Repairing birth defects in the womb. Inserting a tiny laser into the mother's uterus to seal off an abnormal blood flow and save fetal twins. Advancing the science that may allow doctors to deliver cells or DNA to treat sickle cell anemia and other genetic diseases before birth. Practitioners at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia describe the current state of the science in fetal surgery in a special issue of Seminars in Fetal & Neonatal Medicine.

1. Intellectual Ventures Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s former chief technology officer, has assembled commonly available technology — parts used in printers, digital cameras and projectors — to make rapid lasers to shoot down mosquitoes in mid-flight.

The laser mosquito zapping work was first covered here in early 2009

After hundreds of mosquitoes (which were kept in the hotel bathroom until showtime) were released into a glass tank, a laser tracked their movements and slowly shot them down, leaving their carcasses scattered on the bottom of the tank. While the demonstration was slowed down for public viewing, Mr. Myhrvold said that normally the lasers could shoot down anywhere between 50 to 100 mosquitoes per second.

Mr. Myhrvold said he thinks there is particular potential in the Blu-ray laser technology, because blue lasers are more powerful than red ones and there are a lot...



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Lasers made of silicon-compatible material could bring optical data transmission onto computer chips

Scientists have built a clock which is 100,000 times more precise than the existing international standard.

The quantum-logic clock, which detects the energy state of a single aluminum ion, keeps time to within a second every 3.7 billion years. The new timekeeper could one day improve GPS or detect the slowing of time predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

“It could it be a real contender for the next frequency standard, or next timekeeper,” said physicist Chin-wen (James) Chou of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, lead author of a study to appear in a forthcoming Physical Review Letters.

Chou’s team is one of several racing to build an atomic clock that can replace the current international standard, the cesium fountain clock. The cesium clock loses one second every 100 million years. Chou’s is not the first quantum-logic clock, but his uses aluminum and magnesium ions, which makes it twice as precise as its predecessors that used aluminum and beryllium.

To keep time, quantum-logic clocks measure the vibration frequency of UV lasers. Unfortunately, the best lasers we can build veer off their normal frequency by about one tick every hour, Chou said. To keep the laser’s timekeeping precise, its vibration must be anchored to something much more stable.

There are 522 pages of unclassified DARPA projects for 2010-2011. This is a second look at more of the projects.

The first look at DARPA 2010-2011 projects is here

Transformer (TX) Vehicle AKA flying car
($12 million) The Transformer (TX) Vehicle program will examine the feasibility and approaches for developing vertical take-off and landing, road-worthy vehicles that carry a 4-person payload >250 NM on one tank of fuel, can safely travel on roads, and can be operated by a typical soldier.

FY 2010 Plans:
- Conduct trade studies of vehicle designs, lift motors, flight dynamics and control, energy conversion
and storage, vehicle architectures, and concepts of operation.
- Initiate preliminary design studies.
- Conduct risk reduction experiments and modeling to validate designs.

JOULE AKA Ten times Higher Density Batteries
($4 million) The JOULE program will exploit new architectures, reversible electrode structures, materials, and chemistries for the development of rechargeable, high energy density batteries that match or exceed
energy density of hydrocarbon fuels (e.g. gasoline, JP8, etc.). Three-dimensional structures with very high surface areas for electrodes will

MIT researchers have demonstrated the first room temperatur laser built from germanium that can produce wavelengths of light useful for optical communication. Germanium is easy to incorporate into existing processes for manufacturing silicon chips. So the result could prove an important step toward computers that move data — and maybe even perform calculations — using light instead of electricity.

Onchip photonics is a key to increasing the speed and lowering the power usage of computer chips to enable zettaflop computing (one million times faster than petaflop supercomputers that exist now).

Optics Letters - A Ge-on-Si laser operating at room temperature

The researchers describe how they coaxed excited germanium electrons into the higher-energy, photon-emitting state.