David Custis Kimball - blog
You: Why Dave; why now?
Me: Well, I've two talented kids; the younger mentioned my stopping with the lectures. Then enthusiastically asked, 'Dad, can I help you set up a blog?' Moments later, Me: 'OK, that's a great idea, thinkin' they might just read it someday.
me ---> 'Gaarr of Blog' <---
Goto oft comments on Art, Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), CommoNonsense, Dance, Dark Matter, Design, Etc., Environment, Eventspace, Fable, Food, Frogsense, Hazard Mitigation, Hegel, History, Horsense, Human Affairs, Humor, Law+Lawless, Mathematics, Medicine, Music, Nerd Stuff, Parenting, Physics, Psychophysics, Real Estate, Sailing, Science, Science Fiction, Swimming, Technology, Theology, UncommonSense, and Waldo, alphabetically.
Just use 'Search' for the topic of choice or Waldo, perhaps.
Matters of Import & Timely Expertise
repressing gossip and hate-speech.
An Unmapped Ponderocity:
To say: '"He is a man of truth," is to say nothing; to say: "He is a man of of," is to state an elementary truth of logic.'
Winston Davids, 1969 - Trinity College Valedictorian - 1970; known endeavor: actuarial contributions to The Donald; since has contacted me and sadly is quite ill. Ask prayers for recovery; thanks for his brilliance and music.
Physics, Science, Technology
It’s not too often that one gets to experience ‘dynamite’ Nobel prizers talk about their work. Well here’s to graphene and thin films everywhere.
Graphene Reveals Its Magnetic Personality
Can organic matter behave like a fridge magnet? Scientists from The University of Manchester have now shown that it can.
Image above shows Strain in graphene opens up a pseudomagnetic gap. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Manchester)
In a report published in Nature Physics, they used graphene, the world’s thinnest and strongest material, and made it magnetic.
Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a chicken wire structure. In its pristine state, it exhibits no signs of the conventional magnetism usually associated with such materials as iron or nickel.
Demonstrating its remarkable properties won Manchester researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010.
This latest research led by Dr Irina Grigorieva and Professor Sir Andre Geim (one of the Nobel prize recipients) could prove crucial to the future of graphene in electronics.
The Manchester researchers took nonmagnetic graphene and then either ‘peppered’ it with other nonmagnetic atoms like fluorine or removed some carbon atoms from the chicken wire. The empty spaces, called vacancies, and added atoms all turned out to be magnetic, exactly like atoms of, for example, iron.
“It is like minus multiplied by minus gives you plus,” says Dr Irina Grigorieva.
The researchers found that, to behave as magnetic atoms, defects must be far away from each other and their concentration should be low. If many defects are added to graphene, they reside too close and cancel each other’s magnetism. In the case of vacancies, their high concentration makes graphene disintegrate.
Professor Geim said: “The observed magnetism is tiny, and even the most magnetized graphene samples would not stick to your fridge.
“However, it is important to reach clarity in what is possible for graphene and what is not. The area of magnetism in nonmagnetic materials has previously had many false positives.”
“The most likely use of the found phenomenon is in spintronics. Spintronics devices are pervasive, most notably they can be found in computers’ hard disks. They function due to coupling of magnetism and electric current.
“Adding this new degree of functionality can prove important for potential applications of graphene in electronics,” adds Dr Grigorieva.
(via scinerds)
