Month: January 2017

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Enlarge / A 3D printed metamaterial. (credit: Lawrence Livermore National Lab)

It has been a long time since I've been grabbed by a metamaterial. For those of you who don't know or remember what metamaterials are, they are the things that make invisibility cloaks work. Unfortunately, I got tired of writing about incrementally better invisibility cloaks and stopped paying attention.

So it was with a glorious sense of anticipation that I attended the opening talk at the Physics@FOM 2017 conference. Martin Wegener, who delivered it, hails from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Wegener has quite a reputation in the field of optics, but for this talk, he took a kind of scattered approach to show how the ideas behind metamaterials apply everywhere and can be used to design entirely new functions into simple materials—materials that may find their way into almost every aspect of your life one day.

What are metamaterials?

A metamaterial is both a very simple and a very complex object to describe. The simple level is very simple: mix two materials to obtain a new material with distinct properties. But, to borrow Wegener's analogy, imagine that we take two materials, one very dense, like lead, and the other less dense, like air. I can mix the two by drilling holes in a bar of lead. At the end of the process, the density of my new material lies somewhere between the density of air and lead. But, with a metamaterial, this combination can result in strange properties—the equivalent of a density that is larger than that of lead or less than that of air.

Enlarge / Lee Jae-Yong, vice chairman of Samsung, leaves after attending a court hearing at the Seoul Central District Court. (credit: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

On Thursday, South Korean judges denied a request by prosecutors to arrest Lee Jae-yong, the vice chairman of Samsung Group and acting head of the company, over accusations of bribery, embezzlement, and perjury. Lee was accused of giving multimillion-dollar bribes to Choi Soon-sil, a friend of the South Korean President, in exchange for the approval of a 2015 merger between two Samsung Group affiliates, Cheil Industries and Samsung C&T.

The judge said in a statement that the arrest of Lee was not necessary, saying "it is difficult to acknowledge the necessity and substantiality of an arrest at the current stage." Lee isn't out of the woods though, and could still face another arrest warrant as the prosecutors gather more evidence. In a statement to Reuters, a Samsung spokesperson said "We appreciate the fact that the merits of this case can now be determined without the need for detention."

The accusations against Lee are part of an ongoing corruption scandal that has reached the highest levels of the South Korean government. South Korean President Park Geun-hye has already been impeached, and she is expected to become South Korea's first elected leader to be forced from office early. Two other Samsung executives are also under investigation.

(credit: Netflix)

Netflix has long been an outspoken supporter of net neutrality rules, but the streaming video provider says it is now so popular with consumers that it wouldn't be harmed if the rules were repealed.

The potential of reversing net neutrality rules increased the moment Donald Trump became president-elect, as Republicans in the Federal Communications Commission and Congress want to get rid of the rules. But in a letter to shareholders yesterday, Netflix reassured investors that this won't affect the company's financial performance or service quality.

"Weakening of US net neutrality laws, should that occur, is unlikely to materially affect our domestic margins or service quality because we are now popular enough with consumers to keep our relationships with ISPs stable," Netflix wrote.