Researchers Turn Cement Into Metal Using Lasers.

                                      You might be getting a gadget made out of cement soon.

Illustration Of The Process This isn't quite what the process will look like, of course, but you get the idea. Argonne National Laboratory 

A team of scientists say they've just figured out a process that turns cement into a metal semi-conductor using lasers.

Metal sidewalks! Metal buildings! Metal everything!

Well, no. But it could have make its way into one of your gadgets.

The team--led by researchers from the Department of Energy and Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute/SPring-8--took liquid cement and transformed it into a glass-metal hybrid. A glass is a solid with a non-crystalline chemical structure that can be turned into a molten, liquid state when heated. A glass-metal, or amorphous metal, is a type of metal with a similar structure and properties to a glass, which makes it conductive, less brittle than glass, and easily molded. The researchers were able to change the liquid cement--a not-so-conductive material with characteristics of both a crystalline and non-crystalline structure--into a glass-metal through a process called "electron trapping": basically, holding electrons down in a chemical structure.

The researchers melted a cement ingredient, mayenite, with 2,000-degree Celsius lasers, and lifted it with an "aerodynamic levitator." The levitator kept the material suspended, ensuring that it didn't touch a surface and form crystals. By zapping the floating liquid in different artificially created atmospheres, the scientists altered its structure, "trapping" free electrons and making it conductive.
That means the researchers made an effective semiconductor out of a glass, which could be useful in your smartphone, TV, computer, and a lot more. The same levitate-and-laser technique, the researchers say, could be used to turn other materials into semiconductors, too.

Arm control iphone.

Arm Control A demonstration of Open Limbs using an iPhone's accelerometer (left) and a flex sensor on a model skeleton (right) to control creator Will Canine's arms. Screenshot via Vimeo

A group of graduate students in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program have developed an open-source API that can allows you to move someone else's arm remotely using a keyboard, a joystick or even an iPhone.

Open Limbs, "a platform for controlling human arms over the internet," uses electric pulses to fire the nerves connected to muscles, making them contract, in conjunction with the Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX), an orthopedic device designed to help people with weak muscles move their arms.

For their demonstration at the ITP annual spring show, Will Canine, one of the creators, attached electrodes to his arm to cede control over his nerves to a computer. When someone moved a model skeleton's arm nearby, the electrodes caused his muscles to contract and his arm to mimic the movement of the skeleton. Alternately, the electrodes were attached to an infrared finger-tracking sensor, so that Canine's arm could be moved just by moving a hand up in down in front of the sensor.

“We’ve been really interested in non-autonomous body control, so other people controlling your body,” Canine told Yahoo! News. “Usually people are really scared of this idea but we think it has some really interesting implications for people with paralysis or who can’t control their own bodies.”

Right now, the system is only effective at curling forearms and biceps--legs are too heavy--but the students hope it can be further developed to help people who can't move their limbs autonomously.

Redefining the ampere with the help of graphene?

The world's first single-electron graphene pump has been built by researchers at the UK National Physical Laboratory and the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. The device could be used to redefine the standard unit of current, the ampere, in terms of the electron charge – a fundamental constant of nature.

The international system of units (SI) is made up of seven base units, which are the metre, kilogram, second, kelvin, ampere, mole and candela. The ampere, volt and ohm are the three fundamental units of electricity.

Although physicists have already come up with modern ways to represent the volt and ohm (through measurements of the Josephson voltage and quantum Hall resistance, respectively), there is no equivalent for the ampere. Indeed, today, the ampere is defined as the current which, when flowing through two parallel conductors one metre apart, exerts a certain force between the conductors. Directly realizing such a macroscopic definition of current is experimentally difficult, and the accuracy of the result also depends on other base units, such as the kilogram, which drifts with time.

Read more about it by following this link http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/may/28/redefining-the-ampere-with-the-help-of-graphene.