Hard… soft… New nanomaterial switches properties

A world premiere: a material which changes its strength, virtually at the touch of a button. This transformation can be achieved in a matter of seconds through changes in the electron structure of a material; thus hard and brittle matter, for example, can become soft and malleable. What makes this development revolutionary, is that the transformation can be controlled by electric signals. This world-first has its origins in Hamburg. Jörg Weißmüller, a materials scientist at both the Technical University of Hamburg and the Helmholtz Center Geesthacht, has carried out research on this groundbreaking development, working in cooperation with colleagues from the Institute for Metal Research in Shenyang, China.

The 51-year-old researcher from the Saarland referred to his fundamental research, which opens the door to a multitude of diverse applications, as “a breakthrough in the material sciences”. The new metallic high-performance material is described by Prof. Dr. Jörg Weißmüller and the Chinese research scientist Hai-Jun Jin in the latest issue of the renowned scientific journal Science. Their research findings could, for example, make future intelligent materials with the ability of self healing, smoothing out flaws autonomously. …

via Hard… soft… New nanomaterial switches properties.

Phase change memory-based ‘moneta’ system points to the future of computer storage

This is a view of the internals of the Moneta storage array with phase change memory modules installed. Credit: UC San Diego / Steve Swanson

A University of California, San Diego faculty-student team is about to demonstrate a first-of-its kind, phase-change memory solid state storage device that provides performance thousands of times faster than a conventional hard drive and up to seven times faster than current state-of-the-art solid-state drives (SSDs).

The device was developed in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and will be on exhibit June 7-8 at DAC 2011, the world’s leading technical conference and trade show on electronic design automation, with the support of several industry partners, including Micron Technology, BEEcube and Xilinx. The storage system, called “Moneta,” uses phase-change memory (PCM), an emerging data storage technology that stores data in the crystal structure of a metal alloy called a chalcogenide. PCM is faster and simpler to use than flash memory – the technology that currently dominates the SSD market.

Moneta marks the latest advancement in solid state drives (SSDs). Unlike conventional hard disk drives, solid state storage drives have no moving parts. Today’s SSDs use flash memory and can be found in a wide range of consumer electronics such as iPads and laptops. Although faster than hard disk, flash memory is still too slow to meet modern data storage and analysis demands, particularly in the area of high performance computing where the ability to sift through enormous volumes of data quickly is critical. Examples include storing and analyzing scientific data collected through environmental sensors, or even web searches through Google.

“As a society, we can gather all this data very, very quickly – much faster than we can analyze it with conventional, disk-based storage systems,” said Steven Swanson, professor of Computer Science and Engineering and director of the Non-Volatile Systems Lab (NVSL). “Phase-change memory-based solid state storage devices will allow us to sift through all of this data, make sense of it, and extract useful information much faster. It has the potential to be revolutionary.” …

via Phase change memory-based ‘moneta’ system points to the future of computer storage.

Fake Gold Bars with Tungsten Cores in Fort Knox?

How to detect tungsten in gold bars without destroying them:

This is translated from Chinese I believe:

In theory, as density is 19.1g/cm3, which is approximately 70% denser than lead, uranium could be used as material of making fake coin. However, it is weakly radioactive and not as dense as gold, so it does not appear to be a practical method.

Then people have discovered that tungsten is environmental-friendly, durable and hardness, the most important is that its density of 19.25g/cm3 is just about the same density as gold (19.3g/cm3), which bears the similar specific gravity. These advantages make tungstenalloy jewelry enjoys the superiority to be the best substitute for the costly metal of gold or platinum. It is necessary to tell that tungsten gold-plated would not work for several reasons but a coin with a tungsten center and gold all around it could not be detected as counterfeit by density measurement alone. …

Nowadays, tungsten alloy gold substitution is increasingly used in some field relevant to gold or platinum substitution, such as: tungsten alloy jewelry, e.g. ring, ear ring, necklace, wrist chain, etc. Also, it is widely adopted in making souvenir coins, such as memorial crown and other application such as watch band.

- link

Tungsten (/ˈtʌŋstən/), also known as wolfram (/ˈwʊlfrəm/wuul-frəm), is a chemical element with the chemical symbol W and atomic number 74.

A steel-gray metal under standard conditions when uncombined, tungsten is found naturally on Earth only in chemical compounds. It was identified as a new element in 1781, and first isolated as a metal in 1783. Its important ores include wolframite and scheelite. The free element is remarkable for its robustness, especially the fact that it has the highest melting point of all the non-alloyed metals and the second highest of all the elements after carbon. Also remarkable is its high density of 19.3 times that of water, comparable to that of uranium and gold, and much higher (about 1.7 times) than that of lead.^[3] Tungsten with minor amounts of impurities is often brittle^[4] and hard, making it difficult to work. However, very pure tungsten is more ductile, and can be cut with a hacksaw.^[5]

The unalloyed elemental form is used mainly in electrical applications. Tungsten’s many alloys have numerous applications, most notably in incandescent light bulb filaments, X-ray tubes (as both the filament and target), and superalloys. Tungsten’s hardness and high density give it military applications in penetrating projectiles.

- wikipedia

How much is tungsten per ounce? Today gold is at $1,541 per oz. A pound is therefore 16 X 1,541 or $24,656/lb. You can pretty much buy your weight in tunsten for $63.  ($63 – 75/Kilogram =  165 pounds). So tungsten is around $0.38 (38 cents) per pound?