Today's Technologies

Bandwidth on Demand

2008-02-16T00:47:00.001-08:00

An academic internet provides clues about ways to improve the commercial Internet.

Big sender: Internet2’s dynamic circuit network will help provide channels for large quantities of information to flow to and from academic research projects, such as CERN’s hadron collider, above. In the future, the technology may find commercial applications, such as for fast transfer of high-definition online video.
Credit: CERN

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Internet2, a nonprofit advanced networking consortium in the United States, is designing a new network intended to open up large amounts of dedicated bandwidth as needed. For example, a researcher wanting to test telesurgery technologies--for which a smooth, reliable Internet connection is essential--might use the network to temporarily create a dedicated path for the experiment. Called the dynamic circuit network, its immediate applications are academic, but its underlying technologies could one day filter into the commercial Internet, and it could be used, for example, to carry high-definition video to consumers.

"The idea here is to basically look at the network in a different way," says Rick Summerhill, CTO of Internet2. The Internet Protocol (IP) currently used for the Web breaks data into packets that are sent through fiber-optic cables to their ultimate destination. The packets don't have to take a common path through the network; routers act like way stations along the network, examining every packet individually and deciding where it should be sent next. The problem with this system is that large data transfers can clog the routers with packets waiting for direction, and if the packets don't make it to their final destination at the same time, the receiver may experience jitter--interruptions to the data stream that can produce skips in online video, for example.

Summerhill says that, using the dynamic circuit network, a researcher could set up a temporary connection to another location that would work like a phone call: the user's data would be carried directly to that other location, uninterrupted by the traffic of others sharing the network. The result is that large quantities of information could be transferred quickly and clearly.

The dynamic circuit network is really an enhancement of a traditional network, rather than a replacement. Internet2 still has a backbone that uses the standard IP common across the Web. What makes the dynamic circuit network different is that it uses a circuit-switched network, which can be set up so that all the packets follow the same path. Also, those circuits don't have to be in place permanently. Lachlan Andrew, a researcher at Netlab, at the California Institute of Technology, explains that a circuit-switched network determines a pathway for the entire stream of packets, so that at every way station, they can be sent on without having to be individually examined. "Internet2 is developing technology to communicate between nodes, find a path, and construct it," he says.

The idea of the dynamic circuit network, Summerhill says, is that these circuits can be set up on demand, so that traffic needing excellent quality of service can step out of the regular flow. Because data is sent down fiber-optic cables at different frequencies of light, he explains, data from the dynamic circuit network can coexist with IP data and wouldn't require new cable to be laid. Summerhill says that Internet2 is working on software that could eventually be built into network devices to control these different flows and to set up circuits when and where they are needed.

Among the current applications for the dynamic circuit network, Internet2 expects to facilitate the transfer of data from CERN's large hadron collider to researchers at other institutions, and it has done trials in which circuits are opened between the collider and the University of Nebraska. In the future, Summerhill says, the researchers hope that commercial applications develop from the technology. "Think of a network that provided hundreds or thousands of high-definition channels and also provided on-demand video capabilities," he says. He foresees a commercial network that needs both high bandwidth and high quality of service, like some current academic requirements. "The methods for supporting that network are under investigation," Summerhill says. Although right now, there are no commercial implementations, he notes that Internet2 works with commercial partners that might eventually be a conduit to bringing the technology into the ordinary Internet.

Clive Davenhall worked on software for academic circuit-switched networks in the United Kingdom, as part of his role as an engineer at the National e-Science Centre, in Edinburgh, which works to improve methods for conducting large-scale science research over the Internet. Davenhall says that, although people have been talking about dynamic circuit networks for a long time, this type of network hasn't had much of an impact on the commercial Internet, partly because of concerns about how it might function in an environment less controlled than academia. For example, if the average person could set up a dedicated circuit on demand, it might be possible to hog resources that could interfere with other users' experience.

Summerhill says that the dynamic circuit network is still in its early stages, and "still has some evolution to do." He recalls the time that IP wasn't considered ready for commercial applications. So far, four universities in four different regional networks are connected to the dynamic circuit network, says Lauren Rotman, public relations manager for Internet2. Rotman adds that it will be easy to add universities in regions that are already connected. The organization hopes to increase the dynamic circuit network's reach significantly in the coming year.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20277/

Mobile Carriers See Gold in Femtocells

2008-02-16T00:46:00.000-08:00

If consumers buy in to private wireless phone networks, the industry could save money.

Can you hear me now? Airvana's HubBub femtocell (above) could provide better cellular reception inside homes and offices.
Credit: Airvana

On its face, it sounds like a company's technological fantasy: a product sold to customers that will also save the business itself money.

That's roughly the attraction of a young wireless phone technology called femtocells, which promise to give homes and businesses their own private wireless phone networks.

Similar in concept to the Wi-Fi routers that many people use to blanket their homes with wireless Internet access, these little boxes instead provide a network for carrying the voice and high-speed data services of mobile phones. They're designed to give bandwidth-hungry cell-phone subscribers the strongest possible connections at home. But by keeping those customers off the main mobile network and using home broadband connections to transfer data, they could wind up saving the phone companies money, too.

It's no wonder, then, that equipment vendors say that mobile phone companies are rushing into this market--with technology and even commercial trials beginning on both sides of the Atlantic--even before standards have been set or final technological hurdles cleared.

"Usually in the networking business, you build equipment, and then drum up demand," says Paul Callahan, vice president of business development for Airvana, a femtocell equipment vendor. "This time, demand is already really strong."

The femtocell buzz is part of a broader, years-long push by mobile phone companies to persuade their customers to use cell phones instead of landlines for all their communications needs, and increasingly to use their cells for third-generation (3G) applications such as Web surfing, downloading music, and watching videos.

One hurdle, phone companies say, is that mobile phone coverage inside homes and businesses often isn't as good as it is outside. Some homes are in coverage shadows or have thick apartment walls that impede transmissions. In addition, the Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) technology used for 3G services by T-Mobile and AT&T in the United States transmits at a higher frequency than does its predecessor, so it has a harder time penetrating walls.

A femtocell would relieve this problem--in theory. Instead of relying on the mobile phone's nearest cellular tower (known in the industry as a base station), which might also be serving scores of other callers at the same time, a customer would have her own private, high-quality cell-phone connection.

"Our goal is to get to a place where our services are available to all users at all times," says John Carvalho, head of core network innovation for Telefónica O2 Europe, which announced femtocell trials this week.

Boosters of the technology paint femtocell as technology that benefits everyone. Customers get a fast, reliable broadband phone connection at home, and the mobile phone companies get to offload a small piece of their infrastructure investments to their customers.

In effect, every customer who buys and installs his own home femtocell would reduce the load on the carrier's local macro network. The femtocell itself serves as an alternative base station, broadcasting and receiving ordinary wireless signals from cell phones that the femtocell owner permits. This is a strikingly attractive idea, particularly to carriers in big cities that find their networks often overloaded, and find that local regulations or public opinion makes it difficult and costly to set up new antennas.

By using a femtocell, customers will send their voice and data traffic out their own DSL, cable, or fiber connection to the Internet, and then to the carrier's network. This will also reduce the load on the land-based data networks that carry voice and data traffic from the mobile phone companies' base stations to their own central switching facilities. That, in turn, could translate into less infrastructure investment.

Yet all of this will happen only if customers see enough benefit to buying themselves a femtocell--and for now, that's the biggest flaw in this rosy scenario, analysts say.

"What's in it for the user?" asks Keith Nissen, an analyst with the In-Stat research firm. "That's the big question. Right now, there isn't enough."

Broadband subscribers already have fast Internet surfing at home, by definition. Carriers may well offer cheaper cell-phone calls for femto customers using their home connection--but broadband subscribers can already do this using Skype, Vonage, or other voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services. Strong cell signals at home are certainly a plus, but it's not clear how much consumers will pay for this, analysts say.

Without an obvious consumer must-have attraction, demand will likely be tied closely to price, Nissen says. If a femtocell is cheap enough, consumers will latch on to the idea, assuming (and this can be a big assumption) that carriers are able to explain and market it clearly. But this price may be a sticking point for some time.

Today, the equipment cost for femtocells runs in the range of $250 to $300. Sprint, one of the first companies to start commercial trials of the products, is offering them to consumers in Denver and Indianapolis for $50 apiece, along with an offer of lower-priced calling plans--altogether a substantial subsidy.

O2's Carvalho says that he expects equipment costs to come down to between 50 and 80 British pounds (about $100 to $160) once standards are set and mass-manufacturing begins. That's an acceptable price range for consumers used to buying products such as Wi-Fi modems, he says.

The standards process may take several years, however. Different equipment vendors use different techniques for aspects such as security, or for letting the femtocells talk to the carrier's core network. Femtocells have been developed for both rival 3G mobile phone standards--W-CDMA and CDMA2000--but different standards-setting bodies are separately at work on rules for each.

In the long term, analysts expect femtocells to be a fast-growing, successful market. In-Stat forecasts that 40.6 million femtocells will be distributed around the world by 2011. ABI Research is even more optimistic, projecting 70 million in use by 2012.

By that time or shortly afterward, analysts say, femtocell technology may be built into other devices, such as Internet routers for consumers.

Vodafone, T-Mobile, and O2 all announced trials early this year. Equipment vendors say that many other carriers are in undisclosed trials as well. Commercial deployment, in which the products will be distributed to consumers by the phone companies or their retail partners beyond the limited scale of Sprint's two-city experiment, is expected by early next year.

That's all assuming that consumers react positively when they actually get a chance to see how the technology works.

"If it winds up being more expensive, but it provides better data rates, it's probably worth the investment for us," says O2's Carvalho. "If it's more expensive but slower, and it annoys customers, we probably wouldn't take that on."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20293/

Improving Toxicity Tests

2008-02-16T00:44:00.001-08:00

A new initiative will work on cell-based toxicity tests for chemicals.

Credit: Technology Review

As chemical companies develop more pesticides, cleaners, and other potentially toxic compounds, traditional methods of safety testing can hardly keep up. Animal tests, which have been the gold standard for decades, are slow and expensive, and these sorts of tests are increasingly socially unacceptable, too. What's more, the results of animal testing sometimes don't translate to humans, so researchers are eager for better alternatives.

This week, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a multiyear research partnership to develop a cell-based approach that they hope can replace animal testing in toxicity screening. Work has already begun, although it will take years to refine the techniques.

Using systems that are already employed in the search for new drugs, researchers hope to develop quick, accurate methods of toxicity testing for chemicals that are carried out on cells, rather than on whole animals.

That way, instead of having to spend weeks dosing and dissecting roomfuls of rabbits or rats, thousands of chemicals could be tested in a matter of hours using automated systems and human cells grown in a lab. Different kinds of cells could be used as proxies for particular tissues, providing a way for researchers to test the effects of a chemical on the liver, for example, and, ultimately, to predict toxic effects.

The approach "really has the potential to revolutionize the way toxic chemicals are identified," says Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Automated cell-based tests could screen many thousands of chemicals in a single day, compared with the decades spent so far gathering detailed information on a few thousand toxic chemicals.

"We need to be able to test thousands of compounds in thousands of conditions much faster than we did before," says Elias Zerhouni, director of the NIH. The new approach repurposes a technique that's a mainstay in pharmaceutical labs, where high-throughput screening is used to help identify new drugs. Automated systems can test hundreds of thousands of candidate compounds in a single day and identify those that have any effect on cells, and hence may have therapeutic value. The aim of the toxicity-testing research is "to try to turn that around to find compounds that might be toxic," Collins says. Their effects could be assessed according to the number of cells they kill, or by using markers that indicate whether certain functions in a cell are affected.

Because high-throughput screening can handle many thousands of tests at a time, a given chemical can be tested at different concentrations and for different exposure times during a single screening process, producing comprehensive and reliable data that's "not a statistical approximation," says Christopher Austin, director of the NIH Chemical Genomics Center. "It's pharmacology."

"In order to get the answers you want, you need to do all the concentrations, all the times, and that's why you need to have a high-throughput system," Austin says.

Researchers at the NIH have already used high-throughput screening to test several thousand chemicals over a range of 15 concentrations varying by several orders of magnitude, and for exposure times ranging from minutes to days. The chemicals they picked have well-known toxic effects, gleaned from animal studies. By comparing data from high-throughput tests with that from animals, researchers should be able to fine-tune cell-based tests so that they're at least as reliable and as informative as animal experiments.

"Animals are not always giving us the right answer," says John Bucher, associate director of the National Toxicology Program, "so we need to use all the information we can get from different systems."

In a sense, Austin says, this new approach turns the animal-testing procedure "upside down." Rather than giving a rat a chemical and then dissecting the animal and examining its tissues to see the effect of the compound, metaphorically, "we are dissecting the rat first into its component cells, then computationally putting the rat back together."

However, it will take years for researchers to prove--if they can--that cell-based toxicity screening can supercede animal tests so "you cannot abandon animal testing overnight," Zerhouni says. "It will have to be intertwined for a few years."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20294/

Power from Fabrics

2008-02-15T22:39:00.000-08:00

Nanowires that convert motion into current could lead to textiles that can generate power.

Power suit: Gold-plated zinc oxide nanowires (yellow), each about 3.5 micrometers tall, are grown on a flexible polymer fiber. The gold-plated nanowires brush against untreated nanowires (green), which flex and generate current. Yarn spun from the fibers could lead to fabrics that convert body movements into electric current.
Credit: Z. L. Wang and X. D. Wang, Georgia Tech

Georgia Tech researchers have taken an important step toward creating fabrics that could generate power from the wearer's walking, breathing, and heartbeats. The researchers, led by materials-science professor Zhong Lin Wang, have made a flexible fiber coated with zinc oxide nanowires that can convert mechanical energy into electricity. The fibers, the researchers say, should be able to harvest any kind of vibration or motion for electric current.

The zinc oxide nanowires grow vertically from the surface of the polymer fiber. When one fiber brushes against another, the nanowires flex and generate electric current. The researchers described a proof-of-concept yarn in a paper published this week in the journal Nature. They show that the output current increases by entwining multiple fibers to make the yarn.

By the researchers' calculations, a square meter of fabric made from the fibers could put out as much as 80 milliwatts--enough to power portable electronics. The development could make shirts and shoes that power iPods and medical implants, curtains that generate power when they flap in the wind, and tents that power portable electronics devices.

In 2007, Wang and his colleague the 2007 TR 35 winner Xudong Wang (no relation) built a zinc oxide nanowire array that generated direct current when exposed to ultrasonic vibrations. The piezoelectric nanowires stood on an electrically conducting substrate that acted as an electrode. The other electrode was a platinum-coated silicon plate with parallel peaks and trenches carved on its surface. (See "Nanogenerator Fueled by Vibrations.") When the ultrasonic waves pushed the electrodes together, the nanowires bent and produced current.

In the new work, the researchers have substituted the rigid, zigzag electrode with a flexible one. They convert some of the bendable fibers into electrodes by applying a thin layer of gold to them. These gold-plated fibers act as flexible electrodes.

The researchers entangle a gold-coated fiber with an uncoated fiber. When the fibers are pulled back and forth with respect to each other, the individual gold-plated nanowires push and bend the uncoated nanowires, generating current.

The flexibility of the fibers brings the idea of wearable, foldable energy sources closer to fruition, says Charles Lieber, a chemistry professor at Harvard University. The flexibility is also crucial for harvesting energy from extremely small ambient motion, says Thomas Thundat, who studies nanoscale biological sensors at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Entwining the flexible fibers, he explains, leads to very close contact between the gold-coated and the uncoated nanowires. As a result, small motions, such as a light wind or walking movements, make the coated and uncoated nanowires brush against each other and generate current.

"The idea is ingenious," says Min-Feng Yu, a mechanical-science and engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It's like you have millions of nanogenerators outputting electricity simultaneously, each at maximum performance.".

The generator's ability to capture small movements makes it especially useful for powering biological sensors, Thundat says. Microscale sensors can be implanted in the body to measure such things as cancer biomarkers and glucose. But chemical batteries are bulky compared with the tiny sensors, and they have a limited lifetime. "Implanted sensors based on [the fiber nanogenerator] concept could use blood pressure or muscle movement for operation," Thundat says.

The Georgia Tech advance would not be possible without the simple but highly innovative process the researchers have used to make the fibers, Lieber points out. Zhong Lin Wang and his colleagues first cover a polymer fiber with a 100-nanometer-thick zinc oxide layer. They immerse the fiber in a reactant solution at 80 °C, which results in nanowires growing vertically from the surface. Then the researchers use a final trick to keep the nanowires firmly attached to the fibers while keeping the fibers flexible. They dip the fibers in tetraethoxysilane, a liquid used in weatherproofing and protective coatings. The tetraethoxysilane forms two coatings: one between the fiber and the zinc oxide layer, and another on top of the zinc oxide layer.

This tetraethoxysilane coating makes the fiber robust. The zinc oxide layer did not crack or peel off even when the fiber was twisted. The nanowires also stayed put after the researchers continuously brushed two fibers against each other for 30 minutes. The fibers will have to last even longer and have higher output power in order to be used practically, Wang says.

Power-generating shirts might still be out of reach for most. At this point, the fabric might be affordable for the military for use in tents and shoes, says Wang, but "it is probably too expensive for you and me to buy."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20278/

Plucking Cells out of the Bloodstream

2008-02-15T09:05:00.000-08:00

A new implantable device can extract stem cells for therapeutic transplant or program cancer cells to die.

Cell catcher: University of Rochester bioengineer Michael King holds up a section of plastic microtubing lined with proteins that trap cancer and stem cells.
Credit: Richard Baker, University of Rochester

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•	Watch Michael King's new device in action.

Bioengineers have developed an implantable device that captures very pure samples of stem cells circulating in the blood. The device, a length of plastic tubing coated with proteins, could lead to better bone-marrow transplants and stem-cell therapies, and it also shows promise as a way to capture and reprogram cancer cells roaming the bloodstream. The company CellTraffix is commercializing the technology.

When patients get bone-marrow transplants, what they're really receiving are infusions of a type of adult stem cell. Bone-marrow-derived stem cells play a crucial role in renewing the blood throughout adulthood, creating new cells to carry oxygen and fight infections. These adult stem cells can be sampled using the new device.

The new device mimics a small blood vessel: it's a plastic tube a few hundred micrometers in diameter that's coated with proteins called selectins. The purpose of selectins in the body seems to be to slow down a few types of cells so that they can receive other chemical signals. A white blood cell, for instance, might be instructed to leave the circulation and enter a wound, where it would protect against infection. "Selectins cause [some] cells to stick and slow down," says Michael King, a chemical engineer at the University of Rochester who's developing the cell-capture devices. Different types of selectins associate with different kinds of cells, including platelets, bone-marrow-derived stem cells, and immune cells such as white cells.

In an upcoming publication in the British Journal of Hematology, King reports that selectin-coated microtubes implanted in rats can capture very pure samples of active stem cells from circulating blood. He gave a similar demonstration of stem-cell purification with samples taken from human bone marrow last year. Cancer patients often require bone-marrow transplants following harsh chemotherapy and radiation treatments that kill adult stem cells in the blood.

The purity of these transplants can be a matter of life or death. When the transplant is derived from the patient's own bone marrow--extracted before treatment--it's critical that it not contain any cancer cells. When it comes from another person, there's a chance that the donor's immune cells will attack the recipient if they're not filtered out. But current purification methods are slow and inefficient, King says. Those that rely on antibody recognition or cell size and shape typically extract only a small fraction of the stem cells in a blood sample; the rest go to waste.

Twenty-eight percent of the cells captured by King's implants were stem cells. "This is astounding given how rare they are in the bloodstream," says King. Implants would probably not be able to capture enough stem cells for transplant. But King believes that filtering a donor's blood through a long stretch of selectin-coated tubing outside the body, in a process similar to dialysis, would be very efficient. "This technique will clearly be useful outside the body" as a means of purifying bone-marrow-derived stem cells, says Daniel Hammer, chair of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hammer believes that King's devices will also have broader applications as implants that serve to mobilize a person's own stem cells to regenerate damaged tissues. By slowing down cells with selectins and then exposing them to other kinds of signals, says Hammer, King's devices "could capture stem cells, concentrate them, and differentiate them, without ever having to take the cells out of the body." There might be a way to use selectins to extract neural stem cells, too.

"This is a very broad-reaching discovery," says Hammer. Indeed, King says that he has already had some success using selectin coatings to reprogram cancer cells.

Cancer cells appear to highjack selectin pathways in order to spread to other parts of the body, the process known as metastasis. Tumors shed cells into the bloodstream. Some of those cells seem to exit with the help of selectins; ensconced in new tissue, they then establish new tumors. These secondary tumors cause more cancer deaths than initial tumors do.

King says he has unpublished work demonstrating that leukemia cells that roll along a coating of selectins and a cancer-specific signaling molecule will go through a process called programmed cell death. Healthy stem cells also roll across the device because they're attracted to the selectins, but the death signal doesn't affect them. Leukemia is a blood cancer, but King expects that the anticancer coating would work for solid tumors as well. Devices lined with these coatings might be implanted into cancer patients to prevent or slow metastasis.

King hopes to test antimetastasis implants in animals this year. He's collaborating with Jeffrey Karp, a bioengineer at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and Robert Langer, an MIT Institute Professor, to develop selectin coatings that are stable over months rather than days.

CellTraffix CEO Tom Fitzgerald says that the company's first product, a kit that will enable researchers to capture large numbers of stem and cancer cells in the lab, will likely reach the market early next year. The company hopes to begin clinical testing of the anticancer coatings by early 2010.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20204/

Wiring Up DNA

2008-02-15T09:04:00.000-08:00

Measuring the conductivity of DNA could provide a way to detect mutations.

Hot-wired: By placing a double-stranded DNA segment in a gap in a single-walled carbon nanotube, researchers have measured the electrical properties of the biological molecule. Since even a single mismatch in the DNA letters affects the conductivity of the segment, the system could eventually be the basis of chemical sensors to detect mutations in DNA.
Credit: Colin Nuckolls

By wiring up DNA between two carbon nanotubes, researchers have measured the molecule's ability to conduct electricity. Introducing just a single letter change can drastically alter the DNA's resistance, the researchers found, a phenomenon that they plan to exploit with a device that can rapidly screen DNA for disease-linked mutations.

Measuring the electrical properties of DNA has proved tricky because the molecule and its attachments to electrodes tend to be very fragile. But in the new study, Colin Nuckolls, a professor of chemistry at Columbia University, in New York, teamed up with Jacqueline Barton, a professor of chemistry at Caltech, in Pasadena, CA, who's an expert in DNA charge transport. Nuckolls's group had previously developed a method for securely hooking up biological molecules to single-walled carbon nanotubes, which act as the electrodes in a miniscule circuit.

The researchers used an etching process to slice a gap in a carbon nanotube; they created a carboxylic acid group on the nanotube at each end of the gap. They then reacted these groups with DNA strands whose ends had been tagged with amine groups, creating tough chemical amide links that bond together the nanotubes and DNA. The amide linkages are robust enough to withstand enormous electrical fields.

The team estimated that DNA strands of around 15 base pairs (around 6 nanometers) in length had a resistance roughly equivalent to that of a similar-sized piece of graphite. This is a finding that the researchers might have expected since the chemical base pairs that constitute DNA create a stack of aromatic rings similar to those in graphite.

"In my opinion, the results of this work will survive, in contrast to many other publications on this topic," says chemist Bernd Giese, of the University of Basel, Switzerland. Previous estimates of DNA's conductivity have varied dramatically, Giese says, partly because it was unclear if the delicate DNA or its connection to electrodes had become damaged by the high voltages used. "One thinks one has burned the DNA to charcoal," Giese says. "It's extremely complicated experimentally."

Barton and Nuckolls performed two tricks with their wired-up DNA. For their first, they introduced a restriction enzyme that bound and cut the DNA at a specific sequence. When severed, the current running through the DNA vanished. "It's a way of biochemically blowing a fuse," Nuckolls says. It also demonstratesthat the DNA keeps its native structure in the circuit; if it had not, the enzyme would not recognize and cut the molecule.

For their second trick, the researchers introduced a single base-pair mismatch into the DNA so that, for example, a C was paired up with an A (rather than its normal partner, G). This tweak boosted the molecule's resistance some 300-fold, probably because it distorts the double helical structure. They could do this easily by connecting only one of DNA's two strands into the circuit. The second strand - which can either be a perfect match to the first or contain a mismatch - can lift on or off.

Showing the electrical effect of such sequence mismatch and enzyme cutting is the real strength of the experiments, says Danny Porath, of Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, Israel, who has also measured current through DNA. "They play with the parameters and show that conductivity of DNA clearly depends on them, and that's beautiful," he says.

Nuckolls is now working to exploit this discovery to detect single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), the one-letter variations in DNA that are linked to, for example, susceptibility to Alzheimer's, diabetes, and many other major diseases. Nuckolls hopes that his method can be used to identify SNPs more rapidly and with greater sensitivity than existing methods. In such a device, a reference strand of DNA is wired into the circuit and other strands allowed to pair up with it. If the second strand carries a different base at the position of the SNP, this would be enough to trigger a change in the current through a nanoscale circuit, just as the base-pair mismatch did. Nuckolls says that he is already working with electrical engineers to create a sensor that can slot into existing semiconductor chips, making it cheap and readily available. "It's one of our big focuses, and we're pretty close," he says.

The team is likely to have competition. Late last year, a group led by Wonbong Choi, of Florida International University, in Miami, reported that it had strung 80 base pairs of DNA between two carbon nanotubes and sent current through the DNA. Choi says that he is working to create a sensor that can rapidly reveal the presence of specific genetic sequences--such as the avian influenza virus--by looking at changes in current through the tiny circuit.

Barton, meanwhile, is intent on finding out whether the conductivity of DNA serves any biological purpose in the cell. She has evidence that proteins bound to DNA may detect DNA damage by changes in its electrical properties, perhaps triggering repair of the damage. "We think it's something nature takes advantage of," she says. "It's a radical idea, but I think as we get more and more evidence, the case will be built."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20205/

A Better Way to Capture Carbon

2008-02-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

New materials provide a potentially cheaper way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Carbon-capturing crystals: This is an optical micrograph of a new material that can pull carbon dioxide from a stream of gases, making it possible to sequester the greenhouse gas.
Credit: Omar Yaghi

Researchers have developed porous materials that can soak up 80 times their volume of carbon dioxide, offering the tantalizing possibility that the greenhouse gas could be cheaply scrubbed from power-plant smokestacks. After the carbon dioxide has been absorbed by the new materials, it could be released through pressure changes, compressed, and, finally, pumped underground for long-term storage.

Such carbon dioxide capture and sequestration could be essential to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, especially in countries such as the United States that depend heavily on coal for electricity. The first stage, capturing the carbon, is particularly important, since it can account for 75 percent of the total costs, according to the Department of Energy.

The new materials, described this week in Science, were created by researchers at UCLA led by Omar Yaghi, a chemist known for producing materials with intricate microscopic structures. They absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide but do not absorb other gases.

Techniques already exist for capturing carbon dioxide from smokestacks, but they use large amounts of energy--15 to 20 percent of the total electricity output of a power plant, according to one estimate, Yaghi says. That is because existing materials, known as amines, need to be heated to release the carbon dioxide they've absorbed. Indeed, capturing and compressing carbon dioxide through these existing methods can add 80 to 90 percent to the cost of producing electricity from coal, says Thomas Feeley, a project manager at the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Feeley says that Yaghi's materials "compare favorably" with other experimental materials that absorb carbon dioxide that are being developed to help bring down these costs. Yaghi says that his materials could lower costs considerably since they use less energy, although exactly how much will require testing the materials at power plants.

Beyond being potentially useful in smokestacks, the materials could be employed in coal gasification plants. In these plants, coal is first processed to produce a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen is then used to generate electricity. The carbon dioxide could be captured using a solvent that increases energy consumption. But as in the smokestack-based process, the new UCLA materials could require less energy.

The materials belong to a class called zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs). They're made of metal atoms bridged by one of a number of ring-shaped organic molecules called imidazolates. Prior to Yaghi's research, 24 types of ZIFs had been developed over the course of 12 years. Yaghi made 25 new versions in just three months. These materials can be extremely versatile, since the metal atoms can act as powerful catalysts, and the organic molecules can serve as anchors for a number of functional molecules.

ZIF proliferation: New automated techniques allow researchers to quickly synthesize dozens of new materials called zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs). Credit: Omar Yaghi

The new materials absorb carbon dioxide in part because they're extremely porous, which gives them a high surface area that can come into contact with carbon dioxide molecules. The most porous of the materials that Yaghi reports in Science contain nearly 2,000 square meters of surface area packed into one gram of material. One liter of one of Yaghi's materials can store all of the molecules of carbon dioxide that, at zero °C and at ambient pressure, would take up a volume of 82.6 liters.

While the exact mechanisms are not fully understood, Yaghi thinks that the slightly negative charge of organic molecules in his material attracts carbon dioxide molecules, which have a slightly positive charge. As a result, carbon dioxide is held in place, while other gases move through the material. This method of trapping carbon dioxide is better than some other methods because it does not involve strong covalent bonds, so it doesn't take much energy to release the gas.

The next step for the materials is commercialization. This means scaling up production and incorporating the materials into a system at a power plant, such as by packing the materials into canisters that can be filled with pressurized exhaust gases--something that the UCLA group says could be possible in two to three years. Yaghi estimates that the materials could easily be made in large quantities, since they are similar to other materials he has developed that can now be made by the ton by BASF, the giant chemical company. "Now it's in the hands of industry," Yaghi says. And he has developed automated techniques that could lead to more materials that could have even better properties.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20295/

Information technology governance

2008-02-14T21:01:00.000-08:00

Problems with IT governance

Nicholas Carr has emerged as a prominent critic of the idea that information technology confers strategic advantage.^[5] This line of criticism might imply that significant attention to IT governance is not a worthwhile pursuit for senior corporate leadership. However, Carr also indicates counterbalancing concern for effective IT risk management.

The manifestation of IT governance objectives through detailed process controls (e.g. in the context of project management) is a frequently controversial matter in large scale IT management. See Agile methods. The difficulties in achieving a balance between financial transparency and cost-effective data capture in IT financial management (i.e., to enable chargeback) is a continual topic of discussion in the professional literature^[6], ^[7] and can be seen as a practical limitation to IT governance

Relationship to other IT disciplines

IT governance is supported by disciplines such as:

Business Service Management
Business Technology Optimization
Enterprise architecture
IT asset management
IT portfolio management
IT security assessment
IT service management
Project governance
Project management and Program management in the enterprise IT context (including software engineering where appropriate)

Frameworks

There are quite a few supporting mechanisms developed to guide the implementation of information technology governance. Some of them are:

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a detailed framework with hands-on information on how to achieve a successful governance of IT, developed and maintained by the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce, in partnership with the IT Service Management Forum.

Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) is another approach to standardize good information technology security and control practices. This is done by providing tools to assess and measure the performance of 34 IT processes of an organization. The ITGI (IT Governance Institute) is responsible for CObIT

The ISO/IEC 27001 (ISO 27001) is a set of best practices for organizations to follow to implement and maintain a security program. It started out as British Standard 7799 ([BS7799]), which was published in the United Kingdom and became a well known standard in the industry that was used to provide guidance to organizations in the practice of information security.

The Information Security Management Maturity Model ISM3 is a process based ISM maturity model for security.

AS8015-2005 Australian Standard for Corporate Governance of Information and Communication Technology

Others include:

BS7799 - focus on IT security
CMM - The Capability Maturity Model - focus on software engineering

Non-IT specific frameworks of use include:

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) - method to assess an organization’s performance in many different areas.
Six Sigma - focus on quality assurance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology_governance

Rethinking the Cell Phone

2008-02-14T20:59:00.000-08:00

An Israeli startup has made a modular mobile phone that can work on its own or slip into other electronic devices. Will it catch on?

Mini mobile: The Modu, a cell phone slightly larger than a domino, is designed to slip into other electronic devices, such as picture frames, stereo systems, and bigger phones.
Credit: Modu Mobile

If you could reduce a mobile phone to its essence, it would look like the Modu. This tiny phone, which is slightly larger than a domino, is capable of sending and receiving calls and text messages. It can store contacts and MP3s with up to 16 gigabytes of storage capacity, and it has a small but usable screen and a sparse keypad that lacks numbers. Launched this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Modu can be used as a stand-alone phone. But more important, it can also be slipped into a variety of "jackets," such as in-car MP3 players, Global Positioning Systems, and larger cell phones, that expand the Modu's functions and change its look.

Modu Mobile, the Israeli startup that launched the phone, is hoping to change the way that consumers think about their handhelds, explains Itay Sherman, the company's chief technology officer. Today, people generally have one phone that they use all the time, and they use it for a year or two because it's too expensive to buy a new model more frequently. But Sherman says that the idea of one phone for all occasions doesn't mesh with people's lifestyle. Sometimes you want to walk around with the smallest possible phone, he says; other times you want a good messaging device with a large keyboard, or a media player with a large screen. "Instead of buying a completely new phone, the jacket enables you to switch."

In making the Modu, Sherman says, there were a number of technical considerations. While semiconductor technology is at the point where chips are small enough to easily fit into the mini mobile, his team also had to shrink the phone's other features, such as the screen, keypad, and battery. The display, for instance, needed to be specially designed: it uses organic light-emitting diodes and is a mere one millimeter thick. (See "Super-Vivid, Super-Efficient Displays.") Knowing that it would be impractical to put a full, numbered keypad on the Modu, Sherman says, his team designed a simpler keypad that lets people access menus on the screen, similar to those of MP3 players. The lithium-ion polymer battery, which uses the same basic technology as traditional phone batteries, was customized to be thin and long, while still providing about 3 hours of talk time and 100 hours of standby.

Once a user plugs the Modu into a jacket, however, the features improve. "The jacket may also have a battery," says Sherman, and the combined device shares the load between the two batteries. "It extends the talk time and standby time."

One of the main innovations, says Sherman, is that the software that runs the Modu automatically reconfigures when it is put in another device. A resource file defines the way the Modu and jacket will work together. "Every jacket you plug into, you'll get a completely different experience, yet it keeps the basic functionality in all cases so that it's familiar to the user," he says.

Beyond cell-phone jackets, Modu Mobile will offer other consumer-electronics devices in which the phone module can be inserted, improving the basic functions of the device. For instance, a camera with the Modu could wirelessly send pictures to other phones, and a car entertainment system designed for the Modu could let a user access his MP3s while enabling hands-free calling.

This isn't the first time that consumer-electronics companies have tried to build modular phones, says Avi Greengart, the research director for mobile devices at Current Analysis, a market research firm. He points to IXI Mobile, the maker of the Ogo mobile messenger. "It had the notion of connecting multiple devices together via Bluetooth," he explains. A user would have a basic storage module and then connect to a large display or media player. However, the technology didn't catch on because few people think to buy a shell of a media player and then the other pieces to make it work, Greengart says.

Greengart is skeptical that the Modu will take off. "It makes sense on paper, but in the past, every effort to create modular types of devices has failed because [the companies] miss the way consumers actually buy products," he says. "It requires a change in consumer behavior ... Consumers don't buy [multiple] modules at once or have the foresight to know that they're going to want more ... down the road."

Modu Mobile hopes to buck the trend by getting people used to thinking in terms of jackets and the Modu. "We want to educate the market on the flexibilities and offerings," says Sherman. The company's first products will be available in October in Italy, Russia, and Israel. The initial package, which will include the Modu and two phone jackets, will cost 200 euros, an amount that the company expects will be subsidized by cell-phone carriers. In 2009, the company will extend to operators in the rest of Europe and in the United States, Sherman says.

Greengart admits that by inking deals with major carriers in the three initial countries, Modu Mobile has overcome one of the hurdles in making a marketable phone. "Oftentimes, the biggest challenge with a mobile device is just getting it in front of the consumers," he says. "They have carriers in Israel, Italy, and Russia. We'll see how much weight they put behind it."

The Modu is a different idea, and "the industry could use more 'different,'" Greengart says. But it will be hard for the company to gain traction in the mobile market and, especially, compete with Apple's popular iPhone. "I hate to say it because it sounds cliché," admits Greengart, "but no matter what jacket you slip this thing into, it's not going to be an iPhone."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20276/?a=f

Discovering Novel Pathogens

2008-02-14T20:57:00.001-08:00

Next-generation sequencing uncovers disease-causing microbes.

Mystery microbes: A next-generation sequencing technique allowed researchers to identify the virus that likely killed three transplant patients who received organs from the same donor. Because the technique is "unbiased," it could pick up the virus even though it was highly dissimilar at the nucleotide level to its nearest viral kin, lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). In the top panel, cells infected with the new virus have been stained using antibodies against LCMV and its relatives. In the bottom panel, individual virus particles (denoted with arrows) are revealed by electron microscopy.
Credit: New England Journal of Medicine

The next-generation sequencing technology that was harnessed to assemble the entire sequence of James Watson's genome has been put to a new and potentially life-saving use: identifying novel pathogens. After several other identification techniques failed, the new sequencing approach was used to discover a never-before-seen virus that was likely responsible for the deaths of three transplant patients who received organs from the same donor.

The technique, called unbiased high-throughput pyrosequencing, or 454 sequencing, was developed by 454 Life Sciences, owned by Roche. This is the first time it was used to probe for the cause of an infectious-disease outbreak in humans, and experts say that it could ultimately usher in a new era in discovering and testing for agents of infectious disease.

"This is going to begin to allow us to understand the etiology of infections that had previously gone undiagnosed," says Richard Whitley, professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who was not involved with the research.

Last spring, several weeks after receiving organs from a single donor, three Australian transplant patients became ill with fever and encephalitis; within six weeks of the operation, all three had died. When traditional methods failed to identify the cause of the patients' deaths, the Victorian Infectious Disease Reference Laboratory turned to W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Laboratory for Immunopathogenesis and Infectious Diseases at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, for assistance.

To find the mystery pathogen responsible for the deaths, Lipkin's team extracted RNA from the tissues of two of the patients and prepared the sample by treating it with an enzyme that removed all traces of human DNA; this enriched the sample for viral sequences. The researchers then amplified the RNA into millions of copies of the corresponding DNA using a reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Usually, PCR requires some advance knowledge of the sequence in question because it relies on molecular primers that match the string of code to be amplified. But 454 sequencing avoids that problem by using a large number of random primers.

The resulting strands of DNA were sequenced using pyrosequencing, which determines the sequence of a piece of DNA by adding new complementary nucleotides one by one in a reaction that gives off a burst of light. Pyrosequencing allows for fast, simultaneous analysis of hundreds of thousands of DNA fragments. Although traditional pyrosequencing generally produces relatively short chunks of sequence compared with earlier sequencing techniques, 454 Life Sciences has improved upon the technology such that longer reads are possible.

When 454 Life Sciences used this technique to sequence James Watson's genome, its approach was nearly identical. Lipkin's modification was to eliminate human DNA so that only the mystery pathogen's genetic material would remain.

Once the sequences were generated, Lipkin used computational techniques developed in his laboratory to filter out any remaining human sequences (which sometimes linger due to the presence of human RNA) and to piece together the many sequence fragments into longer strings. Of the more than 100,000 sequences initially produced, a mere 14 matched viral proteins in a database of all known microbes' sequences.

"If we had used a different sequencing strategy--one that gives you shorter reads--or if we had not used the sample preparation to enrich [for viral sequences], we would never have captured those," says Lipkin.

The virus from the patients' tissues was most closely related to a pathogen called lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV), which is known to cause meningitis in humans. While LCMV has been implicated in transplant-associated illness before, the sequence of the new virus was different enough that existing methods could not have detected its presence. The results of the analysis were published online last week in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Once it had characterized the LCMV-like virus, the group was able to design probes to test specifically for its presence. The group found evidence of the virus in several tissue samples from all three transplant recipients.

Unbiased high-throughput pyrosequencing has become a critical tool in Lipkin's lab, which is a member of the World Health Organization and helps train and equip public-health workers around the world. Lipkin has successfully used the technique to identify 20 viruses to date, including the Israel acute paralysis virus thought to be responsible for colony collapse disorder in bees. "There are all sorts of things that we've been able to identify using this approach," says Lipkin. "It's really quite powerful."

Because the sequencing technique is not biased toward known organisms, it is ideally poised to track down previously unknown pathogens. "We're finding the needle in the haystack, even without knowing what the needle looks like a priori," says Michael Egholm, vice president of research and development at 454 Life Sciences and a coauthor of the NEJM report.

"There's an enormous amount of uncharted territory in microbiology," says Lipkin. As many as 40 percent of cases of central nervous system disease cannot be traced back to a specific culprit. For respiratory illness, the figure is 30 to 60 percent. In the United States alone, 5,000 deaths each year result from unidentified food-borne infections. "The advent of molecular tools like the one we've described here will be important in identifying the pathogenesis of a wide variety of diseases, acute and chronic," says Lipkin.

According to Whitley, understanding the microorganisms that cause these diseases could lead to more effective treatments.

As powerful as 454 sequencing is for discovering new pathogens, it is not fast or cost efficient enough for use in routine screening of transplant tissue. But microbes discovered using this technique could be incorporated into existing screening techniques. "As we do more and more transplantation medicine," says Lipkin, "it's going to become critical that we find faster, more efficient, less expensive ways to screen to ensure safety."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20191/

Information technology governance

2008-02-13T23:22:00.000-08:00

Information Technology Governance, IT Governance or ICT Governance, is a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology (IT) systems and their performance and risk management. The rising interest in IT governance is partly due to compliance initiatives (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley (USA) and Basel II (Europe)), as well as the acknowledgment that IT projects can easily get out of control and profoundly affect the performance of an organization.

A characteristic theme of IT governance discussions is that the IT capability can no longer be a black box. The traditional handling of IT management by board-level executives is that due to limited technical experience and IT complexity, key decisions are deferred to IT professionals. IT governance implies a system in which all stakeholders, including the board, internal customers and related areas such as finance, have the necessary input into the decision making process. This prevents a single stakeholder, typically IT, being blamed for poor decisions. It also prevents users from later complaining that the system does not behave or perform as expected:

A board needs to understand the overall architecture of its company's IT applications portfolio … The board must ensure that management knows what information resources are out there, what condition they are in, and what role they play in generating revenue… ^[1]

Definitions

There are narrower and broader definitions of IT governance. Weill and Ross focus on "Specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behaviour in the use of IT."^[2]

In contrast, the IT Governance Institute expands the definition to include underpinning mechanisms: "… the leadership and organisational structures and processes that ensure that the organisation’s IT sustains and extends the organisation’s strategies and objectives. ^[3]

While AS8015, the Australian Standard for Corporate Governance of ICT, defines Corporate Governance of ICT as "The system by which the current and future use of ICT is directed and controlled. It involves evaluating and directing the plans for the use of ICT to support the organisation and monitoring this use to achieve plans. It includes the strategy and policies for using ICT within an organisation."

Background

The discipline of information technology governance derives from corporate governance and deals primarily with the connection between business focus and IT management of an organization. It highlights the importance of IT related matters in contemporary organizations and states that strategic IT decisions should be owned by the corporate board, rather than by the chief information officer or other IT managers.

The primary goals for information technology governance are to (1) assure that the investments in IT generate business value, and (2) mitigate the risks that are associated with IT. This can be done by implementing an organizational structure with well-defined roles for the responsibility of information, business processes, applications, infrastructure, etc.

Decision rights are a key concern of IT governance, being the primary topic of the book by that name by Weill and Ross.^[4] According to Weill and Ross, depending on the size, business scope, and IT maturity of an organization, either centralized, decentralized or federated models of responsibility for dealing with strategic IT matters are suggested. In this view, the well defined control of IT is the key to success.

After the widely reported collapse of Enron in 2000, and the alleged problems within Arthur Andersen and WorldCom, the duties and responsibilities of the boards of directors for public and privately held corporations were questioned. As a response to this, and to attempt to prevent similar problems from happening again, the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act was written to stress the importance of business control and auditing. Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel-II in Europe have been catalysts for the development of the discipline of information technology governance since the early 2000s. However, the concerns of Sarbanes Oxley (in particular Section 404) have less to do with IT decision rights as discussed by Weill and Ross, and more to do with operational control processes such as Change management.

Following Corporate Collapses in Australia around the same time, working groups were established to develop standards for Corporate Governance. A series of Australian Standards for Corporate Governance were published in 2003, these were:

Good Governance Principles (AS8000)
Fraud and Corruption Control (AS8001)
Organisational Codes of Conduct (AS8002)
Corporate Social Responsibility (AS8003)
Whistle Blower protection programs (AS8004)

In 2005, AS8015 Corporate Governance of ICT was published.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology_governance

Options Trading Technology

2008-02-13T23:19:00.000-08:00

The Optioneer strategy uses proprietary technology that has been formulated to give you two valuable indicators that identify trade entry and exit points.

Probability or "P" Factor: The probability of the market being outside the Strike price by contract expiration date.
Risk or "R" Factor: The risk associated with entering the market.

The tried formulas which enable both "R" and "P" factors to be determined are calculated daily by Optioneer Systems and posted on the web site. Without these two indicators we believe it is very difficult to assess one's position on a daily basis.

Through regular practice in smaller trades, skills can be honed, while at the same time gaining confidence and building market knowledge.

http://www.optioneer.com.au/options-trading-technology

Trading Technology

2008-02-13T23:12:00.000-08:00

Internet Trading

Internet Trading unleashes the potential of the Internet by providing the broking members of an exchange with the functionality to grant limited / full access to any of their clients.

When making this connection, the broker is guaranteed complete confidentiality and the rules of the exchange are strictly adhered to. The exchange receives bids and offers from the broker, acting as an agent on behalf of a client. Every such bid or offer is checked against limits, SET UP BY THE BROKER, and when any bid or offer is satisfied all other bids and offers are re-checked. Order authorization is totally unnecessary if the order is within the limits set by the broker, however, the facility is available.

The client has a restricted set of ATS functions, for example they cannot make a request for a double, or an RFQ. In real time however, they can bid, offer, hit a bid or offer, view their orders, trades, positions, and margin requirement.

As the Internet ATS server behaves just as a dealer would who receives a call from a client, a dealer who is logged in will see all the client orders as they are created and as they become trades and positions.

The Internet ATS software package consists of three separate modules, each performing specific functions.

ATS Inet server

Provides the interface between the client, broker and the appropriate exchange through which all deals take place. Stores a client database. The ATS Inet server runs at the broker. The broker can add new clients, delete clients or modify existing client data. Adding a client will grant them access to the relevant exchange system via the internet, if the client has the ATS Client Interface installed on their PC and has access to the internet. When a client is added the broker can choose to which degree the client is restricted to deal by setting the margin limits of the client, deciding whether the client can hit only, view depth and whether the client needs authorization to make deals. A client may also be denied dealing at all and will only be able to view the live data that is transmitted from the relevant exchange. If a client is deleted from the database, they will no longer be able to access the relevant financial market via the internet until they are added to the system again. The client's particulars may also be modified so that more/fewer restrictions are placed on them, according to the current wishes of the broker.

ATS Client Interface

Provides the means through which a client of the broker can view live exchange data, provides the means through which a client of the broker can make deals through the internet. The ATS Client Interface runs at the client. The client must be a registered exchange client, have access to the internet and have the ATS Client Interface installed on their PC. The client will have to supply their personal password before they are allowed to connect to the ATS Inet server. They will then be able to see live data streaming in from the relevant exchange on their terminal, and will be able to perform whatever functions their broker has allowed.

Monitor

The main function of the Monitor is to enable the broker to authorize the deals that a client wishes to make. The Monitor runs at the broker. Brokers will be able to see all those deals for which they wish to deny or grant approval, according to the criteria set up in the ATS Inet server for each client. When a client attempts to make a bid or offer that requires such approval, the client's code and details of the transaction will appear on the screen. The broker can then accept or decline the proposed deal at the click of a button.

Security and data integrity

A number of security measures have been built into the Internet ATS:

Encryption / Decryption

Any deals (bids/offers), or password changes made by the client is sensitive data that needs to be secured. The sensitive data is encrypted at the Client Interface and decrypted at the Internet server by making use of a complex encryption/decryption algorithm. The data is encrypted using an untraceable key, which includes random elements and changes daily. The key is calculated independently at both the Client Interface and the Internet server, making use of identical formulae, and is therefore never transmitted with the sensitive data.

Time encapsulation

Potentially, a hacker can intercept a sensitive message and re-send it a number of times to the Inet server without tampering with the message itself. Any number of identical transactions, unwanted by the client, can be performed at the exchange in this way as long as the margin limit of the client is not transgressed. In order to prevent this, the current time is recorded as part of the sensitive message, and is subsequently encrypted at the Client Interface and decrypted at the Internet server.

When a valid sensitive message has been sent (for example a client has made a valid bid) the time that is encapsulated within the message is stored at the Internet server. When the client sends a subsequent sensitive message, the time that is encapsulated in the second message is compared to the time that had been stored previously. Logic dictates that the time encapsulated in the second message must be a copy of an earlier message. Since the time that is encapsulated is also encrypted within the sensitive message, this cannot be tampered with and the potential scenario, as described, will not occur.

Password Issues

Password lengths must be a certain length and must contain at least 5 different characters. The client must change their password regularly. Recent passwords are stored at the Internet server and new passwords are checked against these so that passwords are not re-used often. If consecutive logins are unsuccessful, it is assumed that someone is tampering with the client's system.

In this case the Internet server changes the client's password to a random number, and a message is sent to the client to contact their broker who will be able to notify them what their password had been changed to. The client will then be able to re-iogin and change their password again should they wish to do so. Each time that a sensitive message is sent (for example on making a bid), the client must provide their password. In this way tampering by other people is minimized when the client is away from their computer.

Set out below are our technological specifications for each module of our Internet Automated Trading System:

Internet SERVERS:

100 % IBM compatible 350 Mhz Pentium
64MB RAM
1.4MB stiffy drive 1 GB Hard Drive VGA
Windows NT Server
Windows IIS or equivalent
Novell 32 Client

Internet CLIENTS and MONITOR:

100 % IBM compatible 200 Mhz Pentium
32MB RAM
1.4MB stiffy drive 1 GB Hard Drive
VGA
Windows 95/98/NT

Margin Monitor

The add-on tool which monitors margins, on Yield-X, real-time. Facilitating what-if inputs which enable you to check margin requirements prior to actual trade entry. Margin requirements are calculated on a trade for trade basis throughout the day. Margin contributions are calculated on trade level.

The Margin Monitor calculates the Risk Margin and the Settlement Margin for each participant of the market (Derivatives and Spot) that has Positions for the trading day. In addition, the Margin Monitor calculates the Margin for every Contract in the deals file per participant.

There is an option "What If" to calculate the margin of selected contracts, number of positions and Strike (only relevant for Option Contracts). These margins will either be calculated with offset - if there is a Participant of the market selected - or not, i.e. only the margin for the selected contracts.

http://www.sttsoftware.co.za/productInternetTrading.html#

Only in Japan: The Best Technologies You Can't Buy

2008-02-12T23:52:00.000-08:00

True mobile TV. Connected cars. Personal robots. The coolest new gadgets and services are still found in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Just a few years ago Japan's lead in all things digital was easy to see. Japanese consumers could buy new domestic gadgets from companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic, often a year or two before they hit the market in other countries. But now things have changed. With gadgets increasingly coming out at the same time around the world, it's no longer the hardware that makes something cool, but what you can do with it.

[Note: To see some of the technology and services described here in action, watch our video, "Made in Japan: Future Tech Today."]

Mobile Digital TV

Take OneSeg, Japan's mobile digital TV system. The entire electronics industry, TV broadcasters, and the government all agreed on a single broadcasting standard, eliminating the technical competition that's holding back such services in the United States and Europe.

The result is a popular service that features all the regular terrestrial channels at no cost. Already, 14 million cell phones with the service have been sold, and the sight of people watching TV is becoming more common on trains and in cafes across Japan.

The latest phones also allow you to record TV shows. And if you're in a public space but forgot to bring your headphones, it's no problem. A couple of button presses brings up the subtitles so you can enjoy the show with the volume turned down. In addition, a companion data service provides information about the current show, promotions from the broadcaster, and, often, a link to the TV station's mobile Internet home page.

Mobile Wallet Service

Something else that's popular in cell phones these days is the "Osaifu keitai," the mobile wallet service. Phones have smart cards embedded inside, and these cards let you add applications like electronic money, your commuter pass, an airline mileage card, or a credit card just by downloading some software.

The strength of Japan's mobile wallet system is that the industry has settled on a single smart card, Sony's Felica. Once a person's phone has this hardware, he or she can add more functionality with software.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest cellular carrier, gives all its customers an electronic credit card application called DCMX Mini. It has a 10,000-yen ($94) credit limit, and charges appear on the phone bill. Big spenders can apply for more credit and use it just like a regular credit card. All you have to do is bring your phone within an inch of the reader and the transaction can be completed.

Electronic money--something that was tried many times but failed during the dot-com bubble--is now becoming very popular, thanks to "Osaifu keitai."

Of the electronic money systems in Japan, Edy from BitWallet is the market leader, accepted in more than 71,000 convenience stores, bookshops, and coffee chains, and at vending machines. More than 37 million cards and cell phones that support Edy are on the market, and the network handles close to a million transactions per day on average.

Connected Cars

In Japan, car navigation systems have been a must-have accessory in automobiles for years. Streets in cities like Tokyo often don't have names, so a navigation system can really save you time. But the latest systems, offered by companies like Nissan, come with something extra.

Hook your navigation system to your cell phone, and you have a connection through which you can get the latest road and traffic data. The navigation system already knows where the nearest gas station is, but with the network link it can also tell you where the cheapest station is, thanks to daily updates on gas prices.

When you're driving, the phone can connect you to an operator who will help you on your journey and even remotely reprogram your navigation system so that you never have to take your hands off the wheel.

About 10 percent of streets are covered with sensors that provide information on traffic. Nissan is experimenting with a new service that collects data about the roads you've driven and the speeds you've achieved, and feeds it to a central computer that adds the information to the traffic database for a more complete picture of jams.

High-tech is also being employed in car safety systems like the Round View Monitor. The video from four cameras around the vehicle is processed and brought together into a single image so that you get the illusion of seeing your car from above. It makes backing into tight spaces really easy and is a big-step beyond the single cameras now found on some large cars and trucks.

Warning of the Big One

One area that's taken very seriously by people in Japan is earthquakes and disaster prevention. The problem is, you never know when a quake could strike, right? Well, not necessarily.

A new warning system has just gone into operation that seeks to quickly detect the weak but fast-moving primary waves from a quake and use them to estimate when the slower-moving but destructive secondary waves will hit.

The system won't help people living at the epicenter of an earthquake, since both kinds of waves arrive virtually simultaneously. But in the event of a major quake, warnings of anywhere from a few seconds to up to a minute can be supplied almost instantaneously.

That's enough time to halt trains and bring factory equipment to an emergency stop, and for homeowners to switch off the gas. Most deaths in the Kobe quake of 1995 were from fires that started after the quake, so preventing flameups is important.

Robots

No discussion of cool tech in Japan would be complete without robots. Japanese researchers are leading the world in robot technology, and humanoid bots like Honda's Asimo are especially impressive.

The latest version of Asimo can serve drinks on a tray and has gained the ability to work intelligently with other Asimo robots in the vicinity to get jobs done faster. Two of the robots have spent most of January working at Honda's Tokyo offices, bringing tea or coffee to guests--and almost certainly entertaining the visitors at the same time.

Rival car-maker Toyota has a clutch of robots including one unveiled in December that plays the violin. (It follows a trumpet-playing robot created a year earlier, so perhaps a robot orchestra is in the making?) The company also has Robina, which is intended to serve as a guide in a public space. Toyota put it into use last year at a public hall in Japan and expects robots like Robina will be commercially realistic in the middle of the next decade.

Taking on a much more serious role is Twendy One, a home-help robot developed by Tokyo's Waseda University. It can do many of the basic tasks that a frail person may need help with, such as assisting people out of bed and serving up toast and drinks.

The robot is still under development but could have a bright future. Japan's population is aging fast--already, 22 percent of people are over 65--and the birth rate is slowing. That likely means a future shortage of workers. It's one of the reasons money is being poured into robot technology in this already technology-saturated nation.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142120/article.html#

Flash Goes Mobile

2008-02-12T00:36:00.000-08:00

Opera's latest browser tries to improve the mobile Internet experience with Flash.

Web to go: A new mobile browser has been launched that can display full Flash media content. This makes it possible for users to view far more of the Web on a mobile phone than they could previously.
Credit: Opera

No matter how much money you spend on a cell phone, the Web you see on its small screen isn't quite the same as the one you view on a laptop. Some features often can't run on mobile-phone Web browsers. But the latest version of Opera Mobile could bring more of the Web to your mobile world. Capable of displaying full Flash media content, Opera Mobile version 9.5 makes it possible to use cell phones and handheld computers to view online animations and movies.

Stripped-down versions of the Web have been offered to mobile users in the past. But these have been widely viewed as flops, says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software, based in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. "There is only one Web, and that's what the end user wants," he says.

Recently, there have been improvements in the design of mobile browsers and their user interfaces in an effort to deliver a more complete Web-browsing experience via mobile devices. But even the swanky browser in Apple's iPhone doesn't support Flash, which puts a limit on the content that users can access with the device.

"A full version of Flash inside the browser makes it possible for users to view the normal versions of video-based websites like YouTube or DailyMotion," says Ian Fogg, research director with London-based analyst firm Jupiter Research.

Some phones offer a lightweight version, called Flash Lite--which is how iPhone users are able to access YouTube--but it has reduced sound and video quality, and only a small minority of devices offer it.

Opera Software was spun out of the Norwegian telecom company Telenor in 1995 and is famed for concentrating almost exclusively on mobile browsing. In addition to offering Flash, the company claims that its latest version can run 2.5 times faster than Microsoft's mobile browser. "Speed is our focus," says von Tetzchner. It is something that the company is very proud of, and it's largely due to optimizing the code so that it runs more efficiently on the limited processing resources of a mobile device, he says.

Users of the new browser will also find tabbed browsing (which allows the user to open multiple Web pages at the same time without launching multiple browser windows) and additional mobile features, such as the ability to easily send a Web link to someone as a text message. "There are a lot of improvements," says von Tetzchner. But it's still not the full Web, because there are still applications that Opera does not support, such as Windows Media. But eventually, it will all be supported, von Tetzchner says.

Despite the advantages of Opera Mobile, the company faces significant competition. Historically, Opera's main revenues have come from device manufacturers such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, which offer the browser on their phones as preinstalled software. "But this model of supplying to the device markets is coming under pressure," says Fogg.

Increasingly, companies like Nokia are turning to open source engines, such as WebKit--the engine behind the browser on Nokia's N-Series devices and iPhones. Similarly, Google's Android platform has been heralded as the software that will bring the "desktop" experience to the mobile Web user, when it eventually comes. But von Tetzchner is pragmatic about it. "There's always going to be competition," he says.

In the meantime, having Flash on your phone may not be all it's cracked up to be. It may give you access to your favorite video websites, but only if the phone's processor and hardware are fast enough to cope. "Often they are not," says Fogg. "This may be one reason that the iPhone does not yet have Flash support."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20198/?a=f

The Next Generation of iPhone Hacks

2008-02-12T00:33:00.001-08:00

Apple's plan to release a software kit that lets people create legitimate add-ons for the iPhone could make the device appeal to an even wider audience.

Virtual rock star: An iPhone owner plays a virtual guitar. Shinya Kasatani developed software called pocketguitar that lets a person play a guitar by pressing and strumming the phone’s touch screen. Apple has not approved pocketguitar, like many other third-party applications made for the iPhone. However, this month the company is planning to release a software development kit that will allow developers to make legitimate applications.
Credit: Shinya Kasatani

Multimedia

•	See how the virtual guitar works.

In today's cell-phone market, the iPhone stands out as the shining example of what a handheld device should have: a sleek design, easy-to-use software, and an intuitive interface. But the day Apple released it, geeks found the phone lacking, and they went to work to make their own software for it. These hackers have been crafting clever add-ons that range from instant access to a Blockbuster Online DVD queue to a pocket guitar that takes advantage of the touch screen. In addition, people have found ways to unlock the iPhone from AT&T, so that it can work on other cellular-phone networks.

All of these hacks, however, are done without Apple's blessing or technical support. This month, Apple is expected to release a software development kit (SDK) that will allow programmers to write legitimate software for the phone. This will enable developers to make more reliable software, and it will let the average iPhone owner easily download new programs without needing to follow arduous online instructions from blogs. And importantly, an SDK will likely spawn a new world of applications--possibly even business software--that could extend the reach of the iPhone beyond a user base of four million, as announced in January. "When you have a device like the iPhone that can attract so many people, you also have enterprise developers who want to use that interface," says Mike McGuire, an analyst for Gartner, a market research firm. He says that an SDK will lead to commercial applications for the business sector, "and that's where the real money is."

The average iPhone owner uses the handheld as Apple intended, updating the software and installing media via iTunes. "By default, the only way to get anything on the iPhone is by using iTunes," says Jerry Jones, a developer who has made an iPhone widget that accesses a user's Blockbuster movie queue, as well as a program that lets people adjust the phone's shortcuts so that a double click of the home key launches different applications than Apple's default. But if you want to add these kinds of illegitimate files to your iPhone, you must jump through some technical hoops. "Truthfully, it's not for the faint of heart," Jones says. "If you're not a technology geek, it's not super simple."

Still, there is a large community of people who are hacking their iPhones. One of the most popular programs is a game called Labyrinth that lets a user roll a virtual marble through a maze by tilting the phone (the game accesses the built-in accelerometer). Labyrinth has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, Jones says. Comparatively, his Blockbuster application, which targets a niche market, has been downloaded about 56,000 times. Although these numbers don't indicate how many people have hacked their phone (some people might have downloaded the software more than once to test it, for example), they show that the number of people interested in such software isn't trivial.

One hack that has garnered YouTube notoriety turns an iPhone into a guitar. Shinya Kasatani, who wrote the software, says that it is easy to use for people familiar with a real guitar: the phone's screen is turned into a virtual fret board on which a person can press and pluck. "It's basically a software-based synthesizer with a guitar user interface," Kasatani says. "The audio sample of a guitar string is loaded from a file and stretched to the desired frequency when playing." Since there wasn't an SDK, Kasatani says, he struggled with understanding the intricacies of the iPhone's built-in software. It was difficult to adjust the volume of the sound output and detect the multitouch input without a trial-and-error approach. "We, the developers, definitely need the official SDK and [programming] documentation to build stable applications," he says.

When Apple releases its SDK, more applications like this could become available, just as they are on PCs and Macs today. However, details on the upcoming SDK are scant, and McGuire guesses that Apple won't open much of the functionality of the phone. "I suspect that it's not going to be a wide open SDK," he says. Programmers might have access to certain layers of the phone's underlying software, such as the instructions that allow widgets to access the Internet, but Apple may keep the instructions for accessing the accelerometer, for example, under wraps. "Apple likes to keep things locked down," McGuire says.

He adds that the control is essential to ensuring that the iPhone works well for most of the people most of the time. In addition, Apple's control is important for ensuring software stability and security--two important criteria if the phone is to be used in the business setting. "I get the impression that [Apple] wants to make [the iPhone] somewhat corporate friendly," McGuire says. "I think you're going to see a lot of focus on pulling developers in to make form-based applications"--the kind used in a sales environment, for example. He says that he suspects Apple will treat third-party software the same way that it approves iPod accessories: by requiring vendors to register with Apple to acquire a badge noting Apple's approval. In this way, Apple could maintain some control over the quality of outside applications, which could help make them more secure.

Regardless of the access the SDK provides to programmers, and the safety precautions available for certified third-party programs, the hacking community will continue to innovate around the iPhone. "Even without the official SDK," says Kasatani, "it's much more attractive than Windows Mobile." The Mac operating system and user interface are more fun to use, he says, and the multitouch display makes it especially interesting to work with.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20193/?a=f

Higher-Capacity Memory

2008-02-12T00:26:00.000-08:00

A new type of memory could soon be available to device makers.

Sharp memory: Ultrasharp silicon tips like this one, which is just 10 nanometers wide, are the core of a new memory technology that could soon provide an alternative to flash.
Credit: Nanochip

An alternative to the flash memory that stores and retrieves data with arrays of microscopic probes could soon be on the market. Nanochip, a company based in Fremont, CA, has recently raised $14 million to complete work on prototypes that it hopes to ship to electronics device makers for evaluation next year.

Nanochip's technology offers advantages to flash memory, both in terms of the amount of data that can be stored and the cost per memory chip, says Gordon Knight, the company's CEO. The first prototypes will store about 100 gigabytes, he says--more than the tens of gigabytes stored on flash memory cards today. Eventually, the devices could store terabytes' worth of data, he says. That's likely out of the reach of flash-type memory, says Stefan Lai, formerly the director of flash memory technology at Intel and now a scientific advisor to Nanochip.

In flash memory, information is stored using specialized transistors, each of which is addressed by a grid of conducting wires. The Nanochip technology, in contrast, stores information by writing data to a thin-film material using an array of microscopic cantilevers, each with an extremely sharp tip. The size of each bit will be 15 nanometers in the first devices, but it could theoretically be as small as just a couple of nanometers.

Nanochip's array-based memory provides an alternative to both flash memory and hard drives. In addition to storing more data than flash, it will be cheaper and can be about as fast, Knight says. What's more, it could last longer than flash. Compared with hard drives, the manufacturing processes used will make Nanochip's devices more economical for small portable electronics, Lai says. The company's memory devices would also be more rugged than hard drives and run virtually silently.

The idea of using microscopically sharp tips to store data is not new. In the late 1990s, IBM demonstrated its Millipede technology, which used arrays of a thousand such tips to write and read bits. (See "Bugged about the Future of Magnetic Storage?") The Millipede program is still active at IBM but so far hasn't produced a commercial memory chip. Nanochip uses a similar approach.

However, while IBM's Millipede uses a polymer material, with data stored by heating and indenting the material with the ultrasharp tip, Nanochip uses a material that can be written electronically: applying a voltage through the tip changes the electronic state of the material at the point of contact. That state can later be read using a weaker voltage. Knight says that the electronic process is faster than a thermal process.

A remaining challenge is engineering a complete chip with thousands of cantilevers. The arrays will need to be mounted on a stage that can be moved, using electrostatic forces, over the storage material and combined with electronics that make it possible to control each tip separately. Part of the challenge will be writing the algorithms for controlling the device to optimize how to store data using the moving stage, says William King, professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. (King was part of the Millipede team at IBM and is a scientific advisor to Nanochip.) In both hard drives and flash memory, he says, bits can be accessed sequentially. But in this system, to take advantage of the parallel arrays of tips, methods of storing and retrieving thousands of bits at once will need to be developed.

"It's a big challenge, but it's something I believe can be done," Lai says. "And if you solve the problems, then you have a whole new memory technology that's available."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20192/

Maintaining Multiple Personas Online

2008-02-11T02:26:00.000-08:00

A new site lets users create profiles for the different sides of their personality.

Facing the online world: Moli, a recently launched social-networking site, allows users to make profiles to represent different aspects of their personality. In the image above, a Roman coin depicts Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, whose two faces, pointed in opposite directions, represent the transition between two times or places.
Credit: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien

Online social networks have allowed people to easily stay in touch with large groups of friends, but the flip side has been well publicized. Some users have struggled over what to do when certain people--such as a boss or an ex-boyfriend--ask to be listed as a friend on their profile. Adding someone as a friend gives him access to the user's profile, photos, and daily musings. Worries about privacy were renewed recently when Facebook's Beacon advertising initiative began broadcasting information about users' purchasing habits throughout its networks. (See "Evolving Privacy Concerns.") Now Moli, a recently launched social-networking site, aims to win over concerned users. President and COO Judy Balint says that the site is intended for a more mature audience than the teenagers targeted by many social-networking websites. Directed at users who are trying to balance personal and professional networks, Moli offers multiple profiles--with different privacy settings--within one account.

"As we get a little bit older in our lives, none of us have the time anymore to spend going to 5, 10, or 15 different sites," Balint says. "So what we tried to do was combine the functionality into one account, so that you can go there and do everything that you need."

Users of Moli can set up as many profiles as they want, and they can choose to make them public, private, or hidden. Anyone, whether he has signed up for Moli or not, can search for and view a public profile. A private profile will show up on searches, but to access it, a user must be a member of Moli and must have approval from the profile's owner. A hidden profile is invisible in searches and can only be viewed by people invited by the owner. Balint says that users are free to set up multiple profiles of various types, with the requirement that they must designate at least one public profile.

Balint says that the site is also intended to appeal to small-business owners, who can use it to set up an intranet and extranet for free. For a fee, businesses can run a store through Moli.

Alessandro Acquisti, an assistant professor in information systems and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, says that, while it's not clear how people will behave on Moli, his research has shown increasing attention to privacy among Facebook users. Studies that he performed on Facebook privacy settings in 2005 and 2006 showed that the vast majority of users left the defaults in place. However, more recent studies have shown that users are now much more likely to adjust those settings than they were in the past. "It's probably because of media attention [to privacy concerns], and more mature people coming into Facebook, and because more time using the technology makes people more sophisticated about data," Acquisti says. However, he notes that, although users may be getting savvier about online privacy, a social network geared toward privacy will still be made or broken by whether it can attract a critical mass of users to the network in the first place.

Michael Zimmer, a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, says that he thinks the type of privacy controls offered by Moli will be useful to a certain part of the population. "I'm sort of surprised that it's taken someone this long to let me, through one login, manage multiple identities and personas online," he says. Zimmer notes that it's important for users to feel at ease with privacy controls: he says that he considers some of Facebook's controls, for example, too complex for many users. However, he says, managing who sees what profile information is only "one half of the coin." The other half, as brought out by Beacon, involves what information the site itself has about users, and what the company does with that information. He notes that Moli's strengths in terms of profile management may lead users to trust the site with more personal information than they might otherwise give, and the company would have that information linked to a common e-mail and a common login. Zimmer says that for maximum privacy control, he would like a site to allow him to view what data is being stored about him and to opt in and out.

While Moli does store demographic information about users' activities on the site, Balint says that information is not stored in a personally identifiable way. The site keeps track of how many users of a certain age, for example, access a profile. Users (particularly small-business owners marketing through Moli) can also access this basic demographic data. Balint says that the company developed its own technology to extract demographic data from people visiting profiles without also extracting personally identifiable data. For example, she says, the company keeps statistics on how many females visit a profile, and how many people visit who are in their late twenties, but it does not combine the variables.

Moli recently announced nearly $30 million in new funding from a group of private investors. The company plans to make money through advertising, as well as through small monthly fees paid for premium services, such as the checkout option for small-business owners.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20183/

Lighting Ballasts That Direct Patients

2008-02-11T02:24:00.000-08:00

An innovative navigation system uses optical signals from hospital lights to guide patients with traumatic brain injuries around hospitals.

Indoor location: An optical receiver sewn onto the left shoulder of a vest (bottom) picks up unique modulation signals from fluorescent lights such as that held by MIT engineer Steven Leeb (top). The optical signal is sent to a PDA in the vest’s pocket. The PDA uses mapping software to generate audio directions for patients in rehab because of head trauma.
Credit: Donna Coveney (top)

Researchers are developing a high-resolution tracking system that uses PDAs and audio directions to guide patients around hospital wards. The system also helps rehabilitate those with traumatic brain injuries. The system, which is made by Boston startup Talking Lights, uses light fixtures as beacons to send information to a PDA via an optical receiver. The PDA is also loaded with mapping software, information about the building, and user-specific data such as appointment schedules.

Traumatic brain injuries, which might result from car accidents or the detonation of an improvised explosive device, among other possible causes, can lead to cognitive problems that include trouble with abstract thinking, memory, and spatial orientation. The Talking Lights guidance system is "a tremendous asset for someone with traumatic brain injury," says Heechin Chae, medical director of the brain injury center at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, in Boston. The system has been tested at the hospital over the past two years and is currently used by about 20 patients. It not only helps patients navigate the rehab center, but it also appears to help them relearn how to process visual cues and navigate unfamiliar environments, Chae says.

Installing the indoor guidance system in a building is a simple and fairly cheap process, says Neil Lupton, president of Talking Lights. The light fixtures don't need to be replaced. All that needs to be switched out is the ballast, an electrical component that's normally replaced every few years in all fluorescent lights. The ballast regulates the amount of electricity that goes into the bulb to maintain the light level and keep the bulb from exploding.

Steven Leeb, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, designed a ballast that modulates the light coming out of the bulb in a set pattern to give each bulb a unique optical signature. No flickering is visible to the naked eye, but off-the-shelf optical receivers can detect these patterns.

Patients at Spaulding Hospital who are participating in the project wear a vest with an optical receiver sewn on the shoulder. The receiver is connected to a PDA that is stored in the vest's pocket. A database containing maps for the building is stored on the device, outlining all the lights and their signatures. Software on the PDA rapidly computes the user's position based on which light she's nearest to. Then, based on the particular patient's location and a unique preloaded schedule, the PDA plays recorded directions. A typical sequence, read in a firm voice, goes, "Katie, go to the gym. Go through the double doors." If the user goes through the wrong double doors, the device provides a correction: "You are going in the wrong direction. Pass the photocopier. Turn to your right." Information about what's near each light at each particular location can be put into a global database in about a day's time, says Daniel Taub, an engineer with Talking Lights.

The system can be customized to particular users. Depending on their stage of recovery, some brain-trauma patients might need more or less frequent instructions, or they might need to start out with a reminder to put on a helmet or check their shoelaces. Family members can make the audio recordings so that patients can hear a trusted voice, and the recordings can be in any language. User data is recorded during use and analyzed afterward to assess each patient's progress--how many reminders he needed, how much time it took him to reach his destination--and the system is adjusted accordingly.

"The brain is a dynamic organ," says Chae. "The whole basis of rehab is repetition of voice commands and tasks." He believes that the system helps patients learn to adapt to unfamiliar places, and so ultimately, it could benefit the patient outside the hospital, too, by retraining his or her brain.

Leeb and Lupton say that their system processes users' locations more quickly and accurately than do other systems that rely on GPS, radio frequencies, or Wi-Fi triangulation. GPS doesn't work well in buildings, and it only has a resolution of about 30 feet, so it isn't ideal for guiding patients around a hospital. Systems that calculate location based on the local strength of Wi-Fi signals from transmitters in multiple locations require more time-consuming calculations than the lightbulb system does, and this could slow people down and drain the PDA's battery. Conversely, the resolution of Leeb and Lupton's system is limited only by the spacing of the light fixtures. (Signals from the Talking Lights system don't interfere with hospital equipment, much of which is shielded.)

The company is currently developing a system that connects to a robust Wi-Fi mesh network to deliver information about patients' locations to hospital staff. Nurses monitoring people with dementia in an assisted-living facility, for example, could be quickly alerted when a patient wanders into an area that poses a fall risk. Talking Lights will demonstrate this monitoring capability in an Alzheimer's facility in a few months, says Leeb. The company has also installed a system for the blind in Stanford University's department of psychology.

In the coming years, Talking Lights plans to develop software that can run on smart phones and hardware for a Bluetooth headset with an optical receiver. The headset would pick up the optical signals, send them to the phone, and then play back directions to the wearer.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20176/

Preventing Concussions

2008-02-11T02:22:00.000-08:00

A new football helmet could help players avoid brain injuries.

Head protection: A new football helmet developed by Xenith is lined with 18 thermoplastic airflow shock absorbers embedded in a flexible cap to better protect athletes from concussions. The helmet’s design adapts to the force of an impact and dissipates the energy to decrease the acceleration of the head and prevent the jarring that causes concussions. A transparent inside view of the helmet is shown at top, while the complete helmet is shown at bottom.
Credit: Xenith

Xenith, a startup company based in Lowell, MA, has developed a new football helmet to better protect athletes from concussions. The helmet is lined with a thermoplastic material that can adapt to the force of impact. On a routine hit to the head, the discs cushion the head, while following a harder, more forceful blow, the material remains stiff and prevents the sudden jarring of the head that causes concussions.

"The idea is that we have something that is more intelligent and responds uniquely to what is happening to it," says Vincent Ferrara, the founder and CEO of Xenith. Testing has also shown that the discs can withstand hundreds of impacts without notable degradation in performance. The Xenith helmet will be available this spring for approximately $350, which is considerably more expensive than helmets already on the market.

The protective material in football helmets has evolved over time from traditional foam padding to gel-filled and inflatable padding. But Joseph Maroon, a neurosurgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Sports Medicine Center, says that none of the designs for football helmets are ideal, and concussions remain a common problem in the sport. "It is estimated that 10 to 25 percent of football players in the United States sustain a concussion each year, and the effects can be catastrophic," says Maroon, the team physician for the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers. "There is a need for a new type of helmet technology."

To address this need, Xenith has embedded 18 shock absorbers into a flexible cap that lines the inside of a helmet. The shock absorbers are made out of a plastic that is elastic and flexible, thus it can accept a wide range of forces and return to its original shape instantaneously. The shock absorbers are hollow discs featuring a tiny hole to allow air to flow in and out. Upon impact, the walls of the discs collapse to absorb and dissipate the energy.

"When you force air or any fluid to flow through a small hole, you get an adaptive response: the harder [the disc] is hit, the stiffer it behaves, because you are generating more resistance inside the disc," says Ferrara. "You want a system to behave softly under low energy, but under high energy, you want it to get progressively stiffer so that it does not collapse down to nothing."

The inside lining of the Xenith helmet shown here is a flexible cap embedded with shock absorbers, or black discs, intended to dissipate the energy of a hit and lessen the sudden movement of the head that causes concussions.
Credit: Xenith

Conventional helmets are lined with different types of absorbency materials, such as foam or fluid-filled pads, intended to conform to the shape of the head and dissipate energy. Upon impact, the pads deform. However, the material lacks resiliency and thus degrades over time. Gel- and air-filled pads have to be refilled and monitored for leaks. What's more, these materials can't adjust to the amount of force.

A cable runs around the flexible cap from the back of the helmet toward the front, and through the helmet's chin straps. When a player pulls on the chin straps, the chin piece pulls the cable downward. This secures the back and sides of the helmet around a person's head, so the inside of the helmet is literally adapting to the person's head size and shape, says Ferrara.

The Xenith helmet is one more step in a football-helmet design that seems to be effective in absorbing energy and dispersing the impact so that it's not all going to the head, says Laurence Young, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Young is also working on a helmet design, still in the research phases, based on a similar concept.

The Xenith helmet will be available in one size this spring, and a full range of sizes will be released in 2009. Ferrara also plans to use the helmet technology in other sports helmets, as well as in military helmets.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20179/

Manufacturing resource planning

2008-02-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

MRP and MRPII: History and Evolution

Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPII) are predecessors of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), a business information integration system. The development of these manufacturing coordination and integration methods and tools made today’s ERP systems possible. Both MRP and MRPII are still widely used, independently and as modules of more comprehensive ERP systems, but the original vision of integrated information systems as we know then today began with the development of MRP and MRPII in manufacturing.

The vision for MRP and MRPII was to centralize and integrate business information in a way that would facilitate decision making for production line managers and increase the efficiency of the production line overall. In the 1980s, manufacturers developed systems for calculating the resource requirements of a production run based on sales forecasts. In order to calculate the raw materials needed to produce products and to schedule the purchase of those materials along with the machine and labor time needed, production managers recognized that they would need to use computer and software technology to manage the information. Originally, manufacturing operations built custom software programs that ran on mainframes.

Material Requirements Planning (MRP) was an early iteration of the integrated information systems vision. MRP information systems helped managers determine the quantity and timing of raw materials purchases. Information systems that would assist managers with other parts of the manufacturing process, MRPII, followed. While MRP was primarily concerned with materials, MRPII was concerned with the integration of all aspects of the manufacturing process, including materials, finance and human relations.

Like today’s ERP systems, MRPII was designed to integrate a lot of information by way of a centralized database. However, the hardware, software, and relational database technology of the 1980s was not advanced enough to provide the speed and capacity to run these systems in real-time, and the cost of these systems was prohibitive for most businesses. Nonetheless, the vision had been established, and shifts in the underlying business processes along with rapid advances in technology led to the more affordable enterprise and application integration systems that big businesses and many medium and smaller businesses use today (Monk and Wagner).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRP_II

New 8x DVD-R Fits MacBooks

2008-02-10T07:43:00.000-08:00

MCE Technologies releases a slot-loading 'SuperDrive' to swap in for optical drives in MacBooks and 15-inch MacBook Pros.

MCE Technologies on Friday announced the release of a new slot-loading DVD-R "SuperDrive" designed to work as a replacement for the optical drives found in 15-inch MacBook Pros and MacBook laptops.

The new drive supports DVD+R DL (Double Layer) and DVD-R (Dual Layer) media, so it can burn up to 8.5GB per disc (on supported media). It replaces the 4x and 6x drives found in these machines, matching the same form factor. It costs US$199.

The drive is 9.5mm high, compared to 12.5mm tall for some other mechanisms. It writes standard DVD-R and DVD+R media at up to 8x speed, and DVD-RW and DVD+RW at up to 4x speed (dual-layer and double-layer disks are written to at up to 4x speed). It can also write to CD-R media at up to 2x speed.

The drive is natively compatible with Mac OS X v10.4 and 10.5, and works with iTunes, iDVD, Finder burning, iPhoto and DVD player. It's bootable, as well.

MCE includes installation tools and a manual.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142126-c,macs/article.html

Manufacturing resource planning

2008-02-10T07:40:00.000-08:00

Key functions and Features

MRP II is not a proprietary software system and can thus take many forms. It is almost impossible to visualise an MRP II system that does not use a computer, but an MRP II system can be based on either purchased / licensed or in-house software.

Almost every MRP II system is modular in construction. Characteristic basic modules in an MRP II system are:

Master Production Scheduling (MPS)
Item Master Data (Technical Data)
Bill of Materials (BOM) (Technical Data)
Production Resources Data (Manufacturing Technical Data)
Inventories & Orders (Inventory Control)
Purchasing Management
Material Requirements Planning (MRP)
Shop Floor Control (SFC)
Capacity Requirements Planning (CRP)
Standard Costing (Cost Control)
Cost Reporting / Management (Cost Control)
Distribution Resource Planning (DRP)

together with ancillary systems such as:

Business Planning
Lot Traceability
Contract Management
Tool Management
Engineering Change Control
Configuration Management
Shop Floor Data Collection
Sales Analysis and Forecasting
Finite Capacity Scheduling (FCS)

and related systems such as:

General Ledger
Accounts Payable (Purchase Ledger)
Accounts Receivable (Sales Ledger)
Sales Order Management
Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP)
[Automated] Warehouse Management
Project Management
Technical Records
Estimating
CAD/CAM
CAPP

The MRP II system integrates these modules together so that they use common data and freely exchange information, in a model of how a manufacturing enterprise should and can operate. The MRP II approach is therefore very different from the “point solution” approach, where individual systems are deployed to help a company plan, control or manage a specific activity. MRP II is by definition fully integrated or at least fully interfaced.

Better control of inventories
Improved scheduling
Productive relationships with suppliers

For Design / Engineering:

Improved design control
Better quality and quality control

For Financial and Costing:

Reduced working capital for inventory
Improved cash flow through quicker deliveries
Accurate inventory records
Timely and valid cost and profitability information

Industry Specifics

MRP II systems have been implemented in most manufacturing industries. Some industries need specialised functions e.g. lot traceability in regulated manufacturing such as pharmaceuticals or food. Other industries can afford to disregard facilities required by others e.g. the tableware industry has few starting materials – mainly clay – and does not need complex materials planning. Capacity planning is the key to success in this as in many industries, and it is in those that MRP II is less appropriate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRP_II

Manufacturing resource planning

2008-02-09T02:00:00.000-08:00

Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II) is defined by APICS as a method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company. Ideally, it addresses operational planning in units, financial planning in dollars, and has a simulation capability to answer "what-if" questions and extension of closed-loop MRP. This is not exclusively a software function, but a marriage of people skills, dedication to data base accuracy, and computer resources. It is a total company management concept for using human

Manufacturing Resource Planning (or MRP2) - Around 1980, over-frequent changes in sales forecasts, entailing continual readjustments in production, as well as the unsuitability of the parameters fixed by the system, led MRP (Material Requirement Planning) to evolve into a new concept : Manufacturing Resource Planning (e.g. MRP 2)^[1]

MRP II is not

Many items on this list can be part of an MRP II, but are not solely what it is.

a computer system
manufacturing control system
inventory reduction plan

Purpose

MRP II integrates many areas of the manufacturing enterprise into a single entity for planning and control purposes, from board level to operative and from five-year plan to individual shop-floor operation. It builds on closed-loop Material Requirements Planning (MRP) by adopting the feedback principle but extending it to additional areas of the enterprise, primarily manufacturing-related.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRP_II

Enterprise resource planning

2008-02-09T01:59:00.000-08:00

Advantages

In the absence of an ERP system, a large manufacturer may find itself with many software applications that do not talk to each other and do not effectively interface. Tasks that need to interface with one another may involve:

design engineering (how to best make the product)
order tracking from acceptance through fulfillment
the revenue cycle from invoice through cash receipt
managing interdependencies of complex Bill of Materials
tracking the 3-way match between Purchase orders (what was ordered), Inventory receipts (what arrived), and Costing (what the vendor invoiced)
the Accounting for all of these tasks, tracking the Revenue, Cost and Profit on a granular level.

Change how a product is made, in the engineering details, and that is how it will now be made. Effective dates can be used to control when the switch over will occur from an old version to the next one, both the date that some ingredients go into effect, and date that some are discontinued. Part of the change can include labeling to identify version numbers.

Some security features are included within an ERP system to protect against both outsider crime, such as industrial espionage, and insider crime, such as embezzlement. A data tampering scenario might involve a disgruntled employee intentionally modifying prices to below the breakeven point in order to attempt to take down the company, or other sabotage. ERP systems typically provide functionality for implementing internal controls to prevent actions of this kind. ERP vendors are also moving toward better integration with other kinds of information security tools.^[4]

Disadvantages

Many problems organizations have with ERP systems are due to inadequate investment in ongoing training for involved personnel, including those implementing and testing changes, as well as a lack of corporate policy protecting the integrity of the data in the ERP systems and how it is used.

Limitations of ERP include:

Success depends on the skill and experience of the workforce, including training about how to make the system work correctly. Many companies cut costs by cutting training budgets. Privately owned small enterprises are often undercapitalized, meaning their ERP system is often operated by personnel with inadequate education in ERP in general, such as APICS foundations, and in the particular ERP vendor package being used.

Personnel turnover; companies can employ new managers lacking education in the company's ERP system, proposing changes in business practices that are out of synchronization with the best utilization of the company's selected ERP.
Customization of the ERP software is limited. Some customization may involve changing of the ERP software structure which is usually not allowed.
Re-engineering of business processes to fit the "industry standard" prescribed by the ERP system may lead to a loss of competitive advantage.
ERP systems can be very expensive to install often ranging from 30,000 US Dollars to 500,000,000 US Dollars for multinational companies.
ERP vendors can charge sums of money for annual license renewal that is unrelated to the size of the company using the ERP or its profitability.
Technical support personnel often give replies to callers that are inappropriate for the caller's corporate structure. Computer security concerns arise, for example when telling a non-programmer how to change a database on the fly, at a company that requires an audit trail of changes so as to meet some regulatory standards.
ERPs are often seen as too rigid and too difficult to adapt to the specific workflow and business process of some companies—this is cited as one of the main causes of their failure.
Systems can be difficult to use.
Systems are too restrictive and do not allow much flexibility in implementation and usage.
The system can suffer from the "weakest link" problem—an inefficiency in one department or at one of the partners may affect other participants.
Many of the integrated links need high accuracy in other applications to work effectively. A company can achieve minimum standards, then over time "dirty data" will reduce the reliability of some applications.
Once a system is established, switching costs are very high for any one of the partners (reducing flexibility and strategic control at the corporate level).
The blurring of company boundaries can cause problems in accountability, lines of responsibility, and employee morale.
Resistance in sharing sensitive internal information between departments can reduce the effectiveness of the software.
Some large organizations may have multiple departments with separate, independent resources, missions, chains-of-command, etc, and consolidation into a single enterprise may yield limited benefits.
There are frequent compatibility problems with the various legacy systems of the partners.
The system may be over-engineered relative to the actual needs of the customer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Resource_Planning

Enterprise resource planning

2008-02-09T01:54:00.000-08:00

Best Practices

were also a benefit of implementing an ERP system. When implementing an ERP system, organizations essentially had to choose between customizing the software or modifying their business processes to the "Best Practice" function delivered in the vanilla version of the software.

Typically, the delivery of best practice applies more usefully to large organizations and especially where there is a compliance requirement such as IFRS, Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel II, or where the process is a commodity such as electronic funds transfer. This is because the procedure of capturing and reporting legislative or commodity content can be readily codified within the ERP software, and then replicated with confidence across multiple businesses who have the same business requirement.

Where such a compliance or commodity requirement does not underpin the business process, it can be argued that determining and applying a Best Practice actually erodes competitive advantage by homogenizing the business as compared to everyone else in the industry sector.

Implementation

Because of their wide scope of application within a business, ERP software systems are typically complex and usually impose significant changes on staff work practices.^{[citation needed]} Implementing ERP software is typically not an "in-house" skill, so even smaller projects are more cost effective if specialist ERP implementation consultants are employed.^{[citation needed]} The length of time to implement an ERP system depends on the size of the business, the scope of the change and willingness of the customer to take ownership for the project.^{[citation needed]} A small project (e.g., a company of less than 100 staff) may be planned and delivered within 3-9 months; however, a large, multi-site or multi-country implementation may take years.^{[citation needed]}

To implement ERP systems, companies often seek the help of an ERP vendor or of third-party consulting companies. These firms typically provide three areas of professional services: consulting, customization and support.

Configuration

Configuring an ERP system is largely a matter of balancing the way you want the system to work with the way the system lets you work. Begin by deciding which modules to install, then adjust the system using configuration tables to achieve the best possible fit in working with your company’s processes.

Modules - Most systems are modular simply for the flexibility of implementing some functions but not others. Some common modules, such as finance and accounting are adopted by nearly all companies implementing enterprise systems; others however such as human resource management are not needed by some companies and therefore not adopted. A service company for example will not likely need a module for manufacturing. Other times companies will not adopt a module because they already have their own proprietary system they believe to be superior. Generally speaking the greater number of modules selected, the greater the integration benefits, but also the increase in costs, risks and changes involved.

Configuration Tables – A configuration table enables a company to tailor a particular aspect of the system to the way it chooses to do business. For example, an organization can select the type of inventory accounting – FIFO or LIFO – it will employ or whether it wants to recognize revenue by geographical unit, product line, or distribution channel.

So what happens when the options the system allows just aren’t good enough? At this point a company has two choices, both of which are not ideal. It can re-write some of the enterprise system’s code, or it can continue to use an existing system and build interfaces between it and the new enterprise system. Both options will add time and cost to the implementation process. Additionally they can dilute the system’s integration benefits. The more customized the system becomes the less possible seamless communication becomes between suppliers and customers.

Consulting Services

Consulting team is typically responsible for your initial ERP implementation and subsequent delivery of work to tailor the system beyond "go live". Typically such tailoring includes additional product training; creation of process triggers and workflow; specialist advice to improve how the ERP is used in the business; system optimization; and assistance writing reports, complex data extracts or implementing Business Intelligence.

The consulting team is also responsible for planning and jointly testing the implementation. This is a critical part of the project, and one that is often overlooked.

Consulting for a large ERP project involves three levels: systems architecture, business process consulting (primarily re-engineering) and technical consulting (primarily programming and tool configuration activity). A systems architect designs the overall dataflow for the enterprise including the future dataflow plan. A business consultant studies an organization's current business processes and matches them to the corresponding processes in the ERP system, thus 'configuring' the ERP system to the organization's needs. Technical consulting often involves programming. Most ERP vendors allow modification of their software to suit the business needs of their customer.

For most mid-sized companies, the cost of the implementation will range from around the list price of the ERP user licenses to up to twice this amount (depending on the level of customization required). Large companies, and especially those with multiple sites or countries, will often spend considerably more on the implementation than the cost of the user licenses -- three to five times more is not uncommon for a multi-site implementation.^{[citation needed]}

Customization Services

The Customization is the process of extending or changing how the system works by writing new user interfaces and underlying application code. Such customisations typically reflect local work practices that are not currently in the core routines of the ERP system software.

Examples of such code include early adopter features (e.g., mobility interfaces were uncommon a few years ago and were typically customised) or interfacing to third party applications (this is 'bread and butter' customization for larger implementations as there are typically dozens of ancillary systems that the core ERP software has to interact with). The Professional Services team is also involved during ERP upgrades to ensure that customizations are compatible with the new release. In some cases the functions delivered via a previous customization may have been subsequently incorporated into the core routines of the ERP software, allowing customers to revert back to standard product and retire the customization completely.

Customizing an ERP package can be very expensive and complicated, because many ERP packages are not designed to support customization, so most businesses implement the best practices embedded in the acquired ERP system. Some ERP packages are very generic in their reports and inquiries, such that customization is expected in every implementation. It is important to recognize that for these packages it often makes sense to buy third party plug-ins that interface well with your ERP software rather than reinventing the wheel.

Customization work is usually undertaken as bespoke software development on a time and materials basis. Because of the specialist nature of the customization and the 'one off' aspect of the work, it is common to pay in the order of $200 per hour for this work. Also, in many cases the work delivered as customization is not covered by the ERP vendors Maintenance Agreement, so while there is typically a 90-day warranty against software faults in the custom code, there is no obligation on the ERP vendor to warrant that the code works with the next upgrade or point release of the core product.

One often neglected aspect of customization is the associated documentation. While it can seem like a considerable -- and expensive -- overhead to the customization project, it is critical that someone is responsible for the creation and user testing of the documentation. Without the description on how to use the customisation, the effort is largely wasted as it becomes difficult to train new staff in the work practice that the customization delivers.

Maintenance and Support Services

Once your system has been implemented, the consulting company will typically enter into a Support Agreement to assist your staff to keep the ERP software running in an optimal way. To minimize additional costs and provide more realism into the needs of the units to be affected by ERP (as an added service to customers), the option of creating a committee headed by the consultant using participative management approach during the design stage with the client's heads of departments (no substitutes allowed) to be affected by the changes in ERPs to provide hands on management control requirements planning. This would allow direct long term projections into the client's needs, thus minimizing future conversion patches (at least for the 1st 5 years operation unless there is a corporate-wide organizational structural change involving operational systems) on a more dedicated approach to initial conversion.

A Maintenance Agreement typically provides you rights to all current version patches, and both minor and major releases, and will most likely allow your staff to raise support calls. While there is no standard cost for this type of agreement, they are typically between 15% and 20% of the list price of the ERP user licenses.

Advantages

design engineering (how to best make the product)
order tracking from acceptance through fulfillment
the revenue cycle from invoice through cash receipt
managing interdependencies of complex Bill of Materials
tracking the 3-way match between Purchase orders (what was ordered), Inventory receipts (what arrived), and Costing (what the vendor invoiced)
the Accounting for all of these tasks, tracking the Revenue, Cost and Profit on a granular level.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Resource_Planning

Knee Power

2008-02-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

A new human-powered generator tries to capture walking energy.

Power walking: This knee brace (above) sports a generative-braking power system that converts energy expended while a person is walking into electricity.
Credit: Greg Ehlers, Simon Fraser University

Multimedia

•	See the knee brace in action.

Engineers who design wearable devices that harvest human energy for power face a daunting dilemma: how do you collect a significant amount of power without making the user expend a lot of extra effort? Gadgets like hand-crank generators and windup radios require manual work from a user, and existing shoe-mounted generators produce less than one watt of power.

A team of engineers has developed a modified knee brace that captures energy that would otherwise have been lost while the wearer walks. The generator produces about five watts--enough to power 10 cell phones simultaneously.

"If you want power, go where the muscles are," says Max Donelan, a professor at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, who led the research. "We thought, maybe there's a smart, selective way to do energy harvesting when muscles are normally decelerating in the body." Donelan's research appears in the February 8 issue of the journal Science.

Donelan looked to the legs, which have the largest muscles in the body, and capitalized on a careful understanding of how humans use energy to walk. During an average stride, a person uses her muscles to bend at the knee and swing her leg forward, like a pendulum bob. This is positive work. At the end of the swing, she executes negative work to decelerate her moving leg. She places her foot on the ground, and by then her other leg has begun its swing.

Donelan and his team concentrated on harvesting energy from the end of the stride using their bionic knee brace. When the brace's generator is engaged, it collects power while slowing down the motion of the leg. As a result, the brace reduces the human effort required at the end of the swing phase.

If the mechanism were continuously engaged, however, it would also impede acceleration at the beginning of the swing and require more energy from the wearer. To solve this problem, Donelan installed a sensor in the device to monitor the knee angle and switch the generator on and off. According to his research, this "generative braking" approach requires only one-eighth the metabolic power of a continuously operating mechanism.

"What's extremely clever about this device is that it only tries to capture mechanical energy when the muscles would be primed to slow the body down," says Lawrence Rome, a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Rome, who did not work on the knee brace, recently designed a backpack that converts walking energy into electricity. "[Donelan's knee brace is] a smart device, and it only works when you're trying to brake yourself," says Rome. "It lets the reverse torque of the generator do the work of the muscle."

If Donelan's approach to energy harvesting sounds familiar, it's because he uses the same strategy employed by hybrid automobiles. When a driver applies the brakes of a hybrid, the electric motor begins to act as a generator. The generator slows down the car and at the same time converts kinetic energy into electricity, which is then used to recharge the battery. Conventional braking systems rely on friction to slow down, and the car's kinetic energy is dissipated as heat.

"Walking is like stop-and-go driving," Donelan says. "Within every stride, the muscles are accelerating and then decelerating the body. Hybrid cars take energy and give it to the battery."

Donelan's prototype weighs in at just over three pounds, and he is currently developing a lightweight model that could be used by prosthetics manufacturers and the military. Demand for human-energy harvesters like Donelan's knee brace and Rome's backpack is increasing, thanks in part to the proliferation of small electronics like cell phones and handheld GPS units, especially in the military.

"A soldier with a 24-hour mission [might have to] carry nearly 30 pounds of batteries with him," Donelan says. "They have to power everything from GPS to communications to night vision."

In addition, Donelan says that his knee brace has potential in medical markets: it could augment a paralyzed limb or power a prosthetic. "You could take a healthy limb and use it to power the injured limb," he says.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20177/

A Window into Alzheimer's

2008-02-08T10:28:00.000-08:00

Advances in imaging shed light on how the disease develops.

Instant plaques: Because Alzheimer's disease develops over the course of decades, many scientists assumed that its hallmark brain lesions, called amyloid plaques, were slow to appear. A new imaging technique called multiphoton confocal microscopy reveals that on the contrary, plaques can form in a single day. This image of a mouse's cortex shows a mature plaque (large blue splotch) with a brand-new "microplaque" (small blue dot within the white square) developing beside it. Reimaging the same brain area over several subsequent days showed the plaque growing.
Credit: Melanie Meyer-Luehmann et al., courtesy of Nature Publishing Group

An innovative imaging technique has revealed that the plaques that develop throughout the brains of Alzheimer's patients can form overnight, and they are likely a cause rather than a symptom of the disease.

Plaques, a defining hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, are brain lesions that result from the abnormal accumulation of a protein called amyloid-beta. Since the symptoms of the disease progress over the course of decades, plaques were generally thought to appear and accumulate slowly.

"The notion was that since the disease plays out over a long period of time, individual lesions in the disease process would also have that same tempo," says Bradley Hyman, director of the Alzheimer's unit at Massachusetts General Hospital's MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease. But his study's results, which appear in this week's Nature, suggest that plaques can develop in a single day.

Hyman's team harnessed a fledgling imaging technique called multiphoton confocal microscopy to peer into the brains of living mice. The technique generates images using rapidly pulsed lasers that penetrate deep into living tissue without damaging it. By cutting out tiny sections of skull and replacing them with glass, the researchers created windows into the brains of mice that were genetically engineered to develop amyloid plaques. They could then repeatedly observe the same area of brain, and thus follow plaque formation over time.

"This gives us an opportunity to apply a time stamp to the events that are occurring," says Hyman. "So rather than simply having an individual snapshot of a pathophysiologic event, we can watch the process evolve."

While groups have applied multiphoton confocal microscopy to living brains before, Hyman's group is the first to apply the technique to the study of a neurodegenerative disorder. "It really pushes the technology forwards," says Steven Finkbeiner, associate director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study.

Besides revealing the surprisingly fast pace of plaque formation, the study addresses a long-standing debate over the role of amyloid plaques in the development of Alzheimer's disease.

A long-established hypothesis posits that amyloid plaques themselves bring about damage to neural tissue, causing the disease's symptoms--most notably behavioral changes, memory loss, and dementia. But some scientists counter that plaques are not correlated strongly enough with the disease to be a convincing culprit for its symptoms. Rather than causing the symptoms of Alzheimer's, plaques could themselves be symptoms--stemming from some other, yet unknown mechanism.

"There's always been a lot of debate," says Juan Troncoso, codirector of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was not involved with the study. "What happens first, and what's responsible for what? Is the damage to the nerve cells first, and then the plaque, or vice versa?"

Because the new imaging technique followed plaque formation in detail over many days, it could address this chicken-and-egg conundrum as previous approaches could not. "When you only have single snapshots of the process, it's hard to be sure how to interpret causation," says Hyman.

Hyman's team found that plaque formation was indeed the first step in the process, with amyloid-beta protein depositing into an aggregate that appeared quickly and continued to grow. Next, immune cells called microglia were activated and flocked to the area. In the ensuing days, a halo of damage began to appear around the plaque. Nearby neurons became distended and twisted into abnormal, corkscrew-like shapes, likely hampering their ability to transport critical cell components and communicate with one another.

"The bottom line," says Troncoso, "is that this study establishes that at least in the mouse, the plaque is the first step." This kind of investigation would not be possible in humans for ethical reasons, and there's no guarantee that the mechanism observed in mice is the same one that takes place in the brains of human Alzheimer's patients. But Troncoso says that the results are relevant nonetheless. "These animal models are our best available tool to try to understand these types of processes," he says.

Finkbeiner agrees that Hyman's results implicate amyloid plaques as the instigators of the neural damage that surrounds them. "I think this study clearly establishes that the dystrophy that you see in association with plaques does occur after the plaque forms," he says. But he contends that there is still no powerful evidence that such damage is to blame for the primary symptoms of Alzheimer's.

"I don't doubt for a minute that dystrophy does have deleterious consequences for the neurons involved," says Finkbeiner. "But it probably doesn't explain the majority of symptoms that people get with Alzheimer's disease."

Hyman maintains that the local damage associated with plaques could very well underlie the systemic disruption in neural function that characterizes the disease. "Ultimately, the types of changes that we see, I think, lead to a breakdown in the connections of the brain," he says.

If that is the case, preventing amyloid buildup is likely to be a key strategy in treating Alzheimer's. According to Troncoso, since the study "strongly suggests that amyloid is a very early event in the development of Alzheimer's disease, the corollary would be that it becomes the therapeutic target of choice."

Hyman plans to probe the plaque formation process in more detail, investigating how the amyloid-beta protein develops into a full-blown plaque, and how it brings about the observed changes in neighboring neurons.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20178/

Large-Scale Rewritable Holograms

2008-02-08T10:25:00.001-08:00

A new material allows researchers to write and erase 3-D images for displays.

Holographic car: A new material could make possible very large holographic displays that can be erased and rewritten. Eventually, the displays could be as big as cars. The car pictured here is on a prototype display that's 10 centimeters on a side.
Credit: Savas Tay, University of Arizona

Multimedia

•	See a video of a hologram.
•	Listen to a description of the technology.

A holographic display based on a new material can be repeatedly written to and erased. Rewritable holograms have been possible at small sizes, such as for holographic memory devices. But it's been difficult to make these materials at a scale large enough for displays. The new material, developed by researchers at the University of Arizona and at Nitto Denko Technical Corporation, in Oceanside, CA, could eventually allow for life-sized displays of people and objects the size of cars that could be refreshed every few minutes.

Existing high-end holographic images can be full-color and extremely detailed, but they've been restricted to still images that can't be rewritten. Stereoscopic displays, in which a different two-dimensional image is shown to each eye, are the basis of 3-D movies, but they lack some of the realism of holograms. The new display can produce holographic images, which are easier to view than stereoscopic images and can be of higher quality. But the display is better than typical holographic images in that it can be updated.

The University of Arizona researchers developed a new polymer-based material that encodes information using electric fields. The material contains two components. When light strikes the film, one of these components, a polymer, absorbs photons and generates electrons and their positive counterparts, called holes. The polymer is also a good conductor of holes, but not of electrons. As a result, the holes can easily move away from the illuminated areas where they were generated, whereas the electrons stay put. This separation of charges creates patterns of tiny electric fields within the material. These electric fields change the way that light moves through the different parts of the film.

The second component of the material, a dye, responds to the electric fields in two ways. The dye molecules change their polarization and physically rotate depending on the nature of the fields in each part of the film. These changes locally affect the index of refraction, which has to do with how a material bends and reflects light. When the researchers shine a laser through the film, the dye alters the path of the light, projecting a pattern that the eye interprets as a three-dimensional image. "It comes out of thin air--you feel like you could touch it," says Nasser Peyghambarian, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Arizona, who led the work.

To erase the image, the researchers expose the film to uniform light, which redistributes the electrons and holes, removing the electric fields and the changes in the material that they had produced.

Researchers have tried making rewritable holographic displays in the past, but they faced a number of problems. Materials failed to produce bright images, for example, or the images faded quickly. Peyghambarian's new materials can preserve an image for hours and produce very bright images. The materials can also be easily made in large areas. The prototype holographic film created with the new material is 10 centimeters on a side, but because it was made using well-known polymer processing techniques, it should be relatively easy to scale it up to much larger sizes, says Joseph Perry, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Georgia Tech.

The process currently takes a few minutes to write and erase an image--much too long for video. But it might be possible to significantly increase the write and erase speed, says Perry. There are two key limitations right now. One is how fast the electric fields can be established, which is determined by how fast the holes can move. Next, once the fields are in place, it takes some time for the dye molecules to rotate. One way to improve the speeds is to amplify the other property of the dye that changes the behavior of light--the change in polarization. Right now, this is a small effect, but the polarization changes very quickly--fast enough to change the image in real time, Perry says.

For many applications, the new approach will face stiff competition from a growing number of 3-D technologies that can already display video and, like the new approach, do not require that the viewer wear special equipment. That could limit the applications of the new display to those that don't require fast updates, such as maps, says Brian Schowengerdt, a research scientist at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington. Peyghambarian's approach could also have an advantage for very large displays, since the other technologies are difficult to make that size. These could be used for high-end marketing displays, says Neil Dodgson, the director of studies in computer science at Emmanuel College, part of the University of Cambridge.

"People already spend a lot of money on holograms," Dodgson says. "An updatable one would be a fantastic advertising medium."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20175/

Brain Signal Linked to Autism

2008-02-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

Imaging the brain during social interaction reveals a deficit that may be tied to a sense of self.

Sensing self: A new brain-imaging study shows that people with a high-functioning form of autism lack a particular brain signal (shown here) linked to a sense of self.
Credit: Tomlin et al., Science, 2006.

By imaging the brains of adolescents with a high-functioning form of autism as they played a social-interaction game, scientists have identified a physiological deficit specific to the disorder. The researchers believe that the change is linked to a diminished sense of self. The findings, recently published in the journal Neuron, could help guide future research into the nature of autism and potentially lead to new ways to diagnose and treat the disorder.

"I think this is an exciting advance," says Uta Frith, a professor at University College London, in England, who wrote a preview of the paper for Neuron. Most studies find only subtle differences in people with high-functioning autism, "so it's quite impressive to find such a big difference," she says.

Autism is a complicated and heterogeneous developmental disorder marked by problems in language and social behavior. No medical tests exist to detect the disorder, so children are typically diagnosed based on doctors' observations. Scientists are avidly searching for more objective markers of autism, but identifying specific brain abnormalities has been a challenge.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, believe that they have now identified a specific physiological marker of the disorder. Read Montague, Pearl Chiu, and their colleagues scanned the brains of adolescents with Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, while they played an interactive trust game.

In the game, one person, designated the investor, chooses an amount of money to send to a second player, the trustee. The money is tripled en route, and the trustee must then decide how much to give back to the investor. When played by normal volunteers, the game unfolds in a very characteristic fashion: generous gestures are met with generous responses, while selfish ones inspire selfishness in return.

Brain activity also follows a stereotyped pattern. A study by Montague and his colleagues. published in 2006, imaged the brains of both the investor and the trustee as they played the game. The researchers discovered a specific signal in the cingulate cortex, part of the brain that integrates information from both the cortex and the body, that was detected only when the investor thought about how much money to give the trustee. A second signal was seen only when the investor received his or her return from the trustee. "We see a 'self, other, self, other' pattern," says Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor. "We think that's an unconscious assessment of who the actions should be attributed to."

According to the new findings, people with Asperger's play the game just as a nonautistic person would, but they lack the characteristic "self" signal in the brain. Normal people lack the signal only when they think that they are playing against a computer, suggesting that autistic people view interactions with other people similarly to the way that normal people think about interacting with a computer. "This approach allows a somewhat objective look at something hopelessly subjective--sense of self," says John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at MIT.

While the findings are clearly intriguing, it's not yet clear what they mean. One popular theory of autism is that people with the disorder lack a normal theory of mind--the ability to imagine the thoughts and actions of others. Identifying a specific deficit linked to thoughts of self could help narrow down what has gone wrong in that process. "People think autism is linked to a lack of understanding of what a partner is doing," says Chiu. "But maybe they don't understand their own role in the social exchange."

Other scientists interpret the results further, suggesting that this signal is linked to a sort of internal reputation assessment in the brain. "If you are a normal person, when you invest money in the game, you are thinking about how you will look in the eyes of your partner," says Frith. "That's precisely what the theory of mind hypothesis would project is wrong with people with autism."

Other autism experts are unwilling to make such a leap. "I'm skeptical about how much [the Baylor College study] tells us about which capacities are intact and engaged in autism," says Matthew Belmonte, a scientist at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. "I'm not convinced they have a deficit at all. Maybe they have adopted a different cognitive strategy."

Regardless of the deeper meaning of their findings, Montague and his team ultimately hope to develop the brain-imaging results into a diagnostic test. They have converted the activity signal from the cingulate cortex into a simple numerical score, which correlates well with a clinical test for the severity of autism. Eventually, they hope to be able to show, for example, "that if you get a 3 rather than a 14, you are 80 percent more likely to be a high-functioning autistic," says Montague. Such a tool could potentially also be used to test the effectiveness of new behavioral treatments, he says.

However, much work remains to be done before such a test could be used in a doctor's office. "We need to make it simpler and test people with a wider range of IQs," says Montague. The Asperger's volunteers in the current study had an above-average IQ.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20167/

The Future of Clean Coal

2008-02-07T07:57:00.000-08:00

The DOE's decision to abandon FutureGen could accelerate clean-coal technology.

Clean dream: FutureGen was the Bush administration’s showcase project to produce carbon-free power and hydrogen from coal. The plant was to burn hydrogen gas produced from coal in high-temperature gasification vessels while carbon dioxide from the coal was sequestered deep underground.
Credit: U.S. Dept. of Energy

When it was first announced in 2003, FutureGen was billed as a $1 billion prototype for the coal-burning power plant of the future, combining electricity and hydrogen production with the near elimination of harmful emissions. So the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) decision late last month to back out of the project, which was meant to build an advanced coal-gasification plant designed to sequester its carbon dioxide emissions underground, is once again fueling debate over the future of clean-coal technology in the United States.

Some energy-policy analysts say that technology development and changing priorities have simply made FutureGen obsolete. In fact, they say that the DOE's plans to instead finance carbon-capture equipment at commercial power plants could actually accelerate the implementation of the clean-coal vision that FutureGen once represented. "The fact that the [FutureGen] project was cancelled reflects budgetary issues more than a lack of confidence in the technology," says Alex Klein, a senior analyst tracking developments in power generation for the consultancy Emerging Energy Research, based in Cambridge, MA. "If the government does, in fact, concentrate its efforts on capture and sequestration, it will be just as significant a development for the industry as if FutureGen went forward."

In a statement released last week, U.S. secretary of energy Samuel Bodman explained that FutureGen had become too expensive. Indeed, FutureGen's predicted price tag has gone from $950 million in 2003 to $1.5 to $1.8 billion today. The DOE had agreed to foot 74 percent of the bill, leaving just over a quarter to the FutureGen Alliance, a consortium of primarily coal-fired utilities.

FutureGen was also overtaken by public concern over rising greenhouse-gas emissions and the emergence of rival commercial projects. Utilities have proposed more than 50 Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) power plants, which are similar in design to FutureGen. Both technologies convert coal into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The commercial IGCC plants burn the mixed gases, producing a more concentrated (and thus easier to capture) stream of carbon dioxide than conventional power plants do. In contrast, FutureGen's design would remove the carbon before the combustion of pure hydrogen in more efficient but as yet unproven ultrahigh-temperature turbines, further reducing the energy penalty caused by carbon capture.

Since the commercial plants are based on existing equipment, they are considerably cheaper to build than FutureGen would have been. For example, utility giant American Electric Power estimates that the 629-megawatt IGCC plants that it wants to build in Ohio and West Virginia would cost about $2.5 billion each, including carbon capture, which is at least 27 percent cheaper per megawatt of power produced than projected costs for FutureGen.

In his statement, Bodman said that restructuring the FutureGen effort will leave IGCC plants to the private sector but will provide funding to coal-fired power plants to help them capture and sequester carbon dioxide. "After the restructuring, funding will be available to equip multiple new clean-coal power plants with advanced [carbon-capture and storage] technology--instead of just one demonstration plant," he said. "These commercial plants ... should each sequester at least one million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually."

However, FutureGen supporters question the DOE's motives, and they vow to fight on. Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich released a statement calling the DOE's decision politically motivated: "Only after it became clear that an Illinois site would be chosen over a Texas site, the Department suggested the project be delayed and now, that it be dismantled."

FutureGen Alliance executive director Michael Mudd says that his group will seek Congressional support to reverse the DOE's decision. He believes that FutureGen is needed to make the next generation of IGCC plants more energy efficient and cost effective. "Right now, the [energy penalty] to add carbon capture and storage to a coal plant, whether it's IGCC or [conventional] coal, is huge," he says. "FutureGen is about trying to find a way to reduce that."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20166/

Beyond Search and Advertising

2008-02-07T07:54:00.000-08:00

If Microsoft purchases Yahoo, the popular Internet property would contribute a lot more than ad revenue.

Credit: Kenn Kiser (foreground) / Technology Review

Last week, Microsoft made an unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo. According to its website, Yahoo is still reviewing the bid, and the offer has generated a flurry of speculation about the possible results, including a statement from Google that raises the possibility that a Microsoft purchase of Yahoo could lead to unfair competition. Some experts say that Microsoft is after more than just the obvious--increased market share in online search and advertising--and point to other assets in the Yahoo portfolio.

Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research, thinks that, in addition to Yahoo's search and advertising capabilities, its social and mobile technologies play "a significant role" in Microsoft's interest. She points especially to Yahoo's ownership of social-computing powerhouses Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site, and del.icio.us, which started a trend of social bookmarking. "These are great brands, and centerpieces for how people interact with each other," Li says. She adds that part of the appeal of del.icio.us is the social search it empowers, since tags that users add to pages give an additional way of determining those pages' relevancy. "It's a democratization of [key Google ranking software] PageRank in many ways," she says. Li also notes that Yahoo's Go Internet portal for mobile phones could be appealing to Microsoft. The Yahoo interface might complement Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, she says, which, in her opinion, still lacks a good user interface.

Lawrence Ricci, an industry consultant who specializes in embedded systems, says that he thinks Yahoo properties like Flickr are attractive to Microsoft in part because they could be closely integrated with devices such as digital cameras that use Microsoft's Windows Embedded operating system. "I suspect that one of their motivations is, they want to make sure that everyone who has a Microsoft embedded device will have access to the services that they need to make that device come alive," he says.

Rob Koplowitz, who is, like Li, an analyst with Forrester Research, says that some of Yahoo's technological expertise could help Microsoft keep its Office products competitive. Challenges to Microsoft's flagship product have come recently from Web-based productivity services such as Google Docs and IBM's Lotus Symphony, offered either free or at extremely low cost. At the recent Lotusphere conference in Orlando, FL, Michael Rhodin, general manager of IBM's Lotus division, said that the company plans to compete in part by changing how it develops software. "We will be very aggressive as to how our services are priced," he said at a press conference. He added that Lotus would provide small-business services such as Symphony, "so people won't have to spend $400 a user on a word processor."

Although competitors have yet to take a significant part of Microsoft's market share, Koplowitz says that the company has begun moving to protect its lucrative Office products. "It's a core strength of Microsoft, how seriously they take their competition," he says. The company has started adding online services to Office, in an attempt to take advantage of the benefits of online services while maintaining the comfort of the desktop for its longtime users. Yahoo's engineers, Koplowitz says, could bring extensive experience at delivering Web-based services to bear on the problem, as well as their expertise at building efficient data centers. "If we're really moving to a model where more and more software is being delivered through the cloud, it's probably not going to be a high-margin business," he says. "The ability to do it efficiently at every level will be a differentiator."

Li notes that, even if the offer goes through, the deal is unlikely to close before the final part of this year, at the earliest. She says that it's likely that the companies would focus initially on advertising and search, followed by easy integrations such as combining instant-messaging clients and the two companies' news coverage. She thinks that Microsoft would only be able to focus on properties such as del.icio.us once those earlier matters were resolved.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20165/

Flexible, Nanowire Solar Cells

2008-02-06T09:32:00.000-08:00

Exotic materials and cheaper substrates could lead to better photovoltaics.

Nano solar: A side profile of gallium arsenide nanowires growing on a silicon substrate. The nanowires grow upward from the substrate, creating a surface that's able to absorb more sunlight than a flat surface is.
Credit: McMaster University

Multimedia

•	See how the technology works.

Researchers at McMaster University, in Ontario, say that they have grown light-absorbing nanowires made of high-performance photovoltaic materials on thin but highly durable carbon-nanotube fabric. They've also harvested similar nanowires from reusable substrates and embedded the tiny particles in flexible polyester film. Both approaches, they argue, could lead to solar cells that are both flexible and cheaper than today's photovoltaics.

Now the researchers' challenge is to improve the efficiency of the cells without increasing cost. The research team, led by Ray LaPierre, a professor in the university's engineering physics department, has been given three years to achieve its goals--backed by about $600,000 from the Ontario government and private-sector research partner Cleanfield Energy, a Toronto-area developer of wind and solar technologies.

LaPierre says that the aim is to produce flexible, affordable solar cells composed of Group III-V nanowires that, within five years, will achieve a conversion efficiency of 20 percent. Longer term, he says, it's theoretically possible to achieve 40 percent efficiency, given the superior ability of such materials to absorb energy from sunlight and the light-trapping nature of nanowire structures. By comparison, current thin-film technologies offer efficiencies of between 6 and 9 percent.

"Most of the nanowire work to date has focused on silicon nanowires," says LaPierre, explaining that McMaster's approach relies on nanowires containing multiple layers of exotic Group III-V materials, such as gallium arsenide, indium gallium phosphide, aluminum gallium arsenide, and gallium arsenide phosphide. "It creates tandem or multi-junction solar cells that can absorb a greater range of the [light] spectrum, compared to what you could achieve with silicon. That's one of the major unique aspects of our work."

When used in conventional crystalline solar cells, Group III-V materials are known to have much higher efficiencies than silicon, but the great cost of these materials has limited their use. LaPierre says that cost becomes less of an issue with nanowires because so little material is needed. This is in part because the structure of the nanowires provides a more efficient way to absorb light and extract electrons freed by the light. In conventional solar cells, which are made of slabs of crystalline material, greater thickness means better light absorption, but it also means that it's more difficult for electrons to escape. This forced trade-off is overcome with nanowires. Each nanowire is 10 to 100 nanometers wide and up to five microns long. Their length maximizes absorption, but their nanoscale width permits a much freer movement and collection of electrons. "The direction in which you absorb the light is essentially perpendicular to how you collect electricity," explains LaPierre. "The dilemma is overcome."

In addition to reducing costs by using less active material, LaPierre's team can also cut the cost of the substrate that the nanowires are grown on. LaPierre's team doesn't require an expensive Group III-V substrate. It has successfully grown its nanowires on substrates made of more plentiful and relatively cheaper silicon. It's also working on using even lower cost substrates made of glass, which would be ideal for building-integrated PV applications. Flexible substrates such as polymer films and carbon nanotube fabric could be useful for many applications, and could be manufactured with inexpensive roll-to-roll processes.

To further drive down costs, the focus on cheaper substrates will be complemented by an attempt to replace the gold catalysts used to grow the nanowires with aluminum, although more work in this area is needed to achieve the necessary nanowire densities. "We have grown nanowires from aluminum, but gold works much better," says LaPierre.

Charles Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University who has created single light-harvesting nanowires made of silicon, says that his team is also pursuing the use of other materials for making nanowires. "But there are many challenges in going from nanowire to photovoltaic," says Lieber. He adds that comparison of approaches is difficult without data on the energy-conversion properties of each material.

Nathan Lewis, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and an expert on nanowire structures, says that it's too early to say which approach and materials are best. "We know nanowires work in bulk form, but we don't know if you can make high-purity, high-quality nanowires and control all their electrical properties," says Lewis. "There's no theory that one works better than the other. It's just a question of getting any of them to work."

It's still early days for McMaster, which in prototypes has only achieved low efficiencies--"where silicon PV was in the 1950s," says LaPierre. But he's optimistic that the higher-efficiency materials and the approach chosen will get results.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20163/

Electromagnetic Railgun Blasts Off

2008-02-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

A supersonic bullet is fired with a record-breaking 10 megajoules of muzzle energy.

Show of force: A shockwave is produced (above) as a supersonic bullet emerges from the navy's electromagnetic railgun, which was tested late last month.
Credit: U.S. Navy

Multimedia

•	Watch the railgun fire a seven-pound bullet.
•	See the flames produced by the bullet.

Last week at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, in Dahlgren, VA, a seven-pound bullet emerged from a truck-sized contraption at seven times the speed of sound and sent a visible shockwave through the air before crashing into a metal bunker filled with sand. With 10.6 megajoules of kinetic energy, this aluminum slug was propelled not by explosives but by an electric field, making this the most powerful electromagnetic railgun ever fired. The device is part of the navy's railgun development program.

While propellant-driven shells have been mainstays of naval warships for the past hundred years, the cost and safety issues related to storing explosive materials have driven engineers to seek alternatives like the electromagnetic railgun. "There are physical limits to what you can do with gunpowder," says Charles Garnett, the manager at Dahlgren, referring to the maximum velocities that explosions can produce. A railgun could eventually send a 40-pound slug 200 miles in six minutes--10 times the range of the navy's primary surface support gun, the MK 45--and it could be used to support Marine troops engaged in land-based operations.

"A lot of people think a railgun is not going to make a lot of noise," Garnett says. "It's electrically fired, and they expect a whoosh and no sound." In reality, when the bullet emerges, it lets out a crack as electricity arcs through the air like lightning.

The railgun gets its name from two highly conductive rails, which form a complete electric circuit once the metal projectile and a sliding armature are put in place. When current starts flowing through the device, it creates a powerful electromagnetic field that accelerates the projectile down the barrel at 40,000 gs, launching it in a matter of milliseconds. Aerodynamic drag along with a million amps of current heats the bullet to 1,000 °C, igniting aluminum particles and leaving a trail of flame in its wake. The researchers estimate the muzzle energy based on the mass and velocity of the bullet in the barrel and from precisely timed x-ray snapshots during flight.

"What's important," says Garnett, "is that this is the first step on the way to building a tactically viable system with 64 megajoules of energy."

The previous experimental railgun record of 9 megajoules had been set 15 years ago by a team at the University of Texas at Austin funded by the U.S. Army. But the Texas railgun was operating at the upper end of its capacity, while Garnett says that the new gun has been designed to handle up to 32 megajoules, and the ultimate goal of the project is to build a 64-megajoule model.

Jon Kitzmiller, an expert in electromechanical systems at the University of Texas, who worked on an earlier railgun project, says that the navy team is "going to have considerable difficulty getting [to 64 megajoules], but it's certainly achievable." He says that the navy's budget of $40 million a year secured through 2011 proves that it is serious about making the gun a reality in the next 15 to 20 years. The previous effort was derailed by funding constraints.

One of the biggest challenges, says Kitzmiller, will be in designing a power supply that can handle multiple shots. "In order to store multiple 64-megajoule shots on a capacitor bank, you would need an aircraft carrier full of capacitor banks," he says. One solution, Kitzmiller and Garnett agree, is a system of rotating pulsed alternators, called compulsators, rather than traditional capacitors.

Other challenges include developing a projectile guidance system that can withstand 40,000 gs--twice the acceleration of current systems--and building a gun barrel that can withstand the force and heat produced by repeated firings. The same force that drives the bullet out of the barrel also tears the rails apart. The Dahlgren prototype looks nothing like a typical gun, and parts will frequently have to be replaced.

"Firing a gun once or twice [makes it] a novelty," says Garnett. "Firing it a thousand times [makes it] a weapon."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20164/

A New Perspective on Search Results

2008-02-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

Google is experimenting with different ways to serve up search results. But will any of them stick?

Results may vary: Google has announced an experiment in which users can sign up to receive alternate views of their search results. Instead of simply seeing the results in a standard list view, participants can view the results on a map, on a timeline (above), or by using filters that narrow down the results based on information such as dates, measurements, locations, and images.
Credit: Google

Amid the flurry of news over Microsoft's bid for Yahoo and Google's rebuttal, a research announcement by Google went largely unnoticed. Last week, the search giant began a public experiment in which users can make their search results look a little different from the rest of the world's. Those who sign up are able to switch between different views, so instead of simply getting a list of links (and sometimes pictures and YouTube videos, a relatively recent addition to the Google results), they can choose to see their results mapped, put on a timeline, or narrowed down by informational filters. Dan Crow, product manager at Google, says that the results of the experiment could eventually help the company improve everyone's search experience.

Google's experiment highlights the slow but steady push of engineers and designers to improve the Web search experience for the masses. While search algorithms are constantly improving, the interface has remained static for more than a decade: people submit keyword queries, and the engine spits back a list of 10 hyperlinked results. "If you compare Google search-result listings today to the Infoseek results in 1997, they're almost indistinguishable [in terms of presentation], except for the ads," says Marti Hearst, a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Hearst says that there continue to be attempts from non-Google engines to offer alternatives to the standard search interface. Ask.com, for instance, lets a user see a thumbnail view of each Web page before she clicks through to the link. And Clusty.com extracts words that are found on the search-results pages, letting a user drill down to a more specific search. For instance, a search for "MIT" can be specified to include references to "laboratory," "Massachusetts Institute of Technology," "project," and other words or word combinations.

But these slight alterations in search have been slow to catch on, as is evident from Google's dominance in the field and its relatively conservative approach to its user interface. Hearst thinks that many people tend to use Google and other simple interfaces for a couple of reasons. One is that search engines must accommodate a wide range of users, from the novice to the savvy. Less experienced users tend to get distracted when more information is presented on the screen, she says: people don't respond well to being overloaded with information, especially when they want a simple answer to a query. But perhaps more important, she says, is the fact that people are familiar with a decade-old interface and, as creatures of habit, they are reluctant to try something new.

Google's Crow says that people are generally happy with the interface as it exists today. "The basic format hasn't changed much because it's been successful ... It works well for most of the users most of the time," he says. "But that doesn't mean we couldn't do something beyond search today."

When a person signs up for the "alternate views" experiment on the Google Labs page, he essentially adds three search filters to his results page: "Info view," "Timeline view," and "Map view." (See below image). By default, a search for "Grateful Dead" serves up results in the "List view," which is essentially the standard results page. If a user selects Map view, he could see a map indicating where the group originated (San Francisco), and where it performed its last show (New York City). Clicking on Timeline view provides a bar graph of dates associated with the group--important concerts, for instance--over the years. And Info view lets the user filter the search by dates, measurements (in this case, Google offers units of years and, oddly, tons), locations, and images.

Crow says that when a person signs up for the experiment, Google collects the same information about his searches that the company would otherwise. This includes noting the search terms and result links that are selected, as well as logging the amount of time a user stays on the page of the selected link. Crow notes that all of the information collected is stripped of any identifying information. This data, in addition to market research collected from participants who visit Google's offices and participants who allow Google to come into their homes to track their search habits, will be used to determine the most helpful features of the experiment, and how best to sprinkle those features into search results without upsetting users, he says.

Improving the search interface isn't easy, but it's a crucial part of the technology, says Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. There are billions of Web pages, and the results page only reveals 10 pages at a time. "Search is the process of drinking from the fire hose," Etzioni says. "This means that getting the user interface right ... is incredibly important." He doesn't see anything revolutionary about Google's experimental views in particular, but "throwing things out there and letting people react is very smart." He believes that in the next couple of years, search will evolve to provide more interface options for people, and not everyone will be using the same interface.

Search will change, but it will be a gradual process, since there's a fine line between providing helpful information and overwhelming the user with text and links. "One thing to remember is that it's still the early days," Google's Crow says. "People think that search is a solved problem. I think we're still in the early days of making search work on a universal global scale. We know we can do better."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20162/

Creating Ethanol from Wood More Efficiently

2008-02-05T01:26:00.000-08:00

Bacteria in termite guts could make ethanol from noncorn sources cheaper.

Special reserve: Shown above is a rare sample of ethanol created from wood chips using a new process. So far the alcohol is made a few bottles at a time, but in a couple of years millions of gallons could be available.
Credit: Karen T. Borchers/Mercury News

A type of bacteria that helps termites digest wood could be key to making ethanol cheaply from wood and grass. ZeaChem, a startup based in Menlo Park, CA, has developed a process based on this bacteria that can produce 50 percent more ethanol from a given amount of biomass than conventional processes can.

The company has demonstrated the method in a laboratory setting and is now drawing up plans for an ethanol plant that will produce about two million gallons of ethanol a year. Construction could begin as early as this year, says Dan Verser, a founder and vice president of research and development at ZeaChem. It is one of a growing number of biofuel companies seeking to make ethanol from noncorn sources, since corn requires large amounts of land, water, and energy to grow.

The process improves yield by making more efficient use of biomass than conventional techniques do. It begins, as do other techniques for making ethanol, with breaking down biomass into sugars. At this point, conventional processes use yeast to ferment the sugars into ethanol. But this process is wasteful: about a third of the carbon in the sugars never makes it into the fuel. Instead, it's released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. ZeaChem replaces yeast with a type of bacteria called Moorella thermoacetica, which can be found in a number of places in nature, including termite guts and the ruminant of cows, where it helps break down grass. Instead of making ethanol and carbon dioxide, the bacteria convert sugars into a component of vinegar called acetic acid, a process that releases no carbon dioxide.

To convert acetic acid into ethanol, ZeaChem turns to chemistry. First, the company's researchers convert the acid into a common solvent called ethyl acetate--something that chemists have long known how to do. The final step--making ethanol--requires adding energy to the system in the form of hydrogen. To get the hydrogen, ZeaChem uses material left over from the process that converts biomass into sugars. This material, called lignin, can be converted into a hydrogen-rich mixture of gases by heating it up under the right conditions--a process called gasification. The hydrogen is combined with ethyl acetate to make ethanol. The remaining gases in the mixture are fed back into the process to provide the energy needed for gasification, making use of material that otherwise would have gone to waste and eliminating the need to use fossil fuels. So far, the company has shown more than 40 percent better yield compared with conventional approaches, and it's working toward a theoretically possible improvement of 50 percent.

"It's a very innovative process," says James McMillan, a research scientist and group manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, CO. He says that it's important to get as much ethanol from the feedstock as possible, since the final cost of ethanol depends heavily on the cost of feedstock. Although ZeaChem's process is more complicated than methods used now, and building ethanol plants that use it will cost more, McMillan says that the improved yield could make up for these increased costs.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20151/

Tuning In to Nanotube Radio

2008-02-05T01:24:00.000-08:00

Researchers have made analog electronics out of carbon nanotubes.

Transistor radio: A micrograph shows an array of four nanotube transistors.
Credit: John Rogers, UIUC

Multimedia

•	See a schematic and electromicrograph of the technology.
•	Listen to a recording of the radio using the nano radio.

Carbon nanotubes have long been a contender for future electronic devices because of their potential to scale down the size of components and their excellent electronic properties. But building practical circuitry out of carbon nanotubes has proved challenging. Now researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report having made scalable radio-frequency analog electronics in which all of the transistor-based devices, including the antennas and amplifiers, are built out of nanotube transistors.

The goal is to establish carbon nanotubes as a realistic competitor with conventional analog electronics, says John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois. Rogers found a novel way to make transistors using parallel arrays of nanotubes. (See "A Breakthrough in Nanotube Transistors.") By way of demonstration of the ability to use the method in electronics, he has made a radio receiver out of which each of the active components is created from nanotubes. To test the electronics, the researchers say that they tuned the nanotube radio to a commercial station in Baltimore to hear the traffic report.

"It's a very significant advance," says Peter Burke, head of the nanotechnology group at the University of California, Irvine. "They have been able to make the first radio-frequency amplifier out of nanotubes."

Indeed, other groups have already demonstrated the use of single nanotubes in radio circuits. (See "The World's Smallest Radio.") "What we have done is a bit different," says Rogers. The previous research has involved using a single carbon nanotube to act as a radio receiver. "In our radios, every single active component is based on nanotubes, all the way up to the point where the headphones plug in," he says.

Employing single nanotubes in this way would not normally be feasible because of the relatively high currents used in analog circuits, such as amplifiers. To get around this, Rogers's nanotransistors consist of arrays of thousands of nanotubes in parallel, in such a way that they spread the current, while collectively behaving like a semiconductor material.

Rogers says that the fabrication method used to build the analog lends itself to current manufacturing processes. "With these arrays, we can build our devices, device arrays, and integrated circuits in wafer scale processing sequences that are fully compatible with established approaches to building semiconductor devices," says Rogers.

A crucial factor in making these transistors lies in Rogers's ability to grow the carbon nanotubes in such uniform arrays. But by growing the nanotubes on a single crystalline quartz substrate, using a standard chemical vapor deposition process, Rogers and his coworkers were able to fabricate "aligned arrays that are completely parallel," he says.

Once the arrays have been grown, Rogers makes a transistor using existing patterning techniques to lay source and drain electrodes over both of the ends of all the nanotubes, and by placing a gate across their collective width. "From that point on, the process is just like making silicon on insulator devices," says Rogers.

"As silicon transistors become smaller, inherent limitations become more critical," says Alex Zettl, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Nanotubes as a material are an exciting alternative material for forming extremely small, stable transistors," he says.

But while the original interest in nanotubes for electronics lay in their nanometer size, there has been an increasing amount of interest in their use for analog electronic devices, says Burke. There are now predictions that nanotubes will actually outperform conventional analog transistors, he says.

Rogers's radio is relatively big, with each transistor consisting of thousands of carbon nanotubes. But he says that there is plenty of room to scale them down, not least because there are relatively large gaps between some of the nanotubes. So it should be possible to pack them in more densely. "Ideally, you would want the nanotubes to be sitting right next to each other," Rogers says. He and his colleagues are now working on creating integrated circuits containing up to 100 of these transistors.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20153/

Internet at its choke points

2008-02-05T01:16:00.000-08:00

Analyzing the Internet Collapse

Multiple fiber cuts to undersea cables show the fragility of the Internet at its choke points.

Cutting off communication: Wednesday's fiber cuts occurred about five miles away from Alexandria, killing connections between Europe and Egypt, the Middle East, and India.
Credit: Telegeography Research

When the Internet suddenly collapsed early last Wednesday across the Middle East and into India, it provided a stark reminder of how the Net's virtual spaces can still be held hostage to real-world events.

Almost simultaneously, two separate undersea fiber-optic cables connecting Europe with Egypt, and eventually with the Middle East and India, were cut. The precise cause remains unknown: experts initially said that ships' anchors, dragged by stormy weather across the sea floor, were the most likely culprit, but Egyptian authorities have said that no ships were in the region.

Whatever the cause, the effects were immediate. According to its telecommunications ministry, Egypt initially lost 70 percent of its connection to the outside Internet and 30 percent of service to its call-center industry, which depended less on the lines. Between 50 and 60 percent of India's Net outbound connectivity was similarly lost on the westbound route critical to the nation's burgeoning outsourcing industry.

"This [fiber path across the Mediterranean] is a choke point, which until recently was a very lightly trafficked route where there wasn't great need for cable," says Tim Strong, an analyst at telecommunications research firm Telegeography Research. "There are many new cables planned for the region, but as it happens, they're not in service yet."

Undersea cable damage is hardly rare--indeed, more than 50 repair operations were mounted in the Atlantic alone last year, according to marine cable repair company Global Marine Systems. But last week's breaks came at one of the world's bottlenecks, where Net traffic for whole regions is funneled along a single route.

This kind of damage is rarely such a deep concern in the United States and Europe. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are crisscrossed so completely with fast fiber networks that a break in one area typically has no significant effect. Net traffic simply uses one of many possible alternate destinations to reach its goal.

Not so with the route connecting Europe to Egypt, and from there to the Middle East. Today, just three major data cables stretch from Italy to Egypt and run down the Suez Canal, and from there to much of the Middle East. (A separate line connects Italy with Israel.) A serious cut here is immediately obvious across the region, and a double cut can be crippling.

The two damaged cables, both cut about five miles north of Alexandria, Egypt, are the most modern of the trio. One, owned by the U.K.-based Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of the India-based Reliance Group, stretches nearly 17,000 miles from Europe to China. The second cable, known as Sea-Me-We 4 and owned by a consortium of 15 different telecommunications companies, stretches from Spain to Singapore. Together, they have a capacity of close to 620 gigabits per second, according to Telegeography Research.

The one remaining cable traversing roughly this route is the older Sea-Me-We 3 cable, which has a capacity of 70 gigabits per second--considerably less than its newer rivals.

A third regional cable, also owned by Flag Telecom, was cut the morning of February 1 off the coast of Dubai, in an apparently unrelated event. This break has caused less trouble, since it is part of a Middle East loop that offers alternative routes for data traffic.

A map of the fiber-optic cables crossing the Mediterranean, connecting Europe with Egypt, the Middle East, and ultimately India. The Flag Telecom Europe-Asia and Sea-Me-We 4 lines were cut last week just north of Alexandria, Egypt.
Credit: Telegeography Research

The cause of the cuts in the two main broken cables remains somewhat mysterious. A spokesman for Flag Telecom said on Monday that the company would not speculate on the causes until the broken line has been examined. However, Egyptian telecommunications officials said on Sunday that no ships had crossed the site of the breaks in the 12 hours before or after the incidents on Wednesday. The site is also a "restricted area," further lessening the chances of a ship's responsibility, the ministry said.

The unexpected collapse in service forced Internet providers across the region to scramble for alternative connections, most using backup bandwidth sources under contract for just such an emergency. Many ISPs began switching traffic east instead of west. Data from India to Europe might thus first pass through East Asia, across the Pacific, through the United States, and across the Atlantic Ocean before reaching its destination. While slowing traffic, in some cases significantly, this at least allowed data to get through.

According to ISP Association of India secretary R. S. Perhar, service providers in his country adapted to the cuts relatively quickly. Traffic from business customers was given a top priority on networks, with consumer traffic taking second place. Three of the country's largest service providers weren't affected at all, since they weren't buying bandwidth from the Flag or Sea-Me-We 4 cables, he says.

Many other Indian companies had diversified their network connections following December 2006, when an earthquake off the coast of Taiwan severed seven major undersea cables that served India as well as East Asia. But some providers who had not acted as quickly found themselves cut off entirely, Perhar says.

"Most have done good network planning and made sure they get bandwidth from several service providers," he says. "But there are people who did not have redundancy in their networks."

Outsourcing companies also found themselves facing potential disruption. With so much outsourced work now being performed in India or elsewhere in the region, companies in the United States and Europe are increasingly dependent on these broken lines for their everyday business. But like the ISPs, the biggest outsourcing companies said that they relied on redundant connections to ensure the flow of data.

"We have planned for circumstances like these," says Nathan Linkon, a spokesman for Infosys, a large Bangalore-based outsourcing company. "We have diversity in path and providers, and we haven't lost any connectivity to our offices or customers."

With just two cables at issue, restoring service is expected to go more smoothly than did the 49-day process required after the Taiwan earthquake. Flag Telecom has told its customers that a repair ship that launched from Catania, Italy, will arrive and begin work today. The company said that Egyptian authorities are "expediting the permits" so that work can begin as soon as the ship arrives.

These repair operations have become fairly routine, with marine service companies on call around the world to launch a ship as quickly as possible when a nearby cable has been torn by a ship's anchor or fishing net, or, more unusually, by a natural event such as an earthquake.

A repair ship will typically take several days to reach the site of a break, says Stephen Scott, commercial manager for the U.K.-based Global Marine Systems, which is not involved in fixing this week's break.

A ship will locate the break in the line, sometimes by using a remote-controlled submarine device that can send signals up and down the cable, Scott says. The cable is then cut entirely at the break, and the little sub brings one half to the surface. Alternately, some operations simply use long grappling hooks to grab the cable.

Once the first half is brought to the surface, the crew splices on a long segment of replacement cable. The first half is let back to the sea floor; the other broken half is brought to the top, and the other end of the replacement cable is spliced on.

Unless the seas are rough, this double-splicing operation can take about 20 hours from start to finish, Scott says.

In the wake of the fiber breaks, Perhar says that his organization is encouraging ISPs and companies dependent on fast connections to continue diversifying their bandwidth sources as much as possible, and to lobby for new cable to be laid.

Telegeography Research counts at least four new fiber lines planned for the Europe-Egypt route over the next few years, including another by Flag Telecom, one by Telecom Egypt, another by the Egypt-based Orascom Telecom, and a fourth funded by the India-Middle East-Western Europe consortium of companies.

But even these will all use roughly the same route, says analyst Strong. That will keep this Mediterranean zone a "choke point" worth watching.

"With more cables, it's getting better over time," Strong says. "But there will still be a lack of physical, geographical redundancy. That is something of a concern."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20152/

Enterprise resource planning

2008-02-04T21:15:00.000-08:00

Overview

Some organizations — typically those with sufficient in-house IT skills to integrate multiple software products — choose to implement only portions of an ERP system and develop an external interface to other ERP or stand-alone systems for their other application needs. For example, one may choose to use the HRMS from one vendor, and the financials systems from another, and perform the integration between the systems themselves.

This is very common in the retail sector^{[citation needed]}, where even a mid-sized retailer will have a discrete Point-of-Sale (POS) product and financials application, then a series of specialized applications to handle business requirements such as warehouse management, staff rostering, merchandising and logistics.

Ideally, ERP delivers a single database that contains all data for the software modules, which would include:

Manufacturing: Engineering, Bills of Material, Scheduling, Capacity, Workflow Management, Quality Control, Cost Management, Manufacturing Process, Manufacturing Projects, Manufacturing Flow
Supply Chain Management: Inventory, Order Entry, Purchasing, Product Configurator, Supply Chain Planning, Supplier Scheduling, Inspection of goods, Claim Processing, Commission Calculation
Financials: General Ledger, Cash Management, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets
Projects: Costing, Billing, Time and Expense, Activity Management
Human Resources: Human Resources, Payroll, Training, Time & Attendance, Rostering, Benefits
Customer Relationship Management: Sales and Marketing, Commissions, Service, Customer Contact and Call Center support
Data Warehouse: and various Self-Service interfaces for Customers, Suppliers, and Employees

Enterprise Resource Planning is a term originally derived from manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) that followed material requirements planning (MRP).^[2] MRP evolved into ERP when "routings" became a major part of the software architecture and a company's capacity planning activity also became a part of the standard software activity.^{[citation needed]} ERP systems typically handle the manufacturing, logistics, distribution, inventory, shipping, invoicing, and accounting for a company. Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP software can aid in the control of many business activities, like sales, marketing, delivery, billing, production, inventory management, quality management, and human resource management.

ERP systems saw a large boost in sales in the 1990s as companies faced the Y2K problem in their legacy systems. Many companies took this opportunity to replace their legacy information systems with ERP systems. This rapid growth in sales was followed by a slump in 1999, at which time most companies had already implemented their Y2K solution.^[3]

ERPs are often incorrectly called back office systems indicating that customers and the general public are not directly involved. This is contrasted with front office systems like customer relationship management (CRM) systems that deal directly with the customers, or the eBusiness systems such as eCommerce, eGovernment, eTelecom, and eFinance, or supplier relationship management (SRM) systems.

ERPs are cross-functional and enterprise wide. All functional departments that are involved in operations or production are integrated in one system. In addition to manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and information technology, this would include accounting, human resources, marketing, and strategic management.

ERP II means open ERP architecture of components. The older, monolithic ERP systems became component oriented.^{[citation needed]}

EAS — Enterprise Application Suite is a new name for formerly developed ERP systems which include (almost) all segments of business, using ordinary Internet browsers as thin clients.^{[citation needed]}

Before

Prior to the concept of ERP systems, departments within an organization (for example, the human resources (HR)) department, the payroll department, and the financial department) would have their own computer systems. The HR computer system (often called HRMS or HRIS) would typically contain information on the department, reporting structure, and personal details of employees. The payroll department would typically calculate and store paycheck information. The financial department would typically store financial transactions for the organization. Each system would have to rely on a set of common data to communicate with each other. For the HRIS to send salary information to the payroll system, an employee number would need to be assigned and remain static between the two systems to accurately identify an employee. The financial system was not interested in the employee-level data, but only in the payouts made by the payroll systems, such as the tax payments to various authorities, payments for employee benefits to providers, and so on. This provided complications. For instance, a person could not be paid in the payroll system without an employee number.

After

ERP software, among other things, combined the data of formerly separate applications. This made the worry of keeping numbers in synchronization across multiple systems disappear. It standardised and reduced the number of software specialties required within larger organizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Resource_Planning

Enterprise Resource Planning

2008-02-03T23:30:00.000-08:00

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems attempt to integrate all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules.

Origin of the term

MRP vs. ERP — Manufacturing management systems have evolved in stages over the past 30 years from a simple means of calculating materials requirements to the automation of an entire enterprise. Around 1980, over-frequent changes in sales forecasts, entailing continual readjustments in production, as well as the unsuitability of the parameters fixed by the system, led MRP (Material Requirement Planning) to evolve into a new concept : Manufacturing Resource Planning (or MRP2) and finally the generic concept Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)^[1]

The term ERP originally implied systems designed to plan the use of enterprise-wide resources. Although the initialism ERP originated in the manufacturing environment, today's use of the term ERP systems has much broader scope. ERP systems typically attempt to cover all basic functions of an organization, regardless of the organization's business or charter. Businesses, non-profit organizations, nongovernmental organizations, governments, and other large entities utilize ERP systems.

To be considered an ERP system, a software package must provide the function of at least two systems. For example, a software package that provides both payroll and accounting functions could technically be considered an ERP software package.

However, the term is typically reserved for larger, more broadly based applications. The introduction of an ERP system to replace two or more independent applications eliminates the need for external interfaces previously required between systems, and provides additional benefits that range from standardization and lower maintenance (one system instead of two or more) to easier and/or greater reporting capabilities (as all data is typically kept in one database).

Examples of modules in an ERP which formerly would have been stand-alone applications include: Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Financials, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resources, Warehouse Management and Decision Support System.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Resource_Planning

High-Quality X-Ray Beams for Scientific Purposes

2008-02-03T23:28:00.000-08:00

A Miniature Synchrotron

Researchers get a new tool to determine protein structures.

X-rays at home: A schematic of the miniature synchrotron (top) shows the electron beam injector (green tube) and storage ring. The electron beam circulates around the ring and collides with a laser pulse at every turn, emitting bursts of x-rays. Bottom: A detailed view shows the components of the miniature synchrotron, which fits inside a room.
Credit: Lyncean Technologies.

Synchrotrons are huge facilities that can produce intense, high-quality x-ray beams for scientific purposes. They usually span the size of a football field and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate. But now, researchers at Lyncean Technologies, a startup in Palo Alto, CA, have shrunk the synchrotron to the size of a room. This miniature synchrotron offers scientists a new way to perform high-quality x-ray experiments in their own labs.

Lyncean has built a prototype synchrotron and is constructing another to be installed this year at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. The new synchrotron will be used by the Accelerated Technologies Center for Gene to 3D Structure, which is part of the National Institutes of Health's Protein Structure Initiative.

The tabletop instrument is "not as powerful as the big synchrotrons," says Ronald Ruth, Lyncean's president and chief scientist. "But on the other hand, it's far cheaper, and it's very compact." He likens the national synchrotrons to supercomputers, where many users must compete for limited time on one of the beams. "[The synchrotrons] address the state-of-the art," Ruth says. "They push the envelope. But their impact is only as broad as the number of people that are willing to travel to go there." The miniature synchrotron is more like a PC, he says, shared by a few users and readily available.

X-rays are useful in probing the properties of materials, since their wavelength is about the same size as atoms and the chemical bonds between them. For example, x-ray crystallography is an important method in determining protein structure. X-rays diffract as they pass through a protein crystal, generating a characteristic interference pattern. By analyzing the pattern, scientists can deduce the arrangement of the atoms and thus determine the protein's structure.

For these kinds of studies, synchrotron radiation has advantages over ordinary x-ray sources: It's a hundred million times brighter and highly concentrated, which allows for very precise, high-resolution experiments. Synchrotrons also produce a continuous source of x-rays, instead of the short bursts generated from common x-ray tubes. And a synchrotron's light is tunable, so researchers can match the energy to the material being probed.

The quality of light from the miniature synchrotron is as good as the big machines, says Franz Pfeiffer, a physicist at the Paul Scherrer Institute and École Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland. "That's what makes it so attractive," he says. "[It] combines the benefit of having something relatively small with the advantages of the extremely brilliant beam that is available through synchrotrons. It's a very nice thing to have."

Ruth first determined that a miniature synchrotron might be possible in the late 1990s, when hewas a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Ruth and a graduate student, Zhirong Huang, were looking for a way to cool electron beams by getting them to radiate. They found that hitting the beams with a laser not only cooled them effectively, but also generated x-rays.

This effect proved to be the key to shrinking the synchrotron down to size. Big synchrotrons use magnetic "undulators" that wiggle the electron beam from side to side as it circulates around a large storage ring. Ruth explains that that wiggle, on the order of one centimeter, generates x-rays that are thrown off on a tangent to the circle, much like a spinning searchlight shines light.

The miniature synchrotron uses only a moving laser pulse that interacts with the electron beam each time it goes around the storage ring, which fits on a tabletop. The wiggle is one thousandth as small -- just one micrometer -- and the x-rays are given off in a single beam.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20149/

Wii Remote

2008-02-03T23:26:00.001-08:00

Moving In on the Wii

A unique motion-based controller from Motus is designed to create a more realistic experience for video game players.

Reaching for realism: Motus Corporation hopes its Darwin game controller (above) can transplant the popularity of the Nintendo Wii’s motion control to other consoles and PCs. Slated for release this fall, the Darwin is intended to feel more realistic than the Wii Remote.
Credit: Motus Corporation

Consumers seem enchanted by the Nintendo Wii's motion-controlled remote, buying more than one million units of Wii hardware last December alone, according to market research firm NPD Group. A Boston-based company, Motus Corporation, hopes to take advantage of the Wii's popularity through a new product: the Motus Darwin , which allows motion-based control on non-Nintendo game systems, including the PC.

Motus is not the first company to compete with the Wii; the Sixaxis controller for the PlayStation 3 also provides motion-based control, for example. But Motus chairman Satayan Mahajan says the Darwin, expected to retail for $79-$99, allows a more realistic game play experience than is currently available.

The Darwin, which was designed to resemble a samurai sword, has its roots in specialized golfing hardware called iClub, also made by Motus. Mahajan says the iClub was designed to help serious golfers improve their swings by sensing and analyzing minute details of the motion. Mahajan hopes to continue this verisimilitude with the Darwin. Where players often operate the Wii Remote one-handed in sports games, Mahajan wants the Darwin to feel more realistic, allowing players of a golf game, for example, to put two hands on the remote and swing it like a real golf club. "The Wii is a great device," he says. "But they're going from very simple applications, and trying to become more complex and capture more complex motion. We've gone from this very complex [process of] capturing very precise motions of the human body to something that's actually less complex."

As part of developing realistic game play, Mahajan says, Motus designed the Darwin to calculate its position differently than the Wii Remote. The Wii Remote tracks its position via an infrared sensor that users must attach to their televisions. However, the Motus Darwin measures absolute position with respect to earth itself. Using gyroscopes and accelerometers, the controller orients itself to the magnetic north, and senses the direction it is pointing.

Mahajan explains that this method has not been used before because the gyroscopes and accelerometers have a tendency towards errors. Through Motus's work on iClub, he says, the company has designed a combination of hardware, software and firmware that corrects the error. Finally, the system relays its positional information to the console in fewer than 30 milliseconds, Mahajan says, adding that this is faster than the human ability to perceive delay.

David Riley, NPD Group's senior public relations manager for entertainment, software, and toys, says that for a controller like the Motus Darwin to be successful, it must be properly marketed to a group willing to pay for a premium realistic experience, such as golf-game enthusiasts. "There's a complaint with 'Tiger Woods' on the Wii, for example, in that some bloggers feel that it has actually harmed their ability to play golf," he says. "They've adjusted over the winter period to the Wii to play this game, and then when they actually pick up a club, they're not swinging the way they did the previous season." If the Motus can be marketed as such a realistic controller so that it helps, rather than harms, real-life game play, Riley says, it could find its niche. However, he adds, the price of the controller is "borderline."

Though Riley notes that peripherals such as controllers sold very well last year, he worries that current and coming economic troubles could leave consumers unwilling to pay for a high-end controller. He says that much will depend on the library of games that are compatible with the Darwin, and how well the controller is integrated with those games.

Mahajan says that the list of games supporting the Darwin is not yet finalized. But, he says, Motus is talking to a variety of console makers and game publishers; is working on building in integration with popular games already on the market; and closely integrating with games that have not yet been released. Mahajan says the company expects to have the Darwin on store shelves in time for 2008's holiday shopping season.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20150/

What the BlackBerry Update Means for You

2008-02-02T00:16:00.000-08:00

BlackBerry owners rejoice! The upcoming BlackBerry 4.5 software will vault your Pearls and Curves into the top ranks of multimedia devices. We got RIM to explain, model by model and server by server, what the new software will give existing BlackBerry owners. (Version 4.5 used to be called 4.3.1, if you're really plumbed into the BlackBerry landscape.)

There's a lot of awesome stuff here, with multimedia streaming support, Microsoft Office document editing and HTML e-mail support at the fore. We're still waiting for RIM to tune up its Web browser, though—it's falling behind the options available on Windows Mobile, Symbian, and the iPhone.

Some of the new features are handheld-only; some require server upgrades. If you're on BlackBerry Enterprise Server, your IT department will need to upgrade; if you're on BlackBerry Internet Service, you'll need to wait a few months for your carrier to upgrade. I've marked server features with an (S), and handheld features with an (H) to show what you'll be able to do immediately.

Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and Alltel all confirmed that you'll be able to upgrade existing BlackBerries to the new software. We're still waiting for word from T-Mobile. The software will arrive within a few months, but the carriers and RIM aren't being any more specific than that.

Here's the scoop by model number.

If you have a BlackBerry Pearl 8100 or BlackBerry 8800, you'll get:

• Spell check (H)
• BlackBerry Maps with Points of Interest (H)
• Improved media player with playlist support and automatic playlist generation (H)
• Voice note recording (H)
• Streaming support for YouTube and Sling Player (H)
• Bluetooth stereo music (H)
• Microsoft Office document editing with DocumentsToGo (H)
• Native format attachment downloading (S)
• HTML e-mails (S)
• Over-the-air device upgrades (S)
• Free/busy calendar lookup (S)
• Searching the server for old e-mail messages (S)

If you have a BlackBerry Pearl 8130, you'll get:

• Automatic playlist generation in the media player (H)
• Microsoft Office document editing with DocumentsToGo (H)
• Native format attachment downloading (S)
• HTML e-mails (S)
• Over-the-air device upgrades (S)
• Free/busy calendar lookup (S)
• Searching the server for old e-mail messages (S)

If you have any BlackBerry Curve or the BlackBerry 8820 or 8830, you'll get:

• BlackBerry Maps with Points of Interest (H)
• Improved media player with playlist support and automatic playlist generation (H)
• Voice note recording (H)
• Video recording on Curve models (H)
• Streaming support for YouTube and Sling Player (H)
• Microsoft Office document editing with DocumentsToGo (H)
• Native format attachment downloading (S)
• HTML e-mails (S)
• Over-the-air device upgrades (S)
• Free/busy calendar lookup (S)
• Searching the server for old e-mail messages (S)

If you have a BlackBerry 8700 or 8703e, you'll get:

• Spell check (H)
• BlackBerry Maps with Points of Interest (H)
• New pictures and ringtones applications (H)
• Voice note recording (H)
• Microsoft Office document editing with DocumentsToGo (H)
• Native format attachment downloading (S)
• HTML e-mails (S)
• Over-the-air device upgrades (S)
• Free/busy calendar lookup (S)
• Searching the server for old e-mail messages (S)

If you have an older BlackBerry, maybe it's time to upgrade!

Mentioned in this roundup:

BlackBerry 8100 – The original BlackBerry Pearl is still on sale from T-Mobile. The Pearl's SureType keypad is easier and more accurate than texting, but takes up less room than a full QWERTY keyboard.

BlackBerry 8130 – The "Pearl 2," for Verizon and Sprint, adds a 2-megapixel camera and music and video players to the slim Pearl form factor.

BlackBerry 8700 – The 8800's predecessor as a business-class BlackBerry isn't quite as sleek, but it has a keyboard with separated keys that many people like more.

BlackBerry 8703e – This high-speed BlackBerry for Sprint and Verizon combines an easy-to-use separated keyboard with a business-friendly lack of camera.

BlackBerry 8310 – AT&T's BlackBerry Curve has lots of multimedia verve, GPS, and a camera, but no Wi-Fi.

BlackBerry 8320 – T-Mobile's Curve, on the other hand, has Wi-Fi and a camera, but no GPS. We like it because you can make unlimited voice calls over Wi-Fi networks with T-Mobile's Hotspot@Home plan.

BlackBerry 8800 – T-Mobile's BlackBerry 8800 is all business, with a bright screen, GPS, and the usual excellent BlackBerry E-mail.

BlackBerry 8820 – AT&T's business-class BlackBerry adds Wi-Fi, which speeds up Internet browsing but doesn't let you make voice calls over home networks.

BlackBerry 8830 – Sprint and Verizon give road warriors this truly global BlackBerry model, one of the few Sprint/Verizon phones to roam to Europe and parts of Asia.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2255033,00.asp

HDTVs For Super Bowl Sunday

2008-02-02T00:13:00.001-08:00

Bring out the best in the big game with a high-performing HDTV.

It's almost time for Super Bowl XLII, taking place in Arizona this year, and the big game begs to be watched on an equally enormous screen. These days, no Super Bowl party is complete without an HDTV—no matter how stocked the fridge is with beer and snacks. After all, high-definition and sports go hand-in-hand, and there's nothing like taking in the game from your living room with all your best buddies crowded around. With this in mind, we've handpicked HDTVs that provide you with the best viewing angles, so no one misses a touchdown or a fumble. In addition, these sets handle action-packed scenes with flair and keep artifacts and other distracting screen noise at bay. Here are some of the best sports-friendly plasma, LCD, and rear-projection sets for your budget and space. So throw the best Super Bowl party ever—one that they'll be talking about all year—by checking out our reviews below.

JVC LT-42X898
The JVC LT-42X898 offers a detailed picture with standard- and high-definition video sources, good image clarity for video containing fast motion, and excellent video processing.

Pioneer Elite KURO PRO-150FD
With superior image contrast and color quality, effective HD video processing, superb video noise reduction and very wide viewing angles, the 60-inch Pioneer Elite KURO PRO-150FD is one of the best plasma HDTVs we've ever seen.

LG 47LBX
This 47-inch LCD HDTV delivers impressive viewing angles and effective video processing of standard-definition video. But you may need a pro to adjust the picture to get it up to snuff.

Panasonic TH-42PZ700U
Panasonic's 42-inch plasma uses full 1080p resolution and effective video processing to keep its picture clean and sharp.

Mitsubishi WD-65833
Mitsubishi's huge WD-65833 rear-projection TV draws you in with its 65-inch 1080p screen, and keeps you watching with its excellent HD video processing, detailed imagery—some of the most impressive to be had from digital HD sources.

Westinghouse Digital TX-47F430S
The affordable Westinghouse TX-47F430S offers a generous number of HDMI ports, and its superb HD video processing ensures excellent detail.

Toshiba 37HL67 REGZA
The 37-inch Toshiba 37HL67 LCD set delivers a good-looking picture with HD sources, boasts three HDMI ports, has plenty of ways to tweak its picture, and can eliminate overscan of HD video.

Samsung HP-S4273
Samsung's 42-inch HP-S4273 plasma HDTV offers a good picture, contrast, and useful multimedia functionality. Bargain hunters should put this plasma on their radar screens.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2252485,00.asp

Motorola RAZR2 V8

2008-02-02T00:08:00.001-08:00

Tired of mediocre call quality on T-Mobile? You could have had a V8. No, not the tomato juice–based beverage—I'm talking about the Motorola RAZR2 V8, T-Mobile's highest-end feature phone with the carrier's best call quality by far. Sure, the huge gap in price between it and other T-Mobile feature phones is hard to justify. Also, the handset's features, such as support for third-party software and Internet connection, could stand some improvement. But there's no denying that this phone takes voice calls on T-Mobile to a whole new level. That's why I'm awarding it our Editors' Choice.

		SLIDESHOW (7)

		Slideshow \| All Shots

The V8 is shaped and styled just like other RAZR2s on other carriers, the V9 and V9m. It's a massive slab of metal and glass. Though thinnish, at 0.5 inches, the device takes up some serious pocket real estate, measuring 4.1 inches long by 2.1 inches wide. It weighs in at 4.2 ounces, average for a feature phone. The front is dominated by the best external screen ever to grace a flip model, a 2-inch display that's 320 by 240 and has 262 thousand colors. A tiny, 2-megapixel camera sits above that screen. Side buttons toggle through the handset's "profiles" rather than directly controlling volume, activating voice dialing, or launching the music player. Also, there's no dedicated camera button, nor is there removable memory —but I'll get to that later. Below the side buttons is a MicroUSB port for charging, PC connectivity, and headsets.

Like the V9, the V8 has CrystalTalk, Motorola's technology designed to dampen ambient din), which produces the best sound quality I've ever heard on a GSM phone. It also sounds just as good as the V9 for AT&T, which operates on UTMS, not GSM. Rather than being loud, the V8 is just clear. The volume and sound characteristics of calls automatically adjust to background noise, so you can hear your calls over, say, a nearby idling truck engine or the buzz of a busy street. CrystalTalk even seems to work some wonders with the speakerphone—which is, once more, far more intelligible than its volume level alone initially might suggest. Alas, the speakerphone doesn't work with the flip closed.

The phone's microphone doesn't entirely block out all environmental noise, but voices come out clearly on top of any background sounds. Voice dialing, which requires no training, worked well in my testing. Battery life was excellent for voice calls, and vibrating alerts felt strong. I found reception to be impeccable. This handset is quad-band, so it will operate on GSM and EDGE networks all over the world. (Frequent travelers should be aware that there's an unlocked version of this phone available as well, direct from Motorola.) Frankly, this is the best T-Mobile voice phone ever.

Powered by Linux…Sort of

There's something unique under the hood of the V8, too: a new, Linux-based operating system. This, combined with the device's 500-MHz processor, could have made the V8 more than just a great voice phone. It could also have been a handheld PC powerhouse. Motorola and T-Mobile completely dropped the ball there.

The V8 scored very well on JBenchmark Java tests, especially in gaming. But when I tried to load Opera Mini or the JBenchmark Net speed tester, I found that third-party Java applications were prevented from accessing the Internet, even with the super-duper-everything service plan my handset came with. This is a pernicious, stupid T-Mobile policy I've seen before, and it lowers the value of a very expensive phone.

Motorola can share the blame, because my V8 suffered also from some Internet access bugs. While the built-in AIM/ICQ/Yahoo!/MSN IM client and Opera full Web browser worked fine, the POP3 e-mail client refused to connect to any services.

The V8's 2MP, flashless camera is not a selling point. Indoor pictures were relatively sharp and well balanced, but outdoor pictures were severely underexposed and a bit blurry. The V8 takes unexceptional 176-by-144 resolution videos as well.

The V8 has a pretty basic but flexible music player that can handle unprotected MP3, AAC, and WMA tracks (including Amazon MP3 and iTunes Plus) without a problem, letting you search and sort by the usual artist and album criteria. You load music using USB or Bluetooth (at a snappy 70 kilobits per second) into the phone's 2GB of "storage" memory, essentially a soldered-in, nonremovable memory card. The phone also plays 3GPP-format videos at 15 frames per second in full-screen mode.

The music player is one of the few features that take advantage of the underused huge external screen. When you play music and close the flip, basic track information pops up on the outside display, and some way-too-easily-pressed music control buttons appear. The external screen can also be used for picture caller ID, as a photo viewfinder, and to see the beginnings of text messages. Still, I had hoped for something moreperhaps the ability to play video that Sprint's model, the V9m, has.

I noticed some annoying compression artifacts when listening to music over a Motorola HT820 Bluetooth headset, but things really improved when I used the cheap wired earbuds that come with the phone. The V8's micro-USB jack seriously limits the available wired headphones you can use. While the phone comes with a mini USB adapter, it doesn't ship with one for 2.5mm or 3.5mm music headphones.

Some minor features round out the V8's offerings. You can print directly to printers using a USB cable, and you can use the phone as a Bluetooth dial-up modem—though since T-Mobile's EDGE network is relatively slow, there's little reason to do so.

At $199 with contract, the V8 costs $129 more than any other non-smartphone device on T-Mobile's network. Since you can't load a full range of apps onto the phone, the real appeal here is the unparalleled voice quality. How much are you willing to pay to have your calls sound beautifully clear? If you're looking for more features and mere decent voice performance at a lower price, turn your eyes to the Blackberry Pearl instead.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2159329,00.asp

LG 42LGX style breaks new ground

2008-02-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

It would have been inconceivable a few years ago to talk about the electronics giant LG and 'Style' in the same sentence. It is a sign of how times have changed that we are now looking at the Korean electronics giant for styling leads for anything from LCD TV's to mobile phones.

With another ground breaking design, LG have not only come up with an ultra slim LCD of just 1.7in wide, they have managed to take a circular chunk out of the frame and managed to make a bold stylistic statement.

The 42LGX also offers 120Hz refresh technology, an ISF mode with user-accessible color temperature adjustment offering 10 separate grayscale points to help calibrators improve color accuracy, 24p True Cinema along with Four HDMI(v1.3) inputs.

LG have made a huge impact on the LCD TV market of late, with the 42LGX sure to enhance their reputation. LG's new found quality, performance and style is encapsulated by some of their more recent models such as the 32LB75, and their top end LY series of LCD TV's

http://hdtvorg.co.uk/news/articles/2008020101.htm

Sharp LC42XL2E Review

2008-02-01T22:01:00.000-08:00

42in LCD

Picture
Sound
Features
Usability
Value

Excellent all round performer let down by a few minor glitches.

HD Ready:

yes

Resolution:

1920 x 1080

Rating:

88%

Design

With a slim (7.5cm) frame finished in black, with a glass bezel around the outside of the screen the LC42XL2E is an indication that Sharp is taking style much more seriously.

Features

With 100Hz processing and 10-bit panels, Sharp's top of the range LC-42XL2E offers some additional features over the entry level LC-42X20E. 100Hz processing doubles the number of frames displayed on-screen for smoother pictures while 10-bit panels increase the number of available colours.

Screen:	42in 16:9
Tuner:	Digital
Sound System:	Nicam
Resolution:	1920 x 1080
Contrast Ratio:	2,000:1
Brightness:	450cd/m2
Other Features:100Hz processing, TruD, RGB plus, TruSurroundXT.
Sockets: 3 HDMI, 2 Scart, S-video, component video, composite video, PC input.

A 'Full HD' native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 on the LC42XL2E along with Sharp's 'Underscan' mode enables 1080-line sources (Sky TV, 1080i etc) to be shown in their pure, native fashion. 'Underscan' employs a one-to-one pixel mapping system to exactly match input to screen resolution.

The LC42XL2E has the ability to display films at their intended 24fps (frames per second) rather than the standard (for TV) of 25fps. LCD TV's without this feature will automatically speed up a film very slightly to compensate.

Sharp's TruD picture processing engine has evolved with some tweaking to remove the smear effect or jerkiness on fast moving images as well as enhancing detail and contrast.

The four-wavelength background lighting system (RGB plus) has been designed to ensure that colours are reproduced more accurately.

Acoustically, an on-board SRS sound system is powered by a digital amplifier and two 15-watt speakers.

Performance

The high point of the Sharp LC42XL2E's performance can be seen with the excellent black levels it manages to achieve. Blacks are truly black, with good detail visible on even the darkest scenes.

As you would expect, High Definition (HD) material looks superb. Sharp have built a solid reputation for producing some of the most capable LCD TV's in this respect, with picture sharpness and fine detail a match for any flat panel.

What Sharp have not done so well in the past is produce LCD TV's that perform well with Standard Definition (SD) sources. Judging by the Freeview performance of the LC-42XL2E however, this looks set to change. Inevitably, with such a large screen things are not perfect with an element of noise creeping into the picture, but for a 46in screen with the lowest SD quality Sharp have made excellent progress. This screen is now a viable day to day Standard Definition display, and even more so with a better quality satellite or cable source.

The only really negative aspect of what is a largely competent performance is colour. No amount of tweaking could produce a colour that we were truly happy with. Whatever the setting, colours seemed over saturated or a little washed out.

The acoustic performance is average with no great perceivable benefit coming from Sharp's proprietary surround sound system.

Conclusion

A fine all round performer frustratingly let down by a few minor glitches.

http://www.hdtvorg.co.uk/reviews/lcd/Sharp_LC42XL2E.htm

RIM BlackBerry Curve 8320

2008-02-01T21:56:00.000-08:00

Design: Candy bar • Carrier: T-Mobile • OS Supported: J2ME • Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 10:00 • Price When Reviewed: $300

Last updated
January 11, 2008

Pros

Wi-Fi support
2-megapixel camera

Cons

Inconsistent voice quality
Expensive

RIM BlackBerry Curve 8320

Voice-over-Wi-Fi feature makes an excellent phone even better.

First came the trim, consumer-friendly BlackBerry Curve 8300. Then came the Wi-Fi-enabled BlackBerry 8820. Now there's the BlackBerry Curve 8320, an impressive PDA phone that combines the best of the previous two models and has an added bonus: While the 8820 supports Wi-Fi for data only, the 8320 lets you make voice calls over wireless 802.11b/g networks too.

Physically, the 8320 is the same as the original BlackBerry Curve, though it comes in two different colors, titanium gray or gold. (Unlike the original Curve, which is available from AT&T, the 8320 is available from T-Mobile for $300 with a two-year contract.) It features the same thin and light design, a small but very usable QWERTY keyboard, a 2-megapixel camera, and a gorgeous 320-by-240 display.

The biggest news is under the hood: In addition to support for GSM voice and EDGE data networks, the 8320 adds Wi-Fi with UMA--a technology that allows you to make voice calls over Wi-Fi. The phone works with T-Mobile's $20-per-month (on top of your voice and data plan) HotSpot@Home service, which permits unlimited calls over Wi-Fi networks. While the service is a bit pricey, it could potentially lower your costs by saving your cellular voice minutes.

I tested the phone and the service using one of T-Mobile's HotSpot@Home wireless routers, manufactured by Linksys. Using the 8320's on-screen wizard to connect to a wireless network is a breeze; within just a few minutes, I was surfing the Web and downloading files with ease. The 8320 will connect to any 802.11b/g wireless network, so you can use your existing router--or even a public hotspot--to make calls and surf the Web.

T-Mobile says its router (priced at $50, but free after a rebate) is designed to conserve your phone's battery life and to prioritize voice traffic, which should--in theory--result in better call quality. However, I noticed no significant improvement when using the T-Mobile router instead of my own Linksys wireless router. Call quality over both wireless networks was the same: decent. Voices were garbled sometimes, and I noticed an echo, just as I often did when using the phone over a regular cellular connection. Being able to make calls over Wi-Fi is a great option in areas (like my house) where cellular service is spotty, though. (We could not lab-test the phone's talk-time battery life in time for this article's initial posting, but we will update this review when we have the results--and the PCW Rating for this phone.)

For both voice calls and data usage, the 8320 will default to your Wi-Fi network when it is available. Should you leave the network's range, the phone is supposed to switch your call seamlessly to the GSM network (and vice versa)--but in my tests, the experience wasn't as smooth. When I went out of range of my Wi-Fi network, my calls occasionally dropped, even though cellular service was available.

Those glitches aside, the 8320 is an excellent phone. Like all BlackBerry units, it is a stellar e-mail device, with support for ten accounts. The included camera (which sports a flash and a 3X digital zoom) took adequate but--like many camera phones--occasionally blurry snapshots. Among other multimedia features is an audio and video player that supports most formats (including MP3, AAC, WMA, WMV, and MP4). The player's interface is basic, but audio quality is good and video looks great. The device also has a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD card slot (which is inconveniently located under the phone's battery, unfortunately).

While voice quality over Wi-Fi was only passable, the capability itself is still impressive. And combined with the 8320's sleek design and awesome e-mail handling, it makes for a winning package.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,138568-page,1/article.html

Fresh Insight into Evolution

2008-02-01T01:08:00.000-08:00

Studies of genetic recombination suggest that genetic shuffling varies by gender.

Genetic recombination: When cells divide to produce eggs and sperm, a process called meiosis, corresponding maternal and paternal chromosomes pair up and swap small pieces of DNA. (Paired chromosomes are depicted above.) This ensures a constant source of genetic diversity, which drives evolution.
Credit: Technology Review

It's a tantalizing thought worthy of X-Men-inspired daydreams: are some of us, for better or for worse, evolving faster than others? Growing evidence suggests that rates of genetic recombination--one of the driving forces of human evolution--vary greatly between individuals. Two new studies shed further light on the inner workings of this gene-shuffling process, highlighting differences in the way men and women rearrange the DNA that they pass on to their children. The findings could help scientists understand disorders such as miscarriage and Down syndrome, which are linked to errors in recombination.

During recombination, corresponding maternal and paternal chromosomes align within cells and swap bits of DNA. These cells eventually develop into sperm and eggs, endowing future offspring with a different configuration of genes than their parents. "Recombination constitutes one of the most powerful means by which new combinations of genetic variants are generated in the genome," says Kari Stefansson, chief executive officer of deCODE Genetics, in Iceland, and senior author of one of the studies.

Previous research shows that recombination is often localized to specific spots on the genome, known as hot spots. Some people's genomes undergo this swap more than other people's, with apparently profound consequences. In 2005, Stefansson's group at deCODE found that women with higher recombination rates had more children, suggesting that evolution has selected for molecular mechanisms that create diversity.

Scientists study recombination by comparing genetic variation in parents and their children. New techniques to analyze huge numbers of genetic variations, commonly used to identify genes linked to disease, are now allowing a more detailed analysis of recombination than ever before. (See "Genes for Several Common Diseases Found.") In one such study, published Thursday in the online version of the journal Science, researchers from the University of Chicago generated a high-resolution map of recombination hot spots by analyzing the DNA of 725 people. The volunteers came from 82 families of Hutterites, a genetically similar group of European immigrants who settled in the Dakotas in the 19th century.

That map allowed researchers to analyze how specific hot spots varied between men and women, and parents and children. "Some individuals use some hot spots more than others," says Graham Coop, a researcher at the University of Chicago who led the work. Coop and his collaborators also found that men and women had different recombination rates and tended to use different hot spots for recombination. In addition, that pattern of hot-spot usage seemed to be inherited. "That suggests differences in recombination machinery between indviduals," says Coop. He ultimately hopes to identify the genes that control recombination.

Stefansson and his colleagues do just that in a second study, also published Thursday in Science. The researchers scanned the genomes of 20,000 people for specific genetic variations linked to recombination rate. They identified two variations within a gene known as RNF212 that together accounted for 22 percent and 6.5 percent of paternal and maternal variation, respectively. Little is known about the function of the gene.

Surprisingly, these variations had opposite effects in men and women: the mutation that increased recombination in women did the opposite in men, and vice versa. The findings suggest an evolutionary mechanism for keeping control of genetic diversity. "It's important to increase diversity, but if it goes unchecked, it's likely to lead to instability in the genome that could be dangerous," says Stefansson. "If you have the same sequence variant influencing recombination in one direction in men and the other direction in women, you have put together a mechanism to keep recombination rates within certain limits."

Both studies shed light on the basic underpinnings of human evolution, which could ultimately impact human health. For example, abnormal recombination can result in miscarriage. Older women, who have higher rates of miscarriage, tend to have children whose genomes show evidence of higher recombination rate. A better understanding of the mechanisms underlying this observation could eventually lead to new fertility treatments.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20139/

Social Search

2008-02-01T01:06:00.000-08:00

A new website will offer personalized search results based on the user's social network.

Credit: Technology Review

People are flocking to online social networks. Facebook, for example, claims an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. But companies are still hunting for ways to make these networks more useful--and profitable. In the past year, Facebook has introduced new services aimed at taking advantage of users' online contacts (see "Building onto Facebook's Platform"), and Yahoo announced plans for an e-mail service that shares data with social-networking sites. (See "Yahoo's Plan for a Smarter In-Box.") Now a company called Delver, which presented at Demo earlier this week, is working on a search engine that uses social-network data to return personalized results from the larger Web.

Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site connects information about a user's social network with Web search results, "so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph." He explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name. Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user--such as a public LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom. The consequence, says Agmon, is that each user gets a different set of results from a given query, and a set quite different from those delivered by Google.

"We have no intention of competing with the Googles of the world, because Google is doing a very good job of indexing the Web and bringing you the Wikipedia page of every search query you're looking for," says Agmon. He says that Delver will free general search queries such as "New York" or "screensaver" from the heavy search-engine optimization that tends to make those kinds of queries return generic, ad-heavy results on Google. "[As a user], you're always thinking, how can I trick Google into bringing me the real results rather than the commercial results?" Agmon says. "With this engine, we don't need to trick it at all. You can go back to these very naive and simple queries because the results come from your network. Your network is not trying to optimize results; they just publish or bookmark pages which they find interesting." As a consequence, the results lean toward user-generated content and items tagged through sites such as del.icio.us.

A person can improve the results he gets from Delver by registering and allowing it access to connections made on sites where information is usually kept private, Agmon says. Registered users can also add connections found through Delver, such as a friend of a friend who consistently leads to interesting sites. Although the registration feature will be available, Agmon says that it's important that people be able to use the site without registering, so it will be available to more casual Web users. One consequence of this design as it currently stands is that it's possible to search the Web as someone other than yourself. Agmon acknowledges the possibility and its potential for use and abuse, but he notes that once a person builds a profile, he must log in to search, and that identity can no longer be used as a proxy.

Help from friends: Before querying Delver (above), a user enters her name to allow the site to search for information about her social network and connections. Once the network is built, the user can search and receive results ranked by ties to her social network. The query "New York," for example, is more likely to return a friend's home video uploaded to YouTube than to return the home page of a five-star hotel.

Clay Shirky, a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, points out that Google itself is already a form of social search, due to its dependence on links. "I think the question is, what value do you get out of being more explicitly social?" he says. Since personalized results are one of Delver's main selling points, Shirky says, it's important to be aware of when a user wants personalized results, and when that might not be desirable. "The further we are away from our own areas of expertise and concern, I think the less we care that our results be different," he says. "If I want to know what happened in the Crimean War, and you want to know what happened in the Crimean War, we're pretty happy that the Wikipedia link is the number-one link, because we'll get a good overview. If you're a Crimean War scholar, on the other hand, you're probably not happy about that."

Shirky says that he is suspicious of the claim that social search sites can return better results for general search queries. "People's tastes are more different than the same in environments with large amounts of freedom," he says. He worries that social search results to a general query like "music" might return either a cacophony of songs that would be all over the map in terms of style, or a list of the top 40 songs no one needs to search to find. A better situation might arise for someone looking for "bluegrass music," Shirky says, provided the user is someone, such as a bluegrass musician, who is likely to have a network well versed in the subject.

Agmon says that Delver plans to make money by serving up personalized advertising along with its search results. The company also hopes to get income by licensing its search technology to socially oriented sites and by bringing up more meaningful search results within those sites. Delver is slated to launch next month, after its crawlers have had more time to collect data. Agmon says that he expects to open the site for an invitation-only preview by May.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20138/

Analytics in Football

2008-02-01T01:02:00.000-08:00

Will using complex statistical analysis give the New England Patriots an edge at game time?

Credit: Technology Review

Football coaches have never been known to be particularly intellectual, tending to favor their "gut feelings" over objective data. But that is slowly changing. Professional-football general managers and coaches are increasingly using analytics--the intensive use of data and statistics to make decisions--both in evaluating a player's performance and in calling plays during the game. Some experts credit part of the success of the New England Patriots, who are competing for their fourth Super Bowl in six seasons on Sunday, to this trend in analytics.

"It is generally accepted that the Patriots are one of the most analytically advanced franchises in the NFL," says Aaron Schatz, the creator of FootballOutsiders.com, a site that uses statistics to analyze the game.

Such heavy use of analytics has already transformed the management of professional baseball, and now it is making inroads into football. KC Joyner, author of Scientific Football 2007, a book that uses a performance-based metric system to analyze nearly every measureable statistic in the NFL, says that analytics began to emerge in football in the past five years as teams have gone from just analyzing game footage to putting a quantitative value on a player's performance.

One of the more widely used metrics is the quarterback rating. It is a complex rating that's computed based on complete passes, pass attempts, passing yards, touchdown passes, and interceptions. "This is a pretty critical metric since quarterbacks are one of the most important players," says Tom Davenport, a professor of IT and management at Babson College and author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning.

Teams continue to analyze video to track, tabulate, and calculate how many times the opposing team, for example, blitzes when its defense is in a nickel formation, but they are also starting to use video to track the number of times that a cornerback misreads a slant route or runs into another defender when covering a pick play. "It's not just about doing advanced scouting on teams' formations, but targeting players so teams say, 'We can run this play at this lineman,' or 'This cornerback can't cover this particular route,'" says Joyner.

Beyond targeting players, football is beginning to use analytics to select the best players for the lowest price. "The Patriots are particularly good at optimizing their payroll," says Davenport. "This is what a corporation would call human resource analytics, and in any sport, that is probably the single most important thing to do."

On the field, the Patriots do not shy away from using analytical data to make play-calling decisions--whether it is deciding to punt on fourth down, or deciding if they should go for one point or two after a touchdown, says Davenport. After the team's head coach, Bill Belichick, read a paper by well-known economist David Romer about how teams are generally too conservative on fourth down, he began using historical data to develop a table to determine when the team should punt and when it should go for the first down. In the past couple of years, Belichick has been one of the most aggressive coaches when it comes to going for it on fourth down, says Schatz.

Analytics in sports have been most commonly used in professional baseball. One early advocate was Bill James, a statistician who is now a senior advisor to the Boston Red Sox. "Bill James has been prolific in coming up with new metrics for team and player performance, gathering those statistics and publishing them," says Davenport.

But baseball lends itself to an analytical mind-set. "The sport is individually oriented and, thus, it is easier to measure the individual's contribution," says Davenport. "Plus, there is just a lot of data available, and when data emerges, people start taking advantage of it."

In football, the use of analytics is harder because there are only a few statistics that are popularly tracked, like yardage and downs. But football, like baseball, is now working to bridge the gap between what the "scouting eye" sees and what the numbers are saying, says Joyner. "Football is still in the early stages," he notes.

The analytics trend "is not going to take off in football until someone wins with metrics like the Red Sox did in baseball," says Joyner. "The Patriots are going to help, but what it will really take is a team to go from a losing record to winning the championship." Until that happens and everyone catches up, analytics are going to give teams that are already using the methods, like the Patriots, a competitive edge, he says.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20132/?a=f

The Rise of Systemic Financial Risk

2008-01-31T01:41:00.000-08:00

MIT's Andrew Lo describes how one rogue trader can impact global markets.

Market watcher: Andrew Lo, director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, says that the growing complexity of world markets makes it more likely that aberrations like the Societe Generale fraud will rock world markets.
Credit: MIT

Yesterday, a week after Societe Generale disclosed a $7.2 billion loss by a single rogue trader, Bank of France chairman Christian Noyer declared to a French senate finance committee, "None of the controls within Societe Generale seem to have worked as they should have."

But beyond the evident failure of internal control technologies lie wider vulnerabilities in the global financial system. It is possible that the deeds of 31-year-old Jerome Kerviel at Societe Generale triggered global stock sell-offs, says Andrew Lo, director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering. And that points to widening systemic risk in ever more complex financial markets.

Technology Review: First, what do we know about the failures of those Societe Generale controls?

Andrew Lo: They are still trying to piece together the different methods he used, but apparently, it was his intimate knowledge of Societe Generale's systems infrastructure that allowed him to circumvent various controls. From news reports, it appears he was able to access internal financial databases and not only alter the stated holdings of the accounts he was trading, but was also able to circumvent the checks and reconciliation processes that were put into place to make sure these were accurate. Apparently, the standard reconciliation processes did run, but he was able to alter the records both before and after these processes ran so as to avoid detection and maintain his portfolio.

TR: Can't we just build better software and other technologies to prevent a recurrence?

AL: Yes, but anytime there is an interface between technology and human behavior, you open yourself up to the potential for fraud. Systems don't build themselves: humans program them. A big event like this happens every so often, and then people say, "Gee, we have to spend more time and money to improve our systems," and the systems become safer. Once the systems become safer, we get lulled into a false sense of security and complacency. And eventually, we experience a rude awakening when the next disaster strikes. I would argue that it is impossible to prevent these disasters with 100 percent certainty.

TR: Okay, so bad things will happen. I take it you are mainly concerned about the ripple effect when they do?

AL: Exactly. The financial system as a whole is getting more complex. Financial institutions rely on ever more elaborate systems architecture and electronic communications across different counterparties and sectors. The number of parties involved, the nature of transactions, the volume of transactions as the market grows--taken together, the dynamics among these aspects of financial markets imply that the complexity is growing exponentially. No single human can comprehend that complexity. And as the system grows more complex, it is a well-known phenomenon that the probability of some kind of shock spreading through the system increases as well. Systemic shocks become more likely. Today, we are looking at some significant exposure to relatively rare events.

TR: In what way was the Societe Generale matter such a shock?

AL: One natural hypothesis is that the global sell-off that happened early last week was a direct outcome of Societe Generale's unwinding of these rogue trades. We don't have any conclusive evidence yet, but it's not an outlandish conjecture given the circumstances surrounding the massive fraud that was allegedly committed. According to Societe Generale, the problem was discovered on Saturday [January 19], and the firm began unwinding their portfolio at the first possible opportunity. If it turns out that this "unwind" was on the scale of a billion dollars or more, it is plausible that the unwind itself triggered the global sell-off--first in Asia, then in Europe, and then in the U.S.

TR: So one person, in this case Mr. Kerviel, can move the entire global financial system.

AL: It's a larger-scale version of what happened in August of 2007--in particular, August 7, 8, and 9. A large number of quantitative equity hedge funds lost money on those dates simultaneously, yet there is no market event that you can point to that can explain why these funds lost money at the same time. But looking at circumstantial evidence, we [at MIT] pieced together a story that one large quantitative equity fund decided to unwind its portfolio, for reasons we don't know for sure, but which we conjecture to be related to credit problems from the subprime mortgage market. Because the conjectured liquidation involved a big fund that needed to be liquidated quickly, this implies that the impact of the liquidation on other similarly positioned quantitative equity funds would be negative--and large. You get a snowball effect. Everybody is heading for the exit door at the same time, and you get a crash. But in August 2007, it was not a crash of the market as a whole, but of portfolios that are similarly structured to the fund that started the snowball.

TR: So how can we mitigate these kinds of wider risks?

AL: Probably the best way to reduce the impact of systemic shocks is to provide investors with some transparency as to their likelihood and severity, and let the investors decide how much risk to bear. This is probably best accomplished by creating a government organization like the National Transportation Safety Board, charged with the mandate of analyzing every financial blowup or crisis and producing publicly available reports that describe the nature of the crisis, the circumstances leading up to it, and proposed methods for avoiding such incidents in the future. In the same way that the NTSB has improved the safety of air travel by sifting through the wreckage of every airplane crash and publishing a detailed study of its findings and recommendations, a Capital Markets Safety Board would give investors more insight into the risks of any given investment. Over time, the aggregate information produced by the CMSB would shed additional light on the nature of systemic risks for the entire global financial system.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20133/

Cheap Hydrogen

2008-01-31T01:40:00.000-08:00

A new process uses sunlight and a nanostructured catalyst to inexpensively and efficiently generate hydrogen for fuel.

Solar gases: A parabolic trough can focus sunlight on nanostructured titania, improving the efficiency of a new system for generating hydrogen by splitting water.
Credit: John Guerra, Nanoptek

Nanoptek, a startup based in Maynard, MA, has developed a new way to make hydrogen from water using solar energy. The company says that its process is cheap enough to compete with the cheapest approaches used now, which strip hydrogen from natural gas, and it has the further advantage of releasing no carbon dioxide.

Nanoptek, which has been developing the new technology in part with grants from NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE), recently completed its first venture-capital round, raising $4.7 million that it will use to install its first pilot plant. The technology uses titania, a cheap and abundant material, to capture energy from sunlight. The absorbed energy releases electrons, which split water to make hydrogen. Other researchers have used titania to split water in the past, but Nanoptek researchers found a way to modify titania to absorb more sunlight, which makes the process much cheaper and more efficient, says John Guerra, the company's founder and CEO.

Researchers have known since the 1970s that titania can catalyze reactions that split water. But while titania is a good material because it's cheap and doesn't degrade in water, it only absorbs ultraviolet light, which represents a small fraction of the energy in sunlight. Other researchers have tried to increase the amount of sunlight absorbed by pairing titania with dyes or dopants, but dyes aren't nearly as durable as titania, and dopants haven't produced efficient systems, says John Turner, who develops hydrogen generation technologies at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO.

Nanoptek's approach uses insights from the semiconductor industry to make titania absorb more sunlight. Guerra says that chip makers have long known that straining a material so that its atoms are slightly pressed together or pulled apart alters the material's electronic properties. He found that depositing a coating of titania on dome-like nanostructures caused the atoms to be pulled apart. "When you pull the atoms apart, less energy is required to knock the electrons out of orbit," he says. "That means you can use light with lower energy--which means visible light" rather than just ultraviolet light.

The strain on the atoms also affects the way that electrons move through the material. Too much strain, and the electrons tend to be reabsorbed by the material before they split water. Guerra says that the company has had to find a balance between absorbing more sunlight and allowing the electrons to move freely out of the material. Nanoptek has also developed cheaper ways to manufacture the nanostructured materials. Initially, the company used DVD manufacturing processes, but it has since moved on to a still-cheaper proprietary process.

NREL's John Turner says that Nanoptek's process is "very, very promising." And Harriet Kung, the acting director of the DOE's office of basic energy sciences, which has funded Nanoptek's work, says that the strained-titania approach is "one of the major exciting advances" since titania was first discovered to be a photocatalyst in the 1970s.

If it works as expected, the technology could help address one of the fundamental problems with using hydrogen as fuel. Hydrogen is attractive because it is light, and burning it only produces water. But today most hydrogen is made from natural gas, a process that releases considerable amounts of carbon dioxide. The other main option is electrolysis. But even if it's powered by clean energy, such as electricity from photovoltaics, electrolysis is inefficient and expensive. Guerra says using strained titania, and Nanoptek's inexpensive manufacturing process, makes the process cheap and efficient enough to compete with processes that create hydrogen from natural gas. What's more, Guerra says, the Nanoptek technology can be located closer to customers than large-scale natural-gas processes, which could significantly reduce transportation costs, thereby helping make the technology attractive. And if in the future carbon emissions are taxed or regulated, Nanoptek's carbon-free approach is another advantage.

Turner says that in addition to making hydrogen for fuel-cell vehicles, Nanoptek's process--if it is indeed efficient and inexpensive, as the company claims--could also be important for large-scale solar electricity. If solar is ever to be a dominant source of power, finding ways of storing the energy for night use will be essential. And hydrogen, he says, could be a good way to store it.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20134/

Programming Advanced Materials

2008-01-31T01:38:00.000-08:00

Ordered nano order: Sequences of DNA attached to gold nanoparticles (upper image) program the particles’ self-assembly into novel crystals (lower image). X-ray diffraction confirms the crystals--partly squashed by the electron microscopy that produced these images--to be perfect lattices of tens of thousands of particles.
Credit: Oleg Gang

In 1996, scientists at IBM and Northwestern University used single-stranded DNA as if it were molecular Velcro to program the self-assembly of nanoparticles into simple structures. The work helped launch the then-nascent nanotechnology field by suggesting the possibility of building novel materials from the bottom up. Twelve years later, researchers from Northwestern and Brookhaven National Laboratory report separately in the journal Nature that they have finally delivered on that promise, using DNA linkers to transform nanoparticles into perfect crystals containing up to one million particles.

"The crystal structures are deliberately designed," says Northwestern's Chad Mirkin, one of the materials scientists who pioneered DNA linking in the 1990s and a coauthor of one of today's reports. "This is a new way of making things."

Ohio State University physicist David Stroud calls the work "quite valuable." He predicts that the breakthrough will enable the assembly of new materials with novel optical, electronic, or magnetic properties that have, until now, existed only in the minds and models of materials scientists. "Even now I'm surprised they could do it," says Stroud.

To date, efforts at programmed nanoparticle self-assembly in three dimensions have produced mostly disordered clumps. These clumps can have value; indeed, Mirkin's startup company NanoSphere has used the technology to develop medical diagnostics that have gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

But more complex and exotic materials imagined by Stroud and others require ordered structures. The hang-up, says Stroud, is that nanoparticles are immense relative to the atoms that form most crystals. As a result, the nanoparticles move relatively slowly, especially with DNA strands attached. When cooled to allow the complementary strands of DNA to link up, the nanoparticles tend to get frozen into a disordered arrangement before they can find their way to the orderly lattice of a crystal.

The authors of the new reports--a team at Northwestern led by Mirkin and chemist George Schatz, and physicist Oleg Gang's team in Brookhaven National Laboratory's functional materials center, in Upton, NY--overcame the particles' sluggishness by using longer DNA strands that give the particles more flexibility during crystal formation. "Typically, we think that crystallinity requires very rigid structures, so one could imagine it's necessary to have a very rigid DNA shell on the particles to have good crystals," says Gang. "In reality, it's the opposite."

While the details of the Northwestern and Brookhaven systems differ, both pad out their DNA strands with sequences that act as spacers and flexors, in addition to complementary sequences on the DNA ends that bind particles together. The groups start by binding one of two types of DNA to gold nanoparticles. The DNA types are complementary to each other. These two pools of modified particles are then mixed and cooled. DNA strands with complementary DNA form a double helix, tying together their respective nanoparticles, while identical DNA strands act like springs to repel their respective particles. The spacers on each DNA strand, meanwhile, allow bound particles to twist and bend so each particle in the mix can bind the largest number of complementary particles.

The result is exactly what theory predicts: a crystal lattice in which each particle of one type is surrounded by eight of the others marking the corners of a cube. Mirkin's group further demonstrated that tweaking the temperature and DNA sequences could nudge the same mix of particles to form a distinct crystal structure in which each particle has 12 neighbors.

Mirkin says that he and his team are just getting started. "To me, it's really only the start rather than the ending," he says. Over the past three years, Mirkin's group has been demonstrating methods to place different DNA linkers on different faces of nonspherical particles, such as triangle-faced prisms and virus particles. That, he says, should enable programming of more complex materials with repeating patterns of three or more components. "The really intriguing possibility here is the ability to program the formation of any structure you want," says Mirkin.

Stroud says that the structures already produced will be useful as the DNA-programmed assembly is extended to particles other than gold. Applications could include photonic crystals, in which the precise periodicity of particles can tune the overall materials to manipulate specific wavelengths of light, and photovoltaics that capture a broader range of the solar spectrum.

The structures are highly porous--10 percent particles and DNA and 90 percent water. That could hinder applications in which water is undesirable. Drain out the water, and the crystals collapse. Gang says that one could stabilize the crystals by filling the lattice with a polymer, but he is also exploring alternate stabilization schemes that would preserve the lattice's open space.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20137/

Philips feminizes the LCD TV

2008-01-30T22:02:00.001-08:00

With its 'Design Collection' of LCD TV's the Dutch electronics giant is cottoning on to the fact that style sells. It is actually focusing some of its design efforts around market research that suggests that for 98% of female consumers style is an important factor in the buying process.

Andrea Ragnetti, Philips' consumer lifestyle guru is at the forefront of a growing trend within large consumer focused organisations who have recognized the increasing importance of female buying power.

Three new LCD TV series' the 7000, 5000 and 3000 certainly lean towards a more 'femmine' style without being overtly directed towards the fairer sex. The new panels however have substance to back up the style with

The top of the range 1080p 7000 series comes equipped with 120Hz processing, an extremely rapid 2 millisecond response time along with an impressive 4 HDMI (v1.3) inputs.

The new panels will feature Philips' proprietary HD Digital Natural Motion technology (HD DNM) which has been designed to reduce on-screen juddering, while Motion Estimation Motion Compensation (MEMC) acts to further smooth motion by inserting compensating frames within faster scenes.

With a growing reputation for producing some of the most technologically advanced LCD TV's around, Philips' like other manufacturers have begun to realize the importance of psychological aspects and how they affect their bottom line.

http://hdtvorg.co.uk/news/articles/2008013002.htm

The demise of HD DVD?

2008-01-30T22:01:00.000-08:00

Without wanting to sound too premature about the possible demise of the HD DVD High Definition format, more bad news continues to suggest that its rival Blu-ray may well emerge as the dominant format.

This week, the market research group Gartner indicated that it believed that the format war would be resolved in 2008 with Blu-ray emerging as the victor. It also suggested that Toshiba's strategy of cutting HD DVD player prices would simply delay the inevitable.

HD DVD was dealt what many believe to be a fatal blow earlier this month with the announcement from Warner Brothers that it would no longer be producing HD DVD versions of its films. With around 20% of all DVD sales, the big Hollywood studio's decision was certainly a huge set back for the HD DVD format.

More bad news for HD DVD has emerged this week in the UK with Woolworths announcing that it would no longer be offering HD DVD films in its stores after March this year. The stores decision is based on Blu-ray outselling its rival 10:1 over the Christmas period, with a company spokesperson pointing to the fact that the 750,000 (Blu-ray playing) PS3's in the UK give the format a significantly larger user base than HD DVD.

If a single format emerges, it will be good news for consumers who up until this point have been reluctant to commit to High Definition DVD, and for the industry in general which will surely see an explosion in public interest. Barry Meyer, chairman of Warner Bros had previously warned that "the window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could be missed if format confusion continues to linger,"

http://hdtvorg.co.uk/news/articles/2008013001.htm

Ultra Slim LCD TV's from Sharp

2008-01-30T21:55:00.000-08:00

At a mere 3.44 cm wide, three new Aquos LCD TV's from Sharp are destined to become the slimmest screens commercially available, for a while at least.

The 37in, 42in and 46in screens represent a trend in demand for larger slimmer panels which owe as much to consumer demand for high style as for the latest technological wizardry. This is not to say that the new panels from Sharp are not very well specified.

The AQUOS X Series feature Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution panels, 120Hz processing, thin-profile 3-way 8-speaker system and 1-Bit digital amplifier along with 3 HDMI (v1.3) inputs.

Available to Japanese consumers this March it looks like that the X series will be available in the UK some time this year. No dates or prices available as yet.

http://hdtvorg.co.uk/news/articles/2008012901.htm

Detecting Asthma Irritants

2008-01-30T05:22:00.000-08:00

A portable sensor array measures air quality to discern the causes of asthma attacks.

Detecting irritants: Mark Jones (above) is the lead engineer for the development of a sensor system (below) that measures five types of chemicals known to cause asthma attacks. The device, approximately the size of a large cell phone, will be used to continuously monitor a person’s exposure levels to find the cause of attacks.
Credit: Courtesy of Kitty Ray Swain

Researchers at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in Atlanta have developed a portable sensor system to monitor the air quality for people suffering from asthma. The device is a combination of sensors that measure the level of chemicals in the air thought to cause asthma attacks, such as ozone, volatile organic compounds, and formaldehyde. It is lightweight and small enough to fit into a patient's pocket, so exposure levels can be continuously monitored.

The only way that we are going to understand how environmental factors affect asthma is if we can measure a person's exposures on a day-to-day basis, says Charlene Bayer, the leader of the Environmental Exposures and Analysis Group at GTRI and the sensor system's principal investigator. "To do so, we need a device like this that can hold numerous sensors in a small, portable package.".

An estimated 20 million Americans suffer from asthma, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and identifying the triggers of an attack is currently a guessing game. "There are a few devices on the market that measure one or two chemicals, but they are stationary and the size of a desktop computer," says Mark Jones, the chief executive officer of Keehi Technologies and the lead engineer developing the sensor system.

Currently, the only way to control an asthma attack is with medication, or "trigger avoidance." In 2007, the total health-care costs of asthma in the United States were approximately $19.7 billion, according to the NIH.

"Research has shown that if you can reduce the triggering of an asthma attack, you will reduce the impact of the disease," says Mark Millard, the director of the Baylor Martha Foster Lung Care Center at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, TX. The new sensor system, he says, is really trying to answer the question, "What are the triggers for people with asthma?"

The device is about the size of a cell phone and contains a total of five sensors that measure different possible asthma triggers: ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, carbon dioxide, and total volatile organic compounds--the brew of chemicals that are emitted as gases from products such as paints, cleaning supplies, and building materials. The device also includes temperature and humidity sensors and a clock, to put a time stamp on the measurements. The researchers used sensors already on the market and kept the device small by outfitting the sensors on a two-sided circuit board.

Establishing a timeline is important for late-phase reactions, says Millard, since reactions to compounds such as formaldehyde may happen four to six hours after a patient is exposed. "Now we can look at the data and know that a patient was exposed to a lot of those compounds and that could be the trigger."

To measure the air quality, a small motor in the device sucks in air through an intake hose. Before the air passes over the sensors, it encounters a small filter that removes particulates, such as dust and pollen. The mass of the filter is measured before and after a sampling period to determine the total amount of particles. The air is then evenly distributed over the sensors.

"It takes about 30 seconds for the air to pass through the device and the data to be stored, and then it goes to sleep for another minute. In one hour it takes approximately 50 or 60 samples," says Jones.

The device can be worn for up to 24 hours before the particle filter needs to be replaced and the memory on the device is full. The data can be downloaded from the sensor system onto a computer.

Millard says the device is unique and innovative, but that he would like to see its capabilities expanded to measure tobacco smoke. He would also like to be able to separate out the particle measurements so they can be measured in real time--an upgrade that Bayer says will be introduced once the device is commercialized. Bayer would also like to get more specific readings on the different volatile organic compounds.

"We would like to get to the point where we can pop certain sensors in and out so a patient can target it towards their particular needs," says Bayer. "Asthma is a very complicated disease and there are a number of different airborne exposures that can exacerbate an asthma attack. This technology will allow us to find the source of exacerbation and understand the health impacts," she says.

The researchers at GTRI are currently in talks with an undisclosed company to commercialize the device, says Bayer. The initial target users will be asthma patients but the device will be open for use by others who want to study environmental exposures.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20131/

Genetic Variant Predicts Heart Disease Risk

2008-01-30T05:18:00.000-08:00

A newly identified risk factor for heart disease also seems to indicate which patients will benefit from popular statin therapies.

Heartsick: There have been many false leads in identifying risk genes for heart disease, so the burden of proof for those studies should be much higher than usually required, some experts say.
Credit: Technology Review

Testing for a genetic variation could predict the likelihood that a patient will respond well to certain statins. But some researchers say it's too soon to use the variation to determine treatment.

Researchers from Celera reported yesterday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology that a single substitution in the sequence of a gene called KIF6 makes people both more susceptible to heart attacks and more responsive to certain drugs that lower cholesterol. Though there is no known biological explanation linking the variation to heart disease, the study found that it increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes by 55 percent.

Celera, the company best known for sequencing the human genome, examined 35 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 30,000 patients. Of those, "KIF6 is by far the most significant," says Thomas J. White, chief scientific officer at Celera. In fact, nearly 60 percent of the study population was found to carry the KIF6 variant. (According to the study, these findings take into account other factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure, and cholesterol levels.)

The researchers also found that carriers of the KIF6 variant responded better to the cholesterol-lowering drugs pravastatin (Pravachol) and atorvastatin (Lipitor). For example, among patients with the genetic variation, those who took pravastatin were 37 percent less likely to experience a heart attack than those who took the placebo. Those without the genetic variation who took the drug were only 14 percent less likely to experience a heart attack than those who took the placebo. Statins are big sellers for the pharmaceutical industry. In 2006, Lipitor, the world's best-selling drug, brought in $13 billion in global sales.

"This is one of the first studies to show an interaction with therapy" and genotype, says Marc Sabatine, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a coauthor on one of the papers. "That is very exciting to see."

Surprisingly, the researchers found that KIF6 doesn't appear to work by lowering levels of LDL or "bad" cholesterol, the standard by which drugs used to prevent heart attacks are normally measured. White says that KIF6 may instead act by stabilizing "vulnerable plaques," which are particularly prone to triggering heart attacks.

Celera is developing a diagnostic that would test for the KIF6 variant and expects to launch it in a few months.

But some experts caution that it may be premature to introduce such diagnostic tests before there is further confirmation of KIF6's role in heart disease.

"Even if there are beneficial results, the standard should be that you need to document that knowing the genetic information is clinically useful," says Sekar Kathiresan, director of preventive cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Coronary heart disease caused one of every five deaths in the United States in 2006, so scientists have for quite some time been on the hunt for genes linked to heart attacks.

Rapid advances in technology have made that task much easier. At the same time, many of the genetic links to heart disease identified so far haven't held up on further analysis. At present, the only credible link is to a variant of the gene 9p21, identified last year by the Icelandic company deCODE Genetics, says Kathiresan. DeCODE offers a $200 diagnostic test for the 9p21 variant. (See "Gene Variant Linked to Heart Disease.")

A second gene, PCSK9, also looks promising, Kathiresan adds. "Nearly everything else is in the realm of 'possible but not definite.'"

It's good that KIF6 has been identified as a potential risk factor in several different studies, Kathiresan says. In each of the studies, he notes, there is less than a one-in-20 probability that the finding is a result of chance, which is generally considered an acceptable threshold for statistical significance.

But because of the high possibility of false positives, the threshold for genome-wide association studies should be much higher, on the order of one in 20 million, Kathiresan says. Both the 9p21 and the PCSK9 pass that test, he says.

"The key issue here is we don't know if these [KIF6 studies] are real results," Kathiresan says. "You need to show that it is clinically useful, and they have not crossed that threshold."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20130/