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Storing data in holograms
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NORTHROP GRUMMAN
TECHNOLOGY
US plays ‘I spy a broken sat’ SPY satellites have a new role: as well as watching us they are now spying on each other. The Pentagon admitted last week that it is using two covert inspection satellites developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to assess damage to a failed geostationary satellite – something no one suspected the US could do. If such satellites can get that close to a target, they could probably attack it. The Department of Defense says its Mitex micro-satellites, which were launched in 2006, have been jetting around the geostationary ring and have now jointly inspected DSP 23, which was designed to pinpoint clandestine missile launches and nuclear tests, but which stopped working a year after its November 2007 launch. The micro-satellites are trying to nail the problem.
Theresa Hitchens, who becomes director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva this week, is troubled by the secrecy surrounding launch of the Mitex craft. It raises questions about their future use, including potential anti-satellite missions, she says.
“Other nations, notably China, will find this suspicious, and the US behaviour hypocritical” “I am positive other nations, particularly China, will find this development suspicious – and the US behaviour regarding the programme as hypocritical, given that Washington is always chastising Beijing for its lack of transparency regarding its space programmes and intentions,” she says.
–Under surveillance–
Tiny motor could power microbots
My other disc is a hologram
SWIMMING microbots small enough to make their way through arteries are a step closer, thanks to the creation of a tiny mechanical motor. Developed by engineers at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, the motor uses a piezoelectric material that vibrates in response to an applied electric field to rotate a flagellumlike tail. At just a quarter of a millimetre in diameter, the device is the smallest of its kind (Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, DOI: 10.1088/ 09601317/19/2/022001). The motor could propel a microbot through the bloodstream at up to 6 centimetres per second, the team says. Compared with sensors and microchips, mechanical motors have not shrunk significantly in the last 50 years, they add.
FORGET Blu-ray. Discs which can store 20 times as much data in 3D holograms just moved a step closer, thanks to better materials. To write the data, two laser beams are aimed at a disc of lightsensitive polymer. One beam has been encoded with patches representing 0s and 1s by shining it through a digital “mask”. At the point in the disc where the beams intersect, they interfere with each other to create islands of bright light and regions of darkness. Where the lasers’ interference pattern creates bright areas on the disc, small monomer molecules
40bn online music files were shared illegally in 2008, compared with 1.4 billion legal downloads, says the recording industry
link up to form chains with a different refractive index. The data is stored in this pattern, which like a hologram can be read back with another laser. One initial problem was that the polymers from which the discs are made tend to shrink during this process, creating distortions that make it difficult to read the data back. So Craig Hawker’s team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have replaced the small monomers with larger ones. Because these take up more space, fewer bonds form between them, reducing this shrinkage and eliminating distortions, Hawker says (Chemical Communications, DOI: 10.1039/b816298k).
“Whopper Sacrifice has been sacrificed” A Burger King message terminating the popular Facebook application, which gave users a free burger in return for dumping 10 “friends”. Facebook was concerned that automatic alerts telling people they had been dumped infringed the dumpers’ privacy (The New York Times, 15 January)
24 January 2009 | NewScientist | 21
NORTHROP GRUMMAN
TECHNOLOGY
US plays ‘I spy a broken sat’ SPY satellites have a new role: as well as watching us they are now spying on each other. The Pentagon admitted last week that it is using two covert inspection satellites developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to assess damage to a failed geostationary satellite – something no one suspected the US could do. If such satellites can get that close to a target, they could probably attack it. The Department of Defense says its Mitex micro-satellites, which were launched in 2006, have been jetting around the geostationary ring and have now jointly inspected DSP 23, which was designed to pinpoint clandestine missile launches and nuclear tests, but which stopped working a year after its November 2007 launch. The micro-satellites are trying to nail the problem.
Theresa Hitchens, who becomes director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva this week, is troubled by the secrecy surrounding launch of the Mitex craft. It raises questions about their future use, including potential anti-satellite missions, she says.
“Other nations, notably China, will find this suspicious, and the US behaviour hypocritical” “I am positive other nations, particularly China, will find this development suspicious – and the US behaviour regarding the programme as hypocritical, given that Washington is always chastising Beijing for its lack of transparency regarding its space programmes and intentions,” she says.
–Under surveillance–
Tiny motor could power microbots
My other disc is a hologram
SWIMMING microbots small enough to make their way through arteries are a step closer, thanks to the creation of a tiny mechanical motor. Developed by engineers at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, the motor uses a piezoelectric material that vibrates in response to an applied electric field to rotate a flagellumlike tail. At just a quarter of a millimetre in diameter, the device is the smallest of its kind (Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, DOI: 10.1088/ 09601317/19/2/022001). The motor could propel a microbot through the bloodstream at up to 6 centimetres per second, the team says. Compared with sensors and microchips, mechanical motors have not shrunk significantly in the last 50 years, they add.
FORGET Blu-ray. Discs which can store 20 times as much data in 3D holograms just moved a step closer, thanks to better materials. To write the data, two laser beams are aimed at a disc of lightsensitive polymer. One beam has been encoded with patches representing 0s and 1s by shining it through a digital “mask”. At the point in the disc where the beams intersect, they interfere with each other to create islands of bright light and regions of darkness. Where the lasers’ interference pattern creates bright areas on the disc, small monomer molecules
40bn online music files were shared illegally in 2008, compared with 1.4 billion legal downloads, says the recording industry
link up to form chains with a different refractive index. The data is stored in this pattern, which like a hologram can be read back with another laser. One initial problem was that the polymers from which the discs are made tend to shrink during this process, creating distortions that make it difficult to read the data back. So Craig Hawker’s team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have replaced the small monomers with larger ones. Because these take up more space, fewer bonds form between them, reducing this shrinkage and eliminating distortions, Hawker says (Chemical Communications, DOI: 10.1039/b816298k).
“Whopper Sacrifice has been sacrificed” A Burger King message terminating the popular Facebook application, which gave users a free burger in return for dumping 10 “friends”. Facebook was concerned that automatic alerts telling people they had been dumped infringed the dumpers’ privacy (The New York Times, 15 January)
24 January 2009 | NewScientist | 21