red wine makes a metal compound superconductive.... I knew it

Yoshihiko Takano (R), professor of Japan’s National Institute for Material Science and researcher Keita Deguchi (L) display a superconductive metal compound, which is seven times higher when dipped in red wine than for ethanol or water at his laboratory in Tsukuba city, suburban Tokyo on March 10, 2011. – AFP Photo

TSUKUBA: Japanese scientists at a boozy office party stumbled across a discovery they hope will help revolutionise efficient energy transmission one day: red wine makes a metal compound superconductive.

The researchers plan to showcase their surprise findings later this year, the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the phenomenon of superconductivity, the zero-loss flow of electricity through certain materials.

The “eureka” moment came when National Institute for Materials Science researchers found that an iron-based compound became superconductive after being soaked in alcoholic drinks such as beer, wine and sake.

Red wine was the hands-down winner in producing the desired physical effect, although no-one is quite clear yet on how exactly it worked, said researchers at the institute in Tsukuba, east of Tokyo.

The ratio at which compounds became superconductive was seven times higher when dipped in red wine than for ethanol or water. It was four times higher for white wine and three times higher for beer, sake and whisky.

“The better it tastes, the more effective it is,” the institute’s lead researcher Yoshihiko Takano said, while allowing that taste is subjective.

“There may be a connection between the substance we humans sense as a taste and the substance that induces superconductivity.”

“It is as if a detective was tracking down the culprit in a suspense story — the guy is in the glass, but we still don’t know if he is acting alone or conspiring with others.”

The team hopes the find will help in the quest to one day unleash the potential of superconductivity to build power infrastructure that reduces energy use and mankind’s reliance on climate-changing fossil fuels.

When an electric current passes through a conductor such as copper and silver, part of the charge is lost as heat, a loss that increases with the distance the charge travels.In superconductivity — first discovered in mercury in 1911 — electrical resistance suddenly drops to zero in some metals when they are cooled to near absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius, -459 Fahrenheit).

This also produces a strong magnetic field — an effect which has found applications, including in MRI body scanners.

To achieve zero-loss power transmission now, cables encased in tubes can be cooled with liquid nitrogen to make them superconductive — but the complex and expensive technology has not been commercially used on a large scale. Power companies have run only small-scale and pilot projects.

The dream is, however, to one day find materials that can become superconductors at room temperature, which would allow zero-loss transmission of power over vast distances.

“This may sound like the stuff of dreams, but electricity generated by solar power in the Gobi desert (of China and Mongolia) could be transported to the other side of the globe,” said Takano.

“The sun is always shining somewhere on Earth, and the dream is for electricity to be transported to far-away places with no power loss.

“Imagine there is a ring of superconductive cables along the equator with solar cells attached at certain places. If there were branches, clean electricity could be dispatched to the remotest rural areas.” Mamoru Mohri, a former astronaut who heads the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, said advances in superconductivity could ring in “an era in which we don’t have to burn as much fossil fuel”.

Takano’s team made their discovery when they put tablets of an iron-based compound called Fe(Te,S) into alcoholic drinks at an office party a year ago.

The team found that after being soaked for 24 hours in red wine or other alcoholic beverages, the compound became superconductive when cooled to about minus 265 degrees Celcius (minus 445 Fahrenheit).

Takano plans to present his findings at a European conference in September in The Hague, near Leiden where Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity 100 years ago.

Reiji Ogino, power-industry analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities, said the hunt for new electricity transmission methods has sped up as the world looks to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

“I’m looking forward to seeing a technical breakthrough,” Ogino said — but he cautioned that it remains unclear how much it would cost to replace existing transmission networks.

Tomoaki Fujii, who heads equity research at Morningstar Japan, said superconductivity is “a technology with high expectations”, but said that it is “a bit too early” to start buying related stocks just now.

“We haven’t seen superconductivity used for electricity transmission even 100 years after it was discovered,” he said. “And we would have to see how smoothly it could actually be utilised”.

The mystery of antioxidants...

A young lady just rang to ask if I was interested in antioxidants.

“Passionately,” I said, and she told me she was happy to hear it, because she
wanted to tell me about the antioxidants in Nescafé.

“We hear a lot about the benefits of antioxidants these days,” I ruminated, “but there is nobody speaking up for the oxidants. We would, after all, have no need for antioxidants if there were no oxidants, an indisputable fact for which I have always felt that oxidants never receive the credit they deserve.”

“Be that as it may,” she said, “most people do not realise the antioxidant
benefit of coffee in general and Nescafé in particular and...”

But before she could continue, I found myself interrupting somewhat ungallantly, with a thought that had suddenly occurred to me: “If coffee contains antioxidants, does instant coffee contain instant antioxidants?” I asked. “If it doesn’t, I fear it could lead to you making and drinking the coffee before the antioxidants arrive, leaving them turning up late when the cup is empty and being flushed away with the washing up.”

“I’m sure that doesn’t happen,” she said. “In fact, the benefits of the
antioxidants in Nescafé...”

But my mind was becoming absorbed with a topic I had introduced earlier. “It’s a bit like antibiotics and probiotics, I suppose,” I said.

“I remember a couple of years ago when several probiotic foods appeared on the market, the antibiotics were furious. ‘We are performing a valuable function fighting disease’, they said, ‘and our biotic opponents ought not to be allowed to call in a mercenary force of probiotics to support them.’

Outright war was only averted when a probiotic spokesorganism came up with
a peace plan involving the partition of the biotic empire into separate regions
of influence for the antibiotic and probiotic movements.

Of course, if the antioxidants were to join forces with the antibiotics, it could force the oxidants into an alliance with the probiotics, leading to a drastic increase in tension.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” my caller replied, “but I am sure that drinking a cup of...”

“And where, we must ask ourselves,” I interrupted again, “do the antiperspirants fit into all this?

Given the potential power of the antibiotic and antioxidant alliance, they would find it hard not to sign up for a grand, anti-everything league, finally giving up the position of neutrality they have held for so long, thanks to there being nobody specifically marketing perspirants as such.

Come to think of it, with the antibiotic and antioxidant alliance calling themselves the AAA, as they surely will, this seems bound to drive the other AAA, the Amateur Athletic Association, into the arms of the probiotics and oxidants, and since athletics is a highly effective way of producing perspiration, that makes it even more likely the antiperspirants will join the other antis.

Very worrying. I think “I need a cup of coffee.”

“Antioxidant Nescafé?” she offered.

“No,” I said: “I hate instant coffee.” And we left it at that.

Why is India still Turbans & Camels?

Most books on India have a disproportionate number of pictures and stories from Rajasthan.

To outsiders, the idyllic world of camels, cows, colourful saris and handle-bar moustaches seems to convey a more authentic feel that the rest of homogenized India.

While relative proximity to the nation's capital has helped, I feel that the Rajasthan theme is rather overworked and it is time that writers and cameras moved on. Simply being drawn to the visual appeal of Rajasthan is rather superficial.

To me, local culture in other regions is equally rich. Reflecting on William Dalrymple's essay on the oral tradition of Rajasthan titled "Homer In India" (The New Yorker, Nov 20, 2006, Issue 38), I feel I might need to alter this view.

A young Harvard classicist named Milman Parry had a brilliant theory that Homer's works, the foundation upon which all subsequent European literature rested, must have originally been oral poems, and that they contained certain recurring formulas that he thought were a product of traditions of oral transmission.

He believed that to study Homer properly you had first to understand how oral poetry worked, and that since Yugoslavia was the place in Europe where such traditions had best survived he caught a ship to Yugoslavia in 1933 to prove it in the field. Parry was described as a sort of "the Darwin of oral literature".

He writes:

While I was staying at Rohet, I heard about what seemed to be the most remarkable survival of all: the existence of several orally transmitted epic poems. Unlike the ancient epics of Europe--the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Nibelungenlied (the basis of Wagner's "Ring Cycle")--which were now the province only of academics and literature classes, the epics of Rajasthan were still very much alive.

They were preserved by a caste of wandering bhopas--shamans and bards--who travelled from village to village, staging performances.

It is perversity that the most backward, conservative regions are often culturally the richest? More than any other part of the country, large chunks of Rajasthan remained under the authority of the local hereditary rulers. It was only after the abolition of the privy-purses in 1971 (Thanks to Indira Gandhi) that the age-old feudal structure started to really erode. This raises a difficult moral question.

Moreover, the Gujars are very often illiterate, and illiteracy seems an essential condition for preserving the performance of an oral epic. It was the ability of the bard to read, rather than changes in the tastes of his audience, that sounded the death knell for the oral tradition. Just as the blind can develop a heightened sense of hearing, smell, and touch to compensate for their loss of vision, so it seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not.

This was certainly the conclusion of the Indian folklorist Komal Kothari. In the nineteen-fifties, Kothari came up with the idea of sending one of his principal sources, a singer from the Langa caste named Lakha, to adult-education classes.

The idea was that he would learn to read and write, thus making it easier to collect the many songs he had preserved. Soon Kothari noticed that Lakha needed to consult his diary before he began to sing. Yet the rest of the Langa singers were able to remember hundreds of songs--an ability that Lakha had somehow begun to lose as he slowly learned to write.

In the Yugoslavian case the recordings survived, but the actual oral tradition did not. Death of oral tradition takes along with it an entire subset of culture, leaving behind only a skeleton of words preserved in mummified form on CDs.

Sad, but can it be preserved in a living form? If it can, then what about the moral implications as suggested above?

I agree that it is a bit of a leap to generalize from oral tradition to culture in general; but, are more developed regions of India culturally shallower than more backward regions like Rajasthan?

Local culture in other regions are equally rich, but not as well preserved. If so, then I should not begrude Rajasthan's pre-eminent position on the covers of those books.

When I read about traditions dying, I feel that I am personally responsible in a way.
Yet, culturally we are relatively better off as this paragraph from the essay suggests,

Anthony Lane noted in this magazine in 2001, in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States, that the people of New York again and again compared what had happened to them to films: "It was like 'Independence Day' "; "It was like 'Die Hard' "; "No, 'Die Hard 2.' " In contrast, when the tsunami struck at the end of 2004, Indians were able to reach for a more sustaining narrative than disaster movies: the catastrophic calamities and floods that fill the Mahabharata and the Hindu tradition in general.

But then, we might have much more to lose too.

Signal acquisition module targets audio and vibration testing

ADLINK Technology Inc. has released the PCI-9527, billed as their first 24-bit high-resolution dynamic signal acquisition module specifically designed for audio testing, acoustic measurement, and vibration analysis applications.

The PCI-9527 features two 24-bit simultaneous sampling analogue input channels with a sampling rate up to 432 KS/s, two analogue output channels with update rates up to 216 KS/s, and one external digital trigger I/O connector.

The PCI-9527 has a dynamic input range of more than 100 dB, an adjustable input range from ±0.316 V to ±40 V, and analogue inputs that support software-configurable features for AC or DC coupling and integrated electronic piezoelectric (IEPE) sensors for interfacing with an accelerometer sensor and microphone.

Overall, the PCI-9527 offers the flexibility needed to create a variety of automated test systems.

Potential uses of the PCI-9527 include production testing for television sets, MP3 players, and other multimedia devices where high-quality sound is essential.

It can also be integrated into monitoring systems for mission-critical machinery, such as turbines in a power station. Defects in the metal components of the turbines would generate abnormal sounds and vibration in operation, which would require high-dynamic range audio equipment to detect.

The PCI-9527 includes drivers and SDK support for mainstream Windows operating systems as well as third-party applications, including LabVIEW.

ADLINK also provides the Dynamic Signal Assistant APP Utility, an application designed to assist system integrators in validation and reduce overall design cycle time.

Image courtesy: ADLINK

More info @ ADLINK website – PCI-9527 product brief

DrDAQ low-cost USB data logger

DrDAQ from Pico Technology is far more than just a data logger plugged on USB. With its software complements Picolog and PicoScope, DRDAQ doubles as a signal generator and an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) too.

Thanks to the built-in sensors for light, sound and temperature you can start using your USB DrDAQ Data Logger straight out of the box.

The USB DrDAQ also has an RGB LED that you can program to show any 1 of 16.7 million colours. When you want to do more with your DrDAQ you can, thanks to the external sensor sockets.

DrDAQ is ideal fore use in colleges and labs because it also contains a basic oscilloscope or spectrum analyzer. By running the supplied PicoScope software DrDAQ becomes a single-channel scope with a 100 kHz bandwidth, 8-bit resolution and the ability to measure voltages of up to ±10 volts. Both PicoLog and PicoScope are fast and easy to use. USB DrDAQ also includes 4 digital input/outputs.

In input mode these give you even more monitoring options. When used as outputs they enable DrDAQ to control external devices.

Two of the digital I/Os include a pulse-counting function when used as inputs, and a pulse- width modulation (PWM) output capability.

DrDAQ is manufactured by Pico Technology (distributors worldwide).

More info @ http://www.picotech.com/distrib/us/

Hot swappable 2-channel 2-wire multiplexer with bus buffers

Linear Technology’s LTC4312 is a hot-swappable 2-channel 2-wire bus multiplexer that allows one upstream bus to connect to any combination of downstream busses or channels. An individual enable pin controls each connection.

The LTC4312 provides bidirectional buffering, keeping the upstream bus capacitance isolated from the downstream bus capacitances. The high noise margin allows the LTC4312 to be interoperable with I2C devices that drive a high VOL (> 0.4V).

The LTC4312 supports level translation between 1.5V, 1.8V, 2.5V, 3.3V and 5V busses. The hot-swappable nature of the LTC4312 allows I/O card insertion into, and removal from, a live backplane without corruption of the data and clock busses.

If both data and clock are not simultaneously high at least once in 45ms and DISCEN is high, a FAULT signal is generated indicating a stuck bus low condition, the input is disconnected from each enabled output channel and up to 16 clocks are generated on the enabled downstream busses.

A three state ACC pin enables input and output side rise time accelerators of varying strengths and sets the VIL, RISING voltage.

Flat panel antennas offer superior directional characteristics

The PN Series of panel antennas from Antenna Factors is designed for long-distance directional communication in wireless link networks.

Operating in the 2.45-GHz band with 16 dBi of gain and a directivity of 23° in both the horizontal and the vertical planes, they offer better performance than typical Yagi antennas, increasing the range and reliability of wireless link networks.

The sleek, attractive flat panel package is rugged and fully weatherised, making the antennas equally suited for indoor or outdoor applications.

Each antenna includes complete mounting hardware for standard masts. In its present range the PN Series panel antennas deliver both value and outstanding performance.

Image courtesy: Antenna Factor

More info @ Antenna Factor website