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Issue no. 14, 2005 Published: Jun 06, 2008
EU warns Microsoft of extra fines
Supercomputing 'Grid' passes latest test
New cellphone to challenge MP3 players
Microsoft adds flash memory to hard drives
Europe's largest supercomputer eavesdrops on stars
VR headset spots concussion in minutes
Mind-reading machine knows what you see
Scientists make bacteria behave like computers
Tiny fridge aims big
Last call for 2006 EU technology prize

EU warns Microsoft of extra fines
The EU has warned Microsoft it could incur additional fines unless it makes more effort to stop abusing its dominant position. The comments were made by an EU spokesman after a meeting between EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes and Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer. In March 2004, the EU found Microsoft guilty of preventing competition, and ordered it to open up its systems. In addition to a EUR 497m fine in March 2004, the EU ordered Microsoft to open up its core software systems to rivals. Following Kroes' meeting with Ballmer, the spokesman said Europe remained unhappy on both counts. Although Microsoft brought out a version of Windows without Media Player last month, Kroes is not convinced it was technically up to standard. Under EU rules Europe could fine Microsoft up to 5 per cent of its daily global turnover for each day that a decision is not applied to its liking.
BBC News Apr 27, 2005	back to top

Supercomputing 'Grid' passes latest test
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online at the CERN in 2007 it will produce more data than any other experiment in the history of physics. Particle physicists have now passed another milestone in their preparations for the LHC by sustaining a continuous flow of 600 megabytes of data per second (MB/s) for 10 days from the Geneva laboratory to seven sites in Europe and the US. This is the first time that such high rates of data transfer have been maintained between so many sites and over such a long period of time. The total amount of data transmitted during the challenge - some 500 terabytes - would take about 250 years to download using a typical 512 kilobit per second household broadband connection. The next service challenge will take place this summer and will involve connecting more computing centres over a three-month period. CERN plans to use an internet-like worldwide supercomputing 'Grid' of computing centres to handle the data from the collider, which will then be analysed by more than 6,000 scientists all over the world.
PhysicsWeb Apr 26, 2005	back to top

New cellphone to challenge MP3 players
A cellphone that can store as much music as Apple's popular iPod Mini MP3 player will be launched by Nokia later in 2005. The move follows Sony-Ericsson's unveiling in March of a music-storing 'Walkman' phone and marks another nail in the coffin for pure MP3 players. Like the basic iPod Mini, Nokia's N91 phone incorporates a diminutive 4GB hard disc drive capable of storing at least 3,000 music tracks. By comparison the first Walkman phone - the Sony-Ericsson W800 - will store about 150 tracks on a 0.5GB flash-memory card. A version with a 3G connection will be available to allow the wireless downloading of music while the standard GSM phone will use a computer and USB connection. Like the, the N91 has a 2-megapixel camera built in. Apple has already struck a deal with US phone and chip maker Motorola to jointly create an 'iPod phone' capable of interfacing easily with Apple's iTunes music purchasing and track management service, but the relationship has yet to bear fruit.
New Scientist Apr 27, 2005	back to top

Microsoft adds flash memory to hard drives
Microsoft has revealed a hybrid hard disk that includes flash memory to reduce laptop power consumption by a claimed 10 per cent. The power saving is achieved because the flash memory chip reduces the need for the disk to spin. The technology is aimed at laptops running Longhorn, Microsoft's upcoming version of Windows. The technology also promises to reduce the number of hard drive failures in laptop computers. A hard disk in a laptop typically lasts just half as long as one in a desktop system, according to Microsoft. Instead of constantly spinning the hard drive to store and retrieve data, the flash memory can be used as a temporary storage area. The prototype that Microsoft unveiled at WinHEC in Seattle used 128MB of flash memory. The memory is also used to accelerate the wake up time for a system once it has gone into sleep mode. By storing information on the chip, a laptop can resume operation within 10 seconds as opposed to the current 15-20 seconds.
VNUnet UK Apr 26, 2005	back to top

Europe's largest supercomputer eavesdrops on stars
Europe's biggest supercomputer will crunch data from thousands of radio antennae eavesdropping on the history of the universe, its Dutch developer ASTRON and US computer giant IBM said this week. The computer, based in the northern Netherlands, will process signals from up to 13 billion light years from earth - as far back in time as the beginnings of the earliest stars and galaxies after the formation of the universe. Running on 12,000 PowerPC microprocessors, the computer can execute 27.4 Teraflops, or 27.4 trillion floating-point operations, per second. While that makes it Europe's most powerful computer in terms of sustained performance, the world's biggest computer remains the US-based BlueGene with a capacity of 70.1 Teraflops. The new computer will consume 150 Kilowatts of power - the equivalent of 2,500 60-watt light bulbs - which is considered economical for a supercomputer. It will form the heart of a new type of radio telescope developed by ASTRON, and gather and analyse information from ASTRON's Low Frequency Array 'software telescope' network.
Yahoo! / Reuters Apr 26, 2005	back to top

VR headset spots concussion in minutes
You've had a blow to the head, but how do you know whether you are concussed or not? The answer could be a matter of life or death, yet it takes hours of testing by professionals to know for sure. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and the Emergency Medicine Research Center at Emory University are developing a virtual-reality headset that can diagnose the extent of a head injury within minutes. Non-medical personnel will use it to quickly gauge the extent of brain damage, and the system works in noisy emergency rooms, on the battlefield or at the side of a sports field. It can also pick up early signs for dementia. The person who has suffered the blow wears a VR headset, plus headphones, and is given a device similar to a video game controller to operate. The system puts the wearer through an array of neuro- psychological tests designed to pick up reduced reaction times and deficits in working memory, conditions that would indicate injuries to different parts of the brain.
New Scientist Apr 27, 2005	back to top

Mind-reading machine knows what you see
It is possible to read someone’s mind by remotely measuring their brain activity, researchers have shown. The technique can even extract information from subjects that they are not aware of themselves and could help doctors work out if patients apparently in a coma are actually conscious. Researchers at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, and Princeton University in New Jersey, US, have achieved these 'mind reading' feats remotely using functional MRI scanning. They showed patterns of parallel lines in 1 of 8 orientations to four volunteers. By focussing on brain regions involved in visual perception they were able to recognise which orientation the subjects were observing. Each line orientation corresponded to a different pattern of brain activity, although the patterns were different in each person. What is more, when two sets of lines were superimposed and the subjects were asked to focus on one set, the researchers could work out which one they were thinking of from the brain images.
New Scientist / Nature Neuroscience Apr 25, 2005	back to top

Scientists make bacteria behave like computers
Bacteria have been programmed to behave like computers, assembling themselves into complex shapes based on instructions stuffed into their genes. The research could lead to smart biological devices that could detect hazardous substances. Eventually, the process might be used to direct the construction of useful devices or the growth of new tissue, perhaps restoring function to a severed spinal cord. The Princeton researchers programmed E. coli bacteria to emit red or green fluorescent light in response to a signal emitted from another set of E. coli. The living cells were commanded to make a bull's-eye pattern, for example, around central cells based on communication between the bacteria. Other patterns produced with this new 'synthetic biology' technique include a pretty good semblance of a heart and a rudimentary flower pattern. Previously, the Princeton team showed they could insert DNA into cells to make them behave like digital circuits. The cells could be made to perform basic mathematical logic. The latest work expands this concept to vast numbers of bacteria responding in concert.
MSNBC / LiveScience.com / Nature Apr 28, 2005	back to top

Tiny fridge aims big
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US have made a chip-sized refrigerator that can cool objects much bigger than itself to millikelvin (mK) temperatures. The device relies on the quantum mechanical tunnelling of electrons between a metal and superconductor and could find applications in a variety of cryogenic sensors in the semiconductor industry and astronomy. Many next-generation scientific instruments will rely on sensors cooled to temperatures near 100 mK. However, present-day solid-state refrigerators cannot go below about 1 K. The physicists now have created a chip-scale electron-tunnelling refrigerator that could ultimately be capable of cooling centimetre-sized objects to 100 mK and below. Such a combination could then be used in a variety of cryogenic applications, including X-ray sensors for defect analysis in the semiconductor industry or photon detectors in a planned satellite mission to search for polarisation in the cosmic microwave background.
PhysicsWeb Apr 28, 2005	back to top

Last call for 2006 EU technology prize
The EU has issued a final call for entrants to the European Information Society Technologies 2006 Prize. Thursday 12 May is the final date for submissions and the three winners of the 2005 prize will each receive EUR 200,000. Prizes will be awarded to 'novel products with a high information technology content and evident market potential'. If the product is already being marketed, it should have been introduced after 1 June 2003 or at least be in prototype stage. The 2005 winners will be announced at a ceremony next week.
VNUnet UK Apr 22, 2005	back to top