Blog

New microscope has resolution less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom

2 Comments

Nanobridge of atoms where two gold crystals meet The world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope has been installed at the Department of Energy’s National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dubbed TEAM 0.5 (TEAM stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope) it can produce images with a resolution of a half-angstrom: half of a ten-billionth of a meter, or less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. (Via EurekAlert.)

That test image above shows the arrangement of atoms formed where two gold crystals meet.

Advances in electronics and computer technology make the new microscope possible, enabling it to counteract spherical aberration (the aberration that, in an out-of-focus image, makes points of light look like disks), which also enables it to maintain its high resolution with a lower-energy beam of electrons, less likely to alter the subject. TEAM 1, due to be up and running next year, will also be able to counteract chromatic aberration, cased by different wavelengths of electrons being refracted at different angles by the microscope’s magnetic lenses.

The microscope can literally focus atom by atom in a sample, and with a new stage to be installed in TEAM 1, scientists will be able to maneuver samples with such fine control that they’ll be able to create a 3D image of the atomic structure. As the project leader puts it:

“This brings us within reach of meeting the great challenge posed by the famous physicist Richard Feynman in 1959: the ability to analyze any chemical substance simply by looking to see where the atoms are.”

TEAM 0.5 and its components are now undergoing testing and tuning, and the microscope should be available to outside users starting this fall.

Oh, and TEAM 0.5 was the focus of my newspaper science column this week.

(Image courtesy of DOE’s National Center for Electron Microscopy.)

[tags]technology,microscopes[/tags]

Blog

The Tipping Point toppled?

3 Comments

Seesaw Being the sort of well-informed netizens you are, I expect you’re familiar with Malcom Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” hypothesis, widely believed to be the cutting-edge theory for predicting how trends, fads and fashions propagate. [Image from Wikipedia]

According to Gladwell, fashions are started by “Influentials” – highly visible and well-connected individuals who others look to for the next big thing.

According to Duncan Watts, however, the Tipping Point is so much baloney:

“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says […] “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”

And this is not, he argues, mere academic whimsy. He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people–and ignoring Influentials altogether.

Of course, Watts has his rival theory to promote – he’s not telling us this out of some philanthropic urge. But the point is that the business of marketing is probably where we’ll see the next big breakthroughs in understanding human communication as a system.

How the results will be used remains to be seen, of course. [Via The Daily Swarm]

Blog

Sun shield developments may allow man to travel to Mars

3 Comments

Sunshine provided a relatively realistic depiction of space travelSpace is a dangerous place. All that vacuum that looks like nothing actually contains huge amounts of solar radiation. In an orbit around Earth or a short trip to the Moon, this is not usually a life-threatening problem – although the Apollo 16 astronauts just missed a solar storm that could have killed them. But in the eight months or so it would take an expedition to get to Mars, a few solar wind storms could easily kill any humans on board. The shield is a common solution in science fiction – from the near-magic forcefield of Star Trek/Wars to the realistic mirrored disk seen on the craft in last year’s Sunshine.

Scientists at Oxford University are aiming to create a similar shield. By creating a magnetic field similar to that of the Earth’s, which protects us from radiation, the scientists found they could successfully deflect intense beams of charged particles. The technology has been proven to work and now needs to be energy-efficient enough to be run by a spacecraft with limited resources – such a development could well provide technology useful in increasing the efficiency of more mundane technologies as well.

[via the Guardian, screenshot from ‘Sunshine’ via Moving Pictures ]

Blog

McQualifications – official qualifications in the workplace

9 Comments

Diploma-scroll Talk about cognitive dissonance – I thought I was still asleep and dreaming when I heard on the radio this morning that three large corporate employers (including a certain well-known fast-food chain) have been granted the right to act as examination boards by the UK government. This means they can grant their employees qualifications which (theoretically) have value beyond the walls of the company where they were earned, unlike many current vocational qualifications. [Image from stock.xchng]

I expect that, certainly at first, an A-Level in McManagement won’t be worth the paper it’s written on, except with similar employers – but if the scheme sticks, that will probably change. You could probably argue that more people will end up with qualifications if there’s the financial incentive of receiving a working wage while earning them.

But what if this is the thin end of the wedge? What if, in a few decades, kindergartens and primary schools are run (or sponsored) by corporate interests? In a climate of growing deficits, it’s not that unlikely a scenario – and we’ve already been softened up to the idea by supermarket vouchers-for-equipment schemes. But then again, there’s little difference between governments and corporations as it is … once again, Snow Crash seems eerily prescient. Or am I just engaging in knee-jerk cyberpunk paranoia?
[tags]corporate, training, education, qualifications[/tags]

Blog

The Alpha Workshop for Young SF Writers

Diane Turnshek, who runs the Alpha Workshop for young writers, sent me details on this year’s workshop, which will be held in Pittsburgh this July. I had the great pleasure of attending the first two years of the workshop, in 2002 and 2003. Alpha taught me a huge amount about the craft and business of writing and led me to my first few fiction sales. If you write science fiction, fantasy or horror and are between the age of 14 and 19 this is the best possible way to learn more about how to improve your work as well as have a lot of fun meeting other like-minded people.

Alpha uses a similar structure to the Clarion and Odyssey writers’ workshops but over ten days rather than six weeks. The teens accepted to the workshop will have their submission story critiqued as well as writing a completely new story with the help of the staff and guest writers. At the end of the final week everyone is encouraged to submit their story to market before heading over to the Pittsburgh SF convention, Confluence for a final weekend of fun.

The ALPHA SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers (ages 14-19) will be held at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg Campus July 16-25, 2008
in conjunction with Pittsburgh’s science fiction convention, Confluence, July 25-27th. Twenty talented young writers will be selected to attend the workshop on the strength of their submission stories. Four guest authors and ten staff members will be present during the ten-day residency workshop to teach genre writing. Mike
Arnzen, Timothy Zahn, Chris McKitterick and Tamora Pierce are our guest authors for 2008 (our seventh year). Workshop fee: $950.00 For more information, see:
http://alpha.spellcaster.org/

Past graduates have been published in Realms Of Fantasy, Aberrant Dreams, Boys Life, Fantasy Magazine and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, as well as placing in awards like Writers Of The Future and The Dell Award for Undergraduates. So if you know any young writer with an ambition to be published, let them know about Alpha and help create a new generation of genre writers.

Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001