Xboxing For Science

Part of the fun of being an experimentalist is cobbling together simple, often unconventional, solutions to difficult problems. This Wired article describes a cool way the Kinect — a $120 motion-sensing accessory designed for Xbox videogames — is increasingly being used to obtain 3D data in various geological settings, replacing specialized devices that can be over a thousand times more expensive.

Best Abstract Ever?

I previously posted a possible candidate for the best scientific abstract ever. Turns out it has some pretty serious competition:

My friend Bryan points out another good one:

2011 Nobel Prize Predictions

Update: wrong on both counts! Physics went to Perlmutter, Schmidt, and Riess for their work studying the expansion of the universe — not a big surprise, they had it coming. Chemistry went to Shechtman for discovering quasicrystals — huge surprise! The fact that Shechtman won a Nobel Prize itself isn’t so surprising; after all, his discovery overturned much of the standard lore in crystallography. What is surprising is that he won the Chemistry, not Physics, prize; his discovery was more of a physics one, and my guess is that many (most?) chemists hadn’t even heard of him until a few days ago.

Even though the Nobel Prizes can be pretty surprising sometimes — did anyone guess Geim and Novoselov last year for the Physics prize? — it’s still fun to try to predict who will win.

Several of the recent Physics prizes have been for applied solid-state things (giant magnetoresistance in 2007, fiber-optics/CCDs in 2009, graphene in 2010). If this trend continues, John and Yablonovitch are good contenders for their work in photonics, or Ohno for his work on dilute magnetic semiconductors, or Haider, Rose, and Urban for their work on electron microscopy. If the committee decides that it’s time for something new, I think Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger are good contenders for their work on quantum entanglement, or, as I’ve previously predicted, Aharonov and Berry for their work on quantum topological and geometrical phases.

The Chemistry prize doesn’t seem to follow a trend, which makes it more difficult to predict. Some strong contenders are: Zare for his work using lasers for spectroscopy; Moerner for his work on single-molecule spectroscopy; and Matyjaszewski for developing ATRP.

So, completely randomly, my predictions for this year are:

• Physics: Aharonov and Berry; backup prediction: Haider, Rose, and Urban
• Chemistry: Zare; backup prediction: Matyjaszewski

There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea

Best scientific abstract ever?

All the more reason to clean up after your dog

As many readers of this blog know, graphene is a pretty attractive material to study these days due to its remarkable electrical, mechanical, and thermal properties. One of the bottlenecks to its commercialization has been the lack of a high-quality, reliable, and cheap way to produce it en masse, although chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of graphene at high temperatures (~1000^oC) on metals such as copper or nickel seems quite promising. In this approach, the graphene grows on the surface of a film of the metal, which acts as a catalyst, using carbon that is fed from some high-purity source.

In principle, though, you just need anything with carbon. An impure source could be placed on the frontside of the metal film; the carbon atoms would then diffuse to the backside of the film, forming graphene, while the impurities would stay put and later be etched away. This amusing paper from Jim Tour’s group does a nice job of highlighting this point. They use CVD to grow high-quality graphene on a copper foil using, among other things, feces from a miniature Dachsund, a cockroach leg, grass, and a short-bread flavored Girl Scout cookie. (The authors do not comment on how different flavors affect their results. I personally prefer my graphene thin-mint flavored.)