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Issue no. 34, 2007 Published: Oct 19, 2007
Scientists bend light 'backwards'
EU targets governments over electronic waste rules
Malicious use of synthetic viruses feared
Xerox researchers work on selective encryption
Mechanical 'fish' could tap turbulence for energy
Skies to be swept for alien life
Light-harvesting nanowire could drive tiny devices
Researchers confirm the power of altruism in Wikipedia
Researchers give computers 'common sense'
'World’s smallest radio' unveiled
For tired computer users: A headband to tell you when to quit

Scientists bend light 'backwards'
A new metamaterial that causes light to refract 'backwards' has the potential to improve the efficiency of optical networking devices. The new material consists of alternating layers of semiconductors and acts as a single lens that refracts light in the opposite direction. The material was developed at the US National Science Foundation's Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment Engineering Research Center and the Princeton Center for Complex Materials. Refraction is the reason that lenses have to be curved, a trait that limits image resolution. With the new metamaterial flat lenses are possible, theoretically allowing microscopes to capture images of objects as small as a strand of DNA. The current metamaterial lens works with infrared light, but the researchers hope the technology will expand to other wavelengths in the future. Earlier efforts have crafted metamaterials that bend light in a similar way, but this is the first to do so using a 3D structure and a metamaterial comprised entirely of semiconductors. These traits will prove critical for incorporating the technology into devices such as chemical threat sensors, communications equipment and medical diagnostics tools.
VNUnet UK / National Science Foundation Oct 17, 2007	back to top

EU targets governments over electronic waste rules
Several EU countries have failed to turn the bloc's rules on electronic waste into national law and now face legal action from Brussels. The rules require manufacturers to accept used refrigerators, computers, cell phones and other appliances from consumers and recycle them. The European Commission said it would take legal action against Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for not properly making the EU's so-called WEEE directive for waste electrical and electronic equipment into national law. Separately, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Malta, Finland and Sweden failed to introduce an EU law banning the use of some heavy metals and other hazardous materials in electronic equipment into their national rulebooks. Those rules cover equipment on sale from July 2006. The Commission sent warning letters to the offending countries, the first step in a legal process that can end up at an EU court which can eventually impose fines.
Reuters Oct 17, 2007	back to top

Malicious use of synthetic viruses feared
The team attempting to develop synthetic viruses and artificial bacteria from manmade DNA have issued guidelines to prevent designer organisms being accidentally or deliberately misused to cause harm. The aim of the team at the J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, Maryland, is to understand how life works and to create bacteria to make green fuels, digest toxic waste or absorb greenhouse gases. However, there is a danger that the same technology could also be used to resurrect an extinct virus, or to create a new kind of disease. Experts from the Institute, the Centre for Strategic & International Studies, and MIT have released a report to prevent 'malicious uses' of the technology, based on 20 months of in-depth study, review and analysis by the teams and a core group of 14 experts. Among various measures, the report recommends firms supplying synthetic DNA use special software to screen orders for potentially harmful DNA. Owners of DNA synthesizers might be required to register their machines, or licenses might be required to purchase specific chemicals needed to synthesize DNA. The report also suggests prior review of synthetic genomics experiments in universities.
Daily Telegraph Oct 17, 2007	back to top

Xerox researchers work on selective encryption
Researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center have demonstrated new software designed to increase speed and accuracy when removing sensitive or confidential material from documents. The 'Intelligent Redaction' software automates the process of removing confidential information from any document. Once users have identified the information they want to protect, the software automatically redacts all references to this information throughout the document. The same information can also be automatically redacted if it appears in other documents, helping to ensure a consistent level of security as well as saving time and increasing redaction accuracy. Most documents containing classified information are protected by encrypting the entire document. Xerox's new software attempts to understand document context so that it can perform partial encryption. This means that only sensitive sections or paragraphs are encrypted, while the rest of the document is not. The Intelligent Redaction software also displays or hides restricted portions of the document so that it appears differently to different people without the need to manage several versions of the same data.
VNUnet UK Oct 18, 2007	back to top

Mechanical 'fish' could tap turbulence for energy
Devices that harvest energy from swirling wakes surrounding buildings are being developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology. Their novel designs – inspired by fish – could generate electricity using eddies, something that conventional turbines cannot do. Fish use their bodies to get an energy boost from surrounding vortices, which may be created by other fish in the same shoal, or by stationary objects in the water. But this kind of turbulent flow cannot be used by conventional wind or water turbines, which instead need a steady flow. The researchers realised that it might be possible for a mechanical system to extract energy from vortex wakes and developed a mathematical model, based on the way fish move, to help put this into practice. Fish move from side to side in order to exploit the way wakes in flowing water produce vortices that alternately spin clockwise and anticlockwise. For a mechanical device to pick up energy from an eddy, the model shows that it must also change its angle in a similar way to a fish, to pick up as much energy as possible. Once operational such devices will generate less power than a normal wind turbine in full flow, but should still compete over the long term, according to the researchers.
New Scientist / Bioinspiration & Biomimetics Oct 16, 2007	back to top

Skies to be swept for alien life
The switch has been thrown on a telescope specifically designed to seek out alien life. Funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the finished Allen Telescope Array (ATA) will have 350 six-metre antennas and will be one of the world's largest. Its creators hope it will help spot definite signs of alien life by 2025. The ATA is being run by the Seti Institute and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory from the University of California, Berkeley, US. Rather than being hand built, each six-metre antenna is made of a mass-produced dish and off-the-shelf components. Digital signal processing software is used to analyse data and clean out man-made interference that would otherwise make the captured information useless. The layout of the array has also been carefully plotted so the instruments work in unison to take a single snapshot of huge swathes of the sky. The ATA's creators claim that even with only 42 antennas on-stream, the instrument already rivals larger instruments in its ability to carry out brightness, temperature and point source surveys. When all 350 dishes are gathering data, the instrument will be able to study an area of the sky 17 times larger than that possible with the Very Large Array in New Mexico.
BBC News Oct 12, 2007	back to top

Light-harvesting nanowire could drive tiny devices
A nanowire that harvests enough electricity from light to power a nanoscale circuit has been demonstrated by Harvard researchers. The nanowire is made of layers of silicon and is the first example of a self-contained nanoscale solar cell. The nanowire functions as a complete solar cell. At its core is a rod-shaped crystal of silicon, about 100 nanometres across, doped with boron. Layers of polycrystalline silicon are added to wrap it in a 50-nm-thick layer of undoped silicon and a 50-nm-thick outer coating of silicon doped with phosphorus. As light hits the wire, electrons are knocked loose from the silicon crystal, leaving positively charged 'holes' that can also move through the material. The electrons tend to move towards the outer layer of the nanowire, while the holes move towards its core, with the layer between keeping the two separate. The flow of electrons and holes creates an electric current when the nanowire is connected to a circuit. Although the proof-of-concept device only converts about 3% of light into electricity, the researchers say it allows them to study a fundamentally different geometry for photovoltaic cells, which may be attractive for improving the efficiency. But the most immediate promise for the nanowires is as power sources for nanoscale electronics.
New Scientist / Nature Oct 17, 2007	back to top

Researchers confirm the power of altruism in Wikipedia
The beauty of open-source applications is that they are continually improved and updated by those who use them and care about them. Dartmouth researchers looked at Wikipedia to determine if the anonymous, infrequent contributors, the Good Samaritans, are as reliable as the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain. The researchers discovered that Good Samaritans contribute high-quality content, as do the active, registered users. They examined Wikipedia authors and the quality of Wikipedia content as measured by how long and how much of it persisted before being changed or corrected. By subdividing their analysis by registered versus anonymous contributors, the researchers found that among those who contribute often, registered users are more reliable. However, among those who contribute only a little, the anonymous users are more reliable. The researchers were most surprised to find that the reliability of Good Samaritans' contributions were at least as high as that of the more reputable registered users' contributions. In traditional laboratory studies of collective goods those Good Samaritans are not included.
PhysOrg Dartmouth College Oct 17, 2007	back to top

Researchers give computers 'common sense'
A little-known Google Labs widget has enabled researchers from UC San Diego and UCLA to add 'common sense' to computers. The computer scientists have added the ability to use context to help identify objects in photographs in an automated image labelling system. For example, if a conventional automated object identifier has scanned an image and identified 'person', 'tennis racket', 'tennis court' and 'lemon', the new post-processing context check will re-label 'lemon' as 'tennis ball'. The researchers showed that Google Sets can be used to provide external contextual information to automated object identifiers. Google Sets generates lists of related items or objects from just a few examples. If a user types in 'John', 'Paul' and 'George', it will return the words 'Ringo', 'Beatles' and 'John Lennon'. In the image labelling process an automated system splits the image into different regions using image segmentation. Next it provides a ranked list of probable labels for each of these image regions. Finally it adds a dose of context by processing all the different possible combinations of labels within the image, and maximising the contextual agreement among the labelled objects within each picture. It is during this step that Google Sets can be used as a source of context that helps the system turn a 'lemon' into a 'tennis ball'.
VNUnet UK Oct 18, 2007	back to top

'World’s smallest radio' unveiled
Scientists at the University of California have unveiled a detector thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair that can translate radio waves into sound. The study marks the first time that a nano-sized detector has been demonstrated in a working radio system. Made of carbon nanotubes a few atoms across, it is almost 1,000 times smaller than current radio technology. The researchers incorporated the microscopic detector into a complete radio system. They used it to transmit classical music wirelessly from an iPod to a speaker several metres away from the music player. The researchers believe that in the future all components could be nanoscale, thus allowing a truly nanoscale wireless communications system. Such a development would bring the concept of smart dust - a cluster of devices, smaller than a grain of sand, equipped with wireless communications that can detect the likes of light, temperature, or vibration - into the realms of reality rather than science fiction. Future uses might include meteorological, geophysical and biological research sensors. It could also be used for military surveillance, or to create a distributed internet that would be accessible anywhere.
BBC News Oct 17, 2007	back to top

For tired computer users: A headband to tell you when to quit
A high tech headband that monitors blood oxygenation levels in the brain may tell people working at PCs and terminals when they are becoming overly fatigued, distracted, or just plain stressed out. The concept was described by a Tufts University team that has been awarded a USD 445,000 grant by the National Science Foundation. The technology involves the use of a MRI-like headband to gain real time insight into the brain's emotional state. The research could produce valuable insight into a range of situations, but particularly for people peering into video screens in stressful situations like air traffic controllers, emergency workers and military personnel in combat situations. A long-term goal of the research would be to improve user interfaces for normal computer users. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the team said the technology is 'safe, portable, non-invasive and can be implemented wirelessly.' Infrared sensors on the headband are fitted with laser diodes that send near-infrared light into the forehead, enabling oxygenation to be tracked. Stress levels from bored to overwhelmed can be measured.
InformationWeek Oct 12, 2007	back to top