Monthly Archives: January 2014

ElbaTech Srl: High Voltage Amplifier and Nanotechnology www.elbatech.com – Video

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ElbaTech Srl: High Voltage Amplifier and Nanotechnology http://www.elbatech.com
ElbaTech, Atomic Force Microscopy, SPM, QCM, Quartz Crystal Microbalance, High Voltage Amplifier, Nanotechnology, MEMS, 1-Wire, Phototrap, Sensor for environ...

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When nanotechnology meets quantum physics in one dimension: New experiment supports long-predicted ‘Luttinger liquid …

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Jan. 23, 2014 How would electrons behave if confined to a wire so slender they could pass through it only in single-file?

The question has intrigued scientists for more than half a century. In 1950, Japanese Nobel Prize winner Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, followed by American physicist Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger in 1963, came up with a mathematical model showing that the effects of one particle on all others in a one-dimensional line would be much greater than in two- or three-dimensional spaces. Among quantum physicists, this model came to be known as the "Luttinger liquid" state.

Until very recently, however, there had been only a few successful attempts to test the model in devices similar to those in computers, because of the engineering complexity involved. Now, scientists from McGill University and Sandia National Laboratories have succeeded in conducting a new experiment that supports the existence of the long-sought-after Luttinger liquid state. Their findings, published in the Jan. 23 issue of Science Express, validate important predictions of the Luttinger liquid model.

The experiment was led by McGill PhD student Dominique Laroche under the supervision of Professor Guillaume Gervais of McGill's Department of Physics and Dr. Michael Lilly of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. The new study follows on the team's discovery in 2011 of a way to engineer one of the world's smallest electronic circuits, formed by two wires separated by only about 15 nanometers, or roughly 150 atoms.

What does one-dimensional quantum physics involve? Gervais explains it this way: "Imagine that you are driving on a highway and the traffic is not too dense. If a car stops in front of you, you can get around it by passing to the left or right. That's two-dimensional physics. But if you enter a tunnel with a single lane and a car stops, all the other cars behind it must slam on the brakes. That's the essence of the Luttinger liquid effect. The way electrons behave in the Luttinger state is entirely different because they all become coupled to one another."

To scientists, "what is so fascinating and elegant about quantum physics in one dimension is that the solutions are mathematically exact," Gervais adds. "In most other cases, the solutions are only approximate."

Making a device with the correct parameters to conduct the experiment was no simple task, however, despite the team's 2011 discovery of a way to do so. It took years of trial, and more than 250 faulty devices -- each of which required 29 processing steps -- before Laroche's painstaking efforts succeeded in producing functional devices yielding reliable data. "So many things could go wrong during the fabrication process that troubleshooting the failed devices felt like educated guesswork at times," explains Laroche. "Adding in the inherent failure rate compounded at each processing step made the fabrication of these devices extremely challenging."

In particular, the experiment measures the effect that a very small electrical current in one of the wires has on a nearby wire. This can be viewed as the "friction" between the two circuits, and the experiment shows that this friction increases as the circuits are cooled to extremely low temperatures. This effect is a strong prediction of Luttinger liquid theory.

The experiments were conducted both at McGill University and at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences user facility operated by Sandia National Laboratories.

"It took a very long time to make these devices," said Lilly. "It's not impossible to do in other labs, but Sandia has crystal-growing capabilities, a microfabrication facility, and support for fundamental research from DOE's office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES), and we're very interested in understanding the fundamental ideas that drive the behavior of very small systems."

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When nanotechnology meets quantum physics in one dimension: New experiment supports long-predicted 'Luttinger liquid ...

Researchers’ precision engineering to target disease

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Researchers at the University of Queensland are using nano-engineered oil droplets to target infectious diseases and cancer cells.

The UQ Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology researchers say the droplets, called nanoemulsions, can effectively target diseased cells and provoke specific immune responses.

The nanoemulsions carry antibodies and protein and can generate an immune response against infectious diseases such as influenza, HIV and malaria.

A paper on the development has been published in the international journal SMALL

Researcher Dr Frank Sainbury said the journal paper provided proof of the precise targeting that could be achieved by nanoemulsions.

He said it addressed challenges with existing targeted therapies, such as limited drug-carrying capacity and difficulty of manufacture.

An ability to target specific cells gives the emulsion the potential to overcome side-effects of broad-spectrum treatments such as chemotherapy, which attacks healthy cells as well as cancerous ones.

Dr Sainsbury said the nanoemulsion could hold antibodies, releasing them only when targeted cells were found.

This is about efficient targeting, he said.

Nanoemulsions have a long, safe history in pharmaceutical formulations.

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Researchers' precision engineering to target disease

DropTask Is A Productivity App That Does Away With To-Do Lists

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To do or not to do. That is the question for anyone who has a love/hate relationship with productivity apps. Ive tested out so many different to-do list, mind-mapping, and Getting Things Done (GTD) apps (as well as various pen-and-paper planner hacks) that I sometimes wonder if its become just another way for me to procrastinate.

My main challenge is that no matter how many productivity apps I try, my to-do list never seems to get shorter, and seeing row after row after row of uncompleted tasks every day is discouraging. DropTask wants to cure to-do list malaise by getting rid of the list altogether. Developed by a UK-based startup, DropTask lets people drag and drop tasks into circles of different colors, then filter them by priority and deadline. You can change the size of circles, and add different people to projects. (Members can also switch to a list view if they prefer, which includes all the same information as the circle view). For visually-oriented people, this layout can help boost productivity (or at least cut down on stress) by letting them see big projects split into small, manageable parts.

Originally a Web app, DropTask is now also available for iPhone ($2.99) and iPad ($4.99).

I found DropTasks circle view works very well with the iPads touchscreen, but is difficult to navigate on the iPhones smaller screen. The app is cloud-based, so I recommend downloading the iPhone app only if you need to use the app while youre out-and-about.

There are already a lot of productivity apps out there for visually-oriented people, like iMindMap and iThoughts. DropTask also competes with products like Asana, Wunderlist, and Trello.

DropTask wants to differentiate not only with its colorful user interface, but also by being as easy and intuitive to use as possible, even for larger projects.

More often than not, when a new task management application is brought into the picture, the user has to take time to read support articles, learn about all the features, and also how to navigate in and around the app its virtually a task within itself, DropTask marketing executive Yogita Khetia told me in an email. But with DropTask, weve aimed to keep things simple, yet powerful.

DropTask can help individuals stay on top of their daily to-do lists and deadlines (Khetia says the app is especially helpful for harried students because its layout helps them instantly see what they have to do for each class). There are also enough features, including the ability to upload files, assign tasks, track progress, and communicate within the app, to make DropTask useful for business users, family members, class projects, or any other group.

We believe the user experience is really heightened when the individual user transitions into working collaboratively and invites others to share projects with, says Khetia.

The app already has enough collaboration features for small teams, but DropTask PRO, which is schedule to launch soon, will include project templates and the DropTask inbox to let users email tasks directly into the app. The startup is also developing a set of user permission and management features to give collaborators and project owners more control over what people can see and edit, and an Android version of the mobile app.

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DropTask Is A Productivity App That Does Away With To-Do Lists

How Imgur Became a Meme Machine

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There is a website where cats and dogs rule the day, profanities are common, and clips from Lord of the Rings movies can be used to convey universal sentiments like the joy of revenge. All right, there are plenty of websites like that, but this one is more popular than those of the Weather Channel and the New York Times. Although it looks like just another photo-sharing hub, its the best example yet of how a new generation of Internet users prefers to express itself.

Imgur (pronounced imager) is a place to post and browse GIFs, the Internets de facto file format for pictures and short, punchy animated clips designed for sharing on social networks. The company has only 11 employees and is located in a seedy San Francisco neighborhood, on the fourth floor of a low-rise building whose lobby combines the scents of trash and disinfectant. Yet Imgurs already profitable, thanks to a stream of display ads from movie studios and video game publishers, and is well on its way to becoming one of the highest-traffic sites in the world, with more than 120 million monthly unique visitors posting images and searching for jolts of humor and insight. GIFs work because the punch line is instantaneous, says Imgur founder Alan Schaaf, 26. Its entirely different from almost any other form of content on the Internet, which takes time to consume.

Imgurs morsels of media are typically trivial, pleasantly distracting, and sometimes bewildering. A quarter of the user-submitted images involve cats and dogs, often running into objects, falling off tables, and cuddling with or fighting other animals. Many images are overlaid with short captions, meant to convey an emotion that could turn that slim slice of content into a meme that resonates with Internet users and inspires them to use it in their conversations on Facebook (FB) or Twitter (TWTR). You guys are adorable, reads the caption on one image of the Mars rover. Shaken, not stirred, reads the caption on a photo of a dog with tuxedo-patterned markings wearing a bow tie.

The company hasnt raised any venture capital, making it an anomaly in high tech. It charges heavy users $24 per year for features such as unlimited image storage and the ability to post high-bandwidth animated GIFs.

The sites appeal lies partly in its ease of use: Users dont have to register. They can jump between images with a click, and they quickly show their approval or disapproval of an image with either an up or down vote or a short comment. The most popular images are posted in a gallery on Imgurs home page that gets about 77 million views per day. Its easy to laugh at and to downplay when you dont take into account the sheer scale at which Imgur is operating at now, says Tim Hwang, co-founder of ROFLCon, an annual conference about Internet culture. People are finding out they can say more with Imgur and an animated GIF than they can with anything else.

Schaaf started the company while a junior at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in 2009, as a photo-uploading tool for Reddit, the popular news and entertainment website. Traffic from Reddit was overwhelming other photo-sharing services: When an image was in high demand, sites such as Photobucket would pull the file and ask the person who posted it to pay for a premium account. Because of that upper limit on popularity, Schaaf says, images could not go viral in the same way videos could take off on YouTube. His site let Reddit users easily augment their posts with pictures. He launched it with a post entitled, My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesnt suck. What do you think?

Imgur ran off user donations for the first six months. Then Schaaf got a $25,000 grant from a small fund associated with his university and eventually started running Google (GOOG) ads to pay his storage costs. Over the next few years he opened the gallery and turned the site into an online destination in its own right. In 2011, Schaaf moved the company to San Francisco to be closer to the rest of the tech industry. It has since surpassed Reddit, whose monthly audience numbers around 85 million.

Imgurs users upload about 1.5 million images a day and spend an average of 10 minutes on the site (more than the average time spent on a well-known porn site, Schaaf says). You can easily spend an hour going through 100 pictures, says user ShamrockFury, whose real name is Stephen, and who asked that his last name be withheld because he doesnt want his boss to know how he spends time at work. He says hes drawn to the site as an easy source of distraction and enjoys trying to reach the home page gallery with his contributions, like a recent clip of a raccoon stealing pet food as two cats watch. Sampling the unfiltered stream of GIFs as they upload to the site is basically like looking into the mind of a 14-year-old boy, he says.

Imgur is the latest in a long line of image-sharing services that have captured large online audiences. Sites such as Photobucket, Flickr, Shutterfly (SFLY), and Instagram all were acquired or had initial public offerings. While many such sites focus on allowing users to organize their photos and create collections, Imgur was purely optimized for getting your image on the Internet as quickly and easily as possible, says Schaaf. The site provides a short link with each image to facilitate sharing on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

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How Imgur Became a Meme Machine