Applied Physics

A team of researchers has created an alternative to conventional logic gates, demonstrated them in silicon, and dubbed them "chaogates."  They used 'chaotic' patterns to encode and manipulate inputs to produce a desired output, in that they selected desired patterns from the infinite variety offered by a chaotic system. A subset of these patterns was then used to map the system inputs (initial conditions) to their desired outputs. It turns out that this process provides a method to exploit the richness inherent in nonlinear dynamics to design computing devices with the capacity to…

Under certain conditions vapor bubbles can form in fluids moving swiftly over a surface and those bubbles soon collapse with such great force that they can even poke holes in steel and damage objects such as ship propellers and fuel pumps.    This phenomenon, called cavitation,  can be used to clean jewelry and disintegrate kidney stones but is better known for damage.   Though Leonhard Euler described cavitation in 1754, the phenomenon made its big engineering impression in 1893 when it caused the failure of a propeller on the world's fastest ship at the time, Great…

When we discuss Foucault on a science site, we mean French physicist Léon Foucault and not that annoying prat of a post-modernist, Michel Foucault.    You know who Léon Foucault  is if you have been to a science museum in the last 150 years because you saw a Foucault pendulum - a simple way of observing the Earth's rotation.  But you rarely see them in outside museums because they are huge.   Argentinean researcher Horacio Salva and colleagues report success in what they considered a fun side project - building two pendulums precise enough to make measurements of…

Our brain, wrinkles on our faces and even mountain chains have one thing in common - all those things, though very different, result from the same process, namely the compression of a 'rigid membrane'.  Take a thin sheet of a solid material and try to compress it in such a way that it remains flat. You won't succeed, since the sheet bends systematically along its entire length. This is known as buckling. Now stick the same sheet onto a soft, thick substrate and compress it again in the same way: this time, it forms an extremely regular pattern of small wrinkles characterized by a…

Depending on whether or not an invisibility cloak conjures up images of 'Harry Potter' or "Star Trek", we can tell a lot about you your age but as far back as H.G. Wells' turn-of-the-19th-century classic "The Invisible Man" people have been fascinated by the notion of invisibility. As have scientists.   Metamaterials have been the effort of the decade to make invisibility practical.    Although cloaks designed to shield objects from both terahertz and near infrared waves have already been designed (see Invisibility Advance - 3D Cloaking Metamaterial In Optical Range Created), a…

Baseball players will tell you that a fastball can rise - and elementary physics says it can also, the same way an airplane rises because the teardrop shape of a wing causes air to go over the top faster than below the flatter bottom, 'sucking' it into the air.    Sure, if the baseball is going 200 MPH it can happen.  But they don't. Likewise, curveballs can break sharply, some say, while others disagree, including us a year ago (see Does A Curveball In Baseball Really Break?).   It's an illusion.  Still a K if you miss them often enough, though, so players are…

A semiconductor material called gallium manganese arsenide has been shown to have an interesting new effect that converts heat into a quantum mechanical phenomenon – known as spin – in a semiconductor.   If developed, the effect could enable integrated circuits that run on heat, rather than electricity. This research merges two new technologies, thermo-electricity and spintronics.   Researchers around the world are working to develop electronics that utilize the spin of electrons to read and write data - desirable because in principle they could store more data in less space,…

Since you are not Moses, with an omnipotently powerful deity covering your escape, in the situation of a fanatical pharaoh on your trail you may be confused as to how you could part the Red Sea and thus save your People.   Numerical modeling is here to help with some physics. The Bible has its science mysteries, and the parting of the Red Sea is among them.    How and if the Red Sea was parted is a matter of faith but how it would have been manifested is a matter of science,  say researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of…

Artificial skin, dubbed "e-skin" by the researchers, is the first such material made out of inorganic single crystalline semiconductors.  It's a pressure-sensitive electronic material made from semiconductor nanowires and this sort of touch-sensitive artificial skin would help overcome a key challenge in robotics: adapting the amount of force needed to hold and manipulate a wide range of objects. "The idea is to have a material that functions like the human skin, which means incorporating the ability to feel and touch objects," said Ali Javey, associate professor of electrical…

Retirement in less than three week’s time!  What shall I sing?  How about this? And now the end is nearAnd so I face the final curtain Well, that’s my second most hated song, suited either to a dictator facing trial at the International Criminal Court or a drunkard expiring in a ditch.  Even the melody was stolen from a much superior (in my opinion) French song “Comme d'habitude”[1,2]. Not that I could justifiably sing it, anyway: Regrets I’ve had a fewBut then again too few to mention On the contrary, my career in science is littered with them.  One of the most poignant…