signal to background

151-year-old recording sings for the first time; labs in Jeopardy!; fueling up on grass; cosmic rays point to better solar panels; electronic circuits with altitude; letters

Photo-illustration: Sandbox Studio

Physicist revives oldest recording of the human voice

In 1860, Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville set out to capture the beauty of a French folk song, "Au Clair de la Lune," using pig hair and soot.

He had a singer croon into a speaking horn, sending sound waves into a diaphragm. This vibrated a stylus—a hair plucked from a pig’s ear—that scratched wavy lines into soot-covered paper.

Scott never intended to play back his recording. His apparatus, called a phonoautograph, was meant to preserve only a paper record of sound vibrations; Thomas Edison would not invent the phonograph until 17 years later.

So it was all the more remarkable when particle physicist Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory pulled the sound from Scott’s soot-covered paper and brought the snippet of song back to life in March 2008. It was the earliest recording of the human voice ever successfully played back.

"It has been a really great way to use physics and technology to impact other areas of society," Haber says of his technique, which sprang from computer algorithms and imaging methods used to design particle detectors for CERN, the European particle physics center.

Giving voice to Scott’s recordings is the latest of Haber’s contributions to the preservation of historic sound. Currently, he’s digitizing and recording turn-of-the-century stories and songs in Native American dialects, some now extinct, that had been captured on 3000 cylinders stored at the University of California, Berkeley.

The challenge is to restore those sounds without damaging their delicate cylinders of wax, foil, shellac, lacquer, or plastic. To do that, Haber takes a 3-D, high-resolution photo of the cylinder’s grooves, which reflect various wavelengths, or colors, of light. Each color comes into focus at a different depth, allowing Haber to plot the topography of the area inside the grooves within a fraction of a hair’s width.

A computer translates the images into sound pitches and durations. It also filters out damage to reduce static, remove skips, and fill in portions that are chipped, moldy, or worn, creating the equivalent of a retouched photograph.

Haber says that when the US Library of Congress finishes constructing a new center to store the world’s sound recordings, he will move his imaging machine there.

You can hear Scott’s recording, and others restored by Huber and his colleagues, at firstsounds.org.
Tona Kunz

I’ll take particle accelerators for $200, Alex

Knowing accelerator trivia may someday earn you cash and a shot at fame.

During the past few months, the TV quiz show Jeopardy! visited Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, NY, and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California to shoot footage for rounds of questions on particle accelerators.

In a twist on traditional quiz shows, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek gives contestants answers for which they must provide the questions. For example, under the category "Accelerators: Science at Nearly the Speed of Light from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center," one clue stated: "In the two-mile-long linear accelerator, an electromagnetic wave pushes these particles along, kind of like surfers." The correct question: "What are electrons?"

The show’s roving "Clue Crew" filmed video clues eight to 12 seconds long at various locations in the labs.

At Brookhaven, this involved standing in the accelerator tunnel for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, to illustrate how magnets help push particles to nearly the speed of light. The segment has not been scheduled to air yet, but a local TV news report on the filming can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/55zvb9.

At SLAC, the camera crew filmed in the main control room as staffers worked in the background, seemingly undisturbed. But filming in the lab’s klystron gallery was not so easy; the buzz from the microwave-generating klystrons that provide power to the accelerator’s beam line nearly drowned out the speaker’s voice. The episode aired in September; you can find clips at http://tinyurl.com/58r4q9.

What is the sound of discovery, Alex?
Calla Cofield

Photo: Fermilab

Fermilab grasses may thwart damaging greenhouse gases

Michael Miller watches grass grow for a living—super grass, of sorts, grass that could fuel a car and reduce carbon dioxide emissions at the same time.

He and other researchers from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago have turned 13 acres at Fermilab into an outdoor laboratory. Their goal is to find the best ways to use native prairie grasses to attack the global warming and fuel crises.

"I believe nature has given us a lot of variety to work with," says Miller, a senior Argonne scientist. "It is just identifying those traits that fit best with what man needs."

Miller and his colleagues are studying seven combinations of prairie grasses, including plots of switchgrass and big bluestem planted in June as well as native grasses that thrive on Fermilab’s restored prairie.

He’s trying to determine which factors produce the most durable, bountiful grasses for use as fuel. He’ll also determine their carbon footprints, balancing the amount of carbon needed to grow the plants and turn them into fuel against the amount of carbon they sequester, or store, in the soil as their roots die and decompose.

By the end of 2009, Miller and his team hope to have a clearer picture of which combinations of grasses would create the most efficient, environmentally friendly feedstock for fuels.

Switchgrass already has known advantages over corn as a feedstock for biofuels. It grows four to eight feet tall in dense patches across the Midwest, flourishing in areas not normally tilled for crops. The grass needs replanting only once every decade, can grow with little or no fertilizer, tolerates drought, and sequesters the same amount of CO₂ that would be released by burning it for fuel. That makes the production of fuel from switchgrass carbon neutral or even carbon negative.

Even if native grasses are not harvested for fuel, they still provide a benefit by trapping greenhouse gases. Miller says 900 acres of Fermilab prairie store as much carbon dioxide in soil as 250 compact cars emit in a year.

"What we are trying to do is take advantage of our prairie system," Miller adds. "Fermilab’s long history of maintaining and restoring the prairie gives us a lot of knowledge about the grasses."
Tona Kunz

Pierre Auger tests solar technology

As the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina collects cosmic rays for science, its thousands of solar panels are collecting data that could make solar power cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable.

Photo courtesy of Acciona Energia

Pierre Auger is "a fantastic experimental test," which is the best in the world right now for solar panels and their batteries, says Angeles Lopez Aguera, dean of physics faculty at Santiago de Compostela University in Spain. "Industry never, never will be able to have this large an amount of experimental data."

Spain is a global leader in the production and design of solar panels and home to the 11 biggest photovoltaic power plants in the world (see image above). Much bigger plants are on the drawing board worldwide, including a 550 MW installation proposed in California that would generate enough electricity for roughly 550,000 homes.

Battery outages in these large solar parks can take two weeks to reach and repair. Reliability is also an issue for solar panels in remote areas, from isolated villages in developing countries to the Colorado site where a second Pierre Auger Observatory is planned.

So Santiago University is working with two Spanish corporations— including ISOFOTON, the second-largest producer of solar panels in Europe—to monitor the performance of the 3320 solar panels that power Pierre Auger’s detectors, which are scattered across 1200 square miles of semi-arid pampas. Spain provided most of the solar panels and Brazil most of the batteries as their contributions to the international observatory.

The companies hope the 70 million bits of data the panels provide each year will help them produce solar panels and batteries that last longer, withstand long periods of extreme temperatures, better respond to peak power needs, and optimize the amount of sunlight converted to electricity.

Researchers recently created a prototype "intelligent" regulator for the solar panels that will be tested in Spain and at the Colorado observatory. The regulator will sound an alarm when a battery is about to go out so it can be replaced, avoiding power outages and optimizing the life spans of batteries.

"This is important for Pierre Auger, that is clear," Aguera says, "but it is also important for the big solar parks."
Tona Kunz

Photo courtesy of IBM

Labs and industry perfect 3-D chip

High-tech businesses must constantly innovate or become obsolete. But when it comes to investing in new machinery and adopting new techniques, industry can be timid, says Bob Patti, chief technical officer of Tezzaron Semiconductor.

That’s where research laboratories come in. Freed from market constraints, they can afford to break new ground and demonstrate that an innovative technology works. Companies can then adapt the technology, with minimal risk, for products with mass appeal.

In this case, Fermilab has recruited more than a dozen other research labs to work with Tezzaron to develop three-dimensional computer chips.

Fermilab has been working on 3-D chips since 2006 as a way to make detectors that track particles coming out of high-energy collisions more precise and compact. Now it hopes to use industry’s economy of scale to accelerate the production of the new chips.

Tezzaron benefits by sharing the cost of developing new prototypes and by demonstrating to potential customers that the 3-D chip is cost-effective.

Once companies see others out there using a new technology, "they feel more comfortable placing bets on it," Patti says.

For almost a decade, Tezzaron has been developing 3-D chip technology to give devices such as cameras and cell phones more memory and to improve the speed and energy efficiency of information processors.

Traditional integrated circuits are flat and connect at the edges like tiles. "They were like one-story buildings built on different lots," Patti says.

In the late 90s, companies began stacking the flat chips and connecting them at the edges like buildings with multiple stories—but with no way for electrical currents to move up and down, aside from outdoor fire escapes.

In today’s 3-D circuits, wires run directly from one layer to the next, a shorter distance that uses 40 percent less energy.

"We’re installing elevators," says Gretchen Patti, a member of Tezzaron’s technical staff.

Working with research laboratories pushes the company to improve its product, she says.

"If you’re working with a client who is not afraid to push the envelope," she says, "you’re more likely to come up with something better than expected."
Kathryn Grim

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