#ALGORITHMS: "Cloud Computing Expands Reach with iDataCenters"

Around the world, data centers are popping up to service the continued expansion of cloud services into mainstream computing. Following the lead of Google, IBM, Amazon and others, Apple continues to prep massive data centers east and west for its new thrust into cloud computing services. The debut of Apple's iDataCenters and its new cloud computing services, rumored to debut soon, will include the rollout of its iCloud.com domain.
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#MEMS: "High-temp MEMS goes seismic"

Analog Devices Inc. is offering a dual-axis accelerometer capable of withstanding up 175 degrees Celsius (342 degrees Fahrenheit) for ruggedized industrial applications. The device is based on what ADI calls the world's first high-temperature micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) technology. Today, applications using an accelerometer in a high-temperature environment, such as tools used in geological down-hole measurements, require complex compensation circuitry to ensure that readings are not skewed by temperature. The new iMEMS ADXL206, on the other hand, has virtually no quantization errors or other non-monotonic behaviors over its entire operating range, from -40 degrees to +175 degrees Celsius, according to ADI (Norwood, Mass.)
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#ALGORITHMS: "Smarter Conservation from Analytics and Cloud Computing"

Ecological conservation of precious natural resources, such as clean water, can be made smarter by using cloud computing to track usage patterns and software analytics to encourage voluntary conservation efforts.
Anecdotal evidence has long suggested that consumers will voluntarily change their usage patterns to foster conservation when given clear choices about how to do so. Now the city of Dubuque, Iowa, together with IBM, has used cloud computing and analytics to determine just how much might be saved voluntarily—measuring a reduction in water utilization by 6.6 percent and an eightfold improvement in leak detection and response time.
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#CHIPS: "Smarter eEyes Focus on Cure for Blind"

By designing electronic-eye (eEye) implants using fractal interconnects, researchers aim to overcome the mismatch between using conventional image chips in bionic eyes. Today, several efforts are under way worldwide to create silicon retinas that can be implanted in the eyes of the blind, thereby enabling them to see again, albeit at vastly reduced resolution. Now researchers are aiming to remedy that by replicating the fractal-like interconnection topology of real eyes.
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#OPTICS: "Plastic optics boosted to 25 Gbit/s"

A new vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) technology from VI Systems aims to extend the reach of cheap plastic fiber optics, with scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology reporting successful operation at 25 Gbits per second. VI Systems (Berlin) reports that it has achieved 40 Gbit/s in the lab and is aiming for 100 Gbit/s performance.
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#ENERGY: "Algae creates hydrogen fuel"

Algae can produce hydrogen fuel from water and sunlight, with a little boost from man-made nanoparticle catalysts, according to engineers at the U.S.Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. By commandeering the photosynthesis mechanisms that enable algae to harness the energy of the sun, algae can produce abundant fuel to power an emerging hydrogen economy, they say.


Chemist Lisa Utschig tests a container of photosynthetic proteins linked with platinum nanoparticles, which can produce hydrogen from sunlight. Tiny bubbles of hydrogen are visible in the container at right.


Led by Argonne National Lab chemist Lisa Utschig, working with colleague David Tiede, the team at Argonne's Photosynthesis Group recently demonstrated how its platinum nanoparticles can be linked to key proteins in algae to coax them into producing hydrogen fuel five times more efficiently that the previous world record.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-l63E

#ALGORITHMS: "Cloud Makes 3D Models from Aerial Photos"

Cloud-based services are enabling fast, cheap, large-scale three-dimensional models of almost any landscape. The models are generated from easy-to-obtain aerial photos from drones—unmanned aerial vehicles.


Unmanned drones can take thousands of aerial photographs today, but stitching them together has required human expertise and sophisticated high-end software. (Source: EPFL)


New software from EPFL spinoff Pix4D automatically generates 3D models from aerial photos. (Source: EPFL)

Unmanned aerial drones (UAVs) are becoming inexpensive enough for small businesses or even individuals to use, permitting thousands of aerial photographs to be snapped of points of interest. Unfortunately, the high-powered analysis software required to stitch together aerial photos is outside the budget of all but large corporations. Now a new genre of inexpensive cloud-based services is appearing, capable not only of stitching together those patchworks of photos, but even able to automatically interpret what they see, thereby generating three-dimensional (3D) models on the cheap.

Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-mkG1

#WIRELESS: "Smart Algorithm Untangles Network Snarls"

As the complexity of networks skyrockets, managers have been hard-pressed to come up with analytic tools that can cope, but now researchers claim to have a general-purpose technique that unsnarls nearly any network.


The driver nodes (red) that can control the rest of a network are often a very small in number, and seldom are they the most active nodes. Credit: Mauro Martino.

Researchers claim to have come up with a new computational model that can analyze any type of complex network—from the nodes of the Internet to the neurons of the brain—revealing the critical points that can be used to control the entire network...
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-iGEm

#GRAPHENE: "Activated graphene boosts supercaps"

Brookhaven National Laboratory recently characterized activated graphene fabricated at the University of Texas-Austin, concluding that it had an power density that could rival batteries, at a quick-recharge rate that exceeded batteries, and a lifetime of at least 10,000 charge/discharge cycles.


Dong Su (left) and Eric Stach study samples of activated graphene at Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Source: Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Used instead of batteries, activated-graphene supercapacitors could last 27 years for a plug-in vehicle recharged once a day. The DoE also speculates that gigantic activated-graphene supercapacitors at power-stations could smooth out power availability from intermittent power, such as wind and solar.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-jjCR

#CHIPS: "Silicon Labs aims to be one-stop timing shop"

Silicon Laboratories Inc. recently unveiled its long-term strategy to dominate the timing chip market following its acquisition of MEMS oscillator maker Silicon Clocks and traditional timing chip maker SpectraLinear. Silicon Labs claims its timing business grew 70 percent in 2010, resulting in a $50 million is timing chip sales, and it forecasts growth in the high double-digits again in 2011.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-lQQW

#CHIPS: "HP discovers memristor mechanism"

Electrical engineers who expressed skepticism that Hewlett Packard Co.'s memristors could switch as fast as DRAM and yet retain their memories millions of times longer than flash can now rest easy, according to HP who cited new experimental results.


Synchrotron x-rays probed the memristor in a 100 nanometer region with concentrated oxygen vacancies (right, shown in blue) where the memristive switching occurs. Surrounding this region a newly developed structural phase (red) was also found to act like a thermometer revealing how hot the device becomes when read or written.

Using their favorite formulation—titanium oxide—HP used a synchrotron x-rays to correlate the device's electrical characteristics with its atomic structure, chemistry, and temperature in three dimensions. The until now unforeseen conclusion was that a hot spot near the bottom electrode heats enough during switching to induce a crystallization of the oxide. After driving out vacancies (for a 1) or introducing them (for a 0) in one-to-two nanometers thick region, the film cools in an annealing-like like process which leaves the film in a fixed crystalline state that should remain that way indefinitely.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-lZsz

#ENERGY: "Smarter Hydrogen Fuel Maker Mimics Plants"

The emerging hydrogen economy depends on finding smarter ways to generate the volatile gas from plentiful natural resources, such as splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with sunlight. Smarter hydrogen generators will ditch precious metals for fields of silicon nanopillars etched with semiconductor fabrication equipment, thus realizing the dream of cheap, abundant hydrogen fuel generated from water and sunlight a la plants.


Silicon nanopillars—each 2 microns in diameter—etched with semiconductor fabrication equipment substitute for expensive platinum electrodes, enabling cheap hydrogen generation from water and sunlight. (Source: Technical University of Denmark)

According to the Department of Energy (DoE) we should be mimicking the way plants generate their own fuel from water and sunlight, but unfortunately the price of convention electrolysis is too high due to its use of expensive platinum catalysts. To realize the dream, DoE-funded researchers are now fabricating tiny micrometer-sized pillars of cheap abundant silicon to take the place of expensive platinum catalysts, thus promising to bring down the price of hydrogen fuel and enabling widespread commercialization
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-ij31

#CHIPS: "Smarter Atomic Clock on a Chip Debuts"

Atomic clocks keep the world's processes on track—providing a universal time base with which everything from satellite communications to demolition explosions are synchronized. Now chip-scale atomic clocks are small enough to install inside mobile devices.


Symmetricom atomic clock on a chip based on Sandia National Laboratories technology (Source: Symmetricom)

Today accurate atomic clock readings are most commonly obtained from global positioning system (GPS) signals, but a new atomic clock on a chip will work where GPS does not reach, such as indoors, in tunnels, underground, under the sea and in outer space.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-jEVV

#3D: "MIT preps high-def, glasses-free 3-D"

A new algorithm for rendering higher resolution 3-D images was recently described by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. The high-resolution 3-D technique is glasses-free, but does not reduce brightness or restrict viewer orientation as with conventional auto-stereoscopic techniques, according to its inventors.


Instead of using the unedited left and right images from a twin-lens camera, MIT's dual-stacked LCD displays uses content-adaptive parallax barriers as displayed here.

Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-mP8p

#MATERIALS: "Paper Smartphones Use Bending Gestures"

A user demonstrates how "bending gestures" work, here turning up the corner of the flexible PaperPhone. (Source: Queen's University Human

If that smartphone or touch-screen tablet is starting to feel heavy after holding it in mid-air for a few minutes, then help is on the way. New "paper" smartphones and tablets will use flexible plastic displays and electronics light enough to wear.


A flexible Snaplet wrist-worn touch-screen tablet demo (Source: Queen's University Human Media Lab)

Most of the weight of mobile devices comes from the metal inside, where copper conductors shuttle around the electrons that make your smartphone or touch-screen tablet work. However, by switching from stiff-metal to flexible-plastic conductors, the mobile devices of the future will be feather-light, thinner, less expensive and consume tiny amounts of power compared with today.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-jdqn

#MATERIALS: "Graphene modulator tackles optics"

The world's smallest graphene modulator was unveiled recently by researchers at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California-Berkeley. The research team, led by professor Xiang Zhang, claimed its breakthrough will someday allow smartphones to download entire movies in a matter of seconds.


The world's smallest graphene modulator uses electrical signals to switch an laser on and off for faster, smaller, cheaper optical communications. Source: UC Berkeley

Today, optical modulators are used to speed communications by using electrical signals to switch a laser on and off for long-haul communications between systems. However, high-speed optical communications is migrating to short-haul communications and someday may even be used by mobile devices to quicken the transfer of large files.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-jl3j

#CHIPS: "MEMS touted for telecomm, embedded apps"

SiTime's chips wire-bond together a mechanical MEMS device with an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) which are mounted together inside a standard package.

The increasingly stringent requirements of high-speed telecommunications, wireless networking and embedded applications can now be satisfied with micro-electro-mechanical systems, according to SiTime Inc., which announced Monday (May 9) its new SiT380X family of MEMS voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs), offering up to 10-times better linearity and wider fine-tuning range than quartz crystals.

Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-iq2S

#MARKETS: "Smarter Enterprises Measure Brand Appeal"

Apple's "I'm a Mac" versus "I'm a PC" campaign was designed to enhance its brand's appeal

Recall Apple's "I'm a Mac" versus "I'm a PC" campaign? Apple, like every other enterprise, wants to establish its "brand" as desirable to consumers, and now there's a better way to measure it, according to university researchers.
Focus-group raves and rip-roaring sales have been the best ways to measure a brand's appeal, but now researchers at North Carolina State University claim to have a better method to calibrate branding.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-jvaG

#MATERIALS: "Seeing Is Believing When Cloaks Disappear"

The world's first visible-light cloak recently converted nonbelievers by making a tiny object disappear—Harry Potter style. Transformational optics will enable a future where what you see is not always what is really there, according to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, which recently pulled off the first disappearance act to cloak a normal visible object.


The internal structure of the carpet cloak arrays pillars at the spacing of a photonic crystal which matches the wavelength of light to be cloaked, thereby bending it around hidden objects. Credit: KIT

Invisibility cloaks have been shown for infrared or microwave wavelengths, and Northwestern and Oklahoma State universities showed the world's first terahertz (which lies between infrared and microwave) cloaking at a recent conference. KIT, however, claims to have brought the magic of transformational optics to the normal visible-light spectrum.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-mgyc

#MATERIALS: "Lab aims for superconducting FET"

Brookhaven physicist Ivan Bozovic wants to understand why a thin-film insulator transitions to the superconducting state.

The resistance of superconductivity to rational explanation has prompted Brookhaven National Laboratory to fabricate atomically perfect ultra-thin-films capable of accurately characterize the transition from an insulator to superconductor. A normally insulating copper-oxide material (cuprate) was configured like the channel of a field-effect transistor (FET), using molecular beam epitaxy to create an atomically perfect superconducting film.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-jEVM

#TOUCH: "Touch-Screen Musicians Jam in Virtual Band"

Smarter drummers have always made music by tapping their fingers against tabletops. Now musicians who play the bass, drums and keyboard are getting into the act with specialized apps for large, flat-panel touch screens. Touch screens as large as 46 inches are enabling musicians to tap out melody, bass and rhythm on virtual instruments, then record the audio all without touching a mouse.

Apps are turning touchscreens into musical instruments. (Source: NextWindow)

Once hailed as a revolutionary advance in man-machine interfaces, the mouse is starting to appear long-in-the-tooth when compared with giant touch screens that enable an entire user interface to be controlled by touch. Musicians especially can benefit from touch screens that offer dedicated keys, buttons, switches, rotary dials and other controller surfaces that operate like conventional music hardware, but can be instantly configured or swapped out.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-k75C

#SPACE: "James Webb Space Telescope Smarter Than Hubble"

Two alternative images of the Carina Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope compare visible (top) with the higher resolution obtained by infrared (bottom) photography as will be used by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The stunning images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope will be like sketches compared with improved images to be delivered by the James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s next-generation space observatory. The James Webb Space Telescope will outperform the Hubble's single mirror by focusing the light from 18 separate mirrors onto a single sensor, enabling ultra-high-resolution observation of the most distant objects in the universe.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-ktXH

#CHIPS: "New IBM Fellows push computing frontiers"

IBM anointed eight innovators as its newest Fellows on Wednesday, May 4. The honorees included the principal investigator behind Watson, the supercomputer that recently beat human champions at Jeopardy.


David Ferruci was named IBM Fellow for his pioneering work in machine question answering that resulting in the Watson supercomputer beating a human at Jeopardy.

IBM bestows the honor of Fellow on its most prolific innovators in a practice started by Thomas J. Watson himself in 1962 as a way to encourage creativity. Of the 231 individuals who have been named Fellows since the program’s inception, 71 are active IBM employees. Past honorees include pioneers in such technologies as reduced instruction set computing (RISC), thin-film recording heads, DRAM, relational databases, the trackpoint, virtual memory, the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), Fortran and the AT bus on the original IBM personal computer. Fellows are typically given greater responsibilities in their area of expertise and are granted virtual carte blanche for choosing specific projects..
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-kK8a

#ALGORITHMS: "Smart Appliances Hook to Smart Grid"

Typical Japanese housewives demonstrate how taking one beer from the fridge (right) automatically decrements the beer-on-hand counter (left) displayed on the touchscreen.

One appliance manufacturer has announced a yearlong rollout for its new line of smart appliances, each with touch-screen apps and remote access from smartphones and touch-screen tablets. One appliance manufacturer, LG, is pioneering smart-grid-ready appliances with new models slated to roll out in nearly every month of this year. First in the line will be a smart refrigerator whose integrated touch screen and remote access capability reveal what food items are inside, their expiration dates and suggested recipes using only on-hand items.

Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-l0Fr

#ROBOTICS: "Freescale mechatronics contest taps Tower-powered FreeBots"

Freescale Semiconductor Inc. announced its Make It Challenge Tuesday, May 3, at the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley. Engineers enter the contest by enrolling in a hands-on workshop, where they will receive a free biped robot studded with Freescale sensors with which to create a unique mechatronics application. Up to 100 robot builders, plus 100 more in a parallel systems track, will share a $12,000 purse.
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-lxlj