Saturday February 6, 2010
New results out of France show that a team of researchers have created a transistor which mimics certain behavior of the brain. Their innovative new device is called a nanoparticle organic memory field-effect transistor (NOMFET). Specifically, the NOMFET appears to allow for the "short-term plasticity" which is a hallmark of biological synapses in the neural systems of humans and other animals. As explained in a Physics World posting:
A biological synapse transforms a voltage spike (action potential) arriving from a pre-synaptic neuron into a discharge of chemical neurotransmitters that are then detected by a post-synaptic neuron. These are subsequently transformed into new spikes, leading to a succession of pulses that either become larger or diminish in size. This fundamental property of synaptic behaviour is known as short-term plasticity, which is related to a neural network's ability to learn. It is this plasticity that Vuillaume and colleagues have succeeded in mimicking.
This isn't the first time in the last few years where physicists have announced ground-breaking new types of transistors (see Nano-Transistor, Tiny Graphene Transistor, and Optical Transistors). This sort of work shows the amazing potential for some of the emerging technologies in modern physics, neurology, and the integration between the organic and inorganic worlds in the form of biotechnologies. Discoveries such as this out of nanotechnology and biophysics could potentially revolutionize the very nature of technology. Think about how the world was revolutionized by telephones, and then by radio, and then television, and then computers, and then cellphones ... and then try to picture what the ability to build our own synapses might unleash.
It's a truly astounding vision, one which has been explored by science fiction for years in ways both positive and negative. Only time will tell, of course, what useful technologies actually manifest, and what the impact of those technologies will be.
Saturday February 6, 2010
After a lot of complications, Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator is resuming operation on February 20, ramping up to a beam intensity of 3.5 TeV (trillion electron volts) sometime in March. It will then run for a period of 18 to 24 months, and will then shut down in early 2012 for winter repairs. (It was originally going to be shut down next winter for repairs, as well, but that plan has been revised.)
The previous record was a beam of intensity of 0.98 TeV, which was broken by the LHC last November when it reached a beam intensity of 1.18 TeV. The LHC plan will result in collisions that are about three times more powerful than any that we've ever performed on Earth. The LHC was designed to circulate beams that have intensity of 7 TeV, but it'll be at least 2013 before we see it even trying to ramp up to this sort of power. In the meantime, physicists should be able to get a lot of great physics results to look over.
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Monday February 1, 2010
Sean Carroll is quickly becoming one of my favorite science writers. While there's a lot of deep material in his new book, From Eternity to Here, I'm tremendously enjoying it (I love deep books, even if my schedule doesn't - they're much slower reads if you're going to do them justice), and it's reaching the point of beating out Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos as the best discussion of the nature of time itself that I've read. I hear it gets somewhat speculative toward the end, moreso than Greene's book, so we'll see how it turns out. But, in addition to From Eternity to Here, Carroll is one of the writers over at Discover magazine's Cosmic Variance blog, and I always enjoy his postings.
In a recent post (Time Travel in Lost: The Metaphorics of Predestination), Carroll explored the time travel at the heart of one of my favorite shows - ABC's Lost, which returns for its final 18-episode season starting this Wednesday. He points out that Lost actually doesn't butcher the idea of time travel too badly, because the events that take place in the time travel appear to be fully self-consistent (so far as we can tell, anyway - there is some possibility that the Desmond/Daniel connection may allow for a loophole, although so far there's no indication of any actual inconsistencies). It even makes a valid conceit to scientific accuracy, by positing that the temporal phenomena on the island are the result of "exotic matter," which would be one of the few ways a physicist could allow for such strange behavior.
Less scientifically, though no less interestingly, Carroll points out the metaphoric manner in which time travel is used, and how time travel in Lost is really entirely about exploring free will, and our ability - in fact, our very desperate and human need - to make choices freely, even in situations where we know that those choices will not necessarily give us the results we want. (Another ABC show, the new hit series FlashForward, also plays on these same themes.)
In other time travel entertainment news, real life physicist Dr. Ron Mallett (author of Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality) gave a talk on time travel to Penn State's Abington campus and spoke a bit about the upcoming film version of his book. Mallett's work in this area is highly controversial among physicists, but his book has been taken up by filmmaker Spike Lee because of the strong narrative power of the motivating event of his life - the sudden death of his father when he was only a young boy. This will be intriguing, especially if Lee makes the film as informative about the related science of relativity as Mallett's book was.
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Monday January 25, 2010
This week marks National Nuclear Science Week, devoted to learning about nuclear science. Nuclear science is the study of the science related to the atomic nucleus, which contains protons and neutrons. These atomic nuclei can join together to form new elements through the process of nuclear fusion (the process that powers the stars) or split apart under the process of nuclear fission (used in nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs).
The week has been split up so that each day of the week focuses on a different aspect of nuclear science, as outlined on the Nuclear Science Week website:
This is an excellent opportunity to explore this topic with young people, so that they can really understand the fundamental ways in which these tiny atomic nuclei impact our life. Without the complexity of the atomic nucleus, there would be no difference between, say, carbon and iron ... and since we're carbon-based lifeforms, these differences are very important to us. (Of course, diamonds are also carbon-based, which just goes to show that there are a lot of curious things going on at the smallest level of reality.)
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