Even though I just said that Space Fridays were an Official Thing now, this week offered a nice mélange of general science-related goodness, so I'm going to cheat a little and offer up three different stories of varying degrees of governmental involvement, but invariable awesomeness. And one does involve space, so there.
Without further ado, I give you three phrases I never thought I'd read in a news article:
"...the first linkup of a private-sector craft with the International Space Station."
Pretty self-explanatory - NASA announced today that SpaceX will launch its new Dragon capsule next month for eventual docking with, and resupplying of, the ISS - not counting test flights, the first entirely commercial space mission in mankind's history.
Amusement parks, here we come.
"...devices with atomic-scale components."
Moore's Law, which dates back to the 1960s, points out that as technology and manufacturing standards improve, circuitry size is cut in half every two years. This is exponential shrinkage, as it were, and it explaints why an iPod-grade processor would've taken up an entire building (at least) only a couple generations ago. Wires are now approaching molecular lengths, and conventional wisdom was that we were nearing the end of that process, because transistors were assumed not to function properly at the quantum level.
Now, however, researchers have been able to test wiring only a few billionths of a meter wide - and the tests are looking good. Traditional circuits are built onto silicon chips, but if they can keep shrinking things down to about a hundredth of where they are now, the wiring could actually fit between the molecules of the chip itself. Damned if I know what effect that will have on my iPhone 9 someday, but it sounds fucking crazy.
..."a complete spatio-temporal cloaking device."
Okay, this one's kind of tough. Picture two cars, one red and one blue, following each other down the street. After watching this for a bit, you turn your back for a minute to look at, I dunno, daisies. One car then goes through a railroad crossing unimpeded, but the second one has to stop and let a train pass. Once the crossing opens up, the second car quickly catches up to the first, erasing the gap that had opened up between them. You turn back to observe the cars again, and since the train crossing happened while your back was turned, the cars appear to have been together the whole time.
Using a process somewhat along those lines, Pentagon scientists have developed a form of invisibility. By splitting a beam of light into two component frequencies--red and blue in this case--they are able to create a time gap between each component, into which a separate pulse of light can be fired (only about 50 picoseconds long) that will then arrive undetected at its destination - rather than being invisible in the traditional sense, the pulse essentially exists between the cracks of the visible light.
This, apparently, has some interesting applications in stealth technology.
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