Click image above to zoom in

This is all basic stuff to anyone who's taken a physics class, but a lot of you have not, so I've made this graphic to show the distance between the two elements. You can click to zoom, but the electron is still invisible. To see it in all its scary glory, go to the page and scroll all the way to the left. As the page says: "We are all phantoms."

It's a good thing various fields take care of the whole empty space bit, or else we'd just pass through each other. [Phrenopolis]

The quantum clock, developed by physicist Chin-wen Chou of the NIST, keeps time by measuring the energy of a single aluminum ion with UV lasers. It loses one second every 3.4 billion years, compared to the cesium fountain clock which loses a second every 100 million years, and upon which the current international standard is based.

In fact, the new quantum-logic clock is so precise that Chou's team can't even measure it, as the current definition of a second is based on the prevailing cesium clock.

Don't get too excited about setting your life to a more precise clock just yet: there are currently no plans to adopt the quantum clock as the international standard. But with potential applications ranging from use in more precise GPS devices to answering questions about the speed of light and Einsteinian relativity, this clock is still a serious tick into the future. [Wired via Make]

An excerpt:

The nanorobotic arm is built out of DNA origami: large strands of DNA gently encouraged to fold in precise ways by interaction with a few hundred short DNA strands. The products, around 100 nanometers in diameter, are eight times larger and three times more complex than what could be built with a simple crystalline DNA array, vastly expanding the space of possible structures. Other nanoscale structures or machines built by Dr. Seeman and his collaborators including a nanoscale walking biped, truncated DNA octahedrons, and sequence-dependent molecular switch arrays. Dr. Seeman has exploited structural features of DNA thought to be used in genetic recombination to operate his nanoscale devices, tapping into the very processes underlying all life.

The article paints this as the next Industrial Revolution, which is troubling for me personally because the first one was complicated enough (steam? what?) and nanotechnology is way too much for my feeble brain to handle, but I can totally understand tiny robots. And I approve, as long as they're as adorable as their tiny size demands. [H+ Magazine]

Now, the picture above is pretty unremarkable, right? Black and white (trivia: molecules have no color), grainy, shot in the kind of out-of-focus manner you expect from a guy like me, who can't seem to venture out beyond the Auto setting on his entry-level Nikon D40 DSLR. But wait a second. Doesn't the image kind of seem, well, familiar? Like high school chem class familiar? Balls and sticks familiar?

Here's another image; a computer generated image that's much more at home for anyone who studied atoms and molecules in the dead and gone days of 1997:

Make sense now? That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the "specimen"—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.

You can actually make out each of those atoms and their bonds, and it's thanks to this: An atomic force microscope.

Like the venerable electron microscope, but more powerful and with an eye for the third dimension, the AFM is able to make the nano world something we humans can appreciate visually. Using a silicon microscale cantilever coated in carbon dioxide (tiny, tiny needle), lasers, an "ultrahigh vacuum" and temperatures that hovered around 5 Kelvin, the AFM imaged the pentacene in nanometers. It did this while sitting a mere 0.5 nanometers above the surface and its previously invisible bonds for 20 long, unmoving hours. The length of time is noteworthy, said IBM scientist Leo Goss in statement from IBM, because any movement whatsoever would have disrupted the delicate atomic bonds and ruined the image.

And that's the real beauty of this image. For the first time ever we can see where each of those carbon and hydrogen atoms line up, and the overall symmetrical shape they create. In 3D.

Quirky, Quarky, Quantum Computing

That IBM, a hardware company, was the entity to accomplish this feat should be fairly obvious, given what we know (and don't yet know) about quantum computing. Said an IBM representative in an email to me this morning, "This pioneering achievement and the new insights gained from the experiments extend the ability of scientists to study matter with atomic resolution and open up exciting new possibilities for exploring electronic building blocks and devices at the ultimate atomic and molecular scale-devices that might be vastly smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than today's processors and memory devices."

In a quarkshell, that means this discovery might help future engineers manipulate atoms and their bonds, as well as create powerful, energy-sipping quantum computers for their cryptography needs, space travel or maybe even large black and yellow rooms that make our fantasies come true (or at the very least allow androids to play Sherlock Holmes).

But not so fast, Einstein. I see that tabletop subspace communicator you've imagined on your desktop. It's a great idea, and while I understand your enthusiasm for such things, as Matt explained earlier this month quantum computing, entangled desktops and Star Trek holodecks are all decades away, if not more.

What this discovery does do however is advance our primitive understanding of the Way Things Are. It's a small, nanometer-sized piece in a puzzle that doesn't even have all the pieces on the table yet. Hell, we don't even know where all the pieces are yet. From the looks of these images though, we will someday soon. [Images: IBM]

In their atom pinhole camera, the atoms act like photons in an optical pinhole camera, but instead of light traveling through a lens, it travels through a pinhole on a mask and creates a high-res inverted image on a silicon substrate. This camera is capable of resizing nanostructures down to 30 nm—10,000 times smaller than the original. So, a camera with say 10 million pinholes could produce large numbers of identical (or diverse) nanostructures simultaneously.

It all sounds very promising, but the real question is will I be getting instant food, clothing and gadgets in my lifetime? Maybe—but chances are the "gadgets" will be a Rascal and the "clothing" will be Depends. [Physorg via KurzweilAI]

A team at the University of Maryland was able to successfully teleport a quantum state (like spin or polarization) from one atom to another over the distance of one meter. How they did it is incredibly complicated: the explanation sounds like half advanced physics and half existential philosophy (i.e. "each photon is in an unknowable superposition of states"). But the end result is that the information doesn't travel the distance between the two atoms. It merely appears at the second and disappears from the first.

The tech is still very young, so there isn't much speculation on, say, when I can stop taking that awful 14-hour bus from Philly to Montreal in favor of teleporting. But it is suggested that this kind of instant transfer of information could be useful in mass exchanges of data, like the Internet. [Live Science]

When fully recharged, the light spheres can light up for about 4 hours individually. In order to recharge each sphere, it gets plugged back into the light molecule. The shape of the molecule is completely amorphous and can be flipped, twisted or turned around in any shape the owner desires.

Unfortunately, the project is still under development. The idea of changing the shape is unique—stick it in some interesting positions and it could provide great conversation fodder whenever you have guests over. "So, uh, is that what I think it's supposed to be?"

[Maarten De Ceulaer via Technabob]

Now, I'm no scientist, but apparently this sort of image gives even the most seasoned electron microscopist a raging science boner. But it is not so much about the graphene as it is about the potential of the TEAM 0.5. One researcher noted that it "allows for the detection of every single atom from the Periodic Table provided that the sample under investigation can stand the radiation damage." Basically, it can study individual atoms in real time and produce high-resolution images of its subject. That will allow researchers to fully realize the potential of graphene by understanding how defects in the crystal structure can effect its properties. And they claim this is only the tip of the iceberg. Noooow I feel a science boner coming on. [Nanowerk and Science Daily]

For many years they stood by us and provided us with handy ways for us to consume our favorite media, but their time has come and gone. In order for us to get some closure I've gathered us here to talk about our fondest memories and to recount those last harrowing years as our friends desperately clung to life. They were fighters, weren't they? Right to the very end.

A eulogy for physical media [Sci Fi Tech]