Interest of the day

Check out the wonderful documentary about the Fermilab called Science at Work. The film shows interviews with resident scientists, behind the scenes look at Fermilab experiments, and describes the new research direction into studying neutrinos, dark matter, dark energy, and high energy particle physics in collaboration with CERN.

Wolfram posted videos of its Visualization Virtual Workshop 2013 recently. One of the videos shows how to create 3-D objects suitable for printing on a 3-D printer. The video Scan, Convert, and Print: Playing with 3D Objects in Mathematica show the details of creating shapes from wire meshes, formulas, and scans with the proper thickness, surface checking, and generating of the proper files compatible with 3-D printer (.stl). A useful tool for inspecting your 3-D print files is MeshLab. It's open source. The presentation files are available from the first link above.

Semiwiki.com posted a very interesting summary of A Failure Analysis of the US Economy on their website. The reason we have jobless recoveries is due to productivity and the supply-demand gap. Basically, companies have become so efficient that they can respond to present demand without hiring workers. Worker wages have stagnated or have been falling, and consumer debt has been rising until recently so consumers are not able to consume as much. Demand has thus been limited as a result. The economy will not grow until the gap between demand and productivity is closed. This is the supply-demand gap. The full article can be found at A Failure Analysis of the US Economy

Singer song writer Helen Arney performs Schrodingers Katt in a Nanofab clean room. The whole idea is just wacky.

Maker has a 3-D printer guide that reviews 15 of the most popular models available today. There is also a beginners design guide to 3-D printing. The Make issue is selling for $10.

The Canadian Light Source has posted a photo map of synchrotrons located around the world. The US has 9, Europe has 16, Japan has 8, China has 4, Russia and India have 2, Australia, Canada, Singapore, Jordan, and Brazil have 1 synchrotron. So if I counted correctly, there are 44 synchrotrons world wide. I surprised that Europe and Japan have so many and that China and Russia have so few.

To follow up on the entanglement telescope, if there are entangled particles distributed across the known and unknown universe and we could find some here on earth, then we might be used them to communicate with other beings if they exist in real time. All the entangled particles would likely function as a party line. We would need to listen for signals and then figure out how to communicate without stepping on conversation that might already be present. Regardless of possible other being, entangled communications would be very useful for wireless communications. Researched at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have proposed the Entanglement-assisted Communication System for NASA's Deep-Space Missions: Feasibility Test and Conceptual Design for the NASA Innovated Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

I have kind of a crazy astronomy idea that occurred to me after reading The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene and Warped Passage by Lisa Randall. After the big bang, the universe went through a rapid expansion that uniformly distributed matter across the entire universe and also gave us low entropy (low disorder) as I understand it in a hand wavy kind of way. I'm wondering how much if any of this matter was entangled before and during the inflation period, and if any of it is still entangled today. If entanglement occurred and you could find some of this matter that is still entangled to measure here on earth, would you be able to learn something useful about the whole universe without the limitations of the speed of light? I think of this concept as a way to make an entanglement telescope. Entangled particles could be much farther away than particles seen in the observable universe using light. Decoding a signal based in entangled particles that may on a many-to-one configuration may be very difficult. There would be no knowledge of the location of the remote entangled particle(s) or there environment either.

Sascha Mehlhase at the Niels Bohr Institute has built a scale model of the ATLAS detector used at the LHC out of plastic blocks. It's an impressive model. Check you the time lapse video of the assembly of the model in parallel with the actual construction of the ATLAS detector.

Professor Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab describes her work on 3-D printing things that are inspired by biology, incorporate multiple materials with different properties, and computational techniques to produce the forms. Her designs are elegantly sculptural as wells as being functional.