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Issue no. 9, 2006 Published: Mar 03, 2006
China sets up system for internet domains
Go-ahead for Europe ice mission
Africa given free journal access
Retrieving data from a black hole
Physicists learn how to 'teleclone'
Nanotube networks conjured on crystals
Cooled by an electric pulse
3D plasma shapes created in thin air
Pentagon develops brain implants to turn sharks into spies
Nazi code cracked
RFID: Sign of the (end) times?

China sets up system for internet domains
The Internet authorities in China have set up a new family of Chinese- language alternatives to .com and other top level domains. It is a move that bypasses the US-controlled Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and some analysts fear that it could enhance China's ability to censor its citizens' access to the internet. US control of internet regulation is a point of contention with many foreign governments. Last year, the US fended off demands to remove control of ICANN from the Department of Commerce and put it under the auspices of the UN. Some analysts say with its move China is gradually creating a domestic internet that will be far more susceptible to censorship than the US-controlled version. Eventually the Chinese could completely disconnect from the ICANN system and route all internal internet traffic through their own domain servers. But Subramanian Subbiah, co-founder of I-DNS.net, a Singapore company that sells domain names created in non-Western writing systems, said that the new policy was driven by the desire to make the internet more accessible to Chinese speakers. He said that China lost patience with ICANN, which has not made addresses available in Asian writing systems.
International Herald Tribune / People's Daily Mar 02, 2006	back to top

Go-ahead for Europe ice mission
The Cryosat mission lost in the Arctic Ocean last year minutes after launch from northern Russia will fly again. The European Space Agency (ESA) has agreed to build a copy of the original 140m-euro craft. Early estimates suggest Cryosat-2 could be ready to launch in three years. The mission will study how the Earth's ice sheets are responding to climate change amid mounting evidence that some areas are thinning. The Cryosat probe was lost soon after lift-off last October from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, crashing into the very ocean it was meant to monitor. Russian investigators later concluded that a problem with the onboard software of the upper stage of the Rockot launch vehicle was to blame. European ministers agreed in December that re-launching Cryosat was a priority; but the final decision fell to members of ESA's Earth Observation Programme Board who met this week in Paris, France.
BBC News Feb 24, 2006	back to top

Africa given free journal access
The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in the UK has announced that it will give Africa free access to its journal archives. A total of 1.5 million pages and 250,000 articles will be available electronically to African scientists. The decision to open access to the journals followed the recent G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, which highlighted the need for capacity building in developing countries in science and technology. The Archives for Africa scheme was launched on Tuesday at the House of Commons. At the launch of the initiative, Ethiopian chemist Hareg Tadesse called on other chemistry journals to open their archives free-of-charge, too. 'It is not about only me, and only Africa - the whole of the developing world needs supporting,' she said. To aid African research, she said more scientific journals needed to give free access to their papers.
BBC News Mar 01, 2006	back to top

Retrieving data from a black hole
Quantum information could be retrieved from a black hole, according to new calculations by a theoretical physicist in the US. Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that only a tiny amount of information - just half a quantum bit, or 'qubit' - is lost from the black hole regardless of how many bits are in the hole to begin with. Ever since Stephen Hawking showed that black holes emit so-called 'Hawking radiation', physicists have wondered if the radiation contains information about the matter that formed the black hole. Now, Lloyd's work has shown that almost all of the information that goes into a black hole is 'entangled' with the Hawking radiation and is preserved. As the black hole evaporates, the escaping information can be recovered with a 'fidelity' of 0.85. This means that only about a half a bit of information is lost, regardless of how many bits were in the hole to start with. According to Lloyd, the result means that black holes could one day function as information processors. However, knowing how to program them will depend on a full knowledge of quantum gravity, which we do not have yet, and an experimental confirmation of final-state projection.
PhysicsWeb / Physical Review Letters Mar 02, 2006	back to top

Physicists learn how to 'teleclone'
A team of physicists in Japan and the UK has demonstrated 'quantum telecloning' for the first time. Telecloning, which combines quantum cloning and teleportation into a single step, involves sending quantum information to more than one receiver. The breakthrough was made by researchers at the University of York, the University of Tokyo and the Japan Science Technology Agency, who successfully sent information about a laser beam to two remote locations in a single step. Quantum teleportation involves a sender (normally called Alice) transferring information about the quantum state of a particle down a classical channel to a receiver (normally called Bob). This is possible because both Alice and Bob are entangled. Quantum cloning involves making copies or 'clones' of quantum states. Quantum telecloning is basically the same as teleportation, except that the information is sent to more than one receiver, such as Bob and Claire. It involves simultaneously cloning a quantum state and sending to it to an arbitrary number of different destinations. Telecloning represents a new quantum information tool and could be used to build quantum computers and quantum communication networks.
PhysicsWeb / Physical Review Letters Feb 24, 2006	back to top

Nanotube networks conjured on crystals
The key to instantly assembling intricate networks of nanotubes has been discovered by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, US, and at Christian Albrechts University of Kiel, Germany. Using high-powered microscopes the researchers watched as copper was deposited onto a layered crystal of vanadium selenide, causing complex networks of nano-piping to suddenly pop up on top of the crystal. It had been previously suggested that such nano-pipes might be created as cracks form on the crystal surface as the copper layer is applied. But the researchers saw that the nano-pipes form when the top layer of the crystal buckles upwards to relieve the molecular strain caused by the deposition of the metal. A better understanding of the phenomenon may lead to the development of nano-circuits that channel electrons through tiny tunnels instead of along silicon wires, which have to be etched lithographically. Such circuits would be many times smaller than today's, allowing greater computer power to be packed into chips of the same dimensions.
New Scientist / Physical Review Letters Mar 01, 2006	back to top

Cooled by an electric pulse
A material has been made that turns cold at the push of a button. Researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, say that their material may open the way to practical applications of 'electrical refrigeration', in which electric fields are used to keep things cool. This principle, called the electrocaloric effect, has been known since the 1960s, but it had seemed too weak an effect to be of much use. The Cambridge team has now found a ceramic material that shows a giant electrocaloric effect; more than 100 times larger than seen previously. The material is a variant of lead zirconate titanate, or PZT. This hard, crystalline solid is piezoelectric: squeezing it creates an electric field inside it. This makes PZT useful for inter-converting sound and electrical energy, as is done in some microphone and ultrasound technologies. The researchers found that they could turn PZT into a promising electrocaloric material simply by making it from about 20 times more zirconium than titanium.
Nature / Science Mar 02, 2006	back to top

3D plasma shapes created in thin air
The night sky could soon be lit up with gigantic three-dimensional adverts, thanks to a Japanese laser display that creates glowing images in thin air. The system is being developed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tokyo, in collaboration with Burton Inc and Keio University. The display utilises an ionisation effect which occurs when a beam of laser light is focused to a point in air. The laser beam itself is invisible to the human eye but, if the intensity of the laser pulse exceeds a threshold, the air breaks down into glowing plasma that emits visible light. The required intensity can only be achieved by very short, powerful laser pulses - each plasma dot, or 'flashpoint', lasts for only about a nanosecond. But the resulting image appears to last longer due to persistence of vision. As with film and TV, the impression of a continuous image is maintained by refreshing the flashpoints.
New Scientist Feb 27, 2006	back to top

Pentagon develops brain implants to turn sharks into spies
Military scientists in the US are developing a way of manipulating sharks by remote control to turn them into underwater spies or weapons. Engineers funded by the Pentagon have created electronic brain implants for fish that they hope will be able to influence the movements of sharks and perhaps even decode what they are sensing. The Pentagon hopes to exploit the ability of sharks to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. The neural implants consist of electrodes buried in the fish's brain which can then be triggered by remote control to stimulate specific areas of the animal's central nervous system. The shark study is also designed to investigate the possibility of monitoring the brain activity of a shark to decipher different patterns of activity that indicate whether the fish has detected an ocean current, a scent or an electrical field.
The Independent / New Scientist Mar 02, 2006	back to top

Nazi code cracked
A new project to crack World War II German military messages that have never before been deciphered is appealing for computer users to volunteer their spare processing power. On February 20 the first of three codes was cracked and now the M4 project hopes to break the remaining two messages that were generated using the Germans' infamous Enigma machine. Although the code breaking efforts by cryptologists at Britain's Bletchley Park helped to win the war, some messages eluded the facility and now the M4 project has set distributed computing to the task. The signals being broken were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to have been enciphered with the four rotor Enigma M4. The hunt to decode the WWII messages officially began in January this year and those wishing to participate can register online. The project is based on open source software so users to see what is going on in their computer and can be run on Windows 98, 2000 and XP, and various flavours of Unix.
The Age Mar 01, 2006	back to top

RFID: Sign of the (end) times?
Katherine Albrecht is on a mission from God. The influential consumer advocate has written a new book warning her fellow Christians that radio frequency identification may evolve to become the 'mark of the beast' - meaning the technology is a sign that the end-times are drawing near. Albrecht has been a leading opponent of RFID, which is fast becoming a part of passports and payment cards, and is widely expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods. RFID chips contain unique identification codes, and can be read at varying distances with special reader devices. Albrecht hopes her new book, The Spychips Threat: Why Christians Should Resist RFID and Electronic Surveillance, will be embraced by the 59 per cent of Americans who share her belief that the Book of Revelation in the Bible forecasts events that are yet to come. But fear not, says Boston University professor Richard Landes, who specialises in the history of apocalyptic thought. New technologies often trigger alarm among millenarians. Y2K, bar codes and Social Security numbers all triggered end-times warnings.' Even the introduction of the Gutenberg press caused waves of apocalyptic thinking,' said Landes.
Wired News Mar 02, 2006	back to top