Feeling the Heat: Berkeley Researchers Make Thermoelectric Breakthrough in Silicon Nanowires
Topic: Science
5:35 am EST, Feb 21, 2008
Energy now lost as heat during the production of electricity could be harnessed through the use of silicon nanowires synthesized via a technique developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. The far-ranging potential applications of this technology include DOE’s hydrogen fuel cell-powered “Freedom CAR,” and personal power-jackets that could use heat from the human body to recharge cell-phones and other electronic devices.
Science image spacer image Rough silicon nanowires synthesized by Berkeley Lab researchers demonstrated high performance thermoelectric properties even at room temperature when connected between two suspended heating pads. In this illustration, one pad serves as the heat source (pink), the other as the sensor.
“This is the first demonstration of high performance thermoelectric capability in silicon, an abundant semiconductor for which there already exists a multibillion dollar infrastructure for low-cost and high-yield processing and packaging,” said Arun Majumdar, a mechanical engineer and materials scientist with joint appointments at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, who was one of the principal investigators behind this research.
Research News: Debut of TEAM 0.5, the World's Best Microscope
Topic: Science
5:34 am EST, Feb 21, 2008
TEAM 0.5, the world's most powerful transmission electron microscope — capable of producing images with half‑angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom — has been installed at the Department of Energy's National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Science image spacer image TEAM 0.5, the world's best transmission electron microscope, is being assembled at the National Center for Electron Microscopy. (Photo Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab CSO)
"We have beam down the column," announced Uli Dahmen of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, who is head of NCEM and director of DOE's collaborative TEAM Project, when the TEAM 0.5 microscope first delivered its ultrabright electron beam at Berkeley Lab in late December.
The TEAM Project (TEAM stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope) is led by Berkeley Lab in a collaboration with DOE's Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the Frederick Seitz Materials Laboratory of the University of Illinois, and two private companies specializing in electron microscopy, the FEI Company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and CEOS of Heidelberg, Germany.
Now that TEAM 0.5's basic systems are operational, additional components and facilities are being completed and tuned, including a state-of-the-art control room display that shows the sample under the microscope on a flat panel resembling a wide-screen, high-definition TV. After a long series of rigorous tests and adjustments, TEAM 0.5 will become available to outside users by October, 2008.
The consequences of quitting exercise may be greater than previously thought, according to a new study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that determined that the weight gained during an exercise hiatus can be tough to shed when exercise is resumed at a later date.
The study, conducted by Paul Williams of Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division, found that the key to staying trim is to remain active year-round, year-after-year, and to avoid seasonal and irregular exercise patterns. Most of all, don’t quit. Failure to do so may be a contributing factor in the nation’s obesity epidemic.
“The price to pay for quitting exercise is higher than expected, and this price may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic affecting Americans,” says Williams, whose study is published in the February issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise
It's the astronomers forecast. It shows at a glance when, in the next 48 hours, we might expect clear and dark skies for one specific observing site. There are many, but the example above is for Cherry Springs State Park, Pennsylvania.
It's is specifically intended for amateur astronomers. The forecast data comes from a numerical weather model run by those very cool guys at the Canadian Meteorological Centre.
Read from left to right. Locate a column of blue blocks. That's when the sky will likely to be clear and dark. A more detailed explanation is here, which also links CMC's original forecast maps.
We had cloud cover here but here is something for the next go around of lunar things...
An eight-year old typographical error listing Laura Todd of Nashville, Tennessee, as ‘dead’ continues to causes her unending problems, her attempts to assert that she is alive, not getting through the bureaucratic undergrowth.
Laura Todd says the error in an official form is affecting everything from her credit to her income-tax return. “I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to be dead when you’re not,” she says. Her problems started when someone in Florida died and it was Laura’s Social Security number that was accidentally typed in against the dead woman’s name. She thought the problem had been straightened out, but when she went to refinance her house in 2002, the mortgage company called and said, “Your credit report says you’re dead.” In 2006 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) refused to process her return. “The IRS says I’m dead. Everybody says I’m dead,” she said.
According to a report run by CNN, Laura said being dead off and on has made everyday life a hassle. Her bank closed her credit card account, while not forgetting to attach a note of sympathy: “Please accept our condolences on the death of Laura Todd.” She says the last straw came recently when the IRS once again refused to let her file her taxes electronically because she’s “dead.” She no longer finds the situation funny. “I’m tired. I’ve been fighting this for eight years, and it never ends,” she says. “I’m very much alive, and would like to live out my life in peace without having this problem.” The IRS has said it will research the problem and try to get it straightened out. Social Security claims to have updated its computers, but as for Laura Todd, she is not so sure her “death” is behind her.
-- Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chinese leader Mao Zedong made what U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States.
Chinese leader Mao Zedong, here depicted in an Andy Warhol painting, offered women to the U.S.
"You know, China is a very poor country," Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department's historian office.
"We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands."
A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. "Do you want our Chinese women?" he asked. "We can give you 10 million."
After Kissinger noted Mao was "improving his offer," the chairman said, "We have too many women. ... They give birth to children and our children are too many."
"It is such a novel proposition," Kissinger replied in his discussion with Mao in Beijing. "We will have to study it.
The 5 minute film tells the story of a couple who spot each other across a crowded street and fall in love. Although everyone else in the world around them moves backwards, the couple moves forward as they find each other.
At some point, every actress decides to have her "Marilyn moment" and dons a platinum wig and a fake mole to prove that she's capable of playing an American icon. This week, Lindsay Lohan graces New York magazine in a spread shot by Bert Stern. Yes, that would be the same Stern who shot Monroe six weeks before she died of a reported overdose in 1962.
In the story, Lohan says of Monroe and Heath Ledger's tragic outcome: "I sure as hell wouldn't let it happen to me." Then, why are you bouncing in and out of rehab and recreating a photo shoot Drewthat precisely mimics a suicidal woman's last flirtation with fame? And Stern should be ashamed of himself for aping such a memorable photo shoot for a 21-year-old actress whose most notable credit is "Herbie Fully Loaded." Monroe - who starred in fantastic movies like "The Misfits" and "Some Like It Hot" - died of acute barbiturate poisoning at age 36.
Database management systems (DBMS) are 20 years out of date and should be completely rewritten to reflect modern use of computers.
That's according to a group of academics including DBMS pioneer Mike Stonebraker (http://s2k-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu:8000/nasa_e2e/mike.html), Ingres founder and a Postgres architect taking his second controversial outing so far this year. Stonebraker upset many last month for his criticism (http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/01/24/stonebraker_dewitt_mapreduce/) of Google's MapReduce.
In a paper (http://www.vldb.org/conf/2007/papers/industrial/p1150-stonebraker.pdf) entitled The end of an architectural era (It's time for a complete rewrite), the group - drawn from DBMS specialists at MIT and in industry - have said that modern use of computers renders many features of mainstream DBMS obsolete.
They have argued that DBMS designs such as Oracle and SQL Server come from an age when online transaction processing (OLTP) dominated and required techniques such as multi threading and transaction locking. They said that modern transactions - entered via web pages - do not need these expensive processing overheads and DBMS should, therefore, be re-designed without them. Persistent storage such as disks are also seen as unnecessary and could be replaced by geographically dispersed RAM storage.
Stonebraker and his group also advocate abandoning SQL because they see no need for a separate data manipulation language. Data manipulation, they said, can be performed with other tasks using languages such as Ruby. They describe a prototype DBMS called H-Store that embodies these ideas.
While there is certainly a point to be made about the way OLTP works in modern computer environments and the group has some persuasive arguments, it seems unlikely that mainstream DBMS builders will move away from tried-and-tested TP technologies in the near future. Banks and financial institutions in particular will want to hang on to the comfort and security provided by DBMS, which fully implement ACID (http://www.linktionary.com/a/acid.html) properties
