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Next
Event
Friday, August 22, 2008, 07:00 PM: Simulations of Society with Loren Cobb
Loren Cobb will present his peculiar 15-year journey into sociological model-making for various military entities, including US Southern Command, the Swedish Ministry of Defence, the British Ministry of Defence, the United Nations, and a miscellany of Latin American countries (Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, ...).
More...
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America has been failed by its government, and the nation now faces economic and security catastrophes unless its leaders change their ways, Wharton management professor Lawrence G. Hrebiniak concludes in his new book, The Mismanagement of America, Inc. He directs his severest criticism at the government's supervision of the Social Security Trust Fund and an intelligence infrastructure in which various agencies are no better at communicating with each other than they were before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Video, 27:34
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Americans are increasingly choosing to live among like-minded neighbours. This makes the culture war more bitter and politics harder.
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An international consortium of scientists published the largest existing survey comparing genetic and chemical traits of human embryonic stem cell lines from around the world.
"You could call this an encyclopedia of embryonic stem cells. "
The study compared 59 lines of stem cells from 17 laboratories around the world and assessed the similarities and differences in the expression of many common molecular markers.
Researchers also identified certain cell surface antigens and developmentally regulated genes that characterize all human embryonic stem cell lines isolated to date, despite the cell lines' variety of genetic backgrounds and growth conditions. The similarities identified in the study will help set benchmarks for future stem cell work.
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Officials confirm that all online data has been lost after the Internet crashed and was forced to restart.
Video, 3:00
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Those entering online dating forums risk having more than their hearts stolen.
A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums.
The artificial intelligence of CyberLover's automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the "bot" from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.
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A lot of industry people in the know are predicting that Moore's Law will come to an end sometime in the next decade. Starting with the current leading-edge 45nm process technology, chipmakers are looking to deliver three more shrinks until silicon-based transistors run up against quantum mechanical effects. Most vendors have plans in place for 32nm and 22nm processors using UV lithography. The next stop is 16nm, but the general consensus is that it will have to be implemented with something other than CMOS-based material -- perhaps SiGe or graphene. At 9 or 10 nanometers, quantum tunneling starts to become a real problem, so even more futuristic approaches, like molecular electronics or spintronics, will be required.
There's no guarantee that the development of these more advanced technologies will obey a Moore's Law timeline, which was based on the progression of two-dimensional semiconductors.
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Intel will launch its first 45nm chips made with reinvented transistors that use a new Hafnium-based high-k metal gate recipe. Take a look inside Intel's 45nm factories where these chips get made. See the many layers or floors of the factory and the automated shuttles that take the wafers from one step to another to ultimately produce millions of Intel's 45nm chips. These buildings are some of the cleanest in the world and so large that 17 football fields can fit inside!
Video, 7:38
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 The World:
An invisible soldier? A space elevator to the stars? Transmit the inventory of the Library of Congress via laser beam in seconds? What are the real fuel sources of the future? Learn about technological quantum leaps that will shape our planet in 50 years.
What would you see and experience if the clocks rolled forward 50 years? In a unique blend of drama and science, this three-part series shows you the world of tomorrow. Will we have flying cars? Will advances in medicine help us stay young forever? What about "printing" custom-made vital organs? What will our cities look like? What will tomorrow's wars be about? Will we have robots helping around the house? Will solar power be the new oil?
Supported by the world's leading scientists and research institutes, we embark on a quest to answer some of society's most fundamental questions and reveal the dramas of tomorrow's world along the way. State-of-the-art computer graphics in combination with a dynamic story line will create a world usually only seen in feature films, but with the accuracy and relevance of a documentary. This series is all about opening the window of our future based on science fact, not science fiction.
Hosted by Michio Kaku
Video, 43:00
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 George Church is dyslexic, narcoleptic, and a vegan. He is married with one daughter, weighs about 210 pounds, and has worn a pioneer-style bushy beard for decades. He has elevated levels of creatine kinase in his blood, the consequence of a heart attack. He enjoys waterskiing, photography, rock climbing, and singing in his church choir. His mother's maiden name is Strong. He was born on August 28, 1954.
If this all seems like too much information, well, blame Church himself.
As Church sees it, the only real utility to his personal information is as data that reflects his phenotype — his physical traits and characteristics. If your genome is the blueprint of your genetic potential written across 6 billion base pairs of DNA, your phenome is the resulting edifice, how you actually turn out after the environment has had its say, influencing which genes get expressed and which traits repressed. Imagine that we could collect complete sets of data — genotype and phenotype — for a whole population. You would very quickly begin to see meaningful and powerful correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, from height and hair color to disease risk and personality.
Church has done more than imagine such an undertaking; he has launched it: The Personal Genome Project.
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 The tributes to Sanford I. Weill line the walls of the carpeted hallway that leads to his skyscraper office, with its panoramic view of Central Park. A dozen framed magazine covers, their colors as vivid as an Andy Warhol painting, are the most arresting. Each heralds Mr. Weill’s genius in assembling Citigroup into the most powerful financial institution since the House of Morgan a century ago.
His achievement required political clout, and that, too, is on display. Soon after he formed Citigroup, Congress repealed a Depression-era law that prohibited goliaths like the one Mr. Weill had just put together anyway, combining commercial and investment banking, insurance and stock brokerage operations. A trophy from the victory — a pen that President Bill Clinton used to sign the repeal — hangs, framed, near the magazine covers.
These days, Mr. Weill and many of the nation’s very wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier era — the Gilded Age before World War I — when powerful enterprises, dominated by men who grew immensely rich, ushered in the industrialization of the United States.
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Click on photos to enlarge.
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A team of researchers has created the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970 base pair genome of a bacterium. This work is the second of three key steps toward the team’s goal of creating a fully synthetic organism. In the next step, the team will attempt to create a living bacterial cell based entirely on the synthetically made genome.
The team achieved this technical feat by chemically making DNA fragments in the lab and developing new methods for the assembly and reproduction of the DNA segments.
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Geeks at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), the UK's spook-infested listening station, are using the infamous Enron email trail to develop software that will monitor people's emails and stop them sending incriminating or confidential messages.
The team would be processing the 500,000 emails in corpus Enron.
"We've got the capability to leak out all our organisation's secrets through email. So how can you stop that happening?"
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Computers outperform humans at recognizing faces in recent tests.
For scientists and engineers involved with face-recognition technology, the recently released results of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge have been a quiet triumph. The match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995. Indeed, the best face-recognition algorithms now perform more accurately than most humans can manage.
The necessary in error rate was due in large measure to the development of high-resolution still-images and 3-D face-recognition algorithms. "For the FRVT 2006 and the ICE 2006, sets of high-resolution face images, 3-D face scans, and iris images were collected of the same people." 3-D face recognition has come into its own in the last few years because 3-D sensors for face recognition have become available only recently."
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Researchers reported on a way to design circuits that should work even when many of the nanotubes in them are twisted and misaligned.
Nanotubes tend to grow with unpredictable kinks and bends that can cause bad wiring connections. The resarchers came to the conclusion that engineers will have to design circuits that will work regardless of where and how the tubes lie.
They came up with a single circuit element—a NAND gate—that was immune from the vagaries of its underlying nanotube layout. From that single element, they abstracted and generalized the math to come up with an algorithm that they say can guarantee a working design for any circuit element, despite the presence of misaligned tubes.
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Western U.S. wildfires are likely to increase in the coming decades, according to a new tree-ring study that links episodic fire outbreaks in the past five centuries with periods of warming sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. States like Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and South Dakota all had an increased prevalence of wildfires in recent centuries when a phenomenon known as the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation -- similar but longer in duration than the better known El Nino-Southern Oscillation -- periodically shifted from a cool to a warm mode that lasted roughly 60 years each time. Warmer waters in the North Atlantic correspond with episodes of drought and subsequent fires in the West as shown by fire scars in annual tree rings studied by the researchers.
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DARPA just announced the 36 teams that will advance to the next stage
of the competition. The next stage of the competition will be October
26-31, 2007.
The final competition will be November 3rd, in Victorville,
California at what used to be George Air Force Base.
The vehicles will have to
conduct military supply missions in a mock urban area filled with
traffic.
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Thomas Lewis, M.D. is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, and a former associate director of the Affective Disorders Program there. Dr. Lewis currently divides his time between writing, private practice, and teaching at the UCSF medical school.
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 Who says big ideas are rare?
The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.
One day, Bell went for a walk on a bluff overlooking the Grand River, near his parents’ house.
Far from the bustle of Boston and the pressure of competition from other eager inventors, he mulled over everything he had discovered about sound.
In that moment, Bell knew the answer to the puzzle of the harmonic telegraph.
In June of 1876, a few months after he shouted out, “Mr. Watson, come here,” Alexander Graham Bell took his device to the World’s Fair in Philadelphia.
Bell was not the only one to give a presentation on the telephone at the Philadelphia Exhibition, however. Someone else spoke first. His name was Elisha Gray. Gray never had an epiphany overlooking the Grand River.
Gray was working on the telephone at the same time that Bell was. In fact, the two filed notice with the Patent Office in Washington, D.C., on the same day—February 14, 1876. Bell went on to make telephones with the company that later became A. T. & T. Gray went on to make telephones in partnership with Western Union and Thomas Edison, and—until Gray’s team was forced to settle a lawsuit with Bell’s company—the general consensus was that Gray and Edison’s telephone was better than Bell’s telephone.
In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.
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Google Health, codename "Weaver", is Google’s planned health information storage program.
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Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? For most, it's an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel peace prize and ranked in a US poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip, has been decapitated in effigy on "I Hate Gates" websites. As for Norman Borlaug … who the heck is Norman Borlaug?
Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the "Green Revolution" that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world such as malaria, diarrhoea and parasites.
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DNA chips have revolutionised biological research. With the help of a microarray, researchers can query the whole genome at once, rather than just a few genes at a time. Experiments that used to be impossible are now being performed in days or hours. "By being able to see the big picture, all the genes, all the genetic variation, we can readily pick out answers—we can make discoveries that we could never make before," explains Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the human-genome project.
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Mythbusters test a bull in a china shop
Video, 3:45
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Berkeley Courses With Video Lectures. Sites Offering Free Courses. Free Online Documentaries. Learn Languages on iTunes. Online Degree Plans Near You. Educational Videos. Education With Podcasting. Useful Free Software For Students. Reference Sites. Web 2.0 For Students. Ask Questions. Free Ebooks. Tiny Flash Freeware. Free Ear Training Software. Learn Languages.
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As the 2008 U.S. presidential election approaches, tens of millions of voters have to make up their minds. They face the task of sifting through media reports, televised debates, political advertisements, campaign literature and conversations with family and friends to identify a candidate who best reflects their political views.
That just may be too much to ask, though.
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Humanity was dealt a decisive blow by a poker-playing artificial intelligence program called Polaris during the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas.
"There are two really big changes in Polaris over last year. First of all, our poker model is much expanded over last year. And secondly, we have added an element of learning, where Polaris identifies which common poker stratagy a human is using and switches its own strategy to counter."
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 The Body: Flying ambulances? Intelligent clothing? Custom-built organs from scratch? Robotic surgery? Learn about today's medical breakthroughs that will extend our lives in 50 years.
What would you see and experience if the clocks rolled forward 50 years? In a unique blend of drama and science, this three-part series shows you the world of tomorrow. Will we have flying cars? Will advances in medicine help us stay young forever? What about "printing" custom-made vital organs? What will our cities look like? What will tomorrow's wars be about? Will we have robots helping around the house? Will solar power be the new oil?
Supported by the world's leading scientists and research institutes, we embark on a quest to answer some of society's most fundamental questions and reveal the dramas of tomorrow's world along the way. State-of-the-art computer graphics in combination with a dynamic story line will create a world usually only seen in feature films, but with the accuracy and relevance of a documentary. This series is all about opening the window of our future based on science fact, not science fiction.
Hosted by Michio Kaku
Video, 43:00
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Parallel computing used to be reserved for big science and engineering projects, but in two years that's all changed. Even laptops and hand-helds use parallel processors. Unfortunately,
the software hasn't kept pace. Kathy Yelick, Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Berkeley Lab, describes the resulting chaos and the computing community's efforts to develop exciting applications that take advantage of tens or hundreds of processors on a single chip.
Video, 1:00:00
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A Swedish HIV vaccine study has produced surprisingly good results. Over 90 per cent of the subjects in the phase 1 trials developed an immune response to HIV.
A vaccine developed by SMI scientists has now undergone the first clinical study on healthy individuals in Sweden in order to examine its safety and different methods of administration. The vaccine is what is known as a genetic vaccine, which uses parts of the virus DNA to stimulate the rapid endogenous production of the proteins for which the injected DNA codes.
The trial subjects were vaccinated on three occasions with this vaccine using a needle-free method of injection. In order to enhance the effect, the researchers also gave the subjects a fourth dose of a vaccine in which parts of the HIV virus DNA had been integrated into another virus (vaccinia = the cowpox virus).
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With the latest advances in treatment, doctors have discovered that they can successfully neutralise the HIV virus. The so-called ‘combination therapy’ prevents the HIV virus from mutating and spreading, allowing patients to rebuild their immune system to the same levels as the rest of the population. To date, it represents the most significant treatment for patients suffering from HIV.
Professor Jens Lundgren from the University of Copenhagen, together with other members of the research group EuroSIDA, have conducted a study, which demonstrates that the immune system of all HIV-infected patients can be restored and normalised. The only stipulation is that patients begin and continue to follow their course of treatment.
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Scientists say they have found the part of the brain that predicts whether a person will be selfish or an altruist.
Altruism - the tendency to help others without obvious benefit to oneself - appears to be linked to an area called the posterior superior temporal sulcus. Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person's real-life unselfish behaviour.
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Harnessing quantum interference enables single aromatic annulene molecules to function as transistors.
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Room-temperature single-electron transistors are realized within individual metallic single-wall carbon nanotube molecules. The devices feature a short (down to ~20 nanometers) nanotube section that is created by inducing local barriers into the tube with an atomic force microscope. Coulomb charging is observed at room temperature, with an addition energy of 120 millielectron volts, which substantially exceeds the thermal energy. At low temperatures, we resolve the quantum energy levels corresponding to the small island. We observe unconventional power-law dependencies in the measured transport properties for which we suggest a resonant tunneling Luttinger-liquid mechanism.
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For a majority of likely voters, meaningless bullshit will be the most important factor in deciding who they will vote for in 2008.
Video, 2:20
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Cellphones, microchips, cars, even iPhones—there's virtually no high-tech Western product that China's cloners can't copy. Pretty soon, you might even prefer their work.
The little gadget was bootleg gold, a secret treasure I'd spent months tracking down. The miniOne looked just like Apple's iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface. But it was more. It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn't. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers. The miniOne's first news teases—a forum posting, a few spy shots, a product announcement that vanished after a day—generated a frenzy of interest online. Was it real? When would it go on sale? And most intriguing, could it really be even better than the iPhone?
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The increasing deployment of gun-toting robots by the U.S. military and other armed forces around the world could end up endangering civilian lives and giving terrorists new ideas.
The prospect of armed, autonomous robots is enough to rattle Noel Sharkey, professor of computer science at the University of Sheffield, England. "One of the fundamental laws of war is being able to discriminate real combatants and noncombatants," he says. "I can see no way that autonomous robots can deliver this for us."
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A probe of the upper echelons of the human brain's chain-of-command has found strong evidence that there are not one but two complementary commanders in charge of the brain. It's as if Captains James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard were both on the bridge and in command of the same starship Enterprise. In reality, these two captains are networks of brain regions that do not consult each other but still work toward a common purpose -- control of voluntary, goal-oriented behavior. "This was a big surprise. We knew several brain regions contribute to top-down control, but most of us thought we'd eventually show all those regions linking together in one system, one little guy up top telling everyone else what to do."
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As the U.S. banking system continues to get into more trouble, the government has responded by buying up stake in the failing companies. But Robert Reich reports the governments doing the owning are overseas.
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Transistors are the basic building blocks of integrated circuits. To use nanotubes in future circuits it is essential to be able to make transistors from them. We have successfully fabricated and tested nanotube transistors using individual multi-wall or single-wall nanotubes as the channel of a field-effect transistor (FET).
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The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk to its lowest level this week since satellite measurements began nearly 30 years ago, opening up the Northwest Passage – a long-sought short cut between Europe and Asia that has been historically impassable.
"We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme.
Mosaics of Arctic Ocean for 2005, 2006, 2007
"The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected and that we urgently need to understand better the processes involved."
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Like my Grandpa always said, there were no naked human pyramids in Starcraft.
There were no whiny anti-war Hollywood types or questionable war motives or granola-munching protesters. I'm starting to think that even World in Conflict, a real time strategy game so "realistic" it takes a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.
Well, below is my open letter to the real time strategy gaming cartel. I want a war simulation. A real one.
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Pundits are eager to provide their predictions for the new year. Here's something a little different.
1. The writers won't win the current strike.
2. DreamWorks isn't going to leave Paramount after all.
3. Apple won't reinvent TV viewing.
4. Juno won't win an Academy Award. Anyone
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New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
"Originally, we all had brown eyes. But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch', which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes". The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. The "switch", which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris – effectively "diluting" brown eyes to blue.
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BBC program where they interview Gordon Moore and various other
people from the silicon valley semiconductor industry. This is a very
introductory program. For those of you who are deeply familiar with
Moore's Law, you won't find much new here. But for those of you not
so familiar, this program will explain some of the issues involved,
and give you some sense of the chaos and craziness that creates our
smooth growth in computer power.
Audio, 27 minutes
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Checkers computer becomes invincible. An invincible checkers-playing program named Chinook has solved a game whose origins date back several millennia, scientists reported Thursday on the journal Science's Web site. By playing out every possible move — about 500 billion billion in all — the computer proved it can never be beaten. Even if its opponent also played flawlessly, the outcome would be a draw.
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Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.
Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. the Sentient World Simulation (SWS) will tell you what happens next.
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Banks are failing to provide consumers with information about fees on savings and checking accounts even though federal rules require such disclosures.
Some of the invisible fees have climbed substantially in recent years. The average overdraft fee, for instance, increased 11 percent from 2000 to 2007.
Staff made undercover visits to 185 branches of 154 depository institutions throughout the country and were unable to get comprehensive lists of checking and savings account fees at more than a one-fifth of the locations. The information was not available on the Web sites of half of the institutions.
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"The Planet"
is a Swedish
campaign to enhance public awareness of the planet Earth; to show its limits, wonders, possibilities.
It is produced by Swedish public service television.
This is a Flash app -- when you use it, make sure you hit the back arrow inside the app, otherwise if you use the browser's back arrow, you will get popped outside of the app completely.
To get started, I suggest you click on "The Big Picture", then "The Current State", then "Great Acceleration". You can see many of the trends we talk about at the future salon there.
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A special technique that uses laser light to sample a person's breath can detect molecules that may be markers for a number of diseases.
This approach, called cavity-enhanced direct optical frequency comb spectroscopy, may one day help doctors screen patients for diseases such as asthma, cancer, kidney failure and diabetes, according to the team of scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"This technique can give a broad picture of many different molecules in the breath all at once," lead researcher Jun Ye said in a prepared statement.
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MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld offers a glimpse at life after the digital revolution by sharing some of the projects created in Fab Labs - low-cost fabrication labs that encourage invention and production on a local level. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 18:04)
Video, 18:04
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Scientists are incorporating the physics of black holes into a highly sophisticated model running on a powerful supercomputing system. The team has produced an unprecedented simulation of cosmic evolution that verifies and deepens our understanding of relationships between black holes and the galaxies in which they reside. Called BHCosmo, the simulation shows that black holes are integral to the structure of the cosmos and may help guide users of future telescopes, showing them what to look for as they aim to locate the earliest cosmic events and untangle the history of the universe.
"Ours is the first simulation to incorporate black hole physics. It is very computationally challenging, involving more calculations than any prior similar modeling of the cosmos, and the result offers us the best picture to date of how the cosmos formed."
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 Photons rarely interact—which makes it challenging to build all-optical devices in which one light signal controls another. Even in nonlinear optical media, in which two beams can interact because of their influence on the medium's refractive index, this interaction is weak at low light levels. Here, we propose a novel approach to realizing strong nonlinear interactions at the single-photon level, by exploiting the strong coupling between individual optical emitters and propagating surface plasmons confined to a conducting nanowire. We show that this system can act as a nonlinear two-photon switch for incident photons propagating along the nanowire, which can be coherently controlled using conventional quantum-optical techniques. Furthermore, we discuss how the interaction can be tailored to create a single-photon transistor, where the presence (or absence) of a single incident photon in a 'gate' field is sufficient to allow (or prevent) the propagation of subsequent 'signal' photons along the wire.
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Multicore chips could bring about the biggest change in computing since the microprocessor. By Brian Hayes.
The pace of change in computer technology can be breathtaking—and sometimes infuriating. You bring home a new computer, and before you can get it plugged in you're hearing rumors of a faster and cheaper model. In the 30 years since the microprocessor first came on the scene, computer clock speeds have increased by a factor of a thousand (from a few megahertz to a few gigahertz) and memory capacity has grown even more (from kilobytes to gigabytes).
Through all this frenzy of upgrades and speed bumps, one aspect of computer hardware has remained stubbornly resistant to change. Until recently, that new computer you brought home surely had only one CPU, or central processing unit—the computer-within-the-computer where programs are executed and calculations are performed.
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Silicon wafers are loaded into various chip-making tools -- some of which cost more than $10 million each -- through a complex routing system that runs on mechanized tracks above the tools. D1D uses what's known as a "ballroom" design, meaning the clean room floor is wide open, lacking walls within the facility where dirt can gather, Horwath said.
The air within the clean room is constantly refreshed and maintained at a cleanliness level known as Class 10, Horwath said. The air is even cleaner within the stackers, which transport silicon wafers from tool to tool. That air is kept at Class 1 status, meaning only three particles of dirt measuring 0.3 microns in size are allowed within a cubic foot of air.
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Answering Questions About Google’s Effort at Standardizing Social Network Widgets, and the Creation of Your First OpenSocial Widget.
Table of Contents:
Background.
Questions About OpenSocial...Answered.
Building Your First OpenSocial Widget.
Limitations of OpenSocial.
Conclusions.
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Where are you from? "Dobbs Ferry." What’s your major? “Mostly computer science but also psychology." Where did you live? "Kirkland House at Harvard."
Mr. Zuckerberg’s creation, an Internet service that allows students to post personal information and photos, is nothing short of a twister sweeping college campuses, keeping millions up to date on their friends’ lives and dating status. There was a reputed $1 billion plus offer from Yahoo!, turned down, natch.
Even more remarkable is that Mr. Zuckerberg is all of 22 years old. What is it that made Facebook become so valuable in less than three years? And will 22-year-olds with 200 employees come up with all the good ideas from now on?
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We give a detailed discussion of the Quantum Interference Effect Transistor (QuIET), a proposed device which exploits interference between electron paths through aromatic molecules to modulate current flow. In the off state, perfect destructive interference stemming from the molecular symmetry blocks current, while in the on state, current is allowed to flow by locally introducing either decoherence or elastic scattering. Details of a model calculation demonstrating the efficacy of the QuIET are presented, and various fabrication scenarios are proposed, including the possibility of using conducting polymers to connect the QuIET with multiple leads.
PDF, 12 pages
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America's elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
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Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the science fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our invisible assumptions. Even when the fictional future isn't a parable about the present day, it is necessarily a creation of the present day.
Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting the future. Futurists spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy. There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic."
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The human gut teems with bacteria. There are 10 microbes in the body for every human cell thanks mainly to the profusion of colonies in the intestines. Yet babies are born without any such germ populations; rather they develop them in fits and starts over time. Now researchers have mapped this development for the first time in 14 California babies, including a set of fraternal twins.
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Scientists at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology have harnessed the power of DNA to create a self-assembling nanoscale transistor, the building block of electronics. The research is a crucial step in the development of nanoscale devices.
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This year, as every year, we present our list of the 10 technologies we find most exciting—and most likely to alter industries, fields of research, and even the way we live. The list comprises projects in a broad range of fields.
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 Nature photographers now use high-definition photography to bring unparalleled images of wildlife and a "you-are-there" experience approaching virtual reality to the viewer. It can be at once informative, thrilling and terrifying -- and all from the comfort of your easy-chair or sofa.
While such video gives the public a view of nature never before seen, two biologists warn this technological wonder represents a proverbial double-edge sword.
"Virtual nature, defined as nature experienced vicariously through electronic means, has potential benefits particularly for children dependent on adults for access to many natural areas ... yet virtual nature appears to directly compete with time previously allocated to more beneficial, direct contact with the outdoors."
They call this phenomena "videophilia," which they define as "the new human tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media."
Their concern is that such activities not only can contribute to a more isolated, sedentary and unhealthy lifestyle, but also may discourage people, especially children, from visiting parks or nature preserves and experiencing nature first-hand. And that, they argue, could affect environmental consciousness, which may hinder long-term efforts to conserve earth's dwindling tracts of wilderness.
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The Bank for International Settlements has warned that years of loose monetary policy has fuelled a dangerous credit bubble, leaving the global economy vulnerable to another 1930s-style slump.
"Virtually nobody foresaw the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the crises which affected Japan and southeast Asia in the early and late 1990s. In fact, each downturn was preceded by a period of non-inflationary growth exuberant enough to lead many commentators to suggest that a 'new era' had arrived", said the bank.
The BIS pointed to a confluence a worrying signs, citing mass issuance of new-fangled credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt, extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and entrenched imbalances in the world currency system.
It said China's growth was "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable", borrowing a line from Chinese premier Wen Jiabao
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Scientists have taken an important step toward understanding how the human brain codes the meanings of words by creating the first computational model that can predict the unique brain activation patterns associated with names for things that you can see, hear, feel, taste or smell.
Researchers previously have shown that they can use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect which areas of the brain are activated when a person thinks about a specific word. A CMU team has taken the next step by predicting these activation patterns for concrete nouns - things that are experienced through the senses - for which fMRI data does not yet exist.
The work could eventually lead to the use of brain scans to identify thoughts and could have applications in the study of autism, disorders of thought such as paranoid schizophrenia, and semantic dementias such as Pick's disease.
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On Nov. 3, when robot vehicles raced through Darpatown, a simulated suburbia created in an abandoned Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif., each machine appeared to show its own distinct personality.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, robot personality quirks can mirror the individual styles of their human designers. And in this third annual race, sponsored by the Pentagon and now called the Darpa Urban Challenge, the leading machines also reflected a very human rivalry between two leading computer science and engineering schools.
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Most countries seem to have finally whipped inflation—at least for now. But not everyone is celebrating the world’s impressive economic stability. In today’s List, FP takes a hard look at the soft currencies of some of the most unstable economies on the planet. Somalia. Iraq. North Korea. Venezuela. Zimbabwe.
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Members of an unknown Amazon Basin tribe and their dwellings are seen during a flight over the Brazilian state of Acre along the border with Peru in this May, 2008 photo distributed by FUNAI, the government agency for the protection of indigenous peoples. Survival International estimates that there are over 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, and says that uncontacted tribes in the region are under increasing threat from illegal logging over the border in Peru.
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Calling its claims “overly speculative and not credible,” and saying that it is too late anyway, lawyers for the federal government argued this week that a so-called “doomsday suit” intended to prevent the startup of a the world’s most powerful particle accelerator should be thrown out of court.
When it begins operations, the collider will smash together subatomic particles at a rate just short of the speed of light in search of new forms of matter and new laws of physics.
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According to the meeting, China has poured about 1.5 billion yuan (about $197 million) into the research and development of nanoscience and nanotechnology over the past 15 years, achieving encouraging advances in this regard. For instance, the number of research papers published by Chinese scientists at the international journals in 2006 were on a par with those contributed by their US or Japanese colleagues. The number of patents they have filed for has increased from less than 1,000 in 2001 to more than 4,600 in March 2005.
Under the guidance of the national framework for nanoscience and technology development during the 10th five-year planning period (2001-2005), China made an overall deployment in the fields concerning nanoscience and nanotechnology, such as materials, information, energy sources, medicine and manufacturing. A flagship nanoscience research program has also been launched.
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It’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper—which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.
The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road.
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The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.
Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.
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IP network giant Cisco estimates that the use of video over global consumer IP networks will grow from 22 percent in 2007 to nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic by 2012.
The company’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast for 2007-2012 predicts that IP traffic will increase at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 percent between 2007 and 2012, resulting in an annual bandwidth demand on the world’s IP networks of approximately 522 exabytes(2) or more than half a zettabyte.
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 Evolution is a random process -- or is it? I ask this because we all can name examples of convergent evolution where very different organisms arrived at similar solutions to the challenges they are faced with. One such example is the striking morphological similarities between sharks (marine fishes) and dolphins (marine mammals). Thus, based on observations of convergent evolution, one is tempted to hypothesize that, even if the mutations that underlie evolution itself are random, the "end result" of evolution is not. In fact, this is the central premise of an interesting book by Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution, where he postulates that "the evolutionary routes are many, but the destinations are limited". This is in direct conflict with the late Stephen Jay Gould's hypothesis that a far different evolutionary outcome would occur if we could only replay the "tape of life". So which is it?
Of course, replaying this tape of life is impossible, except when the organisms being studied have a fast enough generation time that we can watch their evolution during our own lifetimes.
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Antique store owners in lower Manhattan, ticket vendors at India's Taj Mahal and Brazilian business executives heading to China all have one thing in common these days: They don't want U.S. dollars. At the Taj Mahal, dollars were always legal tender, alongside rupees, for entry into the palace. But because of the falling value of the dollar, the government implemented a rupees-only policy a month ago. Indian merchants catering to tourists have also turned bearish on the dollar. In Bolivia, billboards feature George Washington's image on a $1 bill alongside a bright pink 500 euro note. "If the dollar's going down ... save it in Euros!!!"
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Author and Carnegie Mellon alum Scott Berkun shows that much of what we know about innovation is wrong as he explores the history of innovation and creative thinking.
Video, 51:10
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The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth. (Requires registration).
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 The City:
Cars without drivers? Humanoid robots in every household? Cyber-hacking? Intelligent camera surveillance systems? Learn about today's scientific advances that will shape our networked cities of tomorrow.
What would you see and experience if the clocks rolled forward 50 years? In a unique blend of drama and science, this three-part series shows you the world of tomorrow. Will we have flying cars? Will advances in medicine help us stay young forever? What about "printing" custom-made vital organs? What will our cities look like? What will tomorrow's wars be about? Will we have robots helping around the house? Will solar power be the new oil?
Supported by the world's leading scientists and research institutes, we embark on a quest to answer some of society's most fundamental questions and reveal the dramas of tomorrow's world along the way. State-of-the-art computer graphics in combination with a dynamic story line will create a world usually only seen in feature films, but with the accuracy and relevance of a documentary. This series is all about opening the window of our future based on science fact, not science fiction.
Video, 43 min
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