Etch-a-sketch with superconductors

Reporting in Nature Materials this week, researchers from the London Centre for Nanotechnology and the Physics Department of Sapienza University of Rome have discovered a technique to ‘draw’ superconducting shapes using an X-ray beam. This ability to create and control tiny superconducting structures has implications for a completely new generation of electronic devices.

Superconductivity is a special state where a material conducts electricity with no resistance, meaning absolutely zero energy is wasted.

The research group has shown that they can manipulate regions of high temperature superconductivity, in a particular material which combines oxygen, copper and a heavier, ‘rare earth’ element called lanthanum. Illuminating with X-rays causes a small scale re-arrangement of the oxygen atoms in the material, resulting in high temperature superconductivity, of the type originally discovered for such materials 25 years ago by IBM scientists. The X-ray beam is then used like a pen to draw shapes in two dimensions.

A well as being able to write superconductors with dimensions much smaller than the width of a human hair, the group is able to erase those structures by applying heat treatments. They now have the tools to write and erase with high precision, using just a few simple steps and without the chemicals ordinarily used in device fabrication. This ability to re-arrange the underlying structure of a material has wider applications to similar compounds containing metal atoms and oxygen, ranging from fuel cells to catalysts.

(via PhysOrg.com)

Patrick Tresset’s robots draw faces and doodle when bored

Pop along to the Tenderpixel art space in Soho this month, and you could grab a drawing of your mug, sketched by one of Patrick Tresset’s robotic arms.

The sketching bot is called Paul. It starts off the exhibition by scanning the room and looking for people with its motorised eye. When it spots a human face, it uses an edge detection technique called Gabor filter (which is modeled after cells in a human’s visual cortex) to pick out the salient lines.

A robotic arm, gripping a standard biro, then goes to work. It draws out those lines on paper, and then does a spot of shading. If he’s hooked up to the internet, he’ll even post your photo to Facebook or tweet about his sketching.

The technology is based, in part, on “a project hosted in the computing department at Goldsmiths college where we investigate the sketching activity through computational modelling,” Tresset told Wired.co.uk.

The rest is built from scratch, using “current research from computer vision, cognitive computing and robotics”, and a hodge-podge collection of different programming languages, including Urbiscript, python and frameworks such as ROS.

(via Wired UK)