Tipping tiny scales. (Technology).Because even minuscule amounts of chemical or biological warfare biological warfare, employment in war of microorganisms to injure or destroy people, animals, or crops; also called germ or bacteriological warfare. Limited attempts have been made in the past to spread disease among the enemy; e.g. agents can be harmful, sensor developers are striving to build devices to detect those weapons at the molecular level. It's difficult to make such detectors adequately sensitive to noxious agents while operating in ordinary, often-contaminated air and at everyday temperatures. Now, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville. in Tennessee report that they have dramatically improved the sensitivity of certain room-temperature detectors operating in air. The detectors work by weighing contaminants by means of miniature silicon cantilevers. If particles or microorganisms adhere to adhere to verb 1. follow, keep, maintain, respect, observe, be true, fulfil, obey, heed, keep to, abide by, be loyal, mind, be constant, be faithful 2. one of the little springboards, the structure's oscillation frequency The Oscillation frequency (fundamental period): to give an example you can think of a grandfather clock. The pole swings beating the second; the time it takes to start from a point and then go back to that point is the oscillation period (as you can see, the grandfather clock has changes, revealing the mass of the material that landed. In the April 21 Applied Physics Letters Applied Physics Letters is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Institute of Physics devoted to the publication of new experimental and theoretical papers about applications of physics to science, engineering, and modern technology. , Nickolay V. Lavrik and Panos G. Datskos describe the prototype cantilever-based system with which the researchers measured a mere 5.5 femtograms (million-billionths of a gram) of an acid. That's less than a millionth the mass of a bacterium, yet still millions of times the mass of an average molecule. The unusual thinness of the new cantilever and the use of a laser to make the tiny board vibrate contribute to what amounts to a roughly 1,000-fold boost in sensitivity for similar microscopic mass-measuring systems, Datskos says.--P.W. |
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