Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Weigh Smallest Mass Ever
PaSTE writes "From the article, 'US scientists have managed to measure the mass of a cluster of xenon atoms at just a few billionths of a trillionth of a gram - or a few zeptograms. The record measurement is in the mass range of individual protein molecules, and the detection was made using sensitive scales developed at Caltech.' Another big leap forward for nanotechnology."
As big as a dimple on a pimple on a fly's left nut.
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
first dupe!
They weigh less than the Olson Twins!
Article pointed to is from the 30th, two days ago, so it's not A.F. fodder.
Kate Moss?
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
"'US scientists have managed to measure the mass of a cluster of xenon atoms at just a few billionths of a trillionth of a gram - or a few zeptograms. The record measurement is in the mass range of individual protein molecules, and the detection was made using sensitive scales developed at Caltech.' Another big leap forward for nanotechnology.""
Just what the world needs. Weight conscious atoms.
A related article from less than 24 hours ago covers another use of the nanomechanical scale developed at Caltech. This article is not exactly a dupe because it talks about a different application of the same scale.
This was posted on BBC on March 30.
DUPE
Is it still April Fools?
More
just in case NASA are reading
Offtopic?!? Hoax or not, parent is right either way, because... story was here yesterday
--- Above clicky thingy provided free of charge as a service to them lazy /. readers.
A lot of people here are saying that "omg it's taco's penis". Let me explain something to these people: for something to have a mass (even if it is exceptionally small) it is first required that it exists. Since this has not been proven satisfactorily, I will say that it is probably taco's brain, which is obviously present (because he keeps posting stories), however very very small.
Notice who wrote the article (PaSTE).
KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!
I don't know why they put the real ones in with the joke ones.
The smallest mass ever measured would have to go to the electron. However, the measurement does not involve a scale but rather manipulation of electric fields. Moreover, scientists have shown that nuetrinos do in fact have mass (previously thought to be massless) and soon it will be the smallest mass ever measured
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
If they could take the cylinder they have now and weigh with enough precision, Avogadro's number would be known and the kilogram would no longer be tied to a physical object.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
...am I supposed to believe? After today's slew of Slashdot stories, I don't know what's supposed to be an April Fool's Day prank and what isn't.
10100111001
I wish people wouldn't post, you know, real stories on April 1st. Boycott reality for a day. It causes confusion.
The best thing about nanotechnology is that it seems to require exotic industrial gases, cryogenics and stainless piping and pressure vessels and stuff. Woo-hoo, I've got an automatic in!
Since the article itself isn't an april fool's joke, perhaps the repost is?
When they put together a few zeptograms of xenon atoms, did they use a small tube of Zap-A-Gap and zircon-encrusted tweezers?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Does this quark make me look fat?
The thing that pisses me off about it is that some fuckers in Washington and Florida (and probably elsewhere with less outgoing news coverage) got votes out of this woman.
I hear you. I live in JST and have still have put up with these - and it's 1:35 PM April 2nd here!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
"It weighs more than Bush's brain."
:P
Tee hee giggle snort. Uh huh.
If you're going to try for a funny, try soemthing where people have to figure it out. Example:
"Mr. Bush was pleased to find that science could finally measure what makes him such a strong leader!"
Okay, not all that funny, but at least it leaves a little more to the imagination.
"Derp de derp."
Because it's a known fact that brain mass has everything to do with intelligence. [/sarcasm]
You know, you can replace that with just about anybody famous or not, and chances are somebody will agree with you. That doesn't stop you from being incredibly not funny.
[disclaimer] I am rather liberal, and dislike GWB as much as any leftist man. But come ON people. Harding was MUCH dumber than GWB. You know, mister "You'll have to ask my advisor about that tax thing. There was a book about this tax thing which was supposed to explain it to be, but hell, i don't understand the book!"
This isn't the smallest mass ever measured, if it's anything it might be the smallest mass ever measured with something that's essientially mechanical. . ...
http://www.vetscite.org/publish/items/000305/
And what about physists who come up with masses for the fundamental particles??
Usually people use different tools when it comes to measuring things with masses in this range - a mass spectrometer for example
As for measuring really light things using the change in frequency of something that's vibrating that's not new
Professor Roukes' homepage has a link to his earlier published paper on attogram mass detection (2004). The abstract mentions that mass sensing of individual molecules will be realizable with optimized NEMS devices. Also there is link to paper which discusses the ultimate limit to mass sensing based on NEMS. Needless to say that so far it is not the physics of these nanostructures but the extrinsic amplifier noise which limited the measurement.
Yes, I submitted this story earlier last evening, but it was rejected, in favor of a DUPE ... ahem ...
MY Story has an actual nasa.gov link in it. Does the dupe? Nope.
Water found on Mars!
NASA has released a photo proving there is Water On Mars. This is certainly the most dramatic picture I've seen of such, leading credence to the idea that there was once Life on Mars.
Tag lost or not installed.
Ending a post with an insult....check. Welcome to Slashdot, you will fit in here nicely!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Slashdotters Witness Dupest Week Ever
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Relative brain mass w.r.t body mass, yes.
There's a reason why you're smarter than an elephant you know? And a reason why a chimp is smarter than a dog, or why Dolphins are smarter than most other species.
Actually, I seriously do. I'm unable to see the direct connection between this and Nanotechnology. It seems like our scales are just getting more sensitive... I don't mean this as a diss, just bringing it up in case someone knows how it is an advancement in Nanotechnology... 'cause I'm not seeing it.
-Vendal Thornheart
"We couldn't possibly get a dupe of this," we thought "It's April fool's day. April fool's day is nothing but a flood of lame and painfully unfunny jokes: it couldn't possibly be posted again today. This is a serious article, there is no way this could become a dupe."
Sadly, those wily editors fooled us again.
The ______ Agenda
Photons are massless and last I checked 0 (non-zero mass).
You can't teach someone to be clever when they are motivated by ignorance and hate.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
When these scales become common and moderately affordable, drug dealers are going to love this. They will finally be able to measure their drugs right down the the very crystal, ensuring that not a single zeptadollar gets wasted.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
Lets hope so....
I hope my bible thumping relatives don't trump my wife's say when he day rolls around.
I have to get back to reciting now
I pledge allegiance to the flag, of the United States of Jesusland.
And to the haughty moral values for which it stands.......
Weigh as much as a duck?
Task Mangler
1 zeptogram = 1.57473044 × 10-25 stones
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...oh wait, it's already a cluster. Goodbye, free Karma...
...the approximate weight of the average /.er's "little black book."
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
The combined mass of all the brain matter in the heads of everyone who voted for Bush for the first AND second terms!
"I won't let information get in the way of fighting terrorism" - George W. Bush.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
I'm unhappy about the lack of penis jokes in response to this news..
You'd think April 1 people would be thinking about more penises.... cause' they're funny.. penises..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Why weigh on a sunny day? So much to do, so why, why weigh?
- Save a tree, eat more woodpeckers
Well, they have energy and e=mcc, and they are also subject to gravity and as far as I know solar sails work by taking their impulse, so I guess though photons are massless, they are only so when in transit ..
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Thanks for that. Now my girlfriend has a new target weight to reach by next April.
*sigh*
Here are the comments made by Mr. Bush on the experiment: 'There is an old saying in Texas: Measure me once, shame on, shame on you. Can't get measured again!"
You can't handle the truth.
A photon not "in transit" makes no sense. They have zero-rest mass, which doesn't say much, because they are never at rest. However, although they are massless, the do have momentum, determined by this equation.
p=h*f/c
h = is Plank's constant, f= frequency of the photon, and c = speed of light. Since h and c are constants, then the only thing the photon exchanges to transfer momentum is frequency. Weird.
That's right. All your base.
By looking at the change in resonance frequency, they are measuring the mass, not the weight. Therefore the results are the same on any planet, space station, etc. But can you call this procedure weighing?-)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
> They have zero-rest mass
No they don't. A photon is nothing but electromagnetic radiation packet.
> the only thing the photon exchanges to transfer momentum is frequency. Weird.
Not really. "Momentum" for a photon is not the same thing as one for a particle. When a photon "hits" something, it can convert its electromagnetic energy into the mechanical energy of heat. Although it does not have momentum, it has energy, and can give momentum to absorbing particles.
Could somebody please tell me what a mole of these weighs so that I can compare it to something I can actually wrap my brain around?
ie. H2O = 18amu's
H = 1 (x2)
O = 16
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Let's see, the smallest protein product I can find at the moment is NP_871795, a splice variant of C. elegans gene "thioredoxin H", encoding just seven amino acids: MTIYFTV, it weighs in at about 870 daltons (the full gene is 12.5 kD), which is just around the claimed "a few zeptograms" - 1.45 to be more precise.
Looks like for once the irrelevant biological reference is at least accurate. (for reference, the largest product is NP_787974 in drosophila: 2451.35 kilodaltons).
Maybe I'm not getting it, but I don't quite see the medical application of this. Many of the most common techniques in proteomics and molecular biology are based around measuring the weight of proteins (and other molecules), I don't know what benefits direct measurement would add. Unless it were cheaper or less labor intensive, which this doesn't sound like it is.
I'm guessing they just wanted to get the word "cancer" in there somewhere.
sic transit gloria mundi
Oh, mass. My bad.
classical physics = 3 space dimensions relativistic physics = 4 dimensions (space+time) braneworld physics = 5 dimension (space+time+mass) http://superstringtheory.com/experm/exper51.html The holy grail of modern theoretical physics is the unification of quantum and relativistic theory. A key idea here is the possibility that there might be extra, hard-to-perceive dimensions. The braneworld theory say that the extra dimension is mass, so the mass of elementary particles might actually be fluctuating, if ever so slightly. Mass dynamics! Who knows, these ultra fine mass experiments may give us a way to test some of these crazy theories.
We should consider placing this "feat" into a more abstract perspective; a technique commonly employed by reveared physicists Daniel Shor and Cassidy Laflame in their popular "Measurement of Thought" refereed articles. Shor and Laflamme define two "weight numerators" for quantum error correcting codes, connected by a MacWilliams transform, and use them to give a linear-programming bound for quantum codes. They introduced two new enumerators which, while much less powerful at producing bounds, are useful tools for measuring whether in fact something is not nothingness. The new enumerators are connected by a much simpler duality transform, clarifying the duality between Shor and Laflamme's enumerators. They also use the new enumerators to give a simpler condition for a quantum code to have specified minimum distance, and to extend the enumerator theory to codes with block-size greater than 2. Yes, this means our ideas can be "weighed" for value...
Calista Flockhart, Paula Devicq and Jennifer Aniston en route for monthly weigh-ins.
Mod me down all you want, stupid moderators, but I'm not the one who's lying about it being a dupe article. Yet my post has a lower score? That's ridiculous.