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
2010.02.28 Issue No. 217
Recently came back from a training course in Munich. Learned a few new things apart from the NS and NG.
I'm sure these have been around for a long time, but this is the first time I've seen a radio clock. Not a clock that plays radio, but a clock that syncs the time via radio with an atomic clock somewhere out there. Pretty impressive, huh? The only reason we noticed that radio clock in our training room is because around noon, it fast forwards itself to 3pm. Gives new meaning to the saying "time flies when you're having fun."
Over lunch, a colleague from India was telling us how the trains would be packed to the rafters. Most of the commuters don't pay the fare, and it's very difficult for the conductor to check because it's too crowded. Anyway, to battle this problem, they would simply put offenders on a special coach, and ship them out to a remote station far, far away. That'll teach them to evade fares. Another German colleague mentioned that they do the same thing to the homeless loitering about in the Englishgarten before the start of the
Octoberfest. Takes them about a week of so before they manage to come back.
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_________SILICON-AIR BATTERIES_________
Lithium batteries, while lighter and longer-lasting than then their nickel-cadmium and lead-acid predecessors, are not easily recycled and are prone to problems when they encounter high humidity and heat conditions. A recent announcement from the
Technion-Israel Institute may rather quickly make the lithium-ion battery a thing of the past.
A joint research project led by three scientists in three continents — Yair Ein-Eli of Technion, Digby Macdonald of Penn State University, and Rika Hagiwara of Kyoto University — has yielded a working prototype of the battery which dispenses with the typical heavy, metal-based cathode structure and replaces it with something much lighter ... air. The anode is inexpensive, totally nontoxic and biodegradable — oxidized silicon. The current prototype is not rechargeable but can last for thousands of hours. A rechargeable consumer battery may be available within five years. Car batteries could be as little as 10 years away, and these batteries will not have any of the disposal issues of batteries past.
And cars are just the beginning. A lightweight and inexpensive energy storage system with high energy capacity could be a perfect companion for intermittent fuel stocks like solar and wind, making renewable energy easy to store and distribute.
_________3D BLU-RAY_________
Nvidia has announced that
3D Blu-ray movies will begin appearing in the summer of 2010.
Nvidia will support the new 3D Blu-Ray standardd through its 3D Vision technology. New films will use bitrates of around 60Mbits/second – twice that of a standard movie. Despite this increase in bandwidth, HDMI 1.3, which was released in 2006 and last updated in August 2008, should have sufficient bandwidth to ensure smooth playback. New files will be encoded using the
MVC-AVC format, which is based on the AVC format currently used by Blu-ray movies.
3D Blu-ray movies will need screens with refresh rates of 120Hz, double the current standard of 60Hz, and 2x speed Blu-ray drives. As with all of Nvidia's 3D products, shutter glasses will be required to view films.
According to Ben Berraondo, Nvidia PR manager for the UK and Northern Europe, Sony’s PlayStation 3 might be the only current player that could “possibly” run 3D Blu-ray content “with a firmware upgrade” thanks to its discrete Nvidia GPU, which is based on the GeForce 7800 architecture.
_________PLASTIC MEMORY________
Researchers in Tokyo have created a new kind of plastic low-cost flash memory that could find its way into novel flexible electronics. The prototype plastic flash memory cannot match silicon's storage density, long-term stability, or number of rewrite cycles. But its low cost could make it possible to integrate flash memory into more unconventional electronics. For example, cheap plastic memory devices might be incorporated into e-paper or disposable sensor tags.
The plastic memory was made by a team of researchers at the University of Tokyo led by electrical engineering professor Takao Someya. The key to making the plastic memory device work is a hybrid insulating layer made of a polymer and a metal oxide. This layer electrically isolates the metal gate in which charges are stored. An applied voltage causes the metal gates to accumulate charge--charged and uncharged gates represents binary 1s and 0s, as in silicon flash. The better the insulator works, the longer the data can be stored before the electrons leak away and the data degrades.
Someya's group starts by placing metal transistor gates on top of a plastic substrate. Then a thin layer of aluminum oxide is deposited on top and the plastic film is submerged in a solution containing an insulating polymer. The polymer finally self-assembles on the surface of the aluminum oxide. The plastic devices can endure 1,000 writing and reading cycles. In contrast, silicon flash can be written to about 100,000 times.
To demonstrate the memory, Someya's group integrated a 676-memory-cell device with a rubber pressure sensor. The flexible sensor-memory device, which is less than 700 micrometers thick, can record pressure patterns and retain them for up to a day. Someya believes the performance of plastic flash can be improved further.
_________SINGLE-ATOM TRANSISTORS_________
Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon.
The working principles of the device are based on sequential tunneling of single electrons between the phosphorus atom and the source and drain leads of the transistor. The tunneling can be suppressed or allowed by controlling the voltage on a nearby metal electrode with a width of a few tens of nanometers.
The rapid development of computers has been mainly based on the reduction of the size of transistors. At one point, the even tighter inexpensive packing of transistors would require them to shrink down to the atomic length scales. In the recently developed transistor, all the electric current passes through the same single atom. Problems arising when the size of a transistor is shrunk towards the ultimate limit are due to the emergence of so-called quantum mechanical effects. On one hand, these phenomena are expected to challenge the usual transistor operation. On the other hand, they allow classically irrational behavior which can, in principle, be harnessed for conceptually more efficient computing, quantum computing. The driving force behind the measurements reported now is the idea to utilize the spin degree of freedom of an electron of the phosphorus donor as a quantum bit, a qubit. The researchers were able to observe in their experiments spin up and down states for a single phosphorus donor for the first time. This is a crucial step towards the control of these states, that is, the realization of a qubit.
_________FIRST 3D BIOPRINTER_________
3D bioprinting just took a step closer to becoming a reality. One of the companies on the forefront of the technology,
Organovo has developed a bioprinter prototype capable of producing very basic tissues like blood vessels. While it is still limited to simple tissue structures (full organs are a long ways off), Organovo plans to deliver the printers to various research institutions interested in organ and tissue production. Working with these institutions, Organovo hopes to one day progress to creating a system that can print organs as easily as other 3D printers print plastic figurines.
There are many other institutions trying to achieve the same goal. There are differences in the way each company creates a scaffold for cells so that they hold together during printing. There are also differences in the way that cells are clustered together for printing. Essentially, however, no single approach to bioprinting has enough obvious advantages to make it a clear leader in the field. So we have something like the organ version of an arms race. Each company is struggling to produce viable tissues (typically blood vessels) and fine tune their machines as quickly as possible to be the first to see wide-scale adoption of their bioprinters as assistants in current human organ transplants.
Organovo’s commercial version of the 3D bioprinter comes with some nice bells and whistles. There is a design software package that would allow tissue engineers to simulate their constructions before they are printed. Two different heads on the printer allow for the scaffold (or support matrix, or hydrogel) to be applied separately from the living cells. Those cells can even be printed with micron precision thanks to a laser guidance system on the device.
Yet as fancy as the printer may be, the real test for Organovo isn’t the machine, but what the machine produces. The blood vessels (and other tissues) that the 3D printer creates will have to be shown to function in living specimens over long periods of time, and be accepted and integrated into the host. That level of testing is still a long ways off for humans.
_________DATA CENTRE HEAT RECYCLING_________
Helsinki public energy company Helsingin Energia is planning to recycle heat from a new data center to help generate energy and deliver hot water for the Finnish capital city.
Accoring to Juha Sipilä, project manager at
Helsingin Energia, the recycled heat from the data center, being built by IT and telecom services company Academica, could add about 1 percent to the total energy generated by Helsingin Energia's system in the summer. The data center is located in an old bomb shelter and is connected to Helsingin Energia's district heating system, which works by pumping boiling water through a system of pipes to households in Helsinki. The data center gets cold water from Helsingin Energia's system, runs it through the servers and equipment and cools them down. The resulting warmer water flows to a pump that heats the water and sends it into the district heating system. The pump also cools the water and sends it back to the data center. The ability of the heat pump to both heat and cool water is what makes it special.
The data center is supposed to go live at the end of January, and will at first measure 500 square meters. What Acedemica gets from this is cheap cooling power -- five times cheaper than what it would pay for traditional electricity.
According to Päivänen, if all the data centers in Finland were to use the technology they could power a mid-size Finnish city.
_________LIKEABLE LINKS_________
LiveUSB Creator
Linux Live USB Creator
Math Magic
Cleverbot.com
Full ZX-81 Chess in 1K
_________QUESTIONABLE QUESTION_________
Is there really any health benefit to using an air cleaner that emits negative ions?
_________QUOTABLE QUOTE_________
True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.
~ Albert Einstein
_________TRIVIAL TRIVIA_________
What made all the hatters so mad?
More than 100 years ago, the felt hat makers of England used mercury to stabilize wool. Most of them eventually became poisoned by the fumes, as demonstrated by the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Breathing mercury's fumes over a long period of time will cause erethism, a disorder characterized by nervousness, irritability, and strange personality changes.
Source: Arcamax Trivia
_________LAUGHABLE LAUGH_________
An Irishman, an Englishman, and a Frenchman walked into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, some kind of joke?"
That's all for this week. Nybble is and will always be a work in progress. Please do send me your comments and suggestions on how to improve Nybble. Just hit the reply button to you know, reply.
First Sandra Bullock movie I liked in general. Didn't like the monologue with the fake Southern drawl at the start of the movie, but when she loses it eventually, the movie's pretty good.
He went on to play for Ole Miss, his parents' alma mater, and was later drafted by the Baltimore Ravens.
He went on to play for Ole Miss, his parents' alma mater, and was later drafted by the Baltimore Ravens.
