Category Archives: ion

Photograph of Single Atom Captured with a Plain Old Camera

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The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council awarded a remarkable photograph its overall prize in science photography. The subject of the photograph? A single atom visible to the naked eye. Well, perhaps not exactly the naked eye, but without a microscope. In the picture above (click here to enlarge), the atom is that pale blue dot between the two needle-like structures.

You probably learned in school that you couldn’t see a single atom, and that’s usually true. But [David Nadlinger] from the University of Oxford, trapped a positively charged strontium atom in an ion trap and then irradiated it with …read more

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Bicycle Racing In Space Could be a Thing

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It’s 2100 AD, and hackers and normals live together in mile-long habitats in the Earth-Moon system. The habitat is spun up so that the gravity inside is that of Earth, and for exercise, the normals cycle around on bike paths. But the hackers do their cycling outside, in the vacuum of space.

How so? With ion thrusters, rocketing out xenon gas as the propellant. And the source of power? Ultimately that’s the hackers legs, pedaling away at a drive system that turns two large Wimshurst machines.

Those Wimshurst machines then produce the high voltage needed for the thruster’s ionization as …read more

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Researchers Create See Through Batteries to See Why They Explode

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Late last week, Samsung released an expanded recall notice for its infamous exploding Galaxy Note 7 phones, asking users to “power down immediately” and send in their phones for a refund. Within a month of the Note 7 release, there had been upwards… Continue reading Researchers Create See Through Batteries to See Why They Explode→

Expanding Horizons With The Ion Propelled Lifter

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Like many people, going through university followed an intense career building period was a dry spell in terms of making things. Of course things settled down and I finally broke that dry spell to work on what I called “non-conventional propulsion”.

I wanted to stay away from the term “anti-gravity” because I was enough of a science nut to know that such a thing was dubious. But I also suspected that there might be science principles yet to be discovered. I was willing to give it a try anyway, and did for a few years. It was also my introduction …read more

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