| |
|
|
Issue no. 38, 2009
Published: Nov 20, 2009 |
|
 Age of cyber warfare is 'dawning' | | MIT research signals a better way to harness waste heat | | Hyperlens sharpens sights with sound | | Cellphone app to make maps of noise pollution | | NASA seeks its one true glove | | IBM researchers build cyber-moggie |
|
| Age of cyber warfare is 'dawning' |
Cyber war has moved from fiction to fact, according to a report compiled
by security firm McAfee, basing its conclusion on analysis of recent
net-based attacks.
Analysis of the motives of the actors behind many attacks carried out
via the internet showed that many were mounted with a explicitly
political aim. Many nations are now arming to defend themselves in a
cyber war and readying forces to conduct their own attacks. The UK,
Germany, France, China and North Korea are known to be developing their
own capabilities.
The US is known to have an operating manual governing the rules and
procedures of how it can use cyber warfare tactics. It is known to have
used hack attacks alongside ground operations during the Iraq war and
has continued to use this cyber capability while policing the nation.
The targets of future conflicts are likely to be a nation's
infrastructure, because networks of all kinds were now so embedded in
peoples' lives. In response, many nations now have an agency overseeing
critical national infrastructure and ensuring that it is adequately
hardened against net-borne attacks, according to McAfee. |
| BBC News
Nov 17, 2009 |
 back to top
|
|
| MIT research signals a better way to harness waste heat |
New MIT research points the way to a technology that might make it
possible to harvest much of the wasted heat produced by everything from
computer processor chips to car engines to electric powerplants, and
turn it into usable electricity.
More than half of the energy consumed worldwide is wasted, most of it in
the form of excess heat. This new technology would allow conversion of
waste heat into electricity with an efficiency several times greater
than existing devices. That kind of waste-energy harvesting might, for
example, lead to cellphones with double the talk time, laptop computers
that can operate twice as long before needing to be plugged in, or power
plants that put out more electricity for a given amount of fuel.
Theory says that conversion of heat into electricity can never exceed a
specific value called the Carnot Limit, based on a 19th-century formula
for determining the maximum efficiency that any device can achieve in
converting heat into work. But current commercial thermoelectric devices
only achieve about one-tenth of that limit. In experiments involving a
different new technology researchers demonstrated efficiency as high as
40% of the Carnot Limit. The calculations show that this new kind of
system could ultimately reach as much as 90% of that ceiling. |
| MIT
Nov 18, 2009 |
back to top
|
|
| Hyperlens sharpens sights with sound |
A versatile, new hyperlens developed by scientists at the University of
California could soon give expecting parents high-definition baby
pictures as well as provide ship captains incredibly accurate maps of
the sea floor.
The brass hyperlens is made of 36 fins, spread out in a half circle like
a handheld fan. Each fin, roughly 20 cm long, compresses and magnifies
incoming sound waves, making it easier to tease out the image of a tiny
nose or the line of a check bone from an ultrasound.
The researchers made their hyperlens from brass for easier production.
However, a hyperlens could be produced from other durable materials,
including steel. That strength will be important for another use as
well. Deploying a hyperlens underwater could give submarines a detailed
view of underwater geographical features or incoming enemy subs.
A hyperlens is part of a larger group of materials known as
metamaterials. Unlike normal materials, which derive their physical
properties from their chemical components, metamaterials derive their
physical properties from their physical structure. These structures need
to be much smaller than the wavelength they intend to manipulate. |
| MSNBC / Discovery Channel / Nature Materials
Nov 19, 2009 |
back to top
|
|
| Cellphone app to make maps of noise pollution |
In a bid to make cities quieter, the EU requires member states to create
noise maps of their urban areas once every five years. Rather than
deploying costly sensors all over a city, the maps are often created
using computer models that predict how various sources of noise, such as
airports and railway stations, affect the areas around them.
According to researchers at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris,
France, those maps are not an accurate reflection of residents' exposure
to noise. To get a more precise picture, they have developed NoiseTube,
a downloadable software app which uses people's smartphones to monitor
noise pollution.
The app records any sound picked up by the phone's microphone, along
with its the GPS location. Users can label the data with extra
information, such as the source of the noise, before it is transmitted
to NoiseTube's server.
There the sample is tagged with the name of the street and the city it
was recorded in and converted into a format that can be used with Google
Earth. Software on the server checks against weather information, and
rejects data that might have been distorted by high winds, for instance.
Locations that have been subjected to sustained levels of noise are
labelled as dangerous. The data is then added to a file, which can be
downloaded from the NoiseTube website and displayed using Google Earth. |
| New Scientist
Nov 18, 2009 |
back to top
|
|
| NASA seeks its one true glove |
Would you pay USD 250,000 for a pair of gloves? That's what's NASA is
offering to the winners of its Astronaut Glove Challenge.
Bending fingers inside pressurised gloves in space is difficult - a
day's worth of precision work often results in bruises, abrasions and
damaged fingernails. So NASA is holding a competition this week. At
least two teams are expected to compete. Among them will be engineer
Peter Homer, who took home $200,000 at the first challenge in 2007 and
is now developing his glove for use on suborbital flights.
Unlike the previous competition, this year's competitors have been asked
to include the glove's outermost layer, the thermal micrometeoroid
garment. This layer is designed to provide insulation from temperature
swings and solar radiation and to protect against micrometeoroids and
space debris.
To qualify for a prize, competing gloves will have to better the
performance of NASA's current model. Gloves will be evaluated on how
easily they can be bent while pressurised and how well competitors are
able to perform 30 minutes of dexterity tests. |
| New Scientist
Nov 17, 2009 |
back to top
|
|
| IBM researchers build cyber-moggie |
Scientists working for IBM have programmed a supercomputer with a
working simulation of a cat's brain. In a paper presented at the
Supercomputing 2009 conference, Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive
computing for IBM Research, outlined how the team used a 147,456
processor supercomputer to simulate a cat's cortex functions.
The simulation, which runs 100 times more slowly than an actual cat's
thought processes, maps out the interaction of the synapses and neurons.
The work offers new insights into how to build computers capable of the
kind of non-linear functioning found in organic life.
In 2006 the team successfully simulated 40 per cent of a mouse's brain,
and by 2007 extended this to a whole rat's brain. Using a bigger
computer they also mapped out one per cent of a human brain. However if
processors continue at the current pace of development, it should be
possible to simulate a human brain within a decade, Modha said. |
| VNUnet UK
Nov 18, 2009 |
back to top
|
|
|
