I’m on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I’ll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this lot is a bunch of articles about nifty new widgets made in various labs:
- “NMR Gets Seriously Small”: a French group has managed to demonstrate NMR spectroscopy on tiny solid samples. This has been a problem in the past because the small signal gets washed out by thermal noise, but they’ve played some tricks to allow NMR on nanoliter-scale samples. Which is potentially really useful for things that are hard to acquire or synthesize.
- “Turning Heat Into Electricity Through Sound”: pretty much what it sounds like. A group in Utah has made a gadget where thermal gradients drive air currents that produce sound waves, which are turned into electrical signals by piezoelectric transducers. One of our students made a pipe organ based on the sound part a couple of years ago, which was kind of cool.
- “All-Optical Magnetic Recording: a Dutch group has written information onto a magnetic material using polarized light rather than the usual magnetic heads (like in a hard disk). This could potentially allow faster disk writing on smaller scales than can be done with magnets. Just think how small your next iPod could be…
- “A Highly Efficient Room-Temperature Nanolaser”: a Japanese group has made a nanoscale diode laser system that produces light with very little power input, using a photonic crystal structure. This seems like more of an incremental improvement than a conceptual leap, but I’m enough of a laser geek to find it interesting all the same.