Posts Tagged ‘New Scientist’

Encrypted fabric to thwart fashion fakes

Published in New Scientist, 11 Nov 2012

YOUR clothes may soon carry a helpful secret. A new type of thread woven into patterns invisible to the naked eye could put an end to fake designer clothes – and dull outfits.

Concealed patterns visible only under polarised light are used in some nations’ bank notes to deter counterfeiting. To extend the method to other valuables, Christian Müller at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, made a semi-transparent thread from polyethylene and a polymer used in clothes dye. This thread has unique optical properties that allow only certain polarisations to pass through. […]

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Simple solar

Published in New Scientist, Nov 2012

A stripped-down photovoltaic cell promises a new route to cheap solar power by making better use of the Sun’s rays, says Jon Cartwright

IF YOU want more energy from the sun, just take off a layer. Removing one of the main layers in an already-promising solar-cell technology has been found to boost its energy output. The new cells promise another route to making solar energy economical.

Whether solar cells will compete on price with fossil fuels or other renewable energy sources depends on a combination of factors, such as the efficiency with which they turn sunlight into electricity and the cost of materials and manufacturing. […]

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Can cold fusion research survive pioneer’s death?

Published in New Scientist, 22 Aug 2012

Martin Fleishmann kick-started cold fusion controversy and faced decades of hostility. His colleague Michael McKubre ponders the future of the field

Science advances one funeral at a time, said Max Planck. Now Martin Fleischmann is gone, what’s in store for cold fusion research?
I like that quote. It implies you’ve got to wait for the stubborn old bastards to die before you can make progress. But that wasn’t Planck’s intention: what he meant was that people refuse to even consider unorthodox arguments while their authors are still alive. Once they die, the argument becomes depersonalised. I do think there is an opportunity here. The hostility might abate because Martin is gone.

Fleischmann faced a backlash in 1989 when he and Stanley Pons said they had achieved fusion – the process that powers stars – in a lab. A bold claim that brought scorn for years.
They didn’t really claim that. They claimed to have observed an anomalous excess of heat in a tabletop experiment – a palladium electrode loaded with heavy hydrogen, or deuterium. That heat was too great to be explained by chemistry. When Martin and Stan first wrote their paper, they had a question mark after the word fusion. That question mark was removed, apparently, in the review and editing process. [...]

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The great sound escape

Published in New Scientist, 26 Feb 2011

Urban life is a barrage of thumping bass lines and blaring horns. Is there any way to silence the din? Jon Cartwright goes in search of a good night’s sleep

IT IS 3 am. Thud, thud, thud go the footsteps up the stairs. Uh-oh. Sure enough, laughter and music are soon pouring through the ceiling. Even with my head buried under the pillow, bass notes pound through my skull. Eventually I drop off, only to be woken a few hours later by revving engines as the rush hour begins.

Being kept awake by noisy neighbours and traffic is maddening. It is not just the mounting resentment that your personal space is being compromised and the stress of trying to deal with it: chronic noise pollution can seriously damage your health too, and it is a growing problem. [...]

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Feat of clay

Published in New Scientist, 10 Nov 2010

The stuff of pottery and piggy banks can be transformed into a material stronger than steel but as light as plastic. Jon Cartwright reports

Julian Evans leans back on his chair in the chemistry department of University College London. For the past hour or so we have been discussing a new wonder material, and now it’s time for me to see it for myself. He shows me a close-up picture of a sample. It looks like the plastic wrapping on a pack of supermarket fruit. “It’s see-through,” I observe, surprised.

Lots of materials are transparent, of course, but they are rarely noted for their strength. Yet this stuff is stronger than steel, and perhaps even a match for Kevlar, the material used in bulletproof vests. It’s also as light as plastic yet as stiff as carbon fibre.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that it is made from clay - the same stuff we use to make bricks and crockery and which sticks to your spade as you dig your garden. But treated in the right way, clay’s properties can be transformed. It is also dirt cheap. “All you need is to pull it out of the ground and wash it,” Evans says. [...]

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Blingtronics

Published in New Scientist, 27 Apr 2010

It’s like walking into a bank vault. Pass codes secure the doors. The walls and floor are made of reinforced concrete up to 2 metres thick – all built on solid sandstone. The ventilation ducts have automatic shut-offs. Not even cellphone signals can sneak in.

All this might seem fitting given that the place houses diamonds by the hundred. Yet this is no vault. It’s a lab in the Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information at the University of Bristol, UK, and the diamonds stored here are each no bigger than a speck of dust. Diamonds this size might not interest a bank robber, but they are turning out to be a physicist’s best friend. [...]

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Down to Earth: Gadgets from outer space

Published in New Scientist, 18 Jan 2010

A space probe plunges its way through Titan’s atmosphere and lands safely on the surface. Over a billion kilometres away here on Earth, a machine fills a bag of potato crisps. Georg Koppenwallner didn’t think that Saturn’s largest moon had much in common with his favourite bar snack – at least not until he got a call from the European Space Agency (ESA).

Koppenwallner’s company Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen in Germany runs experiments in wind tunnels and calculates the aerodynamics of spacecraft, including ESA’s. This time ESA had an unusual request: could the firm’s scientists and engineers take time out from their daily grind to help find a way of packing crisps faster? Koppenwallner’s team duly obliged. Sure enough, they found a way to fill 50 per cent more bags using clever aerodynamic tricks with air pulses to speed up crisps on the production line.

It might sound strange that ESA is helping out such a decidedly non-space industry. Yet it makes good economic sense. With tens of billions of dollars spent on research every year, ESA, NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA have access to some of the best technology and facilities in the world. That’s where Frank Salzgeber, head of ESA’s technology transfer office in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, comes in. “We make the best out of every buck the taxpayers pay,” he says. [...]

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Phantom space storms

Published in New Scientist, 6 Oct 2009

Whether it’s showering spacecraft with lethal radiation, filling the sky with ghostly light, or causing electrical surges that black-out entire cities, space weather is a force to be reckoned with.

Thankfully, all is calm in space on the day that I speak to Bill Murtagh at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. “Last week we saw a moderate storm, and that was about the most interesting event in months,” he reassures me. “It’s pretty quiet today.”

And Murtagh should know – his job is to forecast space weather, which comprises any disturbance in near-Earth space, including the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere where satellites roam. Many of the serious events involve disturbances in the charged portion of the atmosphere, known as the ionosphere, which stretches from 80 to 1000 kilometres above sea level. The finger of blame has always been pointed at the sun, which bombards the Earth with a stream of charged particles in the form of the solar wind. During the last three years, though, the sun’s cycle of activity has hit a trough, and as Murtagh observes, space weather is temporarily calm. [...]

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Fusion in a cold climate

Published in New Scientist, 15 Jul 2009

For most researchers, any mention of cold fusion brings back memories of a shameful period in modern science. Now, 20 years after Martin Fleischmann instigated this field, he tells Jon Cartwright that he could not have done anything differently, and that if we cannot get fusion of some sort to work on a large scale soon, we’re doomed

Martin Fleischmann (Image: Jon Cartwright)

(c) 2009 Jon Cartwright

Martin Fleischmann can still remember the morning he entered his lab and saw the terrific hole in the workbench. It was about the size of a dinner plate. Beneath, nestled in a shallow crater in the concrete floor, were the remains of a chemistry experiment that had been fizzing idly for several months without incident. “It had obliterated itself!” he recalls.

It happened overnight, so no one witnessed the meltdown that took place in a basement lab at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in 1985. But for Fleischmann and his longtime colleague Stanley Pons, there could be only one cause: room-temperature or ”cold” fusion. If they were right, the chemists had made a reaction that nuclear physicists had thought next to impossible, one that potentially held the key to almost limitless clean energy. Yet four years later, and just weeks after they had announced their discovery at a now infamous press conference on 23 March 1989, their work was dismissed from mainstream science. Cold fusion became a pariah field, and Fleischmann and Pons fell under the shadow of disrepute. [...]

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Hidden photons to send secret signals through Earth

Published in New Scientist, 24 Apr 2009

If you shine a laser on the floor, where does the light go? With the right preparation, some of it might pop out at the other side of the world – an effect that could be exploited to transmit secret messages through the ground.

That is the conclusion of Andreas Ringwald at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, and colleagues, who have explored the possibility of hypothetical particles called “hidden photons” (www.arxiv.org/abs/0903.5300). “If such particles exist, then we can use them to communicate,” says Ringwald. “It’s very simple.”

Hidden photons are a class of particles predicted by so-called supersymmetric extensions to the standard model of particle physics. Unlike normal photons, hidden photons could have a tiny mass and would be invisible because they would not interact with the charged particles in conventional matter. This means hidden photons would flit through even the densest materials unaffected. [...]

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