Jimmy the Geek

Antimatter Rap! I love it!

This is just cool! Written by some students during a 40 minute bus ride, it's about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva.

A quote from Telegraph.co.uk says:

"Now a larky but accurate rap song explaining the point of the 17 mile circumference machine, which formally starts up on September 10, has made a star of Kate McAlpine, 23, aka "alpinekat", who stars with her friends in a YouTube video that has been downloaded more than 400,000 times."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/08/26/scirap126.xml

Teensy-weensy transistors...

QuIET: Quantum Interference Effect Transistors!

University of Arizona physicists have discovered how to turn single molecules into working transistors. It's a breakthrough needed to make the next-generation of remarkably tiny, powerful computers that nanotechnologists dream of.

They have applied for a patent on their device, called Quantum Interference Effect Transistor, nicknamed "QuIET." The American Chemical Society publication, "Nano Letters," has published the researchers' article about it online at Nano Letters. The research is planned as the cover feature in the print edition in November. <read more>

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This is cool some stuff.  I've recently become obsessed with nano-technology and it seems like there is something new every day. 

The Pentium 4 CPU has somewhere around 55,000,000 transistors.  Each of those transistors can be as small as 65 nanometers.  If you've been around computers much, you know about the heat the CPU generates.  That heat translates to lost energy.  25 nanometers is considered the minimum size limit for current technology transistors because of the tremendous energy required. 

"Even if it were possible to build an ultra-advanced laptop computer with molecule-sized transistors using current transistor technology, it would take a city's worth of electricity to run the laptop, and the thing would get so hot it would probably vaporize."

The QuIET technology promises to reduce the size of a single transistor to ONE nanometer.  A billionth of a meter.  And the CPU mentioned before would run at room temperature.

This is exciting stuff!

Google Search of the Day

I'm going to start a new feature here at Jimmy the Geek.  A Google Search of the Day sounds like great fun and a cool way to expand our understanding of nearly everything. 

So here's the first Google Search of the Day:

untapped solar energy

Enjoy... and post your observations in the comments!

Bio-batteries...

This just in...

A research team in Sydney has created molecules that mimic those in plants which harvest light and power life on Earth.
“A leaf is an amazingly cheap and efficient solar cell,” says Dr Deanna D’Alessandro, a postdoctoral researcher in the Molecular Electronics Group at the University of Sydney. “The best leaves can harvest 30 to 40 percent of the light falling on them. The best solar cells we can build are between 15 and 20 percent efficient, and expensive to make.”

“We’ve recreated some of the key systems that plants use in photosynthesis,” says Deanna.  <read the article>

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Kudos to the Aussies for doing this kind of research.  There is so much untapped solar energy out there and it's not going away.  Unlike our precious natural resources, the sun is pretty much an infinite power source... at least for the next few million years.  We need to take advantage of it.

The beauty of this research is that the result is more efficient than the traditional solar cell systems.   30% to 40% efficiency doubles what is currently possible.   Hopefully less expensive too.

A few days ago, I was sitting on the couch with the sun beating down through the window.   It felt good for a while, but soon it became too hot.  As I started pulling the shade down a bit, I had one of those 'Wow!' moments when it occured to me that the Sun, at 93,000,000 miles away, could produce so much heat.  THAT'S a lot of energy!