For a Bigger Hard-drive, Just Add Water

Imagine having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes of information. Imagine an iPod playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies. Now imagine if this could be achieved by combining a computing principle that was popular in the 1960s, a glass of water and wire three-billionths of a meter wide. Science fiction? Not exactly.

Ferroelectric materials possess spontaneous and reversible electric dipole moments. Until recently, it was technologically difficult to stabilize ferroelectricity on the nano-scale. This was because the traditional process of screening the charges was not completely effective. However Jonathan Spanier from Drexel University and his research colleagues have proposed a new and slightly unusual mechanism stabilizing the ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials: surrounding the charged material with fragments of water.

All ferroelectric materials, even Spanier’s wires that are 100,000 times finer than a human hair, need to be screened to ensure their dipole moments remain stable. Traditionally this was accomplished using metallic electrodes, but Spanier and his team found that molecules such as hydroxyl (OH) ions, which make up water, and organic molecules, such as carboxyl (COOH), work even better than metal electrodes at stabilizing ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials, proving that sometimes water and electricity do mix.

“It is astonishing to see that molecules enable a wire having a diameter equivalent to fewer than ten atoms to act as a stable and switchable dipole memory element,” said Spanier, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel.

If commercialized, ferroelectric memory of this sort could find its way into home computers, rendering traditional hard-drives obsolete. The extreme capacity offered by such a device could easily put a room full of hard-drives and servers into a jacket pocket, but this idea can be applied to other computer components, such as ferroelectric RAM.

RAM is necessary in a computer because it stores information for programs that are currently running. As this news release was written, RAM stored the words in a file. Because RAM can transfer files faster than a hard-drive, it is used to handle running programs. However most RAM is volatile, and if the computer loses power all the information in RAM is lost. This is not the case with ferroelectric memory.

Ferroelectric memory is non-volatile, so it is entirely possible for files to be stored permanently in a computer’s RAM. Applying nano-wires and the new stabilization method to existing ferroelectric RAM would deal a double blow to hard-drives in size and speed.

Spanier and his colleagues, Alexie Kolpak and Andrew Rappe of the University of Pennsylvania and Hongkun Park of Harvard University, are excited about their findings, but say significant challenges lie ahead, including the need to develop ways to assemble the nanowires densely, and to develop a scheme to efficiently write information to and read information from the nanowires. In the interim, Spanier and his colleagues will continue to investigate the role of molecules on ferroelectricity in nanowires and to develop nano-scaled devices that exploit this new-found mechanism.

Source: Drexel University

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Wise nano

Just thought I'd give a plug for the wise nano project.

http://wise-nano.org/w/Main_Page

Scientists demonstrate a breakthrough in fabricating molecular electronics

Scientists from Philips Research and the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) have for the first time fabricated arrays of molecular diodes on standard substrates with high yields. The molecular diodes are as thin as one molecule (1.5 nm), and suitable for integration into standard plastic electronics circuits. Based on construction principles known as molecular self-organization, molecular electronics is a promising new approach for manufacturing electronics circuits in addition to today’s conventional semiconductor processing. Details of the technology are presented in the 4 May 2006 issue of Nature.


Although still a relatively new field, molecular electronics can be regarded as the next evolutionary stage for plastic electronics. Molecular electronics holds the potential to fabricate elements for electronics circuits with a functionality that is embedded in just a single layer of molecules.

Instead of using photolithography or printing techniques to etch or print nano-scale circuit features, molecular electronics can be engineered to use organic molecules that spontaneously form the correct structures via self-organization. Nature provides the inspiration by being very efficient at using self-organized structures for conducting charge – e.g. in the photosynthesis in plants and nerve systems in mammals – and assembling such structures with precision beyond the capabilities of any man-made machine or process.

“Molecular electronics will not compete with current silicon-based IC technologies,” explains Dago de Leeuw, a Research Fellow within Philips Research and member of the joint research team that made the breakthrough. “Molecular electronics could be an interesting option for manufacturing plastic electronics. Plastic electronics is very promising for the manufacture of electronics where low temperature or low cost in-line processing techniques are required.”

While there have been many research activities in this field over the last 10 to 20 years, a reliable way of building molecular electronics had not been found. Well-defined molecular-electronics-based diodes can only be realized when the molecules are sandwiched between two metallic (e.g. gold) electrodes. To this end functional molecules are used that (under the proper conditions) spontaneously form a densely-packed monolayer on the bottom electrode. Many approaches have attempted to simply deposit a metal electrode directly on to this monolayer. However, this approach results in shorting, caused by contacts forming between the electrodes, since the monolayer is only 1 to 2-nm thick.

The technology developed by the scientists at the University of Groningen and Philips Research uses monolayers that are confined to predefined holes in a polymer that has been applied on top of the bottom electrode. The key to their success is the deposition of an additional plastic electrode layer on to the monolayer prior to the deposition of the metallic electrode. The plastic electrode protects the monolayer and as such enables a non-detrimental deposition of the gold electrode.

“Based on a molecular self-assembly process we have developed a reliable way to fabricate well-defined molecular diodes,” says Dr Bert de Boer, the Assistant Professor within the Materials Science CentrePlus at the University of Groningen that leads the joint research team. “It will enable us, for the first time, to do reliable and reproducible measurements on molecular junctions, which is essential for the exploration of the potential applications of molecular electronics.”

The success of this research project is further proof of the leading position that the University of Groningen and Philips Research have in plastic electronics research. It also provides a strong foundation to develop new applications for electronic elements in which the functionality has been confined to only one molecular layer.

Source: Philips Research

Carnegie Mellon researchers say use of switchgrass could solve energy woes

Alternative energy solutions
PITTSBURGH-- Carnegie Mellon University researchers say the use of switchgrass could help break U.S. dependence on fossil fuels and curb costly transportation costs.
"Our report indicates the time is right for America to begin a transition to ethanol derived from switchgrass," said Scott Matthews, an assistant professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. A 25 percent hike in gas prices at the pump since December adds to the researchers' call for more ethanol derived from switchgrass, a perennial tall grass used as forage for livestock. Gasoline prices in the U.S. are approaching an average of $3 a gallon. The Carnegie Mellon findings were published in the May 1 issue of the American Chemical Society's Journal "Environmental Science and Technology."
Matthews, along with W. Michael Griffin, executive director of the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, and William R. Morrow, a researcher in the university's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said using switchgrass as a supplement to corn to make ethanol would help ensure the availability of large volumes of inexpensive ethanol to fuel distributors and consumers.
"We need to be thinking about how we can make and deliver ethanol once our corn and land resources are maxed out. Switchgrass can be that next step," Griffin said.
The Carnegie Mellon report also found that ethanol derived from the dry, brown switchgrass, a cellulosic ethanol, could be made in sufficient quantities to deliver 16 percent ethanol fuel to all consumers in the U.S. Researchers said this would likely lead to significant decreases and stability in the price of gasoline.
"It's a renewable resource," Griffin said. "Rather than taking a depletable resource from the ground, switchgrass can be grown again and again."
In a recent address, President George W. Bush made a plea for increased focus on renewable energy, mentioning switchgrass by name.
Scientists have long known how to use enzymes and microorganisms to mine the carbon from carbohydrates to make industrial products. But for decades the technology didn't go very far commercially because fossil fuel – hydrocarbon – was a far cheaper carbon source.
Now that oil prices have climbed roughly 35 percent over the past year, cellulosic fermentation technology is becoming economical.
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization said last week that biofuels may supply 25 percent of the world's energy needs in 15 to 20 years.
"This shift from using hydrocarbons to carbohydrates could revolutionize many industries, including the nation's huge agricultural sector," Griffin said.
While the Carnegie Mellon researchers think switchgrass can be the source of large volumes of inexpensive ethanol in the future, they are concerned about the potential costs and siting concerns of using pipelines, the most cost-effective way to deliver fuels.
The U.S. has 100,000 miles of pipelines dedicated to transporting petroleum. But Carnegie Mellon researchers say the pipelines can't be efficiently used because impurities from the petroleum would adversely mix with the ethanol. "In the long run, our goal would be to make petroleum pipelines obsolete; which raises questions about whether ethanol pipelines should ever be built," Matthews said.
To avoid potential issues with pipelines, the authors expect regional solutions to dominate, such as widespread adoption of 85 percent ethanol delivered by rail or truck in the Midwest. American automakers already sell flexible-fuel vehicles (that can run on ethanol or gasoline) that can be purchased in the U.S.
Much of the discussions today about alternatives to gasoline, such as hydrogen, have similar issues related to infrastructure. "Unfortunately, most of the research time and money is being spent on the fuels without adequate consideration to how we will get it to consumers cost-effectively," Griffin said.

Nanopore will make for speedy DNA sequencing

17:15 10 April 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Tom Simonite

A new technique harnessing a “nanopore” to detect electrical changes as a strand of DNA is passed through it could speed up DNA sequencing more than 200 times. The system could process the human genome in hours, researchers claim, compared with the 6 months it would take in today's best labs.
The technique has been tested theoretically by US physicists using a detailed computer simulation of over 100,000 interacting atoms. The DNA-sequencing nanopore is yet to be built, but you can view the simulation, here (mpeg format).
The device would work by running an electric current across a DNA strand as it is drawn through a nanopore, using electrodes built into the pore's sides. Detecting the changes in current that correspond to the four different bases, or "letters", that make up DNA would read off the sequence as it passed.
"Because we're all physicists working on this we've started at the very bottom – with atoms," explains Johan Lagerqvist, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, US, who worked on the simulation. Lagerqvist and colleagues tested a virtual version of the system by modelling how 100,000 atoms in a short DNA strand, the silicon nitride nanopore, its electrodes and the surrounding chemical solution would all interact.
Multiple measurements
Because DNA is a kind of acid, it has a negative charge and can be drawn through a nanopore by a positive electrode on the other side. But the researchers found that to accurately record the sequence of the strand as it passes through, electrodes on the inside of the pore have to scan each base many times.
"The changes each base causes in the current are not always identical," explains Lagerqvist. "They overlap a little, but we can get around this by taking more than one measurement for each base as it passes." Taking the average of 70 readings from each base made the scanner 99.9% accurate.
In a lab dish, a piece of DNA like that used in the virtual model would take just microseconds to pass through a pore, but modelling the process took 40 high-powered computers around a week. "At a scale this small, each and every atom matters," said Lagerqvist. "We were able to prove that this system could work, and the components to make it already exist, all that's needed now is to put them together."
Nanotubes in nanopores
In fact, a separate team at Harvard University, Massachusetts, US, has been trying build such a nanopore. "Using a nanopore with a current running across it to look at DNA has enormous potential," says Daniel Branton, group leader of the nanopore group at Harvard.
"This technique could also be used for other polymers like proteins or for artificial molecules. And that information has all kinds of valuable uses. We and other groups have been interested in this for some time, but this new simulation gives specifics about how such a device might be used."
The Harvard group are experimenting with adding a carbon nanotube inside a nanopore – a pore left behind after depositing silicon nitride in a way that leaves a pore behind. The carbon nanotube would act as an electrode inside the pore. "We've managed to articulate these tubes and pores together," says Branton. "Because of the favourable electrical properties of the tubes they can function as the electrodes to run current across the molecule passing through the pore."
But although results are promising, rapid scanning of DNA is still dependent on solving a still difficult construction problem. "We have measured some proof of principle signals from molecules in pores," says Branton, "but we're talking about putting things together at the nano level, which is not easily done."

Scientists are meeting the technical challenges of OLED

In the race to create the roll-up TV (and a host of other devices), scientists are continually manipulating organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology. Recently, researchers from Korea have designed a technique that is rigid enough to allow extremely high resolution and flexible enough to cover a large area in a simple process.


Because OLED technology is one of the newer methods to enter the flat panel display market, analysts initially predicted that OLED would have some catching up to do to compete with the popularity of LEDs, LCDs (liquid crystal devices) and plasma screens. However, scientists are meeting the technical challenges of OLEDs and designing technology that proves its worth in many regards: it’s brighter, faster, lighter, cheaper, bigger and smaller than other technologies in certain areas.

OLEDs, like LEDs, are electroluminescent, meaning they generate light when electrically stimulated. As opposed to LEDs that use superconductors to enable electron-hole recombination, OLEDs use carbon-based molecules (which vary depending on desired color). However, the two most prominent OLED techniques have limitations: the pattern transfer method has color constraints, and the shadow mask method can only cover small areas.

In a recent issue of Nanotechnology, scientists Jun-ho Choi et al. present a simple and effective method for OLED displays using rigiflex lithography, a technique that members of the team introduced last year.

“While the rigid nature of the rigiflex mould allows resolution down to the sub-100 nm range, the flexible nature of the mould makes it possible for the transfer to be applied to large areas,” wrote the scientists. “A flat substrate is not necessarily flat in that there is always roughness at the nanometer scale if not the micrometer level….A flexible mould can make intimate contact with the underlying surface over a large area because of the flexibility, which makes large area applications possible.”

To enable large area applications, the method uses low pressure for the transfer of a mold made of poly (urethane acrylate) (PUA). After depositing organic multilayers on the mold, the design is transferred to a glass-coated (indium tin oxide) surface by a simple process based on the adhesion difference between the mold and the surface.

Compared with other OLED techniques, rigiflex lithography demonstrates equivalent luminance strength, but outperformed other techniques with its large size, flexibility and simplicity. The method allows a simple step-and-repeat transfer of each color (red, green and blue) OLED.

“There is no particular limit on the size in principle,” Hong Lee, coauthor, told PhysOrg.com. “With rigiflex OLED, you can 'print' the whole device in one process, whereas with other techniques, you have to do it one at a time, many times for many layers involved in the fabrication.”

Applications for OLED technology currently under investigation include "smart" light-emitting shades; video walls; and electronic displays on clothes, windshields and visors for pilots, drivers and scuba divers.

By Lisa Zyga, Copyright 2006 PhysOrg.com

Solar-powered retinal implant

AN IMPLANT that squirts chemicals into the back of your eye may not sound like much fun. But a solar-powered chip that stimulates retinal cells by spraying them with neurotransmitters could restore sight to blind people.
Unlike other implants under development that apply an electric charge directly to retinal cells, the device does not cause the cells to heat up. It also uses very little power, so it does not need external batteries.
The retina, which lines the back and sides of the eyeball, contains photoreceptor cells that release signalling chemicals called neurotransmitters in response to light. The neurotransmitters pass into nerve cells on top of the photoreceptors, from where the signals are relayed to the brain via a series of electrical and chemical reactions. In people with retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, the photoreceptors become damaged, ultimately causing blindness.
Last year engineer Laxman Saggere of the University of Illinois at Chicago unveiled plans for an implant that would replace these damaged photoreceptors with a set of neurotransmitter pumps that respond to light. Now he has built a crucial component: a solar-powered actuator that flexes in response to the very low intensity light that strikes the retina. Multiple actuators on a single chip pick up the details of the image focused on the retina, allowing some "pixels" to be passed on to the brain.
The prototype actuator consists of a flexible silicon disc just 1.5 millimetres in diameter and 15 micrometres thick. When light hits a silicon solar cell next to the disc it produces a voltage. The solar cell is connected to a layer of piezoelectric material called lead zirconate titanate (PZT), which changes shape in response to the voltage, pushing down on the silicon disc. In future, a reservoir will sit underneath the disc, and this action will squeeze the neurotransmitters out onto retinal cells.

From here we just need to be able to generate the neurotransmitter in the device.

NEWS, but not as we know it

It will mean stories can be defined, on the fly, with a precision greater than a library's card catalogue.
The News Engine Web Services (NEWS) platform is aimed at news agencies, governments and large enterprises and will enable them to develop highly advanced analysis to raw text, with a vast number of potential applications.
News agencies will be able to automatically create very highly personalised news profiles for readers. Governments will be able to analyse social and political trends through newspaper reports, at a much higher level of detail than was possible previously, and large businesses will be able to study market and product developments.
The project that developed the platform even managed to develop a proof-of-concept service for analysing audio, by combining their system with a commercial voice recognition programme.
At the heart of this functionality is the powerful classification and ontology-based annotation system that can work across languages. "News classifications up to now typically consisted of about 12 terms, like sport, world news, finance, that a journalist knew off by heart," says Dr Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of the Knowledge Management Group at DFKI, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and coordinator of the IST-funded NEWS project.
"That's not very precise. Our system can automatically analyse a story and access 1300 classification terms to define it," says Bernardi.
What's more it can access a large ontology of terms related to the specific story definitions within a class, terms like president, head-of-state and government in the politics class, for example. The end result is a very large data set of standardised terms that define the story's content.
That data set can then be used in a huge variety of ways to potentially answer almost any query a user can imagine. A simple example: "Show me news items about the US president in January 2006" will deliver news items about George W. Bush in this time frame.
"We expect that platform users will take the basic functionality and develop around it to respond to the information they want to analyse," says Bernardi. The system also needs to be 'trained' for analysis of specific topics.
To avoid 'false positives', where two people of the same name are confused, for example, or where two cities have the same name, the NEWS team developed IdentityRank, an adaptive algorithm for instance disambiguation.
"It really started out as a by-product of our main work, but it works well and I think it may generate quite a bit of scientific interest," says Bernardi.
It's only one of NEWS' many achievements, and work will not stop there. "We have developed a great network during the project and the consortium has agreed to offer mutual support for a further two years. In the meantime we are pursuing commercial opportunities, several news agencies are interested in the platform, and we had a lot of exposure at CEBIT '05 and '06," says Bernardi

New and Improved Antimatter Spaceship for Mars Missions

Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy).
However, in reality this power comes with a price. Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to be around. High-energy gamma rays can also make the engines radioactive by fragmenting atoms of the engine material.
The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy.
Antimatter is sometimes called the mirror image of normal matter because while it looks just like ordinary matter, some properties are reversed. For example, normal electrons, the familiar particles that carry electric current in everything from cell phones to plasma TVs, have a negative electric charge. Anti-electrons have a positive charge, so scientists dubbed them "positrons".
When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy. This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy.
Previous antimatter-powered spaceship designs employed antiprotons, which produce high-energy gamma rays when they annihilate. The new design will use positrons, which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy.
The NIAC research is a preliminary study to see if the idea is feasible. If it looks promising, and funds are available to successfully develop the technology, a positron-powered spaceship would have a couple advantages over the existing plans for a human mission to Mars, called the Mars Reference Mission.
"The most significant advantage is more safety," said Dr. Gerald Smith of Positronics Research, LLC, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The current Reference Mission calls for a nuclear reactor to propel the spaceship to Mars. This is desirable because nuclear propulsion reduces travel time to Mars, increasing safety for the crew by reducing their exposure to cosmic rays. Also, a chemically-powered spacecraft weighs much more and costs a lot more to launch. The reactor also provides ample power for the three-year mission. But nuclear reactors are complex, so more things could potentially go wrong during the mission. "However, the positron reactor offers the same advantages but is relatively simple," said Smith, lead researcher for the NIAC study.
Also, nuclear reactors are radioactive even after their fuel is used up. After the ship arrives at Mars, Reference Mission plans are to direct the reactor into an orbit that will not encounter Earth for at least a million years, when the residual radiation will be reduced to safe levels. However, there is no leftover radiation in a positron reactor after the fuel is used up, so there is no safety concern if the spent positron reactor should accidentally re-enter Earth's atmosphere, according to the team.
It will be safer to launch as well. If a rocket carrying a nuclear reactor explodes, it could release radioactive particles into the atmosphere. "Our positron spacecraft would release a flash of gamma-rays if it exploded, but the gamma rays would be gone in an instant. There would be no radioactive particles to drift on the wind. The flash would also be confined to a relatively small area. The danger zone would be about a kilometer (about a half-mile) around the spacecraft. An ordinary large chemically-powered rocket has a danger zone of about the same size, due to the big fireball that would result from its explosion," said Smith.
Another significant advantage is speed. The Reference Mission spacecraft would take astronauts to Mars in about 180 days. "Our advanced designs, like the gas core and the ablative engine concepts, could take astronauts to Mars in half that time, and perhaps even in as little as 45 days," said Kirby Meyer, an engineer with Positronics Research on the study.
Advanced engines do this by running hot, which increases their efficiency or "specific impulse" (Isp). Isp is the "miles per gallon" of rocketry: the higher the Isp, the faster you can go before you use up your fuel supply. The best chemical rockets, like NASA's Space Shuttle main engine, max out at around 450 seconds, which means a pound of fuel will produce a pound of thrust for 450 seconds. A nuclear or positron reactor can make over 900 seconds. The ablative engine, which slowly vaporizes itself to produce thrust, could go as high as 5,000 seconds.
One technical challenge to making a positron spacecraft a reality is the cost to produce the positrons. Because of its spectacular effect on normal matter, there is not a lot of antimatter sitting around. In space, it is created in collisions of high-speed particles called cosmic rays. On Earth, it has to be created in particle accelerators, immense machines that smash atoms together. The machines are normally used to discover how the universe works on a deep, fundamental level, but they can be harnessed as antimatter factories.
"A rough estimate to produce the 10 milligrams of positrons needed for a human Mars mission is about 250 million dollars using technology that is currently under development," said Smith. This cost might seem high, but it has to be considered against the extra cost to launch a heavier chemical rocket (current launch costs are about $10,000 per pound) or the cost to fuel and make safe a nuclear reactor. "Based on the experience with nuclear technology, it seems reasonable to expect positron production cost to go down with more research," added Smith.
Another challenge is storing enough positrons in a small space. Because they annihilate normal matter, you can't just stuff them in a bottle. Instead, they have to be contained with electric and magnetic fields. "We feel confident that with a dedicated research and development program, these challenges can be overcome," said Smith.
If this is so, perhaps the first humans to reach Mars will arrive in spaceships powered by the same source that fired starships across the universes of our science fiction dreams.
Source: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, by Bill Steigerwald

Graphite-based circuitry may be foundation for devices that handle electrons as waves

New electronics

A study of how electrons behave in circuitry made from ultrathin layers of graphite – known as graphene – suggests the material could provide the foundation for a new generation of nanometer scale devices that manipulate electrons as waves – much like photonic systems control light waves.
In a paper published April 13 in Science Express, an online advance publication of the journal Science, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France report measuring electron transport properties in graphene that are comparable those seen in carbon nanotubes. Unlike carbon nanotubes, however, graphene circuitry can be produced using established microelectronics techniques, allowing researchers to envision a "road map" for future high-volume production.
"We have shown that we can make the graphene material, that we can pattern it, and that its transport properties are very good," said Walt de Heer, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics. "The material has high electron mobility, which means electrons can move through it without much scattering or resistance. It is also coherent, which means electrons move through the graphene much like light travels through waveguides."  The results should encourage further development of graphene-based electronics, though de Heer cautions that practical devices may be a decade away.
"This is really the first step in a very long path," he said. "We are at the proof-of principle stage, comparable to where transistors were in the late 1940s. We have a lot to do, but I believe this technology will advance rapidly."
The research, begun by de Heer's team in 2001, is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Intel Corporation.
In their paper, the researchers report seeing evidence of quantum confinement effects in their graphene circuitry, meaning electrons can move through it as waves. "The graphene ribbons we create are really like waveguides for electrons," de Heer said.
Because carbon nanotubes conduct electricity with virtually no resistance, they have attracted strong interest for use in transistors and other devices. However, the discrete nature of nanotubes – and variability in their properties – pose significant obstacles to their use in practical devices. By contrast, continuous graphene circuitry can be produced using standard microelectronics processing techniques.
"Nanotubes are simply graphene that has been rolled into a cylindrical shape," de Heer explained. "Using narrow ribbons of graphene, we can get all the properties of nanotubes because those properties are due to the graphene and the confinement of the electrons, not the nanotube structures."
De Heer envisions using the graphene electronics for specialized applications, potentially within conventional silicon-based systems.
"We have shown that we can interconnect graphene, put current into it, and take current out," he said. "We have a very promising electronic material. We see graphene as a platform, a canvas on which we can work."
De Heer and collaborators Claire Berger, Zhimin Song, Xuebin Li, Xiaosong Wu, Nate Brown, Tianbo Li, Joanna Hass, Alexei Marchenkov, Edward Conrad and Phillip First of Georgia Tech and Didier Mayou and Cecile Naud of CNRS start with a wafer of silicon carbide, a material made up of silicon and carbon atoms. By heating the wafer in a high vacuum, they drive silicon atoms from the surface, leaving a thin continuous layer of graphene.
Next, they spin-coat onto the surface a photo-resist material of the kind used in established microelectronics techniques. Using electron-beam lithography, they produce patterns on the surface, then use conventional etching processes to remove unwanted graphene.
"We are doing lithography, which is completely familiar to those who work in microelectronics," said de Heer. "It's exactly what is done in microelectronics, but with a different material. That is the appeal of this process."
Using electron beam lithography in Georgia Tech's Microelectronics Research Center, they've created feature sizes as small as 80 nanometers. The graphene circuitry demonstrates high electron mobility – up to 25,000 square centimeters per volt-second, showing that electrons move with little scattering. The researchers expect to see ballistic transport at room temperature when they make structures small enough.
So far, they have built an all graphene planar field-effect transistor. The side-gated device produces a change in resistance through its channel when voltage is applied to the gate. However, this first device has a substantial current leak, which the team expects to eliminate with minor processing adjustments.
The researchers have also built a working quantum interference device, a ring-shaped structure that would be useful in manipulating electronic waves.
The key to properties of the new circuitry is the width of the ribbons, which confine the electrons in a quantum effect similar to that seen in carbon nanotubes. The width of the ribbon controls the material's band-gap. Other structures, such as sensing molecules, could be attached to the edges of the ribbons, which are normally passivated by hydrogen atoms.
Beyond coherence and high electron mobility, the researchers note that the speed of electrons through the graphene is independent of energy – just like light waves. The electrons also possess the properties of Dirac particles, which allow them to travel significant distances without scattering.
Among the challenges ahead is improving the techniques for patterning the graphene, since electron transport is affected by the smoothness of edges in the circuitry. Researchers will also have to understand the material's fundamental properties, which could still contain "show-stoppers" that might make the material impractical.
De Heer has seen hints that graphene may offer some surprises. "We already have indications of some new and surprising electronic properties of this material," he said. "It is doing things that we have never seen in two-dimensional materials before."

Sonofusion in question

University to Investigate Fusion Study
by Kenneth Chang
The New York Times
Purdue University has opened an investigation into “extremely serious” concerns regarding the research of a professor who said he had produced nuclear fusion in a tabletop experiment, the university announced yesterday.
Fusion is the process the sun uses to produce heat and light, and scientists led by Rusi P. Taleyarkhan, a professor of nuclear engineering at Purdue, said they were able to achieve the same feat by blasting a container of liquid solvent with strong ultrasonic vibrations.
The vibrations, they said, collapsed tiny gas bubbles in the liquid, heating them to millions of degrees, hot enough to initiate fusion. If true, the phenomenon, often called sonofusion or bubble fusion, could have far-reaching applications, including the generation of energy.
The research first appeared in 2002 in the journal Science, but controversy had erupted even before publication. Dr. Taleyarkhan, then a senior scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, reported the detection of neutrons, which are the telltale signs of fusion, but two other scientists at Oak Ridge, using their own detectors, said they saw no signs of neutrons.
Dr. Taleyarkhan, who joined the Purdue faculty in 2003, and his colleagues have published two additional papers in major physics journals, amid the continuing skepticism of other scientists. No other scientists have been able to reproduce the findings.
The university began a review of the research and the accusations last week, Sally Mason, the university provost, said in a statement. “The research claims involved are very significant,” Dr. Mason said, “and the concerns expressed are extremely serious.”
Dr. Mason said that the review was being conducted by Purdue’s Office of the Vice President of Research and that the results would be announced publicly.
Dr. Taleyarkhan did not return phone calls or respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.
Meanwhile, Brian Naranjo, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, said his analysis of data from the last scientific paper that was published by Dr. Taleyarkhan’s group showed a chance of less than one in 10 million that the emission pattern could have been generated by fusion.
Instead, Mr. Naranjo said that the pattern of particles seen in the experiment much more closely matched that given off by californium, a radioactive element that is used in Dr. Taleyarkhan’s laboratory. With $350,000 from the Defense Department, Seth J. Putterman, a professor of physics at U.C.L.A. and the thesis adviser to Mr. Naranjo, has tried to build a replica of Dr. Taleyarkhan’s apparatus and has not seen any signs of fusion.
Dr. Putterman said he told Dr. Taleyarkhan of the calculations last week on a visit to Purdue. “He didn’t have any clear answers,” Dr. Putterman said. “From my perspective, his answers were not satisfactory.”
Californium is present in Dr. Taleyarkhan’s laboratory, stored in a closet about 15 feet from the experiment – close enough to generate the results reported in Dr. Taleyarkhan’s paper if it had been stored improperly.

Easy Up, Not-So-Easy Down - Composite bridge building

Using new fiberglass-polymer materials, contractors in Springfield, Mo., have just subjected a decaying, 70-year-old bridge to a makeover that was as quick as it was dramatic.
Instead of snarling traffic for two to three weeks while they repaired the crumbling deck, girders and guardrails by conventional methods--laying plywood, tying steel rebar and pouring concrete--the workers used pre-fabricated plates and cages developed by a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported university-industry partnership to finish the job in a mere five days. 
The NSF's Repair of Buildings and Bridges with Composites Industry-University Cooperative Research Center is based at the University of Missouri at Rolla and North Carolina State University.  The Missouri researchers joined with their industry partners and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison to develop the new construction solution.
The target of the makeover, an old bridge on Farm Road 148 near Springfield, was one of as many as 156,000 U.S. bridges in need of repair. In fact, it was posted, meaning that local officials had imposed a vehicle weight limit due to the dangerous bridge conditions. Now, however, a fresh layer of concrete conceals the technology responsible for the rapid replacement of the bridge’s crumbling deck and guardrails.
"A key to tackling the challenge of making thousands of deficient bridges in the nation fully operational and safe again is the development of convenient solutions for the rapid construction of long-lasting bridges," says Fabio Matta, a Ph.D. candidate in structural engineering who helped develop the new construction system.  "Advanced composites make the margin for improvements exceptional," he added.
The fiberglass-polymer composites are strong enough to endure several decades of traffic--and unlike steel, will resist the ravages of salt and other corrosive de-icers for just as long. Due to the lightweight and prefabricated nature of the materials, moreover, workers can put the structures in place quickly, saving both time and commuter headaches.
"Since its inception in 1998, we have worked with our NSF I/UCRC partners to provide solutions for our ageing infrastructure," says Antonio Nanni, director of the Missouri center.
"We have demonstrated the economical and technical feasibility of several very attractive technologies," Nanni added. "Their full deployment will become possible only with the modification of existing codes and standards.  It is a long process, but we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel."
The original news release can be found here.

Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century

from PhysOrg.com
With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade. [...]

Scientist Creates Liquid Crystals with High Metal Content

Researchers at North Carolina State University have successfully engineered liquid crystals that contain very high concentrations of metals – potentially paving the way toward the creation of “magnetic liquids” and liquid crystals that may have important ramifications for semi-conductor and solar energy research.

Dr. James Martin, professor of chemistry in NC State’s College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, along with departmental colleague Dr. Jaap Folmer and a team of graduate students, engineered liquid crystals with an inorganic content of up to 80 percent, more than twice the ratio of previously observed organic liquid crystals with incorporated metals, or metallomesogens.

The findings appear in the April edition of Nature Materials.

Liquid crystals are prized for their unique optical and self-healing properties. They generally consist of toothpick- or pancake-shaped molecules that align in the liquid state because of their shape. By using electric fields to manipulate the orientation of liquid crystal molecules, scientists can control whether or not light can pass through the liquid crystalline material. Without such liquid crystals, everyday items we take for granted – such as flat-panel computer displays or LCD watches – would not exist.

The most commonly known liquid crystals are organic molecules composed of carbon,
nitrogen or oxygen. Adding inorganic materials, or metals, to these liquid crystals in order to potentially access electronic or magnetic properties was problematic because the structure of these molecules made it difficult to achieve a metallic concentration high enough to be useful.

Martin’s team recognized that to achieve high metal content in liquid crystals, it was necessary to start with an inorganic network from which liquid-crystalline molecules could be designed. They have achieved success with this strategy by using surfactants, like those in laundry detergent, to help engineer liquid crystalline structure from various inorganic networks. The ratios of surfactant and inorganic components used in preparation of these materials give the scientists a great deal of control over the structure of liquids.

The research could lead not only to the creation of new liquid crystals, but also to a new understanding of the ways in which all liquid structures – even membranes and proteins – are organized.

“Liquids are not random structures, but rather highly organized structures that we can control and shape at the atomic and molecular levels,” says Martin. “When we start exploring the ways in which we can organize these liquids, we can create totally new materials, and access different properties within each material.”

Source: North Carolina State University

Smart glasses switch focus in an instant

NewScientist.com news service
Stu Hutson

This prototype might get their wearer noticed, but future designs aim to be indistinguishable from regular glasses (Image: PixelOptics)
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Glasses that change from "long distance" to "reading" mode at the flick of a switch could prove a revelation for many wearers.
Researchers have developed a prototype that uses liquid crystals to change focus in an instant, thus preventing the eye strain induced by wearing conventional bifocal glasses. Focusing through specific portions of a bifocal lens causes many users to become dizzy or disoriented, while others report increased eye fatigue.
"Bifocals effectively work the same way they have since they were invented by Benjamin Franklin," says Nasser Peyghambarian, a professor of optical sciences at Arizona State University, US, who helped develop the "dynamic" glasses. "But as any of more than 40 million people in America who need bifocals know, they're a pain."
Fresnel lens
The dynamic glasses change focus using a 5-micron-thick layer of nematic liquid crystal, sandwiched between two pieces of glass. Molecules of the liquid crystal reorient themselves when exposed to an electric field and the researchers used this to create a type of dynamic Fresnel lens.
In a normal Fresnel lens, concentric rings are carved into a piece of glass causing light to become focused in a similar way to a conventional lens. Dynamic glasses mimic the Fresnel effect using concentric circles of clear electrodes on the pieces of glass containing the crystal. Activating these electrodes causes the liquid crystal to align into rings and focus light passing through the lens.
A company called PixelOptics, based in Virginia, US, plans to sell glasses containing dynamic lenses commercially within two years. "The prototype is pretty bulky, but when these hit the streets they’ll be virtually indistinguishable from other, very stylish glasses," says Ronald Blum, CEO of PixelOptics.
Infrared laser
PixelOptics first developed the idea of dynamic focusing while working on large lenses for computer screens. Ideally, these would have allowed near-sighted and far-sighted people to read their monitors without their spectacles. "As screens got thinner and thinner, though, the idea became less practical," Blum says. "So instead we decided to move the technology from the computer to the computer user."
The first commercial dynamic glasses will only be able to switch between a person’s normal vision and their "reading" prescription. However, by applying different voltages and by changing the number of current-carrying rings within each lens it should be possible to produce different magnifications using the same lens, researchers say.
Peyghambarian is now working on glasses that can dynamically refocus on whatever the wearer is looking at. These will most probably use an infrared laser built into the bridge of the glasses to determine how far away an object is. "The idea is to put the focusing power found in the lens of a camera on your face all the time," Peyghambarian told New Scientist.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0600850103)

New data transmission record - 60 DVDs per second

Sweet, when can I get one to my house?

New data transmission record - 60 DVDs per second
March 24, 2006
As the world's internet traffic grows relentlessly, faster data transmission will logically become crucial. To enable telecommunications networks to cope with the phenomenal surge in data traffic as the internet population moves past a billion users, researchers are focusing on new systems to increase data transmission rates and it's not surprising that the world data transmission record is continually under threat. Unlike records where human physical capabilities limit new records to incremental growth, when human ingenuity is the deciding factor, extraordinary gains are possible. German and Japanese scientists recently collaborated to achieve just such a quantum leap in obliterating the world record for data transmission. By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower.
"You transmit data at various wavelengths simultaneously in the fiber-optic networks. For organizational and economic reasons each wavelength signal is assigned a data rate as high as possible", explains Prof. Hans-Georg Weber from the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut HHI in Berlin, who heads a project under the MultiTeraNet program funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
A few weeks ago the scientist and his team established a new world record together with colleagues from Fujitsu. Data is transmitted in fiber-optic cables using ultrashort pulses of light and is normally encoded by switching the laser on and off. A pulse gives the binary 1, off the 0. You therefore have two light intensity states to transmit the data. The Fraunhofer researchers have now managed to squeeze more data into a single pulse by packing four, instead of the previous two, binary data states in a light pulse using phase modulation."
"Faster data rates are hugely important for tomorrow's telecommunications", explains Weber. The researcher assumes the transmission capacity on the large transoceanic traffic links will need to increase to between 50 and 100 terabits per second in ten to 20 years. "This kind of capacity will only be feasible with the new high-performance systems."

A Machine With a Mind of Its Own

And here we go, Biology and CS coming together more and more all the time.

Ross King wanted a research assistant who would work 24/7 without sleep or food. So he built one.
By Oliver Morton
For a machine that's changing the world, the device on the lab bench in front of me doesn't look very impressive - it just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A contraption about the size of a human hand moves from side to side along a track. At the far right end of its trajectory, a proboscis-like pipette pecks into a foil-covered plastic container and sucks up some liquid; the hand moves a foot or so to the left, and the pipette squirts out the liquid a few drops at a time onto a rectangular plastic platter covered with an array of 96 tiny depressions. Then it repeats the routine. Whirr, plunge, suck, whirr, plunge, squirt - a mechanical counterpoint to the cries of the seagulls outside the lab in this Welsh coastal town of Aberystwyth. The effect is oddly hypnotic. Ross King, a professor of computer science at the University of Wales and the Dr. Frankenstein behind this most humdrum of monsters, watches me watching it with a wry amusement that might mask a touch of embarrassment. "It comes across better on radio than on TV," he says.
Indeed, King's robotic lab assistant is something of an ugly duckling. High-throughput screening - testing vast libraries of chemical compounds on various types of cells to see whether they interact in ways that might be useful - has become a routine function in modern bio labs, and at the high end machines that do it are positively telegenic. For instance, the Automation Partnership, based in Royston, England, offers one that bobs, weaves, shakes, and stirs like a possessed bartender. Such uncanny dexterity costs roughly $1.8 million - but if you're a pharmaceutical company interested in performing as many experiments as quickly as possible, it's money well spent.
King's humble robot is based on a Biomek 2000, a low-rent fluid-handling device that goes for only $37,900. But it can do something its more nimble cousins can't. Its components - the tireless robot arm, an incubator in which cells cultured on the platter either wither or thrive, and a plate reader that examines the little depressions to see whether anything is growing there - are linked up to a much more exceptional brain. The artificial intelligence routines in that brain can look at the results of an experiment, draw a conclusion about what the results might mean, and then set off to test that conclusion. The "robot scientist" (King has resisted the temptation of a jazzy acronym) may look like a mere labor-saving gizmo, shuttling back and forth ad nauseam, but it's much more than that. Biology is full of tools with which to make discoveries. Here's a tool that can make discoveries on its own.
If this slightly faded town has any contemporary claim to fame, it's Malcolm Pryce's surreal pastiche-noir novels about private eyes and druid mafiosi, Last Tango in Aberystwyth and Aberystwyth Mon Amour. The University of Wales tends to operate well under the radar. It's a quiet hive of computational biology that benefits from small departments and relative isolation, conditions in which like minds are bound to find each other.
Ross King dresses in the black shirt, black jeans uniform that might be called goth geek, a voguish look in bio labs these days. He's soft-spoken and so even-keeled that his flashes of intensity aren't always obvious. But when he tells you that computers will surpass human scientific endeavor in every way, there's true-believer zeal behind the quiet Scots accent.
King came to the borderlands of information technology and biology by chance. When he was an undergraduate microbiologist at the University of Aberdeen in the early 1980s, no one in his class wanted to take on a computer modeling assignment offered as a final project. King literally drew the short straw, and soon he was programming the characteristics of microbial growth into a primitive mainframe. He has hardly looked back since.
Studying AI at the Turing Institute in Glasgow, he set about using machine-learning techniques to predict the shapes of proteins, one of the fundamental challenges of bioinformatics. King, though, found a twist. With his friend Colin Angus, whom he'd met at Aberdeen, he developed software that translated protein structures into musical chord sequences, one of which ended up as a track called "S2 Translation" on Axis Mutatis, an album by Angus' band, the Shamen. Later, at London's Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now called Cancer Research UK), he moved on to using AI to control the drug-related properties of various molecules. However, he soon found that his chemist colleagues weren't interested.
"We'd say, 'We want to make this drug to see if it will work,'" King recalls. "But we could never get any chemists to make the drug. They didn't explicitly say, 'Our intuition is better than your machinery.' They'd just never make the compound we wanted."
It wasn't until he moved to Aberystwyth in the mid-'90s that King found comrades who fully appreciated the potential of AI and machine learning. One of the first people he encountered there was Douglas Kell, a voluble, handlebar-mustached biologist with a clear view of where his field was headed. Kell felt that the piecemeal approach typical of molecular biology from the 1970s onward had been an unrewarding detour. The true aim of biology, he believed, was not the study of individual components and their interactions but a predictive knowledge of whole biological systems: metabolisms, cells, organisms.
In the 1990s, biology was poised to go Kell's way. Genomic research - using then-new hardware like the Biomek 2000 - was starting to produce data at a phenomenal rate, data that covered entire biological systems. That information wouldn't just challenge the capacity of molecular biology to explain what was going on molecule by molecule; it would highlight the inadequacy of the molecule-by-molecule approach.
Automation made it possible to find genes among the growing mountains of data, but it did little to illuminate how they work as a system. King and Kell realized they could begin to tackle that challenge by letting computers not only sift the data but also choose what new data should be generated. That was the key idea behind the robot scientist - to close the loop between computerized lab tools and computerized data analysis.
Once the goal was clear, the collaboration expanded. Steve Oliver at the University of Manchester, who had led the first team to sequence a complete chromosome, lent his expertise in yeast genomics. Another addition was AI specialist Stephen Muggleton, who had passed through the Turing Institute a few years ahead of King on his way to becoming a professor at Imperial College in London. He had worked with King before, and he, too, had been thwarted by chemists unwilling to follow up on ideas arising from his research. For King's team, making machines that could take the next step without human intervention was something of a declaration of independence (and perhaps just deserts).
By summer 2003, the robot scientist was fully programmed and ready to perform its first experiment. The team selected a problem based on a fairly simple and well-known area of biology - "something tractable but not trivial," as King puts it. The assignment was to identify genetic variations in differing strains of yeast.
Yeast cells, like other cells, synthesize amino acids, the building blocks of proteins that King and Angus had used to create their music. Generating amino acids requires a combination of enzymes that turn raw materials into intermediate compounds and then the final products. One enzyme might turn compound A into compound B, which then might be made into C by another enzyme, or D by yet another, while another turns surplus G into yet more C, and so on.
Each enzyme along the way is the product of a gene (or genes). A mutant strain that lacks the gene for one of the necessary enzymes will stall out, unable to continue the process. Such mutants can be easily "rescued" by receiving a sort of food supplement consisting of the intermediate substance they can't make themselves. Once that's done, they can get back on track.
The robot scientist's job was to take a bunch of different strains of yeast, each lacking one gene relevant to synthesizing the three so-called aromatic amino acids - three related chords - and to see which supplements they required and thus work out what gene does what. The machine was armed with a digital model of amino acid synthesis in yeast, as well as three software modules: one for making what might be called informed guesses about which strains lacked which genes, one for devising experiments to test these guesses, and one for transforming the experiments into instructions to the hardware.
Crucially, the robot scientist was programmed to build on its own results. Once it had conducted initial tests, it used the outcomes to make a subsequent set of better-informed guesses. And when the next batch of results arrived, it folded them into the following round of experiments, and so on.
If the process sounds familiar, that's because it fits a textbook notion of the scientific method. Of course, science in the real world progresses on the basis of hunches, random inspirations, lucky guesses, and all sorts of other things that King and his team haven't yet modeled in software. But the robot scientist still proved awfully effective. After five cycles of hypothesis-experiment-result, the automaton's conclusions about which mutant lacked which gene were correct 80 percent of the time.
How good is that? A control group of human biologists, including professors and graduate students, performed the same task. The best of them did no better, and the worst made guesses tantamount to random stabs in the dark. In fact, compared with the inconsistency of human scientists, the machine looked like a radiant example of experimental competence.
The robot scientist didn't start out knowing which strains of yeast were missing which genes. Its creators, however, did. So, from a biologist's point of view, the machine made no valuable contribution to science. But, King believes, it soon will. Even though yeast is fairly well understood, aspects of its metabolism are still a mystery. "There are basic bits of biochemistry that have to be there or the yeast wouldn't exist," King explains, "but we don't know which genes are coding for them." By year's end, he hopes to set the robot scientist searching for some of these unknown genes.
Meanwhile, the team is designing new hardware and software to upgrade the robot's mechanics. King and company received a grant to buy a machine like those from the Automation Partnership, one that can deal with far more samples and keep them from becoming contaminated with airborne bacteria. Then they would like to give the device's brain an Internet connection, so the software can reside in a central server and control several robots working in far-flung locations.
King has his eyes on different fields of science, too. The robot scientist's hypothesis-generating behavior might be just the thing for using pulsed laser energy to catalyze chemical reactions. Applying lasers to chemistry could be very powerful in theory, but variables like frequency, intensity, and timing are hard to calculate, and chemical reactions happen so quickly that it's tricky to make adjustments on the fly. A robot scientist's reasoning and reflexes would be quick enough to try lots of different approaches in a fraction of a second, learning what works and what doesn't through ever-better-informed guesses. King recently started testing this idea at a new femtosecond laser facility in Leeds.
For now, however, the emphasis remains on biology. Stephen Muggleton argues that the life sciences are peculiarly well suited to machine learning. "There's an inherent structure in biological problems that lends itself to computational approaches," he says. In other words, biology reveals the machinelike substructure of the living world; it's not surprising that machines are showing an aptitude for it. And that aptitude makes the machines a bit more lifelike themselves, developing plans and ideas - in a limited sense - and the means to carry them out. If you believe living things are uniquely mysterious, it's easy to imagine that fathoming the secrets of life would be the last intellectual quest to become fully automated. It may be the first.

SpaceX private rocket flight a bust - Yahoo! News

This is unfortunate, but as Musk said, not unexpected. Hopefully the next one will be a success.

By Irene Klotz Fri Mar 24, 8:27 PM ET

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The debut flight of a low-cost launcher developed and financed by Internet billionaire Elon Musk lasted about a minute before the rocket failed due to unknown technical reasons on Friday.

The 70-foot, two-stage Falcon 1 rocket was launched at 5:29 p.m. from a U.S. base on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean's Marshall Islands.

The rocket lifted off from the launch pad but was destroyed about a minute later. It was unknown why the rocket failed.

The rocket was designed and built by privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, of El Segundo, California.

"Clearly this is a setback, but we're in this for the long haul," Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX vice president of business development, told reporters on a teleconference call.

Musk, who sold his electronic payment service firm PalPay to Ebay for $1.5 billion in 2002, has high ambitions for SpaceX. He aims to drastically cut the price of launch services with a family of semi-reusable rockets called the Falcon.

Even before its debut flight, SpaceX, which Musk founded four years ago, had won nine launch services contracts worth more than $200 million.

The cargo aboard the Falcon 1 rocket lost on Friday was a 43-pound, $750,000
Department of Defense satellite called FalconSat 2, which was to study how space plasma can disrupt communications and navigational positioning satellites.

The spacecraft was built by U.S. Air Force Academy students and supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

SpaceX sells its smallest vehicle, the Falcon 1, for $6.7 million -- about one-third the price of similarly sized rockets. The Falcon 1 is a two-stage rocket powered by liquid oxygen and purified kerosene.

Musk, who has sunk more $100 million of his own funds into Falcon's development, has said repeatedly a launch failure would not be unexpected.

SpaceX has three more flights scheduled over the next 12 months and plans to debut its heavy-lift Falcon 9 in 2007.

It is among 20 companies competing for a commercial contract with
NASA to launch cargo to the
International Space Station. Eventually, NASA would like to hand over launches of its astronaut crews to a commercial carrier as well.

Friday's liftoff of Falcon 1 followed three unsuccessful attempts that were canceled due to technical issues.

In an earlier news conference, Musk said he figured his company could withstand one or two major launch failures, but a third disaster would probably put him out of business.

"I really feel that one successful launch will establish us as being fairly reliable," he said.

China to build world`s first "artificial sun" experimental device

As opposed to the "cold" fusion going on with sonofusion, we are also approaching from the hot side, one or the other should be producing good clean abundant energy for us soon.

A full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, which aims to generate infinite, clean nuclear-fusion-based energy, will be built in March or April in Hefei, capital city of east China`s Anhui Province.

[Via Kurzweil AI]

The Shape of Robots to Come

March 16, 2006
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
A segmented tower on a metal and plastic base swiveled around. Two glowing segments, suggesting a head, tilted forward and spoke: "Hello. My name is Scoty. Let me explain a few things about myself."
In a vaguely female synthesized voice — but always in plain English — Scoty, the latest robot from the robotic-toy maker WowWee, demonstrated its functions for a visitor recently.
Chief among them are managing a personal computer's communication and entertainment abilities, finding and playing songs by voice request, recording television shows, telling users when they have e-mail and, again by voice request, reading the e-mail aloud. It takes and then sends voice-to-text e-mail dictation. It takes pictures, and gives the time when asked.
Scoty, pronounced Scotty, has no keyboard and does not require mastery of any specialized computer languages to nudge it to perform and reply in a likeable human manner, its makers said.
While its name stands for smart companion operating technology, "Scoty is more of a companion than operating technologies," said Richard Yanofsky, president of WowWee, which is based in Hong Kong. For lack of a better term, he said, Scoty, which is 24 inches tall, is a "digital maid."
As robots increasingly migrate from heavy industrial tasks, like welding automobile chassis on assembly lines, to home uses as restless toys and venturesome vacuum cleaners, a fetching personality and appealing appearance become critically important. A flashy show called "Robots: The Interactive Exhibition" is touring museums and science centers in the United States through 2012 with the aim of demystifying robotics, especially their harder edges.
"Robots are an evergreen," said Eddie Newquist, president of the creative division at the Becker Group, which makes displays for malls, museums and theme parks and created the interactive exhibition based on the computer-animated feature film "Robots" and its themes of invention. "Kids are always fascinated by robots."
But robotics makers and experts say marvelous mechanics and electronic intelligence are not enough to lure consumers. Robotic novelties that could command steep prices from some early adopters are giving way to lower-priced products (though still rather expensive for toys) that offer personality, utility or both.
At the American International Toy Fair last month in New York, being a robot for a robot's sake appeared to be a losing bet. Sony said it was ending production on its $2,000 Aibo robotic dogs, which are shiny and aggressively techie. In the meantime, Hasbro announced that it was adding cuddly electronic animals to its successful and largely modestly priced FurReal line of toys, including a $30 baby chimpanzee.
"The impetus for FurReal was that we wanted to make the most realistic plush animal that existed up until that time," said Sharon John, general manager of Hasbro, which is based in Pawtucket, R.I. "Robotics were a means to an end, not the end itself."
In a departure from its smaller toys, Hasbro is introducing what it calls a "realistic, life-size" miniature pony, Butterscotch My FurReal Friends Pony, that will be sensitive to light and touch and will embody enough robotics to, among other things, turn its head to see who tickled its ears and shake its head after "eating" its carrot.
It will sniff and whinny and respond to soothing voices when it becomes frightened by the dark or by too much commotion around it, company spokesmen said. And it is made to bear the weight of young children and simulate galloping. Available in the fall, it is expected to cost $300.
Like Butterscotch, many of the robotic toys shown at the toy fair were engineered to conceal their joints and metallic jowls beneath furry pelts and cute doll faces. Even traditional robots, like WowWee's Robosapien series, were packed with more personality than previous models.
Some strived to be friendly, like the coming I-Cat "interactive music companion" from Hasbro's Tiger Electronics brand, a follow-up on last year's I-Dog, a robotic dog speaker accessory for digital music players.
While both the I-Cat and the I-Dog are furless and highly stylized, Ms. John noted that both make use of colored L.E.D. lights that are diffused inside their smooth, seamless and translucent bodies. Scoty, whose core technologies were developed by Philips Home Dialogue Systems in Germany, uses the same approach. Its smooth, segmented body glows with different colors signifying that it is "listening" to and "understanding" requests.
"The overall mission is to find ways of bringing robotics into useful interaction with people," said Colin Angle, chief executive of iRobot, the makers of government and industrial robots as well as consumer ones, including its Roomba series of vacuum cleaners and Scooba floor washers.
"We tried to figure out how to do that," he said. "The challenges are that high technologies can be viewed as scary and distancing."
Besides, Mr. Angle said, his company, which is based in Burlington, Mass., near Boston, is less interested in selling robots to "gadget people" than to residents of "Middle America looking for better ways of living their lives and looking for a little help."
IRobot's popular consumer robots are shaped like overfed Frisbees and roll inconspicuously on tiny wheels performing their tasks. Mr. Angle said there was little efficiency in building highly functioning robots in anthropomorphic form. "It's wildly impractical to do so in any real sense," he said of organic-looking robots.
Yet, many Roomba owners say they discern endearing traces of a personality in the artificially intelligent discs, prompting some users, Mr. Angle said, to name their robots. It was such emotional attachments that led the company to base its new television advertising campaign on the phrase "I love robots."
IRobot, which went public last November, has sold more than 1.5 million Roombas, which cost about $300, since they were introduced in late 2002. The company reported revenue of $142 million in 2005, a 49 percent increase over 2004.
Late last year, the company introduced the iRobot Scooba floor-washing robot, a $400 device that washes, scrubs and dries hard floors with no more prompting than a touch of a button.
"The simplicity of the interaction is one of the most critical things," Mr. Angle said.
It is a point not lost on a range of robots heading for store shelves this year.
Playmates Toys is extending its Amazing series of computerized dolls, which introduced the voice-recognition-assisted Amazing Amanda last year. In the fall it will introduce Amazing Allysen, which is a "tween" rather than a baby doll like its little sister, and requires little more from children than simply to touch it and talk to it.
Its face emotes electronically as it speaks and listens, its makers say. The $100 doll also has a richer vocabulary and keener object recognition than its predecessor, said a spokesman for Playmates, which is in Costa Mesa, Calif.
Mr. Yanofsky of WowWee said he and his company had worked hard to ensure that when Scoty was released later this year — at a price he expected to be $400 — it would be simple to set up and operate.
A demonstration video shows Scoty being removed from its packaging and prompting a new user. "You need to install some software in your computer before I become fully alive," it said.
Mr. Yanofsky said that WowWee planned to release additional robotic companion devices in the coming years. "At the end of the day there will be a seamless interaction with machines in a manner that will be very close to human experience," he said.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

New Artificial Muscles Are Powerhouses

New Designs Are More Than 100 Times Stronger Than Natural Muscle

By Miranda Hitti WebMD Medical News

Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD on Thursday, March 16, 2006

March 16, 2006 -- The latest artificial muscles make natural muscles look like weaklings, according to a study in Science.
Researchers invented two types of artificial muscles that use high-energy chemical fuels -- such as methanol and hydrogen -- instead of batteries. The inventions can outwork natural muscles, with one design showing 100 times the strength of natural muscles.
The scientists included Von Howard Ebron, PhD, and Ray Baughman, PhD. Both work at the University of Texas at Dallas.
The invention should lead to powerful devices that truly "keep on going," states a journal editorial. But the new muscles don't yet give the "exquisite control" needed for tasks like catching and throwing balls, the editorial also notes.
Unplugging Artificial Muscles
Artificial muscles and electrical motors in robots and prosthetic limbs "are typically battery powered, which severely restricts the duration of their performance and can necessitate long inactivity during battery recharge," write Ebron and colleagues.
"Because of high electrical power needs, some of the most athletically capable robots cannot freely prance around because they are wired to a stationary power source," the scientists add.
Their artificial muscles work differently, tapping chemical energy in fuels instead of relying on batteries. One model converts chemical energy in fuels to electrical energy for movement or storage. The other model mixes fuel and oxygen to create heat for energy.
The latter version is "especially easy to deploy in robotic devices," Baughman says in a news release. "Students and scientists of all ages will be working on optimizing and deploying our artificial muscles," he predicts.
"The approach is not without challenges, but it could transform the way complex mechanical systems are built," writes editorialist John D. Madden, PhD. Madden works at Canada's University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Developing fine control over such artificial muscles is one of those challenges, Madden notes.

Researchers simulate complete structure of virus -- on a computer

This looks like the first step toward a virtual brain simulation. When we can map and simulate all the neurons in a human brain, will that be true AI, or just an electronic human conciousness? From there it won't be long before we simulate the entire body, and we can live virtually forever.

An overall computer-simulated view of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus credit: University of Illinois/NCSA
Click here for a high resolution image.

When Boeing and Airbus developed their latest aircraft, the companies' engineers designed and tested them on a computer long before the planes were built. Biologists are catching on. They've just completed the first computer simulation of an entire life form -- a virus.

In their quest to study life, biologists apply engineering knowledge somewhat differently: They "reverse engineer" life forms, test fly them in the computer, and see if they work in silico the way they do in vivo. This technique previously had been employed for small pieces of living cells, such as proteins, but not for an entire life form until now.

The accomplishment, performed by computational biologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and crystallographers at the University of California at Irvine, is detailed in the March issue of the journal Structure.

Deeper understanding of the mechanistic properties of viruses, the researchers say, could not only contribute to improvements in public health, but also in the creation of artificial nanomachines made of capsids -- a small protein shell that contains a viral building plan, a genome, in the form of DNA or RNA.

Viruses are incredibly tiny and extremely primitive life forms that cause myriad diseases. Biologists often refer to them as particles rather than organisms. Viruses hijack a biological cell and make it produce many new viruses from a single original. They've evolved elaborate mechanisms of cell infection, proliferation and departure from the host when it bursts from viral overcrowding.

For their first attempt to reverse engineer a life form in a computer program, computational biologists selected the satellite tobacco mosaic virus because of its simplicity and small size.

The satellite virus they chose is a spherical RNA sub-viral agent that is so small and simple that it can only proliferate in a cell already hijacked by a helper virus -- in this case the tobacco mosaic virus that is a serious threat to tomato plants.

A computer program was used to reverse engineer the dynamics of all atoms making up the virus and a small drop of salt water surrounding it. The virus and water contain more than a million atoms altogether.

The necessary calculation was done at Illinois on one of the world's largest and fastest computers operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The computer simulations provided an unprecedented view into the dynamics of the virus.

"The simulations followed the life of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, but only for a very brief time," said co-author Peter Freddolino, a doctoral student in biophysics and computational biology at Illinois. "Nevertheless, they elucidated the key physical properties of the viral particle as well as providing crucial information on its assembly."

It may take still a long time to simulate a dog wagging its tail in the computer, said co-author Klaus Schulten, Swanlund Professor of Physics at Illinois. "But a big first step has been taken to 'test fly' living organisms," he said. "Naturally, this step will assist modern medicine as we continue to learn more about how viruses live."

The computer simulations were carried out in Schulten's Theoretical and Biophysics Group's lab at the Beckman Institute for Avanced Science and Technology.

Nanotechnology May Repair Damaged Brains

TUESDAY, March 14 (HealthDay News) -- Rodents blinded by brain damage had their vision partially restored within weeks after being treated with nanotechnology developed by bioengineers and neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The findings provide evidence that similar strategies might someday work in humans.
"If we can reconnect parts of the brain that were disconnected by stroke, then we may be able to restore speech to an individual who is able to understand what is said but has lost the ability to speak," study co-author Rutledge G. Ellis-Behnke, research scientist in MIT's department of brain and cognitive sciences, said in a prepared statement.
This method uses an extremely tiny biodegradable scaffold that provides brain cells with a place to re-grow -- like a vine on a trellis -- in the damaged area of the brain. This is the first study to use nanotechnology to repair and heal the brain and restore function in a damaged brain region. The approach may one day help treat stroke patients and people with spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries.
The findings appear online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study included young and adult hamsters with severed neural pathways. The animals were injected with a solution containing certain kinds of peptides (protein fragments) that create a mesh or scaffold of tiny, interwoven fibers. Brain cells are able to grow on this mesh.
Within about six weeks, the hamsters had regained useful vision and the adults' brains responded as well as the younger animals' brains.
"This is not about restoring 100 percent of damaged brain cells, but 20 percent or even less may be enough to restore function, and that is our goal," Ellis-Behnke said.
More information
The Brain Injury Association of America has more about types of brain injury.
Copyright © 2006 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Swedish plans to colonise space

http://www.physorg.com/news11669.html

This looks very cool.  I think with a lot of the new technologies we have for low-cost pre-fab housing, we should be able to apply the principles to something like this and be able to do this kind of colonization for a lot cheaper than what the US government and NASA are proposing it to cost.  Just get government out of the way and let the private industries go at it.  If there is money to be made, they will do it better.

Technorati tags Space, NASA, Colony

RE: Captain Kirk's Clone And The Eavesdropper

This relates to an enduring question I have, which is also somewhat related to longevity. If I were to create a younger duplicate of myself in order to live longer, which one would then be "me"? They would both think they were me, but which one actually would be? I know that I still would not want to die, even though there was another, younger "me" in existance. My dad makes the arguement, how about if you were to go to sleep, and then the copy is made, or a perfect software/hardware copy made, and the older one just never wakes up. IMO I would still be dead, there would just be a copy of me running around. I still don't want to die even with a copy running around. Now for the part that really gets me. If you were to replace each cell in my body with a mechanical duplicate that exactly replicates its function, only do it slowly, would I then perceive that I was no longer me? I think it's a more a matter of perception than existance in any particular place, or it may be that you would need time to integrate the new parts before getting more. If you just yank out the whole brain, maybe that wouldn't work. There is a book I read not too long ago that deals with this issue Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Hopefully we'll both live long enough to find out.

Imagine Captain Kirk being beamed back to the Starship Enterprise and two versions of the Star Trek hero arriving in the spacecraft's transporter room. It happened 40 years ago in an episode of the TV science fiction classic, and now scientists at the University of York and colleagues in Japan have managed something strikingly similar in the laboratory - though no starship commander was involved.

[Via ScienceDaily]

Technorati tags Cloning, Science Fiction, Quantum Physics

RE: Space-elevator tether climbs a mile high

A slim but superstrong cable reaches a mile into the sky, while robots scrabble up and down the line – one day, the cable will end in space

[Via New Scientist]

This is promising, only a few months after the contest, we're progressing very nicely. I think the goal will be reached well before 2018

Technorati tags Space, NASA, contest, Space elevator, Centennial Challenges

RE: New design for transistors powered by single electrons

Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and NTT Corp. of Japan have demonstrated the first reproducible, controllable silicon transistors that are turned on and off by the motion of individual electrons. The experimental designs may have applications in low-power nanoelectronics.

[Via EurekAlert!]

RE: New material brings hydrogen fuel, cheaper petrochemicals closer to reality

A rubbery material that can purify hydrogen efficiently in its most usable form for fuel cells and oil refining has been developed by a chemical engineering group at The University of Texas, Austin.

[Via EurekAlert!]

RE: New technologies enhance quantum cryptography

A team of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, in collaboration with researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., and Albion College, in Albion, Mich., have achieved quantum key distribution (QKD) at telecommunications industry wavelengths in a 50-kilometer (31 mile) optical fiber. The work could accelerate the development of QKD cryptography for secure communications in optical fibers at distances beyond current technological limits.

[Via Flagged Items]