I.B.M. Reportedly Will Buy Rival Sun for $7 Billion

I.B.M. appears on the verge of acquiring Sun Microsystems, a longtime rival in the computer server and software markets, for nearly $7 billion.
The two companies have been negotiating for weeks, ironing out terms of an agreement that would turn I.B.M. into the dominant supplier of high-profit Unix servers and related technology.
I.B.M. is offering $9.50 a share, down from a bid of $10 a share, said people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. The new agreement would restrict I.B.M.’s ability to walk away from the deal, these people said.
Even at $9.50 a share, the deal would value Sun, based in Santa Clara, Calif., at close to $7 billion. It is close to a 100 percent premium based on Sun’s value before rumors of an acquisition spread last month.
Representatives of I.B.M. and Sun declined to comment. People familiar with the negotiations say a final agreement could be announced Friday, although it is more likely to be made public next week. I.B.M.’s board has already approved the deal, they said.
I.B.M., based in Armonk, N.Y., has spent weeks poring over Sun’s patents and licensing agreements. Some 100 lawyers have been working in a hotel in Silicon Valley on intellectual property matters.
Although in a slump of nearly a decade, Sun is one of the largest sellers of server computers and is known for systems based on its Sparc chips. It has a vast software portfolio, including the Solaris operating system , the open-source MySQL database and the Java programming language.
“Sun has obviously been a lost child for many years, but they have some great assets,” said Rebecca Runkle, director of technology research at Research Edge, an equities analysis business. She said that Sun and I.B.M.’s cultures would mesh in their commitment to large research and development projects.
Sun’s software assets would fit into I.B.M.’s long-term strategy of chasing higher-profit software and services sales. It could also give I.B.M. more strength in competing against Oracle, which has sold its database software on top of Sun systems for years.
I.B.M.’s acquisition of Sun would disrupt that long partnership with Oracle. I.B.M. could also undercut Oracle by more actively promoting the free MySQL software, which has become the most popular database software with Internet companies.
Hardware inherited from Sun could present antitrust concerns. I.B.M. faces an antitrust complaint from T3 Technologies over its dominance in the mainframe market. By buying Sun, I.B.M. would gain close to total control over robotic tape storage devices used to file data on mainframes.
Sun has a sales and technology partnership with Fujitsu for the sale of Unix servers. If I.B.M. buys Sun, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard will be the combined company’s only major competitors in the Unix market, a possible concern for regulators here and in Europe. Sun faces a patent infringement lawsuit from the storage maker NetApp and has countersued. NetApp has a sales pact with I.B.M.
Silicon Valley executives, including Paul S. Otellini, chief of Intel, have said that Sun has spent months seeking a suitor.
Shares of I.B.M. rose more than 3 percent on Thursday, to $100.82, and Sun’s shares rose more than 2 percent, to $8.21.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com

TR10: Nanopiezoelectronics - Zhong Lin Wang thinks piezoelectric nanowires could power implantable medical devices and serve as tiny sensors.

Nanoscale sensors are exquisitely sensitive, very frugal with power, and, of course, tiny. They could be useful in detecting molecular signs of disease in the blood, minute amounts of poisonous gases in the air, and trace contaminants in food. But the batteries and integrated circuits necessary to drive these devices make them difficult to fully miniaturize. The goal of Zhong Lin Wang, a materials scientist at Georgia Tech, is to bring power to the nano world with minuscule generators that take advantage of piezoelectricity. If he succeeds, biological and chemical nano sensors will be able to power themselves.
The piezoelectric effect--in which crystalline materials under mechanical stress produce an electrical potential--has been known of for more than a century. But in 2005, Wang was the first to demonstrate it at the nanoscale by bending zinc oxide nanowires with the probe of an atomic-force microscope. As the wires flex and return to their original shape, the potential produced by the zinc and oxide ions drives an electrical current. The current that Wang coaxed from the wires in his initial experiments was tiny; the electrical potential peaked at a few millivolts. But Wang rightly suspected that with enough engineering, he could design a practical nanoscale power source by harnessing the tiny vibrations all around us--sound waves, the wind, even the turbulence of blood flow over an implanted device. These subtle movements would bend nanowires, generating electricity.

Piezoelectric wires: The mechanical stress produced by bending a zinc oxide nanowire creates an electrical potential across the wire. This drives current through a circuit. The conversion of mechanical energy to electrical energy is called the piezoelectric effect. It's harnessed in the devices on the next page, which might be made from the nanowires.
Credit: Bryan Christie Design

Nanogenerator: (Left, clockwise) Arrays of zinc oxide nanowires packaged in a thin polymer film generate electrical current when flexed. The nanogenerator could be embedded in clothing and used to convert the rustling of fabric into current to power portable devices such as cell phones. Hearing aid: An array of vertically aligned piezoelectric nanowires could serve as a hearing aid. When sound waves hit them, the wires bend, generating an electrical potential. The electrical signal can then be amplified and sent directly to the auditory nerve. Signature verification: A grid of piezoelectric wires underneath a signature pad would record the pattern of pressure applied by each person signing. Combined with a database of such patterns, the system could authenticate signatures. Bone-loss monitor: A mesh of piezoelectric nanowires could monitor mechanical strain indicative of bone loss. Dangerous stress to the bone would generate an electrical current in the wires; this would cause the device to beam an alert signal outside the body. The sensor could be implanted in a minimally invasive procedure. Credit: Byran Christie Design

Last November, Wang embedded zinc oxide nanowires in a layer of polymer; the resulting sheets put out 50 millivolts when flexed. This is a major step forward in powering tiny sensors.
And Wang hopes that these generators could eventually be woven into fabric; the rustling of a shirt could generate enough power to charge the batteries of devices like iPods. For now, the nanogenerator's output is too low for that. "We need to get to 200 millivolts or more," says Wang. He'll get there by layering the wires, he says, though it might take five to ten more years of careful engineering.
Meanwhile, Wang has demonstrated the first components for a new class of nanoscale sensors. Nanopiezotronics, as he calls this technology, exploit the fact that zinc oxide nanowires not only exhibit the piezoelectric effect but are semiconductors. The first property lets them act as mechanical sensors, because they produce an electrical response to mechanical stress. The second means that they can be used to make the basic components of integrated circuits, including transistors and diodes. Unlike traditional electronic components, nanopiezotronics don't need an external source of electricity. They generate their own when exposed to the same kinds of mechanical stresses that power nanogenerators.
Freeing nanoelectronics from outside power sources opens up all sorts of possibilities. A nano­piezotronic hearing aid integrated with a nanogenerator might use an array of nanowires, each tuned to vibrate at a different frequency over a large range of sounds. The nanowires would convert sounds into electrical signals and process them so that they could be conveyed directly to neurons in the brain. Not only would such implanted neural prosthetics be more compact and more sensitive than traditional hearing aids, but they wouldn't need to be removed so their batteries could be changed. Nanopiezotronic sensors might also be used to detect mechanical stresses in an airplane engine; just a few nanowire components could monitor stress, process the information, and then communicate the relevant data to an airplane's computer. Whether in the body or in the air, nano devices would at last be set loose in the world all around us.

Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=22118&ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&pg=1

TR10: Traveling-Wave Reactor - A new reactor design could make nuclear power safer and cheaper, says John Gilleland.

Wave of the future: Unlike today’s reactors, a traveling-wave reactor requires very little enriched uranium, reducing the risk of weapons proliferation. (Click here for a larger diagram, also on page 3). The reactor uses depleted-uranium fuel packed inside hundreds of hexagonal pillars (shown in black and green). In a “wave” that moves through the core at only a centimeter per year, this fuel is transformed (or bred) into plutonium, which then undergoes fission. The reaction requires a small amount of enriched uranium (not shown) to get started and could run for decades without refueling. The reactor uses liquid sodium as a coolant; core temperatures are extremely hot--about 550 ºC, versus the 330 ºC typical of conventional reactors. Credit: Bryan Christie Design

Enriching the uranium for reactor fuel and opening the reactor periodically to refuel it are among the most cumbersome and expensive steps in running a nuclear plant. And after spent fuel is removed from the reactor, reprocessing it to recover usable materials has the same drawbacks, plus two more: the risks of nuclear-weapons proliferation and environmental pollution.
These problems are mostly accepted as a given, but not by a group of researcher­s at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and investment company in Bellevue, WA. The scientists there have come up with a preliminary design for a reactor that requires only a small amount of enriched fuel--that is, the kind whose atoms can easily be split in a chain reaction. It's called a traveling­-wave reactor. And while government researchers intermittently bring out new reactor designs, the traveling-wave reactor is noteworthy for having come from something that barely exists in the nuclear industry: a privately funded research company.
As it runs, the core in a traveling-­wave reactor gradually converts nonfissile material into the fuel it needs. Nuclear reactors based on such designs "theoretically could run for a couple of hundred years" without refueling, says John G­illeland, manager of nuclear programs at Intellectual Ventures.
Gilleland's aim is to run a nuclear reactor on what is now waste. ­Conventional reactors use uranium-235, which splits easily to carry on a chain reaction but is scarce and expensive; it must be separated from the more common, nonfissile uranium-238 in special enrichment plants. Every 18 to 24 months, the reactor must be opened, hundreds of fuel bundles removed, hundreds added, and the remainder reshuffled to supply all the fissile uranium needed for the next run. This raises proliferation concerns, since an enrichment plant designed to make low-enriched uranium for a power reactor differs trivially from one that makes highly enriched material for a bomb.
But the traveling-wave reactor needs only a thin layer of enriched U-235. Most of the core is U-238, millions of pounds of which are stockpiled around the world as leftovers from natural uranium after the U-235 has been scavenged. The design provides "the simplest possible fuel cycle," says Charles W. Forsberg, executive director of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Project at MIT, "and it requires only one uranium enrichment plant per planet."

The trick is that the reactor itself will convert the uranium-238 into a usable fuel, plutonium-239. Conventional reactors also produce P-239, but using it requires removing the spent fuel, chopping it up, and chemically extracting the plutonium--a dirty, expensive process that is also a major step toward building an atomic bomb. The traveling-wave reactor produces plutonium and uses it at once, eliminating the possibility of its being diverted for weapons. An active region less than a meter thick moves along the reactor core, breeding new plutonium in front of it.
The traveling-wave idea dates to the early 1990s. However, Gilleland's team is the first to develop a practical design. Intellectual Ventures has patented the technology; the company says it is in licensing discussions with reactor manufacturers but won't name them. Although there are still some basic design issues to be worked out--for instance, precise models of how the reactor would behave under accident conditions--Gilleland thinks a commercial unit could be running by the early 2020s.
While Intellectual Ventures has caught the attention of academics, the commercial industry--hoping to stimulate interest in an energy source that doesn't contribute to global warming--is focused on selling its first reactors in the U.S. in 30 years. The designs it's proposing, however, are essentially updates on the models operating today. Intellectual Ventures thinks that the traveling-wave design will have more appeal a bit further down the road, when a nuclear renaissance is fully under way and fuel supplies look tight.
"We need a little excitement in the nuclear field," says Forsber­g. "We have too many people working on 1/10th of 1 percent change."

A. Coolant pumps
B. Expansion area for fission gases
C. Fuel (depleted uranium) inside the hexagonal pillars; green represents unused fuel, black spent fuel
D. Fission wave (red)
E. Breeding wave (yellow)
F. Liquid sodium coolant

Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=22114&ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&pg=3

Conventional battery: Ordinary batteries use at least one solid active material. In the lead-acid battery shown here, the electrodes are solid plates immersed in a liquid electrolyte. Solid materials limit the conductivity of batteries and therefore the amount of current that can flow through them. They’re also vulnerable to cracking, disintegrating, and otherwise degrading over time, which reduces their useful lifetimes.
Credit: Arthur Mount

Without a good way to store electricity on a large scale, solar power is useless at night. One promising storage option is a new kind of battery made with all-liquid active materials. Prototypes suggest that these liquid batteries will cost less than a third as much as today's best batteries and could last significantly longer.

The battery is unlike any other. The electrodes are molten metals, and the electrolyte that conducts current between them is a molten salt. This results in an unusually resilient device that can quickly absorb large amounts of electricity. The electrodes can operate at electrical currents "tens of times higher than any [battery] that's ever been measured," says Donald Sadow­ay, a materials chemistry professor at MIT and one of the battery's inventors. What's more, the materials are cheap, and the design allows for simple manufacturing.

The first prototype consists of a container surrounded by insulating material. The researchers add molten raw materials: antimony on the bottom, an electrolyte such as sodium sulfide in the middle, and magnesium at the top. Since each material has a different density, they naturally remain in distinct layers, which simplifies manufacturing. The container doubles as a current collector, delivering electrons from a power supply, such as solar panels, or carrying them away to the electrical grid to supply electricity to homes and businesses.

Discharged, charging, charged: The molten active components (colored bands: blue, magnesium; green, electrolyte; yellow, antimony) of a new grid-scale storage battery are held in a container that delivers and collects electrical current (left). Here, the battery is ready to be charged, with positive magnesium and negative antimony ions dissolved in the electrolyte. As electric current flows into the cell (center), the magnesium ions in the electrolyte gain electrons and form magnesium metal, which joins the molten magnesium electrode. At the same time, the antimony ions give up electrons to form metal atoms at the opposite electrode. As metal forms, the electrolyte shrinks and the electrodes grow (right), an unusual property for batteries. During discharge, the process is reversed, and the metal atoms become ions again.
Credit: Arthur Mount

As power flows into the battery, magnesium and antimony metal are generated from magnesium antimonide dissolved in the electrolyte. When the cell discharges, the metals of the two electrodes dissolve to again form magnesium antimonide, which dissolves in the electrolyte, causing the electrolyte to grow larger and the electrodes to shrink (see above).

Sadoway envisions wiring together large cells to form enormous battery packs. One big enough to meet the peak electricity demand in New York City--about 13,000 megawatts--would fill nearly 60,000 square meters. Charging it would require solar farms of unprecedented size, generating not only enough electricity to meet daytime power needs but enough excess power to charge the batteries for nighttime demand. The first systems will probably store energy produced during periods of low electricity demand for use during peak demand, thus reducing the need for new power plants and transmission lines.

Many other ways of storing energy from intermittent power sources have been proposed, and some have been put to limited use. These range from stacks of lead-acid batteries to systems that pump water uphill during the day and let it flow back to spin generators at night. The liquid battery has the advantage of being cheap, long-lasting, and (unlike options such as pumping water) useful in a wide range of places. "No one had been able to get their arms around the problem of energy storage on a massive scale for the power grid," says Sadoway. "We're literally looking at a battery capable of storing the grid."

Since creating the initial prototypes, the researchers have switched the metals and salts used; it wasn't possible to dissolve magnesium antimonide in the electrolyte at high concentrations, so the first prototypes were too big to be practical. (Sadowa­y won't identify the new materials but says they work along the same principles.) The team hopes that a commercial version of the battery will be available in five years.

Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=22116&ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&pg=2

TR10: Paper Diagnostics - George Whitesides has created a cheap, easy-to-use diagnostic test out of paper

Color change: Paper tests, such as those shown here, could make it possible to diagnose a range of diseases quickly and cheaply. A small drop of liquid, such as blood or urine, wicks in through the corner or back of the paper and passes through channels to special testing zones. Substances in these zones react with specific chemicals in the sample to indicate different conditions; results show up as varying colors. These tests are small, simple, and inexpensive.

Credit: Bruce Peterson

Diagnostic tools that are cheap to make, simple to use, and rugged enough for rural areas could save thousands of lives in poor parts of the world. To make such devices, Harvard University professor George Whitesides is coupling advanced microfluidics with one of humankind's oldest technologies: paper. The result is a versatile, disposable test that can check a tiny amount of urine or blood for evidence of infectious diseases or chronic conditions.

The finished devices are squares of paper roughly the size of postage stamps. The edge of a square is dipped into a urine sample or pressed against a drop of blood, and the liquid moves through channels into testing wells. Depending on the chemicals present, different reactions occur in the wells, turning the paper blue, red, yellow, or green. A reference key is used to interpret the results.

The squares take advantage of paper's natural ability to rapidly soak up liquid­s, thus circumventing the need for pumps and other mechanical components common in microfluidic devices. The first step in building the devices is to creat­e tiny channels, about a millimete­r in width, that direct the fluid to the test wells. Whiteside­s and his coworkers soak the paper with a light-­sensitive photo­resist; ultraviolet light causes polymers in the photoresist to cross-link and harden, creating long, waterproof walls wherever the light hits it. The researchers can even create the desired channels and wells by simply drawing on the paper with a black marker and laying it in sunlight. "What we do is structure the flow of fluid in a sheet, taking advantage of the fact that if the paper is the right kind, fluid wicks and hence pulls itself along the channels," says Whiteside­s. Each well is then brushed with a different solution that reacts with specific molecules in blood or urine to trigger a color change.

Paper is ­easily incinerated, making it easy to safely dispose of used tests. And while paper-based diagnostics (such as pregnancy tests) already exist, Whitesides­'s device has an important advantage: a single square can perform many reactions, giving it the potential to diagnose a range of conditions. Meanwhile, its small size means that blood tests require only a tiny sample, allowing a user to simply prick a finger.

Currently, Whitesides is developing a test to diagnose liver failure, which is indicated by elevated levels of certain enzymes in blood. In countries with advanced health care, people who take certain medications undergo regular blood tests to screen for liver problems that the drugs can cause. But people without consistent access to health care do not have that luxury; a paper-based test could give them the same safety margin. ­Whitesides also wants to develop tests for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.

To disseminate the technology, ­Whitesides cofounded the nonprofit Diagnostics for All in Brookline, MA, in 2007. It plans to deploy the liver function tests in an African country around the end of this year. The team hopes that eventually, people with little medical training can administer the tests and photograph the results with a cell phone. Whitesides envisions a center where technicians and doctors can evaluate the images and send back treatment recommendations.

"This is one of the most deployable devices I have seen," says Albert Folch, an associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, who works with microfluidics. "What is so incredibly clever is that they were able to create photoresist structures embedded inside paper. At the same time, the porosity of the paper acts as the cheapest pump on the planet."

Recently, the Harvard researchers have made the paper chips into a three-­dimensional diagnostic device by layering them with punctured pieces of waterproof tape. A drop of liquid can move across channels and into wells on the first sheet, diffuse down through the holes in the tape, and react in test wells on the second paper layer. The ability to perform many more tests and even carry out two-step reactions with a single sample will enable the device to detect diseases (like malaria or HIV) that require more complicated assays, such as those that use antibodies. Results appear after five minutes to half an hour, depending on the test.

The researchers hope the advanced version of the test can eventually be mass produced using the same printing tech­nology that churns out newspapers. Cost for the materials should be three to five cents. At that price, says Folch, the tests "will have a big impact on health care in areas where transportation and energy access is difficult."

Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=22113&ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&pg=2

TR10: Racetrack Memory - Stuart Parkin is using nanowires to create an ultradense memory chip.

Speeding bits: In one implementation of racetrack memory, information is stored on a U-shaped nanowire as a pattern of magnetic regions with different polarities. Applying a spin-polarized current causes the magnetic pattern to speed along the nanowire; the data can be moved in either direction, depending on the direction of the current. A separate nanowire perpendicular to the U-shaped "racetrack" writes data by changing the polarity of the magnetic regions. A second device at the base of the track reads the data. Data can be written and read in less than a nanosecond. Racetrack memory using hundreds of millions of nanowires would have the potential to store vast amounts of data.

When IBM sold its hard-drive business to Hitachi in April 2002, IBM fellow Stuart Parkin wondered what to do next. He had spent his career studying the fundamental physics of magnetic materials, making a series of discoveries that gave hard-disk drives thousands of times more storage capacity. So Parkin set out to develop an entirely new way to store information: a memory chip with the huge storage capacity of a magnetic hard drive, the durability of electronic flash memory, and speed superior to both. He dubbed the new technology "racetrack memory."

Both magnetic disk drives and existing solid-state memory technologies are essentially two-dimensional, Parkin says, relying on a single layer of either magnetic bits or transistors. "Both of these technologies have evolved over the last 50 years, but they've done it by scaling the devices smaller and smaller or developing new means of accessing bits," he says. Parki­n sees both technologies reaching their size limits in the coming decades. "Our idea is totally different from any memory that's ever been made," he says, "because it's three-dimensional."

The key is an array of U-shaped magnetic nanowires, arranged vertically like trees in a forest. The nanowires have regions with different magnetic polarities, and the boundaries between the regions represent 1s or 0s, depending on the polarities of the regions on either side. When a spin-polarized current (one in which the electrons' quantum-mechanica­l "spin" is oriented in a specific direction) passes through the nanowire, the whole magnetic pattern is effectively pushed along, like cars speeding down a racetrack. At the base of the U, the magnetic boundaries encounter a pair of tiny devices that read and write the data.

This simple design has the potential to combine the best qualities of other ­memory technologies while avoiding their drawbacks. Because racetrack memory stores data in vertical nanowires, it can theoretically pack 100 times as much data into the same area as a flash-chip transistor, and at the same cost. There are no mechanical parts, so it could prove more reliable than a hard drive. Racetrack memory is fast, like the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) used to hold frequently accessed data in computers, yet it can store information even when the power is off. This is because no atoms are moved in the process of reading and writing data, eliminating wear on the wire.

Just as flash memory ushered in ultra­small devices that can hold thousands of songs, pictures, and other types of data, racetrack promises to lead to whole new categories of electronics. "An even denser, smaller memory could make computers more compact and more energy efficient," Parkin says. Moreover, chips with huge data capacity could be shrunk to the size of a speck of dust and sprinkled about the environment in tiny sensors or implanted in patients to log vital signs.

When Parkin first proposed racetrack memory, in 2003, "people thought it was a great idea that would never work," he says. Before last April, no one had been able to shift the magnetic domains along the wire without disturbing their orientations. However, in a paper published that month in Science, Parkin's team showed that a spin-polarized current would preserve the original magnetic pattern.

The Science paper proved that the concept of racetrack memory is sound, although at the time, the researchers had moved only three bits of data down a nanowire. Last December, Parkin's team successfully moved six bits along the wire. He hopes to reach 10 bits soon, which he says would make racetrack memory competitive with flash storage. If his team can manage 100 bits, racetrack could replace hard drives.

Parkin has already found that the trick to increasing the number of bits a wire can handle is to precisely control its diameter: the narrower and more uniform the wire, the more bits it can hold. Another challenge will be to find the best material for the job: it needs to be one that can survive the manufacturing process and one that allows the magnetic domains to move quickly along the wire, with the least amount of electrical current possible.

If the design proves successful, racetrack memory could replace all other forms of memory, and Parkin will bolster his status as a ­magnetic-memory genius. After all, his work on giant magnetoresistance, which led to today's high-capacity hard drives, transformed the computing industry. With racetrack memory, ­Parkin could revamp computing once more.

Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=22115&ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&pg=1

TR10: $100 Genome - Han Cao's nanofluidic chip could cut DNA sequencing costs dramatically.

Han Cao's nanofluidic chip could cut DNA sequencing costs dramatically.

Nanoscale sorting: A tiny nanofluidic chip is the key to BioNanomatrix’s effort to sequence a human genome for just $100.
Credit: Bionanomatrix

In the corner of the small lab is a locked door with a colorful sign taped to the front: "$100 Genome Room--Authorized Persons Only." BioNanomatrix, the startup that runs the lab, is pursuing what many believe to be the key to personalized medicine: sequencing technology so fast and cheap that an entire human genome can be read in eight hours for $100 or less. With the aid of such a powerful tool, medical treatment could be tailored to a patient's distinct genetic profile.

Despite many experts' doubt that whole-genome sequencing could be done for $1,000, let alone a 10th that much, BioNanomatrix believes it can reach the $100 target in five years. The reason for its optimism: company founder Han Cao has created a chip that uses nanofluidics and a series of branching, ever-narrowin­g channels to allow researchers, for the first time, to isolate and image very long strands of individual DNA molecules.

If the company succeeds, a physician could biopsy a cancer patient's tumor, sequence all its DNA, and use that information to determine a prognosis and prescribe treatment-- all for less than the cost of a chest x-ray. If the ailment is lung cancer, for instance, the doctor could determine the particular genetic changes in the tumor cells and order the chemo­therapy best suited to that variant.

Cao's chip, which neatly aligns DNA, is essential to cheaper sequencing because double-stranded DNA, when left to its own devices, winds itself up into tight balls that are impossible to analyze. To sequence even the smallest chromosomes, researchers have had to chop the DNA up into millions of smaller pieces, anywhere from 100 to 1,000 base pairs long. These shorter strands can be sequenced easily, but the data must be pieced back together like a jigsaw puzzle. The approach is expensive and time consuming. What's more, it becomes problematic when the puzzle is as large as the human genome, which consists of about three billion pairs of nucleo­tides. Even with the most elegant algorithms, some pieces get counted multiple times, while others are omitted completely. The resulting sequence may not include the data most relevant to a particular disease.

In contrast, Cao's chip untangles stretches of delicate double-stranded DNA molecules up to 1,000,000 base pairs long--a feat that researchers had previously thought impossible. The series of branching channels gently prompts the molecules to relax a bit more at each fork, while also acting as a floodgate to help distribute them evenly. A mild electrical charge drives them through the chip, ultimately coaxing them into spaces that are less than 100 nanometers wide. With tens of thousands of channels side by side, the chip allows an entire human genome to flow through in about 10 minutes. The data must still be pieced together, but the puzzle is much smaller (imagine a jigsaw puzzle of roughly 100 pieces versus 10,000), leaving far less room for error.

Sequencing DNA: Thousands of branching channels just nanometers wide (left) untangle very long DNA strands; bright fluorescent labels allow researchers to easily visualize these molecules (right).
Credit: Bionanomatrix

The chip meets only half the $100-genome challenge: it unravels DNA but does not sequence it. To achieve that, the company is working with Silicon Valley-based Complete Genomics, which has developed bright, fluorescently labeled probes that bind to the 4,096 possible combinations of six-letter DNA "words." Along with ­BioNanomatrix's chip, the probes could achieve the lightning-fast sequencing necessary for the $100 genome. But the probes can't stick to double-stranded DNA, so Complete Genomics will need to figure out how to open up small sections of DNA without uncoupling the entire molecule.

BioNanomatrix is keeping its options open. "At this point, we don't have any exclusive ties to any sequencing chemistry," says Gary Zweiger, the company's vice president of development. "We want to make our chip available to sequencers, and we feel that it is an essential component to driving the costs down to the $100 level. We can't do it alone, but we feel that they can't do it without this critical component."

Whether or not BioNanomatrix reaches its goal of $100 sequencing in eight hours, its technology could play an important role in medicine. Because the chips can process long pieces of DNA, the molecules retain information about gene location; they can thus be used to quickly identify new viruses or bacteria causing an outbreak, or to map new genes linked to specific diseases. And as researchers learn more about the genetic variations implicated in different diseases, it might be possible to biopsy tissue and sequence only those genes with variants known to cause disease, says Colin Collins, a professor at the Prostate Center at Vancouver General Hospital, who plans to use BioNanomatrix chips in his lab. "Suddenly," Collins says, "you can sequence extremely rapidly and very, very inexpensively, and provide the patient with diagnosis and prognosis and, hopefully, a drug."

Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=22112&ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&pg=2

TR10: Intelligent Software Assistant - Adam Cheyer is leading the design of powerful software that acts as a personal aide.

Adam Cheyer is leading the design of powerful software that acts as a personal aide.

Weekend plans: Adam Cheyer participates in a conversation with the software. (Go to the next page to read the dialogue and an explanation of the artificial-intelligence behind it.) Credit: Howard Cao

Search is the gateway to the Internet for most people; for many of us, it has become second nature to distill a task into a set of keywords that will lead to the required tools and information. But Adam Cheyer, cofounder of Silicon Valley startup Siri, envisions a new way for people to interact with the services available on the Internet: a "do engine" rather than a search engine. Siri is working on virtual personal-assistant software, which would help users complete tasks rather than just collect information. Cheyer, Siri's vice president of engineering, says that the software takes the user's context into account, making it highly useful and flexible. "In order to get a system that can act and reason, you need to get a system that can interact and understand," he says. Siri traces its origins to a military-funded artificial-intelligence project called CALO, for "cognitive assistant that learns and organizes," that is based at the research institute SRI International. The project's leaders--including Cheyer--combined traditionally isolated approaches to artificial intelligence to try to create a personal-assistant program that improves by interacting with its user. Cheyer, while still at SRI, took a team of engineers aside and built a sample consumer version; colleagues finally persuaded him to start a company based on the prototype. Siri licenses its core technology from SRI. Mindful of the sometimes spectacular failure of previous attempts to create a virtual personal assistant, Siri's founders have set their sights conservatively. The initial version, to be released this year, will be aimed at mobile users and will perform only specific types of functions, such as helping make reservations at restaurants, check flight status, or plan weekend activities. Users can type or speak commands in casual sentences, and the software deciphers their intent from the context. Siri is connected to multiple online services, so a quick interaction with it can accomplish several small tasks that would normally require visits to a number of websites. For example, a user can ask Siri to find a midpriced Chinese restaurant in a specific part of town and make a reservation there. Recent improvements in computer processor power have been essential in bringing this level of sophistication to a consumer product, Cheyer says. Many of CALO's abilities still can't be crammed into such products. But the growing power of mobile phones and the increasing speed of networks make it poss­ible to handle some of the processing at Siri's headquarters and pipe the results back to users, allowing the software to take on tasks that just couldn't be done before. "Search does what search does very well, and that's not going anywhere anytime soon," says Dag Kittlaus, Siri's cofounder and CEO. "[But] we believe that in five years, everyone's going to have a virtual assistant to which they delegate a lot of the menial tasks." While the software will be intelligent and useful, the company has no aspiration to make it seem human. "We think that we can create an incredible experience that will help you be more efficient in your life, in solving problems and the tasks that you do," Cheyer says. But Siri is always going to be just a tool, not a rival to human intelligence: "We're very practical minded."

Weekend PlansSiri cofounder Tom Gruber volunteered Adam Cheyer to participate in a conversation with the software (shown above). Gruber explains the artificial-intelligence tasks behind its responses.

1. "The user can ask a broad question like this because Siri has information that gives clues about what the user intends. For example, the software might store data about the user's location, schedule, and past activities. Siri can deal with open-ended questions within specific areas, such as entertainment or travel."

2. "Siri pulls information rele­vant to the user's question from a variety of Web services and tools. In this case, it checks the weather, event listings, and directories of local attractions and uses machine learning to select certain options based on the user's past preferences. Siri can connect to various Web applications and then integrate the results into a single response."
3. "Siri interprets this reply in the context of the existing conversation, using it to refine the user's request."

4. "The software offers specific suggestions based on the user's personal preferences and its ability to categorize. Because Siri is task-oriented, rather than a search engine, it offers to buy tickets that the user selects."

5. "By now, the conversation has narrowed enough that all the user has to do is click on his choice."

6. "Siri compiles information about the event, such as band members, directions, and prices, and structures it in a logical way. It also handles the task of finding out what's available and getting the tickets."

Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=22117&ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&pg=2

The iPhone's Untapped Potential Apple could do a lot more with all the sensors in the iPhone.

Extrasensory phone: Apple’s iPhone comes with sensors that can detect changes in the phone’s position and environment. Researchers at other companies have been developing mobile-phone applications that can employ data collected by these sorts of sensors to infer a user’s behavior.
Credit: Apple

Apple is known for its innovative gadget design, and with the release of the iPhone, it continues to live up to its hype. But while people are fawning over features like the smart, multitouch screen and the advanced Web browser, there is important technology under the hood that will likely go underappreciated. The iPhone has tiny, powerful sensors--an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor, and an infrared sensor--that are able to pick up cues from the environment and adjust the phone's functions accordingly. Apple has decided to use these sensors for detecting when to convert the screen view from portrait to landscape, for adjusting the brightness of the screen based on the brightness of the environment, and for disabling the touch screen when a person holds the phone to her ear.

Of course, Apple isn't the first to put sensors such as accelerometers in phones. Nokia, for example, has a sports phone (called the 5500) that uses an accelerometer as a pedometer. When a person takes the phone jogging, the accelerometer logs the rate of vibrations and sends that data to software that determines speed and distance. The 5500 also offers an accelerometer-based game in which a user tilts the device to navigate a ball through a maze. In addition, Nokia offers a developers' kit so that people can make their own accelerometer-based games, potentially mimicking the style of those played with Nintendo's popular Wii controller. (See "Hack: The Nintendo Wii.")

These functions, while useful and entertaining, are still pretty mundane, says Nathan Eagle, a research scientist at MIT. "These are trivial uses for what has the potential to provide a whole slew of new features and functionality," he says. Separate research taking place at MIT, Intel, and other companies suggests that, with the right software, built-in hardware such as accelerometers, light sensors, a GPS, and the phone's own microphone could provide contextual clues about people's activities and behaviors. A sensor-enabled phone could feasibly help monitor your exercise habits, keep track of an elderly relative's activities, and let your friends and family know if you're available for a call or instant-messaging conversation. It could even provide insight into social networks.

"If you get access to [a phone's] accelerometer data, you can get a variety of contextual clues about how the user is living their life," Eagle says--for instance, whether or not a user is riding a bike, taking the subway, walking up stairs, or sitting for a long period of time. The data can be used to let workers know if they need to take a break or if a person is meeting exercise goals, he says. Eagle and Sandy Pentland, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, have used Nokia phones equipped with sensors to study the behavior of people in groups and even predict their actions to a certain extent. (See "Gadgets That Know Your Next Move.")

To explore other possibilities, researchers at Intel use a small gadget, about the size of a pager, that amasses data from seven sensors: an accelerometer, a barometer, a humidity sensor, a thermometer, a light sensor, a digital compass, and a microphone, says Tanzeem Choudhury, a researcher at Intel Labs Seattle. Most of the sensors are used to determine location and activity, but the microphone can provide interesting insight into social networks, she says, such as whether a person is having a business conversation or a social chat. Aware of privacy concerns, the researchers designed the microphone data to be immediately processed so that all words are removed, and only information about tone, pitch, and volume is recorded. Recently, Intel researchers equipped a first-year class of University of Washington graduate students with these sorts of sensors and, based on their interactions, were able to watch social networks develop over time.

To churn through all the data the Intel sensors collect, the researchers designed software to process it in stages, explains Choudhury. "You can do some simple processing on the mobile device," she says, such as averaging similar data points over time and throwing out data from a sensor that's below a threshold. Most mobile phones have the processing capabilities to do this and extract actions such as walking and sitting.

In the next stage of processing, researchers plug these actions into machine-learning models that infer more-complex behaviors. For instance, making a meal will require short walking bursts, standing, and picking things up. The Intel researchers developed models that look for certain actions occurring in succession. These models can also adjust to the basic quirks of the user, accounting for variation in cooking behavior; some meals may require more walking than others, and some people may sit more during meal preparation than others. This sort of information could be useful, Choudhury says, in determining if an elderly person is eating regularly. She notes that currently, some of the modeling is too computationally intensive to do entirely on a cell phone, and some of the data must be uploaded to a computer or a server. However, she says, the algorithms are becoming more efficient, and the processing power in phones continues to increase.

At this point, says MIT's Eagle, it wouldn't be too difficult to write consumer software that could infer a person's basic activities. These activities could then be used to update the status listed in an instant-messenger program or on a blog. Eagle notes, however, that manufacturers might be hesitant because it's likely that all the required data processing could cut battery life.

Apple has made no announcements about whether it might include such software in future versions of the iPhone. And it's unlikely that outside developers will be able to take advantage of the sensors at this point: Apple is limiting third-party development to applications that run within the Web browser--essentially, specialized Web pages. But as more phones become equipped with sensors, and phones' processing power continues to increase, Eagle suspects that sensor-based applications will become more popular.

Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/18990/page1/

Call to 'shut down' Street View

Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt: "We get sued every day"

A formal complaint about Google's Street View has been sent to the Information Commissioner (ICO).

Drawn up by privacy campaigners, it cites more than 200 reports from members of the public identifiable via the service.

Privacy International wants the ICO to look again at how Street View works.

"The ICO has repeatedly made clear that it believes that in Street View the necessary safeguards are in place to protect people's privacy," said Google.

Privacy International (PI) director Simon Davies said his organisation had filed the complaint given the "clear embarrassment and damage" Street View had caused to many Britons.

Speaking to the BBC, Google boss Eric Schmidt, said: "We agree with the concerns over privacy.

"The way we address it is by allowing people to opt out, literally to take anything we capture that is inappropriate out," he said "and we do it as quickly as we possibly can."

He added: "We are getting controversy over street view because it is so successful. It turns out that people love to see what is going on in their local community."

Private and public

Mr Davies said Street View fell short of the assurances given to the ICO that enabled the system to launch.

"We're asking for the system to be switched off while an investigation is completed," said Mr Davies.

"The Information Commissioner never grasped the gravity of how a benign piece of legislation could affect ordinary lives," he added.

In July 2008, the ICO gave permission for Street View to launch partly because of assurances Google gave about the way it would blur faces and registration plates.
Google removed image
Google has removed some images following complaints

Since Street View launched in the UK on 19 March, PI has been contacted by many people identifiable via the service.

Among them were a woman who had moved house to escape a violent partner but who was recognisable outside her new home on Street View.

Also complaining were two colleagues pictured in an apparently compromising position who suffered embarrassment when the image was circulated at their workplace.

The ICO said it had received the complaint from PI and would respond "shortly".

It added: "It is Google's responsibility to ensure all vehicle registration marks and faces are satisfactorily blurred.

"Individuals who feel that an image does identify them (and are unhappy with this) should contact Google direct to get the image removed," it added.

"Individuals who have raised concerns with Google about their image being included - and who do not think they have received a satisfactory response - can complain to the ICO."

Safeguards

"Data protection is a question of taking reasonable steps," said Nick Lockett, an IT lawyer with DL Legal.

"If Street View is infringing privacy then almost anything you can do with data is going to be infringing privacy," he added.

Struan Robertson, a legal director at Pinsent Masons, said he did not think the turning on of Street View would result in court action against Google for breaching privacy.

"That's largely because we have got rulings from the courts on when a photograph risks privacy rights and when it does not," he said.


Faces blurred by Google, Google
The Manchester United star Christiano Ronaldo is blurred on a poster at Old Trafford - a wonderful example of what can happen when anxieties over our 'surveillance society' collide with our 'celebrity culture'

Mark Easton's blog
Recent cases in the courts have revolved around whether the focus of a camera was on an individual. Google's Street View, which snaps the whole scene, would seem to pass that test, he said.

Responding to the filing of the complaint, Google said: "Before launching Street View we sought the guidance and approval of the independent and impartial Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

In a statement Google said the ICO had re-iterated its confidence that Street View did enough to protect privacy.

"The fact that some people have used the tools in place to remove images shows that the tools work effectively," it added.

"Of course, if anyone has concerns about the product or its images they can contact us and we look forward to hearing from them," it said.

Mr Davies said the ICO should take another look at Street View because of the promises Google gave about the efficacy of its face-blurring system.

In its complaint, PI said Google's assertion that its face blurring system would result in a "few" misses was a "gross underestimation".

This meant, said the complaint, that the data used for Street View came under Data Protection legislation which requires that subjects give permission before information is gathered.

"The promised privacy safeguards do not provide adequate protection to shield Street View from the general requirement of notice and consent," said the complaint.

Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7959362.stm

Virgin eyes 150Mb broadband speed

Fibre optic networks are offering faster broadband speeds

Virgin Media will offer 100 to 150Mbps broadband speeds up to two years before BT completes its rival fibre network.

"We have an opportunity with our network to provide significantly higher speeds," Virgin Media's chief executive Neil Berkett told BBC News.

BT has said its fibre network will hit the first crop of UK cities by early 2010 and will be complete by 2012.

Virgin currently offers a top speed of 50Mbps while BT is pledging 40 to 60Mb.

Mr Berkett said its fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) network was capable of supporting up to 150Mbps but its roll out was a "function of timing".

He said: "When we look at the market I don't see us getting the returns right now for 100 or 150Mbps.

See what applications work at different speeds

"As we work with application providers, and content providers... there will be a natural point where we upgrade from 10, 20 and 50Mbps to something more.

"If BT were to meet the time frame they have suggested - of finishing by 2012 - I would see us as having much, much faster upstream speed, running at a minimum of 100Mbps downstream and possibly more. You can see a real opportunity there."

Faster speeds

Mr Berkett said he would be surprised if Virgin Media did not start the roll out of faster speeds next year.

BT has said it will deploy FTTC technology at 29 exchanges across the UK in the coming 9 to 12 months.

The network will offer speeds of up to 40Mbps - and potentially 60Mbps - to 500,000 homes and businesses.

Areas of Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Greater Manchester will be able to access the fibre network, which will be opened up on a wholesale basis to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who can then offer various broadband packages to customers.

Virgin Media says its network reaches half of all homes in the UK. The technology has a theoretical limit of 200Mbps downsteam speeds.

Mr Berkett said the firm had not ruled out the possibility of opening its own network to other ISPs.

He said: "We had this conversation with a bunch of investors recently. Our position is 'Let's prove the market'.

"Wholesaling is not off our agenda but right now it is not a priority for us."

He added: "Who knows, by the time BT have rolled out their next generation network we may be in position to explore wholesale."

Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7961135.stm

Carbon Nanotube Muscles Strong as Diamond, Flexible as Rubber

For the next installment of the Terminator franchise, Hollywood might skip the polymimetic liquid alloys — they're so 2003 — and turn to the laboratory of Ray Baughman, who has created a next-generation muscle from carbon nanotubes.

Baughman and his colleagues have produced a formulation that's stronger than steel, as light as air and more flexible than rubber — a truly 21st century muscle. It could be used to make artificial limbs, "smart" skins, shape-changing structures, ultra-strong robots and — in the immediate future — highly-efficient solar cells.

"We can generate about 30 times the force per unit area of natural muscle," said Baughman, director of the NanoTech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas.



Carbon nanotubes have fascinated material scientists since the early 1990s, when researchers started to explore the ultra-light, ultra-strong cylindrical molecules. Though bulk manufacturing difficulties have slowed the development of commercial applications, carbon nanotubes are already used in bicycle components, and in prototypes of airplanes, bulletproof clothing, transistors, and ropes that might someday be used to tether a space elevator. (On a historical note, carbon nanotube-infused steel was used to made Damascus blades, renowned as history's sharpest swords, though the technique has been lost.)



Baughman became interested in carbon nanotubes while designing artificial muscles from energy-conducting polymers. He figured he could do the job better with linked carbon nanotubes. First he made haphazard tangles of fibers activated by charged liquids. Then he experimented with more structurally-consistent configurations, and other methods of delivering the charge.

His latest muscle, described Thursday in Science, is made from bundles of vertically aligned nanotubes that respond directly to electricity. Lengthwise, the muscle can expand and contract with tremendous speed; from side-to-side, it's super-stiff. Its possibilities may only be limited by the imaginations of engineers.

"This apparently unprecedented degree of anisotropy" — direction-dependent physical properties — "is akin to having diamond-like behavior in one direction, and rubber-like behavior in the others," wrote John Madden, a University of British Columbia material scientist, in an accompanying commentary.



Baughman's muscles rely on the tendency of an electric charge to make carbon nanotube fibers repel or attract each other, depending on their configuration.

Natural muscles, said Baughman, contract at a maximum rate of 10 percent per second. In the same amount of time, his latest nanotube sheaths can contract by 40,000 percent. Because it responds to an electrical current rather than ion movement in electrolytic liquids, it's far more efficient than his old formulations.

The nanotube bundles retain their properties at temperatures ranging from the -320 degree Fahrenheit of liquid nitrogen to the 2800 degree Fahrenheit melting point of iron.

The first applications, said Baughman, will likely be as wrappers for solar cells, with nanotubes conducting electricity and rapidly changing shape in order to produce optimally light-sensitive arrangements.



"We've characterized the activity and performance," he said. "Now we want to use them."

Citations: "Giant-Stroke, Superelastic Carbon Nanotube Aerogel Muscles." By Ali E. Aliev, Jiyoung Oh, Mikhail E. Kozlov, Alexander A. Kuznetsov, Shaoli Fang, Alexandre F. Fonseca, Raquel Ovalle, Márcio D. Lima, Mohammad H. Haque, Yuri N. Gartstein, Mei Zhang, Anvar A. Zakhidov, Ray H. Baughman. Science, Vol. 323 Issue 5921, March 19, 2009.

"Stiffer Than Steel." By John D. W. Madden. Science, Vol. 323 Issue 5921, March 19, 2009.

Image and Videos: Ray Baughman

Source : http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/nanomuscle.html

2010 Chevrolet Camaro V6 and V8 Performance Test Results - Car News

Well, the wait is over. After some hands-on quality time with Chevrolet’s new 2010 Camaro—to which we finally were able to strap test gear—we can report that GM’s latest muscle car is indeed one quick machine. How quick depends on if you opt for the base model and its 304-hp, 3.6-liter V-6 or the SS version, which features a 6.2-liter V-8 that makes 400 hp when mated to the optional six-speed automatic transmission and 426 hp when backed by the standard six-speed manual. Either way, Camaro buyers will be getting one seriously capable performance car.

So, How Fast is It?

The quickest of the new Camaros is the SS model with the automatic gearbox, which sprints to 60 mph in 4.6 seconds. While this is 0.2 second better than the more powerful, manual-equipped car’s time of 4.8, the off-the-line advantage quickly fades, with the manual tripping the quarter-mile lights in 13 seconds flat at 111 mph versus the auto’s 13.1 at 109. As the arrival of the Camaro brings the modern pony car wars into full swing, it only makes sense to compare the SS to the 315-hp 2010 Mustang GT and the 376-hp Dodge Challenger R/T, both of which manage the 0-to-60-mph run in 5.1 seconds. The 425-hp Challenger SRT8 is a better match for the SS at 4.8 seconds, yet is considerably more expensive than the Camaro.

But don’t assume you need to blow at least $31K on the SS to have a good time, as the $23K base model can hit 60 in 5.9 seconds and cover the quarter-mile in 14.5 at 99 mph. Unfortunately, we only were able to test the V-6 with the six-speed manual, so stay tuned for a future test of the base car with the six-speed automatic, likely the lineup’s volume seller. With nearly as much power as the V-8–powered Mustang GT, the V-6 Camaro easily beats the standard V-6 Stang, which runs from 0 to 60 mph in 6.5 seconds and does the quarter-mile in 15.5 at 93 mph. The V-6, automatic-only Challenger SE fares even worse, with 60 mph coming up in 7.5 seconds and the quarter mile in 15.8 at 90 mph. However, V-6 Camaro drivers should beware of lining up next to any 2010 Hyundai Genesis coupes with the optional 3.8-liter V-6, as the 306-hp import bests the V-6 Camaro with a 5.5-second 0–60 sprint and a quarter-mile run of 14.2 at 100 mph. Bring on the comparison testsour

Source: http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/hot_lists/high_performance/american_performance/2010_chevrolet_camaro_v6_and_v8_performance_test_results_car_news

Terrafugia's flying car makes maiden voyage

The start-up Terrafugia first popped up on our radar screens in early 2006 with a one-fifth scale model, $30,000 in prize money, and an urge to build a car that could fly. Or is that an airplane you can take on the highway?



Some signs point strongly to the latter. Terrafugia describes its Transition vehicle as a "roadable aircraft" and is pitching it in part as giving private pilots an easy travel alternative when bad weather makes flying a bad idea, or simply to avoid having to take a separate car to the airport. Also, in the eyes of the Federal Aviation Administration, the vehicle falls into the light sport aircraft category.

On March 5, Terrafugia got to show that--whatever the eventual business prospects--the Transition can indeed fly. The maiden voyage (the duration wasn't specified) took place at the Plattsburgh International Airport in New York, with a retired U.S. Air Force Reserve colonel in the pilot's seat. The flight followed six months of static, road, and taxi testing.

As a car, the two-seat Transition is designed to be easy on garages and oncoming traffic--its wings fold up quite snugly. In folded mode, the approximately 19-foot-long vehicle is 80 inches wide, and 6 feet, 9 inches high. As an airplane, it stands a few inches shorter and has a wingspan of 27 feet, 6 inches.

The vehicle runs off unleaded fuel from your run-of-the-mill gas station for both terrestrial and aerial travel, cruising at highway speeds on land and better than 115 miles per hour in the air.
But Woburn, Mass.-based Terrafugia (Latin for "escape from land") still has a long road ahead of it. The vehicle that flew earlier this month is still just a proof of concept, and a production prototype has yet to be built, tested, and certified. The company says it expects to make the first customer delivery of a Transition in 2011.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10199366-76.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Robot octopus will go where no sub has gone before

INVEST €10 million in a robotic octopus and you will be able to search the seabed with the same dexterity as the real eight-legged cephalopod. At least that's the plan, say those who are attempting to build a robot with arms that work in the same way that octopuses tentacles do. Having no solid skeleton, it will be the world's first entirely soft robot.

The trouble with today's remote-controlled subs, says Cecilia Laschi of the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, is that their large hulls and clunky robot arms cannot reach into the nooks and crannies of coral reefs or the rock formations on ocean floors. That means they are unable to photograph objects in these places or pick up samples for analysis. And that's a major drawback for oceanographers hunting for signs of climate change in the oceans and on coral reefs.
Because an octopus's tentacles can bend in all directions and quickly thin and elongate to almost twice their length, they can reach, grasp and manipulate objects in tiny spaces with extraordinary dexterity.

"So we are replicating the muscular structure of an octopus by making a robot with no rigid structure - and that is completely new to robotics," she says.

We are making a robot with no rigid structure. And that is completely new to robotics
The team will have its work cut out. The octopus has evolved a beguilingly manoeuvrable muscle architecture. Each tentacle has four independent muscles running along its length. These longitudinal muscles are separated by transverse muscles which span the width of the limb with an axial controlling nerve that passes through its centre.

This arrangement keeps the tentacle's volume constant, so when it extends a limb by elongating the longitudinal muscles and contracting the transverse ones, it also becomes narrower.

The nearest engineers have come to mimicking this before is with a snake-like tentacle whose segments inflate with compressed air. But while this machine could move well, it did not become narrower when stretched - nor could it work underwater because of the buoyancy of air.

So Laschi and colleagues in the UK, Switzerland, Turkey, Greece and Israel are testing artificial muscle technologies that will more accurately mimic tentacles (Biomimetics and Bioinspiration, DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/4/1/015006). The team plans to mimic the longitudinal muscles with soft silicone rubber interspersed with a type of electroactive polymer (EAP) called a dielectric elastomer. Apply an electric field to this material and it squeezes the silicone, making it shorter (see diagram).

While Laschi has high hopes for the robot, others are more sceptical. Claire Little, a cephalopod expert at Weymouth Sealife Centre in Dorset, UK, thinks the researchers have underestimated the magnitude of the task. "Don't they realise how flexible an octopus is? They can squeeze through the smallest of holes. This plan sounds a bit crazy," she says.

But Laschi is undeterred. The team has yet to build a tentacle but have built a mechanical simulator that mimics the forces that the EAPs produce. This has proved that the peculiar motions of an octopus tentacle can be copied, she says.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127006.500-robot-octopus-will-go-where-no-sub-has-gone-before.html

For Palm, Some Tough Acts to Follow

OMEBACK stories are irresistibly appealing, in business as well as in sports. But recovering from some strategic mistakes is awfully hard. A case in point is Palm’s failure to anticipate the threat that Apple posed to its core business.

Nearly two years since Apple introduced the iPhone, Palm has yet to release the Pre, the successor to its aging Treo. Much is riding on the Pre, which the company says will available before July 1: sales of Palm’s older smartphones have collapsed.

Last Thursday, Palm reported smartphone revenue for the quarter ending Feb. 28 declined to $77.5 million, from $171 million the preceding quarter. Its net loss of $94.7 million was its seventh consecutive quarterly loss.

“The Pre is a bet-the-company product,” says Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner.
A Palm spokeswoman said it is not the Pre, but Pre’s new operating system, WebOS, that is the bet-the-company offering. Palm plans to introduce additional products for WebOS, but has not announced any specifics.

Apple, meanwhile, has been bounding ahead. Last week, it previewed the third generation of iPhone software, which over all has attracted 50,000 companies and individuals who have registered as software developers. After only eight months, Apple’s App Store is stocked with more than 25,000 applications, the company says.

Palm was once in a similar position, boasting of an unmatched collection of third-party software in the 1990s, when the Palm Pilot brought computing power to the palm of one’s hand.
In the innovation race, Palm has fallen behind not just Apple but also others, like Google and Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, that have introduced products or software in response to the iPhone.

In January, Palm demonstrated the Pre at the Consumer Electronics Show, where it impressed industry observers. The phone uses finger-flicking gestures, which the iPhone popularized, but it also has a full-sized qwerty keyboard, which the iPhone lacks.

Neither Palm nor Sprint, its exclusive United States distributor, has been willing to announce the Pre’s price. I spoke with Brodie C. Keast, Palm’s senior vice president for marketing, about how Palm planned to position the Pre.

“We don’t want to go head-to-head with Apple, and we don’t want to compete with RIM,” he said. The Pre, he suggested, could find a comfortable place between them: “If RIM is about your work life and Apple is about simply entertainment, then the Pre is about having a single phone for your entire life.”

But aren’t different flavors of the single essential phone already here? After all, the second-generation iPhone works nicely with corporate e-mail and provides security features demanded by I.T. departments. And BlackBerry now runs Facebook, Flickr and MySpace software.

One thing that the Pre will do that the iPhone does not is multitasking, running more than one program at once. Having such capability will be welcome, but we must await the chance to test the Pre in actual use. Last week, Apple said it would permit software developers to send notification messages to the iPhone, such as news headlines or Twitter updates, while a user is looking at another software application, but had decided not to add full background processing because it drained the battery unacceptably.

Pre’s success will hinge on consumer perceptions of not only the phone but also of Sprint. In January, Consumer Reports published the results of a survey for cellphone service ratings among its subscribers. Of the 22 cities in the United States in which Sprint is mentioned, Sprint came in last in 20 cities, and third among four in the remaining two.

Asked about the results, a Sprint spokesman said that “third-party analysis shows Sprint is making progress” and that this year it shared first place in the West region, as measured by the Call Quality Performance Study from J. D. Power & Associates. (Sprint remained in last place, alone or with others, in four of six regions in the same study.)

David Owens, a Sprint marketing executive, said that he understood that “consumers don’t perceive Sprint as having the best network,” but that if they were to “look at actual network performance, there’s a gap between perception and reality.” He said that his company’s 3G data network in the United States covered an area populated by 250 million people, which “is significantly larger than AT&T’s.”

(A spokesman for AT&T said that it plans by year-end to expand its 3G network to 370 metropolitan areas, populated by approximately 258 million.)

When the Pre is ready, Palm has a lot of catching up to do in achieving sales that will attract software developers in large numbers. Last week, Apple said that it had sold 30 million devices running iPhone software.

In 2006, the year before Apple unveiled the iPhone, Ed Colligan, Palm’s chief executive, brushed aside the notion that Palm had anything to worry about from new entrants like Apple. “I would just caution people that think they’re going to walk in here,” he said.

“We’ve struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he added. “PC guys are not going to just knock this out.”

Apple, the novice, didn’t merely walk into the business. It climbed a 10-meter platform and executed a back two and a half somersaults with two and a half twists in the pike position.
Palm’s turn.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/business/22digi.html?_r=1&ref=technology

FED & SED Monitors; New technology 2009

Sony presented a FED monitor (Field Emission Display) of 19.2 inches, with a resolution of 1 280 X 960, a luminosity of 400 cd/m2 an exceptional contrast rate which reaches 20.000:1! Refresh rate would be between 24 and 240 images per second and the angles of vision would be total (180°), a perfect table.

Field emission display (FED) technology was invented in the 1970s as a possible alternative to the traditional cathode-ray tube TV but has been never commercialized.

What is a SED Monitor?It’s the next generation of television screens; the SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display) monitors offer a vivid color images, high definition displays and more larger screens.The researches began in 1986 by Canon and Toshiba, and later they formed SED Inc. in October 2004.FED and SED, Two Competitors? The FED approaches technically the SED, The two Technologies uses hundreds of thousands of micro guns (electron emitters), each one able to generate a pixel, from where the advanced quality of the image With no warm up, heat and No backlight. The FED uses micro guns in cones forms, whereas the SED uses micro guns in the shape of slits, the FED is as finer as the SED, it consumes less energy and it offers a broad angle of vision, and a total absence of dead pixels. Sony aims mainly the professional markets in particular the data-processing monitors (As Computer monitors & televisions) whereas the SED is intended for the market of the large screens.The marketing of the SED is planned by Toshiba Corp. and Canon for 2009 with Full HD models of more than 26 inches.

Source:http://www.xcess.info