Researchers create all-electric spintronics

From PhysOrg.com:

Until now, scientists have attempted to develop spin transistors by incorporating local ferromagnets into device architectures. This results in significant design complexities, especially in view of the rising demand for smaller and smaller transistors," says Philippe Debray, research professor in the Department of Physics in the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences. "A far better and practical way to manipulate the orientation of an electron's spin would be by using purely electrical means, like the switching on and off of an electrical voltage. This will be spintronics without ferromagnetism or all-electric spintronics, the holy grail of semiconductor spintronics."

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A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database

http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-of-the-olsonzoneinfotz-database/

What I didn’t appreciate, until I finally unzipped and untarred a copy of ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2009o.tar.gz, is the historical scholarship scribbled in the margins of this remarkable database, or document, or hybrid of the two.

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Transforming nanowires into nano-tools using cation exchange reactions

From PhysOrg.com:

A team of engineers from the University of Pennsylvania has transformed simple nanowires into reconfigurable materials and circuits, demonstrating a novel, self-assembling method for chemically creating nanoscale structures that are not possible to grow or obtain otherwise.

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Seeing Previously Invisible Molecules for the First Tim

From PhysOrg.com:

A team of Harvard chemists led by X. Sunney Xie has developed a new microscopic technique for seeing, in color, molecules with undetectable fluorescence. The room-temperature technique allows researchers to identify previously unseen molecules in living organisms and offers broad applications in biomedical imaging and research.

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Gizmo Converts Light Into Motion

From Science:

A tiny ladderlike beam of silicon converts light into vibrations and vice versa with extremely high efficiency, physicists report. That may seem like an esoteric result, but the finding could open the way to new physics and someday serve as a key element in optical microcircuits akin to the electronic microcircuits in computer chips.

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Researchers find new route to nano self-assembly

From PhysOrg.com:

If the promise of nanotechnology is to be fulfilled, nanoparticles will have to be able to make something of themselves. An important advance towards this goal has been achieved by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who have found a simple and yet powerfully robust way to induce nanoparticles to assemble themselves into complex arrays.

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New material could efficiently power tiny generators

From PhysOrg.com:

Very little mechanical energy would be needed to power the new nanogenerator because even a small amount of displacement has a larger effect on nanoscale materials than regular materials — a theory Wang intends to prove in his lab.

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Carbenes: New molecules have wide applications

From PhysOrg.com:

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have created in the laboratory a class of carbenes, highly reactive molecules, used to make catalysts - substances that facilitate chemical reactions. Until now, chemists believed these carbenes, called "abnormal N-heterocyclic carbenes" or aNHCs, were impossible to make.

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Running electronics using light

From PhysOrg.com:

"If you open up almost any electronic gadget, you will see various elements that operating using electric circuitries," Nader Engheta tells PhysOrg.com. "Many of them have different functionalities, such as inductors, capacitors, resistors, transistors, and so forth. These well-known elements have been around for decades. But what if you could bring these concepts to the nanoscale, and what if they could operate with light instead of electricity?"

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Going plasmonic in search of faster computing, communications

From PhysOrg.com:

A team of European researchers has demonstrated some of the first commercially viable plasmonic devices, paving the way for a new era of high-speed communications and computing in which electronic and optical signals can be handled simultaneously.

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