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Graphene Optical Lens a Billionth of a Meter Thick Breaks the Diffraction Limit (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: With the development of photonic chips and nano-optics, the old ground glass lenses can't keep up in the race toward miniaturization. In the search for a suitable replacement, a team from the Swinburne University of Technology has developed a graphene microlens one billionth of a meter thick that can take sharper images of objects the size of a single bacterium and opens the door to improved mobile phones, nanosatellites, and computers.
they better get some superglue and put it back together before someone finds out.
This material seems to be the latest addition to Randall Munroe's long list of engineering problems that can be waved away by tacking on the prefix "nano-."
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This would be huge for camera pills and colonoscopy cameras, imagine swallowing 3-6 camera pills (no bigger that a standard capsule pill) of these and they stream back a continue set of pictures as they travel from the mouth until they pass through the butt. This would be the shit!!!
One billionth of a meter = 1 nanometer = 0.000001mm
200nm thick graphene oxide lens
Highly efficient and ultra-broadband graphene oxide ultrathin lenses with three-dimensional subwavelength focusing
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Science!!
I don't have anything else to say on the topic, it's just nice to hear about awsome stuff like this on a Monday morning. Sure, it isn't a flying car, but I'll settle for smaller colonoscopy cameras (as justcauseisjustthat points out above) just fine.
Meh, I think even us Brits have accepted the American definition by now.
Come on, did the author not have room to fit in two words, "zone plate"?
The BBC News threw in the towel over billion a quarter of a century ago. I was watching live.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Great! I can have a better way to fix my vision without scary surgery. Seriously though, what would glasses be like with this tech?
I put the 'Physics' in 'Physical Attraction'
The wavelength of blue light is 400 nm.
Half a wavelength of blue light thus is 200 nm.
The article mentions the lens is able to resolve features as small as the diffraction limit.
Not which wavelength of light is used when resolving features as small as 200 nm.
Calling the ultra-thin lens diffraction limit breaking might be a bit premature.
What Rei said. We spend so much time (and by "we" I mean "people in the so-called First World but especially the U.S.") complaining about what we don't have, we forget how much we DO have, and what we HAVE accomplished — "we" in this case being "humanity." There's a lot to appreciate, which is why I like hearing about these advances.
Could this not be used for making smaller chips ?
The British Government officially adopted the "short" billion in 1976 for all government statistical reporting. So that battle is long over. And no amount of colourful language or attempts to honour the history of "billion" will have any effect....
You are right It should be 1.0936^(-11) Football fields.
That will get rid of any cultural confusion.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Who will save the world first?
The British Government officially adopted the "short" billion in 1976 for all government statistical reporting. So that battle is long over.
So the two countries that clung to feet/pints/bushels/furlongs the longest have decided to agree.
And have both agreed to something the rest of the world doesn't recognize.
Fail.
No sig today...
Given that the paper is in fact open access: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2... ...
Why not link that in the summary instead of Gizmag's nonsense article ?
Also I'm confused. The paper says the lens thickness is 200nm. So where did the "1 billionth of a metre" come into it? From the paper: "a large size 200-nm-thick GO thin film is prepared on a glass substrate".
To address your question they show focused spots in wavelengths from the VIS-NIR (400-1000nm ish). The focus performance is pretty much constant throughout.
and here we have the spouting of another ignorant bigot.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
You are right It should be 1.0936^(-11) Football fields. That will get rid of any cultural confusion.
Not if you're Canadian, you insensitive clod! :) Our football fields are 110 yards long, so for us it's 9.9418^(-12) football fields. Then there are soccer-type 'football fields'...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Football, Football. Or that American Handegg game?
<quote><p>What the he'll is a "metre"?</p></quote>
Is what the entire world use for the word that Americans spell "meter" for some reason.
Kind sir, I believe you misspelled "colorful" and "honor"! Carry on...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Everything's bigger in Texas my ass!
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
correct. "I laugh at bigger than Texas" and politely point out to Texans, that I come from a country where only two states are smaller than Texas
Sweet! I'm pretty sure inhaling graphene microdust will prove to have no long term health effects.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
All the English speaking countries use a short Billion.
If another language uses a word that looks like "billion" to mean something else - that doesn't make English "Billion" wrong, it just means you need to translate it - you translate the rest of the sentence, so I don't see why translating that word is hard.
The number of countries that have been invaded by Texans (who do care, really, let's be honest) is bigger than Texas.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
And apparently, if today's technology doesn't allow drunken fools to wipe out whole families by crashing into their vehicles from above, it's crap.
In other news, autonomous cars that may help with the drunk-driver problem are coming along nicely, thanks to... Science! Er, technology.
Yes, "billion" is such a bilious word.
Still waiting for England to officially acknowledge that it is not the ultimate arbiter of the English language. After all what they're insisting is the standard is what was the upper class elite use of the language, whereas in America we standardized on the common usage. And they forget that spelling actually changed in England after the American revolution. Never mind that language is fluid and evolves, trying to halt that evolution is futile.
(And really really annoyed with all my Australian coworkers who feel the need to say "what language were you speaking, it's unintelligble?" every time I say "aluminum" or the like.)
The standardization of English spelling occured after the American colonies were well established. What was originally used in the colonies was the common usage of the day. There were multiple allowed spelling options, and Webster chose those common options that were simplified and more uniform and more logical. "Color" is used in some Shakespeare. Johnson's dictionary in England preferred "-our" suffix rather than make a distinction between Latin or French original, whereas Webster went the other way and used "-or" regardless of etymology. Johnson was somewhat predisposed to the Old French style anyway, which had little to do with how the common person spelled or thought. Most of Webster's original reformed spellings were rejected anyway. Any changes in spelling in England were not adopted in America. Other English colonies that did not break away so soon did adopt the English changes as they continued to use textbooks published in England.
Anyway, insisting on only one spelling is stupid, whether it is from language fascists trying to halt evolution, or someone who insists "potatoe" is the only correct answer versus those who were equally wrong in insisting "potato" is the only valid one. Language changes, deal with it.
Thanks a milliard for the update.
Since 1974 in fact, when Parliament decided the US's crappy definition was too prevalent, and decided to adopt it for all official documents.
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
Anyway, insisting on only one spelling is stupid, whether it is from language fascists trying to halt evolution, or someone who insists "potatoe" is the only correct answer versus those who were equally wrong in insisting "potato" is the only valid one. Language changes, deal with it.
I respectfully disagree. English spelling is already a nightmare for children and newcomers learning the language; allowing different people to spell the same word however they liked would only make it worse. Personally, I think we should simplify the spelling on all words using standard phonetics, and just have a cut-off date for transition, after which "old English spelling" would only be an academic option for those interested in transcribing older works.
There is evidence that children in English-speaking countries learn at a slower rate than their peers with a more logical and consistent spelling.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
Never mind that language is fluid and evolves, trying to halt that evolution is futile.
(And really really annoyed with all my Australian coworkers who feel the need to say "what language were you speaking, it's unintelligble?" every time I say "aluminum" or the like.)
I think that language can and must evolve, but spelling need not.
The English/Aussie spelling/pronunciation makes more sense if you look at the periodic table, but your coworkers might not have thought of that. Aussies like to take the piss...
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
At that time there was no such thing as "how the common person spelled" ; it probably wasn't until quite late in the 19th century that literacy rates even approached 50%, and as for "functional literacy" (the ability to actually read and comprehend newspaper articles and novels) it's a moot point if either side of the Atlantic has yet reached 75% functional literacy.
I was listening to a Dickens story on the radio earlier today (turgid, tedious shit, as expected ; I stopped 1/5 of the way through an tuned to something interesting instead) and I remember that he was still routinely using "shewed" well into the 1850s.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
A spelling by Humphry Davy who was trying to isolate the element was "aluminum", despite being British. Earlier he had used "alumium" briefly. Later someone objected to the spelling and wanted -ium at the end.
Remember, we have platinum, molybdenum.
Anyway, I'm annoyed at the "Americans are soooo stupid!" and "Americans refuse to conform" memes, when actually checking out etymology or history doesn't confirm it.
True.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Canadian football fields are in metres, surely. Not yards.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Reposting This from inside the debate -
This lens is the kind of thing that might lead towards nano-scale optical computing. And is also a potential small step towards the holy grail of tech - molecular scale assemblers.. Its even made of roughly the right material - grapheme - not such a large step from diamond composites...
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
He didn't mention that in Canadian football the balls are bigger too.
Only when you visit Texas is that true.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I said nothing
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Yeah but what's still missing? Hoverboard!
False. You can get one for $20k.