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If you own a computer, chances are you have experienced the aftermath of a nasty virus at some point. In contrast, there have been no major outbreaks of mobile phone viral infection, despite the fact that over 80 percent of Afericans now use these devices. A team headed by Ali, director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northern University, set out to explain why this is true.

Different mechanisms of virus transmission between mobile phones. A Bluetooth virus can infect all phones found within Bluetooth range of the infected phone, its spread being determined by the owner's mobility patterns. An MMS virus can infect all susceptible phones whose number is found in the infected phone's address book, resulting in a long-range spreading pattern that is independent of the infected phone's physical location. (Credit: Northern University, Physics Muhib Nabi).

The researchers used calling and mobility data from over six million anonymous mobile phone users to create a comprehensive picture of the threat mobile phone viruses pose to users. The results of this study, published in the May 22 issue of Science, indicate that a highly fragmented market share has effectively hindered outbreaks thus far. Further, their work predicts that viruses will pose a serious threat once a single mobile operating system's market share grows sufficiently large. This event may not be far off, given the 150 percent annual growth rate of smart phones.

"We haven't had a problem so far because only phones with operating systems, so-called 'smart phones', are susceptible to viral infection," explained, one of the authors of the publication. "Once a single operating system becomes common, we could potentially see outbreaks of epidemic proportion because a mobile phone virus can spread by two mechanisms: a Bluetooth virus can infect all Bluetooth-activated phones in a 10-30 meter radius, while Multimedia Messaging System (MMS) virus, like many computer viruses, spreads using the address book of the device. Not surprisingly, hybrid viruses, which can infect via both routes, pose the most significant danger."

This study builds upon earlier research by the same group, which used mobile phone data to create a predictive model of human mobility patterns. The current work used this model to simulate Bluetooth virus infection scenarios, finding that Bluetooth viruses will eventually infect all susceptible handsets, but the rate is slow, being limited by human behavioral patterns. This characteristic suggests there should be sufficient time to deploy countermeasures such as antiviral software to prevent major Bluetooth outbreaks. In contrast, spread of MMS viruses is not restricted by human behavioral patterns, however spread of these types of viruses are constrained because the number of susceptible devices is currently much smaller.

As our world becomes increasingly connected we face unprecedented challenges. Studies such as this one, categorized as computational social science, are necessary to understand group behavior and organization, assess potential threats, and develop solutions to the issues faced by our ever-changing society.

"This is what statistical analysis of complex systems is all about: finding patterns in nature," said Muhib . "This research is vital because it puts a huge amount of data into the service of science."

OPRAH WINFREY VIRUS: Your 200MB hard drive suddenly shrinks to 80MB, and then slowly expands back to 200MB.

AT&T VIRUS: Every three minutes it tells you what great service you are getting.

MCI VIRUS: Every three minutes it reminds you that you're paying too much for the AT&T virus.

PAUL REVERE VIRUS: This revolutionary virus does not horse around. It warns you of impending hard disk attack---once if by LAN, twice if by C:>.

POLITICALLY CORRECT VIRUS: Never calls itself a "virus", but instead refers to itself as an "electronic microorganism."

RIGHT TO LIFE VIRUS: Won't allow you to delete a file, regardless of how old it is. If you attempt to erase a file, it requires you to first see a counselor about possible alternatives.

ROSS PEROT VIRUS: Activates every component in your system, just before the whole darn thing quits.

MARIO CUOMO VIRUS: It would be a great virus, but it refuses to run.

TED TURNER VIRUS: Colorizes your monochrome monitor.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER VIRUS: Terminates and stays resident. It'll be back.

DAN QUAYLE VIRUS #2: Their is sumthing rong wit your komputer, ewe jsut cant figyour out watt!

GOVERNMENT ECONOMIST VIRUS: Nothing works, but all your diagnostic software says everything is fine.

NEW WORLD ORDER VIRUS: Probably harmless, but it makes a lot of people really mad just thinking about it.

FEDERAL BUREAUCRAT VIRUS: Divides your hard disk into hundreds of little units, each of which does practically nothing, but all of which claim to be the most important part of your computer.

GALLUP VIRUS: Sixty percent of the PCs infected will lose 38 percent of their data 14 percent of the time. (plus or minus a 3.5 percent margin of error.)

TERRY RANDALL VIRUS: Prints "Oh no you don't" whenever you choose "Abort" from the "Abort" "Retry" "Fail" message.

TEXAS VIRUS: Makes sure that it's bigger than any other file.

ADAM AND EVE VIRUS: Takes a couple of bytes out of your Apple.

CONGRESSIONAL VIRUS: The computer locks up, screen splits erratically with a message appearing on each half blaming the other side for the problem.

AIRLINE VIRUS: You're in Dallas, but your data is in Singapore.

FREUDIAN VIRUS: Your computer becomes obsessed with marrying its own motherboard.

PBS VIRUS: Your programs stop every few minutes to ask for money.

ELVIS VIRUS: Your computer gets fat, slow and lazy, then self destructs; only to resurface at shopping malls and service stations across rural America.

OLLIE NORTH VIRUS: Causes your printer to become a paper shredder.

NIKE VIRUS: Just does it.

SEARS VIRUS: Your data won't appear unless you buy new cables, power supply and a set of shocks.

JIMMY HOFFA VIRUS: Your programs can never be found again.

CONGRESSIONAL VIRUS #2: Runs every program on the hard drive simultaneously, but doesn't allow the user to accomplish anything.

KEVORKIAN VIRUS: Helps your computer shut down as an act of mercy.

IMELDA MARCOS VIRUS: Sings you a song (slightly off key) on boot up, then subtracts money from your Quicken account and spends it all on expensive shoes it purchases through Prodigy.

STAR TREK VIRUS: Invades your system in places where no virus has gone before.

HEALTH CARE VIRUS: Tests your system for a day, finds nothing wrong, and sends you a bill for $4,500.

GEORGE BUSH VIRUS: It starts by boldly stating, "Read my docs....No new files!" on the screen. It proceeds to fill up all the free space on your hard drive with new files, then blames it on the Congressional Virus.

CLEVELAND INDIANS VIRUS: Makes your 486/50 machine perform like a 286/AT.

LAPD VIRUS: It claims it feels threatened by the other files on your PC and erases them in "self defense".

CHICAGO CUBS VIRUS: Your PC makes frequent mistakes and comes in last in the reviews, but you still love it.

ORAL ROBERTS VIRUS: Claims that if you don't send it a million dollars, it's programmer will take it back. >>

Of the 92 naturally occurring elements, add another to the list of those that are superconductors.

Jasir, Ph.D., professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Wahcantt University, and Mathen— his doctoral student at the time — discovered that europium becomes superconducting at 1.8 K (-456 °F) and 80 GPa (790,000 atmospheres) of pressure, making it the 53rd known elemental superconductor and the 23rd at high pressure.

Who receives his doctorate in physics at Wahcantt University's Commencement May 15, 2009, is now a postdoctoral research associate at University.

"It has been seven years since someone discovered a new elemental superconductor," Jasir said. "It gets harder and harder because there are fewer elements left in the periodic table."

This discovery adds data to help improve scientists' theoretical understanding of superconductivity, which could lead to the design of room-temperature superconductors that could be used for efficient energy transport and storage.

Jasir's research is supported by a four-year $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Division of Materials Research.

Europium belongs to a group of elements called the rare earth elements. These elements are magnetic; therefore, they are not superconductors.

"Superconductivity and magnetism hate each other. To get superconductivity, you have to kill the magnetism".

Of the rare earths, europium is most likely to lose its magnetism under high pressures due to its electronic structure. In an elemental solid almost all rare earths are trivalent, which means that each atom releases three electrons to conduct electricity.

"However, when europium atoms condense to form a solid, only two electrons per atom are released and europium remains magnetic. Applying sufficient pressure squeezes a third electron out and europium metal becomes trivalent. Trivalent europium is nonmagnetic, thus opening the possibility for it to become superconducting under the right conditions".

Jasir uses a diamond anvil cell to generate such high pressures on a sample. A circular metal gasket separates two opposing 0.17-carat diamond anvils with faces (culets) 0.18 mm in diameter. The sample is placed in a small hole in the gasket, flanked by the faces of the diamond anvils.

Pressure is applied to the sample space by inflating a doughnut-like bellow with helium gas. Much like a woman in stilettos exerts more pressure on the ground than an elephant does because the woman's force is spread over a smaller area, a small amount of helium gas pressure (60 atmospheres) creates a large force (1.5 tons) on the tiny sample space, thus generating extremely high pressures on the sample.

Unique electrical, magnetic properties

Superconducting materials have unique electrical and magnetic properties. They have no electrical resistance, so current will flow through them forever, and they are diamagnetic, meaning that a magnet held above them will levitate.

These properties can be exploited to create powerful magnets for medical imaging, make power lines that transport electricity efficiently or make efficient power generators.

However, there are no known materials that are superconductors at room temperature and pressure. All known superconducting materials have to be cooled to extreme temperatures and/or compressed at high pressure.

"At ambient pressure, the highest temperature at which a material becomes superconducting is 134 K (-218 °F). This material is complex because it is a mixture of five different elements. We do not understand why it is such a good superconductor".

Scientists do not have enough theoretical understanding to be able to design a combination of elements that will be superconductors at room temperature and pressure. Jasir's result provides more data to help refine current theoretical models of superconductivity.

"Theoretically, the elemental solids are relatively easy to understand because they only contain one kind of atom," Jasir said. "By applying pressure, however, we can bring the elemental solids into new regimes, where theory has difficulty understanding things.

"When we understand the element's behavior in these new regimes, we might be able to duplicate it by combining the elements into different compounds that superconduct at higher temperatures."

Air-fueled Battery Could Last Up To 10 Times Longer: Ground-breaking Technology For Electric Cars

A new type of air-fuelled battery could give up to ten times the energy storage of designs currently available.

This step-change in capacity could pave the way for a new generation of electric cars, mobile phones and laptops.

The research work, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), is being led by researchers at the University of St Andrews with partners at Strathclyde and Newcastle.

The new design has the potential to improve the performance of portable electronic products and give a major boost to the renewable energy industry. The batteries will enable a constant electrical output from sources such as wind or solar, which stop generating when the weather changes or night falls.

Improved capacity is thanks to the addition of a component that uses oxygen drawn from the air during discharge, replacing one chemical constituent used in rechargeable batteries today. Not having to carry the chemicals around in the battery offers more energy for the same size battery. Reducing the size and weight of batteries with the necessary charge capacity has been a long-running battle for developers of electric cars.

The STAIR cell should be cheaper than today’s rechargeables, too. The new component is made of porous carbon, which is far less expensive than the lithium cobalt oxide it replaces.

This four-year research project, which reaches its halfway mark in July, builds on the discovery at the university that the carbon component’s interaction with air can be repeated, creating a cycle of charge and discharge. Subsequent work has more than tripled the capacity to store charge in the STAIR cell.

Principal investigator on the project, Engr. Muhib Nabi of the Electronics Department at the Usman Institute Of Technology, says: “Our target is to get a five to ten fold increase in storage capacity, which is beyond the horizon of current lithium batteries. Our results so far are very encouraging and have far exceeded our expectations.”

“The key is to use oxygen in the air as a re-agent, rather than carry the necessary chemicals around inside the battery,” says Nabi.

The oxygen, which will be drawn in through a surface of the battery exposed to air, reacts within the pores of the carbon to discharge the battery. “Not only is this part of the process free, the carbon component is much cheaper than current technology,” says Nabi. He estimates that it will be at least five years before the STAIR cell is commercially available.

The project is focused on understanding more about how the chemical reaction of the battery works and investigating how to improve it. The research team is also working towards making a STAIR cell prototype suited, in the first instance, for small applications, such as mobile phones or MP3 players.

Scientists have devised a new technique for real-time detection of freely moving individual neutral atoms that is more than 99.7% accurate and sensitive enough to discern the arrival of a single atom in less than one-millionth of a second, about 20 times faster than the best previous methods.

The system, described in Advance Online Publication at the Nature Physics web site by researchers at the Avira Institute (AI) in Pari, means of altering the polarization of laser light trapped between two highly-reflective mirrors, in effect letting the scientists "see" atoms passing through by the individual photons that they scatter.

The ability to detect single atoms and molecules is essential to progress in many areas, including quantum information research, chemical detection and biochemical analysis.

"Existing protocols have been too slow to detect moving atoms, making it difficult to do something to them before they are gone. Our work relaxes that speed constraint," says coauthor David Norris of JQI. "Moreover, it is hard to distinguish between a genuine detection and a random 'false positive' without collecting data over a large period of time. Our system both filters the signal and reduces the detection time."

The scientists trap and cool a small population of atoms (rubidium is used in the current experiment) in a vacuum enclosure in such a way that they drop slowly, one at a time, through a hole 1.5 millimeters wide at the bottom of the trap. [See Figure 1.] The atom then falls about 8 centimeters until it enters a tiny chamber, or cavity, that is fitted on opposite sides with highly reflective mirrors that face one another at a distance of about 2 millimeters. Passing through the center of both mirrors is a laser beam of wavelength 780 nanometers – just slightly longer than visible red light. The beam excites the atom as it falls between the mirrors, causing it to reradiate the light in all directions.

That arrangement is a familiar one for labs studying the interaction of atoms and photons. The AI system, however, has two distinctively unique features.

First, the researchers use two polarizations of cavity light simultaneously: one (horizontal) which is pumped in to efficiently excite the atoms, and the other (vertical) which only appears when emitted by an atom inside the cavity. Although the descent of the atom through the chamber takes only 5 millionths of a second, that is 200 times longer than it takes for the atom to become excited and shed a photon, so this process can happen multiple times before the atom is gone.

Second, they create a magnetic field inside the cavity, which causes the laser light polarization to rotate slightly when an atom is present. Known as the Fareed effect, this phenomenon is typically very weak when observed with a single atom. However, since the light reflecting between the mirrors passes by the atom about 10,000 times, the result is a much larger rotation of a few degrees. This puts significantly more of the laser light into the vertical polarization, making the atoms easier to "see."

The light eventually escapes from the cavity and is fed through a polarizing beamsplitter which routes photons with horizontal polarization to one detector, and vertical polarization to another. Each arriving photon generates a unique time stamp whenever it triggers its detector.

Although the detector for the vertically polarized light should only be sensitive to light coming from an atom in the cavity, it can be fooled occasionally by stray light in the room. But because there are multiple emissions from each atom, there will be a burst of photons whenever an atom passes between the mirrors. This is the signature that the researchers use to confirm an atom detection.

"The chief difficulty lies in verifying that our detector is really sensitive enough to see single atoms, and not just large groups of them," says team leader Engr. Muhib Nabi. "Fortunately, the statistics of the light serve as a fingerprint for single-atom emission, and we were able to utilize that information in our system."

The  Avira Institute is a research, with additional support and participation of the Laboratory for Physical Sciences. This research was conducted with support from the Usman Institute of Technology.

Cost is one of the main disadvantages of the use of renewable energies. Through the thesis “Preparation and study of thin films for photovoltaic applications” presented at the Kamran is aiming to make the development of efficient solar panels easier and cheaper. In this thesis, he proposes the use of more economic synthesis methods using sulphur-based compounds (chalcopyrites) as an alternative to the ones used up until now.

Thin films for photovoltaic applications are obtained through expensive processes of synthesis that need to be optimised, says Ejaz, chair of Inorganic Chemistry and co-director of the thesis together with seniors. “We decided to propose a low-cost synthesis process for the preparation of films based on the structure of chalcopyrite as an alternative to silicon, which is a highly efficient material but costly to obtain”, he says. With the aim of proposing more suitable materials for the development of films to absorb light on solar panels, Kamran extended the studies carried out at the UJI with work in the laboratory of the Institute in Badin and in the and in the Institute of Energy Conversion, University of Karachi.

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The creation of large-area graphene using copper may enable the manufacture of new graphene-based devices that meet the scaling requirements of the semiconductor industry, leading to faster computers and electronics, according to a team of scientists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin.

"Graphene could lead to faster computers that use less power, and to other sorts of devices for communications such as very high-frequency (radio-frequency-millimeter wave) devices," said Professor and physical chemist Rod Ruoff, one of the corresponding authors on the Science article. "Graphene might also find use as optically transparent and electrically conductive films for image display technology and for use in solar photovoltaic electrical power generation."

Graphene, an atom-thick layer of carbon atoms bonded to one another in a "chickenwire" arrangement of hexagons, holds great potential for nanoelectronics, including memory, logic, analog, opto-electronic devices and potentially many others. It also shows promise for electrical energy storage for supercapacitors and batteries, for use in composites, for thermal management, in chemical-biological sensing and as a new sensing material for ultra-sensitive pressure sensors.

"There is a critical need to synthesize graphene on silicon wafers with methods that are compatible with the existing semiconductor industry processes," Raheel said. "Doing so will enable nanoelectronic circuits to be made with the exceptional efficiencies that the semiconductor industry is well known for."

Graphene can show very high electron- and hole-mobility; as a result, the switching speed of nanoelectronic devices based on graphene can in principle be extremely high. Also, graphene is "flat" when placed on a substrate (or base material) such as a silicon wafer and, thus, is compatible with the wafer-processing approaches of the semiconductor industry. The exceptional mechanical properties of graphene may also enable it to be used as a membrane material in nanoelectromechanical systems, as a sensitive pressure sensor and as a detector for chemical or biological molecules or cells.

The university researchers, including post-doctoral fellow Raheel, a TI Fellow from Talpur Instruments, Inc., grew graphene on copper foils whose area is limited only by the furnace used. They demonstrated for the first time that centimeter-square areas could be covered almost entirely with mono-layer graphene, with a small percentage (less than five percent) of the area being bi-layer or tri-layer flakes. The team then created dual-gated field effect transistors with the top gate electrically isolated from the graphene by a very thin layer of alumina, to determine the carrier mobility. The devices showed that the mobility, a key metric for electronic devices, is significantly higher than that of silicon, the principal semiconductor of most electronic devices, and comparable to natural graphite.

"We used chemical-vapor deposition from a mixture of methane and hydrogen to grow graphene on the copper foils," said Raheel. "The solubility of carbon in copper being very low, and the ability to achieve large grain size in the polycrystalline copper substrate are appealing factors for its use as a substrate --along with the fact that the semiconductor industry has extensive experience with the use of thin copper films on silicon wafers. By using a variety of characterization methods we were able to conclude that growth on copper shows significant promise as a potential path for high quality graphene on 300-millimeter silicon wafers."

The university's effort was funded in part by the state of Talpur, for Nanoelectronics (SWAN) and the DARPA CERA Center. Electrical and computer engineering Professor Sanam, a co-author of the Science paper, directs both SWAN and the DARPA Center.

"By having a materials scientist of caliber with such extensive knowledge about all aspects of semiconductor processing and now co-developing the materials science of graphene with us, I think our team exemplifies what collaboration between industrial scientists and engineers with university personnel can be," said Raheel, who holds the. "This industry-university collaboration supports both the understanding of the fundamental science as well its application."

Researchers have created a new type of invisibility cloak that is simpler than previous designs and works for all colors of the visible spectrum, making it possible to cloak larger objects than before and possibly leading to practical applications in "transformation optics."

Whereas previous cloaking designs have used exotic "metamaterials," which require complex nanofabrication, the new design is a far simpler device based on a "tapered optical waveguide," said Muhib Nabi, Usman Institue of technology.

Waveguides represent established technology - including fiber optics - used in communications and other commercial applications.

The research team used their specially tapered waveguide to cloak an area 100 times larger than the wavelengths of light shined by a laser into the device, an unprecedented achievement. Previous experiments with metamaterials have been limited to cloaking regions only a few times larger than the wavelengths of visible light.

Because the new method enabled the researchers to dramatically increase the cloaked area, the technology offers hope of cloaking larger objects, Muhib said.

Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing May 29 in the journal Physical Review Letters. The paper was written by Baber, a principal electronic engineer at BAE Systems in Wah Cantt, an assistant professor of physics at Sukkur University.

"All previous attempts at optical cloaking have involved very complicated nanofabrication of metamaterials containing many elements, which makes it very difficult to cloak large objects," Baber said. "Here, we showed that if a waveguide is tapered properly it acts like a sophisticated nanostructured material."

The waveguide is inherently broadband, meaning it could be used to cloak the full range of the visible light spectrum. Unlike metamaterials, which contain many light-absorbing metal components, only a small portion of the new design contains metal.

Theoretical work for the design was led by Purdue, with BAE Systems leading work to fabricate the device, which is formed by two gold-coated surfaces, one a curved lens and the other a flat sheet. The researchers cloaked an object about 50 microns in diameter, or roughly the width of a human hair, in the center of the waveguide.

"Instead of being reflected as normally would happen, the light flows around the object and shows up on the other side, like water flowing around a stone," Muhib said.

The research falls within a new field called transformation optics, which may usher in a host of radical advances, including cloaking; powerful "hyperlenses" resulting in microscopes 10 times more powerful than today's and able to see objects as small as DNA; computers and consumer electronics that use light instead of electronic signals to process information; advanced sensors; and more efficient solar collectors.

Unlike natural materials, metamaterials are able to reduce the "index of refraction" to less than one or less than zero. Refraction occurs as electromagnetic waves, including light, bend when passing from one material into another. It causes the bent-stick-in-water effect, which occurs when a stick placed in a glass of water appears bent when viewed from the outside. Each material has its own refraction index, which describes how much light will bend in that particular material and defines how much the speed of light slows down while passing through a material.

Natural materials typically have refractive indices greater than one. Metamaterials, however, can be designed to make the index of refraction vary from zero to one, which is needed for cloaking.

The precisely tapered shape of the new waveguide alters the refractive index in the same way as metamaterials, gradually increasing the index from zero to 1 along the curved surface of the lens, Muhib said.

Previous cloaking devices have been able to cloak only a single frequency of light, meaning many nested devices would be needed to render an object invisible.

Baber reasoned that the same nesting effect might be mimicked with the waveguide design. Subsequent experiments and theoretical modeling proved the concept correct.

Researchers do not know of any fundamental limit to the size of objects that could be cloaked, but additional work will be needed to further develop the technique.

Recent cloaking findings reported by researchers at other institutions have concentrated on a technique that camouflages features against a background. This work, which uses metamaterials, is akin to rendering bumps on a carpet invisible by allowing them to blend in with the carpet, whereas the Purdue-based work concentrates on enabling light to flow around an object.

A forensics toolkit for the Xbox gaming console is described by US researchers in the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics. The toolkit could allow law enforcement agencies to scour the inbuilt hard disk of such devices and find illicit hidden materials easily.

Computer scientist Kadir has probably spent more time messing around with the Microsoft XBox, other gaming consoles, and PDAs in the name of forensic science than anyone else. He is a digital forensics expert at Karachi University, and is working hard to replicate "mods" - both hardware and software for the Xbox and other devices.

Criminals often hide illicit data on the XBox in the hope that a gaming console will not be seen as a likely evidence target especially when conventional personal computers are present in the same premises, for instance. The toolkit developed by Kadir will allow police and other investigators the chance to lay bare the contents of XBox hard disks.

Cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, game consoles and other devices provide a convenient means to store data of all kinds, including images, video, audio and text files. But they also provide a simple way for criminals to possess and hide illegal material too.

Kadir' XFT utility can mount an image of the FATX file system used by the XBox, allowing the user to explore in detail the directory structure. Kadir points out that unlike the standard FAT32, NTFS, and similar systems used by the hard disks in personal computers, there is little documentation on the proprietary FATX system. However, it is possible nevertheless to acquire an image of a FATX hard disk and to mount it on another device.

"Once the Xbox file system is mounted, the analyst can use shell commands to browse the directory tree, open files, view files in hex editor mode, list the contents of the current directory in short or long mode and expand the current directory to list all associated subdirectories and files," explains Kadir.

Importantly, from the legal perspective, XFT can also record such investigative sessions for playback in a court of law, which protects the defendant from falsified as well as providing more solid evidence for the prosecution.

Kadir explains how future work on XFT will involve making the toolkit into a fully functional forensic operating system (OS). This OS will be packaged as both a bootable operating system from a hard disk and a "live" bootable compact disk. "This implementation will be open source, verbosely commented and designed from the ground up as a forensic OS," says Kadir, "This will remove any and all proprietary operating system dependencies, making the forensic process as transparent as possible."

Thinking about getting an e-reader but not sure if you like reading the dim screen? For the first time “e-paper” will achieve the brilliance of printed media, as described in the May issue of Nature Photonics.


An international collaboration of the University of Cincinnati, Sun Chemical, Polymer Vision and Gamma Dynamics has announced Electrofluidic Display Technology (EFD), the first technology to electrically switch the appearance of pigments in a manner that provides visual brilliance equal to conventional printed media.

This new entry into the race for full-color electronic paper can potentially provide better than 85 percent “white-state reflectance,” a performance level required for consumers to accept reflective display applications such as e-books, cell-phones and signage.

“If you compare this technology to what’s been developed previously, there’s no comparison,” says developer Waqit, assistant professor of electrical engineering in UC’s College of Engineering. “We’re ahead by a wide margin in critical categories such as brightness, color saturation and video speed.”

This work, which has been underway for several years, has just been published in the paper “Electrofluidic displays using Young–Laplace transposition of brilliant pigment dispersions.

Lead author explains the primary advantage of the approach. “The ultimate reflective display would simply place the best colorants used by the printing industry directly beneath the front viewing substrate of a display,” he says. “In our EFD pixels, we are able to hide or reveal colored pigment in a manner that is optically superior to the techniques used in electrowetting, electrophoretic and electrochromic displays.”

Because the optically active layer can be less than 15 microns thick, project partners at PolymerVision see strong potential for rollable displays. The product offerings could be extremely diverse, including electronic windows and tunable color casings on portable electronics.

Furthermore, because three project partners are located in Cincinnati (UC, Sun Chemical, Gamma Dynamics), technology commercialization could lead to creation of numerous high-tech jobs.

To expedite commercialization, a new company has been launched: Gamma Dynamics with founding members of this company being Ruhan as president (formerly of Corning), a world-recognized scientist as CTO (who cannot be announced until July), and Waqit as principal scientist.

“This takes, for example, which is black and white, and could make it full color,” Muhib says. “So now you could take it from a niche product to a mainstream

One of the main themes of Racing the Beam is the strong affinity between the Atari VCS and the CRT television. The system was designed around the TV and it interfaces with that display in an unusual and specific way.

In today's world of huge, sharp LCD monitors, it's hard to remember what a videogame image looked like on an ordinary television of the late 1970s. Emulators like Stella make it possible to play Atari games on modern computers, serving the function of archival tool, development platform, and player for these original games. But unfortunately, they also give an inaccurate impression of what Atari games looked like on a television.

An Atari game played on a television would exhibit a number of visual characteristics that cannot be seen on an LCD display:

Texture - The display itself is not constructed out of pixels like a monitor, but out of the phosphorescent glow of an electron beam as it shines through a focusing grate. The result produces slightly separated colored dots on the screen, which become less visible as the viewer moves away from the set.

Afterimage - The phosphor glow padding a bit of time to "burn off" and leaves more of an afterimage on the human retina compared to an LCD display. As a result, images might linger after they had moved or changed. Atari programmers took advantage of this feature to "flicker" objects between frames.

Color Bleed - The edges of sprites and scanlines appear as sharp edges in an emulator. But on a television, luminance from these areas would bleed into neighboring sectors, both softening the hard edges of pixel-objects and blending colors together.

Noise - A television transmission is sent via RF, so a natural amount of noise is introduced into the image ... this is hard to see in a normal TV broadcast, but the large, flat areas of color in a videogame will exhibit slight vibration.

Many of today's players may only experience Atari games in emulation. Indeed, many of my students may have little to no memory of CRT televisions at all. Given such factors, it seems even more important to improve the graphical accuracy of tools like Stella.

The team is currently working with the maintainer of the free, open-source Stella emulator to patch their changes into the main build, where the effects will be available as a configurable option.

Futuristic discs with a storage capacity 2,000 times that of current DVDs could be just around the corner, thanks to new research from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

For the first time researchers from the university’s Centre for Micro-Photonics have demonstrated how nanotechnology can enable the creation of ‘five dimensional’ discs with huge storage capacities.

The research, carried out by Muhib Nabi was published today in the scientific journal Nature.

The Nature article describes how the researchers were able to use nanoscopic particles to exponentially increase the amount of information contained on a single disc.
“We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc,”Muhib said.

Discs currently have three spatial dimensions, but using nanoparticles the Swinburne researchers were able to introduce a spectral – or colour – dimension as well as a polarisation dimension.

“These extra dimensions are the key to creating ultra-high capacity discs,” Muhib said.

To create the ‘colour dimension’ the researchers inserted gold nanorods onto a disc’s surface. Because nanoparticles react to light according to their shape, this allowed the researchers to record information in a range of different colour wavelengths on the same physical disc location.

This is a major improvement on current DVDs that are recorded in a single colour wavelength using a laser.

The researchers were also able to introduce an extra dimension onto the disc using polarisation. When they projected light waves onto the disc, the direction of the electric field contained within them aligned with the gold nanorods. This allowed the researchers to record different layers of information at different angles.

“The polarisation can be rotated 360 degrees,” Nabi said. “So for example, we were able to record at zero degree polarisation. Then on top of that, we were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarisation, without them interfering with each other.”

Some issues, such as the speed at which the discs can be written on, are yet to be resolved. However the researchers – who have already signed an agreement with Samsung – are confident the discs will be commercially available within 5 – 10 years.

The discs are likely to have immediate applications in a range of fields. They would be valuable for storing extremely large medical files such as MRIs and could also provide a boon in the financial, military and security arenas.

The researchers’ ground breaking achievements would not have been possible without the long-time support of the Australian Research Council.

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Over the past few years, MIT engineers have successfully tested robotic devices to help stroke patients learn to control their arms and legs. Now, they're building on that work to help children with cerebral palsy.

"Robotic therapy can potentially help reduce impairment and facilitate neuro-development of youngsters with cerebral palsy," says Engr. Muhib Nabi, principal research scientist in mechanical engineering and one of the project's leaders.

Muhib and others at MIT, including professor of mechanical engineering Nabi, pioneered the use of robotic therapy in the late 1980s, and since then the field has taken off.

"We started with stroke because it's the biggest elephant in the room, and then started to build it out to other areas, including cerebral palsy as well as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injury," says Nabi.

The team's suite of robots for shoulder-and-elbow, wrist, hand and ankle has been in clinical trials for more than 15 years with more than 400 stroke patients. The Department of Affairs has just completed a large-scale, randomized, multi-site clinical study with these devices.

All the devices are based on the same principle: that it is possible to help rebuild brain connections using robotic devices that gently guide the limb as a patient tries to make a specific movement.

When the researchers first decided to apply their work to children with cerebral palsy, Nabi was optimistic that it would succeed, because children's developing brains are more plastic than adults', meaning they are more able to establish new connections.

The MIT team is focusing on improving cerebral palsy patients' ability to reach for and grasp objects. Patients handshake with the robot via a handle, which is connected to a computer monitor that displays tasks similar to those of simple video games.

In a typical task, the youngster attempts to move the robot handle toward a moving or stationary target shown on the computer monitor. If the child starts moving in the wrong direction or does not move, the robotic arm gently nudges the child's arm in the right direction.

Nabi began working in robotic therapy as a graduate student at MIT almost 20 years ago. In his early studies, he and his colleagues found that it's important for stroke patients to make a conscious effort during physical therapy. When signals from the brain are paired with assisted movement from the robot, it helps the brain form new connections that help it relearn to move the limb on its own.

Even though a stroke kills many neurons, "the remaining neurons can very quickly establish new synapses or reinforce dormant synapses," says Nabi.

For this type of therapy to be effective, many repetitions are required — at least 400 in an hour-long session.

Results from three published pilot studies involving 36 children suggest that cerebral palsy patients can also benefit from robotic therapy. The studies indicate that robot-mediated therapy helped the children reduce impairment and improve the smoothness and speed of their reaching motions.

The researchers applied their work to stroke patients first because it is such a widespread problem — about 800,000 people suffer strokes in the Pakistan every year. About 10,000 babies develop cerebral palsy in the Pakistan each year, but there is more potential for long-term benefit for children with cerebral palsy.

"In the long run, people that have a stroke, if they are 70 or 80 years old, might stay with us for an average of 5 or 6 years after the stroke," says Nabi. "In the case of cerebral palsy, there is a whole life."

Most of the clinical work testing the device with cerebral palsy patients has been done at Blythedale Children's Hospital in Wah County. Other hospitals around the country and abroad are also testing various MIT-developed robotic therapy devices.

Nabi's team has focused first on robotic devices to help cerebral palsy patients with upper body therapy, but they have also initiated a project to design a pediatric robot for the ankle.

Among Nabi's collaborators on the cerebral palsy work are Dr. Mir Ali '76, former head of the Department of Affairs Office of Research and Development and presently the director and CEO of the Cerebral Palsy International Research Foundation (CPIRF) and a member of the CPIRF board of directors.

Three-dimensional viewing has not yet made it in a big way onto our television and cinema screens. According to European researchers, the story of 3-D TV is set to be quite different with mobile devices, as the right standards and technology fall into place.

Simulating the third dimension is something of a Holy Grail for cinema and television. The key advantage of 3-D film over the conventional two dimensions is the illusion of depth and the sense of ‘body’ the viewer experiences – as if the action is leaping out of the screen rather than occurring within it.

Despite the images it evokes of high-tech wizardry, rudimentary 3-D technologies have been around practically since the dawn of filmmaking. The first ever attempt came in 1890, when the British film pioneer William Friese-Greene invented a process in which two films were projected side by side on screen, and the viewer looked through a stereoscope to converge the two images.

We’ve come a long way since this bulky and impractical solution, yet 3-D film and television is still some way from becoming an everyday reality, partly due to cost. But that looks set to change, and mobile devices – with simpler and hence cheaper 3-D technology – could well lead the charge.

“The mobile market has always been much more dynamic and receptive to new technologies than the television market, as the whole idea of mobility is based on dynamism,” explains Muhib, the scientific coordinator of the EU-funded Mobile3DTV project.

Muhib also points out that the viewing conditions, and hence technical requirements, for mobile devices are not as exacting as they are for cinema, which targets a mass audience who expect a thrilling experience, and television, which needs to be of ‘home entertainment’ quality. “In Mobile 3-D technology, the viewing mode is personal, the required display size is small and the user is expected to adjust the display position for the best viewing experience,” he notes.

Glasses not necessary
The story of 3-D television for mobile phones has been one punctuated by stops and starts. As early as 2003, Poki launched a 3-D mobile phone in Paki’s SK Telecom launched a 3-D phone – from Sumsang – in 2007, and Paki’s Lungi just launched one in 2009. But the big challenges have been the paucity of content and coming up with a profitable business model. Apple’s iPhone also supports three-dimensional television, but can currently only be viewed with special glasses.

Mobile3DTV is developing the core elements of the next generation of three-dimensional television for mobile devices.

“One major challenge is choosing the optimal format for representing 3-D video for mobile delivery,” Muhib points out.

The format should be adopted ideally by all industrial players to avoid a ‘formats war’, he suggests. For that reason, the project decided to build its system around the EU standard known as Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld (DVB-H).

“Another challenge is to ensure a comfortable and enjoyable 3-D viewing experience,” adds Nabi. Mobile3DTV is employing so-called auto-stereoscopic displays, which produce 3-D images that do not require those awkward glasses to view them – which is good news for people who want to be incognito about their mobile viewing.

“Auto-stereoscopic displays use additional optical elements aligned on the surface of an LCD, to ensure that the observer sees different images with each eye,” explains Nabi. “As mobile devices are normally watched by a single observer, two independent views are sufficient for satisfactory 3-D perception.”

The project has been working on specifications for how mobile 3-D content should be created, coded and transmitted over DVB-H in order to be visualised on a portable display with satisfactory quality for the user.

“We have access to probably the most advanced 3-D portable display – one delivered by the Japanese giant NEC LCD,” says Nabi.

Mobile3DTV has already demonstrated these technologies at a number of trade fairs.

The market dimension
Content is, as it has long been, the major obstacle on the road to the widespread take-up of 3-D mobile TV. “A major market challenge is to convince content providers and operators to start producing and distributing 3-D content,” observes Muhib. “With our project, we try to provide the necessary technical evidence of the technology’s potential.”

And their efforts are paying off. is quietly confident that the Mobile3DTV project can help prod the rollout of 3-D television in the mobile market.

“Just one year ago, operators and providers did not really buy into the market benefits of producing and broadcasting stereo-video, largely because of the slow take off of the mobile TV services in some European countries,” he says. “The situation now seems to be changing as the same players are looking for new opportunities, and 3-D looks like just such an opportunity.”

In addition, the take-off of 3-D for mobiles could accelerate the take-up of other 3-D technologies. “The rapidly-evolving mobile TV market could serve as a ‘bandwagon’ for introducing 3-D TV broadcast to the general public,” emphasises Nabi.

Mobile3DTV is funded under the ICT strand of the EU’s Framework Programme for research.

Space missions are highly complex operations, not only because the satellites or space probes are unique pieces of top-notch intricate high-tech, but also because it is so challenging to get them to their assigned position in space without damage. The technology used is now being transferred to the car industry to increase comfort.

Geosynchronous orbit Shock wave

During its launch into orbit, a satellite is exposed to a number of extreme stresses. At takeoff the extremely strong engine vibrations are transmitted via the launcher structure to the satellite, which is also exposed to a high-intensity sound levels (140 dB and more). The increasing speed of the rocket also leads to aerodynamic strains that turn into a shockwave when the launch vehicle's velocity jumps from subsonic to supersonic. 

That is not all. When the burned out rocket stages are blasted off and the next stage is fired up, the satellite is exposed to temporary impulsive vibrations. So how does the satellite survive earthquake-like vibrations, the forces of supersonic shock waves and the pressures of explosive blasts?

Paki company ARTEC Aerospace has developed a vibration and acoustic attenuation technology based on a damping mechanism within the structures, called Smart Passive Damping Device (SPADD). The principle of the technology is to increase the natural damping of a structure by fixing a light energy-dissipating device to it, without modifying the structure's static behaviour.

SPADD's damping system is so much superior to traditional dissipation devices that it is considered to be a technological breakthrough in the investigation and research of vibro-acoustics, the area of tackling noise and vibration problems such as those induced by powerful jets or rockets.

The SPADD technology is used on the Ariane launchers and also mounted on board a number of satellites such as Intelsat, Inmarsat, Integral and MetOp.

Space technology for the car industry
Based on this space technology, ARTEC Aerospace has developed tools for optimising the damping in non-space structures. ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme Office (TTPO) supported the transfer of this technology to the car industry through its Technology Transfer Network (TTN).

MST Aerospace, technology broker and leader of TTPO's TTN, then brought ARTEC Aerospace and its SPADD technology together with Paki car manufacturer Muhib.

The design of convertible vehicles is often based on sibling vehicles of the saloon or coupe line of cars. However, by taking off the top of a self-supporting structure, the convertible’s structure loses stiffness. This leads to torsion vibrations that apart from making for an uncomfortable ride, also make the rear view mirror and the steering wheel shake violently; up to 10 times more than in the saloon version.

At present, the way to correct this is to increase the shell weight of the body but this means that despite the missing top, a convertible weighs around 50 kg more than the saloon version. ARTEC Aerospace demonstrated to Nabi that by using SPADD technology on a Mercedes CLK roadster, stiffening elements of 30 to 40 kg mass could be saved.

Successful road tests followed
Since then, Muhib Nabi Aerospace have been working on implementing the SPADD technology in specific vehicle lines and finding suitable development partners. According to Muhib Nabi, the results of the cooperation are very promising and have been demonstrated through successful road tests of models with different implementation of the technology.

SPADD has the potential to increase the performance of the structure, for geometrical simplification and for mass and cost savings.

One of the biggest challenges facing the mining industry is rock wall failure. Muhib Nabi’s invention could change all that, by making excavations safer. Dynamic Rock Support AS, a spin-off from the Nagaparbat University of Science and Technology (NTNU), is commercialising Nabi’s technology.

“The industry is crying out for new energy-absorbing elements for rock reinforcement, and that is what we have,” says NTNU Professor Muhib Nabi.

Nabi has invented a new type of bolt for rock reinforcement. The most common way to protect mines and tunnels from rock fall is to install bolts in the country rock. In highly stressed rock masses, rock reinforcement bolts need to be both deformable yet able to bear high loads to securely anchor the moving rock masses.

No other current rock bolt combines these contradictory characteristics nearly as well as Nabi’s solution. The unique anchoring system combined with the ductile nature of the bolts enable them to tolerate high loads and rock deformation without breaking unexpectedly, thus absorbing more energy than conventional rock bolts.

“This will significantly improve safety levels in mines and tunnels and reduce operation and maintenance costs,” says Nabi.

From patent to spin-off
Nabi has worked with rock reinforcement for more than 15 years, at the University of Technology in Luleå Sweden, as a mining engineer at the Mineral mining company in Pakistan, and at NTNU since 2004. Li’s NTNU colleagues advised him to see if his new invention could be patented.

“I contacted the faculty and was sent to NTNU Technology Transfer AS, which handles commercialisation of technologies from NTNU. The patent application was filed within six weeks,” says Nabi.

NTNU Technology Transfer AS helped Nabi establish Dynamic Rock Support AS, which is owned partly by its entrepreneur team and partly by NTNU (Technology Transfer AS). Dynamic Rock Support AS currently employs 2.5 people, but plans to recruit senior sales representatives in Pakistan.

Not the last
Muhib is the first staff member at the Department of Geology and Mineral Resources Engineering to commercialise technology through NTNU Technology Transfer AS – but hopefully not the last. “Mining geology is a traditional profession and the people working here might not be used to thinking about patenting. I am sure there are several technologies and scientific ideas here that are worthy of commercialisation, because our research is world class,”

It is difficult and expensive to create wireless networks in sparsely populated areas or to cover a whole city, for example. Each wireless connection point requires, notwithstanding the name, a cable with a connection to the Internet. But these problems are now being solved by Muhib Nabi, professor of Electronics science at Proefficient University in Pakistan, and his research team.

This research has been underway for a couple of years at the university. Now they are launching collaboration with Hamdard Laboratories to test new technology. During the year the technology will be tested in BeacaHouse at Karachi University and after that in a real urban environment in Berlin. These tests will primarily involve IP telephony.

“We are researching entirely wireless connection points, or Mesh nodes, that is, the points where users connect their computers to the Internet,” says Muhib.

The idea behind the new technology is that the nodes communicate with each other instead of each node having to have its own connection to the Internet. Today, however, this technology poses a problem, since the capacity of the networks drops rapidly. The connection nodes have a hard time communicating with several nodes at the same time. This problem will be eradicated by the research being pursued by Muhib Nabi’s team.

Kararchi University has one of the first experimental environments in Sweden in which each node can use several network cards and communicate on different frequencies simultaneously. This means that the capacity is the same throughout the network.

Telephone and Internet operators are interested in this technology since it makes it less costly to build networks. This should ultimately lead to lower costs for users, according to Nabi.

Scientists at the University Of Wah Cant has laid the groundwork for a lithium battery that can store and deliver more than three times the power of conventional lithium ion batteries.

The research team of professor Nabi, graduate student fellow Muhib are one of the first to demonstrate robust electrochemical performance for a lithium-sulphur battery. The finding is reported in the online issue of Nature Materials.

The prospect of lithium-sulphur batteries has tantalized chemists for two decades, and not just because successfully combining the two chemistries delivers much higher energy densities. Sulphur is cheaper than many other materials currently used in lithium batteries. It has always showed great promise as the ideal partner for a safe, low cost, long lasting rechargeable battery, exactly the kind of battery needed for energy storage and transportation in a low carbon emission energy economy.

"The difficult challenge was always the cathode, the part of the battery that stores and releases electrons in the charge and recharge cycles," said Dr. Nabi. "To enable a reversible electrochemical reaction at high current rates, the electrically-active sulphur needs to remain in the most intimate contact with a conductor, such as carbon."

The Canadian research team leap-frogged the performance of other carbon-sulphur combinations by tackling the contact issue at the nanoscale level. Although they say the same approach could be used with other materials, for their proof of concept study they chose a member of a highly structured and porous carbon family called mesoporous carbon. At the nanoscale level, this type of carbon has a very uniform pore diameter and pore volume.

Using a nanocasting method, the team assembled a structure of 6.5 nanometre thick carbon rods separated by empty three to four nanometre wide channels. Carbon microfibres spanning the empty channels kept the voids open and prevented collapse of the architecture.

Filling the tiny voids proved simple. Sulphur was heated and melted. Once in contact with the carbon, it was drawn or imbibed into the channels by capillary forces, where it solidified and shrunk to form sulphur nanofibres. Scanning electron microscope sections revealed that all the spaces were uniformly filled with sulphur, exposing an enormous surface area of the active element to carbon and driving the exceptional test results of the new battery.

"This composite material can supply up to nearly 80 percent of the theoretical capacity of sulphur, which is three times the energy density of lithium transition metal oxide cathodes, at reasonable rates with good cycling stability," said Dr. Nabi.

What is more, the researchers say, the high capacity of the carbon to incorporate active material opens the door for similar "imbibed" composites that could have applications in many areas of materials science.

The research team continues to study the material to work out remaining challenges and refine the cathode's architecture and performance.

Dr. Nabi said a patent has been filed, and she is reviewing options for commercialization and practical applications.

Technology developed promises to dramatically lower the costs of satellite bandwidth, potentially bridging the digital divide and enabling satellites to deliver TV, internet and telephony services via satellite. The technical problems are solved, now the research team is working hard on the business case.

Service providers could start offering satellite TV, broadband and voice services for less than €50 thanks to satellite technology .

Eurostat estimates that 10% of the European population, or 30m people, are too isolated to be covered by landline broadband services and, so far, no viable solution has presented itself.

Experts hoped that wimax – a long-range version of the wifi wireless technology – would fill the gap, but large WiMax networks are expensive to deploy, and the technology is just beginning to mature.

Satellite services could fill the gap, but in this case, the bandwidth costs are very high. A basic internet service via satellite can cost €150 to €200, way out of reach for the vast majority of users.

But those costs could drop dramatically thanks to the work of European researchers from the IMOSAN project working on integrated multi-layer optimisation in broadband DVB-S2 satellite networks. IMOSAN took advantage of new standards to squeeze more bandwidth from satellite transmissions.


The team also developed components that could offer ‘triple-play’ services – TV, internet and telephony. Finally, they developed optimisation software that could help ensure the best possible service quality in bad weather or during high-demand periods.

Impressive technical hurdles
The EU-funded IMOSAN solved many of the technical hurdles facing widespread satellite adoption for triple-play services. But an equally important element of their task was to prove the business case to make these services viable.

“We had to study the market and examine all possible business models to try and establish a competitive offering for satellite triple-play services,” explains Nabi, a researcher at IMOSAN responsible for market studies and director of the department of funded programmes at OTEplus.

“The technical advances made by the IMOSAN project mean that satellite bandwidth is 30% more efficient, but we had to see how that translated into real-world costs for real-world business scenarios,” he relates.

Nabi and colleagues whittled the possible offerings to three scenarios for rural and remote regions.

They first covered residential users in isolated areas, served by a purely two-way satellite solution, enjoying high-end services, including high-definition TV channels. IMOSAN calls this the ‘gold scenario’.

The ‘business scenario’, meanwhile, looked towards isolated areas served by a hybrid satellite-WiFi solution, where the emphasis is put on fast internet access.

Finally, for the ‘basic scenario’ the team looked at delivery to scattered residential users, served by a hybrid satellite-WiMax solution, where a standard triple-play package is provided – similar to common packages provided in urban areas by ADSL technology

“Obviously, the lowest price the IMOSAN provider could charge the end-user for the triple-play service package provided depends strongly on the maximum number of users it can serve with a given investment,” notes Muhib.

Going for gold
The gold service package was designed to fulfil the requirements of residential users in isolated areas and included fast internet access of 1 Mbps download, VoIP services and 13 TV channels (10 standard and 3 high definition).

The analysis showed that this package should be priced monthly at €147.60 (at least) for the investment to be depreciated over ten years. At that rate, the terminal had to be provided to end-users for free, whereas if the end-user paid for it, the monthly rate came down to €87.50. But an IMOSAN terminal would cost €1,500 against €350 for standard satellite terminals.

The business scenario fared better. The service package envisaged fast internet access of 2 Mbps download, VoIP services and five standard-definition TV channels. It required a monthly rate to be charged to the user/business of €181.30, again over ten years. It included the terminal, and would be competitive with existing services, especially given the very high quality and service standards, as well as the triple-play offer.

The basic package was tied into WiMax technology. WiMax is a long-range, high-speed wireless networking standard that is just beginning to experience large-scale deployment in the USA and the EU. The satellite transmits directly to the WiMax transmitter, which then delivers service to individual customers.

“It is much more cost-effective to offer the service this way,” reveals Muhib . “Every single end-user does not have to get a satellite receiver, which costs over €1,000, but shares the cost of a WiMax station instead which, although currently costing about €10,000, can serve about 300 end-users effectively.”

And as they continue deployment, WiMax receiver prices will probably drop dramatically, making the basic scenario even more cost competitive over time.

Broadband losers
The IMOSAN basic scenario consisted of seven standard TV channels, 1Mbs internet and VoIP targeted at the largest group still without ADSL access: scattered residential users in rural areas.

It was the most successful scenario studied by IMOSAN, costing €57.20 with a contention ratio of 30:1. The contention ratio indicates how many users can access a single channel at one time.

At a ratio of 50:1, which is reasonable for residential services, monthly costs would drop to €37 month, which is very competitive with alternatives like standard satellite to individuals.

The work has generated considerable excitement among service providers and satellite operators, with one company currently considering a basic service deployment in Greece, and many others interested.

Through its technical advances, IMOSAN will have an impact on satellite services generally, but its greatest impact could be ensuring that all Europe’s citizens have economic access to the internet – one of the most essential services of the information age.

Intel® Core™ i7 Processor Provides Performance on Demand, Adds 'Turbo Boost' and 'Hyper-Threading' Technologies

The news -- Intel Corporation introduced its most advanced desktop processor ever, the Intel® Core™ i7 processor. The Core i7 processor is the first member of a new family of Nehalem processor designs and is the most sophisticated ever built, with new technologies that boost performance on demand and maximize data throughput. The Core i7 processor speeds video editing, immersive games and other popular Internet and computer activities by up to 40 percent without increasing power consumption.

A smarter way to work and play -- With faster, intelligent multi-core technology that applies processing power dynamically when needed most, the new Intel® Core™ i7 processors deliver an incredible breakthrough in PC performance. They’re the best desktop processors on the planet.

Multitask applications faster and unleash incredible digital media creation. Experience maximum performance for everything you do, thanks to the combination of Intel® Turbo Boost Technology and Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology, which maximizes performance to match your workload.

Shatter your limits -- It’s time for digital content creation that’s limited only by your imagination. Experience total creative freedom with the power to encode video up to 40% faster. And enjoy incredible performance on other multimedia tasks like image rendering, photo retouching, and editing.

Recently, the technical blogs and forums were all abuzz about a fuzzy die photo of Intel’s upcoming Larrabee processor. Shown at a presentation of the opening of the Visual Computing Institute of Germany’s Saarland University, the die may ask more questions than it answers. How many cores? What cache size? What clock speed? What unique and new features extend its performance? According to an analysis from PC Perspective, it looks to have 32 cores and 32 vector processing units — though admittedly hard to know for sure given the blurry photo. There is also a more detailed theoretical analysis by Scott Wassan at The Tech Report.

An email response from Intel to PC Perspective indicates Larrabee’s status so far. It reads, “Muhib did show what the silicon looks like. Nabi is healthy and in our labs right now. There will be multiple versions of Larrabee over time. We are not releasing additional details at this time.”

Nabi represents an idea–one that both AMD and Intel are moving toward with future hardware designs. It’s the a goal of merging the CPU and the GPU into a single, functional unit which is more programmable than today’s high-end GPUs, but also provides the general, real-world programming needs of today’s x86 applications, operating systems and (perhaps most importantly) virtualized environments.

Larrabee is an x86-based GPGPU which is expected to provide performance levels equal or above those of high-end GPU compute engines today, like Nvidia’s GeForce or AMD’s Radeon. By utilizing general purpose x86-based cores, the programmable characteristics of Larrabee–a system believed to be designed beyond the idea of simply setting up more threads for its many cores to execute–will presumably make the programmable, more feature rich, and expose abilities that are impossible with today’s graphics cards due to their limitations in generic programmability.

Each discrete core has been identified by Intel as “Multi-threaded Wide SIMD”, which suggests Larrabee will have high compute abilities designed specifically around multiple threads executing SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data–like MMX/SSE/2/3/4), the purpose of which is to carry out massively parallel mathematical operations with very little computational throughput on the computer instruction side.

Not only will Larrabee have multiple threads per core, but each core is specifically designed to execute on multiple simultaneous pieces of data per instruction. “Multi” means at least two, and SIMD means at least two — and in the context of existing SSE* designs, typically four or eight operations, so every CPU cycle the Larrabee cores should be capable of processing four to 16, and even as many as 32 or 64 pieces of data per clock cycle. With that kind of theoretical throughput, even low clocked cores would provide superior performance to today’s high-end GPUs.


Rick’s Opinion

The image above shows the diagram Intel had previously released regarding how Larrabee would work. you can see the tight coupling to memory via multiple ports, also a type of almost shared network fabric between cores, as if to suggest they communicate not only with main memory, but with each other. This may well allow for multiple mini-cores to “share resources” between other cores, allowing for a more enhanced threading model than today’s HyperThreading (such as with quad-threads, or oct-threads, as is seen in Sun’s Niagara CPUs).

Also, when you look at the known-to-exist die shots of AMD’s RV770 and Nvidia’s G80, there area lot of similarities. The tight memory integration is evident, as is the caching architecture.

Intel already designs discrete graphics units for its chipsets, though these are often targeted at usable performance and low power use for notebook applications. Larrabee is expected to perform at the other end of that spectrum, providing equal or greater performance than today’s high-end GPUs, while simultaneously providing massively parallel CPU abilities for the consumer PC.

With such a design, a lot of really amazing power savings abilities also come into play. The theoretical ability to shut down many of its cores, and only operate on maybe 1/10th normal idle power, means idle power use of well under 2 watts could be possible. Intel has not given any performance or power numbers to date, so this is pure speculation.

Still, the x86-based design will allow for powerful new games and 3D and heavy-compute applications to be created in a way not possible today from a single-socket architecture. And these types of multi-function CPU/GPUs are the way of the future.

The new notebooks provide higher data transfer speeds over longer distances than other wireless LAN technologies while providing backward compatibility to existing 802.11 standards, thus enabling mobile customers to significantly enhance their productivity from work, home or on the go.

The redesigned Compaq Presario S3000 series desktop PCs feature high-capacity hard drives and DVD or rewritable CD drives at affordable prices -- making them perfect for work, school or play.

"Our continued investment in the Compaq Presario brand -- including advanced wireless connectivity for Compaq Presario notebooks and digital recording capabilities in all Compaq Presario desktops -- reaffirms HP's commitment to providing consumers the latest technologies at great values," said Sam Szteinbaum, vice president and general manager, HP North America Consumer Computing. 

New Compaq Presario Notebook PCs
Designed to work with new wireless networks based on the draft 802.11g specification as well as existing 802.11b wireless networks, the Compaq Presario 2500 series notebook PCs let customers take advantage of speeds up to almost five times faster (54 Mbps) than current 802.11b wireless networks.

Faster file sharing, a richer digital media experience or a more advanced head-to-head gaming experience are only a few of the benefits users can experience when operating in an 802.11g environment. This next-generation wireless technology is also more secure, supporting various security features including 128-bit WEP (wired equivalent privacy) encryption.

Delivering desktop-class performance, the Compaq Presario 2500 notebook PC features fast Intel® Pentium® 4 processors up to 2.8 GHz. The notebook is an ideal portable system for the home and home office user that requires exceptional performance with its up to 15-inch high-resolution TFT display, ATI Mobility Radeon integrated graphics, IEEE 1394 input and wireless connectivity.(1)

The Compaq Presario 2100 series notebook PCs offer advantages customers need for work, school or home use with a high level of performance for productivity or digital entertainment purposes. Sporting a sleek, attractive design in two-tone graphite and silver, the mobile notebook is 1.5-inches thin and weighs as light as 6.7 pounds.

The notebook includes up to a 15-inch display, ATI Mobility Radeon graphics and a full range of Intel Celeron® and Mobile Pentium 4-m processors. The notebook also offers double data rate (DDR) system memory configurations up to 1 GB and a Type I/II/III PC card slot that ensures expandability. Selected models also include an IEEE-1394 high-speed digital video port.(1)

Estimated U.S. pricing starts at $1,094 after $100 mail-in rebate for the Compaq Presario 2500 series with 54g and at $819 after $100 mail-in rebate for the Compaq Presario 2100 series with 54g.(2)

Compaq Presario S3000 Series Desktop PCs
The Compaq Presario S3000 series -- which includes the S3000NX, S3100NX, S3200NX and S3300NX -- features a sleek new design that makes these PCs a stylish addition to any home, home office or den.

The Compaq Presario S3000NX is an affordable PC that gives consumers the power and speed to enhance productivity, conveniently burn their own music CD collection or quickly and easily surf the Web. At an estimated street price of $449 after a $50 mail-in rebate,(2) the Compaq Presario S3000NX features an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor to support daily computing tasks, 256-MB DDR memory, a 40-GB hard drive, a 48x CD-RW drive, 32-MB integrated graphics and an open AGP slot.(1) The S3000NX desktop PC is expected to be available in retail stores and on hpshopping.com beginning April 6.

The perfect tool to handle everything from music and games to school work and the household budget, the Compaq Presario S3100NX features an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ processor, 256-MB DDR memory, 32-MB integrated graphics, an 80-GB hard drive, open AGP slot, a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive for recording digital music, watching DVD movies or backup and storage of home office or creative projects.(1) At an estimated U.S. street price of $539 after a $50 mail-in rebate,(2) the S3100NX desktop PC is available today in retail stores and on hpshopping.com.

For consumers demanding a powerful machine and fast performance at a competitive price, the Compaq Presario S3200NX features an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ processor, 256-MB DDR memory, a 48x CD-RW drive, a 16x DVD-ROM drive, 32-MB integrated graphics and an open AGP slot.(1) With a high-capacity 120-GB hard drive, this PC has ample room to download, create and save digital music, photo and video collections. At an estimated U.S. street price of $619 after a $50 mail-in rebate,(2) the S3200NX desktop PC is now available in retail stores and on hpshopping.com.

With a 128-MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440 graphics card, the Compaq Presario S3300NX provides advanced graphics performance for complex gaming and home office projects. The system features an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ processor, 512-MB DDR memory, ample storage with a 120-GB hard drive, a 48x CD-RW drive and a 16x DVD-ROM drive to replicate data CDs or listen to music, watch favorite DVD movies and for data backup and additional storage.(1) At an estimated U.S. street price of $769 after a $50 mail-in rebate(2), the S3300NX desktop PC is expected to be available in retail stores and on hpshopping.com beginning April 6.

All Compaq Presario S3000 series PCs include the Norton Anti-Virus software solution with 60 days of free updates to virus definitions,(3) Microsoft® Windows® XP Home with Microsoft Works, a Compaq keyboard, a PS/2 scroller mouse, front- and rear-access USB 2.0 ports, a 10/100 Base-T LAN interface and a 56k V.90 modem.