Electron microscope image of a hole embedded within a sheet of graphene. The corners of the green hexagons are carbon atoms which form graphene’s crystal structure. Image courtesy of the Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley.

Acquiring a sample of graphene is almost comically easy. Start with an ordinary piece of graphite, which is basically the same material that is used in pencil lead. Squeeze it between two pieces of Scotch tape and tear them apart. Repeat several times until pieces of the graphite have been cleaved into sheets no more than a single atom thick. Voila – graphene! Total cost of 1 pencil plus a roll of Scotch tape: about $3.

Simple as this process is, scientists did not even know that single sheets of graphene could exist until 2004. Now that we know that we can make graphene, it turns out that it has some amazing electrical properties and someday might even replace silicon as the most important component in computer circuitry. To that end, researchers in Alex Zettl’s group at Berkeley have endeavored recently to isolate suspended membranes of graphene for study and image them at Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope (TEM). Results were published last spring by Çaglar Ö. Girit and others in the Science.

Two aspects of the Zettl group’s recent work have been particularly interesting. First, the TEAM 0.5 microscope not only has the ability to see individual atoms of graphene, but can also take pictures in close to real time. This means that Girit was able to see dynamics of graphene as they actually happened. Other types of microscopy (scanning tunneling microscopes, for example) can take several minutes to get a single picture.

Second, Girit and others centered their images at a hole within the graphene sheet. This allowed them to observe the dynamics that occur at the material’s edge. Such edges can have a notable effect on a graphene sheet’s electrical properties and thus understanding them and controlling them would be crucial in the design of any future technology.

Aside from technological applications, graphene is a theoretical physicist’s dream system because it beautifully combines the dynamics of relativistic particles from space such as neutrinos with the experimental accessibility of an easy system to make and manipulate here on Earth. Girit thinks that this is perhaps the single most exciting aspect of the system.

Only time will tell if graphene will have a long-term impact on society, but this would not be the first time a new discovery has transformed the Bay Area. In 1955 William Shockley moved to Mountain View, CA to found a new startup developing the silicon transistor. His company’s success was ultimately marred by Shockley’s own belligerent personality (“He understood everything except people,” Charles Townes once remarked), but the invention and the industry that grew up around it have revolutionized the region. The Santa Clara Valley’s old nickname, “the Valley of Heart’s Delight,” has long since been whisked away into a memory of a distant time and setting. Today most of us know it only as Silicon Valley. Our children may know the region as something entirely different.

Lawrence Berkeley Lab's TEAM 0.5 is capable of resolving individual carbon atoms in the honeycomb crystal structure of graphene. See QUEST's video The World's Most Powerful Microscope for more information. Image source: Nano Letters

Fifty years later, a new field of nanotechnology has exploded. At the cutting edge, researchers are successfully manufacturing everything from corporate logos to radios that are all small enough to be stacked end-to-end perhaps a million items long across the proverbial head of a pin. The advent of personal computers and smart phones has brought the power of such miniaturization into sharp focus for the general public. In a very real sense, we have all become bottom feeders. Below is a brief progress report on the state of the field.

Microscopes: The old adage “seeing is believing” was not lost on Feynman back in the late fifties. He noted that many of the most fundamental questions in biology could be readily solved if we only had the ability to see the molecules directly. Today, new inventions such as the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the atomic force microscope (AFM), and the transmission electron microscope (TEM) have all achieved resolution at the scale where individual atoms can actually be seen and manipulated.

Miniature Motors: Perhaps the speech’s most imaginative scenario, due to Feynman’s friend (and graduate student) Albert Hibbs, was the concept of being able to “swallow the surgeon.” Feynman imagined that we might some day be able to construct robots capable of repairing or investigating the inner reaches of an ailing patient’s body. Mixing engineering and biology like this can run quickly into thorny ethical questions. Nevertheless, interesting progress has been made. Researchers in Alex Zettl’s group at UC Berkeley have recently constructed a nano motor, for example.

Information Storage: Using order-of-magnitude arguments, Feynman argued that the Encyclopedia Britannica could be squeezed into a pin’s area if the text were reduced by a factor of 25,000. He offered a $1,000 prize to the first person capable of printing one page of any book at this scale. Tom Newman, a graduate student at Stanford, first accomplished this in 1986 with an impressive reprinting of the first page of Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities. Today, you can buy the book in its entirety for only 1.9 megabytes. For a high-end smart phone with 30 gigabytes of memory, you could perhaps hold 15,000 books within the palm of your hand. Not bad.

Then again, at the extreme limit, Feynman also reasoned that you ought to be able to squeeze the text of every book that has ever been written (now more than 32 million titles according the Library of Congress) within the confines of a single speck of dust. We still have a long way to go.

The Sloan Telescope used to conduct BOSS

One of those is BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is a new project to create a 3-D map of over 2 million galaxies and quasars representing the best data ever obtained on the large-scale structure of the universe. Baryon oscillations began as pressure waves through the hot plasma of the early universe. Those waves left an imprint on the matter that makes up the universe, including the dark matter. The survey will essentially act as a ruler, in order to measure how the universe has been expanding.

Next Monday, you’ll be able to meet David Schlegel, the principal investigator of BOSS. He’ll be part of a panel of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory scientists discussing their search for dark energy. As a primer, check out QUEST’s story on Dark Energy from last year. The piece features astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, who will also be speaking at the event.

See QUEST's Video on Dark Energy below:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.


Dark Secrets: What Science Tells Us About the Hidden Universe

Where: Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison Street, Berkeley

When: Monday, October 26th 7-830 PM

Cost: FREE

Details: No mystery is bigger than dark energy — the elusive force that makes up three-quarters of the Universe and is causing it to expand at an accelerating rate. KTVU Channel 2 health and science editor John Fowler will moderate a panel of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists who use phenomena such as exploding stars and gravitational lenses to explore the dark cosmos.

The Large Hadron Collider, if located in the Bay Area, would encompass a sizable piece of San Francisco. Image Credit: NASA.

She’s Electric: To power a standard light bulb you need 60 Watts (or 15 watts for an equivalent CFL). To power a small house you need an average of about a thousand watts. To run the LHC at full power researchers will need 120 million watts. Alternatively, you could run the LHC, supply electricity to a population the size of Berkeley, or simultaneously bake 60,000 Thanksgiving turkeys. You could only fly three 747 airplanes, though.

Life in the Fast Lane: A fundamental axiom of physics states that no information can travel faster than the speed of light. The LHC’s proton beams are no exception, but their speeds do approach light speed to within a fraction of a millionth of 1 percent. Such velocities defy comprehension. Suffice it to say that if we ever managed to accelerate a person to this velocity, time would warp so much that we could expect her to live for half a million years.

The Long and Winding Road: The LHC’s 17-mile circumference could make it a nice racetrack for a half-marathon, but don’t try racing the beam. When operational, protons will shoot around the LHC more than 11,000 times per second. Even more mind-boggling is the length of wire used in the construction of the LHC’s thousands of superconducting magnets. CERN claims there is enough wire wrapped up in these magnets to trace out more than six trips to the Sun and back.

OK Computer: When operational, the LHC is expected to generate 15 petabytes of data and simulations per year, which amounts to the hard drive space of about 30,000 high-end personal computers. At CERN in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau revolutionized the world with their development of key pieces in the framework of the World Wide Web. The networks being developed to manage the LHC’s expected data have inspired talk of a similar revolution to come.

A Whole New World?: All of these wonders of physics and engineering have been developed for the purpose of one thing: to create a particle smasher with the capability of knocking two protons together with an energy of 14 TeV (trillions of electron volts). This is about the same energy that it takes to pick a grain of salt up off the floor. Compressed into such an acute space, however, it just might lend us insight into the most fundamental properties of our universe.

Now, if they can only get those wires hooked up correctly…

Bumps and ripples in the otherwise flat ring system of Saturn cast long shadows at equinox. Image credit: NASA/Cassini

Hard to imagine what it would be like to float just above the rings of Saturn, but what a sight it must be! As a kid, one of my favorite astronomical pass-times was imagining the view from other places in the Solar System.

Now imagine a towering bulge of frosty mist rising up out of this super-flat plane of ice chunks, literally the size of a mountain. Such is what was beheld by NASA's Cassini spacecraft last month–albeit, from a distance–when it turned its cameras to Saturn's vast rings during the few days surrounding Saturn's equinox (August 29, 2009), giving us a view never before seen.

Equinox on Earth, when the Sun is positioned directly over our equator, happens twice a year. Due to Earth's tilted rotational axis, as we orbit the Sun the latitude over which the Sun shines directly cycles north and south between the latitudes of the Tropics. On its way north to warm our (Northern Hemisphere) summers or south to leave us in the chill, the Sun crosses the equator on the equinoxes (Fall and Spring).

The same thing happens on Saturn, with two differences. First, Saturn takes nearly 30 years to orbit the Sun, so equinox comes only about every 14 years. Second, Saturn has its system of rings that encircle the planet directly above its equator, serving as a visible extension of the equator. At Saturn's equinox, the Sun is not only directly over the equator, but sunlight strikes the rings edge-on, like a flashlight shining on a flat piece of paper from the edge, the light just grazing over the surfaces on either side.

When this happens, any deviations from the flatness of the ring system—bumps and ripples–cast long shadows across the rings, making the features much easier to see. The same thing is seen on that piece of paper with shadows from creases and bumps leaping across the page.

As seen from Earth, equinox on Saturn means the rings appear to vanish as we look at them edge-on. This behavior puzzled astronomers long ago before they understood the rings for what they are. During the August 2009 Saturn equinox, however, for the first time in history we had a bird's-eye view of the rings during equinox, from Cassini. Cassini has been in orbit around Saturn for five years now.

Cassini spotted a number of prominent shadows trailing bright spots and ridges—bumps and ripples of different sorts rising above the ring plane.

Some of the bumps–icy ring material kicked up by the gravitational disturbance of a small moonlet inside the rings–were measured at over two miles high, the height of the Rocky Mountains. Other rippling features, such as long ridges running along the direction the rings encircle Saturn, are waves created by the gravity of moons orbiting outside the ring system. Still other types of disturbances observed are possibly caused by the impact of meteoroids or chunks of ice with the rings.

Saturn's rings are tens of thousands of miles across, but are extremely thin—perhaps no thicker than the height of a four-story building! So a bump or ripple as high as a mountain is a big deal!

Ah, to be on Saturn, now that equinox is here…

Water and cornstarch make a non-Newtonian fluid when mixed: messy but great fun!

Fast-forward fifteen years to the beginning of the present school year and the Internet has given us all a huge leg-up in finding hands-on ways to learn science. These are demonstrations rather than experiments–an important difference for those entering a fair. Nevertheless, I have included two of my favorites below.

Homemade Oobleck:

Pay tribute to Dr. Seuss's book Bartholomew and the Oobleck by whipping up this mixture that is both solid and liquid at the same time! The simplest version is listed below, but adding a few more bells and whistles can increase the demonstration's awe-factor a bunch.

What to do: You need a mixing bowl, water, and cornstarch. Fill the mixing bowl with about 1 cup of cornstarch, and add roughly an equal volume of water. Mix, incrementally adding cornstarch or water until the mixture attains an appropriate blend of goopiness and firmness. Enjoy the fluid's bizarre properties by squishing and kneading it with your hands.

What's going on? Nearly all fluids have some intrinsic flow resistance. This property, called viscosity, is the reason water flows more easily than honey and at least partly why Usain Bolt can run 100 meters in under 10 seconds while it takes Michael Phelps well over a minute to swim the same distance. Our water/cornstarch mixture has a very special viscosity, making it easy to dip your hand into the mixture slowly, but quite hard to push it in quickly. (Technically, this is an example of a non-Newtonian fluid.) Science class will teach you that almost all matter can be classified into either a solid, liquid, or gas, but this is at least one example where the distinctions blur.

Bernoulli's Hair Dryer:

In 1738 the mathematician Daniel Bernoulli (pronounced Ber-NEW-lee) published a theory of fluids that has influenced the designs of airplane wings and sailboats ever since. Exploit this concept to suspend a balloon or ping-pong ball precariously in mid-air with a hair dryer.

What to do: You need a hair dryer and a small round balloon (or a ping-pong ball, depending on the hair dryer's strength). Turn the hair dryer on, point it upward, and place the balloon in the vertical column of air. If the ceiling is not too high, you should be able to balance the balloon in mid-air this way. Now begin to tilt the hair dryer and watch the balloon stay suspended almost magically.

What's going on? Everyday experience helps us understand why the balloon or ball stays suspended when the hair dryer is pointed vertically: air blowing upward pushes on the balloon, and this in turn counteracts gravity. But why doesn't the balloon fall off to the side when we begin to tilt the hair dryer? The answer lies in Bernoulli's principle, which states that, all other things being equal, a fluid loses pressure as it picks up speed. The air coming out of the hair dryer is moving faster than the room's air so its pressure is lower. This pressure difference helps keep the balloon suspended, even when you tilt the hair dryer.

Water and cornstarch make a non-Newtonian fluid when mixed: messy but great fun!

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is often mistakenly associated with the Tsunami.

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

The philosopher George Berkeley posed this philosophical question and a quick internet search found a somewhat scientific answer in an 1894 issue of Scientific American. There they wrote: "Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound."

Maybe sometimes vibrations are heard much later, only when the right person is listening.

On January 26, 1700, at about 9:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time one of the largest earthquakes ever to strike the Pacific Northwest rumbled across the Cascadia Subduction Zone. This massive earthquake sent a giant 33 foot high tsunami crashing onto shore, inundating the quiet coastline. While there is no written account describing the earthquake, tsunami or consequential damage, the devastation was enormous.

So wait. If there was no written record, how can we know the exact time and date when the tsunami struck? How can we know how big it was or what kind of damage it did? It took some digging and an impressive bit of scientific detective work by geologist Brian Atwater. First scientists discovered an unusual layer of sand in a marsh area that left a clue that a wave had struck, taken sand from offshore and brought it far inland. The scientists were able to date this thin sand deposit to around 1700, plus or minus 25 to 50 years. Then through tree-ring dating they were able to narrow that down to within five or ten years. Further study of tree roots narrowed it down even further to winter, 1700. Then investigators went to Japan and checked for evidence of a tsunami during that time. They looked for one which did not have a known earthquake associated with it. These were known as “orphan tsunami." There, in the records from 1700, was a tsunami the struck Japan, a wave that had the right pattern, right size, and was generated at the same place, the Cascadia Subduction Zone all the way on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. January 26, 1700, 9:00 p.m.

Can it happen again. Yes. Are we listening?

Watch the Scary Tsunamis television story online.

Centuries ago the stars were believed to reside just beyond the planets of our solar system.

How do we know how far away celestial objects are? This shouldn't be taken for granted, as it's not as straightforward as sounding the depth of the ocean floor with sonar, or determining the range to an object by bouncing radio waves off it and timing the reflection.

In fact, we have "pinged” the nearest celestial objects with radar to determine their distances very accurately. Examples are the Moon and Venus, where round-trip lightspeed travel is measured in seconds or minutes.

Before radar, the scale of the Solar System had to be determined geometrically, by observing events like Venus or Mercury transiting the face of the Sun from different locations on Earth and triangulating. Even this technique requires telescopes, which we've had only four hundred years. Before that, figuring out distances to just about everything except the Moon was mostly guesswork. In fact, it wasn't too many centuries ago that the entire Universe was believed to be not much larger than the Solar System—the Sun and it's nine…excuse me…eight planets—as we know it today.

Once the distance from Earth to the Sun was figured out, that length (the "Astronomical Unit”) in effect became a basic measuring rod for working out distances to everything else, by one means or another.

As Earth orbits the Sun, the direction from which we see stars shifts minutely, and we can observe a small change in a star's position compared to the more distant "background” stars. You can see the same effect by holding a finger in front of your face and looking at it alternately with one eye, then the other.

The geometry of this observation is a simple triangle, whose base is the distance between your eyeballs and whose legs are the lines from each eyeball to your finger. By knowing the length of the base, and observing the change in viewing angle against the background, the length of the legs (distance from your eyeballs) can be calculated.

In the case of Earth and a nearby star, the "eyeballs” are the Earth at two ends of its orbit around the Sun (six months apart) and the "finger” is the star.

But this measuring of distance by "trigonometric parallax," as it's called, only works for the nearest stars, as the minute shift in the star's apparent position diminishes with distance.

As astronomers learned more about the distance to nearby stars, they determined how to relate their temperature and mass to their actual brightness, and it became possible to estimate the distance of many stars by measuring their apparent brightness, with an understanding of how the brightness of light weakens with distance.

To measure the depths of space between us and galaxies far, far away, in which individual stars are indistinguishable from the overall galactic glow, we can turn to certain types of supernovae: individual stars that temporarily shine brightly enough to be observed and measured. Like the flare of a match struck in the dark night, the brilliance of the flash reveals how far away the striker stands.

We have built up our knowledge of the Universe's vastness over the past couple centuries, working out the problem from the near to the far. Even as science and technology have made the world on which we live smaller, it has done exactly the opposite to the Universe….

(left) A cell imaged with an optical microscope. (right) The same cell imaged by allowing the cell to absorb UCNPs and then irradiating it with infrared light. Each nanocrystal is one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. Image courtesy of PNAS.

Thus proceeds Michael Crichton's 2002 thriller, Prey, as the protagonists face off against a malicious swarm of flesh-hungry nano-robots that are the offspring of a most unholy marriage of biological, computer science, and engineering research efforts.

Real science capabilities lag somewhat behind, but researchers succeeded recently in demonstrating an exciting new class of nanoparticle with potential applications in biological imaging. The new crystals, more formally known as lanthanide-doped upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs), were fabricated and studied under the direction of principle investigators Bruce Cohen and James Schuck at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Molecular Foundry, and results were published on June 18^th in a paper by Shiwei Wu and others in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Happily, while Crichton's nanoparticles coordinated an attack on a your vital organs, these particles behave more like benign light bulbs. After allowing a living cell to absorb the UCNPs, researchers shine infrared laser light on the cell, and the nanocrystals within light up like a Christmas tree in red or green arrays of dots. These, in turn, can easily be spotted using an optical microscope and used to map out particle distributions within a cell, yielding information impossible to obtain by other methods.

The method, known as single-molecule imaging, has been demonstrated using other nanoparticle types, but UCNPs are unique because of their uncommon brightness and stability, and because they are powered by infrared light. This is both good for the studied cells, because infrared light is less damaging than visible or X-ray frequencies, and good for the people measuring them, because it can probe more deeply into tissue than other types of light. In fact, one prospect for future research is the imaging of entire animals.

Reflecting on the research effort's long-term goals, Cohen commented that cross-disciplinary sharing of ideas is crucial. "In general, we'd like to bring nanoscience to the larger scientific community, especially biology, where few researchers have had much exposure to it," he said. "Our goal is to make interesting and useful new materials that will let them do all sorts of experiments that would otherwise be impossible."

A phonautograph, which made the first sound recordings (playback made possible thanks to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Last summer, QUEST told you about how scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have developed a technology to playback old audio recordings using visual scans. Along with bringing to life the wax cylinders we featured in our TV story, the Berkeley technology helped the world hear, for the first time ever, the oldest known sound recordings ever made. Now the historians who unearthed those recordings have discovered that they've been playing them all wrong.

The recordings were made by a phonautograph, invented by a Frenchman named Léon Scott more than 20 years before Edison came up with the phonograph. The technology worked by scratching sound waves onto sheets of paper covered with lampblack. Last year, historians used the Berkeley Lab's "visual stylus" to replay an 1860 recording of what they thought was a young girl singing the French song "Au Claire De La Lune". Since then, they've realized that they were actually playing the recording at double speed. Instead, it's likely the inventor himself doing the singing. You can hear both version at FirstSounds.org, or listen to an interview with the historians from NPR. It turns out learning to play old sounds isn't the only challenge — we have to know how to play them right!

Watch "How Edison Got His Groove Back" to learn more about how LBL's innovations are helping restore old sound:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.