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Issue no. 26, 2007 Published: Aug 17, 2007
SCO does not own Unix, judge rules
Scientists 'break speed of light'
'Sharp rise' in Chinese patents
Alien life in the form of DNA-shaped dust
Magnetic gravity trick grows perfect crystals
Opaque lens focuses light
Ionic wind dramatically improves CPU cooling
Researchers create 'paper' thin battery
Invention: Social networking TV
Email - the root of your work stress?

SCO does not own Unix, judge rules
A federal judge has ruled that Novell and not SCO owns the copyrights to the Unix operating system. The ruling is considered a crucial step in SCO's legal campaign against Linux users and developers because it eliminates the foundation from underneath its legal claims against IBM. The latest ruling relates to a 1995 asset purchase agreement for Unix between Novell and Santa Cruz Operations, a predecessor to SCO. Novell had acquired the Unix intellectual property from AT&T in 1993. SCO claimed that the 1995 transaction concerned the entire Unix intellectual property. Novell, however, argued that the transaction was more limited. Novell produced the original transaction agreement and bill of sale as evidence, which indicated that the purchase did not include the copyright. The agreement furthermore gives Novell the right to waive any claims for misuse of Unix by IBM, and requires SCO to forward all royalties that it received for the software to Novell. The latter could very well lead to SCO's demise. In 2003 the software maker inked a USD 10m licensing agreement with Sun Microsystems, and a USD 16.8m agreement with Microsoft. It should have paid 95% of those funds to Novell, but has failed to do so. A claim on these revenues would provide SCO with a negative net worth.
VNUnet UK Aug 13, 2007	back to top

Scientists 'break speed of light'
A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 300,000 kilometres per second. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory. The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons travelled 'instantaneously' between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 1m apart. Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences. For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving. The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.
Daily Telegraph Aug 16, 2007	back to top

'Sharp rise' in Chinese patents
China has seen a sharp increase in requests for patents, according to the UN's intellectual property agency. The number of requests for patents in China grew by 33% in 2005 compared with the previous year. That gives it the world's third highest number behind Japan and the United States, the agency said. China has established itself as the heart of the world economy but it is not the brains. Most of the products it produces are invented and designed elsewhere. So the profit that China makes on every laptop or DVD player it produces is very small. Cheap labour and huge volumes are what drive profits in China. But that may be changing. China appears to be becoming more creative. The country filed over 170,000 patents in 2005, up by a third on the year before, according to the World Intellectual Property Agency.
BBC News Aug 12, 2007	back to top

Alien life in the form of DNA-shaped dust
Could alien life exist in the form of dancing specks of dust? According to a new simulation, electrically charged dust can organise itself into DNA-like double helixes that behave in many ways like living organisms, reproducing and passing on information to one another. Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany have built a computer simulation to model what happens to dust immersed in an ionised gas, or plasma. The dust grains pick up a negative charge by absorbing electrons from the plasma and then this charged 'nucleus' attracts positive ions, which form a shell around it. The simulation suggests that the dust should sometimes form double helixes. Like DNA, the dust spirals can store information. They do so in the scaffolding of their bodies, as they have two stable states - one with a large diameter and the other with a small one - so a spiral could carry a series of wide and narrow sections. The specific order of these sections can be copied from one dust spiral to another, like a genetic code. The researchers are not sure how it happens, but they think each narrow section of spiral creates a permanent vortex of moving dust outside it. So if another spiral drifts alongside it, that vortex pinches the same length into its narrow state.
New Scientist / New Journal of Physics Aug 10, 2007	back to top

Magnetic gravity trick grows perfect crystals
One of the few scientific success stories of the International Space Station has been its use to grow large, pure crystals in microgravity. Now scientists from the Netherlands and Japan have shown that a strong magnetic field can mimic the effects of microgravity when growing protein crystals. The technique could provide a cheaper and easier way to produce crystals of the same quality as those grown aboard the ISS. The approach exploits the fact that diamagnetic materials - including most organic materials - are repelled by very strong magnetic fields as a result of changes in the orbital motion of their electrons. Researchers at the High Field Magnet Laboratory at Radboud University in Nijmegen and colleagues at Tohoku University, Japan, have now shown that this effect can be used to grow a pure crystal of the protein lysozyme. Large, pure protein crystals are prized by researchers because they give good results with a technique called X-ray crystallography. This can reveal to biologists and drug designers the precise structure of the protein. But the way crystals grow on Earth means they inevitably develop defects. Crystals grown in space do not suffer this problem due to the lack of gravity. By adjusting the magnetic field produced by a 33-tesla magnet, the researchers were able to counteract the force of gravity, stilling the convection currents around the growing crystal.
New Scientist / Applied Physics Letters Aug 10, 2007	back to top

Opaque lens focuses light
You might expect that an opaque material will always hinder the transmission of light by absorbing or scattering any light that is shone on it. But by carefully preparing a beam of laser light, physicists from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have managed to use scattering in opaque materials to focus the light to an intensified point. Their technique could be used to obtain optical images of biological samples that are hidden beneath layers of opaque tissue. The researchers expanded the diameter of the beam from a laser using a lens, and then split the cross-section into a number of segments by passing the beam through the pixels on a LCD. After focusing this expanded beam back to its normal diameter, they shone it through an opaque sample onto a digital camera. A computer program reads the intensity of the light hitting the camera and makes corrections to the LCD's pattern to make this intensity as large as possible. In practice, such an intense beam could be scanned over a biological sample to image it in a similar manner to a scanning electron microscope by using any opaque layers of tissue covering it as the 'lens'. However, the technique would still require a camera or other detector behind the sample to read the intensity for optimization. The researchers have now started to work on optimisation using local nanoscale probes that can be put inside tissue.
PhysicsWorld / Opt. Lett. 32 2309 Aug 15, 2007	back to top

Ionic wind dramatically improves CPU cooling
Scientists at Purdue University have developed a technology based on 'ionic wind engines' that could dramatically improve computer chip cooling. The researchers demonstrated that the technique could increase chip cooling rates by as much as 250%. The experimental cooling device works by generating electrically charged atoms using electrodes placed near one another. The device contained a positively charged wire, or anode, and negatively charged electrodes, called cathodes. The anode was positioned about 10mm above the cathodes. When voltage was passed through the device, the negatively charged electrodes discharged electrons toward the positively charged anode. The electrons collided with air molecules, producing positively charged ions, which were then attracted back toward the negatively charged electrodes, creating an 'ionic wind'. This 'breeze' was found to increase the airflow on the surface of the experimental chip and so dramatically improve cooling.
VNUnet UK Aug 14, 2007	back to top

Researchers create 'paper' thin battery
Researchers at the Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have invented a super lightweight, flexible, biodegradable battery in the form of a piece of paper. By harnessing the power of nanotechnology among other things, the researchers figured out how to shrink, reinvent, and otherwise repackage the components of a regular lithium-ion battery in a sheet of cellulose paper. An early prototype of the device, just big enough to be held between thumb and forefinger, produces 2.5 volts, enough to power a small fan, or illuminate a light, and its inventors say that the battery can be easily scaled up to provide enough power to run any number of electronic gadgets. The scientists substituted nanotubes for the electrodes used in a conventional battery and used an ionic liquid solution as the battery's electrolyte. The nanotubes were embedded in the cellulose while the electrolyte was soaked into the material. The cellulose, which accounts for 90% of the item's weight, acts as a separator.
Middle East Times / National Academy of Sciences Aug 14, 2007	back to top

Invention: Social networking TV
The ever-increasing choice of watch-on-demand TV programmes available over the internet presents a problem: how do you choose what to watch? Narrowing the choice using recommendations from newspapers, websites and listings magazines is a time-consuming business. And even when you have made your choice, the viewing experience will be a lonely one if all your friends and family are watching something else. But Microsoft thinks it has an answer: a version of its instant messaging system that is designed to connect to your TV, DVD player or media player and keep track of everything you have watched. The messaging system allows online buddies to see what the others have been watching. So groups of friends can synchronise their viewing habits and chat about what they have seen. It looks like a powerful idea. Marketing experts have long recognised that personal recommendations from like-minded peers are far more influential than adverts or other forms of publicity. Instant messaging and social networking are already a pervasive part of the web, so combining the two to provide viewing recommendations looks like a sure-fire winner. All we need now is a piece of software that is trustworthy, easy-to-use and works smoothly with every single on-demand system currently being trialled.
New Scientist Aug 13, 2007	back to top

Email - the root of your work stress?
A deluge of emails constantly interrupting work is stressing out modern employees, who become tired, frustrated and unproductive as they attempt to keep up with the barrage of messages. One in three workers feels stressed by the number of emails they get and the obligation to respond - although a chilled-out 38% said they do not reply to email until a day or even a week after receiving it. The research, carried out by researchers from the University of Glasgow and Paisley University quizzed 177 people to see how they deal with emails received at work. It found that employees working on a computer typically switch applications to view their emails as many as 30 or 40 times per hour, for anything from a few seconds to a minute. While half of the participants said they check their email more than once per hour, and 35% said they check every 15 minutes, monitoring software showed they check email more often. The research said email senders at work should never press other employees, especially those they supervise, to respond to their emails as they would to a phone call. Recipients should not constantly monitor their emails since this will negatively affect all other work activities, and should instead set aside dedicated email reading time.
Silicon.com Aug 13, 2007	back to top