Applied Physics

Snap Circuits Science: Resistors In Series

A tone generator is a useful piece of test equipment used, for example, to test the frequency range of audio equipment such as your stereo or the external speakers for your iPod. A tone generator can also be used to tune a musical instrument such as a gui ...

Article - Steve Schuler - Sep 18 2014 - 8:06am

Phase-Change Materials Set New Speed Limit For Silicon

As has been predicted for some time, there is a physics train wreck coming at the semiconductor industry- a size and speed where atoms have reached their limits. Quantum computing has remained a dream for 20 years with little progress, which means chips w ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 20 2014 - 10:04am

Robotics: 555 Timer H-Bridge

You can build a simple circuit using two 555 Timer ICs to create an H-bridge that will drive a single motor in forward or reverse. An H-bridge circuit is often used in robotics to reverse the polarity of a motor. For example, if the motor is spinning in th ...

Article - Steve Schuler - Apr 6 2015 - 7:09am

Spin-Based Computing: Single Material Is Both Semiconductor And Magnetic

Electricity and magnetism rule our digital world but they are really 19th century advancements still being optimized in the 21st. In our current scheme, semiconductors process electrical information while magnetic materials enable long-term data storage b ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 28 2014 - 11:00am

Physics Nobel Prize Awarded For Blue LEDs

Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura have been award the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources". Using blue LEDs, white lig ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 7 2014 - 10:38am

Kano Computer: In A Word, Wow!

I've lost count of how many computers I've built over the years, but I think it is safe to say that the Kano Computer was the easiest build ever. So simple a child could do it. Kano founders, Yonatan Raz-Fridman, Alex Klein, and Saul Klein, wante ...

Article - Steve Schuler - Mar 10 2015 - 7:31am

Bio-Hairpins And Polymer Spaghetti

When a sturdy material becomes soft and spongy, it's been damaged in some way. But when it comes to complex fluids and biological cells, things may be different. By looking at the microscopic building blocks – known as "filaments" – of biop ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 11 2014 - 8:00am

Through The Combining Glass To The Future Of Public Interaction

In the future, it may be possible to try on clothes even when the shop is closed, thanks to semi-transparent mirrors in interactive systems presented at the ACM UIST 2014 human-computer interface conference. The work, led by Professor Sriram Subramanian, D ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 14 2014 - 8:00am

Next-Gen Lighting May Be Flat Panel Lights Based On Carbon Nanotubes

The Obama administration only recently banned incandescent bulbs and compact fluorescent bulbs are getting all of the marketing due to generous government subsidies, so light emitting diodes (LEDs) are yet to even get off the cultural ground but researche ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 14 2014 - 11:54am

Nanocryotron Adder: Superconducting Circuits Simplified

Computer chips with superconducting circuits would be 50 to 100 times as energy-efficient as today's chips due to a lack of electrical resistance. That means less heat, less deformation and less energy cost. Superconducting chips also promise greater ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2014 - 1:32pm