Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have made a breakthrough in the effort to uniformly control the orientation of liquid crystal molecules by developing a stable, rewritable memory device that takes advantage of the “anchoring transition” property of liquid crystals. The team was able to align rod-like liquid crystal molecules in a polymer using a laser beam or electrical field. The liquid crystal can store and erase data, and be used repeatedly. “This is the first rewritable memory device utilizing anchoring transition,” says lead researcher Hideo Takezoe. The device also is bi-stable–the liquid crystals retain their orientation in one of two directions–and does not need power to keep images, Takezoe says.
View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Improvements to network bandwidth will be for naught unless the Internet’s underlying protocols are updated, says Google’s Urs Holzle. He says that in the next few years the average network speed worldwide will likely expand three-fold from 1.8 Mbps to 5.4 Mbps. Holzle speculates that, according to internal tests at Google, Internet protocols as well as the browser are the reason a disparity exists between what Web page load times should be and what they actually are. Google is attempting to upgrade browser speeds with Google Chrome, which aims to achieve 100 millisecond load times–but this advance cannot come without changes to Net protocols. Google has successfully increased the speed of its search engine by 18 percent without changing the site itself by making “some very modest changes” to the TCP protocol, Holzle says. Meanwhile, Google’s in-development SPDY protocol is designed to reduce Web latency via improvements such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization, and HTTP header compression. Holzle says SPDY can slash packet counts by 40 percent and byte counts by 15 percent.
View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

European researchers working on the StratusLab project are developing software designed to improve distributed computing infrastructures in an effort to enable research and higher education organizations to pool computing resources. Trinity College Dublin (TCD) researchers are leading the development of a repository of virtual appliances that will make it easier to create grid systems. The virtual appliances repository is designed to facilitate the growth and availability of grid computing for researchers. “The StratusLab toolkit will make the grid easier to manage and will allow grids to tap into commercial cloud services to meet peak demands,” says TCD’s David O’Callaghan. “Later it will allow organizations that already provide a grid service to offer a cloud service to academic users, whilst retaining the many benefits of the grid approach.” The StratusLab project enhances the distributed computing infrastructure ecosystem by simplifying management, adding flexibility, and increasing maintainability, quality, energy efficiency, and resiliency of computing sites.
View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

The fusion of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-performance data (HPD) could potentially result in the generation of robust systems that are at least one order of magnitude faster than anything the HPC community currently uses for certain applications, says San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) interim director Michael Norman. Last November, SDSC announced plans to construct Gordon, a data-intensive supercomputer that is expected to read latency-bound files at 10 times the speed and efficiency of current HPC systems with the help of flash memory solid state drives. Ultimately, Gordon will possess 245 teraflops of total compute power, 64 TB of digital random access memory, and 256 TB of flash memory. Gordon also will assist in the integration of HPC and HPD because it is designed for data-intensive predictive science as well as data-mining applications.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Researchers working on the European Union-funded PERPLEXUS project have developed a computing platform inspired by biological systems in which a self-configuring wireless network connects several modules to enable them to operate as a coherent group. PERPLEXUS is based on the ubidule, a purpose-designed module that can take information from the environment, share data wirelessly, and adapt its behavior to different circumstances. In large networks, ubidules can evolve to specialize in a certain task, which other ubidules then delegate to them. The researchers say that ubidules can model grid-based problems in the physical sciences, as well as more challenging biological and social sciences problems. Another branch of the PERPLEXUS project involved a fleet of all-terrain robots equipped with ubichips. The researchers developed a strategy known as collective robotics, in which groups of robots communicate with one another to perform a task and are more effective than the same robots acting individually.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Flying pixels have the potential to offer a more immersive three-dimensional (3D) viewing experience than 3D television sets, according to engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The engineers describe their unique 3D display, called Flyfire, as a flock of tiny aircraft carrying multicolored light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The pixels can hover in front of a viewer and form an image, but they also can change their position to add greater depth to the image. “It’s a 3D display with a dual aspect–it can show an image like a traditional display, but then those pixels can move and transform into another shape,” says MIT’s E. Roon Kang. The initial proof-of-principle experiments used quad-rotor helicopters more than 10 centimeters across, and the precise control of their altitude was within three centimeters. Kang says it could take at least five years to make a display with 1,000 or more of the small flying pixels. MIT’s Emilio Frazzoli says onboard controls and a central control system also will be needed to coordinate pixel movement.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Nagoya University researchers have developed a light-activated switch to turn nanomachines on and off. The team used tiny triggered tweezers made of DNA to open and close in response to ultraviolet (UV) and visible light. “We are designing DNA nano-robotics that are mechanically operated by light rather than chemical fuel,” says Nagoya researcher Hiroyuki Asanuma. The researchers focused on a loop of DNA that looks like a hairpin with two arms. At the end of each arm, azobenzene groups are integrated into the DNA sequence. Under visible light, the azobenzene groups adopt the trans isomer, allowing the base pairs to join together. When UV light is applied, the azobenzene groups switch to the more sterically-constrained cis isomer. The system is fully reversible, allowing it to have great potential to be applied to other nanotechnologies that use DNA. “To be able to switch biomolecular conformational changes is of considerable interest for many applications in biomedicine and bionanotechnology,” says Technical University of Munich’s Friedrich Simmel.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Microsoft Live Labs researchers have developed Pivot, a tool designed to visually organize large data sets. Pivot presents data in the form of several images accompanied by textual data. Users can zoom into the images to study individual pieces of data, or zoom out to see items grouped according to certain criteria. Data collections can contain a few images with static data attached, or they can be large and connected to a feed of changing data. Pivot is based on Microsoft’s Seadragon, software designed for manipulating large amounts of visual information. Users can make their own collections of data by converting images to the Deep Zoom format used by Seadragon, and annotate them using a format based on extensible markup language. Pivot also could provide a better way to sort through Internet search results, because users could sort through thousands of results visually, instead of just looking a list of the top 10 search results.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Carole Palmer says data curation is an important part of supporting and advancing research. “This is especially important in data-intensive science, where the power of discovery lies in applying computational approaches to large, aggregated data sets,” Palmer says. She says researchers need to plan around data-management requirements from the beginning of their projects, and to think in terms of a data set’s lifecycle. The biggest hurdles to overcome in collecting, curating, and managing data over a long period of time involve cost and labor. Even with the Internet and search engines, data stored online does not last nearly as long as data preserved in print. “We’re just beginning to do the research needed to guide how we build large-scale, multidisciplinary data repositories and collect and manage data in ways that add value and promote sharing and integration across laboratories, institutions, and disciplines,” Palmer says.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Vienna University of Technology researchers have developed the “deanonymization” attack as a way to reveal the identity of Internet users based on their interactions in social networks. The attack uses social networking groups as well as traditional browser history-stealing tactics to single out specific users. The researchers focused on Germany’s Xing business social network and Facebook and matched stolen browsing histories with social network group members to identify users. “It is the combination of history stealing and group information that is novel,” says Vienna University post-doctoral researcher Gilbert Wondracek. Criminals could use the deanonymization method for targeted attacks, which only requires that the victim visit a malicious Web site that contains the attack code. There is no fix for the attack, but users can turn off their browsing history or use a private-browsing mode to minimize the risk.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com