A small selection of links....
This game is very addictive, educational, and as you play, you feed the hungry (albeit extremely slowly).
Now this is a nanotube radio! Rather than having the nanotube just be the nonlinear element responsible for demodulating the AM signal on the carrier wave, this one has the nanotube acting as the antenna and amplifier as well, effectively. I heard Alex Zettl get interviewed on NPR about it.
The FSP has an interesting post about ambition. Physics as a discipline has issues with this, with an historical attitude that anything less than a tenured job at Harvard is somehow inadequate - a notion that's wrongheaded and sociologically unhealthy.
Schlupp has a post about a little frustrating science journalism. It is a shame that sometimes the media can't tell the difference between good science or engineering and crackpottery. On a plane last week I had someone (who realized I was a physicist from my reading material) ask me about the guy who can get hydrogen from seawater by hitting it with microwaves. Kind of cool, yes. Source of energy? Of course not - it takes more microwave power to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen than you can get back by burning the resulting hydrogen. It's called thermodynamics.
Okay the game is highly entertaining. I didn't realize that I knew that many words. I got to "47" by knowing what a geoduck is. In Seattle everybody knows that. Probably a sign I've burned enough time. (350 grains of rice)
ReplyDeleteBut I don't see how this is going to feed anyone.
The Zettl radio is pretty cool, but it's nothing more than a lab curiosity. It's not really "nano" if it requires a vacuum chamber and vibration isolation table. The Burke nanotube radio may actually be used in something.
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