Wednesday, June 23, 2010

100 Websites You Should Know and Use

The Web is constantly turning out new and extraordinary services many of us are unfamiliar with. During TED University at this spring's TED2007 in Monterey, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, offered an ultra-fast-moving ride through sites in many different areas, from art, design and illustration, to daily news, blogs and curiosity. Now, by popular demand, here's his list of 100 websites you should know and use >>
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H2O: Dangerous Chemical!

A student at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair, April 26. He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide."

And for plenty of good reasons, since:
  1. it can cause excessive sweating and vomiting
  2. it is a major component in acid rain
  3. it can cause severe burns in its gaseous state
  4. accidental inhalation can kill you
  5. it contributes to erosion
  6. it decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes
  7. it has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients
He asked 50 people if they supported a ban of the chemical.
  • Forty-three (43) said yes,
  • six (6) were undecided,
  • and only one (1) knew that the chemical was water.
The title of his prize winning project was, "How Gullible Are We?"
He feels the conclusion is obvious.
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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

CANTO IX.: RISHYAS'RING.

They hid behind the creepers' shade.
But when by careful watch they knew
The elder saint was far from view,
With bolder steps they ventured nigh
To catch the youthful hermit's eye.
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Nanobots

The SPM is only two decades old but it has had a major impact on science and technology [Wiesendanger 1994]. SPMs are typically used for imaging surfaces, often with atomic resolution. But a growing body of research shows that SPMs can function both as sensors and as actuators. They can modify surfaces and structures at the nanometer scale. For example, a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) can draw lines on a hydrogen-passivated silicon surface by hydrogen removal, and can deposit gold dots or lines on a surface – see e.g. [Wiesendanger 1994, Salling 1996] for reviews of some of this work, which has been able to produce features that range from a few to hundreds of nm. And recently a "desktop factory" has been proposed for producing integrated circuits by STM-induced material deposition [Tabib-Azar & Litt 1997]. This application is roughly analogous to robotic spray-painting or welding in the macro-world. In our own lab we have built patterns of nanoparticles with diameters of 5-30 nm by using an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) [Bauret al. 1997, Requicha et al. 1998], and others have also tackled challenging nanomanipulation tasks. These are examples of robotic manipulation and assembly at the nanoscale. Despite their remarkable achievements, SPM methods for fabrication or manipulation suffer from a major drawback: they are inherently serial, and therefore have low throughputs.
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