{"id":1625,"date":"2007-07-31T09:23:04","date_gmt":"2007-07-31T09:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/07\/31\/physics-news-clever-gadgets-ed-1\/"},"modified":"2007-07-31T09:23:04","modified_gmt":"2007-07-31T09:23:04","slug":"physics-news-clever-gadgets-ed-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/07\/31\/physics-news-clever-gadgets-ed-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Physics &#8220;News&#8221;: Clever Gadgets Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/physicsweb.org\/articles\/news\/11\/6\/6\/1?rss=2.0\">&#8220;NMR Gets Seriously Small&#8221;<\/a>: 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&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.aip.org\/pnu\/2007\/split\/828-1.html?source=rsspnu\">&#8220;Turning Heat Into Electricity Through Sound&#8221;<\/a>: 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.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.aip.org\/pnu\/2007\/split\/830-1.html?source=rsspnu\">&#8220;All-Optical Magnetic Recording<\/a>: 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&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.aip.org\/pnu\/2007\/split\/830-2.html?source=rsspnu\">&#8220;A Highly Efficient Room-Temperature Nanolaser&#8221;<\/a>: 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&#8217;m enough of a laser geek to find it interesting all the same.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/07\/31\/physics-news-clever-gadgets-ed-1\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Physics &#8220;News&#8221;: Clever Gadgets Edition<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}