61 posts · 43,663 views
I am a Senior Editor of the science magazine Nature Materials and freelance science writer. The views represented in my blog are my own.
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- May 3, 2012
- 07:50 AM
- 124 views
High-risk research can’t be kept secret forever
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Should scientific journals publish high-risk scientific research that could in the wrong hands be disastrous for us all? Although it might be sensible to keep certain results secret for a while, I argue that eventually it does not make sense to withhold results in the long-term. What is this all about? Yesterday saw the publication [...]... Read more »
Imai, M., Watanabe, T., Hatta, M., Das, S., Ozawa, M., Shinya, K., Zhong, G., Hanson, A., Katsura, H., Watanabe, S.... (2012) Experimental adaptation of an influenza H5 HA confers respiratory droplet transmission to a reassortant H5 HA/H1N1 virus in ferrets. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature10831
Editorial. (2012) Publishing risky research. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/485005a
- February 19, 2012
- 01:45 PM
- 366 views
Transistors reach the single atom limit
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
When Gordon Moore made his observation in 1965 that the number of transistors integrated on a single silicon chip is doubling roughly every two years, the only logical end point for such a trend would be a transistor made from a single atom. This point has now been reached. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Michelle Simmons from the [...]... Read more »
Fuechsle, M., Miwa, J., Mahapatra, S., Ryu, H., Lee, S., Warschkow, O., Hollenberg, L., Klimeck, G., & Simmons, M. (2012) A single-atom transistor. Nature Nanotechnology. DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2012.21
- February 8, 2012
- 01:01 PM
- 318 views
Coaxial ‘cables’ make great lasers, too
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
When Oliver Heaviside invented the coaxial cable in 1880 he could not have foreseen the implications of his idea on modern nanotechnology. His coaxial cables consist of three layers: an inner metallic core, surrounded by an insulator, surrounded by a metallic layer on the outside. The benefit of this design is that the outer metallic [...]... Read more »
Khajavikhan, M., Simic, A., Katz, M., Lee, J., Slutsky, B., Mizrahi, A., Lomakin, V., & Fainman, Y. (2012) Thresholdless nanoscale coaxial lasers. Nature, 482(7384), 204-207. DOI: 10.1038/nature10840
- February 6, 2012
- 08:39 AM
- 205 views
A perfect couple for designing chemical reactions
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
We are all familiar with the basic ways in which light interacts with matter, when light absorption causes atoms to move and creates heat, or when light gets absorbed by the outer electrons of atoms so that they move into energetically excited states, which is how electricity in solar cells is created. Common to both [...]... Read more »
Schwartz, T., Hutchison, J., Genet, C., & Ebbesen, T. (2011) Reversible Switching of Ultrastrong Light-Molecule Coupling. Physical Review Letters, 106(19). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.196405
Hutchison, J., Schwartz, T., Genet, C., Devaux, E., & Ebbesen, T. (2012) Modifying Chemical Landscapes by Coupling to Vacuum Fields. Angewandte Chemie International Edition. DOI: 10.1002/anie.201107033
- January 15, 2012
- 02:09 PM
- 370 views
Shrinking magnetic storage devices
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
I now finally got the time to follow-up on last week’s paper in Science by Andreas Heinrich‘s group at IBM on magnetic storage elements that are only a few atoms in size. There have been a few misconceptions in some of the news reports with some being plainly wrong (‘smallest storage device ever made’), and many didn’t [...]... Read more »
Loth, S., Baumann, S., Lutz, C., Eigler, D., & Heinrich, A. (2012) Bistability in Atomic-Scale Antiferromagnets. Science, 335(6065), 196-199. DOI: 10.1126/science.1214131
- January 4, 2012
- 01:04 PM
- 404 views
The cloak that hides events in time
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Devices that conceal objects from an observer are called cloaks. Conceptually, the idea of cloaking devices has its roots in science fiction, but such devices have indeed been demonstrated in the past few years. These cloaks are based on tiny structures that are able to bend light on predetermined paths as it passes through the [...]... Read more »
Fridman, M., Farsi, A., Okawachi, Y., & Gaeta, A. (2012) Demonstration of temporal cloaking. Nature, 481(7379), 62-65. DOI: 10.1038/nature10695
Boyd, R., & Shi, Z. (2012) Optical physics: How to hide in time. Nature, 481(7379), 35-36. DOI: 10.1038/481035a
- December 12, 2011
- 10:09 AM
- 1,466 views
The Beethoven connection
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Symphonies are some of the most complex musical pieces. They involve different instruments, each with their own unique sound, and each instruments section playing their own tunes. Yet, what are symphonies in comparison to the complexity of life? Proteins for example, they are made of a limited number of building blocks, amino acids, but take [...]... Read more »
Spivak, D., Giesa, T., Wood, E., & Buehler, M. (2011) Category Theoretic Analysis of Hierarchical Protein Materials and Social Networks. PLoS ONE, 6(9). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023911
Giesa, T., Spivak, D., & Buehler, M. (2011) Reoccurring Patterns in Hierarchical Protein Materials and Music: The Power of Analogies. BioNanoScience, 1(4), 153-161. DOI: 10.1007/s12668-011-0022-5
- December 2, 2011
- 07:22 AM
- 317 views
Whither organic solar cells?
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
This week I am attending the Materials Research Society Fall meeting in Boston, where there is a big focus on energy. Catalysis, fuel cells, batteries, solar cells, solar fuel, you name it. And I had a discussion with some researchers from the inorganic solar cell community, who asked me what is with the organic solar cells? [...]... Read more »
Green, M., Emery, K., Hishikawa, Y., Warta, W., & Dunlop, E. (2011) Solar cell efficiency tables (Version 38). Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications, 19(5), 565-572. DOI: 10.1002/pip.1150
- November 27, 2011
- 08:36 AM
- 528 views
Electrons out of balance
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Apply an electric field to a material, and its positive and negative charges will separate, creating an electric polarization. This is the fundamental effect behind capacitors used in electronics as well as in ferroelectrics used in some computer memories. In the latter case, to achieve a permanent electric polarization, the positive and negative charges need [...]... Read more »
Li, W., Pohl, T., Rost, J., Rittenhouse, S., Sadeghpour, H., Nipper, J., Butscher, B., Balewski, J., Bendkowsky, V., Low, R.... (2011) A Homonuclear Molecule with a Permanent Electric Dipole Moment. Science, 334(6059), 1110-1114. DOI: 10.1126/science.1211255
- November 21, 2011
- 06:00 AM
- 633 views
Science doesn’t shoot from the hip
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
The young Max Planck, when completing his high school degree, asked a professor of physics at the University of Munich, Philipp von Jolly, whether he should study physics. He got the famous answer that this wouldn’t make much sense, because physics is an almost fully mature science with not much to discover. (If you happen [...]... Read more »
Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, & Terry Rudolph. (2011) The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically. -. arXiv: 1111.3328v1
The OPERA Collaboration. (2011) Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam. arXiv. arXiv: 1109.4897v2
- November 18, 2011
- 08:07 AM
- 658 views
Plucking light out of space
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
You may imagine vacuum as complete emptiness, as the very definition of nothing. But that’s not the case at all. Vacuum is humming with activity, as has now been demonstrated impressively in a study by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, RIKEN in Japan and other institutions. They have created light basically [...]... Read more »
Wilson, C., Johansson, G., Pourkabirian, A., Simoen, M., Johansson, J., Duty, T., Nori, F., & Delsing, P. (2011) Observation of the dynamical Casimir effect in a superconducting circuit. Nature, 479(7373), 376-379. DOI: 10.1038/nature10561
- November 17, 2011
- 06:42 AM
- 276 views
The reluctance of science to open up
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
I finally had the chance to read Michael Nielsen‘s book ‘Reinventing discovery‘ - a must read for anyone interested in scientific discovery. Why? Well, because the closed, individual way in which we organize science today in many ways is hampering progress and may eventually become a thing of the past. If you are in science, why did you [...]... Read more »
Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243-1248. DOI: 10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
- October 18, 2011
- 08:14 AM
- 551 views
Through the tangled web
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Understanding the properties of something chaotic like a bowl of spaghetti may seem a daunting task. But that’s what Garry Rumbles from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the USA, Natalie Stingelin from Imperial College London in the UK, and coworkers are trying to do. With success. They study polymers – long spaghetti-like molecules made of repeating atomic subunits [...]... Read more »
Reid, O., Malik, J., Latini, G., Dayal, S., Kopidakis, N., Silva, C., Stingelin, N., & Rumbles, G. (2011) The influence of solid-state microstructure on the origin and yield of long-lived photogenerated charge in neat semiconducting polymers. Journal of Polymer Science Part B: Polymer Physics. DOI: 10.1002/polb.22379
- October 10, 2011
- 06:12 AM
- 400 views
Restoring oil paintings digitally
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
The restoration of oil paintings is always a delicate process. Decades and centuries of dust and grime on the surface of a painting are difficult to remove, as the dirt sticks firmly to the painting’s oil paints and varnish. There is always the danger that a thorough physical cleaning and restoration may alter a painting’s original appearance. A solution [...]... Read more »
Palomero, C., & Soriano, M. (2011) Digital cleaning and “dirt” layer visualization of an oil painting. Optics Express, 19(21), 21011. DOI: 10.1364/OE.19.021011
- May 26, 2011
- 09:10 AM
- 684 views
The air is getting thinner for silicon’s competitors
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Finally I am getting around to blog about the latest generation of transistors that Intel presented earlier this months. These transistors reach feature sizes of only 22 nanometres, down from 32 nm. To give you some perspective what this amazingly high integration means: 4,000 of those 22 nm structures fit across the width of a human [...]... Read more »
Green, J., Wook Choi, J., Boukai, A., Bunimovich, Y., Johnston-Halperin, E., DeIonno, E., Luo, Y., Sheriff, B., Xu, K., Shik Shin, Y.... (2007) A 160-kilobit molecular electronic memory patterned at 1011 bits per square centimetre. Nature, 445(7126), 414-417. DOI: 10.1038/nature05462
Liao, L., Lin, Y., Bao, M., Cheng, R., Bai, J., Liu, Y., Qu, Y., Wang, K., Huang, Y., & Duan, X. (2010) High-speed graphene transistors with a self-aligned nanowire gate. Nature, 467(7313), 305-308. DOI: 10.1038/nature09405
- May 23, 2011
- 06:56 AM
- 945 views
Superfast broadband
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Here in the UK, the fastest broadband download speeds on offer for fibre optic broadband are 40 Mbit per second, which is much better than the 8 Mbit/s or so offered via conventional copper cables. But to those for which 40Mbit/s is not enough, fear not: In a Nature Photonics paper, Juerg Leuthold and colleagues from [...]... Read more »
Hillerkuss, D., Schmogrow, R., Schellinger, T., Jordan, M., Winter, M., Huber, G., Vallaitis, T., Bonk, R., Kleinow, P., Frey, F.... (2011) 26 Tbit s−1 line-rate super-channel transmission utilizing all-optical fast Fourier transform processing. Nature Photonics. DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2011.74
- May 15, 2011
- 01:24 PM
- 1,106 views
Sensors in the focus
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Sensing the presence of molecules in gases and liquids is a billion dollar business. Just think about all the carbon monoxide detectors in private homes, or blood glucose sensors. In particular for many technical and scientific applications, ultrasmall and precise sensors are desired. This includes sensors to measure gases in catalytic nanoreactors and fuel cells, [...]... Read more »
Liu, N., Tang, M., Hentschel, M., Giessen, H., & Alivisatos, A. (2011) Nanoantenna-enhanced gas sensing in a single tailored nanofocus. Nature Materials. DOI: 10.1038/nmat3029
- April 29, 2011
- 12:41 PM
- 761 views
Semiconductor optical switches reach the speed of light
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Fibre optic cables transmit information so fast because they can make use of the unique properties of light and transmit many data channels at the same time. The digital 1s and 0s the light beams carry are imprinted onto the beams by semiconductors that in quick succession turn the light beam on and off. Unfortunately, that also puts [...]... Read more »
Ctistis, G., Yuce, E., Hartsuiker, A., Claudon, J., Bazin, M., Gérard, J., & Vos, W. (2011) Ultimate fast optical switching of a planar microcavity in the telecom wavelength range. Applied Physics Letters, 98(16), 161114. DOI: 10.1063/1.3580615
- April 17, 2011
- 02:13 PM
- 1,036 views
Gravity weighs in on spectroscopy
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
In 1814 the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer observed narrow dark lines in the otherwise continuous spectrum of light emitted by the sun. Hundreds of them. As Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen later showed, these lines correspond to the absorption of light by various chemical elements in the sun. Each element has its own unique [...]... Read more »
Jenke, T., Geltenbort, P., Lemmel, H., & Abele, H. (2011) Realization of a gravity-resonance-spectroscopy technique. Nature Physics. DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS1970
- April 8, 2011
- 07:38 AM
- 1,159 views
100 years of superconductivity
by Joerg Heber in All that matters
Today marks the 100th anniversary of superconductivity by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. In a superconductor, the electrons flow without any electrical resistance. Apart from their fundamental scientific interest, superconductors are used to make powerful electromagnets, for example for MRI and NMR machines in medical diagnostics. Other promising applications include power transmission cables with low losses, highly [...]... Read more »
van Delft, D., & Kes, P. (2010) The discovery of superconductivity. Physics Today, 63(9), 38. DOI: 10.1063/1.3490499
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