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Submission + - Big Test Coming Up For Kilogram Redefinition (ieee.org)

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: Electromechanical balances have got to be better than an aged lump of platinum and iridium right? Teams are working to get kilograms measured and shipped to Paris in time for a test to see whether the technology (along with another that uses ultrapure silicon spheres) is now ready to redefine the kilogram.

Submission + - Leap second is heading to the chopping block. Maybe (ieee.org)

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: The days of 61-second minutes may be coming to an end. The World Radiocommunication Conference is meeting for nearly the entire month of November, and one of the hot-button issues is what to do about the leap second. The addition to UTC is supposed to keep atomic time aligned with Earth's rotation, but past leap seconds have caused server crashes and some are worried that future problems could be even worse. Going into the conference, it doesn't look like there's much of a consensus on what to do. One official is expecting weeks of debate.

Submission + - Mars One Has No Money To Develop An Actual Plan

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: Listening to Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp talk about colonizing Mars will give you an immediate flashback to Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony. Clinton questioned the definition of "is". And Lansdorp has a bizarre definition of the word "plan". Last week he debated two MIT aerospace engineers who were co-authors on a report that said that astronauts would suffocate on Mars if they tried to grow their own food with existing tech. The question on the table: Is the Mars One plan feasible? And the answer seemed to be "it depends on what your definition of a plan is". The stated plan is to send the first humans to Mars for $6 billion by 2027 (twice delayed already). Lansdorp admits they probably won't stick to that schedule or that budget, but that has nothing to do with whether they're going or not. IEEE Spectrum has a write-up of the debate and a link to the MIT team's presentation. It seems the company's looking for $15 million now to fund--you guessed it--more studies.

Submission + - Tiny Fantastic Voyage-inspired robots are starting to get reasonably mature

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: No shrinking machine in an underground military lab (as far as we know). And no Raquel Welch. Still there is a growing microrobotics movement underway, looking at ways that tiny, untethered robots might be used to perform medical interventions in the human body. There have been piecemeal reports for years now of various designs, such as microscallops that can swim through the eye and bots that can be pushed around by bacteria flagella. This article in IEEE Spectrum gives a round-up of recent progress and looks at some of the difficulties that arise when you try to make things tiny and still have them retain a modicum (or give them more than a modicum) of function.

Submission + - No Nobel for the Father of the LED (ieee.org)

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: Nick Holonyak Jr. doesn't want to go gently into that good night. Widely regarded as the father of the LED (for his work on early visible-light devices), he's been making strongly-worded comments about being passed over for the Nobel Prize. His wife said he'd given up on getting it. But, he says, this year's physics award, to inventors of the blue LED, was just plain "insulting". The history the LED goes beyond and back further than Holonyak (all the way to the beginning of the 20th century), but a number of his colleagues are disappointed and/or surprised by the snub.

Submission + - Robots Will Pave the Way to Mars (ieee.org)

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: There's a lot of skepticism swirling around NASA's plan to send humans to Mars in the 2030's, not to mention all those private missions. If we want to have sustainable (read: not bank-breaking) space exploration, the argument goes, there's no way we can do it the way we've been going to the moon and low-Earth orbit. We have to find a way to exploit space resources and cut down on the amount of stuff we need to launch from Earth. That's not a new idea. But this article in IEEE Spectrum suggests research on resource extraction and fabrication in low and zero gravity might actually be making progress...and that we could take these technologies quite far if we get our act together.

Submission + - The Mile Markers of Moore's Law Are Meaningless

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: Keeping up the pace of Moore's Law is hard, but you wouldn't know it from the way chipmakers name their technology. The semiconductor industry's names for chip generations (Intel's 22nm, TSMC's 28nm, etc) have very little to do with actual physical sizes, says IEEE Spectrum. And the disconnect is only getting bigger. For the first time, the "pay us to make your chip" foundries are offering a new process (with a smaller-sounding name) that will produce chips that are no denser than their forbears. The move is not a popular one.

Submission + - EUV Chipmaking Inches Forward

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: You've got falling droplets of molten tin, bright lasers, and fancy evacuated optics. What's not to love about EUV light sources? The fact that we still don't have them in production lines producing chips. Light source maker ASML says it's "more confident" that the technology's on track now, and that the machines should meet their target brightness by 2015, in time to help pattern the 10nm generation of chips — the next next generation. We'll see. Or then again maybe we won't. The light's outside the visible range.

Submission + - Monopoles and Magnetricity (ieee.org)

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: Although there was once a hint from a cosmic ray experiment (on Valentine's Day, no less), no one's found any solid evidence of monopoles (unpaired north and south magnets) flying around the cosmos. But physicists did find monopole-like quasiparticles in some exotic crystals in 2009. One of the discoverers has an article this month in IEEE Spectrum that looks at how the particles were found and what's happened since. They might seem like a wacky curiosity, but the author says we shouldn't write them off — they might one day make useful new "magnetronic" devices.
Power

Submission + - Laser Fusion's Brightest Hope (ieee.org)

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: The National Ignition Facility has one foot in national defense and another in the future of commercial energy generation. That makes understanding the basic justification for the facility, which boasts the world's most powerful laser system, more than a little tricky. This article in IEEE Spectrum looks at NIF's recent missed deadline, what scientists think it will take for the facility to live up to its middle name, and all of the controversy and uncertainty that comes from a project that aspires to jumpstart commercial fusion energy but that also does a lot of classified work. NIF's national defense work is often glossed over in the press. This article pulls in some more detail and, in some cases, some very serious criticism. Physicist Richard Garwin, one of the designers of the hydrogen bomb, doesn't mince words. When it comes to nuclear weapons, he says in the article, “[NIF] has no relevance at all to primaries. It doesn’t do a good job of mimicking secondaries...it validates the codes in regions that are not relevant to nuclear weapons."

Submission + - Transistor Wars (ieee.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Interesting round-up of how chipmakers are handling the dwindling returns of pursuing Moore's Law. Intel's about 4 years ahead of the rest of the semiconductor industry with its new 3D transistors. But not everyone's convinced 3D is the answer.

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