Bend It, Charge It, Dunk It: Graphene, the Material of Tomorrow
By NICK BILTON             April 13, 2014, 11:00 am

I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

No, fans of “The Graduate,” the word isn’t “plastics.”

It’s “graphene.”

Graphene is the strongest, thinnest material known to exist. A form of carbon, it can conduct electricity and heat better than anything else. And get ready for this: It is not only the hardest material in the world, but also one of the most pliable.

Only a single atom thick, it has been called the wonder material.

Graphene could change the electronics industry, ushering in flexible devices, supercharged quantum computers, electronic clothing and computers that can interface with the cells in your body.

While the material was discovered a decade ago, it started to gain attention in 2010 when two physicists at the University of Manchester were awarded the Nobel Prize for their experiments with it. More recently, researchers have zeroed in on how to commercially produce graphene.

The American Chemical Society said in 2012 that graphene was discovered to be 200 times stronger than steel and so thin that a single ounce of it could cover 28 football fields. Chinese scientists have created a graphene aerogel, an ultralight material derived from a gel, that is one-seventh the weight of air. A cubic inch of the material could balance on one blade of grass.

“Graphene is one of the few materials in the world that is transparent, conductive and flexible — all at the same time,” said Dr. Aravind Vijayaraghavan, a lecturer at the University of Manchester. “All of these properties together are extremely rare to find in one material.”

Scientists develop bacterial ‘FM Radio’ Posted April 10, 2014 - 03:15             by Thomas Anderson

Programming living cells offers the prospect of harnessing sophisticated biological machinery for transformative applications in energy, agriculture, water remediation and medicine. Inspired by engineering, researchers in the emerging field of synthetic biology have designed a tool box of small genetic components that act as intracellular switches, logic gates, counters and oscillators.

But scientists have found it difficult to wire the components together to form larger circuits that can function as “genetic programs.” One of the biggest obstacles? Dealing with a small number of available wires.

A team of biologists and engineers at UC San Diego has taken a large step toward overcoming this obstacle. Their advance, detailed in a paper which appears in this week’s advance online publication of the journal Nature, describes their development of a rapid and tunable post-translational coupling for genetic circuits. This advance builds on their development of “biopixel” sensor arrays reported in Nature by the same group of scientists two years ago.

The problem the researchers solved arises from the noisy cellular environment that tends to lead to highly variable circuit performance. The components of a cell are intermixed, crowded and constantly bumping into each other. This makes it difficult to reuse parts in different parts of a program, limiting the total number of available parts and wires. These difficulties hindered the creation of genetic programs that can read the cellular environment and react with the execution of a sequence of instructions.

The team’s breakthrough involves a form of “frequency multiplexing” inspired by FM radio.

“This circuit lets us encode multiple independent environmental inputs into a single time series,” said Arthur Prindle, a bioengineering graduate student at UC San Diego and the first author of the study. “Multiple pieces of information are transferred using the same part. It works by using distinct frequencies to transmit different signals on a common channel.” 

Universe Measured With Near-Perfect Accuracy: Scientists Say It's Probably Infinite, Flat, And Eternal
By Ben Wolford on January 9, 2014 3:29 PM EST

Scientists have mapped the universe to 1 percent accuracy. (Photo: Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Scientists announced Thursday that they've pretty much figured out the universe, unlocking potential clues to mysterious "dark energy;" bolstering theories that the universe is flat, eternal, and infinite; and mapping 1.3 million galaxies down to about 1 percent accuracy. All of this from an experiment that isn't even done collecting data yet. It's supposed to keep going until June.

"We've done the analysis now because we have 90 percent of [the experiment's] final data, and we're tremendously excited by the results," says Martin White, chair of the survey team and physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. They announced the findings Thursday and have submitted their paper for publication with the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The team has good reason to be excited: no one has ever mapped the universe so accurately. As team leader David Schlegel put it, "I now know the size of the universe better than I know the size of my house."

They did it using a high-powered telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, which, for almost five years, has been hunting deep space for galaxies. Some of them are more than 6 billion light-years away and, therefore, at least as many years old (FYI, a light-year is a distance, equal to about 5.9 trillion miles). They say it may be the largest collection of redshift galaxies (galaxies moving away from us) ever compiled. By comparison, the new Hubble photo of deep space, said to capture the farthest reaches yet, only shows galaxies 3.5 billion light-years from earth.

With that information, the physicists looked for clusters of galaxies called Baryon acoustic oscillations, or baryons, which arrange themselves in circles around a central cluster. They're basically caused by pressure ripples from when the universe was formed about 13.4 billion years ago, which cooled and froze. In this case, they proved useful because the radius of each cluster is always the same. In effect, they are a 500-million-light-years-long measuring tape.

The scientists translated the data into a 3-D map of the universe. What they discovered is that the universe is "flat" — not in the two-dimensional sense, but in the physicist jargon sense. That is, its shape adheres to principles of basic fourth-grade geometry: A triangle's angles add up to 180 degrees, and that kind of thing. Here's the cool part about that: "One of the reasons we care is that a flat universe has implications for whether the universe is infinite," Schlegel says in the news release. "That means — while we can't say with certainty that it will never come to an end — it's likely the universe extends forever in space and will go on forever in time. Our results are consistent with an infinite universe."

That said, there will always be dissenting voices. These physicists in Denmark say the universe could die at any moment, and that this outcome is more likely that previously thought. "Maybe the collapse has already started somewhere in the universe, and right now it is eating its way into the rest of the universe," they said. "Maybe a collapse is starting right now, right here. Or maybe it will start far away from here in a billion years. We do not know."