Being The Only Audience Member At A Panel, The Grad Student Pities Everyone In The Room.

Engineers build world’s lightest mechanical watch thanks to graphene

An ultralight high-performance mechanical watch made with graphene is unveiled today in Geneva at the Salon International De La Haute Horlogerie thanks to a unique collaboration.

The University of Manchester has collaborated with watchmaking brand Richard Mille and McLaren F1 to create world’s lightest mechanical chronograph by pairing leading graphene research with precision engineering.

The RM 50-03 watch was made using a unique composite incorporating graphene to manufacture a strong but lightweight new case to house the delicate watch mechanism. The graphene composite known as Graph TPT weighs less than previous similar materials used in watchmaking.

Graphene is the world’s first two-dimensional material at just one-atom thick. It was first isolated at The University of Manchester in 2004 and has the potential to revolutionise a large number of applications including, high-performance composites for the automotive and aerospace industries, as well as flexible, bendable mobile phones and tablets and next-generation energy storage.

Read more.

Building microfluidic circuits is generally a multi-day process, requiring a clean room and specialized manufacturing equipment. A new study suggests a quicker alternative using fluid walls to define the circuit instead of solid ones. The authors refer to their technique as “Freestyle Fluidics”. As seen above, the shape of the circuit is printed in the operating fluid, then covered by a layer of immiscible, transparent fluid. This outer layer help prevent evaporation. Underneath, the circuit holds its shape due to interfacial forces pinning it in place. Those same forces can be used to passively drive flow in the circuit, as shown in the lower animation, where fluid is pumped from one droplet to the other by pressure differences due to curvature. Changing the width of connecting channels can also direct flow in the circuits. This technique offers better biocompatibility than conventional microfluidic circuits, and the authors hope that this, along with simplified manufacturing, will help the technique spread. (Image and research credit: E. Walsh et al., source)

Theatre time. All dancer have their own ways of getting ready for a show. I believe that a consistent routine is important to preparing for what’s ahead in a few hours. Because Forsythe’s “Artifact” is so hard on the body and I’m in every show, I tend to get to the theatre pretty early to make sure everything is ready, to put on some “normatec” boots (a compression boot for athletes that helps greatly with fatigue) and do hair and makeup. - Lia Cirio

Lia Cirio - Boston Opera House

Follow the Ballerina Project on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter & Pinterest

For information on purchasing Ballerina Project limited edition prints.

Your blog is super cool! I have a few questions. How do you get your equipment and chemicals to carry out your experiments? I was just wondering as I'd like to start doing experiments at home. What would be a good experiment to start with also? Sorry if you have already answered these questions

Hey, thanks for the kind words! This is going to be a long answer! Let’s start with equipment:

Keep reading

Black phosphorus holds promise for the future of electronics

Discovered more than 100 years ago, black phosphorus was soon forgotten when there was no apparent use for it. In what may prove to be one of the great comeback stories of electrical engineering, it now stands to play a crucial role in the future of electronic and optoelectronic devices.

With a research team’s recent discovery, the material could possibly replace silicon as the primary material for electronics. The team’s research, led by Fengnian Xia, Yale’s Barton L. Weller Associate Professor in Engineering and Science, is published in the journal Nature Communications April 19.

With silicon as a semiconductor, the quest for ever-smaller electronic devices could soon reach its limit. With a thickness of just a few atomic layers, however, black phosphorus could usher in a new generation of smaller devices, flexible electronics, and faster transistors, say the researchers.

That’s due to two key properties. One is that black phosphorus has a higher mobility than silicon—that is, the speed at which it can carry an electrical charge. The other is that it has a bandgap, which gives a material the ability to act as a switch; it can turn on and off in the presence of an electric field and act as a semiconductor. Graphene, another material that has generated great interest in recent years, has a very high mobility, but it has no bandgap.

Read more.

How we determine who’s to blame

How do people assign a cause to events they witness? Some philosophers have suggested that people determine responsibility for a particular outcome by imagining what would have happened if a suspected cause had not intervened.

This kind of reasoning, known as counterfactual simulation, is believed to occur in many situations. For example, soccer referees deciding whether a player should be credited with an “own goal” — a goal accidentally scored for the opposing team — must try to determine what would have happened had the player not touched the ball.

This process can be conscious, as in the soccer example, or unconscious, so that we are not even aware we are doing it. Using technology that tracks eye movements, cognitive scientists at MIT have now obtained the first direct evidence that people unconsciously use counterfactual simulation to imagine how a situation could have played out differently.

“This is the first time that we or anybody have been able to see those simulations happening online, to count how many a person is making, and show the correlation between those simulations and their judgments,” says Josh Tenenbaum, a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the senior author of the new study.

Tobias Gerstenberg, a postdoc at MIT who will be joining Stanford’s Psychology Department as an assistant professor next year, is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Oct. 17 issue of Psychological Science. Other authors of the paper are MIT postdoc Matthew Peterson, Stanford University Associate Professor Noah Goodman, and University College London Professor David Lagnado.

Follow the ball

Until now, studies of counterfactual simulation could only use reports from people describing how they made judgments about responsibility, which offered only indirect evidence of how their minds were working.

Gerstenberg, Tenenbaum, and their colleagues set out to find more direct evidence by tracking people’s eye movements as they watched two billiard balls collide. The researchers created 18 videos showing different possible outcomes of the collisions. In some cases, the collision knocked one of the balls through a gate; in others, it prevented the ball from doing so.

Before watching the videos, some participants were told that they would be asked to rate how strongly they agreed with statements related to ball A’s effect on ball B, such as, “Ball A caused ball B to go through the gate.” Other participants were asked simply what the outcome of the collision was.

As the subjects watched the videos, the researchers were able to track their eye movements using an infrared light that reflects off the pupil and reveals where the eye is looking. This allowed the researchers, for the first time, to gain a window into how the mind imagines possible outcomes that did not occur.

“What’s really cool about eye tracking is it lets you see things that you’re not consciously aware of,” Tenenbaum says. “When psychologists and philosophers have proposed the idea of counterfactual simulation, they haven’t necessarily meant that you do this consciously. It’s something going on behind the surface, and eye tracking is able to reveal that.”

The researchers found that when participants were asked questions about ball A’s effect on the path of ball B, their eyes followed the course that ball B would have taken had ball A not interfered. Furthermore, the more uncertainty there was as to whether ball A had an effect on the outcome, the more often participants looked toward ball B’s imaginary trajectory.

“It’s in the close cases where you see the most counterfactual looks. They’re using those looks to resolve the uncertainty,” Tenenbaum says.

Participants who were asked only what the actual outcome had been did not perform the same eye movements along ball B’s alternative pathway.

“The idea that causality is based on counterfactual thinking is an idea that has been around for a long time, but direct evidence is largely lacking,” says Phillip Wolff, an associate professor of psychology at Emory University, who was not involved in the research. “This study offers more direct evidence for that view.”

(Image caption: In this video, two participants’ eye-movements are tracked while they watch a video clip. The blue dot indicates where each participant is looking on the screen. The participant on the left was asked to judge whether they thought that ball B went through the middle of the gate. Participants asked this question mostly looked at the balls and tried to predict where ball B would go. The participant on the right was asked to judge whether ball A caused ball B to go through the gate. Participants asked this question tried to simulate where ball B would have gone if ball A hadn’t been present in the scene. Credit: Tobias Gerstenberg)

How people think

The researchers are now using this approach to study more complex situations in which people use counterfactual simulation to make judgments of causality.

“We think this process of counterfactual simulation is really pervasive,” Gerstenberg says. “In many cases it may not be supported by eye movements, because there are many kinds of abstract counterfactual thinking that we just do in our mind. But the billiard-ball collisions lead to a particular kind of counterfactual simulation where we can see it.”

One example the researchers are studying is the following: Imagine ball C is headed for the gate, while balls A and B each head toward C. Either one could knock C off course, but A gets there first. Is B off the hook, or should it still bear some responsibility for the outcome?

“Part of what we are trying to do with this work is get a little bit more clarity on how people deal with these complex cases. In an ideal world, the work we’re doing can inform the notions of causality that are used in the law,” Gerstenberg says. “There is quite a bit of interaction between computer science, psychology, and legal science. We’re all in the same game of trying to understand how people think about causation.”

Making twisted semiconductors for 3-D projection

A smartphone display that can produce 3-D images will need to be able to twist the light it emits. Now, researchers at the University of Michigan and the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have discovered a way to mass-produce spiral semiconductors that can do just that.

Back in 1962, University of Michigan engineers E. Leith and J. Upatnieks unveiled realistic 3-D images with the invention of practical holography. The first holographic images of bird on a train were made by creating standing waves of light with bright and dark spots in space, which creates an illusion of material object. It was made possible by controlling polarization and phase of light, i.e. the direction and the timing of electromagnetic wave fluctuations.

The semiconductor helices created by U-M-led team can do exactly that with photons that pass through, reflected from, and emitted by them. They can be incorporated into other semiconductor devices to vary the polarization, phase, and color of light emitted by the different pixels, each of them made from the precisely designed semiconductor helices.

Read more.

On this day in 1996, then-World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov makes his first move in the sixth game against Deep Blue, IBM’s supercomputer. Kasparov emerged the victor, winning three games, drawing in two, and losing one.

via reddit