This post has been almost two years in the making, which seems laughable when considering that the story starts in 100 BCE (before the common era).
Picture ancient Greece and a Roman sailing ship holding an object we know as an Antikythera, named after the Greek island near where the ship was wrecked and where it lay undiscovered until 1900. From the Dec.10, 2010 posting by GrrlScientist on the Guardian science blogs,
Two years ago [2008], a paper was published in Nature describing the function of the oldest known scientific computer, a device built in Greece around 100 BCE. Recovered in 1901 from a shipwreck near the island of Antikythera, this mechanism had been lost and unknown for 2000 years. It took one century for scientists to understand its purpose: it is an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision. In 2010, a fully-functional replica was constructed out of Lego.
Here’s the video mentioned by Grrl Scientist,
As noted in the video, it is a replica that requires twice as many gears as the original to make the same calculations. It seems we still haven’t quite caught up with the past.
Bob Yirka’s April 4, 2011 article for phys.org describes some of the research involved in decoding the mechanism,
If modern research is correct, the device worked by hand cranking a main dial to display a chosen date, causing the wheels and gears inside to display (via tabs on separate dials) the position of the sun, moon, and the five known planets at that time, for that date; a mechanical and technical feat that would not be seen again until the fourteenth century in Europe with precision clocks.
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Now James Evans and his colleagues at the University of Puget Sound in Washington State, have shown that instead of trying to use the same kind of gear mechanism to account for the elliptical path the Earth takes around the sun, and subsequent apparent changes in speed, the inventor of the device may have taken a different tack, and that was to stretch or distort the zodiac on the dial face to change the width of the spaces on the face to make up for the slightly different amount of time that is represented as the hand moves around the face.
In a paper published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, Evans describes how he and his team were able to examine x-rays taken of the corroded machine (69 then later 88 degrees of the circle) and discovered that the two circles that were used to represent the Zodiac and Egyptian calendar respectively, did indeed differ just enough to account for what appeared to be the irregular movement during different parts of the year.
Though not all experts agree on the findings, this new evidence does appear to suggest that an attempt was made by the early inventor to take into account the elliptical nature of the Earth orbiting the sun, no small thing.
Jenny Winder’s June 11, 2012 article for Universe Today and republished on phys.org provides more details about the gears and the theories behind the device,
The device is made of bronze and contains 30 gears though it may have had as many as 72 originally. Each gear was meticulously hand cut with between 15 and 223 triangular teeth, which were the key to discovering the mechanism’s various functions. It was based on theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek astronomers who may have drawn from earlier Babylonian astronomical theories and its construction could be attributed to the astronomer Hipparchus or, more likely, Archimedes the famous Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor and astronomer. … [emphases mine]
I’ve highlighted the verbs which suggest they’re still conjecturing as to where the theories and knowledge to develop this ancient computer came from. Yirka’s article mentions that some folks believe that the Antikythera may be the result of alien visitations, along with the more academic guesses about the Babylonians and the Greeks.
I strongly recommend reading the articles and chasing down more videos about the Antikythera on Youtube as the story is fascinating and given the plethora of material (including a book and website by Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens), I don’t seem to be alone in my fascination.
Strictly speaking or otherwise, this is not a ‘nano’ story but it does speak (wordplay intended) to some longstanding interests of mine. Christina Chaey in her July 10, 2012 article for Fast Company notes,
More than 275 million hearing-impaired people are unable to use speech to communicate. Sign language is one solution, but it’s only as helpful as the number of people who know the language. That problem is what drove three Ukrainian students to develop EnableTalk, a pair of sensory gloves that help bridge that communication gap by turning sign language into speech.
The three-programmer team behind EnableTalk, who were inspired by interactions with hearing-impaired athletes at their school, took the $25,000 top prize in software design at Microsoft’s 10th annual Imagine Cup. The decade-old tech competition challenges students to design innovative technology across various categories including game design, Kinect, the Windows Phone, and Windows 8.
Bob Yirka in his July 11, 2012 article about Enable Talk for physorg.com provides some insight on why the team chose their project,
The team said the idea for their system came from the frustration they experienced when trying to communicate with hearing impaired athletes at their school. … The problem with sign language they point out, is that most people who can hear never learn it, thus those with hearing impairments are only able to communicate with a small part of the general population which generally includes those who cannot hear and those in their immediate circle.
The quadsquad receiving their $25,000US price,
downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/events/imaginecup/
Yirka offers the best description of the technology that I was able to find (Note: I have removed links),
The gloves work through the use of five hardware components: flex sensors in the gloves record finger movements and a main controller coordinates information from an accelerometer/compass, an accelerometer/gyroscope, a microcontroller and a Bluetooth module. Windows mobile software was used to convert the gesture commands to sound signals for broadcast by the Bluetooth module. The sound waves are converted to voice using Microsoft Speech and Bing APIs running on a Smartphone, which ultimately serves as the voice for the person using the system.
For even more technical details, you can go to the Documentation page on the Enable Talk website.
The quad squad’s Imagine Cup presentation video is pretty glitzy, from the Enable Talk Gallery page,
I was surprised that everyone in those ‘street scenes’ seems to be about the same age and social class, that the streets are so clean, and, coming from the West Coast of Canada, that everyone is the same colour.
ETA July 12, 2012: The article by Christina Chaey indicated the gloves would cost $50 but I notice the video indicates a $200 price tag. Perhaps the $50 price is what they’re hoping to charge after widespread commercialization?
I gather that today’s soldier (aka, warfighter) is carrying as many batteries as weapons. Apparently, the average soldier carries a couple of kilos worth of batteries and cables to keep their various pieces of equipment operational. The UK’s Centre for Defence Enterprise (part of the Ministry of Defence) has announced that this situation is about to change as a consequence of a recently funded research project with a company called Intelligent Textiles. From Bob Yirka’s April 3, 2012 news item for physorg.com,
To get rid of the cables, a company called Intelligent Textiles has come up with a type of yarn that can conduct electricity, which can be woven directly into the fabric of the uniform. And because they allow the uniform itself to become one large conductive unit, the need for multiple batteries can be eliminated as well.
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The company says it has found a way to weave the conductive yarn into virtually all parts of the uniform: vest, shirt, backpack, helmet, even gloves or the interactive parts of weapons. Different pieces of the uniform can then be connected via plug-and-play connections when the soldier dresses for battle, … They say they are currently also working on a keyboard that can also be integrated into a uniform to allow for interaction with a small computer that will also be carried as part of the uniform.
Field trials are scheduled for next month and uniforms made with e-textiles are expected to begin being worn by actual soldiers over the next two years.
The Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) is the first point of contact for anyone with a disruptive technology, new process or innovation that has a potential defence application. CDE funds research into novel high-risk, high-potential-benefit innovations sourced from the broadest possible range of science and technology providers, including academia and small companies, to enable development of cost-effective capability advantage for UK Armed Forces.
CDE is the entry point for new science and technology providers to defence, bringing together innovation and investment for the defence and security markets.
Here’s a link to a video featuring an employee from Intelligent Textiles discussing their new product and the joys of applying for funds from the CDE.
I did try to find out more about Intelligent Textiles. While they do have a website, it is currently under construction, here’s an excerpt from their home and only page,
Welcome to this very special first glimpse of a new 21st century world. A wonderful world of soft, safe, stylish, comfortable, colourful fabrics which not only do all the traditional fabric things but which discreetly and unobtrusively include a host of additional attributes.
The new world of Intelligent Textiles is limited only by your vision and needs, and the enthusiasm by innovative manufacturers to embrace a new world.
Building on the best of the past, see an amazing high tech future using traditional techniques and materials with the addition of the Intelligent Textiles globally patented technology.
Even after reading the news item, watching the video clip, and reading the information on Intelligent Textile’s home page, I don’t really understand the benefit of the technology. It’s nice that cables are being eliminated but it sounds as if at least one battery is still needed (and probably one backup just in case something goes wrong) and they have plans to include a computer in the future. Are they eliminating five pounds of equipment and replacing it with one pound’s worth? If they include a computer in the future, how much weight will that add?
This February 29, 2012 news item by Bob Yirka poses a challenge from a professor of electrical engineering and computing science to physicists everywhere (I have removed links from the excerpt) which may not be as farfetched as it seems initially,
Geraldo Barbosa, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University … wonders if the human eye and brain together are capable of actually seeing entangled images. This is not a philosophical question, as he has phrased the query as part of a practical experiment that someone with the proper lab could actually carry out. To that end, he’s posted a paper on the preprint server arXiv with the hope that a physics team will take up the challenge.
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Some animals can see things in the infrared spectrum for example and evidence has been slowly emerging as described here, here and here, suggesting that some migrating birds are able to “see” the Earth’s magnetic field. So maybe it’s possible that we see entangled images every day, and just don’t know it.
The human’s visual system detect intensity images. Quite interesting, detector systems have shown the existence of different kind of images. Among them, images obtained by two detectors (detector array or spatially scanning detector) capturing signals within short window times may reveal a “hidden” image not contained in either isolated detector: Information on this image depend on the two detectors simultaneously. In general, they are called “high-order” images because they may depend on more than two electric fields. Intensity images depend on the square of magnitude of the light’s electric field. Can the human visual sensory system perceive high-order images as well? This paper proposes a way to test this idea. A positive answer could give new insights on the “visual-conscience” machinery, opening a new sensory channel for humans. Applications could be devised, e.g., head position sensing, privacy in communications at visual ranges and many others.
Good luck to everyone devising an experiment to test the ability to see entangled images.
It takes a great deal of nerve to found a startup company for any emerging technology; I’m not sure what it takes to found a startup company that produces quantum computers.
D-Wave Systems: the quantum computing company (based in the Vancouver area) recently announced they were able to employ an 84-qubit calculation in a demonstration calculating what Dexter Johnson at the Nanoclast blog for the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) called ‘notoriously difficult’ Ramsey numbers.
Here’s a brief description of the demonstration (excerpted from the Jan. 12, 2012 article by Bob Yirka for phsyorg.com),
In the research at D-Wave, those involved worked to run a just recently discovered quantum algorithm on an actual quantum computer; in this case, to solve for a two-color Ramsey number, R(m,2), where m= 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, also known as the “Party Problem” because it’s use can be explained by posing a problem experienced by many party planners, i.e. how to invite the minimum number of guests where one group knows a certain number of others, and another group doesn’t, forcing just the right amount of mingling. Because increasing the number of different kinds of guests increases the difficulty of finding the answer, modern computers aren’t able to find R(5,5) much less anything higher. …
Quantum algorithms take advantage of such facilities [ability to take advantage of quantum mechanics capabilities which allow superconducting circuits to recognize 1 or 0 as current traveling in opposite directions or the existence of both states simultaneously] and allow for the execution of “instructions” far faster than conventional computers ever could. In the demonstration by the D-Wave team, the computer solved for a R(8,2) Ramsey number in just 270 milliseconds using 84 qubits, though just 28 of them were used in actual computation as the rest were delegated to correcting errors. Also, for those that are curious, the answer is 8.
While Yirka goes on to applaud the accomplishment, he notes that it may not be very useful. I think that’s always an issue with the early stages of an emerging technology; it may not prove to have any practical applications now or in the future.
Dexter in his Jan. 12, 2012 blog posting about D-Wave Systems and their recent announcement speaks as someone with lengthy experience dealing with emerging technologies (he provides a little history first [I have removed links from the excerpt, please see the posting for those]),
After erring on the side of caution—if not doubt—when IEEE Spectrum [magazine] cited D-Wave Systems as one of its “Big Losers” two years ago, it seems that there was a reversal of opinion within this publication back in June of last year when Spectrum covered D-Wave’s first big sale of a quantum computer with an article and then a podcast interview of the company’s CTO.
In the job of covering nanotechnology, one develops—sometimes—a bit more hopeful perspective on the potential of emerging technologies. Basic research that may lead to applications such as quantum computers get more easily pushed up in the development cycle than perhaps they should. So, I have been following the developments of D-Wave for at least the last seven years with a bit more credence than Spectrum had offered the company earlier.
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While it may seem that D-Wave is on irreversible upward technological slope, one problem indicated … is that capital may be beginning to dry up.
If so, it would seem almost ironic that after years of not selling anything and attracting a lot of capital, D-Wave would make a $10-million sale and then not be able to get any more funding.
Here’s an excerpt from an interview that Brian Wang had with Geordie Rose, D-Wave’s Chief Technical Officer, for The Next Big Future blog (mentioned in Dexter’s piece) which brings the conundrum Dexter notes into high relief (from Wang’s Dec. 29, 2011 post),
The next 18 months will be a critical period for Dwave systems [sic]. Raising private money has become far more difficult in the current economic conditions. If Dwave were profitable, then they could IPO. If Dwave were not able to become profitable and IPO and could not raise private capital, then there would be the risk of having to shutdown.
According to Wang’s post, D-Wave managed the feat with the Ramsey number two years ago. There was no mention of what they are currently managing to do with their quantum computer.
This is the piece I mentioned yesterday (Jan. 18, 2012) in my posting about the recently released report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012, from the US National Science Board (NSB) in the context of the government initiative, Startup America, and what I thought was a failure to address the issue of a startup trying to become profitable.
ETA Jan. 22, 2012: Dexter Johnson, Nanoclast blog at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) mentions the problem in a different context of a recent US initiative to support startup companies through a public/private partnership consortium called the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), from his Jan. 20, 2012 posting,
My concern is that a small company that has spun itself out from a university, developed some advanced prototypes, lined up their market, and picked their management group still need by some estimates somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 to $30 million to scale up to being an industrial manufacturer of a product.
Dexter’s concern is that AMP funds available for disbursement will only support a limited number of companies as they scale up.
This contrasts with the Canadian situation where it almost none of our smaller companies can get sufficient funds to scale up when they most need it, e.g., D-Wave System’s current situation.
A flat layer of carbon atoms packed into a two-dimensional honeycomb arrangement, graphene is being touted as a miracle (it seems) material which will enable new kinds of electronic products. Recently, there have been a number of news items and articles featuring graphene research.
Here’s my roundup of the latest and greatest graphene news. I’m starting with an application that is the closest to commercialization: IBM recently announced the creation of the first graphene-based integrated circuit. From the Bob Yirka article dated June 10, 2011 on physorg.com,
Taking a giant step forward in the creation and production of graphene based integrated circuits, IBM has announced in Science, the fabrication of a graphene based integrated circuit [IC] on a single chip. The demonstration chip, known as a radio frequency “mixer” is capable of producing frequencies up to 10 GHz, and demonstrates that it is possible to overcome the adhesion problems that have stymied researchers efforts in creating graphene based IC’s that can be used in analog applications such as cell phones or more likely military communications.
The graphene circuits were started by growing a two or three layer graphene film on a silicon surface which was then heated to 1400°C. The graphene IC was then fabricated by employing top gated, dual fingered graphene FET’s (field-effect transistors) which were then integrated with inductors. The active channels were made by spin-coating the wafer with a thin polymer and then applying a layer of hydrogen silsequioxane. The channels were then carved by e-beam lithography. Next, the excess graphene was removed with an oxygen plasma laser, and then the whole works was cleaned with acetone. The result is an integrated circuit that is less than 1mm2 in total size.
Meanwhile, there’s a graphene research project in contention for a major research prize in Europe. Worth 1B Euros, the European Union’s 2011 pathfinder programme (Future and Emerging Technologies [Fet11]) in information technology) will select two from six pilot actions currently under way to be awarded a Flagship Initiative prize. From the Fet11 flagships project page,
FET Flagships are large-scale, science-driven and mission oriented initiatives that aim to achieve a visionary technological goal. The scale of ambition is over 10 years of coordinated effort, and a budget of up to one billion Euro for each Flagship. They initiatives are coordinated between national and EU programmes and present global dimensions to foster European leadership and excellence in frontier research.
To prepare the launch of the FET Flagships, 6 Pilot Actions are funded for a 12-month period starting in May 2011. In the second half of 2012 two of the Pilots will be selected and launched as full FET Flagship Initiatives in 2013.
Here’s the description of the Graphene Science and technology for ICT and beyond pilot action,
Graphene, a new substance from the world of atomic and molecular scale manipulation of matter, could be the wonder material of the 21st century. Discovering just how important this material will be for Information and Communication Technologies is the long term focus of the Flagship Initiative, simply called, GRAPHENE. This aims to explore revolutionary potentials, in terms of both conventional as well as radically new fields of Information and Communication Technologies applications.
Bringing together multiple disciplines and addressing research across a whole range of issues, from fundamental understandings of material properties to Graphene production, the Flagship will provide the platform for establishing European scientific and technological leadership in the application of Graphene to Information and Communication Technologies. The proposed research includes coverage of electronics, spintronics, photonics, plasmonics and mechanics, all based on Graphene.
[Project Team:]
Andrea Ferrari, Cambridge University, UK
Jari Kinaret, Chalmers University, Sweden
Vladimir Falko, Lancaster University, UK
Jani Kivioja, NOKIA, Finland [emphases mine]
Not so coincidentally (given one member of the team is associated with Nokia and another is associated with Cambridge University), the Nokia Research Centre jointly with Cambridge University issued a May 4, 2011 news release (I highlighted it in my May 6, 2011 posting [scroll down past the theatre project information]) about the Morph concept (a rigid, flexible, and stretchable phone/blood pressure cuff/calculator/and other electronic devices in one product) which they have been publicizing for years now. The news release concerned itself with how graphene would enable the researchers to take the Morph from idea to actuality. The webpage for the Graphene Pilot Action is here.
There’s something breathtaking when there is no guarantee of success about the willingness to invest up to 1B Euros in a project that spans 10 years. We’ll have to wait until 2013 before learning whether the graphene project will be one of the two selected as Flagship Initiatives.
I must say the timing for the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics which went to two scientists (Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov) for their groundbreaking work with graphene sems interesting (featured in my Oct. 7, 2010 posting) in light of this graphene activity.
The rest of these graphene items are about research that could lay the groundwork for future commercialization.
Hui-Ming Cheng and co-workers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Metal Research at Shenyang have now devised a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method for turning graphene sheets into porous three-dimensional ‘foams’ with extremely high conductivity (“Three-dimensional flexible and conductive interconnected graphene networks grown by chemical vapour deposition” [published in Nature Materials 10, 424–428 (2011) doi:10.1038/nmat3001 Published online 10 April 2011]). By permeating this foam with a siloxane-based polymer, the researchers have produced a composite that can be twisted, stretched and bent without harming its electrical or mechanical properties.
Here’s an image from the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) of both the vapour and the bendable, twistable, stretchable composite (downloaded from the news item on Nanowerk where you can find a larger version of the image),
The ‘elastic’ conductor (image to the right) reminds me of the ‘paper’ phone which I wrote about May 8, 2011 and May 12, 2011. (It’s a project where teams from Queen’s University [in Ontario] and Arizona State University are working to create flexible screens that give you telephony, music playing and other capabilities much like the Morph concept.)
Researchers in Singapore have developed a graphene quantum dot using a C60 (a buckminster fullerene). From the June 13, 2011 news item (Graphene: from spheres to perfect dots) on Nanowerk,
An electron trapped in a space of just a few nanometers across behaves very differently to one that is free. Structures that confine electrons in all three dimensions can produce some useful optical and electronic effects. Known as quantum dots, such structures are being widely investigated for use in new types of optical and electronics technologies, but because they are so small it is difficult to fabricate quantum dots reproducibly in terms of shape and size. Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and A*STAR have now developed a technique that enables graphene quantum dots of a known size to be created repeatedly and quickly (“Transforming C60 molecules into graphene quantum dots” [published in Nature Nanotechnology 6, 247–252 (2011) doi:10.1038/nnano.2011.30 Published online 20 March 2011]).
This final bit is about a nano PacMan that allows for more precise patterning from a June 13, 2011 article written by Michael Berger,
A widely discussed method for the patterning of graphene is the channelling of graphite by metal nanoparticles in oxidizing or reducing environments (see for instance: “Nanotechnology PacMan cuts straight graphene edges”).
“All previous studies of channelling behavior have been limited by the need to perform the experiment ex situ, i.e. comparing single ‘before’ and ‘after’ images,” Peter Bøggild, an associate professor at DTU [Danish Technical University] Nanotech, explains to Nanowerk. “In these and other ex situ experiments the dynamic behavior must be inferred from the length of channels and heating time after completion of the experiment, with the rate of formation of the channel assumed to be consistent over the course of the experiment.”
In new work, reported in the June 9, 2011 advance online edition of Nano Letters (“Discrete dynamics of nanoparticle channelling in suspended graphene” [published in Nano Letters, Article ASAP, DOI: 10.1021/nl200928k, Publication Date (Web): June 9, 2011]), Bøggild and his team report the nanoscale observation of this channelling process by silver nanoparticles in an oxygen atmosphere in-situ on suspended mono- and bilayer graphene in an environmental transmission electron microscope, enabling direct concurrent observation of the process, impossible in ex-situ experiments.
Personally, I love the youtube video I’ve included here largely because it features blobs (as many of these videos do) where they’ve added music and titles (many of these videos do not) so you can better appreciate the excitement,
From the article by Michael Berger,
As a result of watching this process occur live in a transmission electron microscope, the researchers say they have seen many details that were hidden before, and video really brings the “nano pacman” behavior to life …
There’s a reason why they’re so interested in cutting graphene,
“With a deeper understanding of the fine details we hope to one day use this nanoscale channelling behavior to directly cut desired patterns out of suspended graphene sheets, with a resolution and accuracy that isn’t achievable with any other technique,” says Bøggild. “A critical advantage here is that the graphene crystal structure guides the patterning, and in our case all of the cut edges of the graphene are ‘zigzag’ edges.”
So there you have it. IBM creates the first integrated graphene-based circuit, there’s the prospect of a huge cash prize for a 10-year project on graphene so they could produce the long awaited Morph concept and other graphene-based electronics products while a number of research teams around the world continue teasing out its secrets with graphene ‘foam’ projects, graphene quantum dots, and nano PacMen who cut graphene’s zigzag edges with precision.
ETA June 16, 2011: For those interested in the business end of things, i.e. market value of graphene-based products, Cameron Chai features a report, Graphene: Technologies, Applications, and Markets, in his June 16, 2011 news item on Azonano.
