MIT researches use M13 virus to increase solar cell efficiency

By adding a geniticaly modified version of the m13 virus to dye-sensitized solar cells to wrangle, position and coat carbon nanotubes in titanium dioxide. This will keep the tubes aligned and seperated for a boost in efficiency around 8-10.6% even though the virus' will be less than 0.1% of the weight of the finished cell.

      The virus' grab the nanotubes with thier peptides and can hold abotu 10 nanotubes with 300 pertides per virus.“It is likely that the virus template assembly has enabled the researchers to establish a better contact between the TiO2 nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes. Such close contact with TiO2 nanoparticles is essential to drive away the photo-generated electrons quickly and transport it efficiently to the collecting electrode surface.”

      The virus' also alow the process to be carried out in a water medium at room temprature. Since the virus' can be implemented in one simple step axisting amnufacturing should be able to easily adapt to the new process, keeping prices low.


Neat stuff again, more nanotubes, more soloar cells... good stuff.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/solar-virus-0425.html

Artificial synapse created useing nanotubes

Alice Parker and Chongwu Zhou of USC used carbon nanotubes to mimic synapses used in the human brain, they feel that while they are still decades away from true artificial brains that this is a big step in the right irection, the biggest problem is with scale, producing nanotubes on that scale is still not quite up to snuff.

      Artificial brains could be utilized for AI applications but the biggest problem is with the limited plasticity of the nanotubes, real synapses can adjust, multiply and die off as needed, as apposed o the inherently stactic nature of nanotube synapses.

      Mabye if they utilize some of the phase change materials being developed they could possibly create an artificial brain, but the technology is still ahead of us.


It was a pretty short article so there is not much else to say about it, but it is sort of neat to be up to date on the new breakthroughs in technology.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/25/researchers-build-synthetic-synapse-circuit-prosthetic-brains-s/

Triumph of the Nerds Pt. 3

The Macintosh launch put a big goofy grin on my face, it was geektastic =p.
Oracle guy( Larry Allison) predicted cloud computing future for Internet. You hear about vision and such but until you experience it for yourself it really doe snto sink in how neat it is. How today the things Allison said are coming to pass, how apt it is that he heads Oracle.

      I found that I do not like Steve Jobs as a person... and it is amazing how such personalities succeed in so many ways, despite even open distaste for the person. A little bit off topic but I think it is an interesting note anyway. You expect something more from people you hear about but they are just people, and not even likable ones at that.

      I always like when i can feel like the information I have is useful or at least able to be referenced, such as when he talked about Windows 95 and how it did away with DOS, I was thinking "Well it combined DOS and the previous Windows GUI into something new but similar, DOS was not really done away with until Windows 2000/NT (If I recall correctly). Sorta nice to feel smart =p.

      Such rampant piracy would seem like a bad thing but I think that short of the open source philosophy it is one of the major ways things can change and get better, you see something neat and think "I could do better" is the heart of what drives innovation in my opinion. Some would say well how would you feel if someone blatantly stole your idea and got rich off of it. Sure I would be frustrated maybe a little angry, but really who can I be mad at besides myself, if I failed to capitalize on something someone else did after I had the idea. I would try to take the enlightened approach to the topic and try to use it as either a way to get better (so it does not happen again) or to gain some small solace in the fact that my contribution, even though unrecognized maybe, would still go towards making things better overall, an I would like that.

      I really liked the movie overall, but then again I also like cheesy horror movies, and Farside comics, so take from that what you will =p.

I realize this post had a lot more emoticons in it, but thats just the mood i'm in at the moment and you should just be thankful that I did not use internet/game slang the 4-5 time I could have >=P. Also I would not do you (read: no one, because this blog will never get read, except mabye the teacher) the injustice of shielding you from the full force of my textual charisma.

Ja

Laser sparkplugs!

lasers are always better, but besides that it is more efficient, you get  a cleaner burn because lasers can ignite leaner fuel mixtures without wearing like standard electrical arc spark plugs. They also can be focused closer to the center of the piston to produce a more complete burn, and achieve more power, with less waste and byproduct.

      Japanese researchers from National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Japan, have designed a ceramic two beam laser small enough to fit into a cylinder. Besides more complete combustion the lasers Will also produce a quicker combustion; normal plugs take milliseconds, but laser plugs will take nanoseconds to do the same thing better! How neato is that, they haven't actually started producing these plugs yet but are working with a large, unnamed spark plug company and DENSO Corp.

      They say they can be produced economically in large quantities so if things work out we could soon have laser plugs in most car engines, as Ford is working on something similar to this for itself. More fuel economy is a welcome change in this market with gas prices how they are, plus it is just plain cool =p


As usual I left out the techobabble for various reasons but here is the link to the article I saw as well as the main article.


http://gizmodo.com/#!5794073/your-new-cars-engine-will-work-with-lasers-not-spark-plugs

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-laser-revolution-internal-combustion.html

LED droop souce discovered

Researchers found out that the droop in effeciency Nitrade based LEDs experience at the higher power levels, is caused by indirect auger recombination, which is where electrons fall out createing a hole which nearby electrons try to fill in or get knocked out of.

Basically what it means is that at higher levels of power use (such as for household lighting) LEDs receive a drop in effieciancy, nad scientisits knew it happend but never knew why, and now they do. This could mean more effecieint LED lighting could replace incandecent or CFL bulbs.

Neat stuff, a little heady but interesting none-the-less.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110419164211.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

Teleportation of Quantum data

Researchers at the university of south wales successfully "teleported" packets of light waves in a complex quantum data string.

"It opens the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via quantum communications networks."

it is a fairly brief article with a lot of technical data, I couldn't hope to explain it all here without making all involved in the process numb and reeling. Basically they transferred a complex string of linear equations with no actuall transfer. The subject was destroyed on the original end and created on the other. Since there is no real middle the data is duplicated with high fidelity at the other end. I really don;t know what else to do without spewing alot of jargon, so her eis the link and some wiki sites I used to try to figure out why this was a deal =p

 http://www.kurzweilai.net/beam-me-up-qantum-teleporter-breakthrough

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium

Triumph of the Nerds Pt. 2

I thought it was very interesting  how cutthroat it became, in a nerdy way. I always had a vague idea of how lucky people like Gates had to have gotten but it really was a case of everything lining up followed up by some initiative and hard work. How cliche does that sound? I suppose though that cliches and stereotypes were all based off of something though. IBM really missed out with their stodgy bureaucracy, and yet they still managed to hang on and even thrive despite several setbacks, I guess that's the upside to being established or set in one's ways. That other fellow Killdal messed up as well, even when he got tipped off by Gates he did not foresee the impact of that moment, but I suppose that's how most great moments are, you never recognize them except in hindsight. Although it was an interesting movie I find myself lacking in words at the moment. Perhaps I'll add more later but probably not =P

IBM wants to kick out the jams with predictive software

IBM is working on and testing software to predict traffic patterns and help people avoid traffic jams. They apparently already tried something like that out in London and it caused crashes and was generally a failure. They apparently moved on (read ignored) since then and want to have some finished soon that runs on smart phones using the location tracking data alongside road sensors to receive data for where people are driving and when and use this data to predict where traffic jams are liikely to occur. Nothing amazing but then again evryday can't be nanomachines removing cancer cells, or microchips storeing lightwaves.

http://www.techeye.net/software/ibm-wants-to-kick-out-the-jams-with-predictive-software?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techeye+%28Tech+Eye%29

Rainbow trapping Scientist strives to slow light waves futher

In a paper published March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Qiaoqiang Gan (pronounced "Chow-Chung" and "Gone") Published a paper march 29th that described how they slowed broadband light waves using a type of material called nanoplasmonic structures.

"Gan explains that the ultimate goal is to achieve a breakthrough in optical communications called multiplexed, multiwavelength communications, where optical data can potentially be tamed at different wavelengths, thus greatly increasing processing and transmission capacity."

It gets pretty heavy after that but basically he is trying to catch lightwaves of varying frequencies in nanoscale grooves in a metallic surface, which would slow down light waves and allow them to be processed better at the receiving end. If things keep advanceing as he hopes

"These plasmonic chips provide the critical connection between nanoelectronics and photonics, Gan explains, allowing these different types of devices to be integrated, a prerequisite for realizing the potential of optical computing, "lab-on-a-chip" biosensors and more efficient, thin-film photovoltaic materials."

Such applications are obviously awesome, really in my opinion, anything that gets us clsoer to SciFi is a win in my book, and light catching processor chips would definately fit that.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110412162406.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

Google Speeds up the web with SPDY

Google created a new internet protocol to speed up web page loading over HTTP, called SPDY (speedy). It is  already in use in Chrome if you go to a google website as a toggle option. According to the author of this article it sped things up by about 20% and the benchmarking tool they provide backed up what he had seen himself showing a 15% increase in performance.
      Google started working on this in November 2009, and currently it only works if both the browser and the website server both use SPDY. Currently only chrome and google sites and services use it but
Google plans on open-sourcing SPDY and the C++ code is available today. There’s also an experimental SPDY Apache Web server module and Ruby code if you want to tinker with it yourself on the server side.
      SPDY also won’t work equally well on all kinds of data. According to a note in the SPDY developers’ mailing list, “SPDY requires that the client support gzip compression [a data compression program] of payloads. The hope is that gzip quickly, simply and automatically gets pretty good compression of the payload.”
      That means that since it compresses the data , transfers of data that is already compressed will not see much of an improvement, but you should still see some improvement because SPDY compresses the HTTP header, and  more importantly, according to the second draft of the SPDY specification, SPDY “adds a framing layer for multiplexing multiple, concurrent streams across a single TCP connection (or any reliable transport stream). The framing layer is optimized for HTTP-like request-response streams.” Under SPDY, there is no limit to the number of requests that can be issued concurrently over a single SPDY connection. Because requests are interleaved on a single channel, the protocol is more efficient over TCP.
     Also something I found neat is with SPDY, a Web browser can also prioritize requests. This way you can get the most critical data first, say a video stream, rather than wasting waiting around for an ad to appear before starting the video.


Overall this seems promising and like the author of this article says: "I hope that Google will soon officially open the source and submit SPDY to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make it an official standard."



http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/google-speeds-up-the-web-with-spdy/930

Triumph of the Nerds Pt. 1

Well, I thought it was interesting to get some of the things I had heard about verified and clarified. Like why Silicon valley is called silicone valley and not computer valley (because the silicon chip got it's start there), and other such tidbits. I don;t know exactly what I supposed to do for this assignment. There were some questions on the board in class but to be honest I don't really remember what they were. So in lieu of any set guidelines I just figured I would give my thoughts on the film thus far:
      I really liked seeing how the whole industry got started, and what things were like for PC users back then as well as seeing how the big names got their starts. How the first PC didn't really do anything, but that they found ways to use it anyway, like playing the tune by putting the radio on top of it. That type of innovation and creative thinking is really how things developed to the point they are at now. Some people thought it was boring probably, and I suppose if you knew everything covered or were not interested in the topic it was a bit dry, and dated but I enjoyed it. There were several things covered that escape me as I sit here and type, but that does not mean I didn't absorb it, I'm just a little tired.
      I suppose the point of this whole assignment was to see if we payed attention to the film, and I watched it exclusively that day, but my memory is a fickle thing and can't be relied upon to produce facts from subjective material like a film, but I am fairly confidant I gained from watching the film and am looking forward to the next installment. If you are dissatisfied with my work, that's your prerogative I suppose and I shall have to take whatever judgement you render upon it and me.

Until Monday,  fare thee well

IEEE prepares to regulate the cloud

IEEE has announced that it will begin a new initiative that aim to put in place a set of global standards for cloud computing. The standards will be put forth in two projects: IEEE P2301 which they say will
provide an “intuitive roadmap” for firms such as HP, which is beginning to roll out cloud services.
It is hoped that the P2301 standards give more clarity to users over what they are buying into as the move to cloud computing gathers pace.
      The second project P2302 will define protocols and functionality that are required to enable the cloud-to-cloud interoperability demanded by users, which it claims will have the effect that for example, naming and routing protocols did for the Internet.


The man leading the proposals, Steve Diamond
believes that just as the early Internet caused an upheaval in the way information was transformed, the cloud is similarly “disruptive technology and business model that is primed for explosive growth and rapid transformation”.
     He also claims that “without a flexible, common framework for interoperability," innovation could become stifled.
No one knows how restrictive the regulations will be but there is talk in some quarters that over-regulation would not be beneficial. With the big companies like Microsoft and IBM pushing cloud forward and the responses of business to it, mass migration to the cloud will probably be happening sooner rather than later.

The cloud cometh...


http://www.techeye.net/internet/ieee-prepares-regulations-for-the-cloud?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techeye+%28Tech+Eye%29