News Revisited

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has snapped shots of seven different caverns or pits which are so deep they aren’t reflecting sunlight.  When I first saw one of the photos at Universe Today I thought it looked like a PhotoShop trick.  Then I noticed in the article that the author said, “When I first saw this image, I thought it was some kind of joke, or Photoshop trick. But nope, this is real.”  Well, at least I’m not the only one.

IBM has published a couple of interesting papers in the journal Science describing steps toward storage devices using single atoms as bits and computers using single molecules as logic gates reports physicsworld.com.  They used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to place a single magnetic atom on a copper-nitride film in such a way that its magnetic moment points in a particular direction.  They also discovered that a single molecule of naphthalocyanine can be switched “on” or “off” without changing it shape.  Prior attempts at switching molecules caused them to change shape and therefore would not be appropriate for a molecular logic gate.

Hong Liu, Yanzhen Fan, and Hongqiang Hu of Oregon State University have authored an article claiming to have achieved 1,500 watts of electricity from a 1 cubic meter