Photon Compression??

Researchers condense entire image into single photon - Engadget

A team of researchers has managed to find a way to store a large amount of data in a single photon of light. Although the first stored item -- an image of the characters "UR" -- implies that the inventor was a 13 year old girl dealing with an extremely low text messaging limit, the image was in fact intended to signify the institution which developed the technology, the University of Rochester (either that or it's the shortest example of the "UR IN MY ... " meme that we've seen in the while.) Apparently the system works because "instead of storing ones and zeros" (a la binary code), the team has figured out how to store an entire image in a single photon, which sounds sort of impossible to us. Funny, because that's exactly what John Howell, the leader of the team said about the system. One of the key components of the process is the particle-wave duality nature of light: by firing a single photon of light through a stencil -- we presume one heckuva small one -- the wave carries a shadow of the image along with it at a very high signal-to-noise ratio, even with low light levels. The light is then slowed down in a cell of cesium gas, where it is compressed to 1 percent of its original length. This is where the storage aspect of the device comes in, as the researchers hope to be able to delay a single photon almost permanently, resulting in a device that can store "incredible amounts of information in just a few photons": an enticing thought for a world currently satisfied with a maximum of 1TB hard drives based on physical platters. A pity then that the world is completely distracted by the potential for "Photon on photons" jokes that this throws into the ring.

Blogged with Flock

Untitled

Can't Touch This - Jeff Han - Touch Screen

Jefferson Han, a pale, bespectacled engineer dressed in Manhattan black, faced the thousand or so attendees on the first day of TED 2006, the annual technology, entertainment, and design conference in Monterey, California. The 30-year-old was little more than a curiosity at the confab, where, as its ad copy goes, "the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration." And on that day, the thinkers and doers included Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) gazillionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page, e-tail amazon Jeff Bezos, and Bill Joy, who helped code Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW) from scratch. Titans of technology. It was enough to make anyone feel a bit small.

Blogged with Flock

String Theory's Extra Dimensions Must Be Less Than Half the Width of a Human Hair

If extra dimensions of space exist, they must be smaller than about half the width of a human hair, according to new measurements of the strength of gravity at short distances. Researchers found that the same law governing the gravitational pull between planets continues to work when objects are separated by as little as 56 micrometers. The finding rules out extra dimensions of 44 micrometers or larger, they report in this week's Physical Review Letters.Discovering extra dimensions with the relatively huge size of a few micrometers would offer spectacular confirmation for string theory, the still unproved body of equations that may unify gravity with the normally incompatible realm of quantum physics. "Even though we haven't seen anything, these results put boundaries on what people can legitimately propose," says experimental physicist and study author Eric Adelberger of the University of Washington. "Testing the inverse square law [meaning Newton's law of gravity] is the bombproof way to look for extra dimensions.""I'm a big admirer of this class of experiments; I think they're awesome," says theoretical particle physicist Raman Sundrum of Johns Hopkins University. In principle, such tests could effectively rule out theories of micrometer-size extra dimensions, he says. To study such questions researchers would normally expect to use giant particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), set to switch on in Geneva later this year.Sundrum says the LHC may still get its shot at large extra dimensions, because the new result leaves the idea some wiggle room. "It's not killing that scenario," he says.With no pressing reason to check, researchers, until a few years ago, had never measured the strength of gravity when objects were separated by much less than a millimeter (roughly the width of a period on this page). But beginning in the late 1990s, some physicists proposed that string theory might cause gravity to grow stronger at such distances if the universe came with relatively big extra dimensions of micrometers in width. (To make its arithmetic come out right, string theory requires that space have extra dimensions beyond the three we can readily experience, but researchers had assumed that these dimensions are extraordinarily tiny.)Adelberger and his colleagues on the so-called Eot-Wash experiment have led the way in checking gravity's short-distance strength. They employed a small metal pendulum suspended above a stacked pair of fused metal disks, which exerted a gravitational tug on a metal ring on the bottom of the pendulum.The ring and the upper disk contained a series of matching holes. If the holes lined up, gravity was pulling straight down, but if the holes were offset, the disk's gravity was twisting the pendulum. As a result, the experiment was able to measure the strength of gravity at the distance between the ring and the upper disk.The key to the experiment is the lower disk, which contains holes of different sizes that are designed to cancel out the twisting caused by the upper disk when the ring and disks are in certain orientations. If that canceling does not occur, it means that the force between the ring and the upper disk has changed, either because the strength of gravity has changed or because some new force has intervened that has no effect at the slightly larger distance between the ring and the bottom disk.In a prior experiment, the Eot-Wash team ruled out extra dimensions larger than 100 micrometers. This time researchers attained greater sensitivity by using more holes and covering the apparatus in gold to screen out electromagnetic forces between the ring and disks.Adelberger says they might be able to get down to a few micrometers, but it would be very tough. "As the dimensions get smaller and smaller, the force [they cause] gets smaller much faster," he says. The payoff could be worth it, though. Sundrum says that if extra dimensions failed to turn up at that distance, it would likely prune off that branch of string theory.

Scientific American: String Theory's Extra Dimensions Must Be Less Than Half the Width of a Human Hair

Optimized adhesives

Print the story

ESA launches new project to protect biodiversity

"The United Nations Convention on Biodiversity (UNCBD) agreed on a set of headline indicators to assess the progress made towards this target. DIVERSITY will make a contribution to the required monitoring efforts that will help us to determine whether we are making progress and which management and policy measures are most effective and thereby support decision-making," the UNCBD Secretariat Robert Höft said.
[...]
The DIVERSITY project, developed under ESA's Data User Element (DUE) programme, is being carried out in collaboration with the UNCBD Secretariat and UNESCO, which, in addition to being a user, is also the main coordinator between the users and contractors selected by ESA.

ESA Portal - ESA launches new project to protect biodiversity

Blogged with Flock