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Bought this because it's so odd, it was buried for 50 years plus, up in New Jersey in a carriage house under some floor boards. I have looked at it under a loop, looks like just ink on stone no dot matrix. I think the stone is soap stone, weighs 42 pounds, 12 by 16, the original etching which is easy to find was done in 1948 by Gerome Kaplin titled "the Arabs" on what I think is a 42 pound piece of soap stone. Never seen anything like it, Sotheby's is checking it out. Figured a Freeper might know.

Chinese tech giant Huawei’s attempt to make semiconductors without American equipment has generated global headlines as the US-China tech war takes yet another turn. It is one more strong hint – if any were needed – that the US government is in the process of creating a competitor that it won’t be able to control while forcing American companies to abandon a massive market that until now has supported their sales, profits, economies of scale and stock prices. Geopolitics have overridden America’s past devotion to open markets and the situation is not likely to change anytime soon as long as...

Lithography was invented in 1798 by Aloys Senefelder and was used initially for printing sheet music. By the 1890s, artists including Pierre Bonnard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had adapted it for artistic purposes, using it to create color prints and posters. Lithography can be one of the most direct printmaking mediums, since images are executed on a flat surface—either a polished limestone slab or an aluminum plate—in much the same manner as crayon drawings or watercolors on paper. After chemicals are used to securely bond the image to the stone or plate, it can be inked and printed. The Expressionists—and...

Fabrication methods combining printing and lithography have proven fertile. Andy Extance now asks how successful will they be outside the lab? © Felice C FrankelAbout eight carbon–carbon single bonds laid end-to-end. Roughly two sodium chloride unit cells side-by-side. These chemists’ benchmarks are useful for understanding a size far too small to see with the naked eye: the nanometre. Chemicals naturally inhabit this scale, even as electronic engineers drill ever further into it to make chips for our computers and smartphones. Now that semiconductor scientists are making commercial transistors with dimensions as small as 22nm, they face perhaps their biggest challenge...

A superlens would let you see a virus in a drop of blood and open the door to better and cheaper electronics. It might, says Durdu Guney, make ultra-high-resolution microscopes as commonplace as cameras in our cell phones.No one has yet made a superlens, also known as a perfect lens, though people are trying. Optical lenses are limited by the nature of light, the so-called diffraction limit, so even the best won’t usually let us see objects smaller than 200 nanometers across, about the size of the smallest bacterium. Scanning electron microscopes can capture objects that are much smaller,...

Many of you have offered prayers for my family and mother-in-law who was ill for quite some time. Thanks to all for the thoughts. Here's the obituary from the LA Times about her: http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-june-wayne-20110825,0,2512278.story?page=1

Microscale lenses and better materials move OLEDs closer to lighting our world. In an advance that could hasten the day when energy-efficient glowing plastic sheets replace traditional lightbulbs, a method for printing microscopic lenses nearly doubles the amount of photons coming out of the materials, called organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. Stephen Forrest, an electrical engineer and vice president of research at the University of Michigan, says his technology increases the light output of the thin, flexible OLEDs by 70 percent. "They just create local curvature that allows light to pass through," he explains. This means that OLEDs, which are...