Science & Technology
Roger Highfield talks to the British scientists who have found a way to make microscopic objects vanish
|
| ©Unknown
|
| Quantum conjurers from Imperial College London: Dr Mark Frogley and Prof Chris Phillips
|
It sounds like magic: walls, curtains, even dresses could be rendered transparent by bathing them in a specially crafted beam of light. Rescuers could use the beam to peer through rubble after an earthquake, while doctors could gaze at a damaged lung after making a patient's skin and ribs vanish.
It goes through walls, but slows to a standstill in ultra-cold gases. It carries electronic information for radios and TVs, but destroys genetic information in cells. It bends around buildings and squeezes through pinholes, but ricochets off tiny electrons.
It's light. And although we know it primarily as the opposite of darkness, most of light is not visible to our eyes. From low energy radio waves to high energy gamma rays, light zips around us, bounces off us, and sometimes goes through us.
Each Monday, this column turns a page in history to explore the discoveries, events and people that continue to affect the history being made today.
Humans had been speaking for a couple hundred thousand years before they got the inspiration or nerve to mark their ideas down for posterity.
But when a Mesopotamian people called the Sumerians finally did scratch out a few bookkeeping symbols on clay tablets 5,000 years ago, they unknowingly started a whole new era in history we call, well ... history.
Kids of any age love to read fairy tales because the storyline never limits the possibility that anything could happen. Curses, spells, and handsome princes reign in worlds beyond the reader's imagination.
But are the most magical moments from some of our favorite stories actually possible? Basic physical principles and recent scientific research suggest that what readers might mistake for fantasies and exaggeration could be rooted in reality.
So suspend your imagination for a moment, and look at the following fairy tales as a hard-core scientist might.
Roger Highfield
TelegraphMon, 11 Feb 2008 06:29 UTC
Good news for those who hate washing socks, are worried about hygiene or resent spending money on dry cleaning: self cleaning forms of wool and silk have been developed with the help of nanotechnology.
Wool socks, skirts and silk ties may soon clean themselves of smells and stains in the sunshine, researchers in Australia and China suggest.
|
| ©Unknown
|
| Red wine stained wool with no treatment (top), a stain-treating agent (middle) and nano particle coating (bottom)
|
Andrew Bridges
Space.comSat, 16 Feb 2008 01:29 UTC
Gravitational waves are distortions or the warping of the very fabric of space-time, which Einstein described as different aspects of reality itself. As a fabric, space-time can be measured either in terms of distance or time.
However, large amounts of mass or energy think here of the incredibly dense core of an exploded star known as a neutron star can curve space-time, resulting in the warping of the fabric which can be observed as gravitational shifts.
Scientists have created the sound of silence, an "acoustic cloak" that could one day block out the din of noisy neighbours.
Two teams have come up with a design of special materials that could cloak an object from sound and a third has already devised a scheme to create them, so sound waves travel seamlessly around them.
The work follows recent research on "invisibility cloaks", where a number of teams have shown that synthetic materials, called metamaterials - which are designed down to the microscopic level - can make beams of light flow around an object to make it invisible.
When it comes to being misled, humans are no more sophisticated than ants or fish.
Implications for evacuations and how to guide people safely in an emergency will arise from the discovery that most of us are happy to play follow-my-leader, even if we are trailing after someone who does not know where they are going and taking the most meandering route.
Even more striking, even when we are shown a faster route, we prefer to stick with the old one and tell others to take the long road too, a finding that could have lethal implications when it comes to evacuating a building or ship in an emergency.
Scientists at UCL (University College London) have found the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually saw. The study, published in this week's PLoS Journal of Computational Biology, reveals that the context surrounding what we see is all important - sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things which aren't really there.
French archaeologists in Sudan say they have uncovered the oldest proof of human sacrifice in Africa, hailing the discovery as the biggest Neolithic find on the continent for years.
