Materials ← A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Year end link clean up

Dec

2010

* “Poor Halo play prompts stabbing threat”:http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattle911/archives/231642.asp. Doesn’t seem unreasonable. I’ve heard campers threatened with worse. * “How Secure Is My Password”:http://howsecureismypassword.net/. No idea how accurate, but fun. 17 thousand years for my typical password. * “Rich on photobooks”:http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2010/12/photobooks-for-christmas/. I just always use the default in Aperture but perhaps I should branch out. * “AR.Drone”:http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/12/01/ar-drone-torn-down/. ...

My fall quarter academic work — vibrations, DEP modeling

Sep

2010

Fall quarter kicking off, hurray! Formal coursework will be ME 588 — Dynamics and Vibrations. Basic theoretical framework, single DOF systems, multiple DOF systems, and continuously driven systems. Not my first choice of material but need to take remotely and the options were few. Informally, I’ll be working on modeling of dielectrophoresis effects at the ...

Silk and Timber electronics

Aug

2010

“Paper and Lignin-based RFID tags”:http://www.physorg.com/news200760151.html. “Silk electronic metamaterials”:http://www.physorg.com/news200841751.html. Seems like we are not far away from having processing power embedded in damn near everything. Not lots of processing power, but enough to do identification and limited sensing. Interesting times.

An aside — why am I reading bunches of PDFs?

Apr

2010

I finally officially matriculated last fall as a part time grad student at UW and am studying nanoengineering. For the moment I am sited in the mechanical engineering department tho I could just have easily been in the electrical engineering department, materials science department, chemistry, physics, or several other places. And in fact I am ...

Materials/Science grabbag

Oct

2009

No time to blog, fall quarter starting, and travelling too. Dump of stuff that is interesting: * “Ultimate Productivity Blog”:http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/. I think that is clear. * “Paintable transistors”:http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122605160/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0. Semiconducting polymer stable when applied at room temp, cool. * “Hydrophobic Nano Grass”:http://www.materialsviews.com/matview/display/en/1102/TEXT. Nano scale fluid handling tech is pretty awesome. * “Fantastic Solar System Photos”:http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/photos/?c=y&articleID=59247082&page=1. Humbling ...

Thinking that intrigues me

Sep

2009

* Touchable holography. Uses tracking cameras and directed ultrasound to create interaction and physical sensation. Cool demo. * Algortihmatic - online library of algorithms and IDE. Cool tho limited. * The LED’s dark secret. Droop in LED performance to be overcome for broader use. * Plasmobots — “their previous research has already proved the ability ...

Oriented Assembly of Metamaterials — Science

Aug

2009

Oriented Assembly of Metamaterials — Stebe et al. 325 5937: 159 — Science — good article. “Such metamaterials may, for example, be used to create cloaking devices or light-based circuits based on manipulations of local optical electric fields rather than on the flow of electrons.” “The challenge now is to move from hit-or-miss assemblies of ...

FT.com / Reportage – A library of the world’s most unusual compounds

Jun

2009

FT.com / Reportage – A library of the world’s most unusual compounds — would love to visit this library/museum.

Polymer Circuits

Apr

2009

Good basic article on polymer circuits. I need to learn more about charge transport in polymers, i have a basic understanding of charge transport in metals and semiconductors and ionic fluids, i don’t really understand polymers. Polymer circuits potentially a research area for my future course work.

Ferroelectric or Electroactive Polymers

Apr

2009

Had first lecture in ME 568 — Active and Sensing Materials. Topics include Ferroelectric polymers. Paper here PVDF as a specific case. Strong piezo behaviour Penn State does a lot of work in these materials, as does Stanford

For the First Time, Scientists Measure the Size of a One-Neutron Halo with Lasers

Mar

2009

Matter is strange — “These isotopes consist of a compact nuclear core and a cloud made of diluted nuclear material – called ‘heiligenschein’ or ‘halo’” via For the First Time, Scientists Measure the Size of a One-Neutron Halo with Lasers.

Spring Coursework

Mar

2009

Continuing my educational adventure this spring: ME 568 Active and Sensing Materials: Fundamental knowledge of the nano-structure property relations of active and sensing materials, and their devices. Examples of the active and sensing materials are: shape memory alloys (SMAs), ferromagnetic SMAs, ferroelectric, pyroelectric and piezoelectric materials, thermoelectrics, electroactive and conducting polymers, photoactive polymers, photovoltaics, and ...

Materials stuff that intrigues me

Feb

2009

Targeted nanospheres find, penetrate, then fuel burning of melanoma | Science Blog. How Vision Sends Its Message To The Brain – the ability to record and study the reactions is what fascinates me Dynamic control of domain walls and Single Atom Quantum Dots – just a ton of innovation at the nano level as researchers ...

nanoHUB – Simulation, Education, and Community for Nanotechnology

Dec

2008

nanoHUB – Simulation, Education, and Community for Nanotechnology. – hub for nano educational materials and software. interested in learning more about nano TCAD, pointed to by this article

Quantum computers could excel in modeling chemical reactions | Science Blog

Dec

2008

Quantum computers could excel in modeling chemical reactions | Science Blog. — from the department of tautology. A quantum system can be best modelled by a quantum system.

Scientists Store and Retrieve Data Inside an Atom

Oct

2008

Scientists Store and Retrieve Data Inside an Atom | Science Blog. – Kind of mind-bending. Love this stuff.

Molecular programming

Sep

2008

Caltech researchers awarded $10M for molecular programming project. UW involved as well. More info at the Molecular Programming Project: …we will develop new computer science principles for programming information-bearing molecules like DNA and RNA to create artificial biomolecular programs of similar complexity. …computing and decision-making will carried out by chemical processes themselves. Through the creation ...

Cool materials science stuff — solar, cloaking

Aug

2008

* Solar nanoantenna energy collectors — highly effective sunlight receptors based on nanoscale antennas. Now onto nanoscale rectifiers… * Another step towards cloaking devices

Materials science — circuits in everything

Jul

2008

Flexible CNT circuits move on – nanotechweb.org. Just one of many efforts to implant circuits onto papers, plastics, etc. We are going to have processing power embedded in pretty much everything. Work on nanonet circuits — ok this stuff is all a long way from commercialization, they can only create circuits with 100 elements, but ...

Interesting materials stuff

Jul

2008

* Nanowire quantum dot counts electrons – nanotechweb.org — measuring current one electron at a time * Imaging using quantum-entangled photons — quantum entanglement stretches the brain. * Nanotube-coated pot boils water fast — the power of surface area. Maybe not great for cookware, but for water heaters?