Here’s Where They Make China’s Cheap Android Smartphones Apple and Samsung, beware. Practically anyone can make a smartphone these days. By Michael Standaert on March 14, 2013 A little over a year ago, 38-year-old entrepreneur Liang Liwan wasn’t making smartphones at all. This year, he expects to build 10 million of them. Liang’s company, Xunrui Communications, buys smartphone components and then feeds them to several small factories around Shenzhen, in southern China. There, deft-fingered workers assemble the parts into basic smartphones that retail for as little as $65. Manufacturers built about 700 million smartphones last year. But the market has taken on a barbell shape. On one side are familiar names like Apple and Samsung, selling pricey phones for $300 to $600; on the other, several hundred lesser-known Chinese brands supplied by a thousand or more small factories.The change began in 2011, when computer-chip makers began selling off-the-shelf chipsets—the set of processors that are the brains of a touch-screen phone. Those, plus Google’s free Android operating system, made smartphones much easier to produce.The flood of inexpensive devices could hurt struggling phone makers like Nokia and might also force Samsung and Apple to offer cheaper models. “They have reached their peak,” Liang said during an interview near his office in Shenzhen, which has become a hub for electronics makers. “In [manufacturing] technique we are close to the same level. Then the only difference will be the cost and the brand.”Larger Chinese companies, like Lenovo and Huawei, have also swarmed into China’s market with midrange phones that cost closer to $200. Lenovo captured 12 percent of China’s market last year.Liang’s phones are the ultracheap kind. He builds them at several Shenzhen factories, like Shenzhen Guo Wei Global Electronics, a nondescript building that opened in 1991 as a manufacturer of fixed-line phones and audio equipment. At Guo Wei, young Xunrui engineers lounge about, smoking cigarettes and drinking warm Coca-Cola while playing games on various brands of laptops.One floor up, past a metal detector and an enclosure where high-pressured air blows dust and other impurities off workers’ blue smocks, are the production lines—five of them, each with 35 young workers able to solder together and box up 3,000 smartphones a day.Guo Wei has had to make some investments to get into the smartphone game, including importing new solder inspection equipment from Korea. One production line costs around $1.6 million to set up, according to Li Li, a production manager at the factory who showed off the equipment.“The techniques are very complicated compared to older phones,” says Li, who joined the factory 17 years ago to work in a department that repaired fixed-line telephones.But the real reason for the switchover to smartphones was that last year large chip makers, including the Taiwan-based MediaTek and Spreadtrum, started offering “turn-key” systems: phone designs plus a set of chips with Android and other software preloaded. Spreadtrum says it may sell 100 million units this year.Each chipset costs $5 to $10, depending on the size of a phone’s screen and other features. In total, Liang says, his cost to make a smartphone is about $40. He says he can manufacture as many as 30,000 smartphones a day for brands such as Konka Mobile and for telecom operators like China Unicom.In the United States, a smartphone’s high cost is generally masked by wireless companies, which discount them steeply if consumers agree to a contract. In China that happens as well. Liang says his phones retail for about $65 or $70 but can cost only $35 with a contract.That is making China, now the world’s largest smartphone market, a challenging place for foreign firms to compete. Apple accounts for 38 percent of U.S. smartphone sales, but its share in China is 11 percent and falling. Google has even bigger problems making money. Even though the devices use Android, they often don’t come with Google’s apps and search tool installed (see “Android Takes Off in China, But Google Has Little to Show for It”).Liang says his aim is to make smartphones that are affordable, even if they aren’t yet as good as an iPhone. That means the camera and LCD screen might not be the best, and the battery life could be shorter. “I always use this word ‘acceptable,’” he says. “A lot of users only need an acceptable product. They don’t need a perfect product.”What’s certain, Liang says, is that the quality of the phones his factories produce will rise. “There is no profit at the bottom,” he says. “Everyone is trying to improve their techniques.” Su Dongxia assisted with interpreting and research. Source
Why IBM Made a Liquid Transistor IBM materials advance shows another promising path to replace the foundation of today’s computing technologies. Researchers at IBM last week unveiled an experimental new way to store information or control the switching of an electronic circuit. The researchers showed that passing a voltage across electrolyte-filled nanochannels pushes a layer of ions—or charged atoms—against an oxide material, a reversible process that switches that material between a conducting and nonconducting state, thus acting as a switch or storing a bit, or a basic “1” or “0” of digital information. Although it’s at a very early stage, the method could someday allow for very energy-efficient computing, says Stuart Parkin, the IBM Research Fellow behind the work at the company’s Almaden Research Lab in San Jose, California. “Unlike today’s transistors, the devices can be switched ‘on’ and ‘off’ permanently without the need for any power to maintain these states,” he says. “This could be used to create highly energy-efficient memory and logic devices of the future.” Even a small prototype circuit based on the idea is two to four years off, Parkin says. But ultimately, “we want to build devices, architecturally, which are quite different from silicon-based devices. Here, memory and logic are fully integrated,” he says. Such a device could be reconfigurable, with individual elements strung together to create wires and circuits that could be reprogrammed. That’s in contrast to traditional chips, which are connected by copper wires that can’t be changed. One problem is that, as a chemical reaction, the switching times for the early demonstration is slow—perhaps one or two orders of magnitude slower than existing technologies. However, shrinking their dimensions and packing them closely together will increase the effective speed, Parkin says. “Having a lot of these devices operating in parallel and using very little energy can create powerful computing devices,” he says. Computing devices that are slow and based on chemistry have a long way to go to compete, says Douglas Natelson, a physicist at Rice University who investigates nanoscale phenomena and technologies. “This is a really nice piece of science but you have to wait and see how much impact it’s going to have on computing,” he says. “Silicon has a lot of legs left, I think.” Parkin has previously been behind other experimental advances, including a technology known as racetrack memory, in which information is represented by magnetic stripes on nanoscale wires deposited on silicon (see “IBM Makes Revolutionary Racetrack Memory Using Existing Tools”). And he’s worked on technologies that leverage not only the charge of electrons, but their up-or-down “spin” (see “A New Spin on Silicon Chips”). But the idea of using fluids to drive computing processes is in some ways even more radical, and presents obvious challenges. Eventual technologies built on such science, Parkin says, would leverage engineering advances made in the field of nanofluidics (see “Nanofluidics Get More Complex“) or the use and manipulation of fluid at tiny scales inside etched channels on silicon or glass wafers. Source
Epic uptime achievement unlocked. Can you beat 16 years? NetWare 3.12 server taken down after a decade and a half of duty. by Peter Bright - It's September 23, 1996. It's a Monday. The Macarena is pumping out of the office radio, mid-way through its 14 week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, doing little to improve the usual Monday gloom. Easing yourself into the week, you idly thumb through a magazine, and read about Windows NT 4.0, released just a couple of months previous. You wonder to yourself whether Microsoft's hot new operating system might finally be worth using. Then it's down to work. Microsoft can keep its fancy GUIs and graphical server operating systems. NetWare 3.12 is where it's at: bulletproof file and print sharing. The server, named INTEL after its process, needs an update, so you install it and reboot. It comes up fine, so you get on with the rest of your day. Enlarge Axatax Sixteen and a half years later, INTEL's hard disks—a pair of full height 5.25 inch 800 MB Quantum SCSI devices—are making some disconcerting noises from their bearings, and you're tired of the complaints. It's time to turn off the old warhorse. Enlarge / It's down. It's probably not coming back up.Axatax Connection Terminated. It seems almost criminal. The server was decommissioned by one of our forum users, Axatax, as documented in this thread. Sixteen and a half years is a long time. Can any of you beat it? Listing image by Axatax Source
Something from Nothing? A Vacuum Can Yield Flashes of Light "Virtual particles" can become real photons--under the right conditions By Charles Q. Choi A vacuum might seem like empty space, but scientists have discovered a new way to seemingly get something from that nothingness, such as light. And the finding could ultimately help scientists build incredibly powerful quantum computers or shed light on the earliest moments in the universe's history. Quantum physics explains that there are limits to how precisely one can know the properties of the most basic units of matter—for instance, one can never absolutely know a particle's position and momentum at the same time. One bizarre consequence of this uncertainty is that a vacuum is never completely empty, but instead buzzes with so-called “virtual particles” that constantly wink into and out of existence. These virtual particles often appear in pairs that near-instantaneously cancel themselves out. Still, before they vanish, they can have very real effects on their surroundings. For instance, photons—packets of light—can pop in and out of a vacuum. When two mirrors are placed facing each other in a vacuum, more virtual photons can exist around the outside of the mirrors than between them, generating a seemingly mysterious force that pushes the mirrors together. This phenomenon, predicted in 1948 by the Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir and known as the Casimir effect, was first seen with mirrors held still . Researchers also predicted a dynamical Casimir effect that can result when mirrors are moved, or objects otherwise undergo change. Now quantum physicist Pasi Lähteenmäki at Aalto University in Finland and his colleagues reveal that by varying the speed at which light can travel, they can make light appear from nothing. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, but its speed passing through any given material depends on a property of that substance known as its index of refraction. By varying a material's index of refraction, researchers can influence the speed at which both real and virtual photons travel within it. Lähteenmäki says one can think of this system as being much like a mirror, and if its thickness changes fast enough, virtual photons reflecting off it can receive enough energy from the bounce to turn into real photons. "Imagine you stay in a very dark room and suddenly the index of refraction of light [of the room] changes," Lähteenmäki says. "The room will start to glow." The researchers began with an array of 250 superconducting quantum-interference devices, or SQUIDs—circuits that are extraordinarily sensitive to magnetic fields. They inserted the array inside a refrigerator. By carefully exerting magnetic fields on this array, they could vary the speed at which microwave photons traveled through it by a few percent. The researchers then cooled this array to 50 thousandths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. Because this environment is supercold, it should not emit any radiation, essentially behaving as a vacuum. "We were simply studying these circuits for the purpose of developing an amplifier, which we did," says researcher Sorin Paraoanu, a theoretical physicist at Aalto University. "But then we asked ourselves—what if there is no signal to amplify? What happens if the vacuum is the signal?" The researchers detected photons that matched predictions from the dynamical Casimir effect. For instance, such photons should display the strange property of quantum entanglement—that is, by measuring the details of one, scientists could in principle know exactly what its counterpart is like, no matter where it is in the universe, a phenomenon Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance." The scientists detailed their findings online February 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This work and a number of other recent works demonstrate that the vacuum is not empty but full of virtual photons," says theoretical physicist Steven Girvin at Yale University, who did not take part in the Aalto study. Another study from physicist Christopher Wilson and his colleagues recently demonstrated the dynamical Casimir effect in a system mimicking a mirror moving at nearly 5 percent of the speed of light. "It's nice to see further confirmation of this effect and see this area of research continuing," says Wilson, now at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, who also did not participate in the Aalto study. "Only recently has technology advanced into a new technical regime of experiments where we can start to look at very fast changes that can have dramatic effects on electromagnetic fields," he adds. The investigators caution that such experiments do not constitute a magical way to get more energy out of a system than what is input. For instance, it takes energy to change a material's index of refraction. Instead, such research could help scientists learn more about the mysteries of quantum entanglement, which lies at the heart of quantum computers—advanced machines that could in principle run more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the universe. The entangled microwave photons the experimental array generated "can be used for a form of quantum computation known as 'continuous variable' quantum information processing,” Girvin says. “This is a direction which is just beginning to open up.” Wilson adds that these systems “might be used to simulate some interesting scenarios. For instance, there are predictions that during cosmic inflation in the early universe, the boundaries of the universe were expanding nearly at light-speed or faster than the speed of light. We might predict there'd be some dynamical Casimir radiation produced then, and we can try and do tabletop simulations of this." So the static Casimir effect involves mirrors held still; the dynamical Casimir effect can for instance involve mirrors that move. SOURCE More Info
Breast-Milk Protein May Help Defeat Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria This colorized image depicts numerous clumps of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, commonly referred to by the acronym, MRSA; Magnified 2390x Image credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Janice Haney Carr Researchers see potential for new topical treatment. Originally published: May 1 2013 - 5:00pm By: Ryder Diaz, ISNS Contributor (ISNS) -- The fight against antibiotic resistance has gained an ally in breast milk. An ingredient found in human milk may make surface infections by the resistant bacteria MRSA more sensitive to attack by antibiotics, a team of researchers from the University at Buffalo, in New York, reports May 1 in the journal PLOS ONE. The University at Buffalo team added a protein complex -- called HAMLET, after Human Alpha-lactalbumin Made LEthal to Tumor cells – purified from human milk to aggressive strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in Petri dishes and along the inside of the noses of mice. The researchers found that the bacteria were more responsive to antibiotics when they were used in combination with HAMLET. "It sensitizes the bacteria to the antibiotics that they used to be resistant to, so suddenly, you can use the old [antibiotics] again," said Anders Hakansson, one of the study's authors. He is interested in the properties of human milk that protect infants from infections. Getting a handle on the stubborn bacteria known as MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, would be a public health relief. MRSA can spur antibiotic-resistant staph infections that are tough to treat. In 2011, an estimated 11,285 people in the U.S. died from MRSA-related infections, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And MRSA has become a common bug that patients pick up in hospitals. Ironically enough, antibiotic resistance results from the increased use of antibiotics. When an antibiotic kills bacteria, it can leave behind a small number of bacterial cells that have evolved defenses to the drug. The original antibiotic doesn't work on these mutated strains and the defiant bacteria multiply. Resistant bacteria can be treated with very high doses of antibiotics but those extreme levels would be toxic to people. Doctors often rely on new antibiotics to kill these superbugs. But eventually bacteria build up resistance to those antibiotics too. "In the end, we really don't have any good way of treating those infections because they are resistant to essentially all antibiotics that we have," said Hakansson of MRSA. In 2012 the team reported that HAMLET used in tandem with antibiotics could control resistant strains of Streptococcus pneumoniae, a strain of bacteria that can cause pneumonia and other lung infections. In MRSA, the researchers believe that HAMLET attacks pumps found in a bacteria's cell membrane. These pumps keep the material inside the cell and the solution outside the cell in a vital balance, thereby controlling the flow of nutrients and toxins into or out of the cell. But HAMLET isn't strong enough to kill the MRSA cells, said Hakansson. He thinks the glitch in the cell's pumps may allow antibiotics to gain a foothold. "It could just be that you make the bacteria not completely happy in the presence of our protein but they're not unhappy enough that they will die," he said. What's more, the team's results show that some strains of MRSA are more difficult to combat with HAMLET than other strains. The authors don't yet know for sure how the cooperation between HAMLET and antibiotics actually works but the team is planning more experiments to peek into the cells. The researchers believe HAMLET can be an important tool for treating bacterial surface infections. Karen Bush, a biologist at Indiana University in Bloomington, worries that some of these infections will still require high doses of antibiotics even when paired up with HAMLET. Treating infections in the bloodstream with HAMLET could be even more difficult. "I'm not sure that the protein would survive very long circulating in the bloodstream," said Bush, who was not involved in the study. In the blood, the HAMLET protein complex would simply fall apart, she said, and the large amounts of HAMLET needed to fight some of the most resistant infections might be challenging to deliver. There is also the potential for resistance to antibiotics from repeated treatments. "If you're constantly applying and ointment or cream to a wound, you are getting multiple exposures," said Bush. Although the researchers report that resistance to antibiotics did occur in their experiments, they argue that while using HAMLET, it happens much slower than with the use of antibiotics alone. Anders Hakansson and his wife, Hazeline Hakansson, also a scientist at the University at Buffalo, have started a company that will begin trials of HAMLET on untested bacteria and different types of infections. Ryder Diaz is a science writer based in Santa Cruz, Calif. Source
Doctors save baby’s life with 3D-printed tracheal implant Using CT scan, doctors modeled and printed bioplastic splint to keep airway open. by Sean Gallagher In an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine today, two doctors from the University of Michigan described how they saved an infant with a life-threatening respiratory disorder using a custom-designed 3D-printed device. Printed with bio-absorbable plastic, the device is holding the child's airway open and allowing him to breathe normally. The child, Kaiba Gionfriddo, suffered from tracheobronchomalacia—a collapse of the airway to one of his lungs. The condition prevented him from breathing out carbon dioxide and getting sufficient oxygen. At six weeks old, he was out with his family at a restaurant when he started to turn blue. By the time he was two months old, he had to have a breathing tube inserted into his trachea to keep him alive. Dr. Glenn Green, MD, the associate professor of pediatric otolarygololgy at the University of Michigan, was called in by Kaiba's doctors to consult on the case. He and Dr. Scott Hollister, Ph.D., a professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan, worked together to design a tracheal splint for Kaiba, using a CT scan of his respiratory tract to create a model of the device. They obtained emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to surgically implant their creation and installed the splint on the bronchus of Kaiba's left lung on February 9, 2012. “The material we used is a nice choice for this," Hollister said in a release published by the University of Michgan. "It takes about two to three years for the trachea to remodel and grow into a healthy state, and that’s about how long this material will take to dissolve into the body.” A University of Michigan video detailing Kaiba Gionfriddo's case and the creation of the 3D-printed tracheal splint. Source
What 5G Will Be: Crazy-Fast Wireless Tested in New York City Samsung’s technology for ultrafast data speeds currently requires a truckload of equipment By David Talbot The world’s biggest cell-phone maker, Samsung, caused a stir last week by announcing an ultrafast wireless technology that it unofficially dubbed “5G.” And the technology has, in fact, been tested on the streets of New York. The system is impressive but is still in development—which is true of all the technologies that will underpin the next generation of wireless communications. When 5G does arrive, it will likely combine new wireless protocols with new network designs, spectrum-sharing schemes, and more small transmitters. Samsung says its new transceiver can send and receive data at speeds of more than a gigabit per second over up to two kilometers—and it could deliver tens of gigabits per second at shorter distances. This compares to about 75 megabits per second for the latest standard, known as 4G LTE. The Samsung technology relies on 28-gigahertz frequencies, which can carry commensurately more data but can be blocked by buildings, people, foliage, and even rainfall. Samsung says it has greatly mitigated these problems by sending data over as many as 64 streams from 64 antennas, dynamically shaping how the signal is divided up, and even controlling the direction in which it is sent, making changes in tens of nanoseconds in response to changing conditions (among other features, it can catch stray reflections of signals that had bounced off an obstruction). The company did not grant an interview request, but the technology is described in this 2010 patent filing. The work has also been tested in the real world. Last summer, an academic lab,NYU Wireless, part of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, did performance tests for Samsung in New York City and Austin, Texas, and found that the technology, which is also known as millimeter-wave cellular, could work well even 200 meters away from the transmitter, and even in a cluttered environment. “A lot of people have the same reaction: ‘How can it work?’ But we showed that it can be done,” says Theodore Rappoport, director of NYU Wireless. “Our measurements have helped give Samsung and the rest of the wireless industry confidence that (28-gigahertz) wireless is viable.” Still, the ranges involved suggest that high-frequency technologies will be best for short-range hot spots, says Jeff Reed, director of the wireless research center at Virginia Tech. “I am skeptical that they will be able to deliver high data rates with the mobility that we have become accustomed to with 2G, 3G, and 4G cellular systems,” he says. “Meanwhile, we still have plenty of room to improve 4G systems that operate at more favorable lower frequency ranges.” It’s certainly true that so far, the industry has only implemented the most basic features of 4G LTE. More sophisticated features will allow improvements in data rates. One of them is “carrier aggregation,” or the ability to use multiple frequencies at the same time to send a signal. Another is the use of multiple antennas, in ways akin to Samsung’s technology. Finally, various signal-processing tricks can effectively boost bandwidth by intelligently coördinating the efforts of base stations and devices on the networks to avoid interference. Beyond these enhancements, greater used of unlicensed spectrum—such as that used by Wi-Fi equipment—can offload traffic inside buildings to provide a huge boost; after all, some 70 percent of mobile traffic comes from people inside homes and offices. Expanding this concept are so-called small cells—cellular transmitters that pick up a signal from a few tens of yards and relay it over the wired Internet (see “Tiny Transmitters Could Help Avert Data Throttling”). If there were one of these in every home, they could provide an entire neighborhood or urban network with cellular coverage without requiring any large base station (see “Qualcomm Proposes a Cell-Phone Network by the People, for the People”). The everyday reality for consumers is that in many cases, high-speed data is better when it’s coming from Wi-Fi hot spots, not 3G and 4G networks, whose peak speeds are not always available everywhere or at all times of the day. “This begs the question: Are faster cellular data speeds really what we need, or would we be better served if 5G improved what cellular standards do better than Wi-Fi, which is wide area mobility and seamless connectivity?” says Vanu Bose, CEO of Vanu, a wireless company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Despite the high data speeds on 3G and 4G networks, we all still suffer from dropped calls and poor coverage in many places.” One technology that could provide better coverage by hopping between different frequencies and different wireless protocols is known as cognitive radio. On a second-by-second basis, such a radio would detect and exploit available spectrum holes. “In the mid term, this is a more likely solution for high data rates and mobility than using higher frequencies,” Reed says (see “The Spectrum Crunch That Wasn’t” and “4G on the Baby-Monitor Frequency”). While Samsung’s technology may form part of the 5G future—an ultrafast network technology running in hot spots—a larger mix of technologies and strategies will be needed to deliver data more quickly and reliably. Standards are set by the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations body. It will be several years until even all of the 4G LTE versions are rolled out. Samsung said its technology could be ready by 2020. Source
“Temporal cloak” used to hide data transmit Output looks like a signal-free beam of light. by John Timmer - June 5 2013 FirasMT In the past few years, there have been a regular series of announcements about devices that cloak something in space. These typically bend light around the cloak so that it comes out behind the object looking as if it had never shifted at all. In contrast, there's just been a single description of a temporal cloaking device, something that hides an event in time. The device works because in some media different frequencies of light move at different speeds. With the right combination of frequency shifts, it's possible to create and then re-seal a break in a light beam. But that particular cloak could only create breaks in the light beam that lasted picoseconds. Basically, you couldn't hide all that much using it. Now, researchers have taken the same general approach and used it to hide signals in a beam of light sent through an optical fiber. When the cloak is in operation, the signals largely disappear. In this case the cloak can hide nearly half of the total bandwidth of the light, resulting in a hidden transmission rate of 12.7 Gigabits per second. The work started with the Talbot effect in mind, in which a diffraction grating causes repeated images of the grating to appear at set distances away from it. The cloaking device relies on the converse of this. At other distances, the light intensity drops to zero. The key trick is to convert the Talbot effect from something that happens in space to something that happens in time. With the right combination of phase modulators and diffraction hardware, the authors could start with a beam that had light distributed across a range of wavelengths from 1,541nm to 1,543nm and convert it into a single, high-intensity pulse right in the middle at 1,542nm. When the light hit a set of hardware that was oriented in the opposite direction, the original spread of the light was restored. But since this Talbot effect is limited in time (rather than space), the authors note that they could have just let the light travel for long enough and the original light would be restored. So, how can you use this to hide a signal? It's possible to encode a signal in the ratio of light at different frequencies. If there's more at the high frequencies, the beam will deposit more energy into a photodetector than it would if more of the light was present at the low frequencies. But when the cloaking device was in operation, the original configuration wouldn't matter. All the light would simply look like it's at the frequency at the midpoint (1,542nm in this case). The authors created a sinusoidal pattern, with light shifting from the lower to higher frequencies. With the cloaking device off, this registered as a sine wave running between lower and higher energies deposited in the detector. Switch it on, and the dramatic waves turned into a series of very small bumps and troughs. The authors then encoded bits with high energy being 1 and low energy being zero. These were easy to read when the cloaking device was off but vanished into a bit of noise once it was switched on. The authors calculated that 46 percent of the total bandwidth of the light could be transmitted as cloaked data, which gets them the 12.7 Gbps figure. But they also suggest that, by putting three phase modulators in series, the total available to be cloaked could be roughly doubled, reaching 90 percent of the total bandwidth. The other neat thing about this work is that most of the hardware seems to be standard off-the-shelf fiber optics equipment (the frequency modulators were driven by Agilent hardware and the optical cables came from Corning). There's no obvious reason that the work can't be put to use fairly quickly. The authors realize this, writing, "This potential to cloak real-world messages introduces temporal cloaking into the sphere of practical application, with immediate ramifications in secure communications." SOURCE
Chromekey: a rumored $35 dongle that mirrors any device http://chromespot.com/2013/06/07/chromekey-dongle-rumor/
Cancer immunity of strange underground rat revealed Naked mole rats may have their supple skin to thank for their cancer resistance. by Akshat Rathi Smithsonian's National Zoo Researchers have discovered how one of the world’s oddest mammals developed resistance to cancer, and there is hope that their work could help fight the disease in humans. Naked mole rats live underground, where environmental conditions are harsh but predators are few. They can live for more than 30 years, almost twenty-seven years longer than their close cousin the house mouse—which is particularly susceptible to cancer. They breathe slowly due to the limited supply of oxygen, survive on very little food, have poor sight, and are largely indifferent to pain. Naked mole rats are also the only mammals that do not regulate their body temperature. Because they live in colonies where the queen rat does the job of producing progeny and only a few males father the litters, their sperms become lazy. For cancer researchers, mice and naked mole rats fall on two extremes of the disease spectrum. Mice are used as animal models of disease because of their short lives and high incidence of cancer, which help researchers study the mechanism of cancer occurrence and test drugs that fight the disease. Naked mole rats, on the other hand, have never developed cancer in the years that they have been studied. In labs, researchers often don’t wait for their animal models to develop cancer. Instead they induce cancer by blasting the animals with gamma radiation, transplanting tumors, or injecting cancer-causing agents. Do that to a naked mole rat, though, and nothing happens. Now, Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov at the University of Rochester think they may have found one mechanism by which naked mole rats defend themselves against cancer. Their results, reported today in the journal Nature, make for a strange tale. While studying cells taken from the armpits and lungs of naked mole rats, they found an unusually thick chemical surrounding the cells. This turned out to be hyaluronan, a substance that is present in all animals, where its main job is to hold cells together. Beyond providing mechanical strength, it is also involved in controlling when cells grow in number. Cancer relies on the unregulated growth of cells, so hyaluronan was thought to be involved in the progression of malignant tumors. According to Gorbunova, aspects of hyaluronan may regulate cell growth as well as hyaluronan's amount and thickness. As a polymer, the greater the number of hyaluronan molecules in a single chain, the thicker it becomes. When the molecular mass is high, cells are “told” to stop increasing in number. When the molecular mass is low, they are “asked” to proliferate. In the case of the naked mole rat, Gorbunova found that the molecular mass was unusually high, as much as five times that of mice or humans. To understand whether this unusual hyaluroanan was responsible for cancer resistance in naked mole rats, Gorbunova increased the amount of enzyme that degrades the chemical, reducing its molecular weight. Soon after, she observed that the rat’s cells readily started growing in thick clusters like cancerous mouse cells do. In a separate experiment, she also tested this hypothesis by reducing the amount of hyaluronan by knocking out the genes that encode for its production. Then, on injecting cancer-causing virus, instead of resisting, the naked mole rat’s cells became cancerous. Gorbunova thinks that having thick hyaluronan might have helped increase the elasticity of the rat’s skin, allowing it to live in small tunnels underground. This trait might then have accidentally developed a new role of preventing cancer. Rochelle Buffenstein, a physiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center, has studied naked mole rats for years and was pleased to see that some light has been shed on this creature’s remarkable resistance to cancer. “As we learn more about these cancer-resistant mechanisms that are effective and can be directly pertinent to humans, we may find new cancer prevention strategies,” she said. Nature, 2013. DOI: 10.1038/nature12234 (About DOIs). This article was published at The Conversation. SOURCE
How NASA steers the International Space Station around space junk How NASA steers the International Space Station around space junk
Scientists Create 360 TB "Superman Crystal" Discs Bye bye Blu-ray? Glass based discs written with femtosecond lasers could blow away current optical media Jingyu Zhang, a UK professor at the Univ. of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre, is not satisfied with today's optical media that maxes out at 128 gigabytes (GB) for "BDXL" Blu-Ray multi-layer discs. With the help of collaborators at the Netherland's Eindhoven University of Technology, he's cooking up new "Superman crystal" discs, which could one day hold 360 terabytes (TB) per disc. Prof. Zhang describes, "We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan. Museums who want to preserve information or places like the national archives where they have huge numbers of documents, would really benefit." Much like the fictional device Superman's scientist birth father Jor-el used to store memories of Kryptonian culture for his son, the new storage media is composed of crystals that can store data for over a million years. The crystal disc can even survive intense temperatures of up to 1000 °C. The data is stored in trillions of tiny fused quartz crystals -- also known as nanostructured glass. Memory crystals in Superman's "Fortress of Solitude" [Image Source: Warner Bros.] The silicon-based storage layer uses a femtosecond laser to created "5D" (five dimensional) storage that writes data with five impendent variables -- crystal position in 3D coordinates (x, y, z), the size of the crystal, and the orientation. The five variables change the polarization of light, which is then read by a combination of a microscope and polarizer (a device commonly found in Polaroid sunglasses). Currently, the researchers have only recorded a 300 KB file as a tech demonstration, which used three layers of nanocrystalline dots (with a 5 µm spacer separating dots). Prof. Jingyu Zhang (left) and his new crystal storage technology. [Image Source: ORC] Significant technological hurdles must be overcome to productize the technology -- most notably advancing femtosecond laser and microscopy technology to the point where the entire reader/writer can be incorporated into a compact, mass-producible package. The research -- sponsored by the European Union's Femtoprint project -- was presented [PDF] as a conference paper at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO’13) in San Jose. Prof. Peter Kazansky, the ORC’s dean, comments, "It is thrilling to think that we have created the first document which will likely survive the human race. This technology can secure the last evidence of civilisation: all we've learnt will not be forgotten." Sources: Univ. of Southampton ORC, CLEO'13 [Paper] SOURCE
Your ability to focus: Why 3D television can’t take off By Caleb Garling Last week the BBC reported that it would wind down broadcasting in 3D by the end of 2013, the conclusion of a two year trial that saw a handful of movies, shows and the 2012 Summer Olympic Games all in their three dimensional glory. Kim Shillinglaw, the BBC’s head of 3D, said the technology had “not taken off” and that audiences found it too much of a hassle. The BBC’s ostensible failure to get stereoscopic television to take off is one more point on a troubling graph for the future-feeling technology. Though the ability to create 3D images is over a century old, both gadget-makers and broadcasting heavyweights have tried a number of times in past decades to bring it into the mainstream — without much success, other than big-budget features in the theaters. Around the time the BBC started its pilot program, gadget-makers were trying to jump start the market with new ideas for both televisions and smartphones with 3D cameras. None of these technologies or products have gone extinct, but the marketing fervor has almost completely died off. So why are 3D televisions and cameras not taking off? The chicken or the egg problem: Movie makers don’t want to invest too much in the technology until there are more televisions to play them. Television makers don’t want to invest too much in the technology until there are more 3D movies. Those 3D televisions that don’t require glasses need specific viewing angles. And for those that require glasses, they look ridiculous. 2D does a good enough job. Yet those are issues eventually solved by technology and market forces. However, film and sound editor Walter Murch, who worked on such legendary films as Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now (for which he won an Oscar) has an explanation that has so far stood the test of time. He points out that during a 3D film, the audience has to focus at a constant distance — from their eyes to the screen. In a movie theater this may be 80 feet; at home this might be 10. But the convergence of the 3D image on the film will move quickly between depths, farther and closer than the screen. So we’re required to focus at one distance and converge — recognize something — at another. “And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before,” he says. “All living things with eyes have always focused and converged at the same point.” Shillinglaw echoes the sentiment: “I think when people watch TV they concentrate in a different way.” Of course, our eyes have the ability to refocus on things from 10 to 40 to 140 feet away, but the problem is that 3D requires that transition to be near instantaneous. In real life we take a second or two to make that change — looking from your keyboard to something out the window — but when a scene or camera angle switch, our eyes suddenly have to find the new focus. And if we do that constantly — especially when keeping up in a movie — our eye muscles begin to tire and get sore. Many people get headaches or nauseated. With that explanation, one possible solution would be for movies to stay from one perspective for long stretches of time. And keep the transitions slow, fading and deliberate, giving the eyes time. But that would start to greatly restrict movies, especially action flicks. Munch edited one of the first famous 3D movies, Captain EO starring Michael Jackson (the movie wasn’t even 20 minutes long), but doesn’t have much faith in the future of 3D: “Dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?” Applies to many 3D sources...
How Technology Is Destroying Jobs By David Rotman Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just how provocative Erik Brynjolfsson’s contention really is. *Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine... more
Scientists Grow Human Heart Capable Of Beating Autonomously According to Nature Communications a team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, in the USA, has successfully grown human heart tissue capable of beating autonomously. For anyone suffering from a cardiovascular disease, or similar heart problems, this is interesting news that could one day bring the research into transplantable replacement hearts; this could quite possibly change the face of cardiovascular medicine. According to the group’s report, the immature heart is only able to survive in its existing form in a Petri dish, but the progress is nonetheless promising and could lead to something far superior. The tissue itself originated from iPS (induced pluripotent stem cells), which were reprogrammed to an embryonic state before being developed into a specialized cell. In this case, the iPS cells, derived from human skin, were induced into multi potential cardiovascular progenitor (MCP) cells, which are required for the heart to function. The researchers in the laboratory then took a decellularized mouse heart and repopulated it with the new MCP cells. After a period of a few weeks, the human cells were able to rebuild into a functional organ that, as previously mentioned above, is capable of beating on its own. The territory being explored by the group is still fledgling and new, but the researchers say the heart is contracting at a rate of 40 to 50 beats per minute; it will need to be stronger in order to distribute blood, but the initial readings are positive. According to current World Health Organization statistics, heart disease is the number one killer around the world, with an estimated 17 million people dying of CVDs. However, science is taking one step closer to perhaps lessening those statistics. In the future, maybe scientists might be able to repair damaged hearts by using a person’s own skin as this early research shows. [Image via news.discovery] SOURCE: http://m.technobuffalo.com/2013/08/18/scientists-grow-human-heart/ SOURCE
Doctor Has Finger On Pulse of Heart Health Enid Burns for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online An academic from the University of Iowa has developed a new, simpler method to measure the stiffness of the aorta, a common risk factor of heart disease. The new method uses an instrument called a transducer on the finger, or over the brachial artery just inside the arm beneath the elbow. Measuring the pulse, combined with factors, including a person’s age and body mass index, enables the doctor to determine whether the aorta has stiffened. Gary Pierce, assistant professor in the Department of Health and Human Physiology, developed the new technique. Physicians currently determine whether a patient has a hardened aorta by taking the pulse from a carotid artery, which is located in the neck; and the femoral artery, which is located in the groin. “Taking a pulse from the finger or the arm is easier to record and nearly as accurate, Pierce says. It also works better with obese patients, whose femoral pulse can be difficult to obtain reliably,” Jennifer Patterson writes in a report on Pierce’s research. “The technique is more effective in that it is easy to obtain just one pulse waveform in the finger or the brachial artery, and it’s less intrusive than obtaining a femoral waveform in patients,” said Pierce, in the report. Pierce is the lead author in a paper published in the American Journal of Phsysiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology. “It also can be easily obtained in the clinic during routine exams similar to blood pressure tests.” Heard disease affects both men and women. The report says it is responsible for about 600,000 deaths each year, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A healthy aorta is key. “A person’s heart has to work harder when the aorta, the large artery that leaves the heart and delivers blood to the body’s tissues, stiffens due to aging and an inactive lifestyle. The harder a person’s heart needs to work, the higher risk he or she has for developing high blood pressure, stroke and a heart attack,” the report says. The new instrument aids early detection of such a condition. “Finding simple noninvasive methods to measure aortic pulse wave velocity in the clinic may help physicians to better inform middle-aged and older adults about their level of cardiovascular risk,” Pierce said. Gary Pierce holds a Ph.D. in exercise physiology from the University of Florida. His area of specialization is vascular aging, vascular endothelial function, arterial stiffness, clinical exercise physiology and clinical/translational research in humans. The assistant professor’s research goals include determining “the cellular and molecular mechanisms that contribute to vascular endothelial dysfunction and increased large elastic artery stiffness with aging, obesityand/or prediabetes in humans.” Pierce authored the paper with Harald Stauss, associate professor in health and human physiology. Additional authors from the University of Illinois include Darren Casey, Jess Fiedorowicz and deMaris Wilson. Douglas Seals from the University of Colorado – Boulder and Timothy Curry and Jill Barnes from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. also contributed to the paper. Source: Enid Burns for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Is Electronic Culture Warping Our Minds? By BRUCE PEABODY, guest blogger Anxiety about the use and abuse of electronic data and communication is all over the news. In addition to still-emerging concerns about former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations, major media outlets report surging online attacks on university and government computer systems and ongoing efforts to commodify online privacy. Journalists, pundits, and bloggers also discuss the recurring fear that sharing information through social networking will come back to haunt us. But much of the worry underlying these stories has a somewhat distant and ultimately sanguine aspect. For many computer and cell phone users these are someone else’s problems—or they are the harms of the right technology falling into the wrong hands. The fault lies not in ourselves, the ways we consume and communicate electronically, but in the leaders, big businesses, and future employers who abuse our wondrous technological gifts. That’s not the only way to see our brave new e-world. Numerous commentators have fretted about the personal toll our digital culture is taking on everything from kids’ emotional health to how brains process information. But these critical accounts are typically somewhat narrow and unconnected. Following a tradition as old as Aristophanes, Chaucer, and Swift, however, we can get a more comprehensive perspective on our current electronic fixation by turning to satiric fiction. M.T. Anderson’s novel Feed is an uncanny exploration of our (inevitable?) future, in which most of the U.S. population has a “software/wetware interface,” so that online data is accessible directly through our brains. Anderson’s work chronicles the personal and social effects of an increasingly “wired” community, providing a valuable map for the range of potential human dysfunction we should watch for, think about, and preempt. The main character in Feed, Titus, along with his various friends and relations, broadly experience what sociologist Max Weber called “disenchantment” with the world, a reduction in their appreciation of its mystery, wonder, and beauty. The instant gratification and ready stimulus of the feed induces a jaded, disappointed attitude captured by the novel’s very first line: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” Moreover, the book’s dramatis personae (the critique is certainly not confined to its teenage protagonists) exhibit a dangerous mix of susceptibility to fickle social and economic trends and a limited awareness of, and respect for, themselves. The most exaggerated and grotesque manifestation of this phenomenon occurs when two of Titus’s friends go to considerable expense and trouble to implant surgically gaping “lesions” on their bodies—in order to show off, as conspicuously as possible, their wealth, status, and perceived attractiveness. These and other passages are consistent with recent critiques of how “selfies” and other online portrayals undermine our self-image and self-worth. Everyone is speculating on Huma Abedin's emotional health, but her electronically dallying husband, New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, is presumably the more unhappy, and psychically damaged, of the two. Anderson additionally contends that the feed makes us less intellectually nimble and aware. Hamstrung by a restricted vocabulary (and with it, a cramped worldview), Titus and his compatriots have difficulty expressing their thoughts, aspirations, and feelings. When Titus meets Violet, his eventual love interest, he struggles to articulate what makes her so attractive, so compelling—initially preventing him from connecting with her emotionally and intellectually. Periodically, the feed offers the book’s characters with recommended word choices, and they sometimes turn to its “English to English wordbook” for translations. But, of course, the feed itself is part of the problem: it saturates the populace with information, some of it inaccurate or misunderstood. As Titus reports:"Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and s**t." Outside of Anderson’s Feed, there is an open debate over whether cell phones and online communication are detracting from or enhancing how we teach and learn. Regardless, we can certainly gain insight about a culture from the words it (mis)uses and in this respect, there is some intriguing evidence that we are becoming a more individualistic and less morally articulate society. Closely related to this point is Anderson’s most damning critique of our growing technological interdependence. Bluntly stated, the individuals inhabiting his novel are unlikable and amoral: they are selfish, self-destructive and incapable of relationships with depth. Anderson’s grim depiction raises the twin questions of whether we are indeed suffering a decline of character and virtue and, if so, whether our reliance on electronic apparatuses plays a role in this diminution or at least shift in values. Whatever the answers, Anderson effectively captures a familiar paradox of our new relationship with electronic media—it gives us greater opportunities to connect with geographically dispersed individuals and groups, and it enhances our capacity to produce and consume content in an individualistic fashion. As Titus puts it (in ostensibly describing a game of "sardines"), the “weirdest thing is that you know that you’re more alone than anyone, but that more people are thinking about you than ever before…so you’re more alone, but more watched.” Is there a better analysis of the compulsive Facebook user who sits at home, alone, spinning through his or her news feed? What are we to do with all this—in Anderson’s world and our own? Anderson himself is remarkably short on hope. His figure of resistance, the iconoclastic Violet, summarizes the book’s desperate atmosphere by concluding “We’re going down… The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.” Indeed, Violet meets with a demeaning and emotionally shattering end. Titus offers much less promise as a symbol of opposition: his primary acts of defiance include dating Violet and mass-ordering jeans. We can, however, find an instructive response to the problems bedeviling Titus, not to mention our own 21st century e-citizens, from a seemingly unlikely source: the 19th century political theory of John Stuart Mill. In Part 2 of this blog entry, we will take seriously Mill’s argument for radical individualism as a means of maneuvering through today’s electronic culture. Bruce Peabody is a Professor of Political Science at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey. He is currently writing a book about American heroism. Read Professor Peabody's follow-up guest post next week at Praxis. SOURCE
How the Bible and YouTube are fueling the next frontier of password cracking Early last year, password security researcher Kevin Young was hitting a brick wall. Over the previous few weeks, he made steady progress decoding cryptographically protected password data leaked from the then-recent hack of intelligence firm Stratfor. But with about 60 percent of the more than 860,000 password hashes cracked, his attempts to decipher the remaining 40 percent were failing. The so-called dictionary attacks he mounted using lists of more than 20 million passwords culled from previous website hacks had worked well. Augmented with programming rules that substituted letters for numbers or combined two or more words in his lists, his attacks revealed Stratfor passwords such as "pinkyandthebrain", "pithecanthropus", and "moonlightshadow". Brute-force techniques trying every possible combination of letters, numbers, and special characters had also succeeded at cracking all passwords of eight or fewer characters. So the remaining 344,000 passwords, Young concluded, must be longer words or phrases few crackers had seen before. "I was starting to run out of word lists," he recalled. "I was at a loss for words—literally." He cracked the first 60 percent of the list using the freely available Hashcat and John the Ripper password-cracking programs, which ran the guesses through the same MD5 algorithm Stratfor and many other sites used to generate the one-way hashes. When the output of a guessed word matched one of the leaked Stratfor hashes, Young would have successfully cracked another password. (Security professionals call the technique an "offline" attack because guesses are never entered directly into a webpage.) Now, with his arsenal of dictionaries exhausted and the exponential increase in the time it would take to brute force passwords greater than eight characters, Young was at a dead end. In the passwords arms race, he was losing. Young knew he needed to compile new lists of words he never tried before. The question was where to find the words... more
Scientists accidentally discover a metal that heals itself A few months ago, a team of European scientists engineered a miraculous self-healing polymer that could change our lives for the better. Imagine furniture that lasts a lifetime, or eyeglass frames that piece themselves back together after a few hours of being wrapped up with scotch tape. Such technology could have huge ramifications in countless industries. Now imagine those same basic healing principles, but applied to a material that's even more pervasive: Metal. MIT researchers "accidentally" stumbled on a remarkable new property in a nickel superalloy that could change the way we approach architecture, industrial design, cars — you name it. The team, led by graduate student Guoqiang Xu, found that when force is applied to a crack in the metal to pull it apart, the damaged areas counter-intuitively fused together. The superalloy self-repaired... continued