Daily Archives: December 6, 2004

Sunflower and Son

It’s a good-news, bad-news day for the salvage industry. This morning we learned that “Electronics recycling is a growing business.”

But this afternoon we learned that “Scientists Make Phone That Turns Into a Sunflower.”

Materials company Pvaxx Research & Development, at the request of U.S.-based mobile phone maker Motorola has come up with a polymer that looks like any other plastic, but which degrades into soil when discarded.

phone flower

Researchers at the University of Warwick in Britain then helped to develop a phone cover that contains a sunflower seed, which will feed on the nitrates that are formed when the polyvinylalcohol polymer cover turns to waste.

“It’s a totally biodegradable and non-toxic plastic,” said Pvaxx spokesman Peter Morris…

The company’s new plastic, which was created over the past five years but was in development for longer, can be rigid or flexible in shape.

Some 650 million mobile phones will be sold this year, and most of them will be thrown away within two years, burdening the environment with plastics, heavy metals and chemicals. A biodegradable cover can offer some relief for nature, Warwick University said.

Yes, but it’s no help for a salvage empire.

Towards a Quantum Repeater

Here’s an important development:

…(S)cientists from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have proposed a scheme to transfer the quantum state of a pulse of light onto a set of atoms and have demonstrated it experimentally.

The current experiment paves the way for new experiments in which the information contained in light can be mapped onto atomic clusters and then back into the light again. In this way, one could not only store the state of light in an atomic clusters, but also retrieve it. This process will be necessary if we want to build quantum repeaters, that is, devices which will allow the extension of quantum communication far beyond the distances (of the order of 100 km) which are achieved nowadays.

Hmmm…long-range quantum communication. That should come in quite handy. As Seth Shostak pointed out a while back, quantum communication provides the means of sending interstellar signals with caller ID turned off. Just in case, you know, some of the folks turn out to be more like their movie counterparts than we would hope they would be.

(via Kurzweil AI)