or cables can emit when air passes over them. The vibrations that make those sounds are caused by vortices pushing the cable back and forth. These vibrations can be extremely violent, as seen in the infamous film of the Tacoma Narrows bridge oscillating itself to bits. Engineers typically try to avoid these vibrations when building structures, but Bernitsas is using them in VIVACE. Slow-moving ocean currents crete vortices that are strong enough to push steel tubes up and down, and generate power.

The system is currently being tested and could be ready for deployment in the near future. Bernitsas estimates that the ocean currents could generate enough power for the entire world. His company, Vortex Hydro Energy, plans to have systems on the market soon.

Link to Vortex Hydro Energy

Link to Endgadget article

Al and Ziggy

Researchers at Yale have created the first ever fully functional quantum processor. Harnessing the bizarre qualities of quantum mechanics, the processor can perform simple calculations.

Typical computers use electrons (through transistors) to compute—reading and writing information in bits. Bits have binary states; they’re either “on” or “off,” 1 or 0. Quantum computers use atoms and “qubits,” which have multiple states. Qubits can be 1, 0, 1-0, 0-1, 0+1, or 0 AND 1 simultaneously. Thus a single qubit can store much more information than a bit. Additionally, typical computers read and write numbers and solve problems sequentially. Quantum computers can read and write long strings of numbers all at once, boosting speed tremendously.

The Yale computer is made up of two artificial atoms—billions of aluminum atoms that act as a single atom—in a solid-state system. The processor is extremely unstable, capable of hanging around for only a millisecond before evaporating. Still, it’s a major breakthrough in quantum computing that will lead to more stable and capable computers in the future.

Because of their tremendous computing power and speed, quantum computers have the potential to truly revolutionize computing.

Link to TG Daily article

At long last my boyhood dreams of ripping a lamp post from the pavement and using it to play stickball with parked cars may come true. Ray Baughman, director of the Nano Tech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas has created carbon nanotube muscles that are 30 times stronger than human muscle.

They’re also fast. Natural muscles can contract a maximum 10 percent per second. The nanotube muscles can contract 40,000 percent per second. Oh, and they can withstand the -320 degree Fahrenheit temperatures of liquid nitrogen and the 2,800 degree Fahrenheit melting point of iron.

The muscles work on a simple function of physics that causes carbon nanotubes to repel each other when electrically charged. They’re as strong and stiff as diamond in one direction and as pliable as rubber in the other. 

Of course, I would need a carbon nanotube skeleton to withstand the forces these muscles generate, as well as carbon nanotube-based power cells to give me enough juice to use them. 

Link to Wired article

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

Intel recently pulled the wraps off its mystical wireless charging device at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco. The gadget uses resonant magnetic fields to transmit power over a short distance. In their demonstration, the wireless power transmitter sent enough juice through the ether to power a 60-watt lightbulb a few feet away.

It works like this: The charger sends power through the air across two resonating electromagnetic coils. Electromagnetic waves are emitted from one coil and are received by another a few feet away. The magic frequency for this power transmission seems to be 10 MHz. The result is a steady flow of juice at the receiving coil, enough to, say, power a lightbulb.

The technology has been around since the days of Tesla, but it hasn’t been deemed efficient enough or stable enough for everyday use. Until recently, engineers working at MIT could only get about 45 percent efficiency out of the system, meaning that more than half of the electricity going into the first coil never made it across the gap to the second. Intel claims that its new charger operates at 75 percent efficiency, a huge leap over previous systems.

Intel researchers say that that there’s no chance of getting zapped by the wireless charger. Magnetic waves pass through human bodies without interference, they say. The company hopes to develop a wireless charging system for laptops in the future.

Link to New York Times article

All computer data boils down to ones and zeros. Until now, that is. A team of computer engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have figured out how to throw a “two” into the mix using copper nanowires, adding a third dimension to computing. They call the data triumvirates “trits,” and they could vastly increase the capacity of memory storage devices.

It works like this: Each nanowire is made up of two materials, a central core and a casing. Flashing a current through the wire causes either the core or the casing to phase change from crystalized (neat and orderly) to amorphous (jumbled and messy). The whole wire can either be crystalized or amorphous, representing a one or a zero, a traditional bit. Zapping the core crystalized and the casing amorphous or vice versa, adds the “two,” giving birth to the “trit.” 

Team member Ritesh Agarwal spoke to PhysOrg.com about the discovery:

“The use of nanowires to create electronic memory is advantageous for several reasons, but a non-binary form of nanowire memory like we have created could allow for a huge increase in the memory density of potential future devices.”

That means more memory in smaller packages and, eventually, digital wristwatches that are smarter than I am.

Link to PhysOrg.com article.

Before swarms of nanites can organize to eradicate the human race, they’ll need a leader. Engineers in Japan have made the first steps in creating such a microscopic overlord, building a nanomachine that imitates human brain cells. The tiny machine can receive information from the macro world and transmit it to a small cadre of its companions. Working in concert, teams of the molecular contraptions could do everything from terminate tumors to crunch vast amounts of data in the blink of an eye.

Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, in Tsukuba, Japan, led the team that developed the nanobrain. It’s made from 17 molecules of an compound called duroquinone, 16 arranged in orbit around one. The whole thing is held together by weak hydrogen bonds. Using a scanning electron microscope, Bandyopadhyay was able to send electrical impulses to the central molecule to change its configuration or state. The lead molecule then transfers its state to the other 16, like dominoes falling one after another.

It’s basically parallel processing on a micro scale, the same kind of number crunching that our brains are capable of. In fact, Bandyopadhyay modeled the microbrain on human glial cells, which pass info between neurons in the brain. They call it “one-to-many computation” and it’s key to parallel processing.

So what can it do? Bandyopadhyay estimates that the simple assembly is capable of generating more than 4 billion different outcomes from one input instruction. There’s no comparing true parallel processing to current processors, which crunch computations linearly. Parallel processors can take on millions of lines of instruction at once. That’s the kind of computing power that can keep Moore’s Law of exponential computing growth chugging away into stratospheric heights. 

And it’s not just powerful—the nanocomputer would represent a completely new way of computing. It’s purely visual, using patterns to replace the differential equations that are at the heart of current computing.

There’s also a potential to manufacture billions of molecules of a custom drug with just one instruction. Imagine a single drop of water hitting a placid pool. Waves radiate out from the site of impact, quickly covering the entire surface. A single instruction dropped into a field of similar nanomachines would spread in the same manner.

Bandyopadhyay is currently working to create more complex versions of his nanobrain and hopes to have a functional computer within a few years. The trick is finding something other than a massive tunneling electron microscope to interact with the machines. Bandyopadhyay hopes other control methods will be developed, including optical readers for the nanocomputers, or chemical triggers for the medical nanofactories.

Link to MSNBC article.

Link to BBC article.

A team of photochemical cooks at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland have whipped up a batch of inexpensive solar cells that could revolutionize solar energy. The “Dye-sensitized Solar Cells” use dye and an electrolyte solution to harness solar radiation to make electricity. The components are sandwiched together to form a flexible film that’s durable and long lasting.

Professors Michael Grätzel and Brian O’Regan invented the solar cells in 1991, but only recently developed an easy, low-cost way to manufacture them. So how do they work? The cells consist of a porous film of white, nanometer-sized titanium dioxide particles covered in a dark dye. The film is suspended in an electrolyte solution. When sunlight hits the dye, it injects an electron (negative charge) into the titanium particles.

Grätzel and his team have tweaked the manufacturing process, nixing the volatile organic solvents that typically make up the electrolyte solution in favor of a mixture of three salts. The bottom line: Dye-sensitized cells that can be made on the cheap without harsh solvents. 

The new salt-based dye-sensitized cells have an efficiency of about 8.2 precent, a little more than half the efficiency of silicon-based photovoltaic cells. No official word on cost, but Grätzel and friends claim that their panels will be considerably cheaper than traditional solar cells. They should also last more than 10 years, says Grätzel.

Link to ScienceDaily article.

Researchers at the Zernike Institute of Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen have developed super-cheap plastic memory that will likely end up in next-gen RFID tags. It works like Flash memory, but it’s easier and cheaper to manufacture. How do they do it? Flash memory is like a club sandwich—layers of semiconductors between ferro-electric toast. The new memory mixes everything up into one blended semiconductor cake. Current can be channeled through the mixture, leaving programming in its wake. The researchers aren’t totally clear on how they’ve managed this feat, but they say it works wonderfully.

Link to ScienceDaily article.