Hello, and welcome to The Edge, the newsletter that brings you groundbreaking stories from the frontiers of technology and science.
We’ve got some great stories for you today including tiny tweezers capable of picking up molecules, planet Earth in the year 2245 and huge progress in the field of holograms. As always, we’ve added extra stories under each article should you find yourself in a curious state of mind.
A childhood dream, now real
Star Wars-style holograms are finally possible. Image credit: Kentaro Iwami/TUAT
Scientists Create True, “Star Wars”-Style Hologram
Scientists have finally figured out how to make a true hologram like the one in Star Wars - the one where Princess Leia asks Obi-Wan Kenobi for help.
Using nanomaterials, scientists at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology were able to bend light in ways impossible for natural materials. This resulted in the first-ever true hologram of Earth spinning on its axis.
The hologram isn’t perfect - it’s a bit rough around the edges, given that it’s just a 48-frame loop of a spinning Earth. What’s important to keep in mind the implications this has for the field. While it’s unrefined, it is vastly more sophisticated than other true holograms built in the past. And this hologram can be viewed from any angle, as opposed to existing holograms. Also, this new hologram doesn’t use any optical trickery at all.
To turn the lasers that form the hologram into the shape of the Earth, the nanomaterial has small scales which are even smaller than the wavelength of the red laser’s light. Building this takes time - according to the researchers, a six-minute hologram would take 800 hours to prepare. However, they’re still hopeful. According to study author and engineer Kentaro Iwami, “The aim is to develop this to produce full color eventually. And we want it to be viewable from any angle: a ‘whole hemisphere’ 3-D projection”
Why it’s taken so long to make holograms.
Today is…
…the International Day of Charity.
The International Day of Charity was declared by the United Nations General Assembly in 2012.
The purpose of the International Day of Charity is to raise awareness of charities and to provide a platform for global charity activities.
There are millions of charities across the globe and in the U.S alone there are over 1.2 million
Want to donate but not sure where? Check out Charity Navigator.
Quick science
Other incredible stories from the world of science and technology
Research into oysters and the moon shows that people might be influenced by Earth’s electromagnetic field
Low-emission cars have been in the works for a while - people have been working on them for 50 years.
AI system detects Alzheimer’s by analysing language patterns.
Exceptionally tiny tweezers
If you ever felt like picking up a molecule. Image credit: University of Rochester
Engineers Build Tweezers So Tiny They Can Pick Up Individual Molecules
Engineers have managed to build optical tweezers that can grab individual biomolecules and proteins without causing them damage. The discovery has huge implications for science and medicine.
Existing tweezers like this - devices that can trap and manipulate minute objects using special lasers - were limited in their capabilities. Up until now, the smallest thing they could grab was a red blood cell. These new nanotweezers, however, can grab individual DNA molecules and proteins. The Vanderbilt University engineers behind the tweezers hope that they can be used by doctors to diagnose diseases like Alzheimer’s even sooner.
The nanotweezers - known officially as opto-thermo-electrohydrodynamic tweezers (OTET) - use a laser that manipulates tiny objects as small as ten nanometres by trapping them and lifting them. Importantly, the tweezers do so without aiming any light directly at the object, thereby not causing any damage. According to lead researcher Justus Ndukaife, the ability to trap and manipulate these tiny objects lets researchers understand how our DNA and other biological molecules behave in great detail on a singular level.
The new tweezers are incredibly valuable to scientists and doctors, especially those investigating signs of Alzheimer’s or other neurodegenerative diseases.
Tiny sculptures
Video of the week
“Unlimited Resources From Space - Asteroid Mining”
The brilliant YouTube channel Kurzgesagt has released another excellent video, this time about the possibilities and challenges of asteroid mining. The video covers just how much our world would change if asteroids could be mined and just how difficult achieving such a reality is.
Teemyco - meet without meeting
The coronavirus pandemic has prompted a lot of businesses to have their employees work from home, and that trend might be around for a while. That’s where start-ups like Teemyco come into the picture.
Image credit: Teemyco
Teemyco is a Stockholm-based start-up that aims to reproduce natural office interactions in a virtual environment. Email, Slack, Zoom or whatever tool you use is great for communicating messages but cannot replicate the spontaneous conversation that takes place in an office. To tackle this, Teemyco offers a room-based interface designed to facilitate spontaneous, natural interaction and collaboration that wouldn’t be possible through email.
While still a young start-up with a product still in beta form, Teemyco’s work is truly exciting and could help facilitate the strange working circumstances we find ourselves in now.
A distant, half-digital future
The future will be unrecognisable. Image credit: NAS/Unsplash
Half The Atoms in The Planet Could Be Digital Data By 2245
It’s hard to imagine information as something physical and ‘real’. However, that might be unavoidable within a few short centuries. So much so that, by 2245, assuming a 50% yearly growth rate in digital content production, the total amount of data produced annually by humanity (measured in single bits of data) could surpass the number of atoms on Earth. Bizarrely, this insane quantity of data would also account for half of Earth’s mass.
Given our information-rich, tech-focused times, every human being is generating huge amounts of digital content every day. Currently, Earth contains around 10^21 - 100 billion billion - bits of computer information.
Physicist Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth in England researched what the future of a digital Earth might look like in terms of data quantities. According to Vopson, a 20% annual growth rate in digital content would mean that, in 350 years, the number of data bits on the planet will exceed the number of atoms inside it. For context, there are around 10^50 or a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion on atoms on Earth.
According to Vopson, this poses a bit of a problem, mainly because of issues with storage and power. However, there’s also the issue of Landauer’s principle, which suggests that erasing a digital bit produces a small amount of heat. While still under scrutiny, Landauer’s principle leads Vopson to believe that there might be a link between information and mass. Put into the context of Einstein’s famous E = mc^2 equation, which shows that energy and mass are interchangeable, Vopson was able to calculate the potential mass of a single bit. He concluded that the mass was about 10 million times smaller than that of an electron.
This means that, right now, the mass of all the digital information produced yearly is about the same of a single E.coli bacteria. However, assuming that 20% growth rate, half of Earth’s mass could be digital in less than 500 years. At 50% growth, that same target would be reached by 2245. While this isn’t a problem now, it might be in the future. Possible solutions would be to find ways to store information in non-material mediums like holograms. However, the idea that information has mass remains theoretical - further experimentation is required to determine if this could become a problem down the line.
What is a bit?
What we’ve been reading
A small selection of the articles we read this week.
How does vinyl work and is it really better than streaming from Spotify?
Physicists: Fake Black Holes Could Be Pulling The Universe Apart
Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet
Starship could attempt near-earth orbit test flight next year, Elon Musk says
Thanks for reading!
We hope you enjoyed this edition of The Edge.
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