Inauguration 2009. Can you find Yo-Yo Ma? Photo by David Bergman.

This is what appears to be a blurry picture of the 2009 presidential innaguration.  In fact, it’s 220 images stitched together, taken with a Canon G10 and the Gigapan Imager by photographer David Bergman.  The Gigapan Imager is a robotic mount that moves a regular digital camera along  panoramic tracks while taking pictures along the way.  The result is what you see above – a very very very scaled down version of the final 1.47 gigabyte image.

Yo-Yo Ma with iPhone

While you can view and pan around this Gigapan image here, I’ve collected a list of some things I challenge you to find:

1. President Obama (easy)
2. Teddy Kennedy
3. Tipper Gore
4. Yo-Yo Ma with iPhone
5. Newt Gingrich not paying attention
6. Snipers(?) on the Capital
7. Snipers on another building
8. Tents lined up in an unusual place

Actually, I’ll show you what Yo-Yo Ma looks like.  What’s he doing?!  Good luck hunting!

Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu. Source: Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l. Lab

If you were like me, you spent most of Tuesday working, only to return home and sit glued to your TV watching the inauguration  on your DVR.  Yes, Obama is president.  Which also means, yes, we again have people in government who put their faith in Science.

One of those people is Steven Chu, the just affirmed Secretary of Energy.  He’s got his work cut out for him.  Not only has Obama charged him with reducing our dependence on foreign oil, but he has to figure out how to curb greenhouse gasses while making our country more energy efficient.  And if he can turn every car into a plug-in, call it icing on the cake.

Of course, like everyone else on Obama’s cabinet, Chu has serious street cred.

Not only was he a professor of physics at Stanford, but he ran the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where they do serious rocket science (and other amazing things).  But perhaps most notable is his receipt of the Nobel prize just 10 years prior.

The prize was for his work on discovering and creating optical tweezers to cool and hold atoms and molecules in place so they can be studied and observed.  Such as, DNA.  Or, an enzyme in the process of utilizing a single molecule of ATP.  Cool stuff.

What’s I find most intriguing is his collaborative approach.  While not unusual in academia, often the drumbeat to publish can feel pretty cut-throat.  And that’s putting it mildly.  Which is why I was fascinated by Chu’s account of how the Nobel Prize came to be.  He protrays himself as a man was  eager to learn, humbled by his discovery, but does not miss to remark on each and every shortcoming, mistake, and area of ignorance.

It’s a good read if you have a chance.  You can either find the Review of Modern Physics, 70, 685 – 706 (1998) or just download it here (also available on Google).  By the end, I think you’ll agree there’s light to be found at the end of this tunnel.

Stephen Chou of Princeton recently introduced a simple, cheap method to drastically improve the straightness of line structures and roundness of dots on a microchip. While this may sound somewhat mundane it may allow for dramatic improvements in chip scalability, as current fabrication methods mandate a size-imposed limit which prevents the further improvements in density and energy usage.

But an excimer laser and a quartz guide plate may change everything.

Scientists have long known that given the ability to melt imperfections on a chip then allowing those structures to re-harden often yields a more perfect structure. Surface tension is the force at work, creating rounder dots or straighter lines. The problem is, applying enough heat to melt conducting material is usually the same amount of heat needed to fry your chip.

Chou solved that problem by using an excimer laser (maybe he was inspired after Lasik surgery?). It heats and consequently melts only the top-most portion of the structures, leaving the remainder of the chip intact. Applied as per (A) in the illustration above yields nearly perfect dots and lines where there was once blobs and jags.

But, what’s really interesting in the next step. By applying a quartz guide plate some tiny distance above the chip structures, these structures grew upward to come in contact with the plate during the melting process. The resulting hardened structures were narrower and taller (not to mention straighter and more perfect) which is exactly what is required for high-density very small-scale chip design.

Why do I have the feeling we haven’t seen the last of Moore’s Law?

Source: Princeton

One of the major changes is a subtle one for you, but was a major undertaking for us. It involved reconstructing the “interesting pics” page to conform to the content management system in place, rather than be an ordinary static page. You’ll never notice the difference, but it’ll make updating and rotating those pictures a breeze for us.

Also, we’ve added links to the most popular and recent posts. You can dig and find these on your own, but hey, now it’s easier, right?

Finally, to mark the start of a revised look, I dug around for a construction picture in Google. What came up first is what you see. As serendipity would have it, it’s a picture taken during construction of one of the world’s largest synchrotrons.

Don’t worry, I didn’t know what a synchrotron was either.

Turns out a synchrotron is a machine that accelerates electrons at near light-speed, and once there, magnets bend the electrons, producing photons. Or more specifically, ultra-high energy x-rays. In other words, don’t get in the way. Work on this one in the UK, called Diamond was completed last year and a series of interesting scientific discoveries have poured forth.

It seems they have their hand in a variety of science fields, to include virology, biochemistry, engineering, and determining answers to critical unknowns. Like, was Beethoven poisoned?

Hm. Sounds like an interesting topic for a future post.

Source: Diamond

NASA is trying to change that. With THEMIS.

THEMIS (Get ready: Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) is a fleet of 5 spacecraft launched in February 2007 tasked with the job of studying these auroras. Already, a series of observations has yielded clues to how auroras occur, but THEMIS still has 2 years left in it’s lifespan to provide a better picture.

Still, for now scientists have use THEMIS data to show that there are “ropes” of magnetism that link the earth to the sun, over which streams of solar wind travel and seemingly provide the energy to feed the auroras. And, it appears that the earth’s 23 degree tilt provides a favorable alignment for these ropes, presumably because it’s during the equinoxes that either pole “points” moreso toward the sun than at other times.

I’m not sure what NASA hopes to do once they unravel the great aurora mystery. They say they’re out to help minimize the risks to orbiting satellites. But it seems to me that this study makes for an excuse to get in some springtime camping while brushing up on nighttime photography. Personally, I’d enjoy the latter.

Source: NASA
Photo: National Geographic, Michael Melford

From my perspective, the amazing thing isn’t the technology (after all, nanotubes have been around for decades), rather it’s the ingenuity required to turn something so tiny and simple into a virtual Swiss army knife. It’s like Rube Goldberg, but in reverse. Note – the primary source is very good.

Primary Source (and picture): Physics Lab, Berkeley