February 20, 2006, 7:12 PM CT

Google Desktop 3 Beta has a serious security risk

Google has recently released its newer version of Google Desktop. Google Desktop is a free, downloadable program that includes an option to let users search across multiple computers for files. This program has much more speed on the search utility compared to the conventional window based searches for files and folder, which is painstakingly slow. In order to provide a fast search result, the application automatically stores copies of files, for up to a month, on Google servers. From there, copies of your files are transferred to the user's other computers for archiving. The data is encrypted to have maximum security during transmission and while stored on Google servers.

The newer beta version has security vulnerability and risk to enterprises, according to Gartner, which is research company. This vulnerability arises from the way shared information is pooled by Google.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink     

February 20, 2006, 6:34 PM CT

The 'Spin Triplet' Supercurrent

Superconductivity occurs when electrical current moves without resistance, a phenomenon that gave rise to particle accelerators, magnetic resonance imagining machines and trains that float, friction-free, on their tracks.

Under quantum physics theory, conventional superconductivity is not supposed to occur in ferromagnets. When electrons pass through these crystalline materials, they realign in ways that won't allow resistance-free conductivity. While supercurrent through a ferromagnet has been observed, it moved only an extremely short distance before resistance kicked in.

But a team of researchers from Delft University of Technology, Brown University and the University of Alabama has now accomplished this physics feat, creating a "spin triplet" supercurrent through a unique ferromagnet.

As explained in the current issue of Nature, the team's experimental system converts the spin, or rotation, of pairs of electrons in such a way that suggests they exist in three quantum states inside the new magnet. There's the standard "spin up" and "spin down" - a reference to an electron's angular momentum - but also a middle state. Picture a planet that was thought to rotate two ways: With its North Pole pointing up or pointing down. But now it's found that this planet can be made to rotate on its side, with its North Pole pointing out in a 90-degree angle.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

February 19, 2006, 3:21 PM CT
Morphing of the iPod

 

 

 

It's amazing how history repeats itself and yet we're all so baffled when it does. CB radios, PDA's, pay phones, pagers and even plain old cameras vanishing into thin air - NOT.

 

I'm convinced that old Star Trekees are designing cell phones and none are employed by Wall Street.  That's right; there has been tens of millions of dollars lost in market research alone because we're just plain stupid.  It took Wall Street more than a year to figure out what happened to the PDA and pager, when all they had to do was watch an old version of Star Trek. The Tricorder, the Communicator and the Padd (Personal Access Display Device) are here but we call it the "Cell Phone".  Maybe we should change the name to Teleporter - A device that converts things into little electrons, transmits them to another Teleporter and converts them back to pictures, music, video, voice messages, email or money. Maybe a simple name change would end all the confusion. Let's give it a try.

 

A fully loaded Teleporter might have a PDA, walky talky, pager, camera, game player,  voice recorder, Mp3 and iPod music player, radio, TV, Web Browser, remote control, electronic wallet, GPS, voice recognition,  voice mail, email, video mail, instant messaging, electronic ID tag, electronic car and door key, an alarm system, a weather station, a heart rate monitor and.... oh yes, a phone. The benefits of a fully loaded Teleporter are vast but for now, let's just focus on music -- where it's at and where it's going.

 

First there's the iPod by Apple, a battery operated device that plugs into your computer and downloads a limited number of music files. It has a very nice user interface but for all practical purposes it's a memory stick with a user interface and headphones. You either play the music through the headphones or plug the iPod into another device that plays the music. Then, there is the Virtual Jukebox such as Rhapsody by RealNetworks, where you have access to over a million songs that can be played on demand from a computer. Rhapsody uses streaming technology to computers but music files can also be downloaded to a portable player similar to the iPod (another memory stick).

 

For those who want to buy a select number of music files, the iPod is a great device and for those who want to pay a monthly subscription for unlimited access to virtually any music files, Rhapsody is your best bet. But if you want unlimited access on a portable device, no mater where you are, you'll need a music player that has a transmitter and a receiver so that it can communicate wirelessly with your preferred music supplier. Gee, doesn't a cell phone have a transmitter and receiver already....

 

Now, let's take an iPod and Rhapsody and a cell phone and hook them all together and we have the perfect music player. Yes, it's a Teleporter. It has the capacity to access and play any music titles ever recorded. You can rent, sample or buy. You can even send your play list to a friend's Teleporter or to your home stereo system. Just imagine, you're jogging along the beach listening to music and you hear a short little alert. Your Teleporter says, "The song you have been waiting for is now available". You say, Play new song" and continue your run - All without a computer.

 

So, when you hear Bill Gates say that he doesn't believe that the success of the iPod is sustainable, don't believe him. He's late to the wireless game and even Blackberry offers better wireless email than Microsoft. The iPod is simply morphing into a cell phone. And, when you see a company like Yahoo compete on price alone, don't get confused, streaming media to your computer is already a commodity. The real battle will be for the huge wireless market where cell phones dwarf music players. The winner will be the pacesetter of technology not the price cutter. Therefore, my money is on RealNetworks and Apple or someone who watches more Star Trek.

 

Read more....

February 17, 2006, 7:34 AM CT

Optimizing Light-emitting Semiconductors

Physicists at JILA have demonstrated an ultrafast laser technique for "seeing" once-hidden electronic behavior in semiconductors, which eventually could be useful in more predictable design of optoelectronic devices, including semiconductor lasers and white light-emitting diodes.

The work at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder, is described in the Feb. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters.

The technique manipulates light energy and wave patterns to reveal subtle behavior, such as correlated oscillations of two objects. Such correlations are important because they may allow scientists to more accurately predict the emission frequencies produced by an optoelectronic device based on its structure and semiconductor materials.

The method was developed originally by other scientists years ago for probing couplings between spinning nuclei as an indicator of molecular structure, and it led to a Nobel prize; more recently, researchers have been trying to use it to study vibrations in chemical bonds. The JILA team is the first to show the approach offers new insights into electronic properties of semiconductors. The use of light as a precision tool to manage electronic behavior could lead to improved optoelectronic devices.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink     

February 15, 2006, 11:54 PM CT

New Technology For Safe Military Aircraft

New technology utilized by engineers at Rochester Institute of Technology is assisting the United States Navy in the sustainment and improvement of their aircraft.

Michael Haselkorn, senior staff engineer at RIT's Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies, is leading a team of professors and researchers along with engineers from Acro Industries, a local Rochester manufacturer, in a major project to redesign and improve numerous components of the Navy's EA-6B jet. The improved design of these parts will reduce costs and improve the safety of the EA-6B, one of the Navy's key aircraft types.

"This project is a unique opportunity to combine the latest scientific innovation with the capabilities of private industry to address key issues of our nation's military fleet," Haselkorn says. "The project is advancing scientific knowledge in the field, promoting a local company and enhancing the quality of Naval aircraft. It really is a win-win all the way around".

Haselkorn is currently working with Raymond Grosshans, professor of industrial and science technology at RIT to utilize new laser scanning technology to create a three-dimensional digital schematic of the turtleback, the metal cover over the EA-6B's fuselage. They use the schematic to build a solid model from which they can perform a structural analysis of the part to identify flaws and improve quality. This analysis was previously incredibly time consuming due to lack of accurate schematics, making improved manufacture of parts extremely difficult.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

February 15, 2006, 0:03 AM CT

Lights, Cameras, And Engineering

Seven UCSD engineering students and one alumnus are currently appearing in a 13-part reality series on the Animal Planet Network called Chasing Nature. The series, which was filmed in Australia, features top U.S. engineering students being challenged to recreate amazing animal behaviors.

"It's actually quite hard to mimic an animal's behavior and attributes, particularly in just five working days," said Chiara Daraio, a Ph.D. candidate in the Jacobs School of Engineering's Materials Science and Engineering Program. "Mother Nature has taken some million years to get things straight."

The "Big Horn Ram" episode features four students, including Scott Anderson, a 2005 graduate of UCSD. The task of Anderson's team was to engineer a skull to protect a fragile glass brain in a 25 mph head-on impact. The team based two competing designs on the impact-absorbing skull structure of male bighorn sheep, which butt heads in vicious collisions during the mating season. Pairs of engineered skulls were attached to the front of dune buggies and crashed into one another. "What I learned at UCSD definitely helped guide our design," said Anderson. "I also took an acting class an undergrad and it helped me get through the long week of filming."

In each episode, four-student teams are given four or five days to build a physical model that, on a human scale, replicates an important animal characteristic or behavior.........

Posted by: Tom      Permalink         Source

February 14, 2006, 11:56 PM CT

New Device To Revolutionizes Nano Imaging

While a microphone is useful for a number of things, you probably wouldn't guess that it could help make movies of molecules or measure physical and chemical properties of a material at the nanoscale with just one poke.

Georgia Tech scientists have created a highly sensitive atomic force microscopy (AFM) technology capable of high-speed imaging 100 times faster than current AFM. This technology could prove invaluable for a number of types of nano-research, in particular for measuring microelectronic devices and observing fast biological interactions on the molecular scale, even translating into movies of molecular interactions in real time. The research, funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, appears in the recent issue of Review of Scientific Instruments.

Not only is FIRAT- (Force sensing Integrated Readout and Active Tip) much faster than AFM (the current workhorse of nanotech), it can capture other measurements never before possible with AFM, including material property imaging and parallel molecular assays for drug screening and discovery. FIRAT could also speed up semiconductor metrology and even enable fabrication of smaller devices. It can be added with little effort to existing AFM systems for certain applications.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

February 13, 2006, 11:13 PM CT

Smarter Search Engines

Google a particular car type or disease and you're bound to spend time sorting between hundreds of more and less useful results. How to sort the wheat from the chaff in the world of too-much electronic information? NRC researchers are helping make the search for electronic information easier, and one key to this is teaching computers to understand language.

"The more computers are able to understand words, the more helpful they'll be to us in every daily task," says Peter Turney, an Ottawa-based research scientist with the Interteractive Information Group of the NRC Institute for Information Technology. The Interactive Information Group focuses on developing software tools to increase access to electronic information.

Turney's computer science speciality is the area of lexical semantics, or word meaning. At present, our desktop and laptop computers are linguistic toddlers. Spam filters, and other software such as editing tools, are able to distinguish and make decisions based on single words like "Viagra", but there's no sense of meaning. It's like learning a second language but not knowing what the words mean or how they create meaning together.

So the race is on to create software that goes beyond single word recognition to extract deeper understanding. One example is sentiment analysis. This is software that can determine whether the words in a sentence are positive or negative. Sentiment analysis is being used to create a kind of Googling for feelings. One application of sentiment analysis involves following financial chat groups to track attitudes towards particular stocks.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

February 13, 2006, 11:08 PM CT

Canada's Ultimate Light Ruler

For NRC scientists turning on the lights is never a simple task. They inevitably ask what kind of light and how much? Which is why they're so excited about a new tool that will soon be Canada's ultimate light ruler.

Called an ultra high-temperature blackbody, this rare physics tool now being readied at the NRC Institute for National Measurement Standards (NRC-INMS) in Ottawa will soon be one of the world's most accurate ways to measure ultraviolet, or UV, light. These UV measurements are critical for a wide range of environmental and health issues, emerging industrial technologies, and regulatory requirements pertaining to global trade.

While it's called a high-temperature blackbody, it's all about measuring light. All objects emit some form of electromagnetic radiation. The electromagnetic radiation of a high-temperature blackbody is predominantly in the optical radiation region. This region ranges from the infrared through the visible spectrum to the UV. While you're reading this at room temperature your body is emitting invisible infrared radiation that would be visible with infrared, or "night", goggles. What's special about a blackbody is that it's a perfect emitter. When it's heated, at any particular temperature it emits a distinct amount of energy at each wavelength of light. Thus if you know the blackbody's temperature you can use a physics calculation to determine the amount of light being emitted at any wavelength.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

February 12, 2006, 11:06 PM CT

Cell Version Of DNA Chip

A new technique in which single strands of synthetic DNA are used to firmly fasten biological cells to non-biological surfaces has been developed by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley. This technique holds promise for a wide variety of applications, including biosensors, drug-screening technologies, the growing of artificial tissues and the design of neural networks.

"Just as DNA chips revolutionized genome analysis, we hope to make cell chips (self-assembled arrays of cells on a thumbnail-sized chip) using our DNA-based cell adhesion strategy," said Ravi Chandra, a researcher affiliated with Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division and UC Berkeley's Chemistry Department. "Cell chips could be used as biosensors for detecting the presence of pathogens, or for drug screening, just to name of a few of the a number of possibilities".

Chandra is the lead author of a paper that appears in the latest issue of the international chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie. The other authors are Erik Douglas, Richard Mathies, Carolyn Bertozzi and Matthew Francis. The paper is entitled: Programmable Cell Adhesion Encoded by DNA Hybridization.

A number of of the vast assortment of biological cells are naturally sticky, a property that enables individual cells to adhere to other cells and non-cellular components, which in turn enables them to assemble into different types of tissue, or carry out functions critical to an organism's health and well-being. Cell adhesion is now being used to incorporate biological cells into simple devices, but is expected to be important for the future production of complex nanotechnology devices.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink

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