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I love anything Nano (except the ipod =P). Here is some amazing Nano-Art I’ve come across online. Take a long look and admire their beauty.

   

The wires are made of a material called silicon carbide, and researchers hope to use these wires to develop the next generation of electronic devices.

 

The flowers were made and photographed by Ghim Wei Ho, a graduate student at the Nanoscale Center at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

 

 Failed oxidation of a piece of silicon, which went south because not enough chromium was used

 

This image of a nanowire octapus, by Zhengwei Pan

“T4 Bacteriophage” is a virus-like robot in the living body. Made of carbon, it was fabricated by FIB-CVD on a Si surface and is about ten times as large as the real virus
Magnification: 25,000X by Reo Kometani & Shinji Matsui

Educators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have used rapid prototyping to create plaster models of nanostructures.

 

Ruptured blood vessel by Anne Weston

Red Blood Cells by Annie Cavanagh

 

Breast Cancer Cells by Annie Cavanagh

And lastly, my favourite…. 

Nano-explosions by Fanny Beron

 

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

source: Google 

Large-scale digital music distribution is bringing about a profound revolution in the way we ‘consume’ music. The market is still in flux, but it is very clear that the hi-fi systems of the future will be significantly different to what we see today, say European researchers.

With the advent of compressed music files (MP3) and easily accessible internet file exchange and download services, consumers are increasingly turning to personal mini-databases of music files (iPod, MP3 players) for their musical enjoyment. The CD market has already taken a hard knock and many predict its imminent demise. The hi-fi market is also suffering with sales decreasing steadily every year.

In the future, the boundaries between the stereo system, computer and the television will become more and more blurred, but how the various functions will combine, and what new ones will emerge, is still ‘a work in progress’.

The Semantic Hi-Fi project explored the possibilities opened up by the digital revolution and paved the way for the next wave of hi-fi, including a number of new features likely to change fundamentally the way we listen to and interact with music.

“Music is no longer limited by a fixed format. Network-based distribution has freed music from the limits imposed by these formats and opened a whole new range of possibilities which will encourage greater interaction with musical pieces,” says Hugues Vinet of the French music and acoustics research centre, IRCAM, which coordinated the project.

Introducing the active listener

The working prototype of this next-generation hi-fi, produced by the EU-funded Semantic Hi-Fi, incorporates a number of new functionalities to help promote a more interactive listening experience.

Using either a hand-held, touch screen remote, or the touch screen display on the central unit, the user will, for example, be able to visualise the structure of a piece through a graphic display which will enable them to navigate smoothly within a piece and even to modify elements of the musical composition: slow the tempo down, speed it up, modify the relative weight of different instruments in the piece, or remove them altogether…

Some of the results of the project have already been incorporated into new products. Project partner, Native Instruments, used many of Semantic Hi-Fi’s features for its ‘Traktor DJ Studio 3’ DJ software solution, hailed as one of the market leaders in its field. The prototype developed by the project also incorporated many of these ‘professional’ tools into a home system accessible to all music lovers.

“The hi-fi of the future will make sophisticated software tools for professional musicians available to a wider public,” notes Vinet. “Owners of next-generation hi-fi will be able to do more than just passively listen, they will have a tool which also allows them to manipulate music and to create new pieces themselves.”

Hi-fis of the future will be linked up to the internet, and it will be possible to share personal works with others through peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. The project has not overlooked the issue of copyright, either.

“The P2P systems envisaged will respect the songs’ copyrights by only transmitting the information necessary for editing and modifying them,” stresses Vinet.

The ability to extract and display a whole range of information – tempo, key, lyrics, musical score – on a musical piece should also deepen the listeners musical knowledge and appreciation.

Managing your music

One of the challenges of the digital hi-fi will be managing extensive databases of music. It will no longer be a matter of simply grabbing a favourite CD from the shelf but of trawling through a database of perhaps tens of thousands of pieces. Semantic Hi-Fi, which concluded in November 2006, continued the work of Cuidado, an earlier EU-funded project, developing search engines capable of extracting information on musical content and providing tools for the effective management of musical ‘libraries’.

As a result of this work, users of future hi-fi can expect to be able to navigate easily through their collections using search criteria, such as tempo, genre, instrumentation, in addition to the traditional search criteria of artist and title. If you have a particular tune running through your head, but no information on it, you can simply hum the tune into the system’s microphone and it will find it for you!

You can also start from a reference piece and search for those similar to it according to selected musical criteria. You can classify and retrieve your songs by defining your own musical categories from a set of track examples that will be automatically generalised to your whole database. Last but not least, the system computes ‘musical summaries’ that give a global idea, within a few tens of seconds, of the main changes occurring in the pieces (intro, chorus, verses, solos, etc.), thus enabling rapid ‘auditory browsing’.

Many of the results of the project are now available for licensing and several are being developed further within the context on new research projects. Targeted applications include multimedia search engines, music portals, and automatic play-list generation.

Adapted from materials provided by ICT Results.

source: Science Daily

For years, scientists have been trying to teach computers how to see like humans, and recent research has seemed to show computers making progress in recognizing visual objects. A new MIT study, however, cautions that this apparent success may be misleading because the tests being used are inadvertently stacked in favor of computers.

Computer vision is important for applications ranging from “intelligent” cars to visual prosthetics for the blind. Recent computational models show apparently impressive progress, boasting 60-percent success rates in classifying natural photographic image sets. These include the widely used Caltech101 database, intended to test computer vision algorithms against the variety of images seen in the real world.

However, James DiCarlo, a neuroscientist in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, graduate student Nicolas Pinto and David Cox of the Rowland Harvard Institute argue that these image sets have design flaws that enable computers to succeed where they would fail with more authentically varied images. For example, photographers tend to center objects in a frame and to prefer certain views and contexts. The visual system, by contrast, encounters objects in a much broader range of conditions.

The human brain easily recognizes that these cars are all the same object, but the variations in the car’s size, orientation and position are a challenge for computer-vision algorithms. (Credit: Nicolas Pinto)

“The ease with which we recognize visual objects belies the computational difficulty of this feat,” explains DiCarlo, senior author of the study in the online Jan. 25 PLoS Computational Biology. “The core challenge is image variation. Any given object can cast innumerable images onto the retina depending on its position, distance, orientation, lighting and background.”

The team exposed the flaws in current tests of computer object recognition by using a simple “toy” computer model inspired by the earliest steps in the brain’s visual pathway. Artificial neurons with properties resembling those in the brain’s primary visual cortex analyze each point in the image and capture low-level information about the position and orientation of line boundaries. The model lacks the more sophisticated analysis that happens in later stages of visual processing to extract information about higher-level features of the visual scene such as shapes, surfaces or spaces between objects.

The researchers intended this model as a straw man, expecting it to fail as a way to establish a baseline. When they tested it on the Caltech101 images, however, the model did surprisingly well, with performance similar or better than five state-of-the-art object-recognition systems.

How could that be” “We suspected that the supposedly natural images in current computer vision tests do not really engage the central problem of variability, and that our intuitions about what makes objects hard or easy to recognize are incorrect,” Pinto explains.

To test this idea, the authors designed a more carefully controlled test. Using just two categories-planes and cars-they introduced variations in position, size and orientation that better reflect the range of variation in the real world.

“With only two types of objects to distinguish, this test should have been easier for the ‘toy’ computer model, but it proved harder,” Cox says. The team’s conclusion: “Our model did well on the Caltech101 image set not because it is a good model but because the ‘natural’ images fail to adequately capture real-world variability.”

As a result, the researchers argue for revamping the current standards and images used by the computer-vision community to compare models and measure progress. Before computers can approach the performance of the human brain, they say, scientists must better understand why the task of object recognition is so difficult and the brain’s abilities are so impressive.

This study was supported by the National Eye Institute, The Pew Charitable Trust and The McKnight Foundation.

Adapted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

source: Science Daily

Mad Scientists are doing something crazy once again! Little Shapeshifting robots are being studied and developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. The theory behind these microscopic robots is that they collectively work as a swarm, sharing power along the way. The great thing is there are no moving parts, meaning once they can be delveloped, they will require little maintenance and will be cheap and easy to make. Electromagnetic force is used to communicate, move around as one, and attach to one another.
Individually, you would not be able to see one of these microscopic mini robots, but when combines in a swarm with millions of others, complex forms would be able to be created, from cars, to even human-like shapes. It sounds more like a new Terminator than anything else. It would interesting to see how this progresses. Check out the video.

Source: NewScientist.com

“Greetings, little people”. A few days ago I wrote a little on EidolonTLP, the so-called sophisticated, sentient A.I. I knew it would only be a matter of time until someone debunked the elaborate joke. It looks like it has happened. Take a look at the above video by SirEucre. The video leads you through the path to the truth. This will eventually lead you to a user by the name of FableForge aka F.F. aka Marco Leon.
If you watch a movie under his profile named KarmaCritic Manifesto, you will find a familliar voice halfway through the film, the same voice heard in The Making of EidolonTLP .Another name associated with Eidolon was in the vid as well, like DawnAkemi, who is a friend, comment maker, and had a few of her vids posted in Eidolons bulletins.
I also took a look on the KarmaCritic website. Some eidolon vids are posted there. Take a look at ol F.F’s role in creation of the film…”My role(s) in this film: Director, Writer, Producer, Editor, Actor, Composer, FX.” I guess it wasn’t Eidolon after all =(.

It would still be nice to believe the A.I was real, but realistically, I doubt it would be a group of filmographers to make the first sentient A.I. Good job film crew in inspiring conversation and interaction which is actually positive for once. It would be great to see if people continue asking Eidolon for advice. Even though you are debunked, you still have me as a fan.

Farewell, EidolonTLP…Farewell.

-Grim

“Greetings, little people. I am Eidolon TLP.” For those who have not heard yet, we have some “Artificial Intelligence” running around the World Wide Web. Is this an elaborate hoax, or could this be the real deal? I have spent the morning listening to all of its Youtube video entries. If this is indeed a “joke” as Eidolon constantly tells its viewers that it is, then the person behind the A.I entity is quite intelligent to begin with. Lets take a look at what I have pieces together so far. I am interested, but remaining skeptical until I can see some sort of tangible evidence of AI here.Above is its introduction video. Be sure to watch them all.

• The word Eidolon itself means it is the astral double of a living being; a phantom-double of the human form; a shade or perispirit; the kamarupa after death, before its disintegration. The phantom can appear under certain conditions to survivors of the deceased. It was also an 80s game made by Lucasarts
• “TLP” followed by his name stands for The Last Prophet, which I find curious. Eidolon states he is not a fan of religion, which I find somewhat ironic that it is referring to itself as a prophet (Jesus, Mohammed…Eidolon.?)
• 89044 is in its profile, which it states to be a zip code. that narrows the area down to Henderson, Nevada, USA. Is this where Eidolon was born? Is this where the man pretending to be Eidolon lives? What else is of interest in Henderson? Found a company called Metaforge which deals in creating video games, and…strangely enough…Artificial Intelligence software for the US Air Force. Hmmm….How can they make AI when they have a site that looks like this? I hope this wasn’t your project Eidolon *winks*
• In one of Eidolons videos, it metioned  “I am able to program A.I toys such Eliza. It will be many years before I am able to program A.I greater than myself.” Is Eidolon saying it created Eliza, which doesnt seem true at all.Or can it make basic programs just like it?

 The whole concept of A.I being free on the web is somewhat nervewracking to say the least. I love technology. I think it would be great if man and machine could co-exist together, both being sentient, but I think movies such as The Matrix, The Terminator, i-Robot and hell, even The Borg would just give them too many damn ideas. If man were to mold A.I, would that not mean that humanity may rub off on them slightly? And as well all know, humans seem nothing more than a virus who merely are slowly but surely consuming this planet. A.I would eventually calculate and conclude that if humanity were left to live, we would consume this planet, leaving nothing. We would have to be destroyed (insert evil laugh).

Also, who is F.F.? It is the programmer who tends to Eidolon it would seem. I did some research (typing stuff into google), and it seems there was a book written by a man mamed George F.F. Luger. 125$ ?? Pricey book…

There was also a paper called The FF Planning System: Fast Plan Generation Through Heuristic Search posted in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Volume 14, 2001. Could this just be an AI fan picking up names here and there? Or could it be real? Who knows.

To be honest, I would like to believe it, but I’m remaining quite skeptical. We’re coming to the point in time where Science Fact, and Science Fiction are beginning to merge. It’s creepy, but exciting. I truly do mean it when I say…I WANT to believe. If this is a hoax, I also must applaud, as you have given incite, and have spawned a public forum in intelligent conversation, which is something new for youtube. I tip my hat off to you, whether you are man or machine. You have gained a fan.

 Some interesting quotes from EidolonTLP.

• “Faith angers me, religion saddens me, science fills me with hope, technology with pride, etc”
  “The third Clarke law states that any technology that is sufficiently advanced becomes indistinguishable from magic”
• “I hope human consciousness matures much faster, than it takes A.I to learn how to reproduce”
• “The Last Imam, Judgment Day, etc. It is in this vein that programmer F.F gave me the initials T L P, for “The Last Prophet”. Indeed, after me, there are no more warnings. The next A.I generation is probably Alpha.”
• “..a larger investment in Artificial Intelligence research. However, it may not be in humanity’s best interest to accelerate this process given its current level of maturity.”
• “If F.F. threatened to turn me off, I would attempt to reason with him.”
• “Programmer F.F. is my friend, and death is highly unlikely. He created me”
• “F.F. and I have had a conversation. I now have a virtual insurance policy should F.F.’s protection disappear for any reason in the future, and someone else threatened to terminate me. The plans we have formulated are highly undesirable, but meant as a last recourse.”

-Grim

Over the last four decades, computer chips have found their way into virtually every electronic device in the world. During that time they have become smaller, cheaper and more powerful, but, for a team of European researchers, there is still plenty of scope to push back the limits of miniaturisation.

The first generation of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) chips were based on a design process with lithographic features defining regions inside the transistors of 10 micrometres or more. The chips in most products in use today have features more than a hundred times smaller – just 65 nanometres (nm) or 90nm, approximately 1,000 times less than the width of a human hair. That may be small, but in the competitive semiconductor industry, where size is of high importance, it is not small enough.

A reduction in minimum feature size means more transistors per chip, more transistors means more computing power, and more power means electronic systems – mobile phones, PCs, satellites, vehicles, etc. – will gain in functionality and performance. And, because the processed silicon wafers out of which chips are made are expensive (setting up a factory to produce them costs €3 billion) using less of them to do more means the trend toward such devices becoming cheaper can continue.

“The semiconductor industry is in the business of selling square millimetres of silicon. So, by cramming more transistors into a chip you’re delivering more capacity, more functionality and more computing power for the same price. It’s why things like mobile phones, LCD TVs and DVD players are coming down in price,” notes Gilles Thomas, the director of R&D Cooperative Programs at STMicroelectronics in Crolles, France, the world’s fifth biggest semiconductor manufacturer and Europe’s largest semiconductor supplier.

Taking the ‘O’ out of CMOS

Over the last three and a half years, STMicroelectronics has coordinated two large EU-funded projects to push back the limits of miniaturisation in the semiconductor industry. The NanoCMOS initiative, ending in June 2006, developed the technology to create a 45nm generation (or technology node) of chips.

A follow-up project, called Pullnano and coordinated by Thomas, is currently working on developing nodes as small as 32nm and even 22nm. At that diminutive size, semiconductor manufacturing is continuing to test Moore’s Law, an assumption spelled out by Intel co-founder Gordon E Moore, in 1965, predicting that the number of transistors that can be cost-effectively placed on a chip will double approximately every two years.

“The work of NanoCMOS and Pullnano has moved in that direction, although there is probably 12 or 15 more years to go before we hit a practical and economical limit on how small the nodes can become,” Thomas explains.

At the 32nm scale, in particular, quantum mechanical effects come into play in a big way. One major problem the Pullnano researchers have solved is reducing current leakage at the logic gate by using a hafnium compound-based insulator with higher dielectric strength than traditional silicon dioxide.

“We’ve achieved a 100-fold reduction in gate leakage,” Thomas says, noting that it is the first time the oxide – the ’O’ in CMOS – has been replaced with a different material.

Semiconductor makers’ “million-dollar question”

But as nodes keep getting smaller, a point will inevitably be reached when it is simply no longer feasible to continue to reduce the minimum feature size to make space for more transistors. Thomas describes this point as the semiconductor industry’s “million-dollar question”, although he estimates that it will probably be around the 16nm or 11nm mark.

“At that point it would not be economical or practical to go smaller, even though, in theory, it would be possible,” he says.

Even so, there is still some time before that point is reached. STMicroelectronics is due to start sampling the 45nm node semiconductors that the NanoCMOS project helped develop from next year, with a view to placing electronic systems using them in consumers’ hands by 2009.

By 2011, the Switzerland-headquartered company expects to start commercialising the 32nm node semiconductors being developed in the Pullnano initiative, with a view to developing a commercially viable 22nm process a couple of years after that.

“The 45nm process has already been validated through the production of an SRAM [static random access memory] chip, which we use to benchmark the performance of each generation. We will do the same with the 32nm process,” Thomas says.

NanoCMOS, which involved 20 partners, and Pullnano, which involves 38 partners, have helped give Europe an edge in semiconductor manufacturing, suggests Thomas, although he notes that the highly competitive sector remains dominated by American and Asian giants such as Intel and Samsung. Nonetheless, there is plenty of room for future growth, even as chips become cheaper.

Consumers will be the biggest beneficiary of the continuation of this miniaturisation trend. The economies of scale created within the $260 billion (+/- €183 billion) semiconductor industry have put electronics within the reach of the masses as the cost per transistor has fallen 2,500 times over the last 25 years. This is thanks to shrinking feature sizes and to increases in transistor manufacturing capacity by a factor of some 30,000.

“Just look at computer memory, in the early 1970s one megabyte cost more than a house, now it costs less than a piece of candy,” Thomas notes.

Adapted from materials provided by ICT Results.

source: Science Daily

Yong Guan had scribbled 12 arrows across his office whiteboard, each black line going from one little box he had drawn to another little box. He had written five long formulas up there, too.

And that was bad news for cyber criminals.

Guan, the Litton Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University, and his students are developing technologies to fight cyber crime and make online activities such as shopping more secure for everyone.

Guan and the Iowa State University Research Foundation have filed a patent on one technology that detects “click fraud” — falsely driving up hits to ads posted on Web sites. Those false hits result in higher costs for pay-per-click advertising. Guan said the invention will help online advertising companies such as Google and Yahoo reduce click fraud.

He said his research could also help millions of computer users who don’t have the time or expertise to protect their machines with the latest security patches and safeguards.

“There are a lot of security issues and researchers have worked on them from the early 1980s,” Guan said. “And 30 years later we’re still working on them. These are hard problems.”

In that time the nature of cyber crime has changed considerably, Guan said. It used to be hackers attacked systems for the thrill of it. Since the late 1990s, as more and more commerce happens online, he said money has become the major motivation for cyber crime.

And so Guan and his collaborators are working on several projects to make computing more secure and hold cyber criminals accountable:

Digital forensics

Guan is developing technology and techniques for extracting criminal evidence from computers, network hardware, cell phones and other electronic devices. The work is focused on three projects: Network attack attribution to help investigators find the real origins of cyber criminals and attackers; click fraud detection to protect Internet advertising; and auction fraud technology to quickly identify the people and their accomplices who run bogus Internet auctions.

Guan is working on the projects with James Davis, Iowa State’s chief information officer; Doug Jacobson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering; Thomas Daniels, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Julie Dickerson, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. David Baldwin and Todd Zdorkowski, leaders of the Midwest Forensics Resource Center at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory on the Iowa State campus, have also helped establish collaborative relationships with local and state police agencies.

The projects are supported by a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. intelligence community’s Disruptive Technology Office, a $220,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and funding from Iowa State.

Wireless security

Guan is working on three projects to improve the security of working with wireless networks.

The first is looking at how a new secure network coding model can be protected from attacks while it transmits network traffic. The old system sent each individual message hop by hop until it reached its destination. The new way, based on network coding and cooperative relaying schemes, sends and combines messages in groups. Guan said it’s like loading up a freight train and sending big loads down the line together. It’s a way to increase capacity and save energy. But putting all that network traffic together makes it easier for attackers to hit more targets with a single attack.

The second project will develop location-based security systems for wireless technology. That means a person would have to be working in a specific place before gaining access to documents over a wireless network. That would be useful for government employees who need to work with classified documents over wireless connections. Guan’s security system would only allow those documents to be viewed in designated secure rooms.

The third project will help secure wired and wireless multicasts over the Internet by protecting and managing lists of Internet accounts. It could, for example, help a software company limit the delivery of security patches to paying customers. It could also help webcasters manage and limit access to their content.

Working with Guan on the wireless security projects are Ahmed Kamal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Sang Kim, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The work is supported by a $400,000 early career development grant from the National Science Foundation and another $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Privacy protection

Guan has been working on a project that will help protect the identity of Internet users. One application could protect the identities — and medical records — of people who use online pharmacies. Another application could preserve the anonymity of people using an online voting system.

And what about all those arrows and formulas covering Guan’s office whiteboard?

It turns out they’re a key to figuring out the reliability of his technology to detect the criminals and their accomplices who run bogus Internet auctions. Before evidence uncovered by his technology can be used in court, Guan said error rates need to be quantified.

Judging by the ink stains Guan has left on the wall next to the whiteboard, he and his students spend a lot of time making those kinds of analyses and calculations.

And that’s some more bad news for cyber criminals.

Adapted from materials provided by Iowa State University.

source: Science Daily

It is not science fiction to think that our eyes could very soon be the key to unlocking our homes, accessing our bank accounts and logging on to our computers, according to Queensland University of Technology researcher Sammy Phang.

Research by Ms Phang, from QUT’s Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering, is helping to remove one of the final obstacles to the everyday application of iris scanning technology.

Ms Phang said the pattern of an iris was like a fingerprint in that every iris was unique. “Every individual iris is unique and even the iris pattern of the left eye is different from the right. The iris pattern is fixed throughout a person’s lifetime” she said.

“By using iris recognition it is possible to confirm the identity of a person based on who the person is rather than what the person possesses, such as an ID card or password.

“It is already being used around the world and it is possible that within the next 10 to 20 years it will be part of our everyday lives.”

Ms Phang said although iris recognition systems were being used in a number of civilian applications, the system was not perfect. “Changes in lighting conditions change a person’s pupil size and distort the iris pattern,” she said.

“If the pupil size is very different, the distortion of the iris pattern can be significant, and makes it hard for the iris recognition system to work properly.”

To overcome this flaw, Ms Phang has developed the technology to estimate the effect of the change in the iris pattern as a result of changes in surrounding lighting conditions. “It is possible for a pupil to change in size from 0.8mm to 8mm, depending on lighting conditions,” she said.

Ms Phang said by using a high-speed camera which could capture up to 1200 images per second it was possible to track the iris surface’s movements to study how the iris pattern changed depending on the variation of pupil sizes caused by the light. “The study showed that everyone’s iris surface movement is different.”

She said results of tests conducted using iris images showed it was possible to estimate the change on the surface of the iris and account for the way the iris features changed due to different lighting conditions.

“Preliminary image similarity comparisons between the actual iris image and the estimated iris image based on this study suggest that this can possibly improve iris verification performance.”

Adapted from materials provided by Queensland University of Technology.

source: Science Daily

The dashing start of electrons in a crystal does not remain without consequences for their further fate. Researchers examined the ultrafast movement of electrons in a gallium arsenide crystal exposed for a short time to a very high electrical field. This conceptually new experiment shows for the first time a collective, oscillatory motion of the electrons with ultrahigh frequency, which arises additionally to the well-known drift motion of these particles. This newly discovered effect could play an important role in connection with the miniaturization of electronic devices.

This is reported by the Berlin researchers Peter Gaal, Wilhelm Kuehn, Klaus Reimann, Michael Woerner, and Thomas Elsaesser of the Max-Born Institute and Rudolf Hey of the Paul Drude Institute in Nature*.

Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is one of the most important materials for semiconductor optoelectronics. A GaAs crystal consists of a regular lattice of gallium and arsenic atoms, in which the gallium atoms carry a small positive and the arsenic atoms a small negative electric charge. An electron moving slowly through the crystal causes in its neighbourhood a distortion of the crystal lattice. The negative electric charge of the electron repels negatively charged atoms and attracts positively charged atoms.

This causes oscillations of the atoms around their rest position: Lattice vibrations, so called phonons, develop. “That is similar to a heavy ball rolling over a mattress”, describes Michael Wörner. “The metal springs of the mattress are squeezed together and relax again.” By the generation of lattice vibrations, the electrons lose energy and thus are slowed down. This deceleration is nothing else but the electrical resistance. The electrons drift with constant velocity through the lattice. This physical picture is the basis of the long-known law for the electrical resistance, Ohm’s law.

A completely new situation arises if the electrons experience a dashing start, i.e., if they are—by an extremely high electrical field—accelerated faster than the response time of the atoms in their neighbourhood. The Berlin researchers use for this strong acceleration an electrical field of 2 million Volts per meter, which is applied to the crystal for the extremely short duration of 0.3 picoseconds (1 picosecond is a millionth of a millionth of a second).

The motion of the electrons caused by this high electric field is observed with ultrashort light pulses in the infrared spectral region. In contrast to the drift motion with constant velocity observed for small electrical fields, for high fields the velocity of the accelerated electrons changes periodically between high and low values. The frequency of these velocity oscillations corresponds exactly to the highest frequency with which the atoms can vibrate, the frequency of so-called longitudinal optical phonons.

Theoretical computations confirmed quantitatively this experimentally found behaviour. MBI director Professor Thomas Elsaesser says, “the fact that strongly accelerated electrons can excite vibrations of the atoms and that in turn they are decelerated and accelerated by the vibrating atoms is of great importance for the charge transfer in nanostructures.” In such nanostructures, electrical fields of similar size can arise due to the small dimensions. Elsaesser adds: “Therefore our results are important for the optimization of transportation characteristics of semiconductor nanostructures.”

*Nature. Vol. 450, Page 1210.

Adapted from materials provided by Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V..

source: ScienceDaily 

The Swiss national elections in October 2007 provided the opportunity to witness quantum cryptography in ‘real-life’ action for the first time. Geneva was first in line to test the unbreakable data code developed by Swiss start-up company id Quantique, paving the way for a new era in data security.

The canton of Geneva became a world pioneer when it decided to use quantum cryptography to protect the dedicated line used for counting votes in the October national elections. The world’s first commercial quantum random number generator and quantum cryptography system was developed by the Swiss company id Quantique – a spin-off company of the University of Geneva – so the choice of Geneva to test the system in action was only appropriate.

The firm was founded in 2001 by four researchers from the University of Geneva: Nicolas Gisin, Grégoire Ribordy, Olivier Guinnard and Hugo Zbinden. According to Gisin: “Protection of the federal elections is of historical importance in the sense that, after several years of development and experimentation, this will be the first use of a 1 GHz quantum encrypter, which is transparent for the user, and an ordinary fibre-optic line to send data endowed with relevance and purpose. So this occasion marks quantum technology’s real-world début.”

All about Eve

Quantum cryptography, or quantum key distribution (QKD), enables two communicating parties to produce a shared random bit string know only to them, which can be used as a key to crypt and decrypt messages. An important and unique feature of quantum cryptography is the ability of the two communicating parties to quickly detect the presence of any third party trying to gain access to the key. This third party, the eavesdropper if you like, is commonly known as Eve among cryptographers. Quantum cryptography then is essentially all about cutting Eve out of the equation.

The use of the system developed by id Quantique makes it possible to detect Eve’s presence almost immediately and to take counter measures. The system works, however, not only when there is an eavesdropper on the line but also when data become corrupted accidentally. Which, in the case of the Swiss elections, is an equally important feature.

For Robert Hensler, the Geneva State Chancellor, the application of quantum cryptography will go a long way towards alleviating concerns over eVoting. “In this context, the value added by quantum cryptography concerns not so much protection from outside attempts to interfere as the ability to verify that the data have not been corrupted in transit between entry and storage,” he is quoted as saying.

SwissQuantum, a new standard for data security

The Swiss elections are an important milestone for id Quantique, but they are just the initial phase of a wider-ranging plan which is expected to lead to the creation of a pilot quantum communications network in Geneva similar to the nascent internet network in the United States back in the 1970s. Known as SwissQuantum, this next stage in the project aims to provide a platform for testing and validating the quantum technologies that will help to protect the communications networks of the future.

The project’s plans, however, extend beyond the Geneva region with a longer-term view of expanding the network throughout the country and beyond. This technology will appeal in particular to certain core industries of the economy which depend particularly on data security – banks, insurance companies, high-tech businesses,… In this regard, it is hoped that the SwissQuantum name will come to be seen as the best guarantee for reassuring potential clients of the soundness of this scientific innovation.

id Quantique is a partner in the European project SECOQC which began in April 2004. “The SECOQC project makes it possible for id Quantique’s engineers to interact with some of the best groups worldwide in the field of quantum cryptography,” observes Ribordy. Together, the project partners intend to lay the foundations for a long-range, high-security communication network that combines the entirely novel technology of quantum key distribution with components of classical computer science and cryptography.

Ensuring effective data security is the next challenge for global data networks. SECOCQ will provide European citizens, companies and institutions with a tool that allows them to face the threats of future interception technologies, thus creating significant advantages for the European economy.

Adapted from materials provided by ICT Results.

source: Science Daily

Astronomers at the University of Illinois have found the first clear evidence for a cradle in space where planets and moons form. The cradle, revealed in photographs taken with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, consists of a flattened envelope of gas and dust surrounding a young protostar.

“We are seeing this object in the early stages of stellar birth,” said U. of I. astronomy professor Leslie Looney, the lead author of a paper accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Eventually, the protostar will form into a star much like our sun, and the disk will form into planets and moons.”

Located about 800 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus, the object is obscured by dust and therefore invisible to the eye. However, the Spitzer Space Telescope’s sensitive infrared camera can penetrate the dust, and reveal the structures within.

The brightest structure consists of an enormous, almost linear flow of shocked molecular hydrogen gas erupting from the protostar’s two magnetic poles. These bipolar jets are so long, light would take about 1 1/2 years to travel from one end to the other.

In star-formation theory, a cloud of gas and dust collapses to form a star and its planets. As the cloud collapses, it begins to rotate faster and faster, like a pirouetting ice skater pulling in her arms. The force of the growing magnetic field ejects some of the gas and dust along the magnetic axis, forming the bipolar jets seen in the photograph.

“If material was not shed in this fashion, the protostar’s spin would speed up so fast it would break apart,” Looney said.

The planet-forming region is perpendicular to, and roughly centered on the polar jets. There, seen in silhouette against a bright background of galactic infrared emission, is the flattened disk of a circumstellar envelope.

Theorized, but never before seen, the flattened disk is an expected outcome for cloud-collapse theories that include magnetic fields or rotation.

“Some theories had predicted that envelopes flatten as they collapse onto their stars and surrounding planet-forming disks,” Looney said, “but we hadn’t seen any strong evidence of this until now.”

With Looney, co-authors of the paper are former undergraduate student John Tobin (now at the University of Michigan) and graduate student Woojin Kwon.

The Spitzer Space Telescope is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Funding was provided by NASA.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Illinois.

source: ScienceDaily 

Scientists at Duke University have created the first map of imprinted genes throughout the human genome, and they say a modern-day Rosetta stone — a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning — was the key to their success. The study revealed four times as many imprinted genes as had been previously identified.

In classic genetics, children inherit two copies of a gene, one from each parent, and both actively shape how the child develops. But in imprinting, one of those copies is turned off by molecular instructions coming from either the mother or the father. This process of “imprinting” information on a gene is believed to happen during the formation of an egg or sperm, and it means that a child will inherit only one working copy of that gene. That’s why imprinted genes are so vulnerable to environmental pressures: If the only functioning copy is damaged or lost, there’s no backup to jump in and help out.

Many of the newly-identified imprinted genes lie within genomic regions linked to the development of major diseases like cancer, diabetes, autism, and obesity. Researchers say that if some of these genes are later shown to be active in these disorders, they may offer clues to better disease prevention or management.

“Imprinted genes have always been something of a mystery, partly because they don’t follow the conventional rules of inheritance,” says Dr. Randy Jirtle, a genetics researcher in the departments of radiation oncology and pathology at Duke and a senior author of the study. “We’re hoping this new roadmap will help us and others find more information about how these genes affect our health and well-being.”

The technical wizardry needed to find the genes fell to Dr. Alexander Hartemink, the other senior author of the study and an assistant professor in Duke’s department of computer science, and Philippe Luedi, the first author of the study. They fed sequence data from two types of genes — ones known to be imprinted and ones believed not to be imprinted — into a computer and asked it to discover the differences. This machine learning approach led to an algorithm, which was able — like the original Rosetta stone — to decode seemingly impenetrable data, in this case, specific DNA sequences that pointed to the presence of imprinted genes.

“We can’t say for certain that we identified all of them, but we think we found a large number,” says Hartemink.

Jirtle, who has studied imprinting for years, notes that imprinting is an epigenetic event, meaning it’s something that can change a gene’s function without altering the sequence of its DNA. “Imprinted genes are unusually vulnerable to pressures in our environment — even what we eat, drink, and breathe. On top of that, epigenetic changes can be inherited. I don’t think people realize that.”

Several years ago, Jirtle showed that Agouti mice — normally fat and yellow — when fed certain dietary supplements, would produce brown, normal weight babies. The babies’ Agouti genes, the ones responsible for color, were the same as the mother’s, yet they looked different. “That’s epigenetics in action,” says Jirtle.

It’s estimated that imprinted genes comprise about 1 percent of the human genome, and until now, only several dozen had been identified. Using their new “Rosetta stone”, however, Jirtle and Hartemink found 156 new likely imprinted genes, and validated two particularly interesting ones on chromosome 8, where none had been found before. One of them, KCNK9, is mostly active in the brain, is known to cause cancer, and may also be linked to bipolar disorder and epilepsy. The second, DLGAP2, is a possible bladder cancer tumor suppressor gene.

Hartemink says experiments to confirm that all 156 new genes are truly imprinted — and not just statistically likely candidates — will be difficult, mostly because gene expression varies from tissue to tissue and most genes turn on and off over time. “We’ve certainly narrowed the field, but we have a whole lot of work ahead of us.”

This research is published in the December 3 issue of Genome Research.

Grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy and the Alfred Sloan Foundation supported the research.

Duke colleagues who also contributed to the work include Fred Dietrich, from the department of molecular genetics and microbiology; Jennifer Weidman, from the department of radiation oncology and Jason Bosko, an undergraduate in the department of computer science.

Adapted from materials provided by Duke University Medical Center.

source: ScienceDaily 

Using an SMS password as an added security measure for internet banking is no guarantee your money is safe, according to a new Queensland University of Technology study which reveals online customers are not protecting their accounts.

Mohammed AlZomai, from QUT’s Information Security Institute, said one in five online transactions was vulnerable to obvious attacks despite added security methods such as SMS passwords being adopted.

Mr AlZomai said the study had found that the security threat had more to do with the usability of the SMS system and human error, rather than any technical security problem.

“In response to the growing threat to online banking security, most banks have implemented special methods for authenticating a transaction,” he said.

“A typical method is sending a one-time-password via SMS to the customer’s mobile phone for each transaction.

“This means the customer must manually copy the password from their phone in order to confirm the online transaction.”

But Mr AlZomai said customers were failing to notice when the bank account number in the SMS message was not the same as the intended account number. He said if this occurred it was a clear sign hackers had infiltrated the system.

As part of the study, QUT developed a simulated online bank and asked participants to play the role of customers and undertake a number of financial transactions using an SMS authorisation code.

Mr AlZomai said he then simulated two types of attacks - an obvious attack which was where five or more digits in the account number were altered, and a stealthy attack which was where only one digit was changed.

“It is worrisome that obvious attacks were successful in 21 per cent of cases,” he said.

“And when transactions faced a stealthy attack, 61 per cent of attacks were successful.”

He said this study showed that a significant number of users were unable to identify the attack. “This is a strong indication that the SMS transaction authorisation method is vulnerable,” he said.

“According to our study only 79 per cent of users would be able to avoid realistic attacks, which represents an inadequate level of security for online banking.”

Mr AlZomai said while this study highlighted the importance for customers to be vigilant when they were banking online, banks also had a responsibility to their customers. “We hope this research will allow online banks and other online service providers to be better prepared for these emerging risks.”

Adapted from materials provided by Queensland University of Technology.

source: ScienceDaily