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Issue no. 24, 2008 Published: Aug 15, 2008
Legal milestone for open source
EU project addresses European energy needs
China's 'rapid renewables surge'
Tiny microscope aims for Third World market
Geological mapping gets joined up
Elastic electronics see better
Invention: Brain signal decoder
Quantum strangeness breaks the light barrier
Scientists say warp drive is possible
Research links ancient 'analogue computer' to Archimedes

Legal milestone for open source
Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free. The US federal appeals court overturned a lower court decision involving free software that a hobbyist put online. The court has now said conditions of an agreement called the Artistic Licence were enforceable under copyright law. According to details outlined in the ruling, Robert Jacobsen had written and then released code under an Artistic Licence. This meant anyone using that free code had to attribute the author, highlight the original source of the files and explain how the code had been modified. Jacobsen accused commercial software developer Matthew Katzer of ignoring the terms of the Artistic Licence when they took his code and used it to develop commercial software products for trains. An earlier court ruling did not agree with Jacobsen and said the licence he used was 'intentionally broad'. Instead the court ruled he might be able to claim breach of contract. The distinction is important since under federal copyright law a plaintiff can seek statutory damages and can be more easily granted an injunction than under contract law. But now the US appeals court determined that the terms of the Artistic License are enforceable copyright conditions and that copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted materials.
BBC News Aug 14, 2008	back to top

EU project addresses European energy needs
A revolution is set to occur in the world of European energy delivery. The ADDRESS European project, funded to the tune of EUR 9m by the EU, aims to provide European citizens with the next evolution in energy delivery through the development of smart energy grids of the future. ADDRESS - Active distribution networks with full integration of demand and distributed energy resources - aims is to create a commercial and technical framework for the development of 'active demand'. Active demand refers to the ability to interact with the network and save on the energy bill. Consumers will be able to inform themselves as to the price and the network's demand of energy in real time, which empowers them to decide whether to consume, or to shift consumption to hours with a lower price. Moreover, private consumers will be able to generate energy autonomously for their own private consumption and to feed it into the network and sell it to others. The ADDRESS project combines 25 partners from 11 European countries spanning the entire electricity supply chain, R&D bodies and manufacturers.
EU Business / CORDIS Aug 14, 2008	back to top

China's 'rapid renewables surge'
China's rapid investment in low carbon technologies has catapulted the nation up the global renewable energy rankings, a report shows. The Climate Group study said China invested USD 12bn in renewables during 2007, second only to Germany, which spent $14bn. However, it was expected to top the table by the end of 2009, it added. Uncertainty over future energy supplies has seen global fuel prices reach record levels, which has resulted in renewable technologies becoming a more attractive option. In order to meet its target of increasing the percentage of energy from low carbon technologies from 8% in 2006 to 15% by 2020, China is expected to invest an average of USD 33bn annually for the next 12 years. Figures within the report showed that China was already the leading producer in terms of installed renewable generation capacity. It has the world's largest hydroelectricity capacity since the controversial Three Gorges project began producing electricity, and the fifth largest fleet of wind turbines on the planet. Although its installed capacity of photovoltaic (PV) panels is still relatively low, it is already a leading manufacturer of solar panels.
BBC News Aug 01, 2008	back to top

Tiny microscope aims for Third World market
In developing countries diagnostic labs in the field struggle to equip themselves with conventional microscopes, which are both large and costly. But now, scientists at the California Institute of Technology have developed a microscope the size of a penny piece that matches the resolution of its larger counterparts. What is more, it could be produced for as little as EUR 6.3. The invention is inspired by the 'floaters' in our eyes - the small clumps of cells that have broken loose from the eye's inner lining and drift through the vitreous humour. Normally we see the world because light reflected from objects is focussed through the eye by a lens onto the retina. However, we see floaters by a different mechanism. These cells sit behind our lens and accumulate on the retina, and so we only obtain a scan or 'direct projection' of them. Because the dots appear larger than the cells themselves, our body has a natural microscope that needs no lens. In the Caltech replica of this effect, the specimen to be magnified is placed directly onto a CMOS sensor, which converts optical images into an electrical signal. The researchers put a thin film of aluminium over the sensor and then piercing it over the centre of each pixel. This restricts pixel sensitivity to the areas directly beneath the holes - effectively creating a smaller pixel that can match conventional microscope resolution. The researchers then suspend the specimen in an 'optofluid' and let it flow into the holes.
PhysicsWorld Aug 05, 2008	back to top

Geological mapping gets joined up
The world's geologists have dug out their maps and are sticking them together to produce the first truly global resource of the world's rocks. The OneGeology project pools existing data and has made it available on the web. Led by the British Geological Survey (BGS), the project involved geologists from 80 nations. Between 60% and 70% of the Earth's surface is now available down to the scale of 1:1,000,000. Project organisers explained that what is novel about this project is that it takes local geological information and makes it global. The resource displays geological information with the use of a 'virtual globe', in much the same way as Google Earth now presents satellite images. Eventually, it is hoped that the geological maps will be detailed enough to help companies find the Earth's exploitable resources, such as minerals and oil. The project could encourage the mining of minerals in developing countries, by making maps available that were previously unavailable to outside investors. It could also help scientists and engineers learn more about the Earth and its environmental changes. The researchers hope that by making geological surveys global, they can encourage 'big science' - research that no one country or geological survey could do on its own.
BBC News Jul 31, 2008	back to top

Elastic electronics see better
A new camera designed with a curved detection surface allows imaging devices to see as animals do. The camera, inspired by the human eye, relies on the ability to construct silicon electronics on a stretchable membrane. In the future, these electronic membranes could be wrapped around human organs to act as health monitoring devices, say researchers from the University of Illinois, who developed the camera. Photosensitive displays are made up of thousands of pixels and are usually formed on a flat, rigid, semiconductor wafer. The animal retina is curved, which allows them to see the world without distortion - unlike the images produced from cameras, which lose focus at the periphery. Hoping to improve digital imaging, the team joined up with a group of mechanical engineers from Northwestern University, to make a camera shaped more like an eye. The result was a 2cm-wide camera with a single, simple lens and a concave light detection system. The team approached the initial problem by dicing up the surface of the silicon wafer into 'chiplets' - tiny pieces of silicon that detect incoming light. One micron thick cables provided the electrical connections between the adjacent chiplets to make a circuit. Next, the team developed a curved elastic membrane. The interconnected mesh allows the stretching, deforming and reshaping the circuit of photoreceptors giving an undistorted image.
BBC News / Nature Aug 06, 2008	back to top

Invention: Brain signal decoder
Interfacing with the brain to control devices such as wheelchairs, robots and prosthetic devices has great potential. Monkeys have shown impressive ability to control robot limbs using brain implants, but must 'rewire' their brains through training to do it. It would make things easier to use the signals naturally used for hand-eye coordination. But nobody has been able to figure out how the part of the brain responsible for hand-eye coordination, the primary motor cortex, does its job. Even recording the activity of this brain region has proved difficult. Now, researchers at Brown University have designed a new implant to make the task easier. They have also created software that turns these brain signals into code that controls an external device. The team tested the device on the brains of monkeys as they watched objects move in front of them. In this way, the researchers built up a database of signals that could be used to work out a decoding strategy. The result is a brain implant that can translate the hand trajectory signals produced by the brain and use them to control an external device.
New Scientist Jul 28, 2008	back to top

Quantum strangeness breaks the light barrier
In the weird world of quantum mechanics, the phenomenon of entanglement trumps all for strangeness - and maybe also for speed. Two entangled particles are so deeply linked that measuring one influences the other, regardless of the distance between them. In some interpretations, a signal passes between the two particles faster than light. To test this idea, researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland sent pairs of entangled photons to labs 18 kilometres apart. By measuring the properties of each photon in many of these pairs, the team showed that if superluminal signals are responsible for entanglement they must travel at more than 10,000 times the speed of light. The team favour an alternative idea - that a measurement on one photon instantly influences the other.
New Scientist / Nature Aug 13, 2008	back to top

Scientists say warp drive is possible
A research paper has suggested that a warp drive capable of moving a craft at faster than the speed of light could indeed be possible. Putting the Warp into Warp Drive was written by Baylor University physicists Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy. The paper suggests that the speed of light could be broken by manipulating the fabric of space to create a bubble on which a craft could ride. Einstein's laws of relativity would not be violated by such a drive since the craft itself would remain stationary and the bubble of space would be mobile. This would also shield passengers from the enormous G forces from such acceleration. However there are significant hurdles to be overcome, most notably creating an engine powerful enough to produce such a distortion. Early calculations indicate that superluminal propulsion for a ship of volume 1000m3 could be achieved at an estimated energy cost of 10 to the power of 45 J, or roughly the total mass-energy contained within Jupiter after using the famous relation E = mc2. This is a significant step forward, since previous calculations have shown that it would take more energy than exists in the entire universe to power such a craft.
VNUnet UK Jul 30, 2008	back to top

Research links ancient 'analogue computer' to Archimedes
After a closer examination of the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games. The new findings also suggested that the mechanism's concept originated in the colonies of Corinth in what is now Italy. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes. Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a manuscript, now lost, on astronomical mechanisms. The Antikythera Mechanism was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C. Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and 3D X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument's back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar. The month names are of Corinthian origin, which researchers suggest is a heritage going back to Archimedes.
International Herald Tribune Jul 30, 2008	back to top