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August 2015 • The PCB Design Magazine 45 hour." I don't believe that this was blind faith on the part of this character; after all, these peo- ple were trained and experienced in the world of space flight and they knew the risks. Instead I believe that this was the confidence of a man who was in essence saying, "No matter the fail- ure and the eventual outcome, we will prevail, despite the difficulty or personal cost." That is a good mindset for us to strive for as well. We are always going to run into failures, whether they are of our own making, or soft- ware and hardware glitches that are ganging up on us, or obstacles put in our path by others. But it is how we navigate these difficulties that show what we are truly made of. A smooth, beautiful pebble found on the beach gets its polished look by the continual pounding of the surf. The failures we experi- ence in life are the pounding surf that shapes us into better designers, and ultimately better people. And the lady who cuts my hair is still laughing at the amount of singed hair she had to repair. By the way, former NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz is now 81 and still flying the aero- batic plane he built when he retired. He discuss- es the nail-biting Apollo 13 flight in his autobi- ography, "Failure is not an Option." PCBDESIGN Tim Haag is customer support and training manager for intercept Technology. tim's takeaways FAILURE MAy NOT BE AN OPTION, BUT SOMETIMES IT'S A REALITy continues Researchers at the MiPT laboratory of na- nooptics and Plasmonics, Dmitry Fedyanin and Yury stebunov, have developed an ultracompact highly sensitive nanomechanical sensor for ana- lyzing the chemical composition of substances and detecting biological objects, such as viral disease markers. The sensitivity of the new device is best char- acterized by one key feature: according to its developers, the sensor can track changes of just a few kilodaltons in the mass of a cantilever in real time. one Dalton is roughly the mass of a proton or neutron, and several thousand Daltons are the mass of individual proteins and DnA molecules. A cantilever, or beam, is a long and thin strip of micro- scopic dimensions (5 micrometers long, 1 micrometer wide and 90 nanometers thick), connected tightly to a chip. To get an idea how it works, imagine you press one end of a ruler tightly to the edge of a table and allow the other end to hang freely in the air. if you touch the latter with your other hand and then take your hand away, the ruler will start making mechanical oscillations at a cer- tain frequency. The difference between the oscillations of the ruler and the cantilever is only the frequency, which depends on the materials and geometry: while the ruler oscillates at several tens of hertz, the frequency of the cantilever's oscillations is measured in megahertz. one chip, several millimeters in size, will be able to accommo- date several thou- sand sensors, con- figured to detect different particles or molecules. The price, thanks to the simplic- ity of the design, will most likely depend on the number of sensors, being much more affordable than its competitors. Physicists Develop Ultrasensitive Nanomechanical Biosensor