SECOND WAVE: In an era where a race may be won by a fraction of a second and scientific applications rely on precise timings it's important to be able to measure time accurately. The world's most accurate clock is in the UK — it's an atomic clock that loses or gains less than 1 second in some 138 million years. The CsF2 clock at the National Physical Laboratory measures the energy required to change the spin property of caesium atoms. One standard second is how long it takes just over 9 billion peaks and troughs of electromagnetic waves to go past in the clock. So we can also measure a nine-billionth of a second perhaps? BBC explain just how the caesium fountain works.
PHANTOM FILM SPEED: To make a slow motion video you have to run a camera fast. So how about 1 million frames per second? The Phantom v1610 from Vision Research will record at that speed for reduced resolution, or notch it down to 16,000 fps at full resolution. The camera uses a proprietary widescreen CMOS sensor with 28 micron pixels, and 12 bits per pixel depth. The camera comes with up to 96GB of high-speed memory. 1 million fps is very impressive indeed. Vision Research explains and you can check out the video here.
TUMOUR DEPRIVATION: Engineers at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen in Germany have created a medical electronic sensor chip. It determines the oxygen content in tissue fluid and sends the data wirelessly via a nearby receiver to the patient's doctor. The chip could spot a loss of oxygen around a tumour that would suggest the tumour was growing aggressively. An implanted sensor like this could reduce the need for regular checkups at a hospital. The chip must not only do its job reliably but also resist contamination from bodily processes and not be rejected by the body. Researchers hope to also add a pump that can release chemotherapeutic agents close to the tumor. Oxygen for drugs: a fair swap. Science Daily has more.
SEEING MOUSE: The LSM-100 wired mouse from LG incorporates a scanner. Unlike most portable scanners, it can scan pages up to A3 in size. A Smart Scan button on one side allows you to swipe across a page to scan it, while OCR software turns words into text. A handy feature in a mouse. Gizmag share the details.
ELECTRON PHOTOS: Theories say electrons orbit a nucleus. Now physicists have seen it for themselves, thanks to IBM's work with the pentacene and naphthalocyanine molecules and a scanning tunneling microscope. Next researchers hope to work on molecule-sized machinery. With the objects they're imaging becoming smaller and smaller they may soon be able to see nothing at all. ScienceNOW show the pictures and explain the process.
