Electricity from magnetism

A new way to get electricity from magnetism

Pump me up Scotty?

NASA prepares to unpack pump-up space podule

Iron out mercury

New technique reclaims mercury from spent compact fluorescent light bulbs

Find your own Boson?

Would you like to do a bit of freelance particle physics?  CERN has more than 300 terabytes of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data online for free. The data covers roughly half the experiments run by the LHC's CMS detector during 2011. This includes over 100 terabytes or 2.5 inverse femtobarns of data from proton collisions at 7 TeV. To help with data handling CERN has also made software based on its in-house data modelling tool, CernVM, free to download but even so, probably not a task for the mobile connection

Saved by nukes?

Russia plans to save Earth from asteroids

Transparent wood

Wooden windows? New material could replace glass in solar cells and buildings

Always works for me

NASA has been having some system problems with its Kepler spacecraft designed to survey regions of the Milky Way for Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone. Whilst probably slightly under playing the work of the scientists and engineers, my interpretation of the explanation that power-cycling the onboard computers and subsystems appears to have cleared the problem is that turning stuff off and on sorted things.

4/4/16 was just one of nine so-called Square Root Days every century

For those of you who missed last month’s rampant celebrations associated with Square Root Day here are some fun square root facts.

No slacking here!

Construction has begun to upgrade the X-ray laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The project will add a second beam that is 10,000 times brighter, firing up to a million pulses per second.

The Belgians go large

IMEC having recently announced the opening of its new 300 mm cleanroom.

300 mm wafer fabs

According to an IC Insights report the number of operating 300 mm wafer fabrication facilities continues to grow and is expected to reach 100 this year.  

Bletchley Park

A visit Bletchley Park reveals the immense human and engineering resources required to decipher messages that were not meant to be read by a third party. However, what if we actually want others to understand our words? Scientific reports are too often mired in jargon and presumed knowledge. The reader should not be forgotten in achieving the end goal of a publication. It is both interesting and heartening to note the launch of a project to develop a series of guides on scientific topics to assist those involved in handling scientific evidence in a courtroom. The aim is to present, in plain English, an easily understood and accurate position on the scientific topic in question including the limitations of the science. The first document to be developed will cover DNA analysis.

To quote Winston Churchill, the man who knew all about Bletchley Park but nothing about DNA analysis: Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.