The Wonder Material

In 2010, the Nobel Prize for Physics went to a couple of researchers for their work with Graphene.
So what is this material and why is it so important? Graphene is a pure carbon substance arranged in a hexagonal pattern, and is currently one of the strongest materials known. One of the main uses is to make extremely thin transistors which can be used to make faster, more powerful computer chips. IBM has even created a graphene based 100GHz transistor. It is possible that graphene will take over replace silicon-based CPUs in computers eventually, but as for now the technology isn't there yet.

 In more recent news, researchers at UCLA have found a way to transform graphene into a graphene-based supercapacitor. It is capable of storing a lot of energy and is very quick to charge, compared to a battery which can store a lot of energy but is slow to charge. The hope is that these will be able to be mass produced and effective enough that they will eventually make batteries obsolete.

The Super Supercapacitor | Brian Golden Davis from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

References

physics.org

Graphene Industries

BigThink.com
Science Daily 

Dangers of Carbon Nanotubes

Carbon nanotubes are, as they sound, tube shaped pieces of carbon with their diameters being on the nano scale. They may vary in

• Structure 
• Length
• Thickness
• Number of layers

  The nanotubes are also extremely strong, yet surprisingly flexible. They act as metals and are semiconductors. When pulled, the tubes form a extremely strong thread-like string that is flexible and hard to break. Discovery gives 10 great examples for the potential uses of this revolutionary material.

Unfortunately now, studies are showing that these mind-boggling new materials could lead to lung cancer. The nanotubes whose structure is like asbestos is behaving like asbestos. They are thin enough where they can penetrate into the lungs and are strong enough where the body will not be able to get rid of them. The good thing is that researchers know that this certain variation of structure and length is dangerous, and can regulate this type. Currently there are no known negative side effects from other variations.



References:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080520144004.htm
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbon-nanotube-danger
http://www.nanocyl.com/CNT-Expertise-Centre/Carbon-Nanotubes
http://dsc.discovery.com/technology/tech-10/carbon-nanotubes-uses.html

The Potential of Quantum Computers

source

Quantum computing, a thing most people have never heard of, is becoming a reality. In a traditional computer, information is represented by a sequence of bits representing either 0 or 1 and are managed by logic gates. In a quantum computer, information is represented by qubits and is handled by quantum gates. A quantum computer uses the strange quantum mechanic laws to process this information in a new way. Each qubit can be in many different states represented by a vector based on its spin and direction. A qubit can be either in the position 0 or 1, or in any position between them, representing 0 and 1 at the same time. This may seem strange, but it obeys the quantum mechanic laws. The state of each qubit can be changed by a pulse of a wave, and can change just one qubit, or up to every qubit in the system. For example, our computers now have 2⁶⁴ different states on a 64 bit machine. In a quantum computer we could change all 2⁶⁴ states in one clock cycle with a pulse of a wave, exponentially faster than we can on a regular computer, and even faster than a supercomputer.
 Peter Shor, a graduate of Berkeley and current faculty member at MIT, developed the algorithm known as "Shor's algorithm". This algorithm, given an integer, finds it's prime factors on a quantum computer. Because it is on a quantum computer, it is much faster than the most efficient known traditional factoring algorithm. While current technology has limited testing this algorithm to only finding the factor of 21, hopefully soon a quantum computer will be built and could be used to break almost any cryptography keys that are based on factoring large numbers.

-Mark Stumpf

References
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~taha/teaching/05F/210/news/2005_09_16.htm
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/01/29/physicists-observe-quantum-computing/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Shor