Graphene Optical Lens a Billionth of a Meter Thick Breaks the Diffraction Limit (gizmag.com) 127
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.
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The BBC News threw in the towel over billion a quarter of a century ago. I was watching live.
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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....
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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.
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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.
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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 an
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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 [theatlantic.com] that children in English-spe
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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 l
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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
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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...
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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.
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Since 1974 in fact, when Parliament decided the US's crappy definition was too prevalent, and decided to adopt it for all official documents.
Re: Billionth (Score:1)
Re:Billionth (Score:4, Insightful)
You are right It should be 1.0936^(-11) Football fields.
That will get rid of any cultural confusion.
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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'...
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Re: Billionth (Score:2)
He didn't mention that in Canadian football the balls are bigger too.
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Re: Billionth (Score:1)
Wait (Score:1)
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You mean armoured rugby for pussies ?
Re: Wait (Score:1)
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Yes, "billion" is such a bilious word.
Re: Billionth (Score:2)
Thanks a milliard for the update.
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Is what the entire world use for the word that Americans spell "meter" for some reason.
Breaks the Diffraction Limit... (Score:5, Funny)
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It does the Kessel run in under 12 nanometres!
Which is probably less than 12 parsecs.
Graphene (Score:5, Funny)
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-."
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FTA?
I think he meant Fuck The Article,
Camera Pills getting small (Score:5, Funny)
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imagine
I'm having breakfast right now.
Bon appétit!
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> Bon appÃf©tit!
Looks like you got one of those used camera pills in your breakfast!
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Unicode gives Slashdot IBS.
Re:Camera Pills getting small (Score:4, Interesting)
SI units (Score:5, Informative)
One billionth of a meter = 1 nanometer = 0.000001mm
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I prefer to use centimeters. Can you please convert this for me?
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0.00001 cm
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The Mrs. once went to the emergency room for a cut and was attended by two physician's assistants:
Assistant #1: "I need the length of the wound in millimeters."
Assistant #2: "But this ruler is marked in centimeters!"
Yep. I'm a 'murican.
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Because apparently timothy thinks we're too stupid to understand 'nanometre'? ugh
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Because apparently timothy thinks we're too stupid to understand 'nanometre'? ugh
Regardless of TIMMAY!!! TFA does use "billionth"
Re:SI units (Score:4, Insightful)
It's for dramatic effect.
A Billionth of a meter sounds way more intense than 1 nanometer IMO.
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Forgot to mention, the Swinburne source material uses both "billionth" and "nm", however the Nature article only uses "nm"
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Because apparently timothy thinks we're too stupid to understand 'nanometre'? ugh
The original TFA was written for a general audience, many of whom probably aren't sure what "nano" is.
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It depends. Now if you use fm, now that really is small. (10^-15 m, a naked proton across)
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Ikr? Why not just say nanometer? Everybody knows what that means.
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One billionth of a meter = 1 nanometer = 0.000001mm
I thought a nanometer was one US quadrillionth of a megameter.
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Hey now, it's not our fault. We don't get to control the language or how it is used. It was probably the grammarians or the econ-guys that did it. I'd have used nanometer.
Use the Source .. TIMMAY! (Score:5, Informative)
200nm thick graphene oxide lens [swinburne.edu.au]
Highly efficient and ultra-broadband graphene oxide ultrathin lenses with three-dimensional subwavelength focusing [nature.com]
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Here is a reference that explains how the technology works:
http://petapixel.com/2015/02/2... [petapixel.com]
Science! (Score:2)
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.
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Yes, yay, science ... but after many many years of "this will revolutionize the world in 5 years", many of us are just sort of numb to it.
Because it never actually seems to happen. So getting all excited about it now seems premature.
Re:Science! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're typing on a device that stores trillions of pieces of data and makes billions of computations per second with the ability to grab data on almost anything from around the world in milliseconds, using electricity transmitted from hundreds of kilometers through wires on towers dozens of meters tall connected to megastructures that do things like burn coal as fast as entire trains can pull into the yard, or spin in the wind with blades the size of jumbo jets, or the like, which were delivered to their location by vehicles with computer-timed engines burning a fuel that was pumped up halfway around the world from up to half a dozen kilometers underground and locked into complex strata (through wells drilled by diamond-lined bores that can be remote-control steered as they go), shipped around the world in tankers with volumes the size of large city blocks and the height of apartment complexes, run through complex chemical processes in unimaginable quantities, distributed nationwide and sold to you at a corner store for $1.80 a gallon, which you then pay for with a little piece of microchipped plastic, if not a smartphone, which does all of the aforementioned computer stuff but in a box the size of your hand that tolerates getting beaten up in your pocket all day.
But technology never seems to advance...
MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
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Quite right, we've become incredibly blasé about the tech miracles of the last 50 years.
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No, we have awesome technology ... but if I got excited over every hardware advancement on the front page of Slashdot which was going to completely change some common technology with 5 years ... well, I'd be living in a perpetual state of disappointment.
Technology advances ... getting breathless over all of the things which might be the next big thing, sooner or later you realize there's an awful lot of stuff which doesn't pan out.
If even a quarter of the breakthroughs in Lithium batteries we've seen on Sla
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You're entirely free to ignore it.
Me, I don't much give a crap about you not giving a crap about things I don't give a crap about, but if you insist on discussing how much you don't give a crap about me not giving a crap ... well, I don't give a crap.
Like every other piece of drivel on the internet, just pretend it's not even there.
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You could well have a cell phone with a two month battery life - if the power draw was the same as it used to be back in the day. Those Nokia phones that went two weeks between charges in the late 90s had 1Ah batteries, and some smartphones are around 4Ah now. Of course, now we have big bright screens and Wi-Fi and multi-core processors to use up all that power. But the batteries definitely have improved whether you've noticed it or not.
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In other words, if Earth is hit by a massive EMP, we're all screwed. We can't switch to much of a local economy any time fast.
Re:Science! (Score:5, Insightful)
And you're discussing it on a medium that didn't even exist 50 years ago, in a browser that only works as expected on websites if it was made in the last 5 years, running on a computer that has to have been made in the last 10 at least to be fast enough, and the markup surrounding your post would probably fill the memory of any machine made when you were a kid (let alone the processing and display of that markup).
Tech moves fast.
Hell, we've basically ended up in a Star Trek-like universe where anyone can call anyone they know, at any time of the day, almost anywhere in the world, by tapping a button and saying "Call Fred". And we barely even noticed.
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Yeah but what's still missing? Hoverboard!
Hoverboards (Score:1)
Yeah but what's still missing? Hoverboard!
False. [arcaspace.com] You can get one for $20k.
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Re:Science! (Score:5, Insightful)
In 2000 T1s (1.54 Mb/s) cost $1000 a month and I don't know how much to install. Now 1.54 up and down is low end consumer speed.
The difference between an iPhone and a brick phone is astonishing. You have a computer better than what was available 20 years ago (better than what sent men to the moon) in the palm of your hand plus a camera plus a recording device plus a calculator plus all the apps that never existed before and yet you're blase about it?
Dude!. Wake up. The pace of change is truly amazing. Not to go Kurzweilian on you but this world is changing faster than ever and you're not seeing it; not appreciating the beauty; nor aware of the dangers.
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But there are still no flying cars or jetpacks. (Score:2)
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.
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But of the 5.32e1568 uses for graphene that seem to have been found so far, not one of them has been found to be practical.
Only if you define practical as "affordable and useful for joe-sixpack" instead of just affordable and useful. The lab I work in makes their own for use in chemistry research on reactivity of other things, as in not for the purpose of researching the graphene itself. Do you complain that MeV scale particle accelerators are also not practical because they are only used in industrial/medical/research environments, but not mass manufactured?
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Also, one doesn't tend to hear much directly about super resolution microscopy (anything beating the diffration limit). Supreres is a great (if rather finicky) tool, but it will enable other descoveries by allowing people to see otherwise unobservable cellular mechanism.
Eventually you'll probably hear about the results of those, but supre-res in general and the technique in particular will probably have long since left the description by the time you hear about it.
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zone plate (Score:3)
Come on, did the author not have room to fit in two words, "zone plate"?
Eye Glasses / Contact Lenses (Score:1)
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Monochromatic.
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FTFP(A) :
That's a little under 1.5 octaves, whereas the human vision range is only about an octave (with some variation between individuals).
Re: Eye Glasses / Contact Lenses (Score:3)
Incredibly delicate?
Diffraction limit maybe becaus blue light waveleng (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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Given that the paper is in fact open access: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2... [nature.com] ...
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 throu
Use in lithography ? (Score:1)
Could this not be used for making smaller chips ?
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FTFP (not the bullshit summary on Gizmodo):
That compares to the 1.22*Î/3.6um ~ Î/3 diameter of an Airy disc for this lens. But the diffraction pattern contains about 83% of the beam intensity in the central disc (the Airy disc proper) compared to 32% in the central spot
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This 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...
Graphene vs. Donald Trump (Score:1)
Who will save the world first?
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Trump will try to destroy the world.
Real Uses ??? (Score:2)
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...
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