Unlimited Information Storage may soon be a Reality

London: Researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, have used a feature of the electron to create holograms that pack information into subatomic spaces, which could one day lead to unlimited information storage.
"Our results will challenge some fundamental assumptions people had about the ultimate limits of information storage," graduate student Chris Moon, one of the authors of the work, told Nature News.
The research team at Stanford University used a feature of the electron - its tendency to bounce probabilistically between different quantum states - to create holograms that pack information into subatomic spaces.
By encoding information into the electron's quantum shape, or wave function, the researchers were able to create a holographic drawing that contained 35 bits per electron.
Compared to previous technologies, Moon and his colleagues saw a way to go smaller by using a quantum analogy to the conventional hologram.
They used the quantum properties of electrons, rather than photons, as their source of 'illumination'.
Using a scanning tunnelling microscope, they stuck carbon monoxide molecules onto a layer of copper - their holographic plate. The molecules were positioned to create speckled patterns that would result in a holographic 'S'.
The sea of electrons that exists naturally at the surface of the copper layer served as their illumination.
Just as water bouncing off stones in a show pond create a rippling wave patterns, these electrons interfere with the carbon monoxide molecules to create a quantum hologram.
The researchers read the hologram using the microscope to measure the energy state of a single electron wave function. They showed they could read out an 'S' - for Stanford - with features as small as 0.3 nanometers.
In addition to breaking the atomic limit for information storage, the researchers demonstrated one of the essential features of holography.
They stacked two layers, or pages, of information - in this case, an 'S' and a 'U' - within the same hologram. They teased out the individual pages by scanning the hologram for electrons at different energy levels.
This led the Stanford team to think about the creation of quantum circuits.
In encoding the 'S', the researchers were concentrating the electron density at certain points and energy levels, and a concentration of electrons in space is, in essence, a wire.
That led study co-author Hari Manoharan to think about using the holograms as stackable quantum circuits, which may eventually be needed to wire together a quantum computer.

Soon, plastic solar cells with higher efficiency

Washington: A company in the US is developing plastic solar cells for portable electronic devices, which would have higher efficiency than the current technology.
Solarmer Energy Inc., the company in question, is on track to complete a commercial-grade prototype later this year, according to Dina Lozofsky, vice president of IP development and strategic alliances at Solarmer.
The prototype, a cell measuring eight square inches (50 square centimeters), is expected to achieve 8 percent efficiency and to have a lifetime of at least three years.
"New materials with higher efficiencies are really the key in our industry. Plastic solar cells are behind traditional solar-cell technology in terms of the efficiency that it can produce right now," Lozofsky said. "Everyone in the industry is in the 5 percent to 6 percent range," she added.
The invention, a new semiconducting material called PTB1, converts sunlight into electricity.
It has been invented by Luping Yu, Professor in Chemistry, and Yongye Liang, a Ph.D. student, both at the University of Chicago.
The active layer of PTB1 is a mere 100 nanometers thick, the width of approximately 1,000 atoms.
An advantage of the Chicago technology is its simplicity.
Several laboratories around the country have invented other polymers that have achieved efficiencies similar to those of Yu's polymers, but these require far more extensive engineering work to become a viable commercial product.
"We think that our system has potential," Yu said. "The best system so far reported is 6.5 percent, but that's not a single device. That's two devices," he added.
By combining Solarmer's device engineering expertise with Yu and Liang's semiconducting material, they have been able to push the material's efficiency even higher.
Silicon-based solar cells dominate the market today. Industry observers see a promising future for low-cost, flexible solar cells, said
According to UchicagoTech's Martin. "If people can make them sufficiently efficient, they may be useful for all sorts of applications beyond just the traditional solar panels on your house rooftop."

Partial solar eclipse on Monday

New Delhi: As the country celebrates Republic Day on Monday, a partial solar eclipse will occur on Monday afternoon when the moon will pass directly between the earth and the sun.
The partial phase of the eclipse will be visible in southern India, the eastern coastal belt, most of North-east, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep, Director of Nehru Planetarium N Rathnashree said.
The eclipse will be annular in regions covering south of Africa, Antarctica, South East Asia and Australia.
Annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon is farther from the earth than normal in its elliptical orbit and hence, its apparent size is not sufficient to cover the sun completely, Director of Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) C B Devgun told a news agency.
Therefore, even though the sun-moon alignment is perfect, the moon will appear slightly smaller in diameter than the sun and a thin ring of sunlight will remain visible around the dark silhouette of the moon, he said.
Perfect-alignment of the sun and the moon means the apparent sizes of both the celestial bodies will be the same when viewed from earth.
The eclipse will begin at 1026 hrs though it will be visible in India only from the afternoon and end at 1630 hrs on Monday, passing through various stages.
The first city to witness the eclipse in India will be Kanyakumari at 1408 hrs while it will be visible from 1417 hrs in Port Blair, the last Indian territory in which the celestial phenomenon will continue till 1625 pm.

Mars polar water is pure: Study

Paris: A large ice cap found at Mars' northern pole is "of a very high degree of purity," according to an international study reported by French researchers.
Radar data sent back by the US Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) point to 95 per cent purity in this deposit, France's National Institute of Sciences of the Universe (Insu) said in a press release.
The Martian polar regions are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometres" (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, it said.
That makes it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America's Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. Kms (5,439 miles).
The study appeared in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union.

Japan launches rocket with greenhouse-gas

Tokyo: Japan fired the world's first greenhouse-gas monitoring satellite into space on Friday, a launch deemed crucial in the country's quest to compete globally in putting commercial satellites into orbit.
The black, white and orange H2A rocket took off from the space center on Tanegashima, a remote island in southern Japan.

The launch - the 15th for an H2A - had been delayed for several days because of bad weather.
Aboard the rocket was the world's first greenhouse-gas monitoring satellite called "Ibuki," which means "breath," and seven "baby satellites" - one developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, known as JAXA, and six created by university research centers and private industry.
The development cost for the greenhouse-gas monitoring satellite was 18.3 billion yen ($206 million), the government space agency said.
A successful launch was seen as crucial to Japan, which is trying to demonstrate that it has the capabilities with its domestically developed H2A rocket to compete in the global commercial launching business.
Japan has long been one of the world's leading space-faring nations and launched its first satellite in 1970.

But it has been struggling to get out from under China's shadow in recent years and gain a niche in the global rocket-launching business, which is dominated by Russia, the US and Europe's Arianespace.
JAXA says the latest launch itself cost about 8.5 billion yen ($96 million), the lowest ever. The standard for a competitive launch - set by Russia's Proton rocket - used to be around 7 billion yen, but has now risen to around 9 billion.
JAXA officials said the agency has already selected four other piggybacks for a launch in 2011. They will be launched for free, but JAXA is considering charging a launch fee in the future.
Earlier this month, Japan got its first commercial order to launch a satellite on an H2A. The agreement - which targets a liftoff date after April 2011 - is with South Korea.

A new way to produce hydrogen 'discovered'

Washington: Scientists have discovered what they claim is a new way to produce hydrogen "by exposing selected clusters of aluminium atoms to water".
"Our previous research suggested that electronic properties govern everything about these aluminium clusters, but this new study shows that it is the arrangement of atoms within the clusters that allows them to split water.
"Generally, this knowledge might allow us to design new nanoscale catalysts by changing the arrangements of atoms in a cluster. The results could open up a new area of research not only related to splitting water, but also to breaking the bonds of other molecules, as well," lead scientist Evan Pugh of Penn State University said.
In their study, the scientists probed the reactions of water with individual aluminium clusters by combining them under controlled conditions in a custom-designed flow-reactor.
They found that a water molecule will bind between two aluminium sites in a cluster as long as one of the sites behaves like a Lewis acid, a positively charged centre that wants to accept an electron, and the other behaves like a Lewis base, a negatively charged centre that wants to give away an electron.

Dear readers,
A very good morning!! It has been my dream to come up with a science & technology blog, since a long time; due to the growing importance of this field. We cannot dream of life today, with the thought of this major field.
Today, at last this dream of mine has come out to be true...Henceforth you will get the latest news on this interesting field of Science and Technology.
Hope you would love to read the contents of this blog...........Looking forward for your co-operation in the days to come.
Best wishes,
Suman Mukherjee
India.
www.sumanspeaks.blogspot.com