Nybble 2006.08.03

N Y B B L E   M O N T H L Y   N E W S L E T T E R
A Free Ezine about Anything Tech and Everything Else
2006.08.03 Issue No. 179

Anybody else seen or heard about DualDiscs before? I went to a Virgin
Megastore recently, on saw these things on display. Apparently,
they've been out on the market for quite some time. I've come across
Copy-Controlled discs before (thwarting my CD-ripping efforts), but
this is the first time I've seen a DualDisc.

So what is a DualDisc? Based on the leaflet I got, it's a dual-sided
optical disc - CD audio on one side and a DVD side. Technically, it's
not a "real" compact disc because its CD side has a thickness of only
0.9mm, while the Red Book CD specs require a minimum thickness of
1.1mm. To compensate, engineers working on the new format increased
the size of the pits, so that the standard laser can still do proper
tracking (hopefully). Because of this deviation from the book, some CD
players might not be able to play the discs. Even if they do, the
increased pit size means that the max playing time is reduced - from
the standard 74 minutes to 60. For these reasons, Philips and Sony
(the inventors of the CD) didn't allow DualDiscs to carry the CD logo.
Being a full-pledged DVD (on the other side), the DVD Forum allowed it
to bear the DVD logo.

Have an answer, comment, suggestion, or violent reaction? Send them my
way by clicking on Reply or join nybbletalk@yahoogroups.com to
discuss a topic. If you think Nybble is good enough, do tell the CD
collectors about it. Thanks.

_________TABLE OF CONTENTS_________
* Biggest Thing in the Universe
* Petaflop Computer
* Blue Crab Nano-Sensor
* Super Mosquitoes from Athens
* Scent Recording and Playback
* Plasma Needle to Replace Dentist's Drill
* Terabyte Laptop Drive from Seagate
* Galileo's PRN Codes Cracked
* Ricoh's All-in-One Optical Device
* Likeable Links
* Questionable Question
* Quotable Quote
* Trivial Trivia
* Laughable Laugh

_________BIGGEST THING IN THE UNIVERSE_________
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-07-27-biggest-blob_x.htm?csp=15

An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and
made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas, that's what. The
galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along
three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the
universe was formed. The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru
and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea.

The interesting thing about this heavenly structure is that the
galaxies are packed four times closer than the universe's average.
Some of the gas bubbles are up to 400,000 light years across, nearly
twice the diameter of our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy. The finding
will give researchers new insight into what the structure of cosmos
looks like at the largest scale.

_________PETAFLOP SUPERCOMPUTER_________
http://snipurl.com/ub7h

For several years now, the US and Japan has been vying for leadership
in high-performance computing. IBM's BlueGene/L at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory has given US bragging rights for the
past two years. Now Japan is about to take back the world speed record
for computing it held earlier in the decade. The MDGrape-3 at Riken
(formerly known as the Institute of Physical & Chemical Research) in
Yokohama was clocked at a mind-boggling one quadrillion calculations
per second. In industry-speak, that's one "petaflop" of floating-point
calculations per second. Four years in development and $9 million in
costs, the Riken machine is the first ever to accomplish the feat.
It's nearly three times swifter than BlueGene/L, the official No. 1 in
an industry ranking called the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites.

The MDGrape-3 wasn't ready in time to qualify for the list which was
released on June 27. It could top the next one, but the machine may be
ineligible because of its specialized hardware. Why the fuss over
supercomputers? Experts believe that the nation with the most machines
near the top of the ranking generally has the most competitive
economy. Trailing far behind the U.S. is Britain with 35
supercomputers, followed by Japan (29), China (28), and Germany (18).

_________BLUE CRAB NANO-SENSOR________
http://www.technologynewsdaily.com/node/3907

We've covered chitosan from shrimp shells in Nybble before. As
reported, they were being used the military as miracle bandages that
can stop bleeding in 30 seconds. This time, chitosan (pronounced
"kite-o-san" found in the shells of the Chesapeake Bay's famous blue
crab, is the key component in a nanoscale sensor system developed by
researchers at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of
Engineering. The sensor can detect minute quantities of explosives,
bioagents, chemicals, and other dangerous materials in air and water,
potentially leading to security and safety innovations for airports,
hospitals, and other public locations.

This is how it works. The nanoscale sensor employs multiple miniature
vibrating cantilevers, similar to diving boards, that are coated with
chitosan, plus optical sensing technology that can see when the
cantilevers' vibrations change. Different cantilevers can detect
different substances and concentrations. When a targeted substance
enters the device from the air or water, the chitosan on a specific
cantilever interacts with the substance and causes that cantilever's
vibration to change its characteristics. The optical sensing system
sees the vibration change and indicates that the substance has been
detected.

_________SUPER MOSQUITOES FROM ATHENS_________
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060704/hl_afp/greecehealthdisease

Don't look now, but the super mosquitoes are coming. According to a
study conducted by Aristotelio University in the northern city of
Salonika, cramped housing conditions and air pollution in Athens have
given rise to a "super breed" of mosquito that is larger, faster and
more adept at locating human prey. They can detect humans at a
distance of 25-30 metres (yards) and also distinguish colours, unlike
their colour-blind counterparts elsewhere in the country that only
smell blood at 15-20 metres. The "super mosquitoes" of the Greek
capital also beat their wings up to 500 times a second -- compared to
350 beats for other variations -- and are larger by 0.3 microgrammes
on average.

According to the study, the mosquitoes of Athens have adapted to deal
with air pollution and insect repellents, and overpopulation in the
Greek capital of over four million has provided them with a healthy
food supply.

_________SCENT RECORDING AND PLAYBACK_________
http://snipurl.com/ub7i

Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan are building
an odour recorder capable of recording a smell and playing it back
later, just as you can with sounds or images. Simply point the gadget
at a freshly baked cookie, for example, and it will analyse its odour
and reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals. While a
number of companies have produced aroma generators designed to enhance
computer games or TV shows, they have failed commercially because they
have been very limited in the range of smells they can produce.

The Tokyo team's system will use 15 chemical-sensing microchips, or
electronic noses, to pick up a broad range of aromas. These are then
used to create a digital recipe from a set of 96 chemicals that can be
chosen according to the purpose of each individual gadget. When you
want to replay a smell, drops from the relevant vials are mixed,
heated and vaporised. In tests so far, the system has successfully
recorded and reproduced the smell of orange, lemon, apple, banana and
melon. The device could be used to improve online shopping by allowing
you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy, to add an extra
dimension to virtual reality environments and even to assist military
doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine
odours that might help a diagnosis.

_________PLASMA NEEDLE TO REPLACE DENTIST'S DRILL_________
http://snipurl.com/ub7k

A flaming plasma needle doesn't sound any better than the dentist's
drill. However, the plasma needle, which is cold and painless to the
touch, could be just the panacea we have been waiting for. And what do
you know? It could also be used to painlessly remove cancerous tissue.

Physicist Eva Stoffels-Adamowicz, who is based at the Eindhoven
University of Technology in the Netherlands, first came up with the
idea for the needle while working with low-pressure plasmas. The
plasma needle she developed is a 50-millimetre-long tungsten wire
housed in a quartz tube filled with gas. Driving a voltage through the
needle generates a small plasma spark at its tip "like a children's
sparkler". The team found that when the nitric oxide plasma is
produced using small amounts of energy and applied in short bursts, it
can kill bacteria while leaving other living cells unharmed. In short,
the plasma needle could be used to excise tumours or skin cancers.
Stoffels-Adamowicz's team is already working on a method to generate a
plasma that can be sent down blood vessels via a catheter. They think
that plasma therapy could one day be used to help clear blocked
arteries, although it is likely to be used in dentistry much sooner

_________TERABYTE LAPTOP DRIVE FROM SEAGATE_________
http://snipurl.com/ub7m

Seagate Technology Inc. plans to increase disk capacity by 10 times
with new technology it has just patented called Heat-Assisted Magnetic
Recording (HAMR). The technology includes nanotube-based lubrication
to allow the read/write head of a disk to get closer to the surface
and store more information. The smaller the data-recording areas on a
disk surface, the more of them that can be packed together, and
subsequently the greater the capacity of the disk.

Storing data properly in extremely small areas requires the magnetic
material to be heated during the writing phase, but this causes the
lubricant film deposited on top of the magnetized recording layer to
evaporate. Seagate's patent resolves this problem by having a
reservoir inside the disk casing that contains nanotube-based
lubricant. Some of this is periodically pumped out as a vapor and
deposited on the surface of the disk, replenishing the evaporated
lubricant.

Seagate anticipates that the new technology could increase disk
capacity by a factor of 10, making possible a 600GB 1.8-in. drive, a
1.46TB 2.5-in. drive, and 7.5TB Barracuda 3.5-in. drive. The lubricant
reservoirs will be built to last the life of the disk.

_________GALILEO'S PRN CODES CRACKED_________
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/521790/?sc=rsla

Members of Cornell University's Global Positioning System (GPS)
Laboratory have cracked the so-called pseudo random number (PRN) codes
of Europe's first global navigation satellite, despite efforts to keep
the codes secret.

The navigational satellite, GIOVE-A (Galileo In-Orbit Validation
Element-A), is a prototype for 30 satellites that by 2010 will compose
Galileo, a $4 billion joint venture of the European Union, European
Space Agency and private investors. Galileo is Europe's answer to the
United States' GPS. Unlike GPS whose signal is free as the project is
funded by American taxpayers, Galileo must make money to reimburse its
investors -- presumably by charging a fee for PRN codes. Because
Galileo and GPS will share frequency bandwidths, Europe and the United
States signed an agreement whereby some of Galileo's PRN codes must be
"open source." Nevertheless, after broadcasting its first signals on
Jan. 12, 2006, none of GIOVE-A's codes had been made public. So in
late January, Mark Psiaki, professor of mechanical and aerospace
engineering at Cornell and co-leader of Cornell's GPS Laboratory, went
about cracking Galileo's PRN codes.

Within one week Psiaki's team developed a basic algorithm to extract
the codes. Two weeks later they had their first signal from the
satellite, but were thrown off track because the signal's repeat
period was twice that expected. By mid-March they derived their first
estimates of the code. On April 1, they published the final results on
http://gps.ece.cornell.edu/galileo. Two days later, NovAtel Inc., a
Canadian-based major manufacturer of GPS receivers, downloaded the
codes from the Web site in a few minutes and soon afterward began
tracking GIOVE-A for the first time.

_________RICOH'S ALL-IN-ONE OPTICAL DEVICE_________
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=190300953

Ricoh announced that it has developed an optical component that reads
and writes all disk formats—Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD, as well as DVD
and CD—with one pickup and one objective lens. The component is a
3.5-mm diameter, 1-mm thick round diffraction plate with minute
concentric groves on both sides which function as a diffraction
grating. The diffraction plate is placed between lasers and an
objective lens. The diffraction grating is designed to adjust a light
beam to an optimum incident ray relative to the objective lens so that
light focuses on the proper position for each disk format. For
example, the data layer of the Blu-ray Disc resides 0.1 mm from the
disk's surface, while the HD-DVD data layer is 0.6-mm deep from the
disk's surface, the same as DVD disks. CDs have a data layer depth of
1.1 mm from the disk surface.

Multiformat players and recorders can identify which format disk is
loaded. Based on the disc information, Ricoh's optical diffraction
component adjusts the laser beam with its diffraction grating for each
format and passes it to the objective lens. The lens then forms a beam
spot at the appropriate depth for each disk format.

The company intends to begin sampling the device with OEMs by year's end.

_________LIKEABLE LINKS_________
Screenplays for You
http://sfy.ru/

The Internet Movie Script Database
http://www.imsdb.com/

Awesome Movie Scripts and Screenplays
http://www.awesomefilm.com/

Krunch
http://krun.ch/
Online compression and decompression

eHow.com
http://www.ehow.com/
Clear Instructions on How to Do (Just about) Everything

_________QUESTIONABLE QUESTION_________
How come regular cars don't have rear wipers, unlike hatchbacks, vans,
and SUVs?

_________QUOTABLE QUOTE_________
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
~ Adrienne Rich ~

_________TRIVIAL TRIVIA_________
When is an eel not an eel?
When it's electric -- Electric eels are not really eels but a kind of
fish. Although they look like eels, their internal organs are arranged
differently.
Source: Arcamax Trivia

_________LAUGHABLE LAUGH_________
Why a man would want a wife is a big mystery to some people. Why a man
would want *two* wives is a bigamystery.

That's all for this week. Nybble is and will always be a work in
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