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DNA: The next hot material in photonics?

Scientists fine-tune organic thin films with an eye toward biomedical devices

Using DNA from salmon, researchers in South Korea hope to make better biomedical and other photonic devices based on organic thin films. Often used in cancer treatments and health monitoring, thin films have all the capabilities of silicon-based devices with the possible added advantage of being more compatible with living tissue.

A thin film is just what it sounds like, a layer of material only nanometers or micrometers thick that can be used to channel light. If the film is a dielectric – that is, an insulator such as glass – it can be used without worrying that it might conduct electricity.

“DNA is the most abundant organic material, and it is a transparent dielectric, comparable to silica,” said Kyunghwan “Ken” Oh, of the Photonic Device Physics Laboratory at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. In the journal Optical Materials Express, from The Optical Society (OSA), Oh and his colleagues lay out their method for fabricating the thin films in a way that gives them fine control over the material’s optical and thermal properties.

As the basis for the silica glass that makes up optical fibers, silicon has long been a dominant material in inorganic photonic devices because it’s readily available and easy to work with from the materials perspective. Oh argues that DNA can play the same role in organic photonic devices because it can be found throughout the living world. It could, for instance, be used to make waveguides similar to silica fibers to carry light within the body. Organic devices should also be easy to manufacture, more flexible than silicon and environmentally friendly.

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Fricken heartbreaking.

It’s about time we put that perfectly good food to use rather than let it go to waste (x) | follow @the-future-now

「Howls Moving Castle (2004) {+color palletes} 」insp.

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Do you know anyone prone to pleonasm?

Read the full definition here: http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/2016/11/16?param=social

:)

Why can we find geometric shapes in the night sky? How can we know that at least two people in London have exactly the same number of hairs on their head? And why can patterns be found in just about any text — even Vanilla Ice lyrics? Is there a deeper meaning? 

The answer is no, and we know that thanks to a mathematical principle called Ramsey theory. So what is Ramsey theory? Simply put, it states that given enough elements in a set or structure, some particular interesting pattern among them is guaranteed to emerge.

The mathematician T.S. Motzkin once remarked that, “while disorder is more probable in general, complete disorder is impossible.” The sheer size of the Universe guarantees that some of its random elements will fall into specific arrangements, and because we evolved to notice patterns and pick out signals among the noise, we are often tempted to find intentional meaning where there may not be any. So while we may be awed by hidden messages in everything from books, to pieces of toast, to the night sky, their real origin is usually our own minds.

From the TED-Ed Lesson The origin of countless conspiracy theories - PatrickJMT

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