Graphene has long-held notions of grandeur over its current silicon overlord, but a few practical issues have always kept its takeover bid grounded. Samsung, however, thinks it's cracked at least one of those -- graphene's inability to switch off current. Previous attempts to use graphene as a transistor have involved converting it to a semi-conductor, but this also reduces its electron mobility, negating much of the benefit. Samsung's Advanced Institute of Technology has created a graphene-silicon "Schottky barrier" that brings graphene this much-needed current-killing ability, without losing its electron-shuffling potential. The research also explored potential logic device applications based on the same technology. So, does this mean we'll finally get our flea-sized super computer implant? Maybe, not just yet, but the wheels have certainly been oiled.
The FCC has been making a big push towards freeing up the airwaves for medical uses, and it just took one of its biggest steps on that front by proposing to clear space for wireless body area networks. Agency officials want to let devices operate in the 2.36GHz to 2.4GHz space so that patients can stay at home or at least move freely, instead of being fenced in at the hospital or tethered to a bed by wires. Devices would still need the FDA's green light, but they could both let patients go home sooner as well as open the door wider for preventative care. Voting on the proposal takes place May 24, which leaves our tech-minded hearts beating faster -- and if the proposal takes effect, we'll know just how much faster.
Remember Star Trek: The Motion Picture? That movie had the alien life force that was gathering everything in it's path(basically). After reading the article below it makes one wonder if it really could happen sometime in the future. Thirty three + years after it's launch, Voyager 1 is still out there gathering information and taking orders, 10.8 billion miles away!
An artist's concept of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes near interstellar space.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL [Full Story]
A venerable NASA spacecraft cruising toward the edge of the solar system has proved that it's not ready to retire just yet by performing a precision maneuver to gear up for new studies of the solar wind.
NASA's Voyager 1 probe, which launched in 1977, rolled itself 70 degrees counterclockwise on Monday (March 7), and then held the position for more than two hours. The goal was to start positioning the probe — humanity's most distant spacecraft — to study how the charged particles streaming from the sun behave deep in space.
It was the first such roll-and-stop move for Voyager 1, or its sibling Voyager 2, since 1990, NASA researchers said. However, the spacecraft have performed rolls — without any stops — regularly in the intervening decades, to help calibrate their instruments and take data on the sun's magnetic field, the scientists added.
"Even though Voyager 1 has been traveling through the solar system for 33 years, it is still a limber enough gymnast to do acrobatics we haven't asked it to do in 21 years," Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "It executed the maneuver without a hitch, and we look forward to doing it a few more times to allow the scientists to gather the data they need." [The Solar System Explained: From the Inside Out]
A solar wind mystery
The two Voyager spacecraft are traveling through a turbulent region of the solar system known as the heliosheath. The heliosheath is the outer shell of a bubble around our solar system created by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles blowing outward from the sun at a million miles per hour.
Astronomers believe that the solar wind banks as it approaches the outer edge of this bubble, where it runs up against the interstellar wind. The interstellar wind originates in the region between stars, and it blows by our solar bubble, researchers said.
In June 2010, when Voyager 1 was about 10.6 billion miles (17 billion kilometers) away from the sun, data from its Low Energy Charged Particle instrument showed that the net outward flow of the solar wind was zero. That zero reading has continued since.
Read the complete article at Space.com
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