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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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