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Opinion The scientific community celebrated April 14 as World Quantum Day to raise awareness of quantum science’s impact across diverse fields The world of science is on the cusp of a transformative era driven by the burgeoning field of quantum technology. Quantum science is founded on several key principles that underpin the behaviour of particles and systems at the quantum scale. The term “quantum scale” refers to the realm of physics that deals with phenomena occurring at very small scales, typically at the level of atoms, subatomic particles and fundamental particles. It encompasses the principles of quantum mechanics, which govern...

Supramolecular assemblies of six rubidium and one iron atom. Scanning tunneling microscopy revealed the clear signal of the one iron atom. (Ajayi et al., Nature, 2023) ***************************************************************************** Atoms may not have bones, but we still want to know how they are put together. These tiny particles are the basis on which all normal matter is built (including our bones), and understanding them helps us understand the larger Universe. We currently use high-energy X-ray light to help us understand atoms and molecules and how they're arranged, catching diffracted beams to reconstruct their configurations in crystal form. Now, scientists have used X-rays...

A company backed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos is set to build a large-scale nuclear fusion demonstration plant in Oxfordshire. Canada's General Fusion is one of the leading private firms aiming to turn the promise of fusion into a commercially viable energy source. The new facility will be built at Culham, home to the UK's national fusion research programme. It won't generate power, but will be 70% the size of a commercial reactor. General Fusion will enter into a long-term commercial lease with the UK Atomic Energy Authority following the construction of the facility at the Culham campus. While commercial details...

One of the strangest things about the gorgeous photo of an atom that has just won a British science photography prize is that you cannot take a photo of an atom. It is just impossible. And yet, there it is, a strontium atom, like a little round dot, shining clear as day. The image is called “Single Atom in an Ion Trap.”

The finding that fission releases huge amounts of energy launched a scientific and military race to understand and use this new atomic source of power Over Christmas vacation in 1938, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch received puzzling scientific news in a private letter from nuclear chemist Otto Hahn. When bombarding uranium with neutrons, Hahn had made some surprising observations that went against everything known at the time about the dense cores of atoms—their nuclei. Meitner and Frisch were able to provide an explanation for what he saw that would revolutionize the field of nuclear physics: A uranium nucleus could...

Bugs can be exploited to extract info, potentially insert rootkits Intel today admitted its Management Engine (ME), Server Platform Services (SPS), and Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) are vulnerable to multiple worrying security flaws, based on the findings of external security experts.The firmware-level bugs allow logged-in administrators, and malicious or hijacked high-privilege processes, to run code beneath the operating system to spy on or meddle with the computer completely out of sight of other users and admins. The holes can also be exploited by network administrators, or people masquerading as admins, to remotely infect machines with spyware and invisible rootkits, potentially.Meanwhile,...

Sometimes you have to think outside the box. Faced with some of the universe’s most stubborn mysteries, such as the identity of dark matter, physicists are turning to a technique that employs the weird laws of quantum mechanics: atom interferometry. Atom interferometers allow the study of various physical phenomena by splitting atom waves using a nanograting, such as this one. Composed of silicon nitride, this grating, imaged with a scanning electron microscope, has a period of 100 nm. Image courtesy of Alex Cronin (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ). This method, which takes advantage of the fact that quantum particles behave...

The Chameleon in the Vacuum Chamber A new proposal for an experiment that could test the presence of a fifth force with unprecedented precision. It still amazes me that everything I see is made up of only some few dozen particles and four interactions. For all we know. But maybe this isn’t all there is? Physicists have been speculating for a while now that our universe needs a fifth fundamental force, one responsible for the phenomenon of dark energy, to maintain the observed expansion rate. Although this idea has been around for more than a decade, it has turned...

Professor Philip Moriarty expresses his displeasure with oft-repeated belief that atoms do no physically touch each other.

I just listened to yet another disturbing piece of propaganda by Oliver Stone, the Untold History of the United States. It is about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As can be expected in a good leftist piece of propaganda, the point made is that the US was the bad guy (including Truman) , who bamboozled poor Japan and Poor USSR during that time. The horrible US dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan, knowing that Japan was going to surrender without its use within a couple of weeks anyway. Then the laughably improbably logical gymnastics come...

AMD is launching its first tablet-optimized APU today, in a bid to challenge Intel's de facto dominance of the Windows 8 tablet market. Dubbed Hondo, the new Z-60 draws less power than any Brazos-based part AMD has launched before. Some of you may remember that AMD launched a tablet processor last year, but the Z-01 -- codenamed Desna -- was an ordinary Brazos core that binned well enough to run within a lower power envelope. It was more a proof-of-concept chip, meant to demonstrate that AMD could, and would, compete in the tablet market. Hondo, in contrast, is a new...

For those of you that haven't seen this yet, Researchers from Purdue, the University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales have created a working transistor from a single atom. Thanks to Robert for the link. We have fabricated a single-atom transistor in which a single phosphorus atom is positioned between highly doped source and drain leads with a lateral spatial accuracy of ±1 atomic lattice spacing. We demonstrate that we are able to register source, drain and gate contacts to the individual donor atom and observe well-controlled transitions for 0, 1 and 2 electron states, in agreement...

A Swedish man who was arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen said Wednesday he was only doing it as a hobby. Richard Handl told The Associated Press that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material. The 31-year-old Handl said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove. Only later did he realize...

Though we still like to think of Intel first and foremost as a computer CPU company, the fact of the matter is the company is trying its hardest to expand their horizons. Among their expansion efforts are a push in to the smartphone space, and to further that Intel is at Mobile World Congress 2011 making their latest smartphone-related announcements. The first announcement, and of course the one nearest and dearest to our hearts, is on the CPU side of things. Medfield – Intel’s next-generation Atom-based smartphone SoC is now sampling and will ship later this year. Intel still hasn’t...

GENEVA — Scientists will have to wait until spring to use the world's biggest particle collider for groundbreaking research because repairs to damage will run into the laboratory's normal winter shutdown, the operators said Tuesday. The European Organization for Nuclear Research earlier said an electrical failure Friday, nine days after the collider was first started, released a large amount of liquid helium into the tunnel. Experts have gone into the 17-mile circular tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider to check on damage caused when an electrical connection between two magnets apparently melted, said James Gillies, spokesman for the organization, which...

European particle physics laboratory CERN is set to launch its gigantic experiment which hopes to throw light on the origins of the universe within a month, the laboratory's head said Tuesday. If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, known as "the God Particle." The "Higgs," named after the eminent British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964, would fill a gaping hole in the benchmark theory for understanding the physical cosmos. Other work on the so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could explain...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report accusing his government of withholding information about its nuclear program, today suggested that Iran may be pioneering development of “wireless atomic energy” that could “ultimately end dependence on oil” in some countries. The IAEA report alleges that Iran has refused to explain its work on explosives, uranium enrichment and missile warhead design, however, Mr. Ahmadinejad continues to assert his nation’s right to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes. “The American puppets see our warheads, explosives and enriched uranium and they immediately think ‘bombs’,” said the Iranian...

Atom smasher may give birth to 'Black Saturns' 20:18 13 February 2007 NewScientist.com news service Stephen Battersby If we ever make black holes on Earth, they might be much stranger objects than the star-swallowing monsters known to exist in space. According to a new theory, any black hole that pops out of the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Switzerland might be surrounded by a black ring – forming a microscopic "black Saturn". A black hole and a black ring can co-exist, in theory, as long as they are set spinning, say Henriette Elvang of MIT in Cambridge, US, and...

Iran still "2-3 years" from atom bomb By Mark Trevelyan Wed 31 Jan 2007 Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks to parliamentarians before presenting his proposed budget in Tehran January 21, 2007. Iran is at least two to three years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon, a leading global think-tank said on Wednesday. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi LONDON (Reuters) - Iran is at least two to three years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon, a leading global think-tank said on Wednesday. But the International Institute for Strategic Studies said pressure on the United States to stop the...

An individual "dopant" atom has been spied interfering with the flow of electrons through a silicon transistor for the first time. Researchers say the feat could help scientists squeeze more power out of conventional computers and ultimately develop silicon-based quantum computers. Dopants are chemical impurities that affect the flow of electrons through a conducting or semiconducting material. They are deliberately added to pure silicon, for example, to create different types of electronic component. To analyse a lone dopant atom in action, Sven Rogge and colleagues at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands cryogenically cooled 35-nanometre-wide silicon wires, taken from...