Japanese scientists create microscopic noodle bowl
Mechanical engineering professor Masayuki Nakao said Thursday he and his students at the University of Tokyo used a carbon-based material to produce a noodle bowl with a diameter 1/25,000 of an inch in a project aimed at developing nanotube-processing technology.
The Japanese-style ramen bowl was carved out of microscopic nanotubes, Nakao said.
Nanotubes are tube-shaped pieces of carbon, measuring about one-ten-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair.
Carbon nanotubes are being explored for a wide range of uses in electronics and medicine because their structure endows them with powerful physical properties such as a strength greater than steel.
The ramen bowl experiment included a string of “noodles” that measured one-12,500th of an inch in length, with a thickness of one-1.25 millionth of an inch.
“We believe it’s the world’s smallest ramen bowl, with the smallest portion of noodles inside, though they are not edible,” Nakao said.
The hardest part was to keep the noodles from rising upright from the bowl “like alfalfa sprouts,” he said. “The achievement was mostly for fun.”
The microscopic bowl was first created in December 2006, but revealed only Thursday after it was entered for a microphotography competition last week.
just to catch everyone up, hmc went to nyc/new haven for the week for her sister’s law school graduation. originally we were all going to try and go, but snapper and i ended up staying home instead. i was going to try and figure out how to work in a visit to my parents during my time off but they decided to come up here instead. it was great: they got to spend a whole week with snapper, and then every night after snapper went to bed and we ate dinner, we’d watch basketball, either lakers/spurs or pistons/celtics depending on what day it was. we took some walks, went to the park, and tamed the agave overrunning the front garden. plus, the endless home-cooked food!
out of this, i realized two things:
1. my dad is mostly fine.
he seems to be more or less recovered from the stroke or whatever it was. he’s sometimes still a little forgetful or says the wrong word, but you can’t tell whether it’s still side effects from the s.o.w.i.w. or just because he’s getting old. what i do notice is that he is old all of a sudden; it’s like he was able to hide it before and not show it so much, but the s.o.w.i.w. took so much out of him that he aged overnight.
again, i don’t know if anyone else really notices. but it’s strange to see him going a little slower now, and looking a little more grey.
2. my parents will probably never understand tivo.
the whole concept of not having to be wedded to when a certain show comes on and instead just watching whatever you want whenever you want to is just totally foreign to them. it took them several days to figure out what was going on when we’d watch the day’s basketball game, and why suddenly we were watching the beginning when it was clearly later then that, but not yet over?
in the end i didn’t even really take the time to try and explain it to them because it was clear that they didn’t need it or want it. yes, it can record stuff you want to watch, but you need to know what you want to watch beforehand so you can tell it to get it. and it can even suggest stuff, but i don’t think they even want that or even care that much. it’s not like they even really have favorite shows or anything. if it’s interesting they’ll watch it, usually golf or something during the day if they’re not out or working in the garden. at night they probably just flipp around prime time until the news comes on. it’s not really about finding good shows to watch or collecting things to see. it’s about filling the time until you go to bed.
so much for giving them that spare tivo.
it makes me realize that at a certain point, there’s some paradigm that you don’t need to and won’t buy into. whether it’s just because it’s too meta for you or you’re just too ingrained in whatever you’re used to; you just don’t see the value in it and it’s not worth the effort. i see tivo as being this for my parents. i just spent yesterday geeking out on the faviconize tab extension, and realized that this would not only make no sense to them, but i probably couldn’t explain to them why they would need tabs in the first place.
i look around and try to figure out what could be my equivalent. perhaps it’s the news comes from newspapers idea that i can’t seem to shake. i can’t really take news from blogs and rss feeds that seriously; i can only follow sports news and tech news using those. everything else is either from a real newspaper (nytimes), or some online replica (sfgate) or amalgamation (my yahoo!).
someday there will be a web 5.0 plugin where you get news piped directly into your brain, and i’ll say, “eh, what do i need that for? i get the news right here every day on my doorstep!”
snapper and i decided at the last minute to dash over to the asian art museum to catch the zhan wang exhibit that was closing yesterday. the highlight was a topographic San Francisco cityscape—one of his “urban landscape” series- using steel rocks, mirrored surfaces, silverware, and stainless steel pots and pans, which was pretty cute, although given all the hoopla i thought his exhibit might have more than just one small room. it certainly was shiny, though.
seeing as we were already out and had paid our admission, we cruised through the rest of the museum. i decided to let snapper lead the way, and would just go over and examine whatever she decided to look at. given that the entire third floor was dedicated to tracing buddhism’s spread across asia, there were a LOT of buddha statues and carvings. it was interesting to see what aspects of buddhism resonated with each culture and how that was reflected in their depictions of him. speaking of which, i’m reminded that i’m desperate to see the hewlett/albarn opera monkey journey to the west, and i see that it’s actually in the states, but i’d have to go to south carolina to go see it? uh, what?
on the other hand, it did make me think of jill bolte taylor, who gave a great TED talk and just had a piece done about her in the nytimes today:
The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.
Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.
…
She brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities. Generally, the left brain gives us context, ego, time, logic. The right brain gives us creativity and empathy. For most English-speakers, the left brain, which processes language, is dominant. Dr. Taylor’s insight is that it doesn’t have to be so.
Her message, that people can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life by sidestepping their left brain, has resonated widely.
…
But many reaching out are spiritual seekers, particularly Buddhists and meditation practitioners, who say her experience confirms their belief that there is an attainable state of joy.
…
Although her father is an Episcopal minister and she was raised in his church, she cannot be counted among the traditionally faithful. “Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain,” she said.
Still, Dr. Taylor says, “nirvana exists right now.”
“There is no doubt that it is a beautiful state and that we can get there,” she said.
how about, “‘we are the world’ remade by japanese celebrity impersonators”?
you know you’ve seen all those warnings on plastic bags and those little inflatable plastic pillows amazon insists on sending you every time you order another Hummel figurine:
Warning - This bag is not a toy. Plastic bags can be dangerous. To avoid danger of suffocation, keep this bag away from babies and children.
well, of course, you think. who would be foolish enough to let their children play with plastic bags? and then, you have children. and you realize that BABIES LOVE PLASTIC BAGS. maybe it would help if they didn’t make the exact same super interesting crinkly sound that so many baby toys already make (which i suspect, is the result of them having plastic bags hidden inside). and of course you’re not going to let them put some shopping bag over their head and roll around in the crib.
however, would it be possible that we’ve let her play with a closed ziplock bag with whatever rattly things inside it to keep her entertained while we’re just trying to just get one thing done for just a minute or two? or that we’ve let her chew on a thick ziplock because it’s probably less lethal than all the other things she’s sitting next to?
if you’re from child services, then uh, NO, we haven’t. that would be silly. i don’t know what you’re talking about.
snapper had what appears to be her first asthma attack today. we’re really not sure what triggered it, whether it was the looong crawl from the living room through the dining area to the kitchen picking up perhaps too much dust because we need to clean again, or whether it was some chasing and petting of mika and then fingers-to-mouth. although we’ve had carefully supervised mika petting before and it never resulted in any reactions before now.
but today, all the signs were there. short repeated coughing, and audible wheezing. we did the steamy bathroom trick which did seem to help, and just sat with her in there reading some books. thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice either way and at no point did she look anything but happy and jumpy (except at the end, where she was getting tired because the schvitz was delaying her nap). i had visions of dealing with this in the future; i can’t decide what’s worse: if she gets a bad attack now and she can’t understand what’s going on, or if it’s later and we have an angry and scared 3 year old who throws a tantrum because they’re being kept in a steamy bathroom for half an hour.
the doctor did warn me that she might have asthma, since he heard the faintest traces of it when we last went in for the ear infection. plus, hmc has mild asthma so it could run in the family.
she later woke up from her nap and was totally fine. and then proceeded to eat about 8 oz of baby food in various forms. holy bejeeezus!
oh great. just when i felt more or less at peace about driving my prius because of gas prices and saving the earth, this just in from the nytimes about how they might be killing us softly (greenly?):
Kent Shadwick, controller of purchasing services for the York Catholic District School Board in York, Ontario, evaluated the Toyota Prius for fleet use. Mr. Shadwick said it was tested at various speeds, and under hard braking and rapid acceleration, using a professional-quality gauss meter.
“The results that we saw were quite concerning,” he said. “We saw high levels in the vehicle for both the driver and left rear passenger, which has prompted us to explore shielding options and to consider advocating testing of different makes and models of hybrid vehicles.”
In a statement, Toyota said: “The measured electromagnetic fields inside and outside of Toyota hybrid vehicles in the 50 to 60 hertz range are at the same low levels as conventional gasoline vehicles. Therefore there are no additional health risks to drivers, passengers or bystanders.”
The statement adds that the measured E.M.F. in a Prius is 1/300th of the European guideline.
The tests conducted by hybrid owners rarely approach the level of thoroughness of those run by automakers.
…
Lawrence Gust of Ventura, Calif., a consultant with a specialty in E.M.F.’s and electrical sensitivity, was one of the electrical engineers who tested Mr. Collins’s Insight in 2001. He agreed that the readings were high but did not want to speculate on whether they were harmful. “There are big blocks of high-amp power being moved around in a hybrid, the equivalent of horsepower,” he said. “I get a lot of clients who ask if they should buy hybrid electric cars, and I say the jury is still out.”
also, this just in: recycling causes cancer. and genital warts.
dear snapper,
you’re 8 months old now! yes, i know that it was actually a few days ago, but you have certainly been keeping us busy so you’ll have to forgive me for being a little bit late with this.
if anything, this has been a month of anxiousness on our part. starting off with you crawling for real, you’re now definitely mobile and a GO-er. if there’s something you see across the room, now you just slither on over there, and BAM you’re sucking on it. or pulling it down. or pulling it down to suck on it. all of which underscores our need to start babyproofing the house. which we haven’t exactly done yet, but we have actually purchased a bunch of babyproofing gear that is sitting in a bag somewhere. that’s almost the same, right?
from there you did your short stint in baby school, which was good since you probably needed more socialization than just staying at home all day with boring old mommy and daddy, which might have been causing/exacerbating your stranger anxiety. instead, you went to baby school where they all said that you were doing really really well for your first days showing all the other babies just what crawling was about. you were practically set to take over the whole place until you started coming down with every single virus and germ that they had there.
this resulted in the past couple of weeks of varying levels of illness: from miserable days of sneezing and coughing, to days where you looked totally fine and were bouncing around and laughing your head off. then sprinkled in were days where you vomited or coughed up a meal, and nights where you had a fever or woke up repeatedly coughing.
i know that in the grand scheme, all of these things are good for you, or at least that’s how the theory goes. both going out and socializing with other babies and caretakers, as well as being exposed to germy germs and building up your immunity will make you better adjusted and stronger in the long run, but that does nothing when you’re sitting here screaming and we can’t explain to you what’s going on.
it turns out that you’ve also come down with the feared ear infection, so hopefully some antibiotics will clear that up.
meanwhile, we’re adjusting back to you sleeping more intermittently, which means that we are also sleeping less. which means that we all can’t wait until you get much much better and we can all get more sleep. amen.