… for tonight’s revelries, the American Chemical Society comes through with the science on just why that hangover is ruining your life.
From the link:
When your head is pounding and you can’t stomach even a dry piece of toast, who among us has not asked why? Not, “Why did I drink so much?” but “Why is this happening to me?”
Which group do you think will come out on top in DC?
National security issues aside, I have the sneaking suspicion the more the general public (on both the right and the left) learns about the power the Israeli lobby has long-held in Washington, and the sheer amount of unreciprocated foreign aid (in both money and material) the United States has provided, and continues to provide, Israel for years, the stronger the public upswell against this aid will become. AIPAC has bitten off a lot more than it can chew in this age of online transparency and enraged message forwarding requiring no more than the flick of finger. This topic is no longer inside baseball played out in dark meeting rooms, it’s been pushed into the light by Bibi’s government and AIPAC.
A new infrared image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
From the link:
A new infrared image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars. The stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster, are the blue dots to the right of the image center. They are ripening out of the dust cloud from which they formed, and at just a few million years old, are young on stellar time scales.
The rosebud-like red glow surrounding the hot, young stars is warm dust heated by the stars. Green “leafy” nebulosity enfolds the cluster, showing the edges of the dense, dusty cloud. This green material is from heated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, molecules that can be found on Earth in barbecue pits, exhaust pipes and other places where combustion has occurred.
Also hit the link for a much larger version of the image. I was going to run it here, but it’s a little too big for this blog’s format.
Via KurzweilAI.net — Rutgers is offering an online course on the technological Singularity.
Rutgers plans online course on the Singularity KurzweilAI.net, Mar. 16, 2010 This summer, Rutgers University plans to offer “Special Topics in Sociology: Singularity Studies, the first accredited college course on the Singularity and associated technologies.
The three-credit summer course will feature online lectures and discussions every Monday and Wednesday evening throughout the summer and is available to students internationally.
The textbook will be The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil, supplemented by online articles appropriate to individual lectures.
The course will feature online interviews with leading futurists and technologists around the world exploring the social implications of these anticipated developments. Topics include future studies and forecasting, finance and entrepreneurship, networks and computing systems,biotechnology and informatics, nanotechnology,neuroscience and human enhancement, artificial intelligence and robotics, energy and ecological systems, and space and physical sciences.
The course will be taught by a father-son team, Ben and Ted Goertzel. Ben is the Director of Applied Research for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and an External Research Professor at Xiamen University in China. He also heads up two startup companies, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC, has written several books on artificial intelligence and related topics, and is an advisor to the AI & Robotics Track at Singularity University.
Ted, Ben’s father, is a sociology professor at Rutgers who regularly teaches a Cyberspace and Society course and is author or co-author of numerous books on sociology andscience.
Students and guest speakers will be recruited internationally. The sessions will be recorded and available for viewing during the semester via the Elluminate system.
More info: Singularity Studies: The Future of Humanity in the Age of Superhuman Artificial Intelligence
… a long national nightmare begins. Without reform, medical care will eventually bankrupt the nation and severely cripple businesses, both large and small, long before. Social Security is that other entitlement program bugaboo, and in a moment of just terrible timing, the chickens have finally come to roost with the program — this year Social Security did not collect enough payroll taxes to cover benefit payments for the first time in over twenty years.
So what, you say? Maybe not so much.
From the link:
For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money inpayroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.
Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.
Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.
Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.
Social Security’s shortfall will not affect current benefits. As long as the IOUs last, benefits will keep flowing. But experts say it is a warning sign that the program’s finances are deteriorating. Social Security is projected to drain its trust funds by 2037 unless Congress acts, and there’s concern that the looming crisis will lead to reduced benefits.
“This is not just a wake-up call, this is it. We’re here,” said Mary Johnson, a policy analyst with The Senior Citizens League, an advocacy group. “We are not going to be able to put it off any more.”
The retirement savings vehicle is now thirty. (Well, technically thirty since the start of the year.)
From the link:
That’s the case with the U.S.’s main corporate pension plan, the 401(k). The Revenue Act of 1978 contained a provision that become Section 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code and it went into effect on Jan. 1, 1980. Subsequent regulations issued by the federal government in 1981 gave benefit specialists the guidance they needed to set up the pension plans. The 401(k) has since evolved into the largest private-sector employer-sponsored retirement plan in the U.S.
Even though I think it’s going to be the thin-film photovoltaic space is where we will see the most market ready advances in cost and efficiency, breakthroughs in other areas, like polymer solar cells, keep the entire field moving forward and might well lead to the next big thing down the road. It truly is promising to follow and read about the sheer volume of basic research and incremental improvements going on in solar and other alternative energy sources. The faster the United States can end dependency on Middle East petroleum, the faster one of the more vexing national security issues gets solved.
From the second link:
Polymer solar cells are finding use in solar charging backpacks and umbrellas, but they still only convert around 6 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity–or around a third of what conventional silicon panels are capable of. If the efficiency of polymer solar cells–which are cheaper and lighter than silicon cells–can be boosted significantly, they could be ideal for plastering on rooftops or laminating on windows.
Solarmer Energy, based in El Monte, CA, is on target to reach 10 percent efficiency by the end of this year, says Yue Wu, the company’s managing director and director of research and development. Organic cells will likely need at least that efficiency to compete on the photovoltaic market.
Hit the first link above in the very first sentence of this post for a story on U.S. firms seeking to push the cost of thin-film solar cells down.
Sounds like an inexpensive and potent improvement in lithium ion batteries.
From the link:
A new high-performance anode structure based on silicon-carbon nanocomposite materials could significantly improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries used in a wide range of applications from hybrid vehicles to portable electronics.
Produced with a “bottom-up” self-assembly technique, the new structure takes advantage of nanotechnology to fine-tune its materials properties, addressing the shortcomings of earlier silicon-based battery anodes. The simple, low-cost fabrication technique was designed to be easily scaled up and compatible with existing battery manufacturing.
Details of the new self-assembly approach were published online in the journal Nature Materials on March 14.
This scanning electron micrograph shows carbon-coated silicon nanoparticles on the surface of the composite granules used to form the new anode. Credit: Courtesy of Gleb Yushin
Sounds like the Norwegians are looking to save on prize money with this nomination.
From the link:
The Norwegian Nobel Institute yesterday announced there are 237 nominees for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Though the the institute doesn’t normally disclose who made the list, an official did confirm to Computerworld that it includes the Internet.
That’s right. The Internet was nominated for the illustrious prize by the Italian edition of Wired magazine, according to the institute.
Not as big as web 2.0/social media, but big enough to get some attention.
From the link:
Chris Valentine, the event’s producer, says that social Web businesses are still king–200 companies applied to compete, and there were twice as many in the social media category as in any other. But he’s starting to see a shift in the technology behind the companies involved in the event. “We knew we were going in the direction of artificial intelligence,” Valentine says, and this year there are a number of startups harnessing technology from the field–especially natural language processing and computer vision.
A prime example is Siri, a startup that launched this February. The company was spun out of SRI International, a research organization based in Menlo Park, CA, commercializing technology developed as part of the CALO artificial intelligence project. The company offers a virtual personal assistant with impressive voice recognition, learning capabilities, and the capacity to interact with many different apps. Its founders describe Siri as “the mother of all mashups with a big brain in the front.”
I’ve done a lot of blogging on cancer and nanotech and I’ve covered this exact use of gold nanoparticles to destroy tumors. This is new research on the same tech, and this amount of news on one cancer-fighting technique is good medical news. Earlier this week I covered this topic on research from Cornell. Today’s news comes from Washington University in St. Louis.
From the final link, the release:
A golden bullet for cancer
Nanoparticles provide a targeted version of photothermal therapy for cancer
IMAGE: Infrared images made while tumors were irradiated with a laser show that in nanocage-injected mice (left), the surface of the tumor quickly became hot enough to kill cells. In…
In a lecture he delivered in 1906, the German physician Paul Ehrlich coined the term Zuberkugel, or “magic bullet,” as shorthand for a highly targeted medical treatment.
Magic bullets, also called silver bullets, because of the folkloric belief that only silver bullets can kill supernatural creatures, remain the goal of drug development efforts today.
A team of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis is currently working on a magic bullet for cancer, a disease whose treatments are notoriously indiscriminate and nonspecific. But their bullets are gold rather than silver. Literally.
The gold bullets are gold nanocages that, when injected, selectively accumulate in tumors. When the tumors are later bathed in laser light, the surrounding tissue is barely warmed, but the nanocages convert light to heat, killing the malignant cells.
In an article just published in the journal Small, the team describes the successful photothermal treatment of tumors in mice.
The team includes Younan Xia, Ph.D., the James M. McKelvey Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Michael J. Welch, Ph.D., professor of radiology and developmental biology in the School of Medicine, Jingyi Chen, Ph.D., research assistant professor of biomedical engineering and Charles Glaus, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Radiology.
“We saw significant changes in tumor metabolism and histology,” says Welch, “which is remarkable given that the work was exploratory, the laser ‘dose’ had not been maximized, and the tumors were ‘passively’ rather than ‘actively’ targeted.”
Why the nanocages get hot
The nanocages themselves are harmless. “Gold salts and gold colloids have been used to treat arthritis for more than 100 years,” says Welch. “People know what gold does in the body and it’s inert, so we hope this is going to be a nontoxic approach.”
“The key to photothermal therapy,” says Xia, “is the cages’ ability to efficiently absorb light and convert it to heat. “
Suspensions of the gold nanocages, which are roughly the same size as a virus particle, are not always yellow, as one would expect, but instead can be any color in the rainbow.
They are colored by something called a surface plasmon resonance. Some of the electrons in the gold are not anchored to individual atoms but instead form a free-floating electron gas, Xia explains. Light falling on these electrons can drive them to oscillate as one. This collective oscillation, the surface plasmon, picks a particular wavelength, or color, out of the incident light, and this determines the color we see.
Medieval artisans made ruby-red stained glass by mixing gold chloride into molten glass, a process that left tiny gold particles suspended in the glass, says Xia.
The resonance — and the color — can be tuned over a wide range of wavelengths by altering the thickness of the cages’ walls. For biomedical applications, Xia’s lab tunes the cages to 800 nanometers, a wavelength that falls in a window of tissue transparency that lies between 750 and 900 nanometers, in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.
Light in this sweet spot can penetrate as deep as several inches in the body (either from the skin or the interior of the gastrointestinal tract or other organ systems).
The conversion of light to heat arises from the same physical effect as the color. The resonance has two parts. At the resonant frequency, light is typically both scattered off the cages and absorbed by them.
By controlling the cages’ size, Xia’s lab tailors them to achieve maximum absorption.
Passive targeting
“If we put bare nanoparticles into your body,” says Xia, “proteins would deposit on the particles, and they would be captured by the immune system and dragged out of the bloodstream into the liver or spleen.”
To prevent this, the lab coated the nanocages with a layer of PEG, a nontoxic chemical most people have encountered in the form of the laxatives GoLyTELY or MiraLAX. PEG resists the adsorption of proteins, in effect disguising the nanoparticles so that the immune system cannot recognize them.
Instead of being swept from the bloodstream, the disguised particles circulate long enough to accumulate in tumors.
A growing tumor must develop its own blood supply to prevent its core from being starved of oxygen and nutrients. But tumor vessels are as aberrant as tumor cells. They have irregular diameters and abnormal branching patterns, but most importantly, they have thin, leaky walls.
The cells that line a tumor’s blood vessel, normally packed so tightly they form a waterproof barrier, are disorganized and irregularly shaped, and there are gaps between them.
The nanocages infiltrate through those gaps efficiently enough that they turn the surface of the normally pinkish tumor black.
A trial run
In Welch’s lab, mice bearing tumors on both flanks were randomly divided into two groups. The mice in one group were injected with the PEG-coated nanocages and those in the other with buffer solution. Several days later the right tumor of each animal was exposed to a diode laser for 10 minutes.
The team employed several different noninvasive imaging techniques to follow the effects of the therapy. (Welch is head of the oncologic imaging research program at the Siteman Cancer Center of Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital and has worked on imaging agents and techniques for many years.)
During irradiation, thermal images of the mice were made with an infrared camera. As is true of cells in other animals that automatically regulate their body temperature, mouse cells function optimally only if the mouse’s body temperature remains between 36.5 and 37.5 degrees Celsius (98 to 101 degrees Fahrenheit).
At temperatures above 42 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) the cells begin to die as the proteins whose proper functioning maintains them begin to unfold.
In the nanocage-injected mice, the skin surface temperature increased rapidly from 32 degrees Celsius to 54 degrees C (129 degrees F).
In the buffer-injected mice, however, the surface temperature remained below 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
To see what effect this heating had on the tumors, the mice were injected with a radioactive tracer incorporated in a molecule similar to glucose, the main energy source in the body. Positron emission and computerized tomography (PET and CT) scans were used to record the concentration of the glucose lookalike in body tissues; the higher the glucose uptake, the greater the metabolic activity.
The tumors of nanocage-injected mice were significantly fainter on the PET scans than those of buffer-injected mice, indicating that many tumor cells were no longer functioning.
The tumors in the nanocage-treated mice were later found to have marked histological signs of cellular damage.
Active targeting
The scientists have just received a five-year, $2,129,873 grant from the National Cancer Institute to continue their work with photothermal therapy.
Despite their results, Xia is dissatisfied with passive targeting. Although the tumors took up enough gold nanocages to give them a black cast, only 6 percent of the injected particles accumulated at the tumor site.
Xia would like that number to be closer to 40 percent so that fewer particles would have to be injected. He plans to attach tailor-made ligands to the nanocages that recognize and lock onto receptors on the surface of the tumor cells.
In addition to designing nanocages that actively target the tumor cells, the team is considering loading the hollow particles with a cancer-fighting drug, so that the tumor would be attacked on two fronts.
But the important achievement, from the point of view of cancer patients, is that any nanocage treatment would be narrowly targeted and thus avoid the side effects patients dread.
The TV and radio character the Lone Ranger used only silver bullets, allegedly to remind himself that life was precious and not to be lightly thrown away. If he still rode today, he might consider swapping silver for gold.
###
Read this report on the shenanigans Lehman Brothers undertook to hide its precarious financial state. Recall the Lehman bankruptcy is what really freaked everyone out and even though it might not have been the actual cause of the bank bailouts, it was most likely the key trigger.
From the link:
It is the Wall Street equivalent of a coroner’s report — a 2,200-page document that lays out, in new and startling detail, how Lehman Brothers used accounting sleight of hand to conceal the bad investments that led to its undoing.
The report, compiled by an examiner for the bank, now bankrupt, hit Wall Street with a thud late Thursday. The 158-year-old company, it concluded, died from multiple causes. Among them were bad mortgage holdings and, less directly, demands by rivals like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, that the foundering bank post collateral against loans it desperately needed.
And:
According to the report, Lehman used what amounted to financial engineering to temporarily shuffle $50 billion of assets off its books in the months before its collapse in September 2008 to conceal its dependence on leverage, or borrowed money. Senior Lehman executives, as well as the bank’s accountants at Ernst & Young, were aware of the moves, according to Mr. Valukas, the chairman of the law firm Jenner & Block and a former federal prosecutor, who filed the report in connection with Lehman’s bankruptcy case.
Richard S. Fuld Jr., Lehman’s former chief executive, certified the misleading accounts, the report said.
But we have a little time to make arrangements. The collision is expected in the next 1.5 million years.
From the link:
A new set of star velocity data indicates that Gliese 710 has an 86 percent chance of ploughing into the Solar System within the next 1.5 million years.
And:
Today, Vadim Bobylev at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St Petersburg gives us the answer. He’s combined the Hipparcos data with several new databases and found an additional nine stars that have either had a close encounter with the Sun or are going to.
But he’s also made a spectacular prediction. The original Hipparcos data showed that an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.
Of course, trajectories are difficult to calculate when the data is poor so nobody has really been sure about what’s going to happen.
What the new data has allowed Bobylev to do is calculate the probability of Gliese 710 smashing into the Solar System. What he’s found is a shock.
He says there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs into space.
That may sound like a graze but it is likely to have serious consequences. Such an approach would send an almighty shower of comets into the Solar System which will force us to keep our heads down for a while. And a probability of 86 percent is about as close to certainty as this kind of data can get.
This move really pushes Microsoft because it’s going to give Google’s users the opportunity to access full-featured Microsoft Office files in the cloud before Microsoft provides that service.
From the link:
Late last week, Google (GOOG) made another aggressive move to stay ahead of Microsoft (MSFT) in the online productivity tools space by acquiring DocVerse, a startup founded by two former Microsoft employees, known for tools that let users collaborate on Microsoft Office files on the Web.
Google nabbed the three-year-old, San Francisco-based DocVerse for $25 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. What Google gets in return is the technology to make Microsoft Office operate more like Google Docs.
DocVerse provides a 1MB plug-in to Office 2007 that allows users to edit and share Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents online and in real-time with all the features of the Office client versions intact.
… but just barely. I’ve seen more than a few tech stories covering Bing’s modest gains in search engine market share. All well and good, but it’s worth looking at the actual numbers and some of the reasons for that gain. Let’s just say I think the Redmond bunch should probably keep the champagne on ice and heed the advice of Winston Wolf. (In case you don’t remember Wolf, he’s the “Pulp Fiction”
Microsoft is gaining market share, but at a very high cost. Bing has had the living hell marketed out of it, particularly on television. If all that money creates converts who consistently use Bing over Google, and market share keeps growing, it’ll be worth the cost. Right now I’m guessing whatever money Microsoft is earning from Bing is dwarfed by the search engine’s marketing budget. Microsoft has a long and proud history of losing a ton of money in a market area they want to enter and challenge a rival (see: Xbox gaming console.)
Now let’s look at the actual numbers and see just how far behind Google Bing really is, and how it may not be chipping away at the targeted rival at all, but actually stealing market share from its now partner, Yahoo.
From the first link:
December 2009 January 2010 February 2010 72.25% 71.49% 70.95% Yahoo 14.83% 14.57% 14.57% Bing 8.92% 9.37% 9.70% Source: Hitwise
And:
January 2010 February 2010 65.4% 65.5% Yahoo 17.0% 16.8% Bing 11.3% 11.5% Source: comScore
Also from the first link:
Bing search engine may still be a bit player in the lucrative online search business dominated byGoogle, but it’s slowly and steadily gaining users. And it appears that Bing’s share is coming at the expense of both Google (GOOG) and Yahoo, the latter of which recentlyteamed up with Microsoft to be more competitive in online search.
A commenter at the link made a great point that some of this gain could be from Windows 7 users retaining — at least for now — the Bing default search engine option.
Lightweight, very thin and wireless when triggered with laser light. One interesting practical application is affixing a nanotube speaker to a surface rendering the entire surface acoustically active.
From the link:
The study confirms earlier research that carbon nanotubes that are stretched into sheets and electrically powered can produce intense sound, but researchers at UT Dallas’ Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute have made some important advancements.
Although prior studies demonstrated that sheets of carbon nanotubes can produce sound when heated with alternating electrical current, the UT Dallas researchers have found that striking tones can be generated by vertical arrays of nanotubes, called forests, which resemble black velvet.
The team also discovered that high-quality sound can be generated when nanotube sheets or forests are struck with laser light that is modulated, or “altered,” in the acoustic frequency range.
And:
In addition to filling a room with sound from invisible speakers, nanotube speakers could easily cancel sound from the noisiest neighbor or dim the roar of traffic rushing past a neighborhood, using the same principles as current sound-canceling technologies.
“The sound generation by nanotube sheets can help to achieve this effect on very large scales,” Kozlov said.
This post is the first in an ongoing series highlighting the artists behind the SculptCAD Rapid Artists Project. (Hit this link for all posts related to the project.)
Heather Ezell is a Dallas-based marble sculptor working out of an Oak Cliff studio and was asked to join the project by project founder and Rapid Artist Nancy Hairston. This project is Heather’s first hands-on experience with 3D/digital technology and tools.
How have these technologies changed the way you approach your process?
My process has been altered by the opportunities the technology offers. It’s given me a chance to think of new ways to create a piece that has an outcome I would not normally or so easily be able to manifest.
Are these digital tools having an effect on the work you are creating? Are the tools aiding/adding to/hindering the process?
The learning curve is, well, stimulating. However once I settled in I found it to be simply another medium. I found I was seeking that sweet spot in much the same way I do with an air hammer/chisel. And as with learning anything new it brings with it equal amounts of frustration and joy. The only negative is that one of the things I love about carving marble is physical freedom and working out doors.
What are your thoughts on the SculptCAD Rapid Artists Project?
I’m thankful for the opportunity to be on the ground floor exploration of the application of these technologies toward a work of art. I also have enjoyed meeting and working with the other participating artists. I’m excited to see the finished pieces all in one room and to get feedback from the people experiencing both the LA and Dallas shows.
Looking beyond the project, what do you have coming up in the near future art-wise? Do you have any shows planned or projects planned?
I am currently looking for new studio space to create a large piece which will take at least a year to complete. Stay tuned!
How can people interested in your work get in touch with you?
website~ http://ezellsculpture.com/
email~ [email protected]
twitter~ twitter.com/ezellsculpture
Any final thoughts on the Rapid Artists Project?
Looking forward to the next one!
Here is Heather’s preliminary sketch for the project piece:
Technical Specs My piece will utilize metal with a shiny surface to illustrate “newness”. The size is approximately 24” x 16” x 20”.
Statement A “pile of leaves” representing the collection of new leaves turned over in a lifetime. Entitled “A New Leaf”, much like this new creative process/medium called FreeForm, it is a revolution within oneself; bringing to the light unseen sides of ourselves while turning attention away from worn paths. How many leaves have we gathered? One for every turn of the calendar? One for each shiny relationship? And no matter the form each is certainly more beautiful than the last. Were all in a pile would we prefer simply to run, jump and land with a giggle amidst our changes? And in doing so recalling the thrill and awe of the moment we first discovered ourselves; beautiful and ever changing.
… of this baseball cap!
Yesterday I received a catalog from a company I’ve never gotten mail from before, J. L. Powell. Interesting clothes, a bit on the high side, but nicely presented and they have a lot of linen shirts and other clothes — always a good fashion choice for men.
Then I found this item — yikes!:
JLP Basic Baseball Cap
by J. L. POWELL · #14719 · $195
I admit I’m a baseball cap fan, what can I say. This one is made of a really lightweight cotton poly blend allowing it to dry and wick moisture away from your head. Packs great, travels even better and wears like a good, basic cap should. Made in Estonia.
Yes, you are reading that correctly — $195 for a self-described “basic” cotton cap. Just insane.
Commercial production of graphene is coming and we can expect to see some of those “miracle material” claims begin to show fruition.
The release:
A huge step toward mass production of coveted form of carbon
Scientists have leaped over a major hurdle in efforts to begin commercial production of a form of carbon that could rival silicon in its potential for revolutionizing electronics devices ranging from supercomputers to cell phones. Called graphene, the material consists of a layer of graphite 50,000 times thinner than a human hair with unique electronic properties. Their study appears in ACS’ Nano Letters, a monthly journal.
Victor Aristov and colleagues indicate that graphene has the potential to replace silicon in high-speed computer processors and other devices. Standing in the way, however, are today’s cumbersome, expensive production methods, which result in poor-quality graphene and are not practical for industrial scale applications.
Aristov and colleagues report that they have developed “a very simple procedure for making graphene on the cheap.” They describe growing high-quality graphene on the surface of commercially available silicon carbide wafers to produce material with excellent electronic properties. It “represents a huge step toward technological application of this material as the synthesis is compatible with industrial mass production,” their
###
ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE “Graphene Synthesis on Cubic SiC/Si Wafers. Perspectives for Mass Production of Graphene-Based Electronic Devices”
DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/nl904115h
Garbage-in/garbage-out may be a computing truism, but getting the same result after entering the same commands ought to be a given. I didn’t realize this was even an issue with multiple-processor computers.
The release:
Conquering the chaos in modern, multiprocessor computers
Computers should not play dice. That, to paraphrase Einstein, is the feeling of a University of Washington computer scientist with a simple manifesto: If you enter the same computer command, you should get back the same result. Unfortunately, that is far from the case with many of today’s machines. Beneath their smooth exteriors, modern computers behave in wildly unpredictable ways, said Luis Ceze, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
“With older, single-processor systems, computers behave exactly the same way as long as you give the same commands. Today’s computers are non-deterministic. Even if you give the same set of commands, you might get a different result,” Ceze said.
He and UW associate professors of computer science and engineering Mark Oskin and Dan Grossman and UW graduate students Owen Anderson, Tom Bergan, Joseph Devietti, Brandon Lucia and Nick Hunt have developed a way to get modern, multiple-processor computers to behave in predictable ways, by automatically parceling sets of commands and assigning them to specific places. Sets of commands get calculated simultaneously, so the well-behaved program still runs faster than it would on a single processor.
Next week at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (http://www.ece.cmu.edu/CALCM/asplos10/doku.php) in Pittsburgh, Bergan will present a software-based version of this system that could be used on existing machines. It builds on a more general approach the group published last year, which was recently chosen as a top paper for 2009 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ journal Micro.
In the old days one computer had one processor. But today’s consumer standard is dual-core processors, and even quad-core machines are appearing on store shelves. Supercomputers and servers can house hundreds, even thousands, of processing units.
On the plus side, this design creates computers that run faster, cost less and use less power for the same performance delivered on a single processor. On the other hand, multiple processors are responsible for elusive errors that freeze Web browsers and crash programs.
It is not so different from the classic chaos problem in which a butterfly flaps its wings in one place and can cause a hurricane across the globe. Modern shared-memory computers have to shuffle tasks from one place to another. The speed at which the information travels can be affected by tiny changes, such as the distance between parts in the computer or even the temperature of the wires. Information can thus arrive in a different order and lead to unexpected errors, even for tasks that ran smoothly hundreds of times before.
“With multi-core systems the trend is to have more bugs because it’s harder to write code for them,” Ceze said. “And these concurrency bugs are much harder to get a handle on.”
One application of the UW system is to make errors reproducible, so that programs can be properly tested.
“We’ve developed a basic technique that could be used in a range of systems, from cell phones to data centers,” Ceze said. “Ultimately, I want to make it really easy for people to design high-performing, low-energy and secure systems.”
Last year Ceze, Oskin, and Peter Godman, a former director at Isilon Systems, founded a company to commercialize their technology. PetraVM (http://petravm.com/) is initially named after the Greek word for rock because it hopes to develop “rock-solid systems,” Ceze said. The Seattle-based startup will soon release its first product, Jinx, which makes any errors that are going to crop up in a program happen quickly.
“We can compress the effect of thousands of people using a program into a few minutes during the software’s development,” Ceze said. “We want to allow people to write code for multi-core systems without going insane.”
The company already has some big-name clients trying its product, Ceze said, though it is not yet disclosing their identities.
“If this erratic behavior irritates us, as software users, imagine how it is for banks or other mission-critical applications.”
###
Part of this research was funded by the National Science Foundation and a Microsoft Research fellowship.
More information on the research is at http://sampa.cs.washington.edu.
