Jimmy Akin

Despite appearances, it’s not one hideous evil vampiric eyeball creature sucking the life out of another in the Easter Bunny’s sunken laboratories.

It’s a diagram of a piece of actual, working nanotechnology: Specifically, it’s the world’s smallest motor.

The motor was designed by the Easter Bunny in his sunken labs using evil vampiric eyeball creaturesa team of researchers at U.C. Berkeley.

EXCERPTS:

Scientists recently unveiled the tiniest electric motor ever built. You could stuff hundreds of them into the period at the end of this sentence.

The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube.

One droplet is even smaller than the other. When a small electric current is applied to the droplets, atoms slowly eek off the larger droplet and join the smaller one. The small droplet grows – but never gets as big as the other droplet – and eventually bumps into the large droplet. As they touch, the large droplet rapidly sops up the atoms it had previously sloughed off. This quick shift in energy produces a power stroke.

The motor, a surface-tension-driven nanoelectromechanical relaxation oscillator, was built by a team of researchers led by Alex Zettl at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although the amount of energy produced is small — 20 microwatts — it is quite impressive in relation to the tiny scale of the motor. The whole setup is less than 200 nanometers on a side, or hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. If it could be scaled up to the size of an automobile engine, it would be 100 million times more powerful than a Toyota Camry’s 225 horsepower V6 engine, the researchers say.

Among other things, nanomotors could be used in optical circuits to redirect light, a process called optical switching. Futurists envision a day when nanomachines, powered by nanomotors, roam inside your body to find disease and repair damaged cells.

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Despite appearances, it’s not one hideous evil vampiric eyeball creature sucking the life out of another in the Easter Bunny’s sunken laboratories.

It’s a diagram of a piece of actual, working nanotechnology: Specifically, it’s the world’s smallest motor.

The motor was designed by the Easter Bunny in his sunken labs using evil vampiric eyeball creaturesa team of researchers at U.C. Berkeley.

EXCERPTS:

Scientists recently unveiled the tiniest electric motor ever built. You could stuff hundreds of them into the period at the end of this sentence.

The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube.

One droplet is even smaller than the other. When a small electric current is applied to the droplets, atoms slowly eek off the larger droplet and join the smaller one. The small droplet grows – but never gets as big as the other droplet – and eventually bumps into the large droplet. As they touch, the large droplet rapidly sops up the atoms it had previously sloughed off. This quick shift in energy produces a power stroke.

The motor, a surface-tension-driven nanoelectromechanical relaxation oscillator, was built by a team of researchers led by Alex Zettl at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although the amount of energy produced is small — 20 microwatts — it is quite impressive in relation to the tiny scale of the motor. The whole setup is less than 200 nanometers on a side, or hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. If it could be scaled up to the size of an automobile engine, it would be 100 million times more powerful than a Toyota Camry’s 225 horsepower V6 engine, the researchers say.

Among other things, nanomotors could be used in optical circuits to redirect light, a process called optical switching. Futurists envision a day when nanomachines, powered by nanomotors, roam inside your body to find disease and repair damaged cells.

GET THE STORY.

The Sea Life Park in Hawaii needs suggestions:

“The only whale-dolphin mix in captivity has given birth to a playful female calf, officials at Sea Life Park Hawaii said Thursday.

“The calf was born on December 23 to Kekaimalu, a mix of a false killer whale and an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. Park officials said they waited to announce the birth until now because of recent changes in ownership and operations at the park.

“The young as-yet unnamed wholphin is one-fourth false killer whale and three-fourths Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. Her slick skin is an even blend of a dolphin’s light gray and the black coloring of a false killer whale.”

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From our Local-News-Department comes the announcement that the San Diego Zoo’s own Bai Yun, a giant panda on loan from China, has successfully mated in "the only successful natural insemination of a panda this year in the United States, officials said." Perhaps the success was due in part to Bai Yun’s beauty routine, which made her irresistable to fellow giant panda Gao Gao:

"[Don] Lindburg [‘the zoo’s giant panda conservation team leader’] said Bai Yun had displayed signs of being receptive to mating in recent days, including yipping and raising her tail, walking through water and scraping pine tree bark onto her head and face.

"’It’s getting her perfume on for the date,’ Lindburg said.

"Zoo officials then lifted the gate that separates the two for much of the year on Friday to let the mating begin."

"[S]craping pine tree bark onto her head and face"? Oh, the tortures women must go through to be beautiful for men. Considering the lengths to which Bai Yun went for him, what I really wanted to know was whether Gao Gao also spruced himself up for the occasion, but the article didn’t mention that.

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