10088838
submission
cyberfringe writes:
Bringing the fictional authoritarian police behavior of "A Clockwork Orange" ( http://zi.pe/iVi ) to reality, classical music is being used increasingly in Great Britain as a tool for social control and a deterrent to "bad behaviour". A school district "subjects" badly behaving children to hours of Mozart in "special detention" isolations. Unsurprisingly, some of these youth now find classical music unbearable. Recorded classical music is blared through speakers at bus stops, outside stores, train stations and elsewhere to drive away loitering youth. Apparently it works. Detentions are down, graffiti is reduced, and naughty youth flee because classical music now is "repugnant" instead of providing an intellectual and emotional opportunity to experience one of humanity's greatest arts.
9859800
submission
cyberfringe writes:
Professor of materials science Dawn Bonnell and colleagues at University of Pennsylvania have discovered a way to turn optical radiation into electrical current that could lead to self-powering molecular circuits and efficient data storage. They create surface plasmons that ride the surface of gold nanoparticles on a glass substrate. Surface plasmons were found to increase the efficiency of current production by a factor of four to 20, and with many independent parameters to optimize enhancement factors could reach into the 1000's. "If the efficiency of the system could be scaled up without any additional, unforeseen limitations, we could conceivably manufacture a 1A, 1V sample the diameter of a human hair and an inch long," Prof Bonnell explained.
Original study report published in the current issue of ACS Nano: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn901148m
Significance? Nano-sized circuits that can power themselves through sunlight (or other directed light source). Delivery of power to nanodevices is one of the big challenges of the field.
