March 12, 2010, 8:06 AM CT

Back to the future for computers

A presentation at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) in San Diego on March 24 will examine the technologies that will emerge in the next three to four years to power warehouse-scale computing data centers, upon which companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and a number of more are increasingly relying.

The advent of distributed, massive-scale "cloud computing" today is something of a return to the early part of 1980s, when computing was of a different sort. Rather than individual desktop or laptop machines, which are the current norm, computers were commonly time-shared among multiple users working on "dumb" terminals connected to a central machineoften located in some remote corner of the building.

Cloud computing basically makes use of the Internet to connect remote users to massive, warehouse-scale data centers that house large networks of processors and memory for crunching and storing data. These warehouse data centers promise to lower computing costs by sharing resources and taking advantage of economies of scale, says Network Architect Cedric Lam of Google, and they will relieve users of the hassles of maintaining and upgrading equipment and backing up their data......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:43:08 GMT

World's first multitouch gaming laptop

The Battalion Touch Notebook is apparently the world’s first multi-touch gaming laptop computer. The rest of the spec seems fairly standard for a 15.6 inch laptop, so we’re wondering exactly what market really wants to swap the lean back ease of use you get with a mouse and keyboard for the hunched over finger stretching hassle that comes with multi-touch screen technology?

Sure it’s cool for mobile phones, but a notebook computer? Really? Anyhoo, those of you with an urge to smear your screens while scrolling down the eBay listings go ahead, knock yourself out. Cough up $999.00 first please.

 Experience a new dimension of interactive gaming, media organization, and content creation with the Battalion Touch series. Featuring a full multi-touch screen, the Battalion Touch series allows you to interact with your system in new ways and take full advantage of the built-in multi-touch capabilities of Windows 7. With the growing popularity of the multi-touch interactive platform, the Battalion Touch series provides the capabilities to support the increasing number of multi-touch optimized game and software titles. Posted by: Redferret      Read more     Source

December 30, 2009, 8:14 AM CT

Moving Video to "Captcha" Robot Hackers

We see the popular "captcha" security mechanism often - wavy letters websites ask us to type into a box. It's used by web pages and newsletter sign-up forms to prevent computer robots from hacking into servers and databases. But these codes, which are becoming increasingly complicated for an average person to use, are not immune to security holes.

A research project led by Prof. Danny Cohen-Or of Tel Aviv University's Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences demonstrates how a new kind of video captcha code appears to be harder to outsmart. The foundation of the work, presented at a recent SIGGRAPH conference, is really pure research, says Prof. Cohen-Or, but it opens the door so security scientists can think a little differently.

"Humans have a very special skill that computer bots have still not been able to master," says Prof. Cohen-Or. "We can see what's called an 'emergence image' - an object on a computer screen that becomes recognizable only when it's moving - and identify this image in a matter of seconds. While a person can't 'see' the image as a stationary object on a mottled background, it becomes part of our gestalt as it moves, allowing us to recognize and process it".



A truly "emerging" technology

In the new research paper, co-authored with colleagues in Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and India, Prof. Cohen-Or describes a synthesis technique that generates pictures of 3-D objects, like a running man or a flying airplane. This technique, he says, will allow security developers to generate an infinite number of moving "emergence" images that will be virtually impossible for any computer algorithm to decode......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

December 24, 2009, 7:13 AM CT

Do computers understand art?

A team of scientists from the University of Girona and the Max Planck Institute in Gera number of has shown that some mathematical algorithms provide clues about the artistic style of a painting. The composition of colours or certain aesthetic measurements can already be quantified by a computer, but machines are still far from being able to interpret art in the way that people do.

How does one place an artwork in a particular artistic period? This is the question raised by researchers from the Laboratory of Graphics and Image in the University of Girona and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in Gera number of. The scientists have shown that certain artificial vision algorithms mean a computer can be programmed to "understand" an image and differentiate between artistic styles based on low-level pictorial information. Human classification strategies, however, include medium and high-level concepts.

Low-level pictorial information encompasses aspects such as brush thickness, the type of material and the composition of the palette of colours. Medium-level information differentiates between certain objects and scenes appearing in a picture, as well as the type of painting (landscape, portrait, still life, etc.). High-level information takes into account the historical context and knowledge of the artists and artistic trends......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:57:51 GMT

How to Make Your Computer Live Longer

© psd


Sometime I think losing a laptop is almost as traumatic as losing a pet. You spend so much time and effort getting to know what it, trying new things. You waste hours of your life playing with it. It even follows you around.

Okay, so I might be pushing the analogy, but the truth is, most of us don"t have the money to get a new laptop every 6 months. We"d like to keep the one we have alive and running for as long as possible.

So here are a few useful little tips that might extend the life your computer. Don"t worry, you probably already know them, but reminders never hurt anyone:

1. Shut it Down: This may sound simple but many of us just close the lid, turn of the monitor or set it to sleep mode. Completely shutting your computer down will keep it from overheating and leaking memory. Think of your computer like your brain, it can"t function without a good night"s sleep.

2. Defrag!: Again, another simple "duh" moment. Defrag your computer. Most PCs will even let you set up a regular defrag schedule once a week. Cleaning up your files on a regular basis will also keep your computer functioning at optimal speed.

3. Keep it Clean: During your regularly scheduled defrag, go ahead and run a scan for viruses, spyware, malware, all that bad stuff you can pick on the internet. Find a good program to keep your PC"s health good.

4. Don"t Drop It: Look, be nice to your laptops. Keep them in safe places, don"t expose them to weird temperatures and be sure not to eat or drink near them if possible. Also pets. I lost a laptop a few years ago to a cat pouncing on and then hairballing all over my keys, it broke my screen and something gross seeped into the circuitry. Trust me, helping your computer and your pets avoid each other is a good idea.

These might not be the most enlightening tips, but they"ll go along way in keeping your computer chugging along for an extra year or so.

Do you have tips for adding an extra life to your laptop? Posted by: Doreen      Read more     Source

October 29, 2009, 11:01 PM CT

How to get a cool laptop

Does your laptop sometimes get so hot that it can almost be used to fry eggs? New technology may help cool it and give information technology a unique twist, says Jairo Sinova, a Texas A&M University physics professor.

Sinova and his colleagues from Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, Institute of Physics ASCR, University of Cambridge and University of Nottingham have had their research reported in the renowned journal Nature Physics.

Laptops are getting increasingly powerful, but as their sizes are getting smaller they are heating up, so how to deal with excessive heat becomes a headache, Sinova explains.

"The crux of the problem is the way information is processed," Sinova notes. "Laptops and some other devices use flows of electric charge to process information, but they also produce heat.

"Theoretically, excessive heat may melt the laptop," he adds. "This also wastes a considerable amount of energy".

Is there a solution?

One approach appears to be found in Sinova's research - an alternative way to process information.

"Our research looks at the spin of electrons, tiny particles that naked eyes cannot detect," the Texas A&M professor explains. "The directions they spin can be used to record and process information"......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

October 6, 2009, 5:13 PM CT

Use computer security guide to protect

Just in time for October's Cyber Security Awareness Month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a guide to help small businesses and organizations understand how to provide basic security for their information, systems and networks. NIST has also created a video that explores the reasons small businesses need to secure their data (at right).

The guide, Small Business Information Security: The Fundamentals, was authored by Richard Kissel, who spends much of his time on the road teaching computer security to groups of small business owners ranging from tow truck operators to managers of hospitals, small manufacturers and nonprofit organizations. The 20-page guide uses simple and clear language to walk small business owners through the important steps necessary to secure their computer systems and data.

Small businesses make up more than 95 percent of the nation's businesses, are responsible for about 50 percent of the Gross National Product and create about 50 percent of the country's new jobs, as per a 2009 Small Business Administration report. Yet these organizations rarely have the information technology resources to protect their sensitive information that larger corporations do.

Consequently, they could be seen as easy marks by hackers and cyber criminals, who could easily focus more of their unwanted attention on small businesses. And just like big companies, the computers at small businesses hold sensitive information on customers, employees and business partners that needs to be guarded, Kissel says. He adds that regulatory agencies have requirements to protect some health, financial and other information......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

September 28, 2009, 7:30 AM CT

Ants vs. worms

In the never-ending battle to protect computer networks from intruders, security experts are deploying a new defense modeled after one of nature's hardiest creatures - the ant.

Unlike traditional security devices, which are static, these "digital ants" wander through computer networks looking for threats, such as "computer worms" - self-replicating programs designed to steal information or facilitate unauthorized use of machines. When a digital ant detects a threat, it doesn't take long for an army of ants to converge at that location, drawing the attention of human operators who step in to investigate.

The concept, called "swarm intelligence," promises to transform cyber security because it adapts readily to changing threats.

"In nature, we know that ants defend against threats very successfully," explains Professor of Computer Science Errin Fulp, an expert in security and computer networks. "They can ramp up their defense rapidly, and then resume routine behavior quickly after an intruder has been stopped. We were trying to achieve that same framework in a computer system".

Current security devices are designed to defend against all known threats at all times, but the bad guys who write malware - software created for malicious purposes - keep introducing slight variations to evade computer defenses......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

September 15, 2009, 2:43 PM CT

Rome was built in a day

The ancient city of Rome was not built in a day. It took nearly a decade to build the Colosseum, and almost a century to construct St. Peter's Basilica. But now the city, including these landmarks, can be digitized in just a matter of hours.

A new computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington uses hundreds of thousands of tourist photos to automatically reconstruct an entire city in about a day.

The tool is the most recent in a series developed at the UW to harness the increasingly large digital photo collections available on photo-sharing Web sites. The digital Rome was built from 150,000 tourist photos tagged with the word "Rome" or "Roma" that were downloaded from the popular photo-sharing Web site, Flickr.

Computers analyzed each image and in 21 hours combined them to create a 3-D digital model. With this model a viewer can fly around Rome's landmarks, from the Trevi Fountain to the Pantheon to the inside of the Sistine Chapel.

"How to match these massive collections of images to each other was a challenge," said Sameer Agarwal, a UW acting assistant professor of computer science and engineering and main author of a paper being presented in October at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Kyoto, Japan. Until now, he said, "even if we had all the hardware we could get our hands on and then some, a reconstruction using this a number of photos would take forever."........ Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

September 3, 2009, 7:31 AM CT

Trash or treasure?

More computers discarded by consumers in the United States are getting a second life in developing countries than previously believed, as per a newly released study the most comprehensive ever done on the topic reported in ACS' semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology The findings may ease growing concerns about environmental pollution with toxic metals that can result from dismantling and recycling computer components in developing countries.

In the study Ramzy Kahhat and Eric Williams focused on the situation in Peru, where Kahhat was born. They used a Peruvian government database that tracks importation of new and used computers and computing equipment. The scientists observed that at least 85 percent of computers imported into Peru are reused, rather than going directly into recycling.

The finding challenges the widespread belief that the trade in e-waste was mainly about dumping unusable junk or recycling components is inaccurate, at least for Peru. The U.S. is the source of up to 76 percent of used computers imported to Peru from 2003-2007, the scientists indicated. They note uncertainty on whether the same holds true for other, much larger countries like China and India......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

July 21, 2009, 11:32 PM CT

This article will self-destruct

Computers have made it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview. A lost cell phone can expose personal photos or text messages. A legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating, inconvenient or just embarrassing details from the past.

The University of Washington has developed a way to make such information expire. After a set time period, electronic communications such as e-mail, Facebook posts and chat messages would automatically self-destruct, becoming irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers. Not even the sender could retrieve them.

"If you care about privacy, the Internet today is a very scary place," said UW computer scientist Tadayoshi Kohno. "If people understood the implications of where and how their e-mail is stored, they might be more careful or not use it as often."

The team of UW computer researchers developed a prototype system called Vanish that can place a time limit on text uploaded to any Web service through a Web browser. After a set time text written using Vanish will, in essence, self-destruct. A paper about the project went public today and will be presented at the Usenix Security Symposium Aug. 10-14 in Montreal......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

June 9, 2009, 5:04 AM CT

Computer-related injuries

While back pain, blurred vision and mouse-related injuries are now well-documented hazards of long-term computer use, the number of acute injuries connected to computers is rising rapidly. According to a study published in the July 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers from the Center for Injury Research and Policy and The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital; and The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Columbus have found a more-than-sevenfold increase in computer-related injuries due to tripping over computer equipment, head injuries due to computer monitor falls and other physical incidents.

According to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database, over 78,000 cases of acute computer-related injuries were treated in U.S. emergency departments from 1994 through 2006. Approximately 93% of injuries occurred at home. The number of acute computer-related injuries increased by 732% over the 13-year study period, which is more than double the increase in household computer ownership (309%).

Injury mechanisms included hitting against or catching on computer equipment; tripping or falling over computer equipment; computer equipment falling on top of the patient; and the straining of muscles or joints. The computer part most often associated with injuries was the monitor. The percentage of monitor-related cases increased significantly, from 11.6% in 1994 to a peak of 37.1% in 2003. By 2006, it had decreased to 25.1%. The decrease since 2003 corresponds to the replacement of heavier cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors with smaller and easier-to-lift liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

June 5, 2009, 4:53 AM CT

Computer graphics researchers simulate the sounds of water

Splash, splatter, babble, sploosh, drip, drop, bloop and ploop!

Those are some of the sounds that have been missing from computer graphic simulations of water and other fluids, as per scientists in Cornell's Department of Computer Science, who have come up with new algorithms to simulate such sounds to go with the images.

The work by Doug James, associate professor of computer science, and graduate student Changxi Zheng will be reported at the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH conference Aug. 3-7 in New Orleans. It is the first step in a broader research program on sound synthesis supported by a $1.2 million grant from the Human Centered Computing Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to James, assistant professor Kavita Bala and associate professor Steve Marschner.

In computer-animated movies, sound can be added after the fact from recordings or by Foley artists. But as virtual worlds grow increasingly interactive and immersive, the scientists point out, sounds will need to be generated automatically to fit events that can't be predicted in advance. Recordings can be cued in, but can be repetitive and not always well matched to what's happening.

"We have no way to efficiently compute the sounds of water splashing, paper crumpling, hands clapping, wind in trees or a wine glass dropped onto the floor," the scientists said in their research proposal......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 5, 2009, 5:05 AM CT

'Lab on a Tube' Monitoring Device

The need for improved monitoring of neurotrauma patients has resulted in the development of a prototype of a novel, multitasking "lab on a tube" at the University of Cincinnati (UC).

UC engineers, working to fill a need expressed by physicians at the Neurotrauma Center at the UC Neuroscience Institute, have developed a preliminary working model of the multimodal tube, or "smart sensor," which is capable of continuously monitoring multiple physiological parameters in patients. The tube also is capable of draining excess cerebrospinal fluid from the injured brain and could be used to deliver medications to the patient.

Eventhough the monitoring device is still not ready for testing in humans, UC scientists hailed it as "a groundbreaking start".

Raj Narayan, MD, chairman and Frank Mayfield professor in the department of neurosurgery and the project's principal investigator, and Lori Shutter, MD, director of neurocritical care, expressed the need for a multimodality monitoring device for neurotrauma patients and participated in its design and creation.

The prototype for a smart neuro-catheter was then engineered by Chunyan Li, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the UC department of neurosurgery who trained under Chong Ahn, PhD, professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering. Concepts for a "lab on a tube" device with multimodality sensors were developed in the Microsystems and BioMEMS Laboratory headed by Ahn......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 5, 2009, 4:59 AM CT

eBay and looting of antiquities

Having worked for 25 years at fragile archaeological sites in Peru, UCLA archaeologist Charles "Chip" Stanish held his breath when the online auction house eBay launched more than a decade ago.

"My greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities trafficking, which previously had been a wealthy person's vice, and lead to widespread looting," said the UCLA professor of anthropology, who directs the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Indeed, eBay has drastically altered the transporting and selling of illegal artifacts, Stanish writes in an article in the May/recent issue of Archaeology, but not in the way he and other archaeologists had feared.

By improving access to a worldwide market, eBay has inadvertently created a vast market for copies of antiquities, diverting whole villages from looting to producing fake artifacts, Stanish writes. The proliferation of these copies also has added new risks to buying objects billed as artifacts, which in turn has worked to depress the market for these items, further reducing incentives to loot.

"For most of us, the Web has forever distorted the antiquities trafficking market in a positive way," Stanish said.

Looting, which is illegal, is widely recognized as destructive to cultural heritage because it can remove from public ownership tangible links to a people's past. In addition, looting is perceived as the enemy of scholarship because it typically is done without regard to any appropriate methods that allow researchers to date objects and to place them in a larger, more meaningful context......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 1, 2009, 5:19 AM CT

Shift in Simulation Superiority

Science and engineering are advancing rapidly in part due to ever more powerful computer simulations, yet the most advanced supercomputers require programming skills that all too few U.S. scientists possess. At the same time, affordable computers and committed national programs outside the U.S. are eroding American competitiveness in number of simulation-driven fields.

These are some of the key findings in the International Evaluation of Research and Development in Simulation-Based Engineering and Science, released on Apr. 22, 2009, by the World Technology Assessment Center (WTEC).

"The startling news was how quickly our assumptions have to change," said Phillip Westmoreland, program director for combustion, fire and plasma systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and one of the sponsors of the report. "Because computer chip speeds aren't increasing, hundreds and thousands of chips are being ganged together, each one with a number of processors. New ways of programming are necessary".

Like other WTEC studies, this study was led by a team of leading scientists from a range of simulation science and engineering disciplines and involved site visits to research facilities around the world.

The nearly 400-page, multi-agency report highlights several areas in which the U.S. still maintains a competitive edge, including the development of novel algorithms, but also highlights endeavors that are increasingly driven by efforts in Europe or Asia, such as the creation and simulation of new materials from first principles......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 30, 2009, 5:21 AM CT

Making Brighter, Full-Color Electronic Readers?

Thinking about getting an e-reader but not sure if you like reading the dim screen? An international collaboration of the University of Cincinnati, Sun Chemical, Polymer Vision and Gamma Dynamics has announced Electrofluidic Display Technology (EFD), the first technology to electrically switch the appearance of pigments in a manner that provides visual brilliance equal to conventional printed media.

This new entry into the race for full-color electronic paper can potentially provide better than 85 percent "white-state reflectance," a performance level mandatory for consumers to accept reflective display applications such as e-books, cell-phones and signage.

"If you compare this technology to what's been developed previously, there's no comparison," says developer Jason Heikenfeld, assistant professor of electrical engineering in UC's College of Engineering. "We're ahead by a wide margin in critical categories such as brightness, color saturation and video speed".

This work, which has been underway for several years, has just been reported in the paper "Electrofluidic displays using Young-Laplace transposition of brilliant pigment dispersions."

Main author Heikenfeld explains the primary advantage of the approach.

"The ultimate reflective display would simply place the best colorants used by the printing industry directly beneath the front viewing substrate of a display," he says. "In our EFD pixels, we are able to hide or reveal colored pigment in a manner that is optically superior to the techniques used in electrowetting, electrophoretic and electrochromic displays."........ Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:06:35 GMT

Google Phone Book Results

Google Inside's author noticed recently that you can now do a reverse phone book look up straight from the front page of Google. He says he got a hang up call, typed the number into Google's search window, hit enter, and got the name and address of the Phone's owner.Am I the only one that is slightly creeped out by how much information Google actually has access to?Well, probably not....

The more profound question is this: How much do we choose to share about ourselves on the web without giving much thought to who might see it?



David Griner had a thought-provoking piece recently about privacy on the web. He relates a conversation he had with a friend that started after he suggested that participating in social media could put our jobs at risk. David's friend compares sharing something about yourself in a closed room of friends as opposed to in the open universe of social media on the web.



The truth is that at least if I stand on my roof with a megaphone and yell stuff about myself, the sound eventually dies and all that exists after that is what my neighbors remember. With Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc., it's a relatively permanent record. People can bookmark it or download it.



Can I find stuff on you? It depends. If you Google me ("Greg Cruey" with the quotes), you get a lot of stuff about me. I live on the web. Just the first 20 links have my personal blog, my Facebook and LinkedIn pages, my Suite101 profile, and a small host of blog entries I've written. You can find out a lot about me on those pages. And after a dozen or so years of writing for the web, my name turns up on about 15,000 pages according to Goggle. Google my wife and you get 34 entries. You get the web page of a closed school she used to teach at. You get a Classmates.com profile for someone (probably one of my distant relatives) who shares both her first and last name. You get a couple of dead links and a few pages where I've mentioned her by name in something I wrote.



How much is out there really does depend on what you share....



© Zach Klein Posted by: Greg Cruey      Read more     Source

April 20, 2009, 9:33 PM CT

"Instant On" Computing

The ferroelectric materials found in today's "smart cards" used in subway, ATM and fuel cards soon may eliminate the time-consuming booting and rebooting of computer operating systems by providing an "instant-on" capability as well as preventing losses from power outages.

Scientists supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) nanoscale interdisciplinary research team award and three Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers at Cornell University, Penn State University and Northwestern University recently added ferroelectric capability to material used in common computer transistors, a feat researchers tried to achieve for more than half a century. They reported their findings in the April 17 journal Science.

Ferroelectric materials provide low-power, high-efficiency electronic memory. Smart cards use the technology to instantly reveal and update stored information when waved before a reader. A computer with this capability could instantly provide information and other data to the user.

Scientists led by Cornell University materials scientist Darrell Schlom took strontium titanate, a normally non-ferroelectric variant of the ferroelectric material used in smart cards, and deposited it on silicon--the principal component of most semiconductors and integrated circuits--in such a way that the silicon squeezed it into a ferroelectric state......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 13, 2009, 12:56 AM CT

Relief for overheating laptops

Our modern age has become accustomed to regular improvements in information technology, says Slava Rotkin, but these advances do not come without a cost.

Take the laptop, for example. Its components, particularly its billions of semiconductor electronic circuits, are growing ever tinier while the instrument's power and capacity increase. But heat generated by electric current can cause the circuits to melt and the laptop hardware to fail.

Indeed, says Rotkin, an assistant professor of physics, a laptop in use can generate heat faster than an everyday hotplate and almost as fast as a small nuclear reactor.

Developing better methods to dissipate this heat has been listed as a "grand challenge" for modern electronics by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) , a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers.

Rotkin and colleagues at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center and at the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, have developed a heat-dissipation method that cools carbon nanotube electronics by utilizing nonconventional radiation in a "near-field zone" just above the substrate, or surface, on which the nanotubes rest.

The new cooling method requires that the nanotubes' substrate be composed of a polar material such as silicon-dioxide (SiO2), says Rotkin. The method channels excess heat from the nanotubes into the substrate which, being much larger, can be more effectively cooled by the vents that push cool air through laptops......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

March 31, 2009, 3:53 PM CT

Faster computer chips

Engineers at Ohio State University are in the process of developing a technique for mass producing computer chips made from the same material found in pencils.

Experts think that graphene -- the sheet-like form of carbon found in graphite pencils -- holds the key to smaller, faster electronics. It might also deliver quantum mechanical effects that could enable new kinds of electronics.

Until now, most scientists could only create tiny graphene devices one at a time, and only on traditional silicon oxide substrates. They couldn't control where they placed the devices on the substrate, and had to connect them to other electronics one at a time for testing.

In a paper reported in the March 26 issue of the journal Advanced Materials, Nitin Padture and colleagues describe a technique for stamping a number of graphene sheets onto a substrate at once, in precise locations.

"We designed the technique to mesh with standard chip-making practices," said Padture, College of Engineering Distinguished Professor in Materials Science and Engineering.

"Graphene has huge potential -- it's been dubbed 'the new silicon,'" said Padture, who is also director of Ohio State's Center for Emergent Materials. "But there hasn't been a good process for high-throughput manufacturing it into chips. The industry has several decades of chip-making technology that we can tap into, if only we could create millions of these graphene structures in precise patterns on predetermined locations, repeatedly. This result is a proof-of-concept that we should be able to do just that"......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

March 16, 2009, 8:04 PM CT

Better computers by shifting sound to light

By reversing a process that converts electrical signals into sounds heard out of a cell phone, scientists may have a new tool to enhance the way computer chips, LEDs and transistors are built.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have for the first time converted the highest frequency sounds into light by reversing a process that converts electrical signals to sound.

Usually used piezo-electric speakers, such as those found in a cell phone, operate at low frequencies that human ears can hear.

But by reversing that process, lead scientists Michael Armstrong, Evan Reed and Mike Howard, LLNL colleagues, and collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Nitronex Corp., used a very high frequency sound wave - about 100 million times higher frequency than what humans can hear - to generate light.

"This process allows us to very accurately 'see' the highest frequency sound waves by translating them into light," Armstrong said.

The research appears in the March 15 edition of the journal Nature Physics.

During the last decade, pioneering experiments using sub-picosecond lasers have demonstrated the generation and detection of acoustic and shock waves in materials with terahertz (THz) frequencies. These very same experiments led to a new technique for probing the structure of semiconductor devices......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:32:15 GMT

Elonex ONEt Ultra Portable Notebook

This week’s Deal of the Day (if we had such a thing) would be this refurb Elonex ONEt Ultra-Portable Netbook computer, priced at a totally measly £99.99. Weight 650g, 7 inch TFT screen, Linux, WiFi, 3 x USB ports, SD card reader, 2GB SSD drive and 128 MB memory. Grab ‘em while they’re hot and sizzling.

 One thing you instantly notice about this the Elonex ONEt is its size and weight; it is an excellent travel companion as well as perfect PC for carrying around the house. The outer casing has an attractive piano-black finish, the keyboard is tactile, the mouse pad easy to use and the 7-inch digital screen provides a perfectly clear image. Posted by: Redferret      Read more     Source

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:03:38 GMT

Application Stores For Everyone

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 5244112 Oh Apple, you used to be so cool with your mobile computing platform and your ubiquitous application store. Now, everyone has gone and shown up to the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona and announced their own application store for their own mobile computing platform. Now, instead of the just the Apple iTunes App store, there are going to be no less than seven application stores for seven different mobile platforms.

There is going to be the Nokia's Ovi Store, Windows Marketplace, App Store for Symbian, Android Market, BlackBerry Applications Center and the Palm Software Store. Now granted, the Palm store has been around since December, and the Android Market has been on the block since October, but the application store seems to be the way things are headed. Apple, I have to admit, did get this digital distribution thing right on the iPhone platform. I can attest that I have used the iTunes App store much more than I had ever anticipated, and they have earned a fair chunk of my money.

I am curious to see what other industries are going to follow Apple's suit. Will the next PSP have a media slot, or will games be downloaded? With broadband speeds creeping up and applications becoming smaller and more nimble, I suppose it won't be long before all software is simply digital.

via Macrumors. Posted by: Chris Matier      Read more     Source

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:00:14 GMT

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 3G - Review

The new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with 3G is, on the face of it, much of a muchness as far as small computers go. It’s pretty hard to find any real differentiation between mini notebooks when all of them use the same processor, same screens and similar storage and memory specs. However the Dell stands out because of a) the name, b) the fact that it’s the one which will probably sell the most via the company’s corporate connections, c) because it has a built-in 3G mobile broadband card and finally d) because you can buy them on mobile phone style pricing (Vodafone UK, Vodafone AU). So I thought it would be interesting to take an in-depth look at one for those of you who may be considering going small-sized with your next computer purchase.

Friendly Note: This review is kinda wordy so if you’re only interested in the verdict, skip to the end.

Posted by: Redferret      Read more     Source