From Darkest Troy: Record material from RPI uses nanotubes

RPI researchers demonstrated use of nanotube arrays to dramatically change an object’s optical reflection. As a result, they claim the darkest material to date. They do not just boast – they have actually submitted their claim to the Guiness Book of World Records.

An integrating sphere was used to measure the material’s reflectivity.

Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer and a member of the university’s Future Chips Constellation, and colleagues report on this event in the insert below:

created a coating of low-density, vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays that are engineered to have an extremely low index of refraction … [to create] a material with a total reflective index of 0.045 percent — more than three times darker than the previous record, which used a film deposition of nickel-phosphorous alloy.

That’s dark matter. It’s also one of many recent signs that recent years’ nano technology efforts may be poised to alter the evolution of many, many fields of endeavor. University information office communication on this breakthrough is available from RPI. Nano news can be found at http://pubs.acs.org/journals/nalefd/index.html

.NET Framework goes multicore

In November, Microsoft added some parallel extensions to .NET via a CTP. Jack Vaughan recently spoke with individuals interested in what mutlicore means to application developers.

Much of the multicore software activity to date could be described as language-centric. While Microsoft addresses .NET language needs with the .NET Parallel Extensions, there are alternatives for other languages. C, C++ and Fortran developers’ needs to adjust to multicores may be handled by the OpenMP shared memory API, or, in the case of C++ developers, multicore needs may be met by Intel’s Threading Building Blocks Library. So far, it may be the case that Java developers find the bulk of their requirements are met with the threading support already part of the language.

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Integrated tester added to semantic development workbench

TopQuadrant’s Integrated Testing Server allows semantic Web applications to be tested without having to create a separate testing platform.

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