Information On Technologies and Talents

Artificial Skin Made From Spider Silk

2011-08-21T05:18:00.000-07:00

Spider-Man has had a rough summer. Recent news of his impending death and an overwrought, injury-prone musical have left the web-slinging community with a few black eyes. Yet like any great origin story, resurrection often rises out of the ashes. Case in point: recent news of spiders coming to the rescue of burn victims, reports Discovery.

Hanna Wendt, a tissue engineer in the Department of Plastic, Hand and Reconstructive Surgery at Medical School Hannover in Germany, along with her colleagues, recently published a study that suggests spider silk may hold the key to creating artificial skin for burn victims and other patients requiring skin grafts.

Wendt says previous materials, like collagen, used to create artificial skin did not seem strong enough, so she and her team turned to a material 5 times stronger than Kevlar: spider dragline silk.

"Spider silks display excellent mechanical features that even rival man-made, high-tech fibers," the study explains.

The researchers essentially milked the silk glands of golden orb web spiders, spooling the silk fibers as they came out. Next, the dragline silk was woven onto a rectangular steel frame, 0.7 mm thick, resulting in an easy-to-handle meshwork frame that could be sterilized.

Wendt and her colleagues found that human skins cell types could flourish on these meshwork frames if they were properly nurtured with nutrients, warmth and air.

"After two weeks of cultivating single single fibroblasts, keratinocytes were added to generate a bilayered skin model, consisting of dermis and epidermis equivalents," the study states.

New way to store sun's heat

2011-07-31T04:04:00.000-07:00

A novel application of carbon nanotubes, developed by MIT researchers, shows promise as an innovative approach to storing solar energy for use whenever it's needed, reports Solardaily.

Storing the sun's heat in chemical form - rather than converting it to electricity or storing the heat itself in a heavily insulated container - has significant advantages, since in principle the chemical material can be stored for long periods of time without losing any of its stored energy.

While the new work shows the energy-storage capability of a specific type of molecule - azobenzene-functionalized carbon nanotubes - Grossman says the way the material was designed involves "a general concept that can be applied to many new materials."

Many of these have already been synthesized by other researchers for different applications, and would simply need to have their properties fine-tuned for solar thermal storage.

The key to controlling solar thermal storage is an energy barrier separating the two stable states the molecule can adopt; the detailed understanding of that barrier was central to Grossman's earlier research on fulvalene dirunthenium, accounting for its long-term stability.

Too low a barrier, and the molecule would return too easily to its "uncharged" state, failing to store energy for long periods; if the barrier were too high, it would not be able to easily release its energy when needed. "The barrier has to be optimized," Grossman says.

Already, the team is "very actively looking at a range of new materials," he says. While they have already identified the one very promising material described in this paper, he says, "I see this as the tip of the iceberg. We're pretty jazzed up about it."

Yosuke Kanai, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says "the idea of reversibly storing solar energy in chemical bonds is gaining a lot of attention these days.

The novelty of this work is how these authors have shown that the energy density can be significantly increased by using carbon nanotubes as nanoscale templates. This innovative idea also opens up an interesting avenue for tailoring already-known photoactive molecules for solar thermal fuels and storage in general."

With an Artificial Memory Chip, Rats Can Remember and Forget At the Touch of a Button

2011-06-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

A new brain implant tested on rats restored lost memories at the flick of a switch, heralding a possible treatment method for patients with Alzheimer’s disease, stroke or amnesia. Such a “neural prosthesis” could someday be used to facilitate the memory-forming process and help patients remember, reports Popsci.

The device can mimic the brain’s own neural signals, thereby serving as a surrogate for a piece of the brain associated with forming memories. If there is sufficient neural activity to trace, the device can restore memories after they have been lost. If it’s used with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device can even enhance memory.

In the study, scientists at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California trained rats to learn a task, pressing one lever after another to receive water. In a series of tests, the rats pressed one lever and were then distracted. They had to remember which one they’d already pressed and therefore which lever to press next, left or right, in order to receive their reward.

The team attached electrodes to the rats’ brains, connected to two areas in the hippocampus, called CA1 and CA3. Prior research has shown that the hippocampus converts short-term memory into long-term memory. The team recorded the signals between these regions as the rats performed their tasks, and then they drugged the rats so that the hippocampus regions could not communicate. The rats forgot which lever to press next, said Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineering professor at USC and lead author of the study, which is published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

“The rats still showed that they knew ‘when you press left first, then press right next time, and vice-versa,’” Berger said. “And they still knew in general to press levers for water, but they could only remember whether they had pressed left or right for 5-10 seconds.”

“Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget,” Berger said.

Although this is a long way from being tested in humans, the research shows that if there’s enough information about the neural coding of memories, the signal patterns can be recorded and duplicated, and restored later through a neural implant. This could be difficult to do in patients with severely limited memory, as the New York Times points out — there needs to be a memory trace that can be recorded and amplified.

A Nanotube Patch to Help Heal the Heart

2011-05-22T02:11:00.000-07:00

A conductive patch of carbon nanotubes can regenerate heart tissue growing in a dish, according to preliminary research from Brown University. The patch, made of tiny chains of carbon atoms that fold in on themselves, forming a tube, conducts electricity and mimics the rough surface of natural tissue. The more nanotubes the Brown researchers added to the patch, the more cells around it were able to regenerate, reports Technology Review.

During a heart attack, areas of the heart are deprived of oxygen, killing muscle and nerve cells used to keep the heart beating strongly and rhythmically. The tissue cannot regenerate on its own, which disrupts the heart's rhythm, weakens it, and sometimes leads to a repeat heart attack. Tissue engineers around the globe are searching for ways to regenerate or repair this damaged tissue using different types of scaffolds and stem cells.

Thomas Webster, an associate professor of engineering and orthopedics at Brown and senior author of the study, says his work is distinctive because he examined not just the muscle cells that beat, but also the nerve cells that help them contract and the endothelial cells that line the blood vessels leading to and from the heart. The fact that the patch helped regenerate all three types of cells, which function interdependently in the heart, suggests the newly grown tissue is similar to normal heart tissue.

Webster's nanotube patch is just one of many approaches underway to help repair the heart. Many involve injecting stem cells collected from the patient into the damaged heart or implanting patches of muscle derived from these stem cells. He says the nanotubes could be used on their own, or as scaffolds for stem cells.

Webster's team is now fine-tuning the nanomaterial to create a linear pattern to more closely mimic the pattern in natural tissue. Others have shown that creating this kind of structure can provide a natural scaffold that supports tissue strength and growth.

To avoid regulatory delays, Webster says, he may try his carbon nanotube patch first on pets. Right now, heart attacks are usually fatal for the family dog, Webster says, because most animals don't get diagnostic medical care or treatment, and have smaller hearts that have a harder time than human hearts compensating for damage. Treating pets "could be a way to get this technology out earlier," he says.

Is the Cellphone Killing the Honeybee?

2011-05-15T03:38:00.000-07:00

Pity the poor honeybee. Since 2003, bee colonies around the globe have declining at an alarming rate. And since bees play a vital role in agricultural production, that's bad news for us humans. Scientists suspect many factors may be responsible, including pesticides, viruses, the varroa mite, genetically modified crops, and even exceptionally cold winters. Now we can add cellphones to the list of possible culprits, reports PC World.

A study by Swiss researcher Daniel Favre shows that mobile phone-generated electromagnetic fields may contribute to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a condition that causes worker bees to desert the hive. In most cases, the queen bee is left with eggs, immature bees, and a lot of honey. The colony survives for a short time, but soon dies out without its workers.

"Recent efforts have been made to study another potential cause responsible for bee losses: manmade electromagnetic fields," Favre writes. And while the results obtained to date have been "highly controversial," they suggest a connection between the growing use of cellphones and a declining bee population.

Earlier studies have shown that cordless telephones placed at the bottom of beehives altered the behavior of honeybees that returned to the hive after foraging. However, other reports have failed to find a connection between mobile phones and colony collapse.

The researcher recorded sounds produced by bees in five healthy hives in two Switzerland locations between February and June 2009. The study recorded the bees' sounds with active mobile phones in the hive. Two mobile handsets (900MHz GSM) were chosen at random.

The bees were also recorded during their normal activities, both with and without inactive mobile phones.With the active devices, the first handset was triggered to call the second phone in the hive. A connection was made after 5 to 10 seconds of ringing.

Sound analyst shows the bees weren't disturbed by inactive or standby mobile phones. However, active cellphones confused the bees, creating "worker piping," or a signal to leave the hive.

The findings suggest that "the behavior of the bees remained perturbed for up to 12 hours after the end of the prolonged mobile phone communication," Favre writes. "This observation means that honeybees are sensitive to pulsed electromagnetic fields generated by the mobile telephones."

Oracle Starts Work on MySQL 5.6

2011-05-07T03:49:00.000-07:00

With work under way to build the next version of the MySQL relational database software, Oracle is focusing much of its efforts on improving the software's performance and replication capabilities, according to an Oracle executive overseeing the software's development, reports PC World.

The company's developers are making notable improvements to the core InnoDB storage engine, which should make the database system more responsive. Also, the ability to replicate a database to another location, always useful for backup and disaster recovery, is being enhanced in a number of ways, said Tomas Ulin, Oracle's MySQL vice president of engineering.

Such work is being applauded in the MySQL community.

Oracle released the last version of MySQL, version 5.5, in December. The company has not set a release date for the next version, but last month Oracle released the first preview, or development milestone, version 5.6.

Much of the work now under way is going into making the database faster, Ulin said. The InnoDB storage engine and the optimizer have both been revamped for faster performance. The optimizer, for instance, can save its algorithms for a particular query, should the administrator be pleased with the performance of that query under the optimizer.

The company is undertaking quite a bit of work on MySQL's replication capabilities, which automatically copy databases to secondary locations.

With this release, replication is being sped up though multithreaded support. Multithreaded replication is "an absolutely killer feature," Schwartz said. When data is replicated on a backup server, the software can now spawn multiple threads on the backup server to copy the material in parallel.

Ulin said the company plans to release some more milestone beta releases before the final launch. Also, the company is releasing different preview versions of MySQL, each one implementing a potentially new feature. This approach can ease the job of testing the software before putting it into a production environment, Schwartz said. "If I wanted to test a specific feature, I can test that without worrying about the influence of other features," Schwartz said.

Overall, Schwartz is pleased by the work that Oracle is doing.

Past releases of MySQL tended to have a lot of bugs, which then later had to be patched, he said. Version 5.5, however, which was largely overseen by Oracle, was a clean release and Schwartz expects that version 5.6 will be solid as well.

Lasers could replace spark plugs in car engines

2011-04-24T06:13:00.000-07:00

Car engines could soon be fired by lasers instead of spark plugs, researchers say.

A team at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics will report on 1 May that they have designed lasers that could ignite the fuel/air mixture in combustion engines, reports BBC.

The approach would increase efficiency of engines, and reduce their pollution, by igniting more of the mixture.

The team is in discussions with a spark plug manufacturer.

Spark plugs only ignite the fuel mixture near the spark gap, reducing the combustion efficiency, and the metal that makes them up is slowly eroded as they age.

But only with the advent of smaller lasers has the idea of laser-based combustion become a practical one.

Ceramic powders

A team from Romania and Japan has now demonstrated a system that can focus two or three laser beams into an engine's cylinders at variable depths.

That increases the completeness of combustion and neatly avoids the issue of degradation with time.

However, it requires that lasers of high pulse energies are used; just as with spark plugs, a great deal of energy is needed to cause ignition of the fuel.

The team has been developing a new approach to the problem: lasers made of ceramic powders that are pressed into spark-plug sized cylinders.

These ceramic devices are lasers in their own right, gathering energy from compact, lower-power lasers that are sent in via optical fibre and releasing it in pulses just 800 trillionths of a second long.

Unlike the delicate crystals typically used in high-power lasers, the ceramics are more robust and can better handle the heat within combustion engines.

The team is in discussions to commercialise the technology with Denso, a major automobile component manufacturer.

HP Unveils EliteBook Mobile Workstations

2011-04-17T03:54:00.000-07:00

Hewlett-Packard has introduced a line of mobile workstations that are more durable than previous models and provide additional storage options. The new HP EliteBook w-series includes the 17.3-inch 8760w, the 15.6-inch 8560w, and the 14-inch 8460w. The products are the first with HP's industrial design has a distinctive radial-brushed gunmetal finish, a backlit jewel log, and orange-colored accents, reports Informationweek.

The 8760w has the biggest graphics punch with the choice of an AMD FirePro or Nvidia Quadro professional graphics and up to 4 GB of video memory. The desktop-replacement model can be configured with three hard drives and RAID 5 support. The latter is a first for HP mobile workstations.

The 8560w provides the option of FirePro graphics for 1 GB of video memory or Nvidia Quadro for 2 GB. The 8560w and its bigger brother are available with HP's DreamColor display, which provides more than 1 billion color possibilities.

The 8460w is HP's smallest and lightest mobile workstation. The system starts at just less than five pounds and comes with a 1 GB FirePro.

The latest portable workstations are targeted at designers, animators, and engineers. "As the fastest growing segment of the workstation market, mobile workstations continue to provide value," Efrain Rovira, director of mobile workstations for HP, said in a statement.

All three systems have aluminum-alloy hinges and cast titanium-alloy display latches for more durability than previous EliteBook workstations. The latest products are available with either a second-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 quad-core processor, which provides enough computing power to handle 3-D professional applications. In addition, the systems support up to 32 GB of system memory and the AMD or Nvidia graphics can power up to five independent displays.

Storage capacity options include SATA hard drives or solid-state drives, with up to RAID 5 capability. Available ports include USB 3.0, eSATA, and USB 2.0. The 8760w and 8560w are available with an eight-cell primary battery, while the 8460w comes with either a six- or nine-cell battery.

The new systems are scheduled to be available in the U.S. in May. Prices start at $1,899 for the 8760w, $1,349 for the 8560w, and $1,299 for the 8460w.

New engine sends shock waves through auto industry

2011-04-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

Despite shifting into higher gear within the consumer's green conscience, hybrid vehicles are still tethered to the gas pump via a fuel-thirsty 100-year-old invention: the internal combustion engine.

However, researchers at Michigan State University have built a prototype gasoline engine that requires no transmission, crankshaft, pistons, valves, fuel compression, cooling systems or fluids. Their so-called Wave Disk Generator could greatly improve the efficiency of gas-electric hybrid automobiles and potentially decrease auto emissions up to 90 percent when compared with conventional combustion engines, reports Msnbc.

The engine has a rotor that's equipped with wave-like channels that trap and mix oxygen and fuel as the rotor spins. These central inlets are blocked off, building pressure within the chamber, causing a shock wave that ignites the compressed air and fuel to transmit energy.

The Wave Disk Generator uses 60 percent of its fuel for propulsion; standard car engines use just 15 percent. As a result, the generator is 3.5 times more fuel efficient than typical combustion engines.

Researchers estimate the new model could shave almost 1,000 pounds off a car's weight currently taken up by conventional engine systems.

Last week, the prototype was presented to the energy division of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is backing the Michigan State University Engine Research Laboratory with $2.5 million in funding.

Michigan State's team of engineers hope to have a car-sized 25-kilowatt version of the prototype ready by the end of the year.

New U.S. computer to be world's fastest

2011-03-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

A supercomputer commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy means the United States will again be home to the fastest computer in the world, reports Spacedaily.

The computer, dubbed "Titan," is predicted to achieve a computation speed 20,000 trillion calculations (20 petaflops) per second, PhysOrg.com reported Wednesday.

If successful, it will surpass China's Tianhe-1A, unveiled last October by the country's National University of Defense and boasting a speed of 2.5 petaflops.

The Titan, to be built by Cray Computer, will become part of a collection of some of the fastest computers in the world at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility in Tennessee, joining the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Gaea, the National Science Foundation's Kraken and the Department of Energy's current workhorse, the Jaguar.

The Titan is expected to be used by the Energy Department to calculate complex energy systems and will cost the U.S. government approximately $100 million.

The first stage of the Titan computing array is expected to be delivered by the end of this year with the second stage scheduled for sometime next year.

When A Bus Becomes A Satellite

2011-03-19T22:49:00.000-07:00

Alphabus has met Alphasat. Europe's largest telecom satellite is taking shape with final assembly and testing ready to begin in Toulouse, France. Planned for launch in late 2012 on Ariane 5, Alphasat will provide advanced mobile communication links for commercial operator Inmarsat.

The Alphabus platform, developed by Astrium and Thales Alenia Space under a joint ESA and French space agency (CNES) contract, is Europe's coordinated response to the increased market demand for larger telecommunication payloads, reports Spacedaily.

A wide range of commercial payloads to provide TV broadcast, broadband multimedia, Internet access and mobile and fixed telecommunication services can be accommodated on Alphabus. Inmarsat's Alphasat, developed in partnership with ESA, will be the platform's first mission.

"The mating took place as planned, preparing the way for the upcoming satellite test campaign," said Stephane Lascar, Alphabus/Alphasat Programme Manager at ESA.Alphabus is now on the commercial market to accommodate missions requiring up to 18 kW of payload power. Improvements will extend the range up to 22 kW.

Alphasat is the first satellite to use the Alphabus platform. It carries a new generation of advanced geomobile communications payload to augment Inmarsat's Broadband Global Area Network service, enabling communications across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East with increased capacity.

Alphasat features a new-generation digital signal processor and a 12 m-diameter antenna. It also carries four technology demonstration payloads developed through ESA.

"The Alphabus/Alphasat Programme is a prime example of a public-private partnership, our new way of working that ESA is pursuing in telecoms," said Magali Vaissiere, ESA Director of Telecommunications and Integrated Applications. "Such initiatives in partnership with satellite operators will foster the development of state-of-the-art technologies to serve the new needs of the worldwide market and Europe's citizens."

BuddyGuard turns an iPhone into a lifeline monitor

2011-03-12T22:14:00.000-08:00

Lots of apps promise to make your life easier. But MPower Lab's BuddyGuard offers to actually save your life.

BuddyGuard VIP provides a suite of services that aim to act as a safety net when you think you might be going into a dangerous situation. The app is designed to be launched and left running on your iPhone or iPod touch, reports Macworld.

An Instant Protection feature uploads audio and camera images from your device in real time to Internet servers, along with your GPS coordinates when activated, so the information you capture cannot be deleted if your iPhone falls into the wrong hands. You can set a check-in timer which requires you to provide an “all clear” back to BuddyGuard when you’re meeting someone after a set period of time; if you don’t check back in, BuddyGuard will raise alarms with your contacts as you specify. Or you can trigger an alarm yourself by sending BuddyGuard an SOS text message from any text-enabled phone. Finally, BuddyGuard uses your iPhone’s accelerometer to trigger an alert if you’re in a crash or a fall lasting more than one second.

BuddyGuard itself is a free application and service, but for $120 a year, you can also sign up for emergency support services though MPower Labs’ affiliation with GEOS search and rescue. GEOS provides a communications center with 24-hour staffing in 150 languages, and direct connections to police and emergency services almost anywhere in the world. (The exceptions: Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and North Korea.) Your annual fee includes access to the emergency response center, and a $1 million Lloyd’s of London insurance policy to pay for emergency services such as ambulances and evacuation.

This may be overkill for the average blind date arranged over the Internet, but as they say, it couldn’t hurt. And perhaps it’s not overkill if your work takes you to dangerous parts of town—or the world.

BuddyGuard requires any iOS device running iOS 4.0 or later; additional versions are in development for Android and Blackberry.

How an Eco Power Strip Can Save the World

2011-03-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

We don't usually pay a lot of attention to the power strips buried under our desk in the cord spaghetti but maybe we should. Because an eco-friendly power strip like EcoStrip might just hold the secret to saving real money by harnessing the power of energy efficiency, reports FastCompany.

Energy efficiency remains a huge opportunity for homes, offices, and corporate sustainability programs to save resources and save money, estimated by McKinsey and Company in 2009 to represent over a trillion dollars in potential savings. Solutions often involve long lists of things we should do like turning out the lights but the best solutions are simple and making savings automatic. One of these is EcoStrip, an eco-friendly power strip that saves energy and saves money all on its own without nagging anyone or sending memos about recycling. If you're in charge of producing solid results with your company's sustainability efforts, EcoStrip is a solution to consider because the results are automatic, significant, and boost the bottom line.

Studies have shown that all of the electronics around the office can suck up a surprising amount of energy even when people go home at the end of the day. Standby power drains from electronics in the home and office are thought to consume billions of dollars in wasted energy each year. Powering down your PC when you're not using it is one step that helps, but what about the other devices that go along with computers like printers, scanners, and speakers? When left on every night of the year, the cost of these adds up.

EcoStrip works like a regular power strip most of the time, with several plugs for your computer and peripherals. When you turn of the computer though, the computer controlled power strip turns off power to the other devices connected to it. There's not a big down side to turning off electronics that are not being used, and the upside is that with a small investment you'll save a significant amount of money. The creators of the patented EcoStrip estimate that one of their energy-saving power strips can save up to $100 a year, and pay for itself with an ROI as short as 90 days. And if you have hundreds or even thousands of computers and peripherals, the opportunity for savings is that much greater.

For some the motivation to adopt changes like this is their concern about doing the right thing for the environment, while others may be focused on the money they save. Even if you're primarily interested in saving money, EcoStrip is still a great option. "EcoStrip has created a revolutionary product that I am recommending to all of my green real estate investor clients," said Jim Simcoe, President of Simcoe Consulting. "This ingenious product saves money and
energy while delivering optimal performance."

Track your cheating spouse with phone software

2011-02-26T08:44:00.000-08:00

If you suspected your spouse, child or employee was up to no good, would you want concrete proof? Would it help if you had access to every phone call, text and e-mail they sent?

If so, a new cell-phone spying application might be right up your alley, reports msnbc.

Made by Retina Software and released this week, ePhoneTracker allows users to monitor every move made on a person’s mobile phone, from call info and text messages to websites visited, e-mails sent and received, new contacts added and even the GPS coordinates of the phone’s user.

Even deleted e-mails and texts can be retrieved by ePhoneTracker.

“Armed with this information, you will know the truth about what your spouse, child or employee does while you’re not around,” ePhoneTracker.com reads. “You will be able to confirm your suspicions and have peace of mind.”

The person doing the tracking receives e-mails of all actions performed on the targeted cell phone, while the person being tracked remains blissfully innocent (to the electronic spying, at least). No signs that he or she is being watched appear on the phone.

The software sells for $49.97. It is available for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile 6 or Symbian OS 9.

IBM's Watson Dominates Humanity in Jeopardy

2011-02-20T02:42:00.000-08:00

You've heard about Watson, the IBM supercomputer that shredded the best human players in a three-day "Jeopardy" challenge. The machine finished the TV game show with $77,147. Ken Jennings, who won 74 contests in a row in the 2004-05 season, finished with $24,000. Brad Rutter, who notched $3.3 million in previous appearances, ended with just $21,600, reports Chicagotribune.

Watson demonstrated engineers' immense progress in making machines that can understand language and answer complicated questions. Or in the case of "Jeopardy," provide questions to complicated answers.

But we're still miffed about one question Watson got wrong.

The machine is loaded with 200 million pages of content, including encyclopedias, books and movie scripts. It is wicked fast: 80 trillion operations a second. But it bungled a simple one under the category of "U.S. cities."

The "Jeopardy" answer: "Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second-largest for a World War II

Watson's question: What is Toronto?
Toronto! Missed it by a full country!

Every Chicagoan over the age of 8 knows the right question: What is Chicago?
Chicago, the home of O'Hare International Airport and Midway Airport.

Team Watson leader David Ferrucci offered some possible explanations for the computer's glitch. Watson probably downgraded the importance of the category because the answers don't always suggest the expected answer. The question itself didn't ask for a U.S. city, so that might have bewildered Watson. Adding to the confusion, there are cities named Toronto in the U.S.

Whatever. Watson would probably put ketchup on a hot dog, too. If a computer could do that.

Samsung launches new printer lines

2011-02-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

If you’re a small or mid-sized business and printing chores are complicating your life, Samsung is offering a solution with two new lines of networked duplex printers. The color laser multifunction SCX-4835FR, SCX-5639FR, and wireless SCX-5739FW printer series feature increased security for sensitive documents, while the monochrome, single function ML-3312ND, ML-3712ND, and ML-3712DW models offer faster output and more economical use, reports Macworld.

“Samsung is anticipating the needs of our business customers as they continue to increase expectations for safer, more intuitive print options,” said Ken Colby, Samsung’s director of printer marketing. “In our latest line of printers we are introducing features like anti-jam technology and secure pull printing that are indispensable for a more efficient workplace.

The SCX-4835FR, SCX-5639FR, and wireless SCX-5739FW multifunction printers feature the company’s secure pull printing technology. This gives users the option to print to any device on their network and ensure that only the specified user can actually collect the document. The printer requires an authentication code before producing the document at the pick-up time. This feature is especially useful in financial, government, and healthcare organizations where confidential information is often printed by multiple users.

These models also include an embedded barcode font feature, which lets users quickly print and scan document barcodes without a separate program to create the code.

In addition, Samsung has enhanced ease of use in printing with the new ML-3712ND and ML-3712DW printers. These models offer Samsung’s new, proprietary anti-jam roller technology, which helps users deal with dreaded printer paper jams.

Most of the printers in Samsung’s new series include a 600MHz dual core processor to boost print speed. The ML-3712ND, ML-3712DW, SCX-5639FR, and SCX-5739FW print at 37ppm, while the SCX-4835FR and ML-3312ND print at 33ppm.

The ML-3712ND, ML-3712DW, SCX-5639FR, and SCX-5739FW also use an extra high yield toner, which lowers the cost per page. The ML-3312ND and SCX-4835FR toner cartridges yield up to 2,000 and 5,000 pages, respectively.

Both of Samsung’s new printer lines feature an Eco-Mode, giving users the option to adjust settings to lower energy use and paper or toner consumption.

New laser detects bombs — right out of thin air

2011-02-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

Engineers have developed a laser-sensing technology that may allow soldiers to detect hidden bombs and scientists to better measure airborne environmental pollutants and greenhouse gases, reports msnbc.

Researchers from Princeton University discovered the new laser sensing method, which uses an ultraviolet laser pulse that is focused on a tiny patch of air, similar to the way a magnifying glass focuses sunlight into a hot spot. Within this hot spot – a cylinder-shaped region just .04 inches long – oxygen atoms become "excited" as their electrons get pumped up to high energy levels. When the pulse ends, the electrons fall back down and emit infrared light. Some of this light travels along the length of the excited cylinder region and, as it does so, stimulates more electrons to fall, amplifying and organizing the light into a coherent laser beam aimed right back at the original laser.

"We are able to send a laser pulse out and get another pulse back from the air itself," said Richard Miles, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton. "The returning beam interacts with the molecules in the air and carries their fingerprints."

The system most commonly used is a remote laser-sensing method, LIDAR (light detection and ranging). This method measures the scattering of a beam of light as it reflects off a distant object and returns back to a sensor. It is commonly used for measuring the density of clouds and pollution in the air, but can't determine the actual identity of the particles or gases.

The laser developed by the Princeton researchers is thousands of times stronger than LIDAR, which enables it to determine not just how many contaminants are in the air but also the identity and location of those contaminants. In addition, the new process will enable scientists to detect much smaller quantities of contaminants, which is a particular concern when trying to detect trace amounts of explosive vapors. Any chemical explosive emits various gases depending on its ingredients, but for many explosives the amount of gas is miniscule.

So far, the researchers have demonstrated the process in the laboratory over a distance of about a foot and a half. In the future they plan to increase the distance over which the beams travel, and they also plan to fine-tune the sensitivity of the technique to better identify small amounts of airborne contaminants.

"We'd like to be able to detect contaminants that are below a few parts per billion of the air molecules," Miles said. "That's an incredibly small number of molecules to find among the huge number of benign air molecules."

More Asteroids Could Have Made Life's Ingredients

2011-01-30T04:22:00.000-08:00

A wider range of asteroids were capable of creating the kind of amino acids used by life on Earth, according to new NASA research.

Amino acids are used to build proteins, which are used by life to make structures like hair and nails, and to speed up or regulate chemical reactions. Amino acids come in two varieties that are mirror images of each other, like your hands, reports Spacedaily.

Life on Earth uses the left-handed kind exclusively. Since life based on right-handed amino acids would presumably work fine, scientists are trying to find out why Earth-based life favored left-handed amino acids.

In March, 2009, researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., reported the discovery of an excess of the left-handed form of the amino acid isovaline in samples of meteorites that came from carbon-rich asteroids. This suggests that perhaps left-handed life got its start in space, where conditions in asteroids favored the creation of left-handed amino acids.

Meteorite impacts could have supplied this material, enriched in left-handed molecules, to Earth. The bias toward left-handedness would have been perpetuated as this material was incorporated into emerging life.

In the new research, the team reports finding excess left-handed isovaline (L-isovaline) in a much wider variety of carbon-rich meteorites.

Now the question is what process creates extra left-handed amino acids. There are several options, and it will take more research to identify the specific reaction.

Whatever it may be, the water-alteration process only amplifies a small existing left-handed excess, it does not create the bias, according to Glavin. Something in the pre-solar nebula (a vast cloud of gas and dust from which our solar system, and probably many others, were born) created a small initial bias toward L-isovaline and presumably many other left-handed amino acids as well.

One possibility is radiation. Space is filled with objects like massive stars, neutron stars, and black holes, just to name a few, that produce many kinds of radiation.

It's possible that the radiation encountered by our solar system in its youth made left-handed amino acids slightly more likely to be created, or right-handed amino acids a bit more likely to be destroyed, according to Glavin.

It's also possible that other young solar systems encountered different radiation that favored right-handed amino acids. If life emerged in one of these solar systems, perhaps the bias toward right-handed amino acids would be built in just as it may have been for left-handed amino acids here, according to Glavin.

Need large-capacity data storage? Try your intestine

2011-01-23T03:37:00.000-08:00

If you needed to score 900,000GB of data, how much do you think your storage system would weigh?

Let's see: 900,000GB is about 880TB. LaCie's 2TB Quadra weighs about 6 pounds. Four hundred and forty 2TB Quadras would weigh about 2,640 pounds—so 900,000GB of data storage would weigh about one and a quarter tons.

That's a bit heavy. But what if you could have it for one gram? A group of 11 students at Hong Kong's Chinese University are making progress in the science (or perhaps I should say art) of "biostorage," i.e. storing data in bacteria cells. For the project, the group is using the bacterium Escherichia coli, a.k.a. E. coli—that bacterium that causes you to have fun experiences like food poisoning and UTIs.

Apparently, storing data in bacterial cells is pretty simple (if you're skilled in the art of manipulation at the cellular level).The group of students has developed a method ofcompressing data, splitting it up, and distributing it between bacterial cells, AFP reports. The students remove DNA from bacterial cells, manipulate the DNA to reflect the stored data using enzymes, and then return them to a new cell, reports MacWorld.

Obviously, the team also maps out the DNA so that the stored information can later be located. The team has also created a three-tiered security fence for encoding the data, as well as built-in checks to make sure that mutations in cells don't corrupt the data.

Text, images, music, and video can all be stored within cells—and just one gram of bacteria can hold the same amount of information as 450 2,000GB hard disk
drives.

why would they use bacteria to store our data when we have such advanced methods of data storage as flash drives? Well, there are a few benefits.

First of all, bacteria are everywhere and are survivors. Not only do bacteria live all over the place (including inside your lower intestine, which is where E. coli is found), but they can survive in all sorts of conditions. Deinococcus radiodurans can even survive nuclear holocausts. Take that, ioSafe.

Secondly, bacteria are constantly reproducing, and the data is stored in their DNA. This means that the data could last thousands of years as the encoded DNA is passed from generation to generation.

Lastly, bacteria is unhackable. "Bacteria can't be hacked," student instructor Allen Yu told the AFP, "All kinds of computers are vulnerable to electrical failures or data theft. But bacteria are immune from cyber attacks. You can safeguard the information."

Unfortunately, this breakthrough doesn't mean you should put off purchasing that new external hard drive--the project is still in the early stages. What the team has really done is proven that the fundamental principles are achievable--but having biostorage as a viable option is a long way off (after all, recovering data takes a team of scientists in a lab).

New Task for Phone: File Taxes

2011-01-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

Few chores are as unpleasant as doing taxes. But filers can avoid some of the drudgery by turning it over to their mobile phones, reports Nytimes.

Intuit, the company that makes TurboTax software, introduced an application on Friday that lets users automatically fill out the 1040EZ, the most basic of the I.R.S. personal tax forms. Filers simply photograph their W-2 and the app does much of the rest.

Intuit charges $15 for each filing through the app, and it says that completing a return can take as little as 15 minutes.

The app is intended for consumers who are increasingly using their mobile phones for everything, including shopping and banking. Taxes are just the next step, although it may take some getting used to for people who are accustomed to preparing their returns with a pencil and calculator or on a desktop computer.

Image-recognition technology, which for years was considered unreliable, is increasingly being put to use in online services. Technical advancements and the spread of smartphones have provided new opportunities for it. The technology is also being used to translate signs from Spanish into English, scan bar codes in stores and help solve Sudoku puzzles.

SnapTax is among a number of mobile phone apps related to taxes. H&R Block’s app lets users ask questions of the company’s tax professionals, Shoeboxed helps users organize their spending by photographing receipts, and Intuit’s TurboTax app estimates what users owe in taxes.

SanDisk Releases $1,500 CompactFlash Card -- "World's Fastest"

2011-01-09T01:10:00.000-08:00

Just how much are you going to have to pony up for SanDisk's latest CF card? Around $11.70 per gigabyte, or $1,500 (technically, $1,499.99) for all 128 gigabytes of SanDisk's new Extreme Pro CompactFlash memory card, announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, reports PCMAG.

Yes, that's right. A CF card that will likely cost you more than that digital SLR you'll be sticking it into.

To SanDisk's credit, the company is billing this as, "the world's fastest high-capacity CompactFlash card." And with a transfer rate of up to 100 megabytes per second—all of 10 megabytes per second faster than the previous "world's fastest" card, SanDisk's own 64-gigabyte Extreme Pro—it's clear that the company is pushing hard on both professional photographers and videographers with its latest storage announcement.

"The 128GB SanDisk Extreme Pro CompactFlash card is ideally suited for imaging applications requiring Full HD3 1920x1080 resolution, up to 50Mbps bit rate and 4:2:2 color sampling," reads SanDisk's press release. "The card's unprecedented combination of speed and storage lets photographers capture more frames when shooting in continuous burst mode, and enables them to record high quality Full HD videos."

For consumers with a big bank account, it's important to note that the speed boost is more designed for the camera itself than the camera-to-PC transfer process. USB 2.0, for example, has a raw data limit of roughly 60 megabytes per second–bumping up to a super-fast memory card would do little to boost transfer performance from a camera to a PC if one's card already pushes past that limit to begin with.

The same holds true for those sporting standard FireWire 400 connections (or card readers). Only those connecting via FireWire 800—or a different connection entirely, like a PCI Express-based reader—would even have a chance to see any difference in transfer speeds.

CompactFlash is currently the de facto memory card specification sitting atop the high-end camera market. While SD cards can at least rival CompactFlash's capacity sizes, the former simply can't compete with the speeds of the latter just yet.

Even the fastest of SD cards only hits roughly one-third the read and write speeds of conventional CompactFlash cards. But that fact might change once the recently announced upgrade to the cards' Ultra High Speed bus interface hits in 2012.

Google to scan your body now

2010-12-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

The high-tech 3D application, called Google Body Browser, has been hailed as a breakthrough in the study of anatomy that could revolutionise people's understanding of the human body and even fast-track medical research, reports Times Of India.

The application, yet to be released officially, lets one explore the human body in much the same way you can navigate the world on Google Earth -- a virtual globe, map and geographical information programme.

In 2007, Google introduced another application called Street View which provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world.

About the development of the new application, Google has, until recently, been tight-lipped, but a new video has appeared on the Internet which provides a sneak peek at how the new tool will work, the Daily Mail reported.

"Google Body Browser also ushers in the introduction of brand new Internet technology called WebGL, that will allow complex 3D graphics to be used on normal web pages, without the need for specially adapted browser plug-ins like Flash or Java," said the report.

The video, shot on a mobile phone, shows an Internet developer from Google's WebGL research unit revealing the application to industry colleagues.

"One can quickly see the possibilities of how this could help anatomical education," a blogger, who witnessed the demonstration said he was excited by the browser's potential, was quoted as saying.

"Last year I got the opportunity to work on an open standards based web3D medical app for learning the bones of the body. After witnessing how that app really helped students learn the bones, I am sold on using web3D for medical education."

Ahead of its official unveiling Google has released a version available on WebGL-supported browsers or beta versions of Firefox and Google Chrome, which can be downloaded from the Google Body Browser site (http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com).

WebGL is expected to become standard in new versions of most Internet browsers, including Firefox, to be released next year.

Samsung develops see-through screens to replace windows

2010-11-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

Samsung showed the concept screens on Wednesday at Japan's FPD International exhibition and attracted a lot of attention from show-goers.

One type, based on OLED (organic LED) technology, was promoted for use in retail applications, reports Macworld.

A scale model showed the displays covering entire windows at a shop and a sports club. Video of a woman working out filled most of the window of the sports
club while the shop window displayed video of models wearing the clothes on sale inside. The interiors of the two businesses could be easily seen through the
display window.

In OLED screens the individual pixels contain an organic material that emits light when energized, so the screens would be visible in daylight or at night.

Another screen used the same LCD (liquid crystal display) technology used in most flat-panel TVs and laptops. It usually requires a backlit panel to illuminate the display, but when used in a window ambient light is enough to make the image visible. After sunset edge-mounted lights can be switched on to illuminate the screen.

"Imagine this is your office window with this transparent display," said Samsung's Jongseo Lee as he demonstrated the screen. "There's basic information, today's news, calendar, weather, even Twitter," he said punching different buttons on the screen.

For offices the window could be used to display a presentation, while at home it could be installed in a kitchen window to show recipes, he said.

Samsung said potential users needn't worry about information security with the LCD screen. Anyone looking from the reverse side would see a reflection during the day and a uniform light at night.

Impressive as they are, high-tech windows do have some drawbacks.

They're likely to be a lot more expensive than the plain piece of glass they would replace and they can only be made as large as current display production equipment allows. For LCDs that means about 2.1 meters by 2.4 meters, which is smaller than some shop windows.

Samsung said it has already begun small scale trials of the technology in South Korea and commercialization is due in 2011.

Without driver or map, vans go from Italy to China

2010-10-31T03:48:00.000-07:00

Four driverless electric vans successfully ended an 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometer) test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo's journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday, reports msnbc.

The vehicles, equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles, are part of an experiment aimed at improving road safety and advancing automotive technology.

The sensors on the vehicles enabled them to navigate through wide extremes in road, traffic and weather conditions, while collecting data to be analyzed for further research, in a study sponsored by the European Research Council.

"We didn't know the route, I mean what the roads would have been and if we would have found nice roads, traffic, lots of traffic, medium traffic, crazy drivers or regular drivers, so we encountered the lot," said Isabella Fredriga, a research engineer for the project.

The project used no maps, often traveling through remote regions of Siberia and China. At one point, a van stopped to give a hitchhiker a lift.

A computerized artificial vision system dubbed GOLD, for Generic Obstacle and Lane Detector, analyzed the information from the sensors and automatically adjusted the vehicles' speed and direction.

"This steering wheel is controlled by the PC. So the PC sends a command and the steering wheel moves and turns and we can follow the road, follow the curves and avoid obstacles with this," said Alberto Broggi of Vislab at the University of Parma in Italy, the lead researcher for the project.

The technology will be used to study ways to complement drivers' abilities. It also could have applications in farming, mining and construction, the researchers said.

The vehicles ran at maximum speeds of 38 miles per hour (60 kilometers per hour) and had to be recharged for eight hours after every two to three hours of driving. At times, it was monotonous and occasionally nerve-racking, inevitably due to human error, Fredriga said.

"There were a few scary moments. Like when the following vehicle bumped into the leading one and that was just because we forgot, we stopped and we forgot to turn the system off," Fredriga said.

An Intelligent System For Maritime Surveillance

2010-10-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) have designed a real application for maritime surveillance that is able to integrate and unify the information from different types of sensors and data in context through artificial intelligence and data fusion techniques.The system has been designed by scientists from this Madrid university for Nucleo CC, a company which develops surveillance systems for the maritime and aeronautic sectors. The first prototype will be used in the near future in Cape Verde (Africa), reports spacedaily.

Two types of sensors have been deployed there: a set of radars and a series of AIS (Automatic Identification System), which allow ships to communicate their position and give other relevant data on their location and characteristics.

These two types of sensors offer complementary data which can be fused in order to obtain better information as to what is happening in the maritime and coastal space of the area of interest. This has been achieved by the scientists from the Applied Artificial Intelligence Group (GIAA) of UC3M, who have carried out the project "Fusion de Informacion en Trafico Maritimo" (Information Fusion in Marine Traffic).

The results of this research, presented last July at the International Conference on Information Fusion in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been the creation of data fusion software which allows improved maritime surveillance to be carried out, simultaneously integrating the capabilities of the radars and the AIS localization stations deployed. The objective is to guarantee security in the area by monitoring the different ships that are in a given maritime route which, at the same time is the entrance and exit of a commercial port.

The scientists developed a prototype which has been integrated into the company's system, after having undergone validation tests to be able to execute in real time with the data supplied by its sensors. It able to monitor 2,000 identifiable objectives between large and small vessels, with a capacity to process the data of up to 10 sensors and provide the exit with one second refresh time.

"Ships have to be able to localized 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, independent of failures in the sensors or in the different intermediate mechanisms, and in some way, what this system attempts to do is guarantee that this can be done", explained Jose Luis Guerrero, the GIAA group researchers, who worked on this project from the UC3M Colmenarejo Campus.

"In this way", he continued", we are able to make it so these vessels never lose their position thus avoiding collisions or any type of problem in information management regarding the movement dynamics of these ships".