Why is the sky blue? Everyone supposedly knows, but just about everybody gets it partially wrong. Don’t feel bad, though; the answer has so many parts, it took philosophers and scientists from Aristotle to Maxwell to answer it.
Besides, it’s a bit of a trick question …
We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.
Induction cooktops are faster than electrics, as responsive as gas, and safer and easier to clean than glass-and-ceramic-top stoves. Unlike these other approaches, which heat food indirectly, induction cooktops use electromagnetism to heat the cookware itself. In this article, I’ll show you how the same power-producing principle that drives Hoover Dam’s giant generators is being used to cook dinner in a kitchen near you.
How induction cooktops work
Some days, I feel like I’m living in the future. Then I remember that I don’t have a flying car, a hyperintelligent monkey sidekick or a quantum computer. Granted, I’ve always suspected a flying car would be a terrible idea (and the less said about the monkey, the better), but I still want my iQuantum. So, what’s the hold up?
Quantum computing is one of those ideas that has enormous potential but is so cutting-edge that even its most basic aspects, like storing and reading data, require a large assortment of people with advanced degrees. Recently, two researchers worked out a way to read quantum states using entanglement, the “spooky action at a distance” that links two quantum particles under certain conditions. The method, which they hit upon while exploring electron-electron interactions, could solve the problem of reading quantum bits (aka “qubits”) once and for all.
For some time now, conventional computer memory has been heading toward a crunch—a physical limit of how much storage can be crammed into a space before it is overwhelmed by heat and power problems. Generally, researchers have tried to avert this heat death in two ways: leapfrogging to the next generation of memory or refining current memory.
Researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for Applied Nanoionics (CANi) have combined the two approaches to create new memory that amps up performance while remaining compatible with today’s devices. CANi also used nanoionics (a technique for moving tiny bits of matter around on a chip) to overcome the limitations of conventional electronics: Instead of moving electrons among ions, nanoionics moves the ions themselves.