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Issue no. 29, 2008
Published: Sep 19, 2008 |
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 Google and GE in energy deal | | IBM unveils technology for 22nm chips | | Genetically modified crops protect wild-type neighbours | | Satellites to bring speedy internet to developing world | | Invention: Drug-delivering contact lenses | | Scientists find world's largest prime numbers |
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| Google and GE in energy deal |
Google has teamed up with technology multinational General Electric to
develop a 'smart' electric power grid and promote clean energy. Both
companies want to make renewable energy more accessible and useful.
GE and Google said they would leverage their lobbying muscle in
Washington to try and persuade politicians to push for major policy
changes in energy. A statement by the two firms said that 'policy is a
major impediment to building a 21st century electricity system.'
GE is now one of the biggest players in the wind power industry and is
involved in developing hybrid locomotives, water reuse solutions and
photovoltaic cells. Google is also involved in clean energy initiatives
that include geothermal, solar and wind-generated electricity.
Google has maintained that the benefits of renewable electricity can not
be fully realised without updating US power transmission lines into a
'smart grid' that lets people track and control what types of power they
use and when. GE and Google plan to work on technologies that will
convert geothermal power into electricity as well as prepare the
nation's grid for plug-in vehicles. |
| BBC News
Sep 18, 2008 |
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| IBM unveils technology for 22nm chips |
IBM has unveiled its strategy to produce future chips using a 22nm
fabrication process. The company is adopting a technique called
'computational scaling' in order to manufacture circuits small enough to
deliver more powerful and energy-efficient devices.
While current chips such as Intel's are manufactured using a 45nm
process, vendors are already looking ahead to succeeding generations.
Intel plans to introduce 32nm chips in 2009, but chipmakers have hit a
problem in that current lithographic methods are not adequate for
designs as small as 22nm owing to fundamental physical limitations.
IBM said that computational scaling overcomes these limitations by using
mathematical techniques to modify the shape of the masks and the
characteristics of the illuminating source used to image the circuits
for each layer of an integrated circuit.
The company is directly tying the development into its cloud computing
strategy, claiming that the process will enable the production of
smaller, more powerful and energy-efficient devices that will be
required to deliver highly scalable web services. |
| VNUnet UK
Sep 18, 2008 |
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| Genetically modified crops protect wild-type neighbours |
A ten-year study in China shows that large-scale cultivation of cotton
plants genetically modified to produce an insecticidal toxin is
associated with a reduction in pest populations in unmodified crops
nearby. The cotton bollworm is one of the most serious insect pests in
Asia, attacking wheat, corn, soya beans, peanuts and vegetables as well
as cotton. In the early 1990s, repeated bollworm outbreaks in China were
barely contained. Researchers say that the heavy pesticide use that
controlled them killed thousands of people each year.
Bollworm is susceptible to an insecticidal toxin made by the bacteria
Bacillus thuringiensis, and China approved the commercial growth of
cotton plants modified to produce this toxin in 1997. This Bt cotton is
now grown on 4 million hectares in the country. Researchers from the
CAAS Institute of Plant Protection in Beijing have monitored bollworm
populations in an area of northern China since 1992. Their study area
now contains 3 million hectares of Bt cotton and 22 million hectares of
various other crops which the bollworm can infect.
The researchers report that, after Bt cotton was introduced, bollworm
populations gradually declined not just in Bt cotton, but also in other
crops. Using statistical analyses, the researchers found that the fall
in bollworm populations correlated better with the amount of land
devoted to Bt cotton than with patterns of temperature or rainfall. |
| Nature / Science
Sep 18, 2008 |
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| Satellites to bring speedy internet to developing world |
People across the developing world could have high-speed internet access
by late 2010, thanks to a new global satellite system. The system was
announced last week by the Jersey-based O3b Networks, whose name stands
for the 'other three billion' people in developing countries who do not
have access to the internet. Their infrastructure will bring internet
access to countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
Traditional communication satellites orbit the Earth at an altitude of
around 35,000 km, which can limit signal strength and bandwidth. O3b
will use cheaper medium earth orbit (MEO) satellites with an altitude of
around 10,000 km, which will provide a stronger signal. O3b has already
begun production of the 16 satellites. Once operational, it will provide
speeds of up to ten gigabits per second, comparable to speeds available
in the developed world. As demand increases, more satellites will be
launched.
O3b will deal with telecom companies in developing countries, who will
then provide services to individual users. Financial backers for the
system are Google , Liberty Global and HSBC who aim to tap into large,
emerging markets in developing countries. |
| SciDev
Sep 18, 2008 |
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| Invention: Drug-delivering contact lenses |
Getting drugs into the eye is a tricky business. The eye is well adapted
at keeping foreign objects out, so most drugs are washed out by tears,
disappear down the eye's drainage system, or simply spilled outside the
eye. By some estimates, as little as 1% of any drug delivered to the eye
actually ends up inside it.
One potential way round this is to use soft contact lenses steeped in a
solution of drug that leach it into the eye. However, it is hard to cram
a dose large enough to be clinically significant into lenses, which also
tend to leak the drugs away too quickly. So Mark Byrne, a chemical
engineer at Auburn University in Alabama, has a developed a contact-lens
material that can hold much greater concentrations of drugs and release
them more slowly.
The trick is to design the molecular structure of the lens material to
mimic tissue-receptor sites that the drug will target within the body.
The goal is to make the dummy receptors strike a balance, not holding
the drug too tight, but also only releasing it slowly into the eye.
Byrne has set up a company – OcuMedic – to commercialise the idea and is
already developing anti-fungal contact lenses for treating eye
infections in horses. |
| New Scientist
Sep 15, 2008 |
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| Scientists find world's largest prime numbers |
Scientists in the US and Germany have found the two largest prime
numbers ever calculated in a discovery which could dramatically increase
the effectiveness of cryptographic systems. The two numbers were
discovered within a fortnight of each other by the Great Internet
Mersenne Prime Search project, which has spent 12 years on the task.
The largest prime number, which has a whopping 12,978,189 digits, was
discovered by a team from UCLA. The second, discovered by a computer
user in Germany, has 11,185,272 digits. The search for large prime
numbers (those which can only be divided by themselves or one) was
sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as part of an
effort to build a near-unbreakable encryption system.
The UCLA team will receive a USD 100,000 prize from the EFF for breaking
the 10,000,000 digit record. Further prizes are available, including USD
150,000 for the first 100,000,000 digit prime and USD 250,000 for the
first 1,000,000,000 digit number.
Prime numbers are fundamental to cryptography systems, which take a
large part of their strength from the difficulty in factoring primes.
The larger the prime the more secure the encryption. |
| VNUnet UK
Sep 18, 2008 |
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