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Nature News: A new generation of light sources—the newly completed Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, one under construction in Japan and the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) being built at at DESY in Germany—are getting set not only to put atoms and molecules under the spotlight, but also to illuminate their dynamics.

The devices, called X-ray free-electron lasers, produce flashes of X-ray light with angstrom-level wavelengths—small and coherent enough to image individual atoms. The flashes are also more intense than any created before—stuffed with enough photons to create and study extreme states of matter such as plasma.

But perhaps most importantly, the bursts of light are short—just hundreds of femtoseconds long, the time it takes for light to cross a human hair. Pulses as brief as this can record functions, not just forms: the folding of a protein, the action of a catalyst, the splitting of a chemical bond.

BBC News: Scientists in Italy think they may have come up with a new way to scan for cancer of the stomach or colon.

The 'spider pill,' which is fitted with a camera, is swallowed by the patient and once within the colon or intestine the legs are opened and the device crawls along the intestine tract, taking pictures as it goes.

ISNS: With the speed of computers so regularly seeing dramatic increases in their processing speed, it seems that it shouldn't be too long before the machines become infinitely fast—except they can't.

A pair of physicists has shown that computers have a speed limit as unbreakable as the speed of light. If processors continue to accelerate as they have in the past, we'll hit the wall of faster processing in less than a century.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted 40 years ago that manufacturers could double computing speed every two years or so by cramming ever-tinier transistors on a chip. His prediction became known as Moore's Law, and it has held true throughout the evolution of computers—the fastest processor today beats out a ten-year-old competitor by a factor of about 30.

If components are to continue shrinking, physicists must eventually code bits of information onto ever smaller particles. Smaller means faster in the microelectronic world, but physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University in Massachusetts, have slapped a speed limit on computing, no matter how small the components get.

"If we believe in Moore's law ... then it would take about 75 to 80 years to achieve this quantum limit," Levitin said.

"No system can overcome that limit. It doesn't depend on the physical nature of the system or how it's implemented, what algorithm you use for computation ... any choice of hardware and software," Levitin said. "This bound poses an absolute law of nature, just like the speed of light."

Scott Aaronson, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, thought Levitin's estimate of 75 years extremely optimistic.

Moore's Law, he said, probably won't hold for more than 20 years.

In the early 1980s, Levitin singled out a quantum elementary operation, the most basic task a quantum computer could carry out. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Levitin and Toffoli present an equation for the minimum sliver of time it takes for this elementary operation to occur. This establishes the speed limit for all possible computers.

Using their equation, Levitin and Toffoli calculated that, for every unit of energy, a perfect quantum computer spits out ten quadrillion more operations each second than today's fastest processors. 

"It's very important to try to establish a fundamental limit—how far we can go using these resources," Levitin explained.

The physicists pointed out that technological barriers might slow down Moore's law as we approach this limit. Quantum computers, unlike electrical ones, can't handle "noise"—a kink in a wire or a change in temperature can cause havoc. Overcoming this weakness to make quantum computing a reality will take time and more research.

As computer components are packed tighter and tighter together, companies are finding that the newer processors are getting hotter sooner than they are getting faster. Hence the recent trend in duo and quad-core processing; rather than build faster processors, manufacturers place them in tandem to keep the heat levels tolerable while computing speeds shoot up. Scientists who need to churn through vast numbers of calculations might one day turn to superconducting computers cooled to drastically frigid temperatures. But even with these clever tactics, Levitin and Toffoli said, there's no getting past the fundamental speed limit.

Aaronson called it beautiful that such a limit exists.

"From a theorist's perspective, it's good to know that fundamental limits are there, sort of an absolute ceiling," he said. "You may say it's disappointing that we can't build infinitely fast computers, but as a picture of the world, if you have a theory of physics allows for infinitely fast computation, there could be a problem with that theory."

Lauren Schenkman
First published at Inside Science News

Nature News: The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), near Gakona, Alaska, has for twenty years used radio waves to probe Earth's magnetic field and ionosphere.

One of the most visible results of the experiments—since the facility upgraded its transmission power output from 1 to 3.6 megawatts—is that they can create lights in the sky that are similar to auroras.

The technique works by using the high-frequency radio waves to accelerate electrons in the atmosphere, increasing the energy of their collisions and thereby creating a glow.

In February last year, HAARP unexpectedly managed to induce a strange bullseye pattern in the night sky. "This is the really exciting part—we've made a little artificial piece of ionosphere," said US Air Force Research Laboratory physicist Todd Pedersen to Nature's Naomi Lubick.

Science: Current computer-aided design tools are not making it easy for architects to design buildings for energy efficiency. New software is needed.

Related News Story
Training to climb an Everest of digital data New York Times

APS News: Restrictions imposed by the US Air Force on the use of lasers are significantly diminishing the utility of adaptive optics for studying the cosmos, according to a number of astronomers.

Physics Today: [First published 6:10am EST 10/6/09, last updated 11:33am EST] The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half of the $1.4 million to

Charles K. Kao
Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong

"for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"

and the other half jointly to

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

"for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor."

"The [transfer of] information in society today is completely based on [this research]," said Joseph Nordgren, the chair of the Nobel Prize committee in a press conference announcing the prize. "The practical implications for this research were enormous...It is something that has changed our life, not just in science but in society as whole."

Fred Dylla, CEO of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today, concurs. "When combined with the laser and the transistor, the invention of an efficient, low-loss optical fiber has made nearly instantaneous communication possible across the entire globe. This mode of communication is essential for high-speed internet and forms the optical backbone of 21st century commerce. The CCD sensor has revolutionized technical, professional, and consumer photography in the last few decades. Taken together these inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half century."

"Optics technologies are exceptionally significant for scientific developments in today’s world," said Elizabeth Rogan, CEO, of the Optical Society of America. "We congratulate Kao, Boyle and Smith on this much-deserved recognition."

Kao

In 1966, Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. "It was the impurities, and other limiting factors such as scattering, atomic motion, that limited glass fibers in the 1960s," said Nordgren.

Kao presented his research at the 1966 London meeting of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970 by the Corning company.

"The Nobel Prize isn't awarded for lifetime achievement, it is given for diverse research, clearly Kao's work achieved a breakthrough that led to a whole new research and technology field," said Nordgren.

Boyle and Smith

In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (charge-coupled device).

The two researchers came up with the idea in just an hour of brainstorming, according to Boyle who spoke during a press conference today. "It is amazing that a [the CCD device] was created so quickly," said Nordgren. "There are so many breakthroughs that came out of research at Bell labs...it's unfortunate that during the 80s, US companies abandoned the idea of having a scientific environment such as Bell labs," said Nordgren.

Boyle said that to him, the biggest achievement of his work was seeing images transmitted back from Mars. "It wouldn't have been possible without our invention," he said.

The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge, when designing an image sensor, was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized how images were collected from spacecraft, by telescopes, and in medical imaging, and has eventually replaced the film camera in every aspect of photography.

Related Physics Today articles on fiber optics
Maurer and Kao win Ericsson Prize, May 1979
An Overview of Lightguide communication, Solomon J. Buchsbaum, May 1976
The fiber lightguide, Alan G. Chynoweth, May 1976
Fiber optics, Alastair M. Glass, October 1993
The golden age of optical fiber amplifiers, Emmanuel Desurvire, January 1994

Related Physics Today articles on CCDs
Charge-coupled devices would be cheap, compact Gloria B. Lubkin, October 1970
From photons to bits, Rajinder P. Khosla, December 1992

Other Related Physics Today Resources
Industrial R&D in transition, R. Joseph Anderson and Orville R. Butler, July 2009
The bell tolls for Bell Labs Toni Feder, October 2008
Industry R&D forecast is bullish despite concerns over talent dearth, Jermey N. A. Matthews, April 2008
Bell Labs fissions, yielding AT&T Bell Labs and Bellcore, Gloria B. Lubkin, May 1984

Related Resources
2009 Physics Nobel Prize Resources American Institute of Physics
A 2004 oral history interview with Charles K. Kao IEEE History Center
A 2001 oral history interview with George E. Smith IEEE History Center

Related News Stories
3 Americans share 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Associated Press
Communication pioneers win 2009 physics Nobel Reuters
Nobel awarded for advances in harnessing light New York Times
Nobel prize in physics goes to Briton who harnessed the power of light The Guardian
Fiber optics, imaging pioneers win physics Nobel NPR
Light work wins Nobel for electronics pioneers New Scientist
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to light pioneers Nature
Pioneers of fiber optics, semiconductors win Nobel NPR
3 Americans win Nobel in physics LA Times
2009 Physics Nobel Winners See the Big Picture ScienceNow
Nobel winners who probably changed your life Washington Post

Science: In the coming weeks, on the plains of Inner Mongolia, China plans to launch its first large-scale effort to capture and store carbon emissions.

A new coal-to-liquid plant in Erdos will burn coal to make, at the outset, a little over 1 million metric tons per year of diesel and other petrochemicals. Operated by China's biggest coal producer, Shenhua Group, the plant will generate as a byproduct about 3.6 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year. In an effort to make carbon capture pay, much of the gas will be sequestered in nearby oil reservoirs, where pressure from the CO2 will force hard-to-get oil to the surface.

Shenhua's plant is one of two pivotal carbon capture and storage efforts in China. The other is GreenGen, an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant that the Chinese government approved last June for construction in Tianjin.

Instead of pulverizing coal as a conventional power plant does, IGCC plants turn it into gas, which allows for easy separation of CO2 from combustible gases--and far easier CO2 capture. If successful, GreenGen could redefine how power is generated from coal in China, says Richard Morse of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "You could make a very strong case that it's the leading carbon-capture project for coal-fired power in the world," he says.

Nature: Two experiments that produce laser light by exploiting the collective wave-like motion of free electrons on a metal surface bring the science and technology of lasers into the realm of the nano-scale.

New Scientist: The first of the asteroid-hunting Pan-STARRS telescopes will be taken apart today in an effort to solve problems with image quality.

The 1.8-metre PS1 telescope is the first of a suite of instruments—the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System - designed to find asteroids and comets with orbits that could bring them close to Earth. Sited atop a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, PS1 is the prototype for a planned four telescopes that will image the whole sky visible from Hawaii three times each month.

To scan so much sky, PS1 boasts a 1.4-billion-pixel digital camera and specially designed software to process the terabytes of data collected by the telescope each night.

But since the camera was installed in 2007, the telescope team has been struggling to get PS1's image quality to its targeted level. "There have been problems that we just didn't anticipate," says Pan-STARRS principal investigator Nick Kaiser of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Nature: In 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a spy walked into the US embassy in Warsaw and offered to sell the CIA the real and code names of all intelligence agents from the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung)—the foreign department of the Stasi, the East German Ministry for State Security. The CIA bought the highly sensitive information for a mere US$75,000.

The spoils—released to the Berlin Stasi archive and made available to history professor Kristie Macrakis at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 2005—have the potential to alter popular perceptions of the activities of the East German intelligence agency and secret police.

Macrakis's analysis of the CIA material reveals that about 40% of all HVA sources planted in West German companies, research institutions, and universities were stealing scientific and technical secrets.

Physics Today: Earlier this week Alan Taub became the new vice president of Research and Development for General Motors. Despite going into and out of bankruptcy, GM is still one of the largest companies in the US that conducts industrial R&D.

Taub (see left image) has run GM's eight science labs for the last nine years and was a key player in building GM's newest R&D lab in Shanghai that officially opened last month.

In his new role, Taub will still coordinate all the advanced technical work within GM, but will be more closely involved in managing GM's collaborative R&D ventures with academia, the Department of Energy, and other strategic partners.

Physics Today Online was lucky enough to ask some questions in a public webcast held on Tuesday. An edited transcript is below.

[Question]: What is the future of fuel cells within the new GM, do we have enough funds to run them?

Taub: Fuel cells are still an important activity for General Motors. And part of the solution to diversifying the energy source for vehicles. We remain committed to developing the technology but as we approach early commercialization, the costs of development are increasing.

[Question]: How do you envision the global R&D organizations work together? How will "who does what" be determined?

Taub: Working with my leadership team, we select the competencies to be developed at each of the eight R&D labs'. Multidisciplinary teams then integrate the labs programs globally to gain the most effective results. The competency selection for each site is based on availability of talent.

[Question]: Why do you believe globalization of GM's R&D activities is necessary?

Taub: Innovation and breakthrough research are enabled by diversity—diversity of education, the working environment and the local marketplace. We have been successful at having researchers located in different sites globally and bringing their ideas together so the team has more perspectives for new ideas.

[Question]: The easiest way to improve fuel efficiency is to cut down on weight. The New York Times had an article on how 60% of the weight of a car is due to steel, and how new types of steel are going into cars to provide safety and lightness. What is GM doing in this area, do you do the basic R&D yourself or do you rely on your partners?

Taub: In the past 15 years, we have dramatically changed the [steel] material mix on vehicles. For example, GM is increasing it's usage of high-strength steels to the point that in the next 10 years we will see very little low-carbon steel in the structural bodies of GM vehicles.

As well as changing the steel mix, GM is also increasing usage of aluminum and magnesium. This is accomplished by collaborations of GM and supplier engineers as well as precompetitive research with Ford and Chrysler in US.

[Question]: Battery technology seems to have significant limitations. Is GM looking at ultra-capacitors as well?

Taub: Yes, we are looking at batteries, fuel cells and ultracapacitors as energy storage devices. We see a role for each.

[Question]
Will you use the plugin technology from the canceled Saturn Vue "two-mode" hybrid in any other small SUVs in the future?

Taub: All we said so far is that the technology will go into another GM product. Stay tuned.

[Question]: To succeed, GM needs world class scientists. After bankruptcy, how does it propose to attract and retain them?

Taub: We have been successful at attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to the various GM global laboratories. People are intrigued by the combination of deep technical assignments on products that make a difference to consumers everywhere.

[Question]: We've seen impressive demos on Vehicle to Vehicle communications technology from GM. What are the remaining obstacles to introducing this technology into the marketplace?

Taub: We are continuing "harden" the technology in order to enable commercialization. Because this is a safety-related technology, it must be robust. It also requires standards for all of GM's suppliers since the vehicle parts needs to interact. There is progress being made on all fronts.

[Question]: What do you see as the biggest challenge in transitioning to wide-spread electric vehicle use?

Taub: Two things. Getting the cost down and the supply base ready.

[Question]: What is your personal favorite research topic at the moment?

Taub: Clearly, it is the electrification of the vehicle. Batteries, motors, hydrogen fuel cells are dominating the research portfolio. At the same time, the connected vehicle (e.g. navigation, OnStar, infotainment) is probably the most fun because we get to implement it at consumer electronics speed.

[Question]: Do you envision GM R&D researchers doing fundamental researchers? Or do you see the researchers act as project managers, and the universities act as the actual researchers?

Taub: The answer is both. Inside GM, we have the world's best individual contributors performing leading edge research on critical automotive applications. They do their work inside our walls while collaborating with the best professors and engineers in universities and national labs.

[Question]: Can you speak to GM's R&D center in Honeoye Falls, New York, the role its played so far, and the type of role it might play moving forward?

Taub: Honeoye Falls is the site of one of our eight global laboratories. It is our main site for fuel cell stack research and more recently battery system research. It will continue to be an important element of our research infrastructure.

[Question]: How's that shape-changing NiTinol material coming along. Any production plans on the horizon?

Taub: Our first application is being deployed as we speak. I just can't tell you at this time what that vehicle is.

[Question]: I wonder what makes fuel cells expensive? It seems very affordable for a new technology. If a fuel cell car has 100 grams of platinum, which is about $3000-4000, the rest of the materials involved is not that much expensive.

Taub: There are many elements that contribute to the cost of vehicle components. Raw material is only one aspect. On the fuel cell stack, our next-generation technology dramatically reduces the platinum loading, making it competitive with that on after-treatment for internal combustion engines.

[Question]: What is the research focus of the science lab in China?

Taub: Glad you asked. I am just back from Shanghai and the jet lag is almost gone. The initial areas of attention are improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines, lightweight materials and the joining technology for those materials, emerging market safety, consumer research methodologies and batteries.

[Question]: How far into the future do think it will be before we see automated cars driving on the expressway?

Taub: I'm on the record for promising limited autonomy driving on highways by 2015. This is enabled by a combination of lane keeping and stop-and-go adaptive cruise control.

[Question]: How does GM R&D foster a culture of innovation and creativity while simultaneously having researchers be accountable for their work and in tune with the overall cost of their projects?

Taub: Welcome to the challenge of leading an industrial research laboratory. We pull on our researchers to solve the tough problems facing the industry while adding to the world's scientific knowledge base. We lead the industry in patents—we filed more than 600 within R&D alone last year—and lead in technology implementation in the product.

[Question]: In your introduction you talked about "mainstreaming R&D." What does this mean and is GM allowing other employees to contribute ideas?

Taub: R&D is now fully integrated into Product Development at GM. That is allowing us to get more streamlined in our technology development and implementation activities. We are always looking for good ideas from both inside and outside the company. Feel free to contact any of our group managers, lab directors or me if you don't know who else to email.

[Question]: The development of the next generation of fuel-efficient vehicles requires advancements and a deep understanding across a wide range of materials (electrode materials for batteries, catalysts for fuel cells). How do you draw the line between what GM can develop and what must be developed by others to make a particular technology successful? Basically how deep into basic research does GM want to go?

Taub: The make-buy decision is different for every technology. For example, stamping of metals for the key components of the vehicle is a core technology within GM. The plastic parts are generally purchased from suppliers. The recent decision to vertically integrated into battery pack manufacturing does not mean we would be manufacturing our own battery cells. However, we are working internally on next-generation cell technology in collaboration with various suppliers.

Space.com: NASA has long planned to mine water on the Moon to supply human colonies and future space exploration. Now the discovery of small amounts of water across much of the lunar surface has shifted that vision into fast-forward, with the US space agency pursuing several promising technologies.

A hydrogen reduction plant and lunar rover prospectors have already passed field tests on Hawaii's volcanic soil, and more radical microwave technology is being evaluated.

"You can make back costs fairly quickly [within a year] compared to the launch costs of just throwing tanks of water and oxygen at the moon," said Gerald Sanders, manager of NASA's InSitu Resource Utilization Project.

Still, Sanders cautioned that there are big unknowns—how much water the Moon holds, where it is, and how deep will they have to excavate to get to it.

NYTimes.com: The modern car still contains 60 percent of steel by weight.

But automotive steel has changed quite a bit since the Ford company's first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1908. Metallurgists and manufacturers have learned to manipulate steel's microstructure through precise control of processing to create sheet steels of increasing strength. Prompted by crash-worthiness requirements and the need to make cars lighter to improve gas mileage, automakers are replacing conventional steels with advanced high-strength ones.

Where once a single grade of steel might have sufficed, the typical "body in white," as automakers call a car's basic skeleton, might now be a patchwork of a dozen or more steels of different types and strengths, tailored through computer modeling to handle the stress and strain of normal driving—and of severe crashes.

The Boston Globe: For more than two decades, scientists have strived to build an artificial nose that can mimic what is sometimes called our most elusive sense. Now, with a growing slate of potential applications—detecting cancer in a breath, say, or identifying airborne toxins on the battlefield—the technology is advancing and efforts are proliferating.

In North Grafton, a small startup company, CogniScent, is working on an electronic nose that resembles a yellow Dustbuster and sniffs out everything from molds to dangerous chemicals. At MIT, researchers are working on "RealNose," a Pentagon-funded project inspired by dog noses that aims to use actual biological parts—the smell receptors that recognize odor molecules. And, further afield, the Space Shuttle just returned to Earth carrying an "ENose," that spent about six months gathering scent data on the International Space Station.

The work is beginning to pay off, in prototypes of devices that are showing their promise in lab experiments.

Building magazine: After dominating the architecture scene for 40 years, Norman Foster seems to have decided that the world is not enough: his practice has joined a European consortium to look into how future structures could be built on the Moon as part of the European Space Agency's Aurora programme.

Space.com: Efforts to free the stuck Spirit rover on Mars have been dragging on since May. Last week a NASA official said the robot may never get free.

"We are proceeding very cautiously and exploring all reasonable options," said John Callas, NASA project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity. "There is a very real possibility that Spirit may not be able to get out, and we want to give Spirit the very best chance."

Wired.com: A Texas team called Armadillo Aerospace is the first to qualify for the top prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge after flying its moonship twice in two hours to simulate a moon landing. Armadillo Aerospace is one of three teams in the hunt for the $1 million award.

The Texans saw their craft, Scorpius, easily meet the requirements for Level 2 of the challenge, which require ascending to at least 50 meters, flying horizontally, and landing on a rocky replica of the lunar surface 50 meters away then making a return flight.

Each flight, made last weekend in Caddo Mills, Texas, had to last 180 seconds. John Carmack, the legendary coder behind Doom and Quake who leads Armadillo Aerospace, said Scorpius is capable of much greater altitude.

"Our Scorpius vehicle actually has the capability to travel all the way to space," he said, adding that Armadillo plans flights to 6,000 feet soon at its base in Texas before heading to New Mexico to achieve greater heights. Fully loaded with ethanol and liquid oxygen fuel, the craft weighs about 1,900 pounds.

Related Link
Engine leak stalls Xombie rocket's bid for NASA cash

BBC News: Less than two months before the scheduled launch of Russia's flagship planetary spacecraft, officials are set to recommend a delay until 2011.

The Phobos-Grunt mission aims to land on the Martian moon Phobos to collect soil samples and return them to Earth.

Sources within the Russian space industry gave RussianSpaceWeb.com details of the likely postponement.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos is expected to announce the mission's fate within a week.

The agency's decision will be based on results of testing which the spacecraft has been undergoing since July at its assembly facility at NPO Lavochkin in Khimki, near Moscow.

A delay for Phobos-Grunt would also affect China's first Mars probe Yinghuo 1, as the two craft are due to be launched together on the same Zenit rocket.

Nature News: In 2003, the University of Rochester in New York launched a digital archive designed to preserve and share dissertations, preprints, working papers, photographs, music scores—just about any kind of digital data the university's investigators could produce.

At the time of the launch, the university librarians were worried that a flood of uploaded data might swamp the available storage space.

Six years later, the US$200,000 repository lies mostly empty.

Researchers had been very supportive of the archive idea, recalls Susan Gibbons, vice-provost and dean of the university's River Campus Libraries—especially as the alternative was to keep on scattering their data and dissertations across an ever-proliferating array of unintegrated computers and websites.

"So we spent all this money, we spent all this time, we got the software up and running, and then we said, 'OK, here it is. We're ready. Give us your stuff'," she says. "And that's where we hit the wall." When the time came, scientists couldn't find their data, or didn't understand how to use the archive, or lamented that they just didn't have any more hours left in the day to spend on this business.

A similar reality check has greeted other data-sharing efforts.

Most researchers happily embrace the idea of sharing. It opens up observations to independent scrutiny, fosters new collaborations and encourages further discoveries in old data sets.

But in practice those advantages often fail to outweigh researchers' concerns. What will keep work from being scooped, poached or misused? What rights will the scientists have to relinquish? Where will they get the hours and money to find and format everything?

NYTimes.com: In good times or bad, the pace of technological change never seems to let up. This relentless engine of innovation, economists agree, is the wellspring of the nation’s long-run prosperity. But it presents a daunting challenge to science and technology professionals who are trying to stay ahead, seeking a career that is unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.

The sour economy has only intensified those pressures. So colleges across the country are reporting a surge in applications since last fall, up as much as 50 percent, for continuing education programs intended for people with science and engineering backgrounds. The offerings, in classroom settings and online, range from short courses of a few days to graduate degree programs that span years.

Science: China was late to join the race to develop novel rare-earth materials. "We lag behind the world in applications," says Xu Guangxian of Peking University, a chemist who was detained by the Red Guard in the late 1960s before becoming a pioneer in separating rare earths from other minerals. But Western observers agree that China is catching up fast in areas such as fuel cells and magnetic refrigeration, thanks in part to research efforts now happening here at the Baotou Research Institute of Rare Earths (BRIRE). "Absolutely, they are gaining ground," says Clint Cox, an analyst at The Anchor House, a rare earths consulting firm in Chicago, Illinois. Today, about three-quarters of the world's neodymium magnets are made in China. Domestic industrial demand is rising: Last year, China consumed 60% of all processed rare earths.

That unnerves some industry analysts and US legislators, who have expressed concern about China's dominance of the rare-earth supply. Last year, China satisfied 95% of global demand--now about 125,000 tons per year—and holds more than half of all proven reserves. In the 1990s, China's cheap production costs sent prices plummeting, driving many non-Chinese rare-earth mines out of business. Prices started creeping up in 2005, however, when China began to limit production and slap export tariffs on some rare earths. In a policy paper last month, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology floated the idea of prohibiting export of three scarcer rare earths--europium, terbium, and dysprosium.

If the Chinese government were to implement such a policy, that "would be a big problem for other countries," says Judith Chegwidden, managing director of Roskill Information Services Ltd., a mining analysis company in London. China has a "natural monopoly" over heavier rare earths, she says, simply because few mines elsewhere have ample reserves.

The Daily Telegraph: US scientists are trying to map the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons in order to reduce the amount of fuel used by spacecraft. The Genesis spacecraft used this technique in 2004 to cut its fuel load by a factor of ten.

Depicted by computer graphics, the optimal journey pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.

The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.

Virginia Tech's Shane Ross said: "I like to think of [these tubes] as being similar to ocean currents, but they are gravitational currents."

"If you're in a parking orbit round the Earth, and one of them intersects your trajectory, you just need enough fuel to change your velocity and now you're on a new trajectory that is free."

"It's not the same as a [gravitational] slingshot," said Ross. "Slingshots don't put you in orbit round a moon, whereas this does."

NPR: Steven Chu is an optimist. The secretary of energy, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, believes science can solve many of the nation's energy challenges.

"Scientists by their nature are very optimistic," he said. "We learn about Newton, about Maxwell, about Einstein. And yet you want to do some science that can contribute on the shoulders of those giants—you've got to be pretty optimistic.

"That doesn't mean I'm a cockeyed optimist," he cautioned. "You've still got to come up with the goods."

Chu knows cleaner coal, new nuclear power plants, more renewable energy will take time. In a conversation with NPR's Steve Inskeep, he lays out ambitious plans for the country's energy future.

The Independent: Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.

"We've been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on," the company's green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

guardian.co.uk: While sailing remains a purely Earth-bound pursuit for now, it could one day be the means of propulsion for hitherto impossible space missions.

Speaking at the British Science Festival in Guildford, Colin McInnes of Strathclyde University described the physics and feasibility of solar sailing, which harnesses the "pressure" of the sun's radiation.

ScienceNOW: Imagine cardboard-thin TV screens that stretch across entire walls or portable video screens that can be rolled up when not in use. Those are some of the possible applications for tiny, inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that researchers have developed. The new LEDs are just as thin as conventional organic LEDs and liquid-crystal displays, but they're much brighter and more versatile.

NPR: To build the 787, Boeing took two giant leaps. First, it created the structure not from metal, but from lightweight composite material. And second, it outsourced more than ever before.

Boeing has more than 800 orders for the new jet. It remains the best-selling new aircraft in the company's history.

But Boeing's 787 Dreamliner has also produced a lot of headaches from the outset. There have been a handful of cancellations for the first test flight, which was first scheduled for nearly two and a half years ago. And this week the man in charge of Boeing's passenger jet business was replaced.

The Register: In a project described as "the computing equivalent of the raising of the Mary Rose," engineers at Bletchley Park intend to restore a 1950s-era computer—featuring a magnificent 112.5 bytes of memory—to working order.

The machine in question was built at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire. It was designed in 1949 to automate the job of a human calculating team, whose work was apparently so boring that mistakes became unacceptably frequent.

NYTimes.com: IBM researcher Frances Ross is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics.

Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster, and more powerful than today's transistors.

The reason that many computer scientists are pursuing this goal is that the shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits.

CNET News: The Excalibur, a new turbine-electric hybrid propelled VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) unmanned attack drone, has successfully completed another test flight after taking on two new onboard computers last week.

Developed by Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. for the US Army Aviation Applied Technology Directorate and the Office of Naval Research, the Excalibur is another radical robo-craft concept vying to fill the military's burgeoning demand for specialized unmanned aerial vehicles.

NPR: Van Gogh, N.C. Wyeth, and other artists recycled canvases by painting over previous works. Today museum scientists are using new x-ray technology to uncover the outline of hidden paintings, and using chemistry to fill in the colors. Jennifer Mass, senior scientist at the scientific research and analysis laboratory at the Winterthur Museum, explains the techniques.

IEEE Spectrum: The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.

But why stop there?

In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger's character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field--virtual captions that enhance the cyborg's scan of a scene. In Rainbows End by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes.

"These visions might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach," says Babak A. Parviz.

"In fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle. These lenses don't give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we've powered wirelessly with RF. What we've done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology."

latimes.com: In a lab in Caltech, Harry Atwater holds up a plastic panel, a fraction of a millimeter thick. Even in the bright room, the surface's panel remains jet-black—absorbing all the light that hits it.

The high-tech material is 10 times more efficient at absorbing light than the regular silicon cells that some homeowners install on their roofs to harvest the energy of the sun.

It is one of several projects that Atwater's team at Caltech is pursuing in a push to design the next generation of solar cells—ones that are cheap, long-lasting and flexible enough to be practical for homeowners and businesses.

NPR: Researchers in several laboratories are vying for the claim that they have produced the world's smallest lasers. The lasers are a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Scientists hope they can be used to create even smaller and faster electronics, to study diseases, or possibly even to treat cancer from inside human cells.

Nanowerk: Electrospray-deposited polymer films can be used to make organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with better characteristics than those made from spin-coated films, according to Yutaka Yamagata of the RIKEN Center for Intellectual Property Strategies, Wako, and colleagues. These researchers have used a novel dual-solvent concept to make the electrospray-deposited films smoother than before, thereby enabling the superior devices to be built.

Related Link
Thin-Film Fabrication Method for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes Using Electrospray Deposition

NYTimes.com: India's national space agency said that communications with Chandrayaan-1, its first spacecraft to orbit the moon, were lost on Saturday and that its scientists were no longer controlling the orbiter.

Chandrayaan-1's mission was expected to continue for at least another year.

Related Physics Today article
Countries Race to Launch Moon Missions

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Chandrayaan-1 suffers critical malfunction
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Asian Powers Shoot for the Moon With Orbiting Research Missions

WSJ.com: In a vault beneath the British Library, Jeremy Leighton John, the library's first curator of eManuscripts, grapples with a formidable historical challenge.

How to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today's discoveries and better understand the people who made them.

His task is only getting harder: Scientists who collaborate via e-mail, Google, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them.

Computer-intensive experiments and the software used to analyze their output generate millions of gigabytes of data that are stored or retrieved by electronic systems that quickly become obsolete.

"It would be tragic if there were no record of lives that were so influential," John says.

Related Link
The future of saving our past Nature

Daily Telegraph: A draft report by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.

China mines over 95pc of the world's rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.

Rare metals play a vital role in most cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons.

Inside Science News Service: Like a person walking across a carpet, the international space station (ISS) accumulates a charge as it orbits the Earth as the ionosphere—the upper atmosphere that the ISS passes through—contains charged particles.

The interaction of charges in Earth's upper atmosphere with spacecraft surfaces have been studied for many years, but predicting how they will behave in a specific situation—such as an accumulation of excess charge on an airlock—is very difficult.

Furthermore, large differences in charging between two adjacent surfaces can lead to an arc discharge that can physically harm surfaces of the ISS, especially the thermal control coating. If such an arc discharge were to strike an astronaut, it could be very dangerous.

A new voltage-sampling device for monitoring the local electrical environment of the ISS has been successfully tested. The device, called the floating potential measurement unit, was built by scientists from Utah State University in Logan, Utah. One of the instrument team members, Aroh Barjatya of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, said that the peak measured voltage is about 35 volts which does not represent a significant threat for an arc-discharge. But as the space station increases in size as it achieves its final configuration, it could build up electrical current that could trigger an arc.

The ISS has a device called the plasma contactor unit that can mitigate and counter any charging hazard, and it can be used during spacewalks so that astronauts who touch an outer surface of the space station aren't in danger of arcing.

Barjatya said that a side benefit from the new voltage sampling device is that its measurements can be used to provide new "in situ" measurements for researchers who study the ionosphere.

Related Link
Data analysis of the Floating Potential Measurement Unit aboard the International Space Station

Disclaimer: Inside Science News Service is a service provided by the American Institute of Physics

Space.com: Officials are hurriedly looking for ways to save fuel on NASA's $79 million lunar impactor mission after a crisis Saturday caused the spacecraft to burn more than half of its remaining propellant.

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite used about 140 kilograms of maneuvering fuel to maintain the probe's orientation in space Saturday, according to Dan Andrews, the mission's project manager at Ames Research Center.

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CNET News: New research being developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, could reduce the size of proton accelerator machines from that of a football field to that of a traditional X-ray machine.

The smaller size and cost could increase the availability of proton therapy treatments.

Related Link
Electromagnetic and Thermal Simulations for the Switch Region of a Compact Proton Accelerator

Physics Today: CyArk, a US nonprofit organization, and the US National Park Service are aiming to digitally preserve Mount Rushmore in South Dakota next month by scanning it with a series of laser beams. The three-dimensional model will be accurate to within 3mm.

The digital record will be created with technical and logistical support from the Scottish government department Historic Scotland and its partner, the Glasgow School of Art, as part of a broad international collaboration in developing preservation techniques for at-risk historical sites.

"While Mount Rushmore is a national icon in the US, there is expertise in other countries which can assist us to preserve it in a modern context," says Gerard Baker, superintendent at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, at a press conference announcing the deal.

The record is to help re-create the monument if it falls victim to a climate change, natural disaster, war, or terrorism.

Some historical artifacts have already been lost and scientists have been unable to re-create the original artifacts because of the lack of records. A classic example is Afghanistan's 2000-year-old Buddha statues in the Bamiyan province, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Other sites at risk include the Acropolis in Athens which is threatened by acid rain, and Machu Picchu in Peru.

CyArk's ultimate aim is to create 3D models of 500 threatened sites around the world.

Related Link
Historic Scotland Launch Scottish and International 3D Scanning Project

The Independent: QinetiQ has perfected a technique that transforms a fiber optic cable into a highly sensitive microphone capable of detecting a single footstep from up to 40 km away.

The system works by picking up tiny seismic waves detected under the ground by the fiber optic cable which carries an optical pulse sent from a central computer. Virtual "microphones" created remotely every 10 meters along the cable register the vibrations through the ground. The patterns caused by the disturbances are then matched to digitally pre-sampled sounds such as footsteps, cars or diggers and the information fed back to a command center where personnel can assess whether the sound warrants further investigation or not.

Trials have already been staged in Europe to use the OptaSense system, as it's called. It has been deployed by several blue chip oil companies to protect energy pipelines that run through some of the most lawless and remote regions of the world.

Physics Today: An investigation by scientists of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration (see below right image) has put new constraints on on the amount of gravitational waves that could have come from the Big Bang—the initial creation of the universe—by not finding anything.

Most of the information gathered on the Big Bang comes from measuring the existing ratios of elements in the universe, and from the cosmic microwave background, an electromagnetic radiation "echo" of the Big Bang found at radio wavelengths.

A similar "echo" of gravitational waves is still believed to exist in the universe as the "stochastic background," analogous to a superposition of many waves of different sizes and directions on the surface of a pond. The amplitude of this background is directly related to the parameters that govern the behavior of the universe during the first minute after the Big Bang.

Earlier measurements of the cosmic microwave background have placed the most stringent upper limits of the stochastic gravitational wave background at very large distance scales and low frequencies. The new measurements—taken over a two-year period between 2005 and 2007—by LIGO and Virgo directly probe the gravitational wave background in the first minute of its existence, at time scales much shorter than accessible by the cosmic microwave background.

The research, which appears in Nature, also constrains models of cosmic strings, objects that are proposed to have been left over from the beginning of the universe and subsequently stretched to enormous lengths by the universe's expansion; the strings, some cosmologists say, can form loops that produce gravitational waves as they oscillate, decay, and eventually disappear.

Gravitational waves carry with them information about their violent origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot be obtained by conventional astronomical tools. The existence of the waves was predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. The LIGO and GEO instruments have been actively searching for the waves since 2002; the Virgo interferometer joined the search in 2007.

"Combining simultaneous data from the LIGO and Virgo interferometers gives information on gravitational-wave sources not accessible by other means. It is very encouraging that the first result of this alliance makes use of the unique feature of gravitational waves being able to probe the very early universe. This is very promising for the future," says Francesco Fidecaro, a professor of physics with the University of Pisa and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, and spokesperson for the Virgo Collaboration.

The analysis used data collected from the LIGO interferometers, a 2-km and a 4-km detector in Hanford, Washington (left), and a 4-km instrument in Livingston, Louisiana (below right). Each of the L-shaped interferometers uses a laser split into two beams that travel back and forth down long interferometer arms. The two beams are used to monitor the difference between the two interferometer arm lengths.

According to the general theory of relativity, one interferometer arm is slightly stretched while the other is slightly compressed when a gravitational wave passes by.

The interferometer is constructed in such a way that it can detect a change of less than a thousandth the diameter of an atomic nucleus in the lengths of the arms relative to each other.

Because of this extraordinary sensitivity, the instruments can now test some models of the evolution of the early universe that are expected to produce the stochastic background.

"Since we have not observed the stochastic background, some of these early-universe models that predict a relatively large stochastic background have been ruled out," says Vuk Mandic, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.

"We now know a bit more about parameters that describe the evolution of the universe when it was less than one minute old," Mandic adds. "We also know that if cosmic strings or superstrings exist, their properties must conform with the measurements we made—that is, their properties, such as string tension, are more constrained than before."

This could be interesting, he says, "because such strings could also be so-called fundamental strings, appearing in string-theory models. So our measurement also offers a way of probing string-theory models, which is very rare today."

"This result was one of the long-lasting milestones that LIGO was designed to achieve," Mandic says. Once it goes online in 2014, Advanced LIGO, which will utilize the infrastructure of the LIGO observatories and be 10 times more sensitive than the current instrument, will allow scientists to detect cataclysmic events such as black-hole and neutron-star collisions at 10-times-greater distances.

"Advanced LIGO will go a long way in probing early universe models, cosmic-string models, and other models of the stochastic background. We can think of the current result as a hint of what is to come," he adds.

"With Advanced LIGO, a major upgrade to our instruments, we will be sensitive to sources of extragalactic gravitational waves in a volume of the universe 1,000 times larger than we can see at the present time. This will mean that our sensitivity to gravitational waves from the Big Bang will be improved by orders of magnitude," says Jay Marx of the California Institute of Technology, LIGO's executive director.

"Gravitational waves are the only way to directly probe the universe at the moment of its birth; they're absolutely unique in that regard. We simply can't get this information from any other type of astronomy. This is what makes this result in particular, and gravitational-wave astronomy in general, so exciting," says David Reitze, a professor of physics at the University of Florida and spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Related Links
Gravity waves 'around the corner'
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration & The Virgo Collaboration. Nature 460, 990-994 (2009)

Physics Today: In one of the first examples of embedding a video player into a print magazine, the US television network CBS has paid Entertainment Weekly to play a 40-minute video in the 18 September issue. Ironically the ad mentioned Physics Today.

The video, which is activated when the magazine page is opened for more than 5 seconds, opens with Jim Parsons, the actor who plays Sheldon Cooper, a theoretical physicist on the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory, welcoming readers to "the current edition of Physics Today" before finding out he has been duped into supporting a different product.

Other parts of the page are touch sensitive to pull up additional content.

The advertisement is powered by technology similar to that used in a mobile phone. Designed by Los Angeles-based company Americhip, the video screen uses a 5 cm diagonal, 320x240 resolution, thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) says Americhips Bob Shaud. The display can be as large as 10 cm he adds, but the cost goes up significantly with larger displays.

The whole screen is only 2.7 mm thick and encased by polycarbonate to protect the display from damage. The remaining electronics are sandwiched behind the screen between two pieces of thick paper. The sound uses a similar chip to those found in electronic audio greeting cards. The battery lasts 65—70 minutes and can be recharged using a mini-usb connector.

The cost of embedding the video electronics is "more than a can of Pepsi," said CBS president of marketing George Schweitzer at a press conference earlier today, which is why only a small number of subscribers in New York and Los Angeles will receive the "video-in-print" ad, and why CBS managed to obtain additional sponsorship from the soft drinks manufacturer Pepsi. Paul Caine—president of the Time Inc. magazine group which publishes Entertainment Weekly—told the Wall Street Journal that it was in the "low teens."

"This is expensive technology," says Shoud "and the price per unit fluctuates depending on how many are ordered." A production run of 1,000 of these displays for a marketing campaign would lead to a cost per unit of about $50, increasing production to 100,000 units drops the price down to $20 he says.

In terms of educational use—such as embedding displays in textbooks—the pharmaceutical industry is evaluating whether the displays would be useful in providing doctors with instructions on how to use new drug examples.

Paul Guinnessy

Science: White light–emitting diodes (LEDs) have already cracked several niche lighting markets, such as flashlights and bike lights. But they're still not ready to go head to head with cheaper incandescent bulbs and fluorescents that dominate the nearly $100 billion global lighting market. A new spate of advances, however, suggests that the whitecoats are coming. "There is steady movement and progress in the field," says E. Fred Schubert, an electrical engineer and LED expert at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York.

Nature News: The world's smallest laser, contained in a silica sphere just 44 nanometres across, has been unveiled. At about 10 times smaller than the wavelength of light, however, this is no ordinary laser, it is the first ever 'spaser'

ScienceNOW: With $27 billion a year in sales, lithium-ion batteries already dominate the market for rechargeables. But there's always pressure to do better. Now researchers report that they've come up with a way to use nanotechnology to either significantly increase the energy storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries or reduce their weight while maintaining their current energy content. The new work could lead to everything from lighter laptops to electric cars with a considerably longer range.

Technology Review: Long-range, low-cost wireless internet could soon be delivered using radio spectrum once reserved for use by TV stations. The blueprints for a computer network that uses "white spaces," which are empty fragments of the spectrum scattered between used frequencies, will be presented today at ACM SIGCOMM 2009, a communications conference held in Barcelona, Spain.

New Scientist: A pack of private teams are racing to send robots to the Moon and claim the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize announced nearly two years ago.

So far 19 teams are registered for the contest, with two more teams—Quantum3 and SCSG—having withdrawn. To win, they must land a rover on the Moon that will then drive 500 meters before turning to photograph its landing site—all before the end of 2012. The team that does it first will pick up $20 million. Second place will earn $5 million and a further $5 million in bonuses will be awarded for finding relics from past US or Soviet Moon missions such as visiting the Apollo 11 landing site.

Physics Today: An engine which blends diesel and gasoline fuels could potentially be 20% more efficient than traditional gas engines, while also lowering the emissions, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The new "hybrid fuel" engine—based on a modified diesel engine from a Caterpillar truck—works via a technique called "fast-response fuel blending," in which the engine's fuel injection mixes the diesel and gas to the perfect ratio for the current combustion conditions.

A fully loaded truck may have a fuel mix of 85% gasoline to 15% diesel; under lighter loads, the percentage of diesel would increase to approximately 50–50.

Normally this type of blend wouldn't ignite in a diesel engine, because gasoline is less reactive than diesel and burns less easily. But in the hybrid fuel engine, just the right amount of diesel is injected to kick-start ignition.

"You can think of the diesel spray as a collection of liquid spark plugs, essentially, that ignite the gasoline," says Rolf Reitz, head of the research group.

This technique has two efficiency and one cost advantage, says Reitz. First, the engine operates at much lower combustion temperatures because of the improved control—as much as 40% lower than conventional engines—which leads to far less energy loss from the engine through heat transfer. Second, because of the burn optimization in the combustion chamber, there is less unburned fuel energy lost in the exhaust, which in turn produces fewer pollutant emissions. Third, the engine can use relatively inexpensive low-pressure fuel injection (commonly used in gasoline engines), instead of more expensive high-pressure injection required by conventional diesel engines.

Reitz's experiments show that the prototype is now the world's most efficient diesel-type engine in the world, with a 53% thermal efficiency, better even than a massive turbocharged two-stroke used in the maritime shipping industry, which has 50% thermal efficiency.

Thermal efficiency is defined by the percentage of fuel that is actually devoted to powering the engine, rather than being lost in heat transfer, exhaust, or other variables.

"For a small engine to even approach these massive engine efficiencies is remarkable," Reitz says. "Even more striking, the blending strategy could also be applied to automotive gasoline engines, which usually average a much lower 25 percent thermal efficiency. Here, the potential for fuel economy improvement would even be larger than in diesel truck engines." Reitz adds that they are already meeting the Environmental Protection Agency's 2010 emissions regulations with the prototype without the addition of expensive additions, such as the urea-injection catalytic reduction used in Mercedes diesel cars and trucks, for example.

The only downside would be the need to have two separate fuel tanks in the truck or car.

The work is funded by Department Of Energy and the College of Engineering Diesel Emissions Reduction Consortium, which includes 24 industry partners.

Reitz presented his findings today at the DOE's 15th Directions in Engine-Efficiency and Emissions Research Conference in Detroit, Michigan.

2009 AIP Industrial Physics Forum: Joseph Lykken of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory describes the many ways in which particle accelerators are used today, and what we will expect the next generation of accelerators to do.

The Atlantic: As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force.

Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that’s the scariest part says The Atlantic's Graeme Wood.

Related Physics Today articles
Geoengineering: What, how, and for whom? February 2009
Will desperate climates call for desperate geoengineering measures? August 2008

The Economist: Israel, with poor access to fossil fuels and a highly educated population, is growing its solar-power industry.

Shining sunlight onto silicon is the most direct way of turning it into electricity—the light knocks electrons free from the silicon atoms—but it is also the most expensive. Two small companies based in Jerusalem are trying, in different ways, to make solar energy cheaper.

The physicists and chemists at GreenSun Energy, led by Renata Reisfeld, think the way is to use less silicon. In their designs the solar cell uses only 20% of the silicon of existing solar cells.

Around the corner, Jonathan Goldstein of 3GSolar hopes to get rid of silicon altogether. 3G's "dye-sensitized" solar cells use titanium dioxide (more familiar as a pigment used in white paints) and complicated dye molecules that contain a metal called ruthenium. When one of the dye molecules is hit by light of sufficient energy, an electron is knocked out of it and absorbed by the titanium dioxide, before being passed out of the cell to do useful work.