Eden.fm

DailyTech – Visual Circuits Harness the Power of the Human Brain

Think your computer is fast? Check out your brain.

The human brain is faster than any computer in the world, including the new RoadRunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory that clocked in last month at a staggering 1.144 petaflop/s, just one part of the cerebral network can perform an as yet immeasurable number of calculations per second. The visual cortex alone, which scientists tried to mimic only a small part of while setting the supercomputer speed record, defies nature with its incredibly ability to process information.

DailyTech – NASA Solves 30-year Mystery of Auroras

NASA used its five THEMIS spacecraft orbiting the Earth to spot the trigger for the substorms that cause the aurora to develop. The trigger was very strong energy bursts in the Earth’s magnetic field. The THEMIS probes monitored the level of energy in the Earth’s magnetic field. The probes were able to find substorms that originated in the tail of the Earth’s magnetosphere that flows away from the sun.

DailyTech – Fresh Drinking Water From Salt Water Coming Using New Chlorine-tolerant Membrane

New membrane will help to ensure many parts of the world have easy access to drinking water.

DailyTech – Texas Memory SSD Breaks Speed, Capacity Record

Texas Memory says that its RamSan-440 can sustain a record setting 600,000 IOPS (input/outputs per second) and can be had with capacities of 256GB and 512GB.

The RamSan-440 uses DDR2 RAM reports eWeek and can sustain 4Gbps random read and write speed with a latency of under 15 ms. The device is in a 4U rack mount chassis and can be attached via SAN or directly attached via up to eight 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports.

DailyTech – Lightning Car Company Shows Off All-electric Lightning GT

LCC’s fast charge system allows the battery to charge to 80 percent in two or three minutes. Recapturing the remaining 20 percent will take another 7 or eight minutes according to LCC. The vehicle is said to travel 200 miles on a 10-minute charge.

DailyTech – SanDisk CEO: Vista is Not a Friend to [Our] SSDs

At least, that’s what Sandisk’s CEO thought, even if their disks suck also in XP

Read the entire article in the source link above.

It is quite true that SanDisk’s SSD are woefully subpar in performance when running Windows Vista. Numerous benchmarks from around the web have shown SanDisk SSDs getting outpaced by the competition.

In fact, it’s not uncommon to see SanDisk SSDs rank last in testing in almost every benchmark and by a large margin — even in Windows XP. Recent testing showed that MSI’s Wind netbook was no faster with a SanDisk SATA 5000 SSD than with the standard 80GB HDD — an Eee PC 1000h featuring similar specifications was significantly faster with a competing SSD from Samsung.

While Vista may be a performance inhibitor compared to Windows XP for SSDs, it appears that most new, current-generation SSDs are having no problems performing well with the operating system. The problem appears to be SanDisk’s low reads and writes (67 MB/sec and 50 MB/sec respectively) compared to the competition (i.e., OCZ’s new Core Series SSDs which clock in at 120 to 143 MB/sec for reads and 80 to 93 MB/sec for writes).

DailyTech – EU Officials: Just 0.3% Of Sahara’s Sun Energy Could Power Entire EU

The largest fully industrialized populus in the world could be entirely powered by a small fraction of solar desert energy, according to new plan

DailyTech – Geologists Find 90 Billion New Barrels of Oil in Arctic

Race to claim begins

The Arctic may hold far more oil than previously thought; as much as 90 billion undiscovered barrels according to a new study released today by the US Geological Survey.   The new amount, equivalent to nearly 20 years of US foreign oil imports, is worth over $11 trillion dollars at current oil prices.  One third of the amount may lie in Alaska alone, according to the study’s authors.The region also holds nearly 1,700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 27% of known world gas reserves.  Counting known deposits already surveyed, total oil and gas deposits in the Arctic are more than 410 billion barrels.

The study, known as CARA — Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal — included only those deposits that could be tapped with current technology.  Future advances would likely boost the number further.  Researchers in Denmark, Greenland, Canada, and Norway contributed data to the study.

According to project chief, Donald Gautier, “The extensive Arctic continental shelves may constitute the geographically largest unexplored prospective area for petroleum remaining on Earth.”

A geopolitical scramble for the resources is beginning.  Russia has taken steps to secure rights to the region, last year sending a nuclear-powered ship to map a possible undersea connection between Siberia and the North Pole.  This would allow the nation a rationale to circumvent the UN 200-mile limit of offshore resource claims.

Seven other nations have claims for the area, including Norway, Sweden, Canada, and the U.S.  Earlier this month, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the nation intends to “defend” its sovereignty in the Arctic, backing up the statement with a plan to divert 8 military patrol ships to the region, along with a new deep-water port.

DailyTech – Harnessing Nanotechnology to Build Exotic Materials

Europe looks into the finer points of nanotechnology.

DailyTech – New Cancer Drug Delivery Cuts Tumor Targetting From Days To Hours

To accomplish this ultra-speedy delivery, researchers used gold nanoparticle vectors to deliver photodynamic therapy (PDT) drugs, a class of drugs that burn away cancer with light via wavelength energization, to tumors.  Case Western Reserve University graduate student Yu Cheng, one of the paper’s coauthors explains, “Gold nanoparticles are usually not used for the PDT drug vector.  However, gold is chemically inert and nontoxic.”

DailyTech – Researchers Peer Into Gold Nanoclusters

Gold nanoparticles are widely used by researchers around the globe. Because they are stable and have defined electronic, electrochemical, and optical properties; they are useful for a great many types of work. However, until recently, how the particles’ structures were as stable as they are has been a mystery. These superatoms, often composed of gold and one or more additional elements, hid their molecular and electronic structures from scientists quite well.

Research done by a collection of universities including Georgia Tech University, Stanford University, the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden broke through the haze of the mysterious atomic clusters. Earlier work at Stanford in 2007 disproved a popular theory that secondary atoms, in this case sulfur atoms, simply sat atop a structure of pure gold, connected to multiple atoms of the core.

Instead, the organic sulfer molecules, known as thiolates, stole gold atoms from the core forming a protective cover around it attached by the thiolate-gold-thiolate bonds. This confirmed, instead, a “divide and protect” theory predicted by Hannu Häkkinen, a professor at the University of Jyväskylä, formerly of Georgia Tech.

The accumulated work has been used to predict the structures of different gold nanoclusters involving various amounts of gold atoms. At least one of these structures, a 25 gold atom cluster, has been confirmed by another group of researchers.

Further understanding the complex gold nanoparticles will aid scientists in designing custom gold nanoparticles for use in various areas of research. “We now have a unified model that provides a solid background for nanoengineering ligand-protected gold clusters for applications in catalysis, sensing, photonics, bio-labeling and molecular electronics,” Häkkinen explained.

Researcher to demonstrate attack code for Intel chips | InfoWorld | News | 2008-07-14 | By Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service.

Security researcher and author Kris Kaspersky plans to demonstrate how an attacker can target flaws in Intel’s microprocessors to remotely attack a computer using JavaScript or TCP/IP packets, regardless of what operating system the computer is running.

Kaspersky will demonstrate how such an attack can be made in a presentation at the upcoming Hack In The Box (HITB) Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during October. The proof-of-concept attacks will show how processor bugs, called errata, can be exploited using certain instruction sequences and a knowledge of how Java compilers work, allowing an attacker to take control of the compiler.

“I’m going to show real working code…and make it publicly available,” Kaspersky said, adding that CPU bugs are a growing threat and malware is being written that targets these vulnerabilities.

Different bugs will allow hackers to do different things on the attacked computers. “Some bugs just crash the system, some allow a hacker to gain full control on the kernel level. Some just help to attack Vista, disabling security protections,” he said.

The demonstrated attack will be made against fully patched computers running a range of operating systems, including Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Linux and BSD, Kaspersky said, adding that the demonstration of an attack against a Mac is also a possibility.

Processors contain hundreds of millions of transistors and errata in these chips are relatively common. While some errata can affect a chip’s ability to function properly — such as the errata that last year forced Advanced Micro Devices to push back volume shipments of its quad-core Opteron processors — many others exist unnoticed by users.

For example, the Silverthorne version of Intel’s Atom processor, which lies at the heart of the Centrino Atom chip platform, contains 35 errata, according to a June specification update released by Intel.

“It’s possible to fix most of the bugs, and Intel provides workarounds to the major BIOS vendors,” Kaspersky said, referring to the code that controls the most basic functions of a PC. “However, not every vendor uses it and some bugs have no workarounds.”

Technology Review: Self-Cooling Microchips

As computer chips are crammed with more and more transistors, they run hotter, and traditional cooling mechanisms–heat sinks and fans–are having trouble keeping up. But future chips might cool themselves with a special ­gadget that uses ionized air and an electric field to create a tiny breeze. In a so-called ion pump, a high voltage across two ­electrodes strips electrons from molecules of ­oxygen and nitrogen in the air, creating positively charged ions. These ions flow to the negatively charged electrode, dragging along surrounding air molecules and cooling the chip. Researchers from Intel, the University of Washington Seattle, and ­Kronos Advanced Technologies of Redmond, WA, say a prototype can cool a two-­square-­millimeter spot on a ­surface by 25 ºC. Since the ion pump is made from silicon, it can be constructed as part of the chip-making process. Project leader Alex Mamishev, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington, says he expects the technology to be incorporated into commercial chips within two years.

Japan’s Ancient Underwater “Pyramid” Mystifies Scholars

Click on the source for the entire article

Submerged stone structures lying just below the waters off Yonaguni Jima are actually the ruins of a Japanese Atlantis—an ancient city sunk by an earthquake about 2,000 years ago. That’s the belief of Masaaki Kimura, a marine geologist at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan who has been diving at the site to measure and map its formations for more than 15 years.

Each time he returns to the dive boat, Kimura said, he is more convinced than ever that below him rest the remains of a 5,000-year-old city.

Samsung NV100HD – click for info