Wednesday, August 1, 2012

astro picture for the day


Credit & Copyright: Robert Gendler & Martin Pugh

--------------------------------------extra goodie thought for the day-----------------------------------

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7409/full/nature11297.html

Negative refraction has been one of the big breakthroughs of the last ten plus years;  electron microscopes have already integrated these technologies to image  atoms thermodynamically moving around(something they could not do before, and scientists would have told you are theoretically impossible before).  Here, metamaterials have blown the roof off of all previous negative refraction ability.  It might require terrahertz technology use as well; terrahertz wavelengths have been another great breakthrough of the last ten years.  This is pretty exciting. 

Nanotechnologists have been excited about optical tweezers; but, their enthusiasm has been tempered somewhere as optical tweezers have only been able to manipulate cell size particles.  Cells themselves are farely large on the molecular scale; with this new drastic improvement in negative refraction, optical tweezers could get a lot closer to the atomic manipulation level; and science and technology just continues to get rediculously exciting!

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