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Self-Healing Rubber Keeps on Stretching, Rip after Rip

2008-02-23T18:02:00.000-08:00

A new synthetic rubber fixes itself when torn ends are touched together.
Francois Tournilhac and Ludwik Leibler ESPCI/CNRS, Paris (France)

Talk about bouncing back from adversity. A new stretchy material can be cut and rejoined at the same spot just by pressing the broken ends together for a few minutes. The self-healing rubber stays stretchy even after being severed five or six times, or cut and left on the countertop overnight, French researchers say. A chemical manufacturer is already working to create large batches of the material for still hypothetical applications such as sealants and self-healing rubber duckies.

The material's secret is its molecular structure, which resembles a plate of spaghetti, says physicist Ludwik Leibler of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, who led the research team. The strands straighten out when pulled, but they relax back to their tangled shape when the tension is released. The result is a rubber that can stretch to six times its resting length, the group reports in the journal Nature.

The self-mending occurs because each strand consists of numerous small molecules of vegetable fat linked to each other and to far-flung neighbors via relatively weak hydrogen bonds, the same chemical bonds that give water molecules their cohesiveness. When the material was cut or ripped, the severed bonds remained chemically sticky for each other.

Leibler recalls the first time his group ripped the material and pressed the torn ends together gingerly. "It was unbelievable, because after few seconds you could take the sample and the pieces would not fall apart," he says. "And it worked again and again and again." They called the sample "Miracle 1."

A full repair required up to six hours of bonding, the researchers report. They note that a ripped sample could be left overnight before being repaired, although it would not stretch as far, because some of the severed bonds had linked to their neighbors. Recycling a sample into a new shape is easy, Leibler adds—just heat it so the bonds break and reform.

The demonstration does have "a touch of magic about it," biochemists Justin Mynar and Takuzo Aida wrote in an editorial accompanying the paper. Prior self-healing materials relied on embedded capsules of sealant that opened during a break and then had to be replenished, or polymers that required high heat to rebond, they note.

Leibler says the Philadelphia-based chemical maker Arkema, Inc., is working on scaling up the synthesis process, "so that people can play with and dream about it." Among his own dreams are self-healing toys, pipe seals and pavement as well as plastic medical pouches that can be punctured and reused.

NASA images reveal mystery figure on Mars

2008-01-23T09:41:00.000-08:00

A Chinese website has reportedly posted the first sighting of Martian life in the form of a mysterious figure caught on camera by the Spirit rover:

According to the Mail on Sunday, the sighting came after alien hunters spent "years" scouring NASA images for evidence of little green men before unearthing this example.

In fact, the Red Planet's first confirmed inhabitant features in this panorama snapped by Spirit back in November last year. We've marked the approximate position of the extraterrestrial with an arrow:

And before you all going running off to the NASA website to get the highest-res snap possible, here's our Martian as seen in the biggest file we could find - the 133 meg tiff.

Well, the jury's out on this one. NASA has the above false colour panorama available here, or you might try the slightly less colourful version here, or stereo representation here. Happy hunting

Frequency counters

2008-01-19T17:43:00.001-08:00

The measurement of energy used by your home is an application to which digital metering
is well suited. It’s easier to read the drum type, digital kilowatt-hour meter than
to read the pointer type meter. When measuring frequencies of signals, digital metering
is not only more convenient, but far more accurate.
The frequency counter measures by actually counting pulses, in a manner similar
to the way the utility meter counts the number of turns of a motor. But the frequency
counter works electronically, without any moving parts. It can keep track of thousands,
millions or even billions of pulses per second, and it shows the rate on a digital display
that is as easy to read as a digital watch. It measures frequency directly by tallying up
the number of pulses in an oscillating wave, even when the number of pulses per second
is huge.
The accuracy of the frequency counter is a function of the lock-in time. Lock-in is
usually done in 0.1 second, 1 second or 10 seconds. Increasing the lock-in time by a factor
of 10 will cause the accuracy to be good by one additional digit. Modern frequency
counters are good to six, seven or eight digits; sophisticated lab devices will show frequency
to nine or ten digits.

Digital readout meters

2008-01-19T17:41:00.000-08:00

Increasingly, metering devices are being designed so that they provide a direct readout,
and there’s no need (or possibility) for interpolation. The number on the meter is the indication.
It’s that simple. Such a meter is called a digital meter.
The advantage of a digital meter is that it’s easy for anybody to read, and there is no
chance for interpolation errors. This is ideal for utility meters, clocks, and some kinds of
ammeters, voltmeters and wattmeters. It works very well when the value of the quantity
does not change very often or very fast.
But there are some situations in which a digital meter is a disadvantage. One good
example is the signal-strength indicator in a radio receiver. This meter bounces up and
down as signals fade, or as you tune the radio, or sometimes even as the signal modulates.
A digital meter would show nothing but a constantly changing, meaningless set of
numerals. Digital meters require a certain length of time to “lock in” to the current, voltage,
power or other quantity being measured. If this quantity never settles at any one
value for a long enough time, the meter can never lock in.
Meters with a scale and pointer are known as analog meters. Their main advantages
are that they allow interpolation, they give the operator a sense of the quantity
relative to other possible values, and they follow along when a quantity changes. Some
engineers and technicians prefer the “feel” of an analog meter, even in situations where
a digital meter would work just as well.
One problem you might have with digital meters is being certain of where the decimal
point goes. If you’re off by one decimal place, the error will be by a factor of 10.
Also, you need to be sure you know what the units are; for example, a frequency indicator
might be reading out in megahertz, and you might forget and think it is giving you
a reading in kilohertz. That’s a mistake by a factor of 1000. Of course this latter type of
error can happen with an analog meter, too.

SOAP

2007-12-31T18:26:00.000-08:00

What You Should Already Know
Before you study SOAP you should have a basic understanding of XML and XML Namespaces.
If you want to study these subjects first, please read our XML Tutorial.
What is SOAP?
SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol
SOAP is a communication protocol
SOAP is for communication between applications
SOAP is a format for sending messages
SOAP is designed to communicate via Internet
SOAP is platform independent
SOAP is language independent
SOAP is based on XML
SOAP is simple and extensible
SOAP allows you to get around firewalls
SOAP will be developed as a W3C standard
Why SOAP?
It is important for application development to allow Internet communication between programs.
Today's applications communicate using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) between objects like DCOM and CORBA, but HTTP was not designed for this. RPC represents a compatibility and security problem; firewalls and proxy servers will normally block this kind of traffic.
A better way to communicate between applications is over HTTP, because HTTP is supported by all Internet browsers and servers. SOAP was created to accomplish this.
SOAP provides a way to communicate between applications running on different operating systems, with different technologies and programming languages.
Microsoft and SOAP
SOAP is a key element of Microsoft's .NET architecture for future Internet application development.
SOAP 1.1 was Proposed to W3C
UserLand, Ariba, Commerce One, Compaq, Developmentor, HP, IBM, IONA, Lotus, Microsoft, and SAP proposed to W3C, in May 2000, the SOAP Internet protocol that they hope will revolutionize application development by connecting graphic user interface desktop applications to powerful Internet servers using the standards of the Internet: HTTP and XML.

CHAD

2007-11-28T17:20:00.000-08:00

That’s the trouble with obsolete technology: when you need to talk about it, you must drag out obsolete terminology. Yes, I’m still following the big political soap opera of the season in Florida. It was reported that the automatic vote-counting machines sometimes got confused because voters didn’t punch the holes in the voting papers right through and the dangling chad messed up the sensors. As a result, and perhaps inevitably, last Sunday’s New York Post referred to Chadgate. We’ve also had a lot of arcane technology appear, including swing-door chad, tri-chad, dimpled chad and even pregnant chad.

Most people associated with computing thought chad had gone out with punch-card tabulating machines, well BME (Before the Microsoft Era). Every time you created a new card, little punched-out bits of card would fall into a hopper below the machine, if you were lucky, otherwise on the floor. This was the chad. You can see exactly the same type of stuff if you give your office hole punch a good shake. By extension, it was also used for the perforated edge strips on continuous printer stationery after they had been torn off by hand or by a vicious machine called a burster. The Jargon File says it has also been known as chaff, computer confetti, and keypunch droppings.

According to the main reference works, nobody has the slightest idea where the word chad came from, though there’s a good chance that it pre-dates the computer. Punched tabulator cards have been around since the machines Herman Hollerith invented to analyse the 1890 US census and punched paper tape has been in use in teleprinter machines almost as long. In fact, from various sources, it seems probable that the term was invented in telegraphy, and only extended its meaning to punch-card technology later. Several people with long memories in the data processing business have told me that the IBM word for the debris from punching cards was chip, never chad.

Older people in Britain might think of a link with a curious little cartoon figure from the same period, forever saying things like “Wot? No bread?” as comments on shortages during and after the War. He was the British equivalent of the American Kilroy (indeed, the two met and merged in places with the cartoon appearing above “Kilroy was here!”). To the British man in the street he was always known as Mr Chad. Mr Chad, however, is not a relative of chad. It is said that it was the invention of George Chatterton, a British cartoonist, about 1938. Mr Chatterton’s nickname was Chat and the shift to Chad is easy to imagine.

Though some lexicographers would point to it being a variant form of chaff, there is another possibility. The story goes that a genius of the mechanical world was fed up with all these bits of confetti lying about and invented a machine that did away with them. Instead of punching a hole right through, it cut a notch and folded the flap back. The inventor, it is said, was a Mr Chadless and his machine was called the Chadless keypunch. The logic was inescapable: if the Chadless punch didn’t make computer confetti, then the stuff it didn’t make must be chad.

There’s one big problem with this: I’ve not been able to turn up any evidence that Mr Chadless ever existed, or indeed that anybody of that name exists anywhere. There is no reference to it in the US patents and trademarks registry, and it doesn’t occur anywhere in telephone directories in the US, Canada, UK or Australia. We must deduce that chadless was derived from chad to describe machines that didn’t litter. Damn, another good story broken on the wheel of academic research. The word is still around, though it has no capital letter and seems to be used only by the makers of automatic letter openers: chadless ones slit only the top surface of envelopes, so your mail room doesn’t end up looking like a hamster cage.

There has been much discussion in various places about an origin for chad in a Scots word meaning “gravel”. This was given in the Third Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, but the new Fourth Edition just says “origin unknown”. However, the English Dialect Dictionary gives chat with various meanings that suggest small things that occur in piles, a word which is also used in some places in the US for gravel used to resurface roads. To move from chat to chad is but a step. However, the connection is far from established.

One curiosity of the recent debacle is that the word has moved from being what grammarians call a mass noun to a count noun. In the former you spoke of chad as a pile of stuff, but had to say piece of chad when you wanted to speak of one of the little bits; recent comments have started to speak instead of chads, where the word does refer to one item. That’s not surprising: firstly, few current users ever encountered it in its heyday, and secondly, the single bits of stuff have taken on an importance they never used to have.

ALEXIPHARMIC

2007-11-23T17:52:00.000-08:00

Having the quality or nature of an antidote to poison.

The word was introduced into English in the seventeenth century in the now obsolete form alexipharmac, a noun meaning “an antidote against poison”. This comes directly from a Greek word which is a compound of alexein, “to ward off”, and pharmakon, “poison”. This word alexipharmac was so often used attributively that users came to think it was an adjective, and so decided it ought to be spelled with the –ic ending instead. The Greek prefix alexi– is rare in English, turning up only in words such as alexipyretic, “helping against fever”; alexiteric, “having the power to ward off contagion”; and alexin, an obsolete word for what is now called a complement, a system of proteins in the blood, particularly one which guards against infection. Pharmakon could mean a drug as well as a poison (a disturbing equation of ideas to the modern mind), and is much more familiar as the origin of our words in pharmaco– such as pharmacology.

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Antivirus

2007-11-18T18:28:00.000-08:00

Antivirus - A software which causes so many pain yet its very important.Every time we format our system , we need a new Antivirus software to get protected from a deadliest virus over the net.Here comes the choice of Antivirus software.

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Hot Desker

2007-11-14T18:17:00.000-08:00

This term dates from the early nineties. It’s one of a set of words invented to describe aspects of new working practices. In hot desking, also sometimes called location independent working, workers do not have their own desks, but are allocated work space according to their needs, keeping their personal belongings in lockers or filing cabinets when not in the office. The system is heavily dependent on computers to route telephone calls, allocate resources and maintain individual working files.

The name may derive from hot bunking, the name given to the sharing of sleeping space by sailors on watch in wartime, when as one went on watch another took his place. The system is best suited to firms in which staff spend a lot of time out of the office, for example seeing clients, so that space doesn’t have to be kept permanently allocated for them and costs are reduced. Other names for the system are the virtual office and hotelling. The latter can refer to a version in which the building is treated as though it were a hotel without beds, in which all space and facilities for staff are provided against bookings as though to guests; one consultancy firm in the US is reported to have engaged a hotel concierge to ensure that services run smoothly.

A person who works according to this system is a hot desker; the verb to hot desk is also common.

Beggar on Horseback

2007-11-14T18:16:00.000-08:00

[Q] From Sheila Davis: “Would you be able to tell me the origin of the phrase, Put a beggar on horseback and he’ll ride to hell?”

[A] I’m not at all sure that it is possible to say where it comes from, at least not exactly. It’s one of those “lost in the mists of time” things. But the saying is first recorded in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, in the form “Set a beggar on horseback, and he will ride a gallop”. Yet another version is “Set a beggar on horseback, and he will ride to the devil”.

In its various forms, the saying means that if one gives an undeserving person an advantage, he will misuse it. A little later, it was shortened to the idiom a beggar on horseback, meaning a person, originally poor, who has been made arrogant or corrupt through achieving wealth and luxury. The shorter phrase has been a frequent choice for the titles of books and at least one play.

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Background

2007-11-08T16:02:00.000-08:00

When we watch the recent spectacular science fiction and fantasy thrillers,
we remain totally under the spell of the amazing scenes and the underlying
special effects that are being displayed. We watch the movies, applaud the
actions, and come home totally enchanted and wanting for more. Most of
the time we forget about the enormous amount of effort that is required to
produce such a spectacle. Even if we acknowledge that, we tend to ignore
the proverbial “work horses” or computers that generate such remarkable
special effects. We have got used to the special effects so much that we
take the computing power required to provide such visual spectacles for
granted. It takes billions and trillions of CPU cycles to create special effects
like those in Spiderman [1], Shrek [2], and other such visual treats.
To satisfy the ever increasing hunger for better special effects among
movie-goers, more and more complex animations are being developed
which are continuously raising the bar for computing power required.
Requirements of huge amounts of computing power are not only limited
to the field of rendering and animation. Scientists are analyzing terabytes
and petabytes of data to provide better weather forecasting [3], develop
more efficient models for detecting natural disasters, high energy
physics [4], and so on. By virtue of the hugely popular SETI@Home [5]
project, most of us are aware of the enormous computing power required
for searching extraterrestrial intelligence. The project allowed people to
download the SETI@Home software in their own machines and run the
program in the screen saver mode. Apart from fundamental research, computing
power is also required in huge quantities in the life sciences industry
for drug discovery [6]. Financial industries require huge amounts of
processing power to do risk calculations, credit analysis, and so on [7].
Manufacturing industries are not very far behind. Simulations of automobiles
based on complicated mathematical models [8] require enormous
computing power.
Similarly, EDA and Oil & Gas explorations also require
computing power to do more computations in a shorter time to satisfy the
ever increasing demands of the market.
Therefore huge computing power is required in several industries.
Now if we look at the computing resources available, we will find that the
laptops of today are perhaps as powerful as servers a decade ago. Moore’s
law, which states that computing power doubles every eighteen months, is
valid even today and will probably be true for the next five to six years.
With the advancements in the field of multi-core technologies, this growth
can be extended further [9]. Therefore computing power is increasing and
so is the demand. In this rat race, researchers have found an able ally in the
form of networking. Between 2001 and 2010, while processing power is
supposed to increase 60 times, networking capabilities is supposed to increase
by 4000 times. This means that at the same cost 4000 times the
same bandwidth will be available in 2010 as compared to 2001 [10].
Therefore the computing architectures developed a decade back would
probably require a rethink based on the technological progress in the fields
of computers and networks. Last decade saw the development of a field
called cluster computing [11] where the different computing resources are
connected together using a very high speed network like the Gigabit
Ethernet or more recently Infiniband [12].
In addition to the technological progress and the huge requirement of
computing power, enterprises have also undergone a radical shift in Information
Technology (IT) operations in the last few years. Enterprises are
now witnessing increasing collaboration and data sharing among the different
participating entities, resulting in the need and use of distributed resources
and computing. Another important element that has increased the
complexity of IT operations is the need for integration of different applications,
middleware developed in different platforms and by different vendors.
We are also seeing a spurt of mergers and acquisitions which require
integration of technologies across enterprises. Moreover, the enterprises
are outsourcing the nonessential elements of the IT infrastructure. The dual
pull of requiring more computing power and the integration of heterogeneous
components into the IT infrastructure has led to the development of
grid technologies. The technology is seeing a classical evolution pattern.
Initiated and started from the academic and the research community to fulfill
their needs, it is slowly being adopted by the enterprises, especially
those who have high computing needs like the life sciences, finance, and
manufacturing industries. However, the promise of grid computing goes
beyond that and the next few years should see a gradual adoption of the
grid as a natural choice among the other enterprises. However, the widespread
adoption of grid computing as an automatic choice in enterprises
depends upon the ability of the researchers and practitioners in reducing
the pitfalls that lie on the way. One such pitfall is security
we will briefly look at the evolution of grid computing, its benefits, and concerns in
the upcoming posts

Grid Computing Security - An Introduction

2007-10-31T18:00:00.001-07:00

Grid computing is widely regarded as a technology of immense potential
in both industry and academia. The evolution pattern of grid technologies
is very similar to the growth and evolution of Internet technologies that
was witnessed in the early 1990s. Similar to the Internet, the initial grid
computing technologies were also developed mostly in the universities and
research labs to solve unique research problems and to collaborate between
different researchers across the globe. Recently, the high computing industries
like finance, life sciences, energy, automobiles, rendering, etc. are
showing a great amount of interest in the potential of connecting standalone
and silo based clusters into a department and sometimes enterprisewide
grid system. Grid computing is currently in the midst of evolving
standards, inheriting and customizing from those developed in the high
performance, distributed, and recently from the Web services community.
Due to the lack of consistent and widely used standards, several enterprises
are concerned about the implementation of an enterprise-level grid system,
though the potential of such a system is well understood. Even when the
enterprises have considered grid as a solution, several issues have made
them reconsider their decisions. Issues related to application engineering,
manageability, data management, licensing, security, etc. have prevented
them from implementing an enterprise-wide grid solution. As a technology,
grid computing has potential beyond the high performance computing
industries due to it's inherent collaboration, autonomic, and utility based
service behavior. To make this evolution possible all the above-mentioned
issues need to be solved. Some of the issues are technical and some of
them have business and economic overtones like the issue related to licensing.
Each of the issues mentioned above is important and deserves a close
look and understanding. In this post we will solely concentrate on the issue
related to grid computing security.
As an issue, security is perhaps the most important and needs close
understanding as grid computing offers unique security challenges. In this
blog we look at different security issues pertaining to the grid system;
some of them are of immediate concern and some are long term issues. We
will also look at security issues in other areas of computer science like
networks and operating systems which may affect the design of future
grids in the upcoming posts.

Bubble Memory

2007-10-27T03:52:00.000-07:00

Magnetic bubble memory
Bubble memory is a sophisticated method of storing data that gets rid of the need for
moving parts such as are required in tape machines and disk drives. This type of memory
is used in large computer systems, because it allows the storage, retrieval, and
transfer of great quantities of data. The bits of data are stored as tiny magnetic fields, in
a medium that is made from magnetic film and semiconductor materials.
148 Magnetism
8-10 On recording tape, particles are magnetized in a pattern that follows
the modulating waveform.
A full description of the way bubble memory systems are made, and the way they
work, is too advanced. Bubble memory makes use of all the advantages of
magnetic data storage, as well as the favorable aspects of electronic data storage. Advantages
of electronic memory include rapid storage and recovery, and high density (a
lot of data can be put in a tiny volume of space). Advantages of magnetic memory include
nonvolatility (it can be stored for a long time without needing a constant current
source), high density and comparatively low cost.
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Internal conflict hampers debate on stem cells.

2007-10-24T16:47:00.000-07:00

Internal conflict hampers debate on stem cells.

Emiliano Feresin

Stem-cell researchers in Italy are worried that a shake-up of the country's bioethics advisory body could hinder a balanced representation of their ethical position on embryonic stem-cell research.

Members of the National Bioethics Committee are nominated directly by the Italian prime minister, and have in the past been predominantly Catholic. The group expresses opinions on and suggests solutions to bioethical issues, and helps prepare legislation on relevant topics.

In October 2000, the committee, which at the time included a number of scientists and independent thinkers, expressed a favourable opinion toward embryonic stem-cell research. But in 2002, then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi renewed the committee, and since then there has been increasing conflict between its Catholic and secular members. Then in 2004, the parliament approved one of the most restrictive laws worldwide on stem-cell research.

Last year, the current prime minister, Romano Prodi, streamlined the committee from 52 to 40 members, and increased the percentage of women from 25% to almost 40%. The proportion of Catholic members remained at well over 50%.

Francesco Casavola has made big changes to the committee.E. OLIVERIO/AP

Prodi also appointed as the committee's president 76-year-old Francesco Casavola, a former president of Italy's supreme court, who is currently director of the Treccani Institute. Casavola, a moderate Catholic, appointed two secular members and one Catholic member as vice-presidents. They were Cinzia Caporale, a bioethicist and former president of the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Intergovernmental Bioethics Committee; Elena Cattaneo, a stem-cell researcher at the University of Milan; and Luca Marini, a lecturer in European Union Law at the University of Rome La Sapienza.

The new committee was fractious from the start. Almost half its members advocated changing the voting system from a simple majority — perhaps to a system that describes, with justifications, the range of views across the committee. This is similar to the way in which the German National Ethics Council works. “Such a procedure encourages a constructive discussion and diminishes conflicts,” says Jens Reich, former deputy chair of the German group.

On 18 September, three members of the Italian committee wrote an internal memo criticizing what they called Casavola's unilateral way of making decisions. In particular, they criticized his decision to choose members of the influential public group Science and Life, which strongly opposes research on embryonic stem cells, as committee representatives on important national and international panels. For example, the committee's representative on the commission that is revising the reproductive-technology law is the president of Science and Life.

The letter was leaked to the press, and Casavola tendered his resignation. At the end of September, Prodi asked him to stay and ratified Casavola's proposal to replace the three vice-presidents with new ones: a rabbi, a Catholic who takes secular positions, and a member of Science and Life.

On 8 October, Casavola wrote in a letter to the committee that the former vice-presidents had not adequately defended him against growing criticism. Prodi's undersecretary Giampaolo D'Andrea, defending Casavola's decision to a parliamentary commission, said that there were “inner conflicts between the vice-presidents”, a point that members of the committee strongly contest.

The current situation worries Cattaneo. “Italian science needs to rise to the level of other European countries,” she says, “which means also having an institution able to make decisions that can strike an appropriate balance between medical benefits and justified ethical concerns of the nation.”

In what is likely to be a turbulent meeting on 26 October, the committee will have to produce advice about the time at which an embryo can be considered dead and could be used for research. “But with the current unbalanced representation,” says Carlo Redi, a stem-cell researcher and scientific adviser at the San Matteo Hospital in Pavia, “I can hardly imagine that there could be good news for science”.