Comment Re:Um..no (Score 1) 865
"Stop Westeners": That's what they said...
New Optomechanical Crystal Allows Confinement of Light and Sound 91
PBH writes "Physicists and engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a nanoscale crystal that traps both light and sound. The interaction of light quanta (photons) and sound quanta (phomons) are so strong that they produce significant mechanical vibrations. 'Indeed, Painter points out, the interactions between sound and light in this device—dubbed an optomechanical crystal—can result in mechanical vibrations with frequencies as high as tens of gigahertz, or 10 billion cycles per second. Being able to achieve such frequencies, he explains, gives these devices the ability to send large amounts of information, and opens up a wide array of potential applications—everything from lightwave communication systems to biosensors capable of detecting (or weighing) a single macromolecule. It could also, Painter says, be used as a research tool by scientists studying nanomechanics. "These structures would give a mass sensitivity that would rival conventional nanoelectromechanical systems because light in these structures is more sensitive to motion than a conventional electrical system is."'"
Comment Re:Evaluating the claimed effect (Score 1) 322
Sorry for the typo: Make that 90 microseconds instead of 90ms. The remainder is correct, though.
Comment Re:Evaluating the claimed effect (Score 1) 322
I cannot access the PDF, so that I have to assume the 3 nm/s^2 for 2 ns are correct. That's small, but not hopeless.
The experiment is probably involving a resonating mass, which is tuned to the packet frequency of the LHC. With 2800 packets making one cycle per 90ms, this gives a frequency of about 3 * 10^7 Hz. If the resonator is of sufficient quality, we might get (I am guessing) 10^9 impulses before the oscillation is damped significantly. This amounts to a maximum velocity of the oscillator of 3 * 10^-9 m/s^2 * 2 * 10^-9 s * 10^9 = 6 * 10^-9 m/s. Assuming a harmonic oscillator, that's a displacement of 6 * 10^-9 m/s
This effect is minuscle, but it might be just at the limit of dectability. A significant problem will be the shielding of the detector, because the LHC should generate a lof of 3 * 10^7 Hz noise, which would influence the experiment. Maybe it would pay to use a higher frequency resonator, despite the smaller displacement.
Mapping Hidden Twitter Data For Epidemiology 75
jamie found this visualization of air travel, which might be usable in some sort of proxy for the spread of flu virus (to choose a random application). Jer Thorp, an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada (and a former geneticist), searched Twitter for the phrase "Just landed in" and obtained lat/lon coordinates for both the indicated airport and the Twitter user's home location, as recorded in their Twitter profile. He then produced videos of multi-hour stretches of air travel that had been latent in the Twitter information stream.
Comment Go standards (Score 1) 470
The problem with GWT is that it mixes so badly with other web toolkits. And it is not standardized, being neither fully Java nor JavaScript at all.
If you want to work in a class-oriented fashion for web development, you should probably go the way of JavaScript 2 as implemented by Jangaroo or Mascara. While JavaScript 2 is not finalized yet, we have a good idea of how it must be like from looking at ActionScript 3.
Slashdot Top Deals
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
