The pain is gone!

When you have been a kid were you scared of needles? Were you scared of going and seeing a doctor because of pain then medicine is injected? Well this pain is the past. You won't need to worry about your kids as they simply won't feel it! And it is not because their pain genes will be changed but due to physics stepping into medicine. In the nearby future drugs will be injected without a pain at all. How will they do this? It is extremely hard to believe but lasers will be used for this reason. You may think that lasers will burn a hole in you to inject medicine, but this is not so straight forward. Anyway mechanism actually is not too hard. To form 150 millionths of a meter, just slightly thicker than a hair, diameter jets of drugs a micronozzle is used. It is attached to the water chamber by a flexible membrane. Process starts when laser heats water which vaporises so the pressure builds up as water vapor needs more space compared than it is in liquid phase. After pressure reaches a certain value, flexible membrane is pushed into the micronozzle. This happens so quickly that drugs are pushed out with a very big velocity. Due to speed and thickness jets passes through the protective layer of skin. Depending on the power of the laser everything changes: the time how quickly water is vaporized, speed of the jet of drugs and its penetration depth in the skin. Scientists had to overcome a lot of challenges to get proper results. They had to choose laser with right energy, duration of the laser pulse, diameter of the nozzle and hundreds of other parameters to make this perfect for use. For example diameter of the nozzle should be as small as possible to make penetration easier. At the same time if it is too thin there will occur some unwanted effects. Sadly this won't be applied for taking blood as it requires a constant withdrawal and this new method helps only for single injections. Hopefully in the future giving blood will become easy as these shots of medicine and everyone will donate it. This could make possible to heal everyone who got into any kind of accident, lost a lot of blood and prevent a lot of deaths.

You can't hide!

During these times here are a lot of discussions about people losing their privacy, as websites like Facebook allow programs to access all your data. Only more and more of these discussions may appear after invention described in this post. After few years it won't be possible to hide anywhere as researchers found a way how to see what is around the corner! This sounds like it is from science fiction movie but it becomes truth. To successfully complete this, scientists used very advanced devices like a camera which captures images more than a billion times per second! I can bet every sport photographer would be jealous about this as every single moment of basketball match could be captured. Second device used is a femtosecond laser, which emits very very short pulses. Duration of every pulse, which left the laser, is thousand million million times shorter than a second! The brilliance of this idea is that the pulse is shot to the surface (let it be the door in this case as seen in the picture), which allows light to reflect around the corner we need. After reflection light goes into the room or other environment and starts bouncing from all surfaces. Some of these photons reflect back to the door and hits sensor of the camera. This camera can make not only images around the corner but 3D images as well. Mentioned feature is possible because of its capturing speed. It allows capturing photons which travels for different duration of time due to reflection of surfaces at different distances from the door. This looks to be a very simple technology but it really requires a lot of work, especially to write logarithms which could convert received signals into a real picture. And it is a long way till we will be able to use it, but it is coming!  This would be a very useful technology in war because lives could be saved, as soldiers could see if someone is waiting around the corner. It could also be used in cars to see if someone is coming and you can't see it. Believe me this would be very useful in small streets of Crete! I could continue with writing about different uses but there isn’t enough of space for it. Hopefully it just won't be used to stalk people so let's not allow that this very useful technology would go to hands of bad guys.

If you have any suggestions write to EasyPhys@gmail.com

Even Superman would be powerless against this...

Inspired by a long break of not writing anything at all, starting internship in laser’s company and appearance of more powerful lasers every day, I decided to present a record achieved few days ago by researchers from Berkley Lab Laser Accelerator called BELLA. This may be useless as with this pace after few days there may appear an article about a new record. And I actually do hope it will happen as this would mean new technological and scientific opportunities. So what have they actually done? They managed to reach one petawatt peak power pulse. It could be compared to the power of million millions of vacuum cleaners or more than 1000 times the power used by United States at any instant time. Why do they use such a huge power for nothing? Where do they get all this energy from? Actually this laser is very short pulsed. Time of the pulse is only 40 femtoseconds (during this time, light traveling at 300 000 000 m/s speed would travel only few micro meters!). So during all this time United States uses almost no electricity and laser usage becomes 40 Watts, just as much as weak light bulb. It looks that scientists are lying about all this enormous power just to get nice numbers but it isn't true as this power is actually achieved due to a very short pulse. And how is it good for us to have such a powerful laser? People won't have a chance to use it in regular activities for decades or even centuries but in science world it is huge news. This would save us billions of dollars as using such powerful laser would make particle accelerators to be only few meter long and still be as powerful as Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Let's just think big. What if instead of few meters the new accelerator would be hundred kilometers (10 000 times more powerful than LHC)? Then it would be easy to find not only Higgs boson but its constituents too. With time these lasers could also be used to ignite fusion which could give cheap electricity to everyone. So let's wait and we will see.

Travel to the Mars in 0 seconds?

Every traveler is always dreaming about ways to make their journey pass quicker. I also realized this after 19 hours journey to France. No one would feel any discomfort if journey lasts only 0 seconds. Very quick isn't it? It's even faster than light if you are traveling over a huge distance, for example going to the Mars. But what device could actually do it? These things are usually met in almost every science fiction movie- they are called teleportation machines. People have fantasized about traveling quick and far from very early days. The first written story appeared as early as 1877 in Edward Page Mitchell's story "The Man Without a Body". After it everyone put only more and more effort to create a real teleportation machine. But did they succeed? Apparently they did! Scientists were studying real teleportation since 1997. Sadly it is really different from teleportation we imagine. It will take decades to transfer the smallest lead ball you could ever imagine as this effect was achieved only for photons. Despite this, scientists are moving forward and teleportation record was broken by Chinese researchers. Instead of 16 km they managed to transfer photons by almost 100 km, which is 6 times more than anyone did it before. So how was this made? Firstly teleportation can appear only between entangled photons which means they have to interact to each other to get the same quantum state and then after separation if one photon changes another becomes the same as well. This leads to the idea of having our avatars in every place of the world in order to be able to teleport, but agree with me, it is better than nothing. I can already imagine transatlantic airplanes (maybe even galactic starships) full of humanoids. We would transfer our minds to them only after the flight. Just imagine comfort of this! I can already see increasing tourism as you can have a truck full of them and no one will complain about it. But let's go back to the topic. The biggest problem till now was laser pulse dispersion, which caused a reduced number of photons reaching the target. It was solved by using very fancy optics with which even this camera couldn't compare http://easyphys.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/digitalizing-universe.html. This is one of the most welcome devices so let's be patient. 

Everything can be found in more details here: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27843/

Hydrogen future

Nowadays every house has a gas pipe and no one could imagine life during winter without it. But not for long as natural gas will be changed by hydrogen. Sounds unexpected? This is not true as such an idea has been developed for years and scientists were putting loads of effort to make this happen. In last year's technology improved really a lot and more research results are still coming. So it is possible to dream about future when all electricity in all private houses will be generated by hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels or wind turbines. Everyone will forget what means gas, coal or wood burner. There will be places to fill your car with hydrogen or sockets to charge it. All these ideas were inspired by an article from Brookhaven National Laboratory. Sadly scientists didn't improve efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells and even reduced it a little, but this didn't stop them to reach a very important goal: reduce the price of required equipment. Till now the most important catalyst in hydrogen industry was platinum as it achieved the best characteristics. Despite that platinum's price is enormous over 50 000 dollars per kilo. For this price you could easily get two very good cars! It is very hard to believe but the new method uses nickel and molybdenum, which are totally opposite to platinum- enormously cheap. For 50 dollars you can get a kilogram of each. This is 1000 times cheaper for a twice bigger quantity! Hydrogen should be rediscovered again especially when using new materials efficiency was reduced only slightly. So what allowed achieving these characteristics? Firstly it was decided to change platinum with nickel. But due to unsatisfying reactivity it was mixed with molybdenum. New material also didn't satisfy scientists so they introduced nitrogen to form sphere like nanoparticles. Results were much better as nanosheet was formed. The door to the future was opened, now we just need to wait what is going to happen.

Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120511122232.htm

Deleting memory as a hard disk?

What is the most powerful thing in the life of the person? Of course it is our memory. It is very hard to imagine society where no one can remember anything. None of the present achievements could be obtained and even daily communication would be different as we wouldn't be able to talk. Today I saw an article that scientists identified a mechanism which is essential for creating our memories. But scientists were happier about finding out that the same mechanism is essential for forgetting as well. This is not everything as forgetting was proved to be active and not passive process as it was thought before. To get these results fruit flies were studied. They were learned to associate smells with negative or positive reinforcement. This showed that small amount of dopamine is responsible for making memories and forgetting the information, but scientists were interested how the same molecule can cause two opposite consequences. The conclusion of the experiment was that dopamine starts to stimulate learning receptor first, but when it is overstimulated, it continues to activate the receptor of forgetfulness. Could this give us a solution how to increase our memory? Yes it does, as mutation of forgetfulness receptor, proved to block forgetting of information. This is a great discovery towards more knowledge about our own body. It can also be instantly used in medicine to cure people who can't forget car crash or any other horrible event. Here we can also start a discussion about people who could use it for bad purposes. They could easily make witnesses to forget important faces or other important information. So how could we protect ourselves? Teach this method only to few people in the world? Leave your opinion below.

More details about experiment: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120509180113.htm

Wind panels?

Very tough times are coming for electric companies because renewable energy came to the game. Every year more and more people are talking about this source of electricity and heat, especially when climate is changing. Government is also trying to convince everyone to use renewable energy and does it by giving grants for installing equipment and even paying for generated and used electricity! This is still not enough as nowadays renewable energy technology is very expensive but new generation and new ideas are coming. Very impressive and promising is Keon Jae Lee from The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology work on piezoelectrics nanocomposite materials (material generating electricity from applied mechanical work like wind or waves). He and his team managed to increase critical limits by mixing piezoelectric nanoparticles with carbon-based nanomaterials. Those critical restrictions are: expensiveness, inability to create big scale samples and difficult way of manufacturing. Let's dream a bit how world can change right now. This technology allows changing existing house into off-grid house (house which doesn't take anything from main electricity or gas suppliers) very easily, you just need to cover the house with piezoelectric's panels (yes, not solar panels!). On the roof they would have a huge advantage against solar panels as it can generate electricity during the night and even winter (which is the biggest disadvantage of solar energy). Panels on the sides of the house could use huge amounts of wind power as it hits them perpendicularly and a lot of energy could be transferred. But this is not enough as it could also use sound waves coming from cars. Finally living close to very busy streets would pay back. Another option is to use piezoelectrics in asphalt. Just imagine you are going somewhere and generating electricity at the same time. So if you have electric car, you leave house with full battery and get to destination without discharging. It is possible to continue and continue talking about how big revolution could be made with this technology, but sadly posts have limits.

Check this for more details: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/tkai-pgt050712.php

Memories of holes in roads

Nowadays our world is based on transport so most people know the feeling that driving in bad roads is pain. Then all concentration is directed to think how to go around holes without damaging car and still moving quicker than snails. This is a problem not only for us. For road service companies it is difficult to find every crack in the road and fix it immediately. Another problem is that price of asphalt is very high as huge amounts are necessary. There is a solution to find material which could withstand loads of different critical conditions like freezing winter, hot summer and heavy trucks. Zhanping You from Michigan Technological University suggested to mix some nanoclay into asphalt, tried this technology and it worked! Nanoclay addition of around 3% by weight to asphalt changed its viscosity to the better side. This improvement won't let to deform asphalt as easily as before and rutting won't appear that often. Less maintenance means saving a lot of money and making roads safer. There still are loads to test, loads to do as characteristics of new asphalt under different temperatures are unknown. Zhanping You and his team are also inspecting asphalt characteristics containing other nano mixtures. Hopefully they will succeed to create material which could stay without any maintenance for more than 20 years. Such roads would be another step to a safer driving. In addition we wouldn't need to worry about holes appearing in the road from nowhere so all our attention would be concentrated on signs, other cars and pedestrians. Better roads, better tomorrow!

More details can be found in: http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2012/may/story67607.html

Glass without reflection

Today I was walking from university and swearing the sun for shining and not allowing to read my e-mails in the phone. I was forced to look for every shadow but reading didn't become even slightly easier. This is a frequent situation which makes very easy to derive equation: sun + screen = no good. This equation applies wherever you are. It doesn't care if you are sitting in front of your pc at home or using laptop outside. Usually bright sun is not the most important variable because even few beams of light can change a very exciting video into pain. The pain could be reduced by increasing brightness but this is not good for batteries and especially eyes so another solution is required. Just after coming back home I started reading science news and I was shocked that god heard me! One of the first articles was about recent improvement in this field. MIT researchers have just developed glass which won't reflect any images and also possesses other very impressive characteristics. The new generation of glass will be self-cleaning and hydrophobic. Instantly a question arises how this can be achieved? Researchers covered glass with nano (nano- 10^(-9) m) size conical spikes. I wish mass production would be started immediately but this technology still requires loads of testing and developing as new structure makes glass easily breakable. A single touch with a key could break it so holding your phone in a pocket with keys would be a horrible idea. This glass is also far away from being as strong as Gorilla Glass which is usually used in smartphones and tablets. Let's hope technology will improve quickly and studying outside in nice weather using laptop will be the best decision ever.  

                                  

More information:http://vr-zone.com/articles/mit-researchers-develop-glare-free-self-cleaning-glass/15701.html

Supercomputer in your room

Who doesn't dream about quicker computers? I guess no one as everyone knows the feeling then program is opening for 5 minutes, sometimes even 15 or longer. I guess we can say a huge step is already made as our clocks are much quicker than first computers of the size of a room. Faster and faster computers are made which already overcomes 10 petaflops (10^(16) floating point calculations) whereas average computer runs at less than 5 GFlops (5*10^(9) Flops). But this is still not enough. Would you like what no operation take more than a millisecond? All files would open quicker than a second? All this may be achieved in coming years as king of electronics, graphene, is being dethroned by silicene (one atom thickness, two dimensional allotrope of silicon). As it will be easier to integrate into current equipment and should be available in the market faster than graphene devices. But this is not enough as engineers from University of Toronto found a way how to create photon pairs using an integrated circuit. This leads to the solution to numerous problems as photons not only travel at speed of light but also allows using more advanced algorithms. The future belongs to optical computers as they would be not only quicker but would use less energy, make less noise, last longer and generate less heat. Nowadays heat is also a very limiting characteristic as cooling systems do not allow reducing size of devices. I am already waiting for my laptop to be much quicker than world's fastest supercomputer 京 built in Japan.

Links to sources: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428625.400-move-over-graphene-silicene-is-the-new-star-material.html

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/uotf-rbt043012.php

Digitalizing the universe

In this century more and more things are becoming digital. I wouldn't be surprised if some people haven't even seen a real picture. Today if you go to the party, you already know that after there will be few hundred photos taken but non of them will be printed out. Even a big part of our lives is spent in websites like Facebook or Second Life. All information is being saved in hard drives as binary code but strangely the need of paper still increases quickly. I didn't mentioned photography just randomly. Nowadays everyone competes with each other, whose camera has more pixels, especially companies making cameras. But even those huge companies couldn't win against scientists. Today it was announced that the biggest digital camera received an approval to be assembled. It's characteristics are just staggering. This camera will have 3.2 billion pixels, 320 times more than normal digital camera! It is really very hard to call it camera as weight will be 3 tons! But you can guess that it's impossible to take this camera to capture your holiday moments. Every advertisement company would wish to have it. Just imagine how big and detailed adverts could be. Anyway SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory designed it to capture night sky. All received data will be used to study dark energy and dark matter, very hot field of science research. It will also allow to create 3D map of the sky, capture rapidly changing objects and lots more. Every year 6 million gigabytes of data will be collected. Let's hope this toy will help to answer all scientists' questions. You can find more about the project by pressing the link: http://scitechdaily.com/worlds-largest-digital-camera-lsst-gets-approval/

Dark Matter disappeared?

There are two huge news in science world today but the biggest disappearance in the whole UNIVERSE easily won against usual very strange behaviour of quantum mechanics. So what did disappeared today? The answer is 23% of the whole universe, all dark matter (DK) is gone! It's just impossible to imagine such quantities and how now one  haven't seen it disappearing? Well...actually, no one has even seen dark matter or received any evidence which could prove its existence. First time DK was mentioned in 1932 so exactly 80 years ago. For all this time scientists were looking for a way to confirm it's presence, they built huge detectors for this reason and spent loads of time. But today Marcel Pawlowski and his PhD student from the University of Bonn revealed their discovery of satellite galaxies circling around Milky Way. To find them photographic plates and images were used which were taken from different apparatus. These newly discovered galaxies formed a structure which continues from 30 000 light years to 1 million light years from the center of the Galaxy. This structure perfectly fits with all data and theory. Scientists wonders that it was formed in distant past when Milky Way smashed into another galaxy. Now everyone is waiting for confirmation or rejection of this new theory. It is really very pleasant that understanding of the universe is getting better and better so a day is coming when we will say "I know everything about Universe". Next step is to explain Dark Energy which forms more than 70 percent of universe so to do it won't be very easy. To get a more detailed view please visit: http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=119616&CultureCode=en

Where did you left your avatar?

I can bet that everyone has seen a film "Avatar" as it became the highest grossing film in the world of all times and some people speculates the most expensive as well. Despite everything said before this post is not about it or "Avatar" is not the main subject at least. Don't understand me wrong because there could be written a lot of articles about science used in "Avatar" as it required to improve most of technologies used before starting to make the film. Anyway few Switzerland scientists have watched it way too many times as they built a robot which is controlled by.........person's minds. This futuristic idea works with a help of brain signals, just like in the film, as they are recorded using head cap. Then signals are decoded by a computer and sent to the robot which completes a given task wherever it is as technology works over 100 kilometers distance. Most of the people from films would imagine them to be used in wars but not this time. These avatars are created to help for patients to communicate with other people if they have movement disability. The aim is really very generous but it is hard to imagine that entrepreneurs are not seeing this as a very good product of future, the future when everyone will have their own avatar or even two. So depending on your mood that day you will be able which person to be. This would be not a first mind controlled product which reached market. MindFlex is a dual game which allows you to challenge your friend and check which has a better concentration. Check this out: http://mindflexgames.com/. For more information about mind controlled robot follow the link: http://phys.org/news/2012-04-swiss-scientists-mind-robot.html.

Unlimited electricity

Are you always afraid of using too much electricity? You don't leave anything on anything even for a second longer than necessary? Then this is a very good time to turn on every electric device you have at home just as a practice for future as times are coming when electricity will be cheaper than water. It probably won't cost almost anything at all as Holy Grail of energy, nuclear fusion (nuclear fusion is a merger of two light nuclei to form a heavy nucleus. This process usually emits a lot of energy), is being controlled better and better every day. So for example today scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory announced that they found a cause for a reason preventing nuclear reactors from achieving higher efficiency. Luis Delgado-Aparicio and David Gates showed what idea of radiation-driven islands in plasma may be correct. Armed with equations which explains how plasma density limit can appear from the growth of the earlier mentioned islands causing collapse of the electric current which heats plasma up to working temperature. Now experiments are waiting and results will hopefully prove this theory to be right. You can say that this is not important as it just remembered theory from 1980s which didn't receive enough attention but you are wrong. Knowing a cause allows to look for solutions and lift density limit much higher. From now on everyone should know that nuclear fusion is coming with huge steps to change the world and wish luck for ITER the most expensive science project of all times. After building it will be the largest and most advanced fusion reactor in the world. For more information click this link:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120423143128.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29 

Immortal people are coming

If you have ever thought about being immortal than today is your lucky day! Today were announced a lot of news about improvement towards people living for thousand years. I can bet that there is no people who would like to die. Everyone wants to visit every place in Earth and go to the Moon or even Mars. To try and master everything you want. Immortality is one of the things which broaden people imagination since earliest ages. This is how gods were created, creatures humans wanted to become. And one of the common feature of gods is ability to stay alive. In the near future we will become just as gods as scientists discovered genes which causes aging. In addition almost 500 age related epigenetic changes (epigenetic factor is a factor responsible for gene activity/inactivity) were discovered and proposed to be dependent on what we eat, where we live and so on. Four of these epigenetic changes looks to cause  the rate of healthy aging and potential longevity. All this work will lead to a better understanding of aging and fighting against it. But for scientists it is not enough. How would like to live forever but still be ill? The answer is no one! So nanotechnology was invoked. This time researchers from the Wayne State University School of Medicine and the Detroit Medical Center used nano drugs to heal rabbits from cerebral palsy disease. An improvement was noticed which meant possibility of preventing cerebral palsy if disease is identified early. Research also started the age of nano drugs. It looks that in few decades all diseases will be just history. More details you can find in: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120419191709.htm and http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120418143755.htm

TVs evolution

Have you ever dreamed about TV which is thinner than a book? Or maybe even thinner than a pen? When listen, your dreams are coming true and even more than you could imagine. New generation TV's will be as thin as bank cards or a sheet of paper. You may have seen it in the futuristic films but have you thought that you will be able to see them with your eyes and touch it in reality? Well all this is becoming reality. Scientists need only few more years and it will be ready as most of required technology already exists as it is used in OLED screens which are usually used in telephones and becomes more popular to use it in TVs. So what happened that we don't have this technology write now? The problem is that all such screens require conductors which were usually calcium, lithium or others but they are very reactive and requires glass or other material to separate from air. Researchers from Georgia Tech came up with an idea to cover conductor with a very thin layer of polymer. It's thickness should be from 1 to 10 nm so we will definitely feel a difference then this technology will change glass and other materials. Apparently this polymer is also very cheap so shortly we will get better and cheaper TVs. It would also reduce weight so carrying it will be possible to take your TV and go to your friends house to watch a film without a problem. It is also very interesting where "Pimp My Ride" producers would decide to put screens as we already seen them everywhere, even on a snowboard! You can find more information in http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120419143123.htm