Bangkok designers draw attention for air-purifying bike idea

Bangkok designers draw attention for air-purifying bike idea

  9:18:00 PM    Science Lover

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Some observers are calling it "the photosynthesis bike." The bike of interest is only a concept, not even a prototype yet, from designers in Bangkok. Nonetheless, in concept alone, it has captured a lot if imaginations, press coverage, and even picked up an award in the 2013 Red Dot competition for design concept. Dubbed "Air Purifier Bike," from Bangkok-based Lightfog Creative and Design, the bicycle presents a next-level functionality to bicycles as environmentally sound vehicles—to the point where the rider not only uses a clean mode of transport but also helps to purify the air along with the ride. (The Red Dot Award for design concept is part of a professional design competition for design concepts and prototypes worldwide.)

Silawat Virakul, Torsakul Kosaikul, and Suvaroj Poosrivongvanid are the designers behind the award-winning idea. They said their Air-Purifier Bike incorporates an air filter that screens dust and pollutants from the air, a photosynthesis system (including a water tank) that produces oxygen, an electric motor, and a battery. "While it is being ridden, air passes through the filter at the front of the bike, where it is cleaned before being released toward cyclist. The bike frame houses the photosynthesis system. When the bike is parked, the air-purifying functions can continue under battery power."

According to a report on the bicycle and the designers behind it on the Fast Company Co.Exist site, the designers presently have mock-ups, but they have not yet built a prototype; they plan to build one soon.

"We want to design products which can reduce the air pollution in the city. So we decided to design a bike because we thought that bicycles are environmentally friendly vehicles for transportation," said creative director Silawat Virakul in an email to Co.Exist.

"Riding a bicycle can reduce traffic jam[s] in a city," said Virakul. "Moreover, we wanted to add more value to a bicycle by adding its ability to reduce the pollution."

If they were to advance their concept, they would be responding to many urban dwellers who are growing increasingly aware that bicycles ease pollution and are taking to bicycles for short-distance transportation. Earlier this year, Lucintel, a consulting and market research firm, analyzed the global bicycle industry in "Global Bicycle Industry 2013-2018: Trends, Profit, and Forecast Analysis." They noted that government initiatives to promote cycling to reduce carbon emissions and noise pollution are a strong growth driver. In addition, bicycles' energy efficiency, coupled with cycling as a fitness activity, will help propel demand during the forecast period.

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Biological Transistor Enables Computing Within Living Cells

Biological Transistor Enables Computing Within Living Cells

  10:14:00 AM    Science Lover

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When Charles Babbage prototyped the first computing machine in the 19th century, he imagined using mechanical gears and latches to control information. ENIAC, the first modern computer developed in the 1940s, used vacuum tubes and electricity. Today, computers use transistors made from highly engineered semiconducting materials to carry out their logical operations.

Artist's rendering of cells. (Credit: © Jezper / Fotolia)

And now a team of Stanford University bioengineers has taken computing beyond mechanics and electronics into the living realm of biology. In a paper to be published March 28 in Science, the team details a biological transistor made from genetic material -- DNA and RNA -- in place of gears or electrons. The team calls its biological transistor the "transcriptor."

"Transcriptors are the key component behind amplifying genetic logic -- akin to the transistor and electronics," said Jerome Bonnet, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering and the paper's lead author.

The creation of the transcriptor allows engineers to compute inside living cells to record, for instance, when cells have been exposed to certain external stimuli or environmental factors, or even to turn on and off cell reproduction as needed.

"Biological computers can be used to study and reprogram living systems, monitor environments and improve cellular therapeutics," said Drew Endy, PhD, assistant professor of bioengineering and the paper's senior author.

The biological computer

In electronics, a transistor controls the flow of electrons along a circuit. Similarly, in biologics, a transcriptor controls the flow of a specific protein, RNA polymerase, as it travels along a strand of DNA.

"We have repurposed a group of natural proteins, called integrases, to realize digital control over the flow of RNA polymerase along DNA, which in turn allowed us to engineer amplifying genetic logic," said Endy.

Using transcriptors, the team has created what are known in electrical engineering as logic gates that can derive true-false answers to virtually any biochemical question that might be posed within a cell.

They refer to their transcriptor-based logic gates as "Boolean Integrase Logic," or "BIL gates" for short.

Transcriptor-based gates alone do not constitute a computer, but they are the third and final component of a biological computer that could operate within individual living cells.

Despite their outward differences, all modern computers, from ENIAC to Apple, share three basic functions: storing, transmitting and performing logical operations on information.

Last year, Endy and his team made news in delivering the other two core components of a fully functional genetic computer. The first was a type of rewritable digital data storage within DNA. They also developed a mechanism for transmitting genetic information from cell to cell, a sort of biological Internet.

It all adds up to creating a computer inside a living cell.

Boole's gold

Digital logic is often referred to as "Boolean logic," after George Boole, the mathematician who proposed the system in 1854. Today, Boolean logic typically takes the form of 1s and 0s within a computer. Answer true, gate open; answer false, gate closed. Open. Closed. On. Off. 1. 0. It's that basic. But it turns out that with just these simple tools and ways of thinking you can accomplish quite a lot.

"AND" and "OR" are just two of the most basic Boolean logic gates. An "AND" gate, for instance, is "true" when both of its inputs are true -- when "a" and "b" are true. An "OR" gate, on the other hand, is true when either or both of its inputs are true.

In a biological setting, the possibilities for logic are as limitless as in electronics, Bonnet explained. "You could test whether a given cell had been exposed to any number of external stimuli -- the presence of glucose and caffeine, for instance. BIL gates would allow you to make that determination and to store that information so you could easily identify those which had been exposed and which had not," he said.

By the same token, you could tell the cell to start or stop reproducing if certain factors were present. And, by coupling BIL gates with the team's biological Internet, it is possible to communicate genetic information from cell to cell to orchestrate the behavior of a group of cells.

"The potential applications are limited only by the imagination of the researcher," said co-author Monica Ortiz, a PhD candidate in bioengineering who demonstrated autonomous cell-to-cell communication of DNA encoding various BIL gates.

Building a transcriptor

To create transcriptors and logic gates, the team used carefully calibrated combinations of enzymes -- the integrases mentioned earlier -- that control the flow of RNA polymerase along strands of DNA. If this were electronics, DNA is the wire and RNA polymerase is the electron.

"The choice of enzymes is important," Bonnet said. "We have been careful to select enzymes that function in bacteria, fungi, plants and animals, so that bio-computers can be engineered within a variety of organisms."

On the technical side, the transcriptor achieves a key similarity between the biological transistor and its semiconducting cousin: signal amplification.

With transcriptors, a very small change in the expression of an integrase can create a very large change in the expression of any two other genes.

To understand the importance of amplification, consider that the transistor was first conceived as a way to replace expensive, inefficient and unreliable vacuum tubes in the amplification of telephone signals for transcontinental phone calls. Electrical signals traveling along wires get weaker the farther they travel, but if you put an amplifier every so often along the way, you can relay the signal across a great distance. The same would hold in biological systems as signals get transmitted among a group of cells.

"It is a concept similar to transistor radios," said Pakpoom Subsoontorn, a PhD candidate in bioengineering and co-author of the study who developed theoretical models to predict the behavior of BIL gates. "Relatively weak radio waves traveling through the air can get amplified into sound."

Public-domain biotechnology

To bring the age of the biological computer to a much speedier reality, Endy and his team have contributed all of BIL gates to the public domain so that others can immediately harness and improve upon the tools.

"Most of biotechnology has not yet been imagined, let alone made true. By freely sharing important basic tools everyone can work better together," Bonnet said.

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Self-Assembling Nanocubes for Lenses

Self-Assembling Nanocubes for Lenses

  8:39:00 PM    Science Lover

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Researchers at the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering have developed a technique that enables metallic nanocrystals to self-assemble into larger, complex materials for next-generation antennas and lenses. The metal nanocrystals are cube-shaped and, like bricks or Tetris blocks, spontaneously organize themselves into larger-scale structures with precise orientations relative to one another.

UC San Diego nanoengineers have developed a 
technique that enables silver nanocubes to 
self-assemble into larger-scale structures for use in 
new optical chemical and biological sensors, and 
optical circuitry. (Credit: Image courtesy of 
University of California - San Diego)

Their findings were published online June 10 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

This research is in the new field of nanoplasmonics, where researchers are developing materials that can manipulate light using structures that are smaller than the wavelength of light itself. The nanocubes used in this study were less than 0.1 microns; by comparison, the breadth of a human hair is 100 microns. Precise orientation is necessary so that the cubes can confine light (for a nanoscale antenna) or focus light (for a nanoscale lens) at different wavelengths.

"Our findings could have important implications in developing new optical chemical and biological sensors, where light interacts with molecules, and in optical circuitry, where light can be used to deliver information," said Andrea Tao, a professor in the Department of NanoEngineering at the Jacobs School. Tao collaborated with nanoengineering professor Gaurav Arya and post-doctoral researcher Bo Gao.

To construct objects like antennas and lenses, Tao's team is using chemically synthesized metal nanocrystals. The nanocrystals can be synthesized into different shapes to build these structures; in this study, Tao's team created tiny cubes composed of crystalline silver that can confine light when organized into multi-particle groupings. Confining light into ultra-small volumes could allow optical sensors that are extremely sensitive and that could allow researchers to monitor how a single molecule moves, reacts, and changes with time.

To control how the cubes organize, Tao and her colleagues developed a method to graft polymer chains to the silver cube surfaces that modify how the cubes interact with each other. Normally when objects like cubes stack, they pack side-by-side like Tetris blocks. Using simulations, Tao's team predicted that placing short polymer chains on the cube surface would cause them to stack normally, while placing long polymer chains would cause the cubes to stack edge-to-edge. The approach is simple, robust, and versatile.

In demonstrating their technique, the researchers created macroscopic films of nanocubes with these two different orientations and showed that the films reflected and transmitted different wavelengths of light.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, and Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.

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Power from the Air: Device Captures Ambient Electromagnetic Energy to Drive Small Electronic Devices

Power from the Air: Device Captures Ambient Electromagnetic Energy to Drive Small Electronic Devices

  8:44:00 PM    Science Lover

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Researchers have discovered a way to capture and harness energy transmitted by such sources as radio and television transmitters, cell phone networks and satellite communications systems. By scavenging this ambient energy from the air around us, the technique could provide a new way to power networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors and communications chips.

Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
professor Manos Tentzeris holds a sensor (left) and an
ultra-broadband spiral antenna for wearable energy-
scavenging applications. Both were printed on paper using
inkjet technology. (Credit: Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek)

"There is a large amount of electromagnetic energy all around us, but nobody has been able to tap into it," said Manos Tentzeris, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who is leading the research. "We are using an ultra-wideband antenna that lets us exploit a variety of signals in different frequency ranges, giving us greatly increased power-gathering capability."

Tentzeris and his team are using inkjet printers to combine sensors, antennas and energy scavenging capabilities on paper or flexible polymers. The resulting self powered wireless sensors could be used for chemical, biological, heat and stress sensing for defense and industry; radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging for manufacturing and shipping, and monitoring tasks in many fields including communications and power usage.

A presentation on this energy scavenging technology was given July 6 at the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium in Spokane, Wash. The discovery is based on research supported by multiple sponsors, including the National Science Foundation, the Federal Highway Administration and Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

Communications devices transmit energy in many different frequency ranges, or bands. The team's scavenging devices can capture this energy, convert it from AC to DC, and then store it in capacitors and batteries. The scavenging technology can take advantage presently of frequencies from FM radio to radar, a range spanning 100 megahertz (MHz) to 15 gigahertz (GHz) or higher.

Scavenging experiments utilizing TV bands have already yielded power amounting to hundreds of microwatts, and multi-band systems are expected to generate one milliwatt or more. That amount of power is enough to operate many small electronic devices, including a variety of sensors and microprocessors.

And by combining energy scavenging technology with supercapacitors and cycled operation, the Georgia Tech team expects to power devices requiring above 50 milliwatts. In this approach, energy builds up in a battery-like supercapacitor and is utilized when the required power level is reached.

The researchers have already successfully operated a temperature sensor using electromagnetic energy captured from a television station that was half a kilometer distant. They are preparing another demonstration in which a microprocessor-based microcontroller would be activated simply by holding it in the air.

Exploiting a range of electromagnetic bands increases the dependability of energy scavenging devices, explained Tentzeris, who is also a faculty researcher in the Georgia Electronic Design Center at Georgia Tech. If one frequency range fades temporarily due to usage variations, the system can still exploit other frequencies.

The scavenging device could be used by itself or in tandem with other generating technologies. For example, scavenged energy could assist a solar element to charge a battery during the day. At night, when solar cells don't provide power, scavenged energy would continue to increase the battery charge or would prevent discharging.

Utilizing ambient electromagnetic energy could also provide a form of system backup. If a battery or a solar-collector/battery package failed completely, scavenged energy could allow the system to transmit a wireless distress signal while also potentially maintaining critical functionalities.

The researchers are utilizing inkjet technology to print these energy scavenging devices on paper or flexible paper-like polymers -- a technique they already using to produce sensors and antennas. The result would be paper-based wireless sensors that are self powered, low cost and able to function independently almost anywhere.



To print electrical components and circuits, the Georgia Tech researchers use a standard materials inkjet printer. However, they add what Tentzeris calls "a unique in house recipe" containing silver nanoparticles and/or other nanoparticles in an emulsion. This approach enables the team to print not only RF components and circuits, but also novel sensing devices based on such nanomaterials as carbon nanotubes.

When Tentzeris and his research group began inkjet printing of antennas in 2006, the paper-based circuits only functioned at frequencies of 100 or 200 MHz, recalled Rushi Vyas, a graduate student who is working with Tentzeris and graduate student Vasileios Lakafosis on several projects.

"We can now print circuits that are capable of functioning at up to 15 GHz -- 60 GHz if we print on a polymer," Vyas said. "So we have seen a frequency operation improvement of two orders of magnitude."

The researchers believe that self-powered, wireless paper-based sensors will soon be widely available at very low cost. The resulting proliferation of autonomous, inexpensive sensors could be used for applications that include:

• Airport security: Airports have both multiple security concerns and vast amounts of available ambient energy from radar and communications sources. These dual factors make them a natural environment for large numbers of wireless sensors capable of detecting potential threats such as explosives or smuggled nuclear material.
• Energy savings: Self-powered wireless sensing devices placed throughout a home could provide continuous monitoring of temperature and humidity conditions, leading to highly significant savings on heating and air conditioning costs. And unlike many of today's sensing devices, environmentally friendly paper-based sensors would degrade quickly in landfills.
• Structural integrity: Paper or polymer-based sensors could be placed throughout various types of structures to monitor stress. Self powered sensors on buildings, bridges or aircraft could quietly watch for problems, perhaps for many years, and then transmit a signal when they detected an unusual condition.
• Food and perishable material storage and quality monitoring: Inexpensive sensors on foods could scan for chemicals that indicate spoilage and send out an early warning if they encountered problems.
• Wearable bio-monitoring devices: This emerging wireless technology could become widely used for autonomous observation of patient medical issues.

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A Vacuum Cleaner Made Out Of Cardboard

A Vacuum Cleaner Made Out Of Cardboard

  10:04:00 AM    Science Lover

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In another attempt to reduce the amount of plastic refuse that winds up in landfills, Jake Tyler, an industrial design student at Loughborough University has devised a means to construct a working vacuum cleaner out of corrugated cardboard. The vacuum, developed as part of his final year degree project in conjunction with a design team from Vax, where Tyler is now employed, has its housing made of cardboard, while the inside motor works employs recyclable pure nylon plastic using rapid process manufacturing, rather than injection molding.

cardboard vacuum cleaner

Called the Vax ev, the cleaner is designed to be assembled at home by the customer using the cardboard from the box in which it is shipped. The cardboard is pretreated with fire retardant, and because it is the corrugated variety, it is assumed it will be able to withstand the rigors of home vacuuming, though, it isn’t clear just yet how long such a vacuum cleaner would last. In its favor, the entire housing can be easily and cheaply replaced, and customers with some foresight might in fact purchase some extra corrugated cardboard from their local packaging store, along with their new vacuum and then use the original panels as a pattern for fashioning their own replacement panels thus avoiding having to go to the manufacture when their new vac runs afoul of some heavy furniture or perhaps a bit of a liquid spill.



Vax, the U.K.s leading floor-care brand says that the new model will be a limited edition, as it’s uncertain just how many customers would actually buy such an appliance.The housings for traditional vacuum cleaners are generally made of injection molded plastics of the type that take a very long time to decay in a landfill and require large centralized plants to make, which means large transportation costs and more air pollution. With rapid process manufactured plastics, such as those used for the inside parts of the Vax ev, parts can be made almost anywhere, making it easier to set up small plants that are closer to the customer.

In an interesting side-feature, future owners of the Vax should be able to very easily customize their vacuums with felt tip pens, creating designs that might make the vacuum look a little less like a cardboard box with wheels, and more like a piece of art, or even perhaps, more like the plastic covered models that home vacuumer’s are used to seeing.
More information: via Press release

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New Switching Device Could Help Build an Ultrafast 'Quantum Internet'

New Switching Device Could Help Build an Ultrafast 'Quantum Internet'

  3:58:00 PM    Science Lover

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Northwestern University researchers have developed a new switching device that takes quantum communication to a new level. The device is a practical step toward creating a network that takes advantage of the mysterious and powerful world of quantum mechanics.

A new switching device could be used to develop a 'quantum Internet,' where encrypted information would be completely secure, and networking superfast quantum computers. (Credit: iStockphoto/Andrey Prokhorov)

 

The researchers can route quantum bits, or entangled particles of light, at very high speeds along a shared network of fiber-optic cable without losing the entanglement information embedded in the quantum bits. The switch could be used toward achieving two goals of the information technology world: a quantum Internet, where encrypted information would be completely secure, and networking superfast quantum computers.

The device would enable a common transport mechanism, such as the ubiquitous fiber-optic infrastructure, to be shared among many users of quantum information. Such a system could route a quantum bit, such as a photon, to its final destination just like an e-mail is routed across the Internet today.

The research -- a demonstration of the first all-optical switch suitable for single-photon quantum communications -- is published by the journal Physical Review Letters.

"My goal is to make quantum communication devices very practical," said Prem Kumar, AT&T Professor of Information Technology in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and senior author of the paper. "We work in fiber optics so that as quantum communication matures it can easily be integrated into the existing telecommunication infrastructure."

The bits we all know through standard, or classical, communications only exist in one of two states, either "1" or "0." All classical information is encoded using these ones and zeros. What makes a quantum bit, or qubit, so attractive is it can be both one and zero simultaneously as well as being one or zero. Additionally, two or more qubits at different locations can be entangled -- a mysterious connection that is not possible with ordinary bits.

Researchers need to build an infrastructure that can transport this "superposition and entanglement" (being one and zero simultaneously) for quantum communications and computing to succeed.

The qubit Kumar works with is the photon, a particle of light. A photonic quantum network will require switches that don't disturb the physical characteristics (superposition and entanglement properties) of the photons being transmitted, Kumar says. He and his team built an all-optical, fiber-based switch that does just that while operating at very high speeds.

To demonstrate their switch, the researchers first produced pairs of entangled photons using another device developed by Kumar, called an Entangled Photon Source. "Entangled" means that some physical characteristic (such as polarization as used in 3-D TV) of each pair of photons emitted by this device are inextricably linked. If one photon assumes one state, its mate assumes a corresponding state; this holds even if the two photons are hundreds of kilometers apart.

The researchers used pairs of polarization-entangled photons emitted into standard telecom-grade fiber. One photon of the pair was transmitted through the all-optical switch. Using single-photon detectors, the researchers found that the quantum state of the pair of photons was not disturbed; the encoded entanglement information was intact.

"Quantum communication can achieve things that are not possible with classical communication," said Kumar, director of Northwestern's Center for Photonic Communication and Computing. "This switch opens new doors for many applications, including distributed quantum processing where nodes of small-scale quantum processors are connected via quantum communication links."

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Plastic Computer Memory Device That Utilizes Electron Spin to Read and Write Data: Alternative to Traditional Semiconductors

Plastic Computer Memory Device That Utilizes Electron Spin to Read and Write Data: Alternative to Traditional Semiconductors

  11:54:00 AM    Science Lover

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Researchers at Ohio State University have demonstrated the first plastic computer memory device that utilizes the spin of electrons to read and write data.

Abstract digital data. (Credit: iStockphoto)

An alternative to traditional microelectronics, so-called "spintronics" could store more data in less space, process data faster, and consume less power.

In the August 2010 issue of the journal Nature Materials, Arthur J. Epstein and colleagues describe how they created a prototype plastic spintronic device using techniques found in the mainstream computer industry today.

At this point, the device is little more than a thin strip of dark blue organic-based magnet layered with a metallic ferromagnet and connected to two electrical leads. (A ferromagnet is a magnet made of ferrous metal such as iron. Common household refrigerator magnets are ferromagnets.) Still, the researchers successfully recorded data on it and retrieved the data by controlling the spins of the electrons with a magnetic field.

Epstein, Distinguished University Professor of physics and chemistry and director of the Institute for Magnetic and Electronic Polymers at Ohio State, described the material as a hybrid of a semiconductor that is made from organic materials and a special magnetic polymer semiconductor. As such, it is a bridge between today's computers and the all-polymer, spintronic computers that he and his partners hope to enable in the future.

Normal electronics encode computer data based on a binary code of ones and zeros, depending on whether an electron is present in a void within the material. But researchers have long known that electrons can be polarized to orient in particular directions, like a bar magnet. They refer to this orientation as spin -- either "spin up" or "spin down" -- and have been working on a way to store data using spin. The resulting electronics, dubbed spintronics, would effectively let computers store and transfer twice as much data per electron.

But higher data density is only part of the story.

"Spintronics is often just seen as a way to get more information out of an electron, but really it's about moving to the next generation of electronics," Epstein said. "We could solve many of the problems facing computers today by using spintronics."

Typical circuit boards use a lot of energy. Moving electrons through them creates heat, and it takes a lot of energy to cool them. Chip makers are limited in how closely they can pack circuits together to avoid overheating.

Flipping the spin of an electron requires less energy, and produces hardly any heat at all, he explained. That means that spintronic devices could run on smaller batteries. If they were made out of plastic, they would also be light and flexible.

"We would love to take portable electronics to a spin platform," Epstein said. "Think about soldiers in the field who have to carry heavy battery packs, or even civilian 'road warriors' commuting to meetings. If we had a lighter weight spintronic device which operates itself at a lower energy cost, and if we could make it on a flexible polymer display, soldiers and other users could just roll it up and carry it. We see this portable technology as a powerful platform for helping people."

The magnetic polymer semiconductor in this study, vanadium tetracyanoethanide, is the first organic-based magnet that operates above room temperature. It was developed by Epstein and his long-standing collaborator Joel S. Miller of the University of Utah. Postdoctoral researcher Jung-Woo Yoo called the new material an important milestone in spintronic research.

"Our main achievement is that we applied this polymer-based magnet semiconductor as a spin polarizer -- meaning we could save data (spin up and down) on it using a tiny magnetic field -- and a spin detector -- meaning we could read the data back," he said. "Now we are closer to constructing a device from all-organic material."

In the prototype device, electrons pass into the polymer, and a magnetic field orients them as spin up or spin down. The electrons can then pass into the conventional magnetic layer, but only if the spin of electrons there are oriented in the same way. If they are not, the resistance is too high for the electrons to pass. So the researchers were able to read spin data from their device based on whether the resistance was high or low.

Collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prepared a sample of conventional magnetic film, and Yoo and his Ohio State colleagues layered it together with the organic magnet to make a working device.

As a test, the researchers exposed the material to a magnetic field that varied in strength over time. To determine whether the material recorded the magnetic pattern and functioned as a good spin injector/detector, they measured the electric current passing through the two magnetic layers. This method is similar to the way computers read and write data to a magnetic hard drive today.

The results, Yoo said, were "textbook" -- they retrieved the magnetic data in its entirety, exactly as they stored it.

The patented technology should transfer easily to industry, he added. "Any place that makes computer chips could do this. Plus, in this case, we made the device at room temperature, and the process is very eco-friendly."

Coauthors on the paper included Chia-Yi Chen and Vladimir Prigodin of Ohio State, and H.W. Jang, C.W. Bark, and Chang-Beom Eom of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This research was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.

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PCs that Work While They Sleep

PCs that Work While They Sleep

  9:47:00 AM    Science Lover

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SleepServer creates a virtual copy of a dozing machine.

Software that lets desktop computers continue to function in sleep mode could reduce the energy consumption of office networks by around 60 percent.

Networked PCs are increasingly being left on 24/7 to allow for out-of-hours access by employees, says Yuvraj Agarwal, at the University of California, San Diego. "The administrator may want to do a backup, or the user may want to be able to connect into it," he says. But most of the time these PCs remain idle, wasting significant amounts of energy, he says.

Energy saver: Yuvraj Agarwal
demonstrates the SleepServer control
software.
Credit: UC San Diego / Erik Jepsen

Agarwal's solution, developed with two UCSD professors, Stefan Savage and Rajesh Gupta, is to create a stripped down, virtual copy of a machine. Software running on a remote server maintains a version of a PC's operating systems and applications. The software, called SleepServer, carries on tasks on behalf of the desktop machine while it is put into a low-energy sleep mode.

This lets SleepServer perform basic tasks on behalf of the PC, such as downloading files or staying logged into voice communications or instant-messaging software. When more complex activity is required, the software wakes up the computer, says Agarwal, a process that typically takes less than 10 seconds.

"Normally if I put my computer to sleep, then Skype is going to show that I'm offline, or I won't be able to continue downloading a large file from the Internet," says Agarwal. SleepServer maintains a fast connection, over the internal network, to each desktop, so any files it has downloaded on behalf of a PC can be transferred quickly.

The energy savings come from the fact that each server can host up to 500 virtual machines. Even the latest low-power computers consume around 45 watts of power when idle. In contrast, a single SleepServer machine runs at just 300 watts, Agarwal says. Using fully functional virtual machines and low power "thin client" desktop machines could reduce power consumption further still.

In trials, details of which were presented at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston last week, 30 PCs used SleepServer for two weeks. The energy they consumed was dropped by between 27 and 86 percent--an average reduction of 60 percent, says Agarwal. With up to 80 percent of electricity consumption in modern offices coming from computing equipment, the savings a SleepServer offers could be roughly equivalent to $60 per computer each year, he says. Fifty PCs in the computer science building of UCSD are now running SleepServer.

Other software can be used to wake up sleeping computers, such as Apple's Wake-on Demand and Microsoft's Sleep Proxy. But these applications do not carry out tasks on behalf of a sleeping machine.

"It's a clever approach," says Howard Noble, principle investigator of the Low Carbon Information and Communication Technology Project, at the University of Oxford, in the U.K.

But Noble says it would be preferable to be able to power down computers completely. Modern computers can still consume as much as five watts when asleep. "We have never found it to be reliable, because often they don't stay asleep," he says.

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New Generation of Neuro-Computer Develop by Computer Scientists

New Generation of Neuro-Computer Develop by Computer Scientists

  7:54:00 PM    Science Lover

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Intelligent machines that not only think for themselves but also actively learn are the vision of researchers of the Institute for Theoretical Science (IGI) at Graz University of Technology.

They have been co-ordinating the European Union research project "Brain-i-Nets" (Novel Brain Inspired Learning Paradigms for Large-Scale Neuronal Networks) for three years, and are launching a three-day meeting of the participating researchers in Graz. The scientists want to design a new generation of neuro-computers based on the principles of calculation and learning mechanisms found in the brain, and at the same time gain new knowledge about the brain's learning mechanisms.

The human brain consists of a network of several billion nerve cells. These are joined together by independent connections called synapses. Synapses are changing all the time -- something scientists name synaptic plasticity. This highly complex system represents a basis for independent thinking and learning. But even today there are still many open questions for researchers.

"In contrast to today's computers, the brain doesn't carry out a set programme but rather is always adapting functions and reprogramming them anew. Many of these effects have not been explained," comments IGI head Wolfgang Maass together with project co-ordinator Robert Legenstein. In co-operation with neuroscientists and physicists, and with the help of new experimental methods, they want to research the mechanisms of synaptic plasticity in the organism.

Revolutionising the information society

The researchers are hoping to gain new knowledge from this research about the learning mechanisms in the human brain. They want to use this knowledge of learning mechanisms to develop new learning methods for artificial systems which process information. The scientists' long-term goal is to develop adaptive computers together which have the potential to revolutionise today's information society.

The three-year project is financed by the EU funding framework "Future Emerging Technologies" (FET), which supports especially innovative and visionary approaches in information technology. International experts chose only nine out of the 176 applications, among which was "Brain-i-Nets." Partners of the research initiative worth 2.6m euro include University College London, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg und the University of Zurich.

For more information, visit: http://www.brain-i-nets.eu

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'Wet' Computing Systems to Boost Processing Power

'Wet' Computing Systems to Boost Processing Power

  2:18:00 AM    Science Lover

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A new kind of information processing technology inspired by chemical processes in living systems is being developed by researchers at the University of Southampton.

Sketch of artificial wet neuronal networks. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southampton)

Dr Maurits de Planque and Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) are working on a project which has just received €1.8 from the European Union's Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Proactive Initiatives, which recognises ground-breaking work which has already demonstrated important potential.

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Glitter-Sized Solar Photovoltaics Could Revolutionize the Way Solar Energy Is Collected and Used

Glitter-Sized Solar Photovoltaics Could Revolutionize the Way Solar Energy Is Collected and Used

  1:21:00 AM    Science Lover

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Sandia National Laboratories scientists have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells that could revolutionize the way solar energy is collected and used.

Representative thin crystalline-silicon photovoltaic cells -- these are from 14 to 20 micrometers thick and 0.25 to 1 millimeter across. (Credit: Image by Murat Okandan)

The tiny cells could turn a person into a walking solar battery charger if they were fastened to flexible substrates molded around unusual shapes, such as clothing.

The solar particles, fabricated of crystalline silicon, hold the potential for a variety of new applications. They are expected eventually to be less expensive and have greater efficiencies than current photovoltaic collectors that are pieced together with 6-inch- square solar wafers.

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