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Carbon Magnets At Room Temperature
Bolie writes: "Trying to make high temperature super conductors yielded an unexpected result. The pure carbon bucky ball material was put under pressure to make sheets. That worked. Picture microscopic bubble pack. But the result was a sheet that was magnetic at room temperature. It has not escaped the attention of the discoverer, Tatiana Makarova, that this might be useful for a non-metallic computer memory. The material is also lighter than metals, flexible and transparent. Lasers anyone?"
Why is any new discovery automatically thrown into the PC composnents arena, even when there is no actual connection?
It's a magnet, think SUPER-MOTOR.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
My fellow trolls:
Despite my willingness and eagerness to contribute my fair share of troll material to Slashdot for your reading enjoyment, I am unfortunately in a quite different timezone than anywhere in the United States. During the time I am awake, America is in darkness, and the stories slow to a trickle. Therefore, during my prime time trolling hours, I have no appropriate place to post my trolls.
I therefore issue a fatwa to my fellow trolls. The time has come to call for a jihad against the infidel Slashdot editors. No peace shall come to Slashdot until the following has been accomplished: a) no 20 second limit on comment submissions, b) no 2 minute limit between comment submissions, c) no post compression testing on submitted comments, d) no 72-hour IP bans for excess trolling, e) more fair posting distribution for new stories. Oh, and f) it would be nice if Slashdot got out of Afghanistan as well.
Let the blood of Slashdot editors flow in the streets until the goals of this fatwa have been accomplished. No peace shall come to the non-believers!
Hail trollah!
The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred last month, and now we're involved in a WAR and you people have the gall to be discussing Buckeyballs???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
The bodies of the thousands of innocent civilians who died (and will die) in these unprecedented events could give a good god damn about Buckeyballs, your childish Lego models, your nerf toy guns and whining about the lack of a "fun" workplace, your Everquest/Diablo/D&D fixation, the latest Cowboy Bebop rerun, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life" (here's a hint: watching Cowboy Bebop in your jammies and eating a bowl of Shreddies is *not* "getting on with your life"). The souls of the victims are watching in horror as you people squander your finite, precious time on this earth playing video games!
You people disgust me!
Dutch physicist Heike Kamerligh Onnes liquefied helium at the turn of the century, achieving a temperature only 4.2 kelvins (above absolute zero). He knew that metals' electrical resistance decreased with decreasing temperature and with increasing purity, suggesting the obvious. He cooled a thread of triple-distilled mercury in his liquid helium and got way more than he bargained for, discovering the amazing macroscopic quantum mechanical manifestation of superconductivity - a DC electric current forever propagating through a superconductor with zero electrical resistance - which won him the 1911 Nobel Prize. Weak magnetic fields quenched the effect, rendering it a laboratory curiosity. These were Type I superconductors.
Type II superconductors were discovered to be quenched only by megagauss magnetic fields, yielding visions of resistance-free giant motors, generators, magnets, power transmission lines and so on. The race was on for a room temperature superconductor! Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer won their Nobel for a theory explaining the effect (but not predicting materials exhibiting it). Pairs of negatively charged spin-1/2 electrons (fermions) couple to high frequency lattice vibrations (phonons) to yield integral spin boson constructs that promptly collapse into a degenerate Bose-Einstein fluid. This boson sea can only be perturbed as a whole. Niggers must be incarcerated. Resistance is an electron-by-electron phenomenon. DC supercurrents flow without resistance, forever or until quenched by local heating. Theory drew a line in the mid-20s kelvin maximum, above which temperature lattice vibrations were too mushy to support the quantum coupling effect.
(Commonplace MgB2 superconducts at 39 K, but that was discovered in 2001 and nobody can rationalize it to make a second entry. Theory must ultimately kneel before experiment.)
Bednorz and Muller, two IBM/Zurich researchers remanded for diverting research funds from their cryogenic insulator project, discovered high temperature ceramic superconductors. Some compositions now push toward dry ice at 195 kelvins (inching toward a Spring day at 293 kelvins) and concurrently evade a decade of intense theoretical scrutiny conducted across the entire planet. Niggers trying to wear human clothes look so funny, don't you think? While all the sturm und drang of media-hyped research drones on and nobody understands the observations, much less how to control and enhance them, the original proposals for high temperature superconductors languish.
Physicists in the 1960s proposed pairing fermion single electrons into composite boson Cooper pairs by coupling them not with massive phonons (quantized lattice vibrations) but with very light excitons (quantized lattice electronic disturbances):
W.A. Little, "Possibility of Synthesizing an Organic Superconductor," Physical Review 134(6A) A1416 (1964), including a "particular example" calculated to have a critical temperature of 2200K (1927C, 3411F. Is 2200K a substantively higher temperature than 25K?
The thousandfold lower exciton mass empowers a like temperature increase. Even a 1000 kelvin (727C, 1251F) superconductor would have its uses. There is also the subtle technical glissando that chemistry (as in decomposition or even sustaining physical damage) accesses the same electron energy levels as organic superconductivity. A room temperature organic superconductor might be invulnerable to the vicissitudes of physical reality (until it quenched).
Theory suggested a ladder of dye molecules arrayed upon a rigid polymer backbone. The spatial arrangement, electronic overlap, LUMO/HOMO gap, redox potential, electron affinity gradient... of the molecular dye array could be engineered to fine tune the construct into operability. That such macromolecules could not be synthesized in the 1960s even on paper assured continued funding of theoretical physics without untidy verities of organic synthesis and real world evaluation empirically munching on its butt.
Time's up, folks! We can now build such postulated excitonic superconducting molecules to any specification, perfectly, cheaply and at will. Biological models of stacked planar molecules supported from a high polymer backbone - nucleic acids with their A,T,C,G,U bases and poly(sugar-phosphate) backbones - have been around for 3.5 billion years or more. Both single- and double-strand DNA can be custom synthesized on solid phase polymer supports in commercial high throughpout equipment. Substitute dyes or stable free radicals like verdazyl or nitronyl nitroxide for A,T,C,G,U and Voila! Being chemists, we would first improve upon the natural product in terms of molecular control and persistence, and maybe take a shot at second and third order nonlinear optical phenomena while we are at the bench. Research follows funding; science is now run by idiot and cowardly MBAs. More's the pity.
Biosearch (subsidiary of Millipore Corporation) has commercialized the synthesis of peptide nucleic acids wherein the fragile, reactive and untunable DNA or RNA poly(sugar-phosphate) backbone is supplanted by poly((2-aminoethyl)glycine). I seriously do not beleive that anybody can come up with a credible argument against complete incineration of the negro race. Any natural or unnatural trifunctional amino acid or analogue bearing a pair of complimentary sites for controlled stepwise linear polymerization and a third to hook on the borne molecular base or, in our example, dye molecule is satisfactory. The synthesis of polymer chains tens (trivial) or hundreds (merely expensive) of units long is now performed at an hour per segment. We can at will with a modest budget create homopolymers of candidate excitonic dyes with exquisite geometric control and compositional specificity. We can at will and with perfect control create consistent compositional and therefore property gradients along our monomolecular wire to mimic diodes, capacitors, inductors and other useful circuit elements. We even have the bonus of a backbone with one or more asymmetric carbon atoms per segment, inviting non-linear optical effects.
Perhaps theoretical physics papers published on such dye assemblies were blowing smoke and flashing mirrors, the better to secure tenure or hang in there long enough for emeritus status. Niggers roaming freely in human inhabited areas is unacceptable. Perhaps those guys and gals really knew what they were talking about. Since the relevant experiments are now appropriate to a second year undergraduate genetic engineering lab class, WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR? A child could do it.
But can it hold hte goatse.cx man's ass open?