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19.10.2006

A curious service for tourists introduced in Singapore. Walking, you saw an interesting architectural monument and want to know the details - what kind of building it is, when and by whom it was built, and so on.

You take a picture of a building with your cell phone camera and send it to the central computer of the local cell phone provider. The computer determines your location by the number of the base station with which the phone has contacted, and searches its collection of photographs (more than 2800 buildings, statues, natural and other attractions) for the object you are standing near. After that, the phone receives all the information about the object you are interested in.

In the future, the collection of images will be expanded, and the phone will even be able to tell a tourist who gets lost in a large store, office center or museum how to get out of a huge building. It will be enough to photograph some noticeable detail of the interior where you are.

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Latest news of science and technology, new electronics:

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Random news from the Archive

Converting a conductor to a dielectric 07.04.2020

A way has been found to control the electrical and magnetic properties of an extremely fragile quantum material for supersensitive sensors by stretching and compressing at the atomic level.

Complex oxides are curious compounds. Some of them, depending on the phase, can exhibit magnetic and electrical properties in different ways. Physicists have long observed the "unconventional" behavior of electrons in such materials and dream of controlling their conductive properties.

Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have managed to fabricate an ultrathin membrane from an oxide codenamed LCMO, whose elastic deformation affects its conductive properties.

LCMO is an oxide of manganese and lanthanum-calcium La0.7Ca0.3MnO3. It is called "quantum" material. As soon as they mocked him in the laboratories before, but until now, scientists have not dared to stretch into a nanoscale membrane. Their conductive properties strongly depend on the distance between the atoms of such oxides. Unfortunately, destroying such material is easier than smashing a ceramic mug on a marble floor.

To fool Mother Nature, a thin LCMO membrane was artificially grown on a surface that had been pre-coated with a plastic film, sort of like a plastic bag in a grocery store. Using microscopic manipulators, the membrane together with the film was stretched and fixed on another solid surface with glue. With X-rays, scientists enlightened the resulting metamaterial and measured the distance between atoms, making sure that it really increased. Then we evaluated how the electrical resistance and magnetic properties changed after deformation.

Mechanical manipulation of the electromagnetic properties of materials will be useful to developers of new generation electronics. Such flexible materials will find their application in power transmission devices and computing circuits, as well as in the creation of ultra-sensitive sensors and detectors that measure minute changes in currents and fields.

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