Posts Tagged ‘science’

Hubble’s portrait of everybody’s favorite ex-planet

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

While the Hubble space telescope has provided the world with some of the most amazing images ever taken of the very edge of our universe , it has now revealed details of something much closer. The newest images, set to appear in the March issue of the Astronomical Journal , are of everybody’s favorite ex-planet—now dwarf planet—Pluto. The images reveal an “icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness.” The changes in color are believed to be the result of seasonal variations where surface ice sublimes from one pole and migrates to the other. This transformation occurred over a short, two-year period from 2000 to 2002—that’s less than one percent of the total orbital period/seasonal cycle of Pluto. These photos are the sharpest and clearest pictures taken of the planet to date, and will remain so until NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft comes within six months of this distant object—something that won’t occur until 2015. Click here to see the full photo map of Pluto’s surface from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Google’s China problem leaves opening for Bing

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Earlier this month , Google unleashed one of the year’s biggest technology stories by announcing it was no longer interested in working with the Chinese government to censor search results, and by threatening to cease operations in the communist country. Microsoft, for its part, remained quiet for as long as it could, and then eventually announced it would continue operations in China, business as usual. This week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer emphasized this again in a post on The Microsoft Blog . “We have done business in China for more than 20 years and we intend to stay engaged, which means our business must respect the laws of China. That’s true for every company doing business in countries around the world: we are all subject to local laws.” We’re not surprised; after all, if one of your biggest competitors has decided to leave a market because it believes it was victimized and you were not (Microsoft maintains its systems were not compromised in the Chinese attacks on the 30 or so US companies), then you would also do your best to take advantage of the surprise that has just landed in your lap.

Photosynthesis uses quantum interactions to harvest light

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

By some measures, the photosynthetic process is one of the more efficient energy transactions in nature. Scientists have taken an interest in figuring out how it works at the atomic level, as some research had suggested that quantum mechanics might be at work when the system was examined at low temperatures. A new experimental setup using photosynthetic proteins shows that, when they are stimulated with light, they interact on a quantum level: their states are dependent on one another, which allows them to transmit energy efficiently. Photosynthesis relies on proteins that absorb light, which excites their electrons, giving them enough energy to move within or even exit the molecule. This excitation energy is transmitted between molecules to a reaction center, where it is harvested for use by the organism. Until recently, scientists thought that the energy was transferred according to classical laws because of the size and complexity of the proteins, but this new research shows that quantum interactions are at work.

Weird Science is training bees and packing viruses

// February 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

To bees, human faces are just another flower: It turns out that if you consistently associate a picture of a human face with some sugar water, bees can actually be trained to identify specific faces. But, it turns out that bees are able to figure out faces because they recognize specific configurations of features ; you can train them just as effectively on a smiley face. “The fact that they were able to integrate visual features into complex representations suggests that face-like stimulus categorization can occur even in the absence of brain regions specialized in face processing,” the authors of the paper note. Building a virus is a bit like packing a can full of springy snakes: There’s a classic gag gift that involves stuffing a Pringles or candy container with a set of cloth-covered springs that launch out at the surprised victime when the container is opened. Apparently, these gag gifts are the perfect analogy for a virus. Researchers have followed the thermodynamics of a viral infection. It turns out that the process of stuffing the DNA into the proteins of a viral coat creates a certain amount of potential energy, which makes the reverse of the process, when the virus injects the DNA into a bacterial cell, an energetically favorable process.

Nano-patterning gives polymer solar cells a big boost

// February 5th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Polymer solar cells are still in their infancy compared to their silicon-based counterparts, but thanks to their low cost and rapidly advancing efficiency, the outlook is encouraging for cheap end-user power generation. Researchers have developed a new nano-patterned array production technique that showed a roughly seven-fold increase in efficiency when compared to the traditional sandwich-style construction. The important bits of the physics that go into generating energy in a solar cell only happen at the interface of the electron donor and acceptor layers, which is a few nanometers thick, so optimizing this interface is an important area of study. In a new study, researchers used a piece of aluminum oxide to pattern the polymer comprising the electron donor part of the solar cell, P3HT. The P3HT was drawn into a honeycomb-like array of nanometer pores using vacuum and capillary forces—the resultant structure was a 30nm thick film of P3HT with a nano-forest of pillars roughly 150nm tall and 75nm thick. Backfilling the P3HT array with the electron acceptor, C60, created a complete heterojunction that could then be used in a solar cell, with an interface area 2.6 times greater than if it were flat. Thanks to the use of aluminum oxide as a patterning material, the P3HT polymer chains would align themselves in a stacked array, which greatly increased the conductivity of the pillar. The conductivity increase, coupled with the higher interfacial area yielded a an efficiency 6.6 times greater than a planar configuration of the same donor and receptor polymers. While the absolute efficiency of the new array—just 1.12 percent—is not cutting edge, the patterning technique is cheap and can be done on a large scale, and is unlikely to be limited to just this material system. Other recent polymer cells have claimed efficiencies of 5.5 percent , for example, and the micro- and nano-pillar approach works with traditional photovoltaic materials, too. There is still much work to be done in the optimization of the processing conditions, but this is yet another piece of the puzzle that may make polymer solar cells a viable option for power generation. Advanced Functional Materials , 2010. DOI: 10.1002/adfm.200901760

16- and 48-core monster chips on tap at next week’s ISSCC

// February 5th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Intel, IBM, Sun, AMD, and other chipmakers are set to unveil the details of a host of present and future processor designs at this year’s International Solid State Circuits Conference. Let’s take a look at each company’s sessions, which cover processors that range from single-core to 48 cores, in turn.

Nuanti brings HTML5 and Ogg Theora video to Silverlight

// February 5th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Nuanti, a company that develops Web browsing technologies, has produced a high-performance Ogg Theora decoder for Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plugin. Nuanti’s Highgate Media Suite will enable support for standards-based HTML5 video streaming with Theora in browsers that have Silverlight. It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software. According to Nuanti developer Alp Toker, the company plans to open the source code in order to enable broader adoption of open and unencumbered video technology on the Web. He revealed some details about the project in a recent blog post . “We’ll be releasing a high-performance decoder for Theora video/Ogg Vorbis audio streams that plugs into the Silverlight 3 streaming media abstraction, as well as a reference front-end player interface and JavaScript bridge layer providing basic compatibility with standard HTML5 media tags, adding support for the standard to Internet Explorer and extending the capabilities of WebKit-based browsers like Safari and Epiphany,” he wrote. “We’re going open source with this! Over the last few years we found that our main business of developing mobile/custom web browser technology is getting more difficult with the demand for proprietary and patent-encumbered formats on the web which we simply can’t support. Perhaps a quarter of our developer time last year was spent trying to hack around bugs in the Adobe Flash player product, for example. So part of the strategy has been to encourage open formats, which means getting it in the hands of as many people as possible.” Although browser vendors, including Microsoft, have acknowledged the value of the HTML5 video tag, they have not been able to build a consensus around any individual codec. Opera and Mozilla have backed Ogg Theora, a codec that is thought to be unencumbered by patents, but Apple and Google have backed the h264 codec, which cannot be used royalty-free. Microsoft has not yet implemented support for the video tag in Internet Explorer. Nuanti’s framework could help boost Theora adoption and will enable Internet Explorer users to consumer HTML5 video content.

Fighting malaria by engineering flies to smell like mosquitos

// February 5th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Mosquitos are still a leading cause of the spread of malaria and other diseases in many parts of the world. While we know that mosquitos find humans through smell, the details of their olfactory abilities hadn’t been worked out. A new study in Nature  describes how researchers isolated the olfactory genes of mosquitos and expressed them in fruit flies to see how each responds to certain smells. They found that mosquitos are attracted to certain chemicals in human breath and sweat, even in small amounts—knowledge they could use to build better repellents and traps. The type of mosquito tested, A. gambiae , is the biggest spreader of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. The fact that mosquitos detect humans through smell is well-known, but the molecular basis of their ability to sniff us out is not, even though the mosquito genome was sequenced several years ago. 

Graphene transistors promise 100GHz speeds

// February 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Researchers are running into the physical limits of speed and scaling in silicon transistor technology, forcing them to look elsewhere for next-generation devices. The leading candidate to replace silicon being pursued by, well, pretty much everyone, is graphene. Graphene, single sheets of graphitic carbon, is exciting because it is a single atom thick and has remarkably high electron mobilities (100 times greater than silicon), making it ideally suited to atomic-scale, high-speed operation. Also, graphene’s electrical properties can be controlled, switching it among conducting, semiconducting and electrically insulating forms. That means graphene-only (or, more likely, graphene-mostly) devices are, in principle, possible. In this week’s Science , researchers from IBM demonstrate graphene-based field effect transistors (FETs) that may operate at much higher speeds (100GHz) than Si FETs. Graphene layers were thermally grown on two-inch SiC wafers and the FETs were formed using standard Si fabrication techniques with HfO 2 as the gate oxide. That’s a rather significant point—the researchers actually created an entire wafer of these devices.

Pound for pound, bats can drink you under the table

// February 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

One of the very nice things about fruit is that it will often ferment all on its own. And a few animal species take advantage of this, deliberately seeking out fermented fruit with the objective of painting the jungle red and waking up in the natural equivalent of a ditch at the side of the road. This works well if you happen to be fairly safe from predators, but not many animals have this luxury. Fruit and nectar eating bats certainly don’t fall under the heading of “immune from predation,” so researchers wondered what happened to fruit bats that ate from the fermented fruit. Considering body weight and the amount of energy required to keep a fruit bat going, the researchers figured that even the low alcohol content of fruit should still be enough to mean that a night’s feeding involved a substantial amount of imbibing.

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