DailyTech – Carbon Nanotubes Now Promising Better Flexible Displays, Circuits
Scientists working with carbon nanotubes and flexible circuitry continue to push reality towards fantasy.
DailyTech – Researchers Invent Reusable Nanopatterning Process
To form their nanoscale patterns, Penn researchers created a layer of PDMS gel on a grid of silicon pillars, 1 µm in diameter, each spaced 2 µm apart. In order to create the “diamond plate” pattern they used, the group harnessed known properties of these gels to swell while wetted by a solvent. The circular pores created in the material eventually deform elliptically along the same axis due to elastic interaction while the polymer is swelled under the influence of the solvent.
DailyTech – Report: Chinese Hotels Ordered to Spy on Olympic Guests’ Internet
Entire article by Dailytech
Journalists, fans, and support staff betrayed by false “open internet” pledge
A secret order to foreign-owned Chinese hotels compels them to spy on guests during the Olympic Games, according to a memo revealed Tuesday by U.S. Senator Sam Brownback.Brownback, a republican representing Kansas, said he received a document issued by the Chinese Public Security bureau, which orders hotels to install spying equipment on their internet connections and threatens owners with “severe retaliation” – including the possibility of losing their operating licenses – should they fail to comply.
“These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order,” said Brownback at a news conference Tuesday, noting that it forces them into the “awkward position” of having to “craft pop-up messages” informing guests of their loss of privacy.
Brownback said he received a copy of the original document, translated from Chinese, from attorneys representing two different “foreign-owned” hotel chains. The companies want to remain anonymous so that they don’t face further reprisal. Several other international hotel chains confirmed the order.
An AP report said the Chinese embassy was unavailable for comment.
According to the memo, hotels were told that “all hotel rooms and offices” are considered subject to “on-site or remote technical monitoring at all times.”
With little more than a week remaining before the 2008 Summer Olympics begin in Beijing, Chinese hotel owners appear to have little choice. Despite their outrage, hotel companies are more concerned about the long-term repercussions of non-compliance – failure to obey could place an entire company’s operations in jeopardy, potentially locking them out of a lucrative, growing Chinese market.
Meanwhile, athletes and participants staying at the Olympic Village have a unique set of woes for their internet access: an IT contractor recently leaked a list of rates for DSL service charged by BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games), with the cheapest option being a 512/512 kilobit line available for 11,700 RMB ($1716.05 USD).
“I just can’t believe that not only do I have to deal with the Great Firewall of China, but also pay through the nose to use it!” wrote the anonymous contractor.
According to Australian newspaper The Age, the International Olympic Committee issued a formal apology Wednesday for “misleading” the world’s press about the China’s “open internet” pledge. Senior IOC member Kevan Gosper, who originally delivered the promise of “unfettered freedom to report in China,” said he was unaware of the apparently backroom negotiations with Chinese censors, which will keep a number of “sensitive sites” blocked from access.
Age reporters said they were unable to access a number of sites involving human rights discussions, Tibet, and the Falun Gong, with merely intermittent access to a larger portfolio of websites including the New York Times, BBC China, al-Jazeera, Radio Free Asia, and Taiwanese newspapers.
BOCOG spokesman Sun Weide said that China promised journalists that they would “be able to use the internet for their work during the Olympic Games. So we have given them sufficient access to do that.”
13 Years of Nvidia Graphics Cards – Picture Story – Tom’s Hardware
Cool article by Tom’s Hardware about the nvidia cards evolution
DailyTech – Star Goes Nova in Our Galaxy and No One Noticed
Exploding star would have been visible to the naked eye
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.”
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