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What does the word “overselling” mean to you? At one level, it can just mean selling more of something than already exists or can be delivered. It’s what happens when airlines overbook flights by selling more seats than physically exist on their planes. They assume a small fraction of passengers won’t turn up, which is fine – until you can’t fly because everyone else has rocked up ahead of you.
Overselling can also involve selling more of something than is strictly required. Also known as “upselling”, you might have experienced it when buying a car or taking out a new broadband contract. You end up paying for extras and add-ons that were offered but you didn’t really need or even want, which explains why you’ve got all those useless WiFi boosters lying around the house.
There’s also a third meaning of “overselling”, which is to exaggerate the merits of something. You see it when a pharmaceutical company claims its amazing anti-ageing product “will make you live 20 years longer”, which it won’t. Overselling in this instance means overstating a product’s capability or functionality. It’s pretending something is more mature than it is, or claiming a technology is real when it’s still at proof-of-concept-stage.
From my experience in science and technology, this form of overselling often happens when companies and their staff want to grab attention or to keep customers or consumers on board. Sometimes firms do it because they are genuinely enthusiastic (possibly too much so) about the future possibilities of their product. I’m not saying overselling is necessarily a bad thing but just that there are reservations.
Fact and fiction
Before I go any further, let’s learn the lingo of overselling. First off, there’s “vapourware”, which refers to a product that either doesn’t exist or doesn’t fulfil the stated technical capability. Often, it’s something a firm wants to include in its product portfolio because they’re sure people would like to own it. Deep down, though, the company knows the product simply isn’t possible, at least not right now. Like a vapour, it’s there but can’t be touched.
Sometimes vapourware is just a case of waiting for product development to catch up with a genuine product plan. Sales staff know they haven’t got the product at the right specification yet, and while the firm will definitely get there one day, they’re pretending the hurdles have already been crossed. But genuine over-enthusiasm can sometimes cross over into wishful thinking – the idea that a certain functionality can be achieved with an existing technical approach.
Do you remember Google Glass? This was wearable tech, integrated into spectacle frames, that was going to become the ubiquitous portable computer. Information would be requested via voice commands, with the user receiving back the results, visible on a small heads-up display. Whilst the computing technology worked, the product didn’t succeed. Not only did it look clunky, there were also deployment constraints and concerns about privacy and safety.
Google Glass simply didn’t capture the public’s imagination or meet the needs of enough consumers.
Google Glass failed on multiple levels and was discontinued in 2015, barely a year after it hit the market. Subsequent relaunches didn’t succeed either and the product was pulled for a final time in 2023. Despite Google’s best efforts, the product simply didn’t capture the public’s imagination or meet the needs of enough consumers.
Next up in our dictionary of vapourware is “unobtanium”, which is a material or material specification that we would like to exist, but simply doesn’t. In the aerospace sector, where I work, we often dream of unobtanium. We’re always looking for materials that can repeatedly withstand the operational extremes encountered during a flight, whilst also being sustainable without cutting corners on safety.
Like other engine manufacturers, my company – GE Aerospace – is pioneering multiple approaches to help develop such materials. We know that engines become more efficient when they burn at higher temperatures and pressures. We also know that nitrous-oxide (NOx) emissions fall when an engine burns more leanly. Unfortunately, there are no metals we know of that can survive to such high temperatures.
But the quest for unobtainium can drive innovative technical solutions. At GE, for example, we’re making progress by looking instead at composite materials, such as carbon fibre and composite matrix ceramics. Stronger and more tolerant to heat and pressure than metals, they’ve already been included on the turbofan engines in planes such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
We’re also using “additive manufacturing” to build components layer by layer. This approach lets us make highly intricate components with far less waste than conventional techniques, in which a block of material is machined away. We’re also developing innovative lean-burn combustion technologies, such as novel cooling and flow strategies, to reduce NOx emissions.
While unobtainium can never be reached, it’s worth trying to get there to drive technology forward.
A further example is the single crystal turbine blade developed by Rolls-Royce in 2012. Each blade is cast to form a single crystal of super alloy, making it extremely strong and able to resist the intense heat inside a jet engine. According to the company, the single crystal turbine blades operate up to 200 degrees above the melting point of their alloy. So while unobtainium can never be reached, it’s worth trying to get there to drive technology forward.
Lead us not into temptation
Now, here’s the caveat. There’s an unwelcome side to overselling, which is that it can easily morph into downright mis-selling. This was amply demonstrated by the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, which saw the German carmaker install “defeat devices” in its diesel engines. The software changed how the engine performed when it was undergoing emissions tests to make its NOx emissions levels appear much lower than they really were.
VW was essentially falsifying its diesel engine emissions to conform with international standards. After regulators worldwide began investigating the company, VW took a huge reputational and financial hit, ultimately costing it more than $33bn in fines, penalties and financial settlements. Senior chiefs at the company got the sack and the company’s reputation took a serious hit.
It’s tempting – and sometimes even fun – to oversell. Stretching the truth draws interest from customers and consumers. But when your product no longer does “what it says on the tin”, your brand can suffer, probably more so than having something slightly less functional.
On the upside, the quest for unobtanium and, to some extent, the selling of vapourware can drive technical progress and lead to better technical solutions. I suspect this was the case for Google Glass. The underlying technology has had some success in certain niche applications such as medical surgery and manufacturing. So even though Google Glass didn’t succeed, it did create a gap for other vendors to fill.
Google Glass was essentially a portable technology with similar functionality to smartphones, such as wireless Internet access and GPS connectivity. Customers, however, proved to be happier carrying this kind of technology in their hands than wearing it on their heads. The smartphone took off; Google Glass didn’t. But the underlying tech – touchpads, cameras, displays, processors and so on – got diverted into other products.
Vapourware, in other words, can give a firm a competitive edge while it waits for its product to mature. Who knows, maybe one day even Google Glass will make a comeback?
Following inaction from the government, fishing communities and conservationists are taking it upon themselves to set up and monitor no-catch zones to combat species depletion caused by overfishing.
By adapting their quantum twisting microscope to operate at cryogenic temperatures, researchers have made the first observations of a type of phonon that occurs in twisted bilayer graphene. These “phasons” could have implications for the electron dynamics in these materials.
Graphene is a layer of carbon just one atom thick and it has range of fascinating and useful properties – as do bilayer and multilayer versions of graphene. Since 2018, condensed-matter physicists have been captivated by the intriguing electron behaviour in two layers of graphene that are rotated with respect to each other.
As the twist angle deviates from zero, the bilayer becomes a moiré superlattice. The emergence of this structure influences electronic properties of the material, which can transform from a semiconductor to a superconductor.
In 2023, researchers led by Shahal Ilani at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel developed a quantum twisting microscope to study these effects. Based on a scanning probe microscope with graphene on the substrate and folded over the tip such as to give it a flat end, the instrument allows precise control over the relative orientation between two graphene surfaces – in particular, the twist angle.
Strange metals
Now Ilani and an international team have operated the microscope at cryogenic temperatures for the first time. So far, their measurements support the current understanding of how electrons couple to phasons, which are specific modes of phonons (quantized lattice vibrations). Characterizing this coupling could help us understand “strange metals”, whose electrical resistance increases at lower temperatures – which is the opposite of normal metals.
There are different types of phonons, such as acoustic phonons where atoms within the same unit cell oscillate in phase with each other, and optical phonons where they oscillate out of phase. Phasons are phonons involving lattice oscillations in one layer that are out of phase or antisymmetric with oscillations in the layer above.
“This is the one that turns out to be very important for how the electrons behave between the layers because even a small relative displacement between the two layers affects how the electrons go from one layer to the other,” explains Weizmann’s John Birkbeck as he describes the role of phasons in twisted bilayer graphene materials.
For most phonons the coupling to electrons is weaker the lower the energy of the phonon mode. However for twisted bilayer materials, theory suggests that phason coupling to electrons increases as the twist between the two layers approaches alignment due to the antisymmetric motion of the two layers and the heightened sensitivity of interlayer tunnelling to small relative displacements.
Unique perspective
“There are not that many tools to see phonons, particularly in moiré systems” adds Birkbeck. This is where the quantum twisting microscope offers a unique perspective. Thanks to the atomically flat end of the tip, electrons can tunnel between the layer on the substrate and the layer on the tip whenever there is a matching state in terms of not just energy but also momentum too.
Where there is a momentum mismatch, tunnelling between tip and substrate is still possible by balancing the mismatch with the emission or absorption of a phonon. By operating at cryogenic temperatures, the researchers were able to get a measure of these momentum transactions and probe the electron phonon coupling too.
“What was interesting from this work is not only that we could image the phonon dispersion, but also we can quantify it,” says Birkbeck stressing the absolute nature of these quantified electron phonon coupling-strength measurements.
The measurements are the first observations of phasons in twisted bilayer graphene and reveal a strong increase in coupling as the layers approach alignment, as predicted by theory. However, the researchers were not able to study angles smaller than 6°. Below this angle the tunnelling resistance is so low that the contact resistance starts to warp readings, among other limiting factors.
Navigating without eyes
A certain amount of technical adjustment was needed to operate the tool at cryogenic temperatures, not least to “to navigate without eyes” because the team was not able to incorporate their usual optics with the cryogenic set up. The researchers hope that with further technical adjustments they will be able to use the quantum twisting microscope in cryogenic conditions at the magic angle of 1.1°, where superconductivity occurs.
Pablo Jarillo Herrero, who led the team at MIT that first reported superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene in 2018 but was not involved in this research describes it as an “interesting study” adding, “I’m looking forward to seeing more interesting results from low temperature QTM research!”
Hector Ochoa De Eguileor Romillo at Columbia University in the US, who proposed a role for phason–electron interactions in these materials in 2019, but was also not involved in this research describes it as “a beautiful experiment”. He adds, “I think it is fair to say that this is the most exciting experimental technique of the last 15 years or so in condensed matter physics; new interesting data are surely coming.”
A new species of cable bacteria, which function like electrical wiring, was recently discovered in the US. Its unique morphology and genetic structure may be useful for the development of bioelectronics.
index.feed.received.before_yesterday6.5 📰 Sciences English
When pigeons outnumber pigeonholes, some birds must double up. This obvious statement, and its inverse, have deep connections to many areas of math and computer science.
In countries like Germany, balcony-mounted solar panels are all the rage. But from breaker-masking to voltage mismatches, America’s grid isn’t ready for it—yet.
Roses have been cultivated for thousands of years, admired for their beauty. Despite their use in fragrance, skincare and even in teas and jams, there are some things, however, that we still don’t know about these symbolic flowers.
And that includes the physical mechanism behind the shape of rose petals.
The curves and curls of leaves and flower petals arise due to the interplay between their natural growth and geometry.
Uneven growth in a flat sheet, in which the edges grow quicker than the interior, gives rise to strain and in plant leaves and petals, for example, this can result in a variety of shapes such as saddle and ripple shapes.
Yet when it comes to rose petals, the sharply pointed cusps – a point where two curves meet — that form at the edge of the petals set it apart from soft, wavy patterns seen in many other plants.
While young rose petals have smooth edges, as the rose matures the petals change to a polygonal shape with multiples cusps.
They found that the pointed cusps that form at the edge of rose petals are due to a type of geometric frustration called a Mainardi-Codazzi-Peterson (MCP) incompatibility.
This type of mechanism results in stress concentrating in a specific area, which go on to form cusps to avoid tearing or forming unnatural folding.
When the researchers supressed the formation of cusps, they found that the discs reverted to being smooth and concave.
The researchers say that the findings could be used for applications in soft robotics and even the deployment of spacecraft components.
And it also goes some way to deepen our appreciation of nature’s ability to juggle growth and geometry.
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