e pur si muove

On April 12, 2005, Iomega was awarded US Patent No. 6,879,556 for a technology that allows the creation of DVD discs that can hold a whopping 850 GB of data. As seen on ScienceBlog. This so-called articulated-optical DVD (AO-DVD) technology recently won an industry award.

AO-DVD is a big deal because it is an example of data density that is sub-wavelength, i.e. it exceeds that normally allowed by the diffraction limit. Iomega’s patent circumvents this by using nanostructured surfaces that have angle-dependent reflectivities. The ability to encode data at different orientiations allows the multi-level dense encoding format that is described in the patent. By reducing the size of the data element to 1/3 of current DVDs, and incorporating 885 different orientations, the data density that could be achieved is about 50 times the highest density industry-standard DVD format (note: the scaling is not proportional).

A commercially important point to note is that the I/O system is backward compatible with current CDs and DVDs, while not costing much more than current drives. Also noteworthy is the suggested use of sol-gel glasses over traditional polycarbonate; the former has been the basis of extensive studies of nanostructuring and nanolithography.

Full of corny jokes (itself a bad pun, muahaha), Grocery Store Wars is perhaps a timely spoof of the Star Wars universe.

The American Chemical Society recently put up a press release about scientists from Penn State who discovered a cheap and effective means of deodorizing hog manure. The results were reported in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

A mixture of horseradish tissue and peroxide was found to be effective in neutralizing appoximately half of the stench produced by pig shit. Of the twelve compounds found to be positively correlated with bad smells, three of which were phenols. Horseradish contains relatively large quantities of peroxidase, which breaks down peroxides. So here’s the clever part: the intermediate oxy radicals which form during the decomposition can then be exploited to induce polymerization of the phenols. So the small phenol molecules become large polyphenols which are much less volatile, and hence less stinky. Brilliant! And indeed it seemed to work: the offensiveness of the smell dropped by about half using this treatment. One point to polymer chemistry!

As a side product, we also get a moral of the story: if you think your job is full of shit, spare a thought for the “panel of six trained odor evaluators” who had to sniff treated and untreated manure samples.