New Record-Breaking Laser Could Speed Up The Internet

Using microscopic semiconductor wires positioned atop a silver surface, a team of physicists from Imperial College London and the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena has produced an ultra-fast laser that dramatically accelerates the interaction between light and matter. This world record-breaking laser is exciting because one day, it could help improve data communication by boosting the speed that information can be transferred, among a variety of other potential applications. The work has been published in Nature Physics.

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The secret to this new super laser lies in the physicists’ use of silver surfaces, rather than the more traditional glass. Slim layers of metal are ideal because they provide surface plasmons, which are oscillations of excited electrons that propagate along the surface of the material. When the light interacts with these waves, it can be focused more tightly than normal. The plasmons therefore effectively squeeze the light into a much smaller space. In doing so, the interaction between the light and the nanowires, which are composed of zinc oxide, was greatly enhanced.

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Surface Plasmons

HOW DOES SURFACE PLASMON RESONANCE WORK?

Surface Plasmon Resonance has been established as a powerful method to monitor label-free biomolecular interactions in liquids. However, today with MP-SPR, it can deliver well beyond kinetics and equilibrium constants.

Surface plasmons

Excitation of surface plasmons is based on total internal reflection when an incident beam of p-polarized light strikes an electrically conducting gold layer at the interface of a glass sensor with high RI (Refractive Index) and an external medium (gas or liquid) with low RI. At a given angle, the excitation of surface plasmons takes place resulting in a reduced intensity of the reflected light. A slight change at the interface (e.g. a change in refractive index or formation of a nanoscale film thickness) will lead to a change in SPR signal, allowing precise measurements of thin film properties as well as surface molecular interactions in real-time.

SPR Navi measurement principle
At specific angle of moving laser, the energy transfer and excitation of the plasmons causes a decrease in the reflected light intensity. The surface plasmon phenomena occurs in the interface between the SPR metal and the adjacent layer, thus providing information about the sample. Total internal reflection (TIR) is part of the curve with maximum light reflection.
With MP-SPR wide angle range measured enables monitoring of whole SPR peak during measurement and this also widens application range to measurements with thicker layers, in gas and with different surfaces.

In SPR NaviTM sensor slide is inserted between the prism and flow-cell. Simplification of the sensor slide layers shows that on top of glass substrate is SPR metal (Au or other metal for plasmons) and on top of that functional coating.

Measure molecule interactions with MP-SPR:

MP-SPR real time and label free measurements makes it excellent method for interaction measurements. Not only affinity but also kinetic of the binding can be measured.

There are two measurement mode available in SPR NaviTM Angular Scan and Fixed Angle measurement.

Angular Scan

When molecules binds on the sensor surface plasmons forms with different angle of incidence and SPR curve shift is seen. With SPR Navi Angular Scan measurement whole SPR curve and sensograms with different parameters can be monitored during measurement.

Effect of growing thickness:

When layer thickness on the sensor surface is changing SPR curve will shift. Even small changes in the deposited layer thickness will cause change in the measured SPR curve. New layers can be deposited in situ or ex situ. Both thickness and refractive index of deposited layer can be determined.

SPR THEORY

A surface plasmon is an electro-magnetic wave propagating along the surface of a thin metal layer. Optical excitation of the surface plasmon can be achieved in the so-called Kretschmann configuration, where p-polarised, collimated light beam undergoes total internal reflection at a glass/thin-metal-film/dielectric interface. The angle at which the resonance occurs is extremely sensitive to any change in the refractive index (RI) of the medium adjacent to the metal surface, and such changes can be monitored by recording intensity of reflected light when the system goes out of resonance.

The concept of surface plasmons originates in the plasma approach of Maxwell’s theory: the free electrons of a metal are treated as an electron liquid of high density (plasma) and density fluctuations occurring on the surface of such a liquid are called plasmons, surface plasmons (SP), or surface polaritons.

According to Maxswell’s theory, surface plasmons can propagate along a metallic surface and have a spectrum of eigen frequencies (ω) related to the wave-vector (k) by a dispersion relation:

ε2= ε 2’+i ε2” and ε1 are the dielectric constant of the metal and of the medium in contact with it, respectively. Wave vector k1 of light at frequency ω travelling through the medium ε1 is described by: where c is the speed of light in vacuum, and for vacuum (or air to some approximation) its dispersion relation is a straight line k1=ω/c (line kc in figure above). Since the SP’s dispersion relation (curve SP in figure above) never intersects the dispersion relation of light in air, they cannot be excited directly by a freely propagating beam of light incident upon the metal surface. However, it is possible to “turn down” the light line to the point where both lines cross each other.

Principal Configurations to Achieve Plasmon Excitation by Light

There are three principal configurations to achieve plasmon excitation by light. All three are shown schematically in figures below.

Grating Configuration:

In the arrangement (a), light excites plasmons via a grating coupler. If the grating constant is b, then light wave vector is increased by an additional term 2Π/b, and the SP´s dispersion relation can be matched by a component of light vector parallel to the surface. For an angle of incidence equaling Θo the resonance condition takes the form:The resonance can be observed at angle Θo as an intensity minimum of the reflected light[ii]. The disadvantage of grating-based sensors is that the light beam is incident through the sample solution, which may give some inaccuracies if the sample is absorptive.

Otto Configuration:

The two other configurations presented in figure above are based on the fact, that the light line in in dispersion figure can be “lowered” by a factor √εo, if the beam is travelling through an optically denser medium (e.g. glass) whose dielectric constant is εo. If this is the case, then plasmons can be excited by p-polarised light undergoing total internal reflection (TIR) on the glass surface, or more precisely, they are excited by an evanescent wave associated with TIR and penetrating up to the metal/air interface. Exact matching of photons and plasmons happens for the resonance condition: In the configuration (b), introduced by Otto,[iii] the metal surface (ε2) is separated from the medium εo by an additional dielectric layer (e.g. an air slit) having the dielectric constant ε1

Kretschmann Configuration (SPR Naviâ„¢ uses this!)

In the third configuration (c), known as the Kretschmann geometry[iv], a thin metallic layer is formed on the substrate εo and acts itself as the spacer. For the correct film thickness, the evanescent field expanding through the metal may couple to the SP on the opposite (ε2/ε1) metal surface.

General

In all three cases, momentum matching between the plasmon and the incoming photon, i.e. excitation of plasmons is evidenced by a drop in intensity of reflected light when the angle of resonance is approached. Figure below shows an example of the SPR curve measured for silver with the aid of the Kretschmann configuration. Such resonant behavior gives an advantage in biosensor applications, because the value of the resonant angle ΘR is a sensitive function of the dielectric constants of the two contacting media. Due to this property, the surface plasmon resonance can be utilized in monitoring surface reactions, as every new ad-layer formed on the metal surface causes changes in dielectric function of medium ε1, establishing new resonance angle ΘR'. The shape of the whole resonance curve, i.e. its depth and width depends on optical absorption within the metal and on radiation losses resulting from surface roughness.

Traditional SPR

Surface reaction (e.g. immunological) monitoring can be arranged in one of two ways: the “fixed angle” or the “focused beam” SPR detection.

Goniometric Fixed Angle SPR

In the fixed angle configuration, the angle of incidence of light is fixed and chosen to be in the middle of the slope of the reflectance dip. Any shift in resonance angle ΘR can be detected as a change in intensity of reflected light when the system goes out of resonance.

Typical angle range is 1 degree.

Focused Beam SPR

The “focused beam” arrangement utilizes an idea of forming simultaneously more than one angle of incidence (an obvious property of any focused beam), and thus being able to record the whole SPR curve without the necessity of rotating the prism. The SPR curve and possible changes of its shape can be followed in real-time by a CCD array, as shown in figure below. A commercial model of the focused SPR, combined with multi-channel flow cell system, and applied to immunological studies, has been presented on the market[vi]. Another possibility is to realize the “focused beam SPR” idea in the form of an integrated optics chip for disposable use[vii].

Typical RI range is 1.30-1.40.

Typical angle range is 10 degrees.

SPR Naviâ„¢

allows the performance of two types of measurements:

Angular Scan: recording of the whole resonance curve by turning the prism against the laser beam, and

Fixed Angle Scan: (same as above) fixed angle monitoring when the prism is stopped close to the resonance angle.

Our RI range is from 1.00-1.40.

Our angle range is 40 degrees (38-78°)

This is the only configuration that enables the measurements of Multi-Parametric SPR!

Typical optical path of an MP-SPR instrument

Lower figure shows an experimental apparatus based on the Kretschmann geometry (used by SPR Naviâ„¢)that allows the performance of two types of measurements: recording of the whole resonance curve by turning the prism against the laser beam, and fixed angle monitoring when the prism is stopped close to the resonance angle. In order to improve sensitivity and accuracy of measurements, noise suppressing equipment, a light fluctuation compensation procedure, and digital data acquisition has been incorporated into the system. Optical sensitivity of this apparatus depends on the metal used (“steepness” of the slope) and is in the range Δn=10-7 for samples exposed to air, and Δn=10-6 for liquid samples[v].

Typical liquid path in a semi-automated SPR instrument:

Modelling of SPR

A shape of the SPR curve can be quantitatively described by Fresnel’s equations as the reflectivity of a multilayered system for p-polarised light[viii]. This possibility can be utilised for numerical simulation and prediction of sensor performance. For example, it has been found, that the SPR signal in liquids can be improved by introduction of an additional dielectric layer between substrate (εo) and metal (ε2)[ix], or background responses can be suppressed by adding an intermediate layer with high permittivity between metal (ε2) and analyte (ε1)[x].

Modelling of the SPR response by using a computer program which calculates reflection and transmission of polarised light in a stratified structure (stack of parallel layers) sandwiched between semi-infinite substrate (prism) and ambient (sample solution) media is also possible. All media have to be assumed to be linear, homogeneous and isotropic. For each medium the refractive index and for layers also the thicknesses have been used as input data. The calculation can be based e.g. on a 2×2 scattering matrix derived by using the Fresnel complex-amplitude reflection and transmission coefficients. The scattering matrix represents the overall optical properties and is expressed as a product of the interface and layer matrices of the entire structure[xi].

The opposite procedure, i.e. fitting of measured data into a theoretical model is also possible and may lead to identification of species adsorbed to the metal surface. Theoretically, only one set of s describing an adlayer (thickness and the real and imaginary parts of the dielectric constant) can fit the theoretical curve1, but the function describing minimum fitting error has a very shallow bottom[xii], so an unequivocal solution can be easily buried under instrumental noise and measurement errors. Proper fitting procedure should take into account also the roughness associated with every real surface. Fairly good agreement of data obtained from SPR fitting, as compared with those from direct surface observations by means of an atomic force microscope (AFM), have been reported in the literature[xiii].

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By boosting this interaction, the team was able to speed up the rate at which the lasers could be switched on and off to ten times faster than that of a conventional nanowire laser that uses glass. Impressively, these lasers are the fastest on record so far. Furthermore, according to study co-author Robert Röder, they may have even achieved the upper limit in terms of speed at which semiconductor lasers such as this can be operated.

But speed is not the only remarkable feature of these new lasers: they are also stable at room temperature. This means that they can be used in a wider variety of applications, for example as a means to improve communication systems by speeding up data transfer. Another possibility is that the light inside the laser could be used in ultra-high resolution imaging systems or biomedical detectors that operate at single-molecule sensitivity.

“This work is so exciting because we are engineering the interaction of light and matter to drive light generation in materials much faster than it occurs naturally,” senior author Dr. Rupert Oulton from Imperial College London said in a news release. “When we first started working on this, I would have been happy to speed up switching speeds to a picosecond, which is one trillionth of a second. But we’ve managed to go even faster, to the point where the properties of the material itself set a speed limit.”

New Record-Breaking Laser Could Speed Up The Internet

Fossil Clue Found To Ancient Battle Between Huge Predators

A buried tooth has rewritten our thinking about how the apex predators of the Triassic interacted. Modern clashes between crocodiles and lions have nothing on what occurred where land met sea more than 200 million years ago. This discovery could help explain a mystery of the era’s ecology.

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Just as the extinction of the dinosaurs gave mammals a chance to flourish, a previous extinction event removed dominant species and allowed the dinosaurs to take over the planet. Before the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, Rauisuchians topped the food chain in most terrestrial environments. Meanwhile, “Phytosaurs were thought to be dominant aquatic predators because of their large size and similarity to modern crocodylians,” says Dr Michelle Stocker of Virginia Tech.

Paleontologists doubted these two giants interacted much.

In Naturwissenschaften, Stocker and Dr Stephanie Drumheller of the University of Tennessee report finding a phytosaur tooth lodged in the thigh bone of a rauisuchid they estimate at 8m long.

“Finding teeth embedded directly in fossil bone is very, very rare,” Drumheller says. “This is the first time it’s been identified among phytosaurs, and it gives us a smoking gun for interpreting this set of bite marks.”

The tooth broke off in the battle and embedded 5cm deep into the bone, which then healed over, indicating the rauisuchid lived for a long time after surviving the attack. Other puncture marks can also be detected.

The discovery is a reminder of the value of specimens waiting to be studied in museums, in this case the University of California Museum of Paleontology. “There are many bones that get dug up, not all are immediately processed, prepared, and studied. No one had recognized the importance of this specimen before but we were able to borrow it and make our study,” says co-author Dr Sterling Nesbitt of Virginia Tech. The team used CT scans and a 3-D printer to replicate the bone, concluding that the rauisuchid was attacked by a phytosaur on at least one other occasion.

The same paper also reports another specimen from the same 220-210 million year old formation that provides insight into feeding behavior. A second femur shows unhealed bite marks, which the authors write, indicates “the animal either did not survive the attack or was scavenged soon after death.” The shape and spacing of the marks indicate a phytosaur was responsible in this case as well.

The authors add, “These marks provide an opportunity to start exploring the seemingly unbalanced terrestrial ecosystems from the Late Triassic of North America, in which large carnivores far outnumber herbivores in terms of both abundance and diversity.”

“Both of the femora we examined came from some of the physically largest carnivorous species present at both locations. Yet they were targeted by other members of the region—specifically phytosaurs,” says Drumheller. “Thus, size cannot be the only factor in determining who is at the top of the food chain.”

Fossil Clue Found To Ancient Battle Between Huge Predators

Physicists Achieve Quantum Teleportation of Photon Over 25 Kilometers

For the first time, a team of physicists have successfully teleported a quantum state of a photon to a crystal over 25 kilometers away through a fiber optic cable. This effectively showed that the photon’s quantum state, not its composition, is important to the teleportation process. The team was led by Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva and the results were published in the journal Nature Photonics. With this new paper, Gisin’s team has successfully squashed the previous record they set a decade ago by teleporting a quantum state of a proton 6 kilometers.

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The quantum state of the photon is able to preserve information under extreme conditions, including the difference between traveling as light or becoming stored in the crystal like matter. The photon’s state acts as information that can be teleported along great distances using the optical fiber, and can be stored within the crystal. This was achieved due to a phenomenon in quantum mechanics known as entanglement, where two particles have a correlation, despite the fact that they aren’t touching and transmitting information to one another.

To test this and ensure what they were observing was actually happening, one photon was stored in a crystal while the other was sent along optical fiber, over a distance of 25 kilometers. The photon that was sent along the optical fiber collides with a third photon, which was assumed to destroy them both. However, the information from the first photon was transferred to the third photon in the collision, like the transfer of energy when one billiard ball hits another. The information from the third photon came back to the crystal where it could be measured to ensure the information was preserved between the first and the second.

The photon did not physically “teleport” as we are used to hearing about in science fiction, where someone’s body can moved from place to place in a matter of seconds. Instead, the information contained on the now-distant photon can be inferred based on what is seen with the information in the photon in the crystal. By knowing one, you already know the other. However, what the information actually is can’t be known until it is examined.

Félix Bussières of Gisin’s team explained in a press release that it appears “that the quantum state of the two elements of light, these two entangled photons which are like two Siamese twins, is a channel that empowers the teleportation from light into matter.” Regardless if the information was in crystal or light, there wasn’t a change to the information itself. This could very well mean that the quantum state, not physical state, rules in quantum physics.

Quantum entanglement is the basis for theoretical quantum computing and quantum communication, though it will be a very long time before these results will have real-world implications. The achievements of Gisin’s lab could also improve how quantum entanglement interactions are measured.

What is Quantum Entanglement?

Physicists Achieve Quantum Teleportation of Photon Over 25 Kilometers

Spreading Continents Kick-Started Plate Tectonics Billions of Years Ago

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First described in the 1960s, plate tectonics explains how volcanoes build mountains and shape oceans. But have these large-scale motions always been this way? A new computer model suggests that plate tectonics was kick-started by gravity and the spreading of continents during the early days of Earth. The work was published in Nature and states:

Spreading continents kick-started plate tectonics

Stresses acting on cold, thick and negatively buoyant oceanic lithosphere are thought to be crucial to the initiation of subduction and the operation of plate tectonics1, 2, which characterizes the present-day geodynamics of the Earth. Because the Earth’s interior was hotter in the Archaean eon, the oceanic crust may have been thicker, thereby making the oceanic lithosphere more buoyant than at present3, and whether subduction and plate tectonics occurred during this time is ambiguous, both in the geological record and in geodynamic models4. Here we show that because the oceanic crust was thick and buoyant5, early continents may have produced intra-lithospheric gravitational stresses large enough to drive their gravitational spreading, to initiate subduction at their margins and to trigger episodes of subduction. Our model predicts the co-occurrence of deep to progressively shallower mafic volcanics and arc magmatism within continents in a self-consistent geodynamic framework, explaining the enigmatic multimodal volcanism and tectonic record of Archaean cratons6. Moreover, our model predicts a petrological stratification and tectonic structure of the sub-continental lithospheric mantle, two predictions that are consistent with xenolith5 and seismic studies, respectively, and consistent with the existence of a mid-lithospheric seismic discontinuity7. The slow gravitational collapse of early continents could have kick-started transient episodes of plate tectonics until, as the Earth’s interior cooled and oceanic lithosphere became heavier, plate tectonics became self-sustaining.

Today, plate tectonics and the resulting movements of the crust and upper mantle (or lithosphere) are primarily driven by the “negative buoyancy” of cold plates—the top is cooler and denser than what’s below—which causes one plate to slip under another in a process called subduction. This happens at mid-oceanic ridges: Hot rocks with low density float and move away from erupting ridges until they cool down, get denser than the underlying hot mantle, and eventually sink below to become recycled. Eight major tectonic plates move above the Earth’s mantle at up to 150 millimeters a year.

During the Archaen eon around 2.5 billion to 4 billion years ago, however, Earth’s interior was much hotter, volcanic activity was more prominent, and the ocean crust was presumably thicker. That made the oceanic lithosphere more buoyant and less cold and dense than nowadays. And it remains unclear if and when subduction and tectonic processes occurred. “Over the past decade, we have kept with the idea that plate tectonics was not something that was born with our planet,” Patrice Rey from the University of Sydney tells Popular Mechanics. “The Earth started with a stagnant plate. The question was, how do we move from there to a situation where we have plate tectonics?”

How Plate Tectonics Got Kick-Started

Scientists propose a new model to explain how plate tectonics, the geological phenomenon behind earthquakes and volcanoes, got started.

The outermost shell of the Earth is constantly in motion. Over eons, our planet’s tectonic plates have dragged the continents apart and slammed them into one another, forming ocean trenches, mountains, and volcanoes.

Plate tectonics explains continental drift, seafloor spreading, and why California has so many earthquakes. The Earth’s shifting plates also created an ideal environment for life itself to evolve and thrive. But exactly how our planet’s seven or eight major plates started shifting remains a mystery. Today, in a study published in Nature, researchers model the conditions that may have kick-started plate tectonics billions of years ago. “Over the past decade, we have kept with the idea that plate tectonics was not something that was born with our planet,” says Patrice Rey, a geoscientist at the University of Sydney in Australia and lead author on the study. “The Earth started with a stagnant plate. The question was, how do we move from there to a situation where we have plate tectonics?”

A Hotter, Heavier Earth

Modern geological plates move about in a predictable fashion. The top portion of a plate is relatively cooler and denser than the Earth below it, and this state of “negative buoyancy” causes one plate to slip, or subduct, under another. But scientists have long suspected that during the Archaean Eon, 2.5 billion years ago, geological plates were more static.

“We look at these old Archaean crusts, for instance, and we don’t see the features that characterize subduction,” Rey says.

This implies that some geological event must have initially set the plates in motion. Rey and his colleagues suspected that early Earth’s unique geology might have had something to do with it. Hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth’s interior was hotter and its crust was thicker. Rey wondered whether heavier continents might have pushed against nearby plates, initiating subduction.

“Continents have a natural tendency to spread horizontally and push other plates on their sides,” Rey says. “When we put this physics into a computer model, we realized that it had the power to force the plate into subduction.”

NASA Funded Rocket Has Six Minutes to Study Solar Heating - Updated

On Sept. 30, 2014, a sounding rocket will fly up into the sky – past Earth’s atmosphere that obscures certain wavelengths of light from the sun — for a 15-minute journey to study what heats up the sun’s atmosphere. This is the fourth flight for the Very high Angular Resolution Ultraviolet Telescope, or VAULT, will launch from the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico.

The instrument, now called VAULT2.0, has been refurbished with new electronics and an imaging detector to capture images more frequently than before. While in space, VAULT2.0 will observe light emitted from hydrogen atoms at temperatures of 18,000 to 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

“That’s the temperature range where the action is,” said Angelos Vourlidas, the principal investigator for VAULT2.0 at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. “These are the temperatures where the heating of the sun’s atmosphere – the corona — really takes place.”

Understanding how the corona heats remains one of the great, unanswered questions on the sun. The solar surface itself is only about 10,500 F, but further up in the atmosphere, the temperatures rise to million of degrees Fahrenheit – the opposite of what one typically expects when moving away from a heat source. Something heats up that corona, and VAULT2.0 will be watching.

The sounding rocket will fly up to about 180 miles in the air, just below the height where the International Space Station travels. It will fly in an arc, taking 15 minutes from launch to landing back on the ground. This allows for just six minutes of actual observations while it is above the atmosphere, during which VAULT2.0 will capture an image every six to eight seconds. Vourlidas plans to focus the telescope on active regions at the center of the sun – areas of intense and complex magnetic activity, to understand the heating process there.

During the VAULT2.0 launch, three other observatories will watch the same area: NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, the joint Japanese Exploration Agency and NASA’s Hinode, and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO. IRIS focuses in on solar material slightly hotter than does VAULT2.0, while Hinode can see solar material both cooler and much hotter. The temperatures also loosely correlate to heights in the atmosphere with the cooler temperatures at the bottom, and the hotter temperatures higher up. SDO will observe the larger scale structure of the solar atmosphere as well as the underlying magnetic field.

“Together the three telescopes will be looking at a sandwich of solar material,” said Vourlidas. “We’ll be looking at the layers from near the surface all the way up into the corona, the layers where the bulk of coronal heating is believed to happen.”

A view of the sun from Sept. 24, 2014 from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows bright spots representing magnetically active regions in the lower right quadrant of the sun. The VAULT2.0 mission will focus on this area to better understand what heats the solar atmosphere.
Image Credit:
NASA/SDO

VAULT’s launch time is planned for 1:47 p.m. EDT on Sept. 30. Launch timing will depend on good weather conditions as well as optimum times for coordinating with Hinode satellite and IRIS spacecraft.

VAULT is supported through NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program at the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. NASA’s Heliophysics Division manages the sounding rocket program.

For more information about NASA’s sounding rocket program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sounding-rockets

Update>

Sounding Rocket Launches Successfully – Six Minutes to Study Solar Heating

UPDATE: The Very high Angular resolution Ultraviolet Telescope, or VAULT, was successfully launched on a NASA Black Brant IX sounding rocket at 2:07 p.m. EDT from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The 1,184 pound payload flew to an altitude of 179 miles before descending by parachute and landing at White Sands. Preliminary results show that all payload systems performed as planned and the science instrument successfully gathered multiple sun exposures. The payload was recovered.

During a 15-minute flight on Sept. 30, 2014, VAULT captured images of an active region on the sun — seen in bright flashes of light on the left — seeking to understand what helps heats such magnetically intense regions. The white lines represent where different images were linked together.
Image Credit:
NASA/VAULT

NASA Funded Rocket Has Six Minutes to Study Solar Heating - Updated

Scientists Make Alcohol Droplets Move on Their Own

Droplets are simple spheres of fluid, not normally considered capable of doing anything on their own. But now researchers have made droplets of alcohol move through water. In the future, such moving droplets may deliver medicines, etc.

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To be able to move on your own — to be self-moving — is a feature normally seen in living organisms. But non-living things can also be self-moving, report researchers from University of Southern Denmark and Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague, Czech Republic.

The researchers have made alcohol droplets move in a life-like way, and this could lead to interesting new technology, they say.

“The system itself is very simple but yet it displays sophisticated behavior,” explains principal investigator Martin Hanczyc, who was at Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLINT), University of Southern Denmark, when the research was done.

Martin Hanczyc is now at Centre for Integrative Biology, University of Trento in Italy. The study’s first author is Jitka Cejkova, also formerly with University of Southern Denmark, now assistant professor at the Chemical Robotics Laboratory of Professor Frantisek Stepanek at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague.

Hanczyc and his colleagues from Prague have shown that small droplets of alcohol in water can move through complex mazes. The droplets can be led to certain targets, and therefore they may be used as a technology to physically move chemistry to a place where it is desired.

“For example, the droplet can act either as a lubricant, targeting an area that needs lubrication. Or the droplet can act as a carrier for chemistry that can find a target destination and release its content, such as flavoring, medicine etc.,” Martin Hanczyc explains.

Alcohol is attracted to salt

The droplets start to move when they sense salt in their environment.

“Salt is the stimulus that makes them move. They move because the salt gradient provides a different energy landscape. It is like taking a ball that is laying still on a flat surface and then suddenly make the surface hilly. The ball will roll to the lowest accessible point. That is what the droplet is doing. Without a salt gradient every direction in which a droplet might move looks the same (flat). But with a salt gradient coming from one direction the droplet can move energetically downhill into the salt gradient. And stronger salt concentrations will attract the droplet more,” says Martin Hanczyc.

The system is sustainable in that the same droplet can migrate towards salts at different positions added sequentially. In addition the droplet can distinguish between salt sources of different concentration. The process can also be controlled by external temperature stimulus, and when the droplet arrives at the source it can physically fuse with it and react with it.

Martin Hanczyc has previously reported that oil droplets display a life-like moving behavior and may be a simple chemical predecessor to biological life.

Scientists Make Alcohol Droplets Move on Their Own

App That Can Improve Your Vision - UltimEyes

Where would we be these days without our smartphones? There’s an app for virtually anything—games, TV shows, photography, music, shopping, fitness; the list goes on and on. And now, it turns out there are apps that can help you improve your vision, and scientific studies have proven that they work.

Earlier this year, a team of neuroscientists based at the University of California, Riverside, published a study in the journal Current Biology in which they tested out their new app called UltimEyes. Rather than improving the eye itself, the app works by exploiting a fundamental characteristic of the brain—neuroplasticity. Connections between brain cells are malleable and can be strengthened, so by exercising the area of the brain that is responsible for processing visual information (the visual cortex), it is possible to improve visual performance. This plasticity has been demonstrated in various prior studies on adults, which usually involve repetitive practice on visual tasks.

The visual stimuli used by UltimEyes and various other eye-training apps are patterns called Gabor patches, which are blurred lines presented on a grey background. Gabor patches are used because they have features that match and therefore activate the receptive field properties of brain cells located in the visual cortex. By presenting the eyes with these patterns and gradually making them more difficult to identify, your brain gets better at processing them, which leads to an improvement in vision.

As reported in the study, the team tested out their training platform on 19 baseball players and found that it improved the distance at which they could see clearly by an average of 31%. Many of them even achieved greater than 20/20 vision after using the app 30 times. Furthermore, the participants also had decreased strike-outs, suggesting it could actually help in playing baseball.

When a major league baseball pitcher throws a 95-mph fastball, only about 400 milliseconds—the duration of a blink—pass before the ball rockets over the plate. And a batter gets less than half that time to decide whether to swing, and where. Baseball players, then, could reap huge benefits from being able to probe a baseball farther from their eyes. And that inspired Aaron Seitz, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Riverside, who has created a new, publicly available app that conditions users to see farther on or off the baseball diamond.

In a study published this week in the journal Current Biology, Seitz worked with 19 players on the University of California, Riverside, baseball team, and showed that his app UltimEyes lengthened the distance at which the players could see clearly by an average of 31 percent. After using the app for 30 25-minute intervals, players saw an improvement that pushed many of them beyond normal 20/20 vision, including seven who attained freakishly good 20/7.5 vision—meaning that at a distance of 20 feet, they were clearly seeing what someone with normal vision could see at no farther than 7.5 feet away.

“We were using standard, on-the-wall eye charts,” Seitz says. “Normally, you stand 20 feet away, but our charts only measured down to 20/10 [vision]. So we moved some of these players 40 feet away from the eye chart and they were still reading the low lines. I was shocked.” Seitz has also calculated that, by measuring the improvement in batting of his test subjects against other players, his app made the team score enough extra runs to win at least four additional games throughout the season.

Although Seitz’s app seems quite implausible, its effects are indeed real, says Peggy Series, a neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study or the development of UltimEyes. “These results are, in fact, very similar to what’s already been proven in the lab,” Series says. “It’s very exciting. The fact that the app is improving the players’ visual acuity is not as surprising to me as that the improvement might actually help in playing baseball.”

The Brain—Not the Eyes

Despite its name, UltimEyes has little to do with improving the physical eye or eye muscles. Rather, the app works by exploiting recent insights into when and how the adult brain can be fundamentally rewired—a concept known as neuroplasticity.

“Within the last decade or so we’ve started to learn that brain fitness is a bit akin to physical fitness,” Seitz says. “If we exercise our brain in the proper ways, pretty much everything that the brain does should be able to be improved.”

UltimEyes exercises the visual cortex, the part of our brain that controls vision. Brain researchers have discovered that the visual cortex breaks down the incoming information from our eyes into fuzzy patterns called Gabor stimuli. The theory behind UltimEyes is that by directly confronting the eyes with Gabor stimuli, you can train your brain to process them more efficiently—which, over time, improves your brain’s ability to create clear vision at farther distances.

UltimEyes App – Seeing is Believing (sorry)