First Digital Message Sent Using Neutrinos

Technology Review - a team at FermiLab in Batavia, Illinois, reveal that they have sent a digital message using a neutrino beam for the first time.

These guys used an experiment called NuMI (NeUtrino beam at the Main Injector) to generate an intense beam of neutrinos. The beam consisted of about 25 pulses each separated by 2 seconds or so, with each pulse containing some 10^13 neutrinos.

The beam is pointed at a detector called MINERvA weighing about 170 tonnes and sitting in an underground cavern about a kilometre away. To reach MINERvA, the beam has to travel through 240 metres of solid rock.

MINERvA is one of world's most sensitive neutrino detectors and yet, out of 10^13 neutrinos in each pulse, it detects only about 0.8 of them on average.

The FermiLab team used a simple on-off protocol to represent the 0s and 1s of digital code and transmitted the word "neutrino".

The entire message took about 140 minutes to send at a data rate that these guys later worked out to be about 0.1 bits per second with an error rate of less than 1 per cent.

Arxiv - Demonstration of Communication using Neutrinos (10 pages)

West Texas Wolfcamp Oil

Pioneer Natural Resources is now deepening its wells to include the Wolfcamp Shale and other, deeper zones that contribute additional oil reserves. Pioneer is also in the early stages of a new horizontal drilling program in the Wolfcamp Shale and has reported very encouraging results to date. Wolfcamp is below the Spraberry field and is getting Bakken like results with per well peak 24 hour production of 2000 barrels per day (although most are still in the 800-1000 bpd range).

EOG's wells in the Wolfcamp are producing 2,000 barrels a day. Pioneer will drill 80 Wolfcamp wells in 2012 and 2013.

Pioneer is the largest acreage holder, driller and producer in the West Texas Spraberry field.

Iraq and Libya Oil Production is up

Business Week - Libyan production rose to 1.3 million barrels a day last month, up 150,000 barrels from the previous month, according to IEA estimates. The country’s output is about 300,000 barrels less than its average before the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi last year.

Saudi will probably produce 9.8 million barrels a day this month, roughly matching last month’s level, a person with knowledge of the kingdom’s oil policy said today. According to OPEC’s monthly report, Saudi output fell to 9.66 million barrels a day in February.

Gulf News - Iraq's oil production has risen above 3 million barrels per day for the first time in more than three decades, it announced March 5, and said it will sharply increase exports when a major new floating oil terminal began operations on March 8.

Iraq aims to double its oil output over the next three years and has a long-term goal of 12 million bpd. Although that target may be out of reach, Iraq is still expected to be the world's biggest source of new oil supplies over the next few years.

Cyborg Snail - Implanted biofuel cells produce electricity from glucose in blood

Nature - Snails have joined the growing ranks of animals whose own metabolism can be used to generate electricity. Next lobster implants and rats and eventually human bio-blood powered implants. Designing devices that are far more energy efficient or only needs occasional bursts of power will increase the range of applications. This technology clearly has transhuman implications.

Into each mollusc, Katz and his team at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, have implanted tiny biofuel cells that extract electrical power from the glucose and oxygen in the snail’s blood. Munching mainly on carrots, the cyborg snails live for around half a year and generate electricity whenever their implanted electrodes are hooked up to an external circuit.

Katz’s snails, for example, produced up to 7.45 microwatts, but after 45 minutes, that power had decreased by 80%. To draw continuous power, Katz’s team had to ramp down the power they extracted to 0.16 microwatts.

Scherson says that he thinks he will be able to get a few hundred microwatts out of cockroaches (his biofuel cells feed on trehalose, a different sugar from glucose). Singhal reports similar results for beetles. Scherson, who is working with a large company to build microelectronics circuits for his cockroaches, points out that power need not be drawn continuously, but could be stored up in capacitors and released in pulses; he has already been able to produce and detect a radio signal from the cockroaches this way

More Designer Electrons- Artificial Molecular Graphene used to Mimic Higgs Field and Relativity

Researchers arranged carbon monoxide molecules to form the same hexagonal pattern found in graphene, except that they could adjust molecular spacing slightly. They placed individual molecules of carbon monoxide onto a copper sheet. The material's electrons behave remarkably like relativistic particles, with a "speed of light" that they can adjust. Additionally, the researchers could change the spacing between molecules in a way that the masses of the quasiparticles changed, or cause them to behave as though they are interacting with electric and magnetic fields—without actually applying those fields to the material.

Manoharan has indicated that his team will be working on using the new material as a test bed for future exploitation as well as creating new nanoscale materials with new properties.

This is a follow up to the design electron article from yesterday

Manoharan lab covers their own work here

The work could lead to new materials and devices.

Graphical summary of this work. Artificial “molecular” graphene is fabricated via atom manipulation, and then imaged and locally probed via scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Guided by theory, we fabricate successively more exotic variants of graphene. From left to right: pristine graphene exhibiting emergent massless Dirac fermions; graphene with a Kekulé distortion dresses the Dirac fermions with a scalar gauge field that creates mass; graphene with a triaxial strain distortion embeds a vector gauge field which condenses a time-reversal-invariant relativistic quantum Hall phase. In the theory panel, images are color representations of the strength of the carbon-carbon bonds (corresponding to tight-binding hopping parameters t), and the curves shown are calculated electronic density of states (DOS) from tight-binding (TB) theory. In the experiment panel, images are STM topographs acquired after molecular assembly, and the curves shown are normalized conductance spectra obtained from the associated nanomaterial.

In this work we combine a central tenet of condensed matter physics—how electronic band structure emerges from a periodic potential in a crystal—with the most advanced imaging and atomic manipulation techniques afforded by the scanning tunnelling microscope. We synthesize a completely artificial form of graphene (“molecular graphene”) in which Dirac fermions can be materialized, probed, and tailored in ways unprecedented in any other known materials. We do this by using single molecules, bound to a two-dimensional surface, to craft designer potentials that transmute normal electrons into exotic charge carriers. With honeycomb symmetry, electrons behave as massless relativistic particles as they do in natural graphene. With altered symmetry and texturing, these Dirac particles can be given a tunable mass, or even be married with a fictitious electric or magnetic field (a so-called gauge field) such that the carriers believe they are in real fields and condense into the corresponding ground state. We show an array of new phenomena emerging from: patterning Dirac carrier densities with atomic precision, without need for conventional gates (corresponding to locally uniform electric fields which adjust chemical potential); spatially texturing the electron bonds such that the Dirac point is split by an energy gap (corresponding to a nonuniform scalar gauge field); straining the bonds in such a way that a quantum Hall effect emerges even without breaking time-reversal symmetry (corresponding to a vector gauge field). Along the way, we make use of several theoretical predictions for real graphene which have never been realized in experiment

Nature - Designer Dirac fermions and topological phases in molecular graphene

Reforms Needed For India to Reach Potential of Double Digit GDP Growth

Baker Institute - Limits of the Jugaad Growth Model: No Workaround to Good Governance for India (12 pages)

Indian industry has gained fame in management circles for jugaad, or persevering despite limited resources. This skill has proven particularly important in overcoming inadequate public services. However, the economy appears to have reached the limit of using jugaad in the place of good government, suggesting a lower growth trajectory in the absence of a major improvement in political dynamics.
India’s economy performed exceedingly well in the past decade, averaging an impressive 7.8% growth across 10 years, even sustaining 5% growth during the peak of the financial crisis. A common refrain holds that growth occurred “despite the government,” requiring India’s celebrated expertise in jugaad, or creative workarounds to poor resources. The exceptional growth of India’s service industry exemplifies this success.

Infrastructure experts like Vinayak Chatterjee, president of Feedback Ventures, caution that the pipeline for infrastructure projects has thinned out significantly and does not reflect the average annual value of projects needed to meet India’s ambitious target of investing $1 trillion over the coming five years. Poor infrastructure, more than low investment in other areas, presents a serious obstacle to India once again exceeding 8% growth.

The report cites lagging government services like education (India's adult literacy rate is 64 percent), energy systems and transportation as major issues facing the Indian people and private sector. "The road systems in India have been expanding but at too slow of a pace, and the rail system used today is basically the same now as in British times

China will supply Westinghouse AP1000 components to Projects Worldwide

China Daily - Most of the Westinghouse AP1000 reactors that are being built in the world are being built in China. Chinese nuclear companies will become suppliers for Westinghouse Electric Co's AP1000 reactor projects in other countries as the nation approaches completion of the world's first AP1000 project.

"Ultimately, we will include Chinese manufacturers in the international supply chain," said Tim Collier, Westinghouse's vice-president and managing director for China.

As the first developer of AP1000 technology, China hopes to export its expertise through a partnership with Westinghouse.

"By the time the US builds its AP1000 reactors, we will send Chinese teams to assist and advise on the project," said Zhang Fubao, director of equipment at the State Nuclear Power Technology Corp.

In February, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorized the construction of two AP1000 reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia. Site preparation has been completed and the components for preliminary construction are in place.