Russian Space Program Tech Leads to Hydrogen Storage Breakthrough

Breakthrough uses capillary array to store hydrogen

Many alternative fuel sources are being eyed to help reduce pollution and our need for imported oil. Among these alternative power sources are solar power, electricity, and hydrogen among others.

Hydrogen is an alternative fuel that is being heavily researched. The big barriers from using hydrogen today are the facts that the gas is highly volatile and it is difficult to store safely. In September, researchers in America announced that they had made a hydrogen storage breakthrough using chemical hydrides.

BusinessWeek reports that a new breakthrough has been made on storing hydrogen safely that has stemmed from technology that the Russian’s developed for their space program. Moshe Stern, an Israeli entrepreneur, was approached by a Russian scientist Evgeny Velikohov in 2005 about adapting the technology for the storage of hydrogen. The storage method uses what is known as capillary arrays.

The capillary array is a bundle of long, thin tubes of extremely strong glass. The complete array can store as much as three times the amount of hydrogen that a conventional steel container used to store hydrogen today. The technology recently received an endorsement from a German institute known as the Federal Institute for Materials Research & Testing (BAM) for its safety.

BAM spokesman Kai Holtapples said, “The lightweight storage and safety factors give the technology a huge commercial potential for a whole range of industries.”

Stern’s company working on the tech is called C.En. The company has announced that it will license out the technology to corporate customers. Stern said, “We’re planning to license out the technology on a company-by-company basis, with the first agreement during 2010.”

If the C.En system and its glass capillaries can withstand pressure, they could be used eventually in cars and electronic devices to store hydrogen for power. So far, the C.En company has been able to raise $25 million in funds from investors in the U.S., Russia, South Korea, and other countries to research and develop its array.

http://www.dailytech.com/Russian+Space+Program+Tech+Leads+to+Hydrogen+Storage+Breakthrough/article17122.htm

Smart CCTV learns to spot suspicious types

Keeping an eye out for baddies (Image: Geoff Moore/Rex Features)

by Nic Fleming

WHAT’S the difference between a suicide bomber and a cleaner? It sounds like the opening line of a sick joke, but for computer scientists working on intelligent video-surveillance software, being able to make that distinction is a key goal.

Current CCTV systems can collect masses of data, but little of it is used, says Shaogang Gong, a computer-vision computation researcher at Queen Mary, University of London. “What we really need are better ways to mine that data,” he says.

Gong is leading an international team of researchers to develop a next-generation CCTV system, called Samurai, which is capable of identifying and tracking individuals that act suspiciously in crowded public spaces. It uses algorithms to profile people’s behaviour, learning about how people usually behave in the environments where it is deployed. It can also take changes in lighting conditions into account, enabling it to track people as they move from one camera’s viewing field to another.

To improve the tracking of an individual at an airport, the system can also learn the routes people are likely to take – straight from the entrance to check-in, say. It can even follow a target as they move in a crowd, using the characteristic shape of the person, their luggage and the people they are walking with, to follow them as they walk between different camera views.

Samurai is designed to issue alerts when it detects behaviour that differs from the norm, and adjusts its reasoning based on feedback. So an operator might reassure the system that the person with a mop appearing to loiter in a busy thoroughfare is no threat. When another person with a mop exhibits similar behaviour, it will remember that this is not a situation that needs flagging up.

While video analysis tools already exist, they tend to operate according to rigid, predefined rules, says Gong, and cannot follow a large number of people across multiple cameras situated in busy public spaces.

The Samurai team last month demonstrated the system to commercial partners including BAA Airports in the UK. The researchers claim the prototype system successfully identified potential threats which may have been missed by human operators, using footage collected at Heathrow airport. The Samurai team has funding to continue refining their software until the end of 2011.

“The use of relevant feedback from human operators will be a very important part of these technologies,” says Paul Miller, of Queen’s University’s Centre for Secure Information Technologies in Belfast, UK, who is leading a project to develop a video-analysis system capable of predicting assaults on buses. “The key is developing learning algorithms that work not only in the lab but that are robust in real-world applications.”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427385.800-smart-cctv-learns-to-spot-suspicious-types.html

What will power next-generation businesses?

by Dion Hinchcliffe

The ongoing and seemingly inexorable decline of traditional media continues to be the canonical example of what happens when the ground rules get changed in an industry that is fundamentally unable to adapt to new market conditions. A great analysis recently posted by Umair Haque at Harvard Business underscores the point: The so-called new normal is starting to seem more and more foreign the deeper we go into the 21st century than most organizations may yet be willing to believe.

The old question about the innovator’s dilemma has become more urgent as the new business landscape looks increasingly unfamiliar: We now live in an age where things that were historically scarce are now available abundantly — at least on the network — in seemingly unlimited quantities (new ideas, existing knowledge, and productive capacity, never mind that all your customers and competitors are there too), and what was formerly abundant is now scarce (broad demand for big ticket, high margin, low volume products and services in the form of large advertisers, big corporate customers, or anything else.)

Denial is also not just a river in Egypt in this discussion. The reality is the businesses are often very uncomfortable about talking about their future in such an uncertain and rapidly changing landscape. There’s even been serious talk recently about “putting the genie back into the bottle.” This includes otherwise shrewd business leaders such as with Rupert Murdoch suggesting they seriously explore charging for online news in an attempt to roll the clock back on their industry and put pay walls back in place.

Moves like these are desperate measures from shrinking, even dying, industries that are breathtakingly misguided while being insufficiently imaginative in their response, to put it mildly. These periodic debates also show us the future of our own corner of the business world.

But it’s the monumental misunderstanding of how the network actually functions and creates value that is the more serious error here. This is not to say, however, that the new business models of the Web are completely understood or that there’s a straight line of travel that we can take to adopt them. We still have much to learn about how the global economic cornucopia that is the Internet really works and yet the broad outlines are indeed steadily emerging. More specifically, organizations on the front line of this transformation of the business landscape right now actually do have some options today as we’ll see.

Related: Twenty-two power laws for the emerging social economy.

Haque himself has an interesting set of suggestions for the media industry in his Nichepaper Manifesto. It’s a set of perspectives and strategies that every industry will have to adapt to theirs if any part of their business model competes with free. Because, in the Web 2.0 era, free is seemingly equivalent to whatever the network can reliably peer produce, which appears to be almost anything these days.

In an age when traffic and visitor counts seem to be the metric everyone cares about, the crux of the problem seems to be a question of this: The actual item being created by the majority of online businesses today are worth a great deal only in terms of low-value customers. In other words, next generation businesses must scale up dramatically if they are to repeat the value levels of old. The new business models are thus terrifying efficient in comparison — at least from a competitive standpoint — yet the economics don’t seem to make sense at first. If there is a conundrum wrapped in an opportunity here, unraveling this knot is where it lies.

How then do we get across this divide? Clearly, new competencies must be acquired that can respond to today’s market forces: Relentless commodotization of information supply, costs to create outputs collapsing towards zero (at least for knowledge-based inputs), and rampant product abundance dividing demand into countless tiny and seemingly unreachable channels and markets. Social media and user generated content is doing this to media, open source is doing this to the software business as well, crowdsourcing is taking on the rest, and if your business depends on the value of information as a product component in any way, you’re in the firing line as well.

An example of how foreign yet novel these new ways of doing business will be: I was studying the story of reCAPTCHA the other day and was stunned to learn that the little text snippets we type into Web sites to prove that we are really human are actually doing useful, productive work. The company takes the 200 million online verification forms that are filled out every day around the Web and uses them as correction for failed OCR jobs (the text displayed is actually scanned from somewhere). The creators of the product realized they had unintentionally “created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles..” No longer, they tapped into a huge reservoir of highly cost-effective value that can tackle enormous problems. The result is a business we can barely recognize with potential we can clearly see but hardly fathom.

Now the service is digitizing a century of print archives and will be able to accomplish far more in the future. If your business competes with this service in any way, you’ll have your work cut out for you. This seemingly limitless and free source of mental and physical effort (both recognition and keying) has been acquired at virtually no cost. But the key is they don’t really control it, their partners that use their badge do and get shared benefit. This loosely shared cooperative partnering on the network is a simple example of the enormous scale and value 21st century business models. More to the point, there are parallels in seemingly every business when you take a close look.

An Analogy Not Far From the Mark?

In one (increasingly not so) extreme version of this view, the advent of the Web has had the effect of a massive asteroid impact to the classical business ecosystem. This has triggered a still-ongoing and just-ramping up global extinction event as the old environment changes radically. Only the hardy species isolated from its effects or the successful adapters will survive. The resulting Internet cloud that has been kicked up now almost completely surrounds the original inhabitants and is relentlessly starving them of the nutrients they used to thrive on. This is caused by newly emerged “gazelles” (Web companies in this analogy) and other much more nimble and resilient alternatives (communities) on the landscape that can do what the dinosaurs could do for a fraction of the cost and effort, driving the value right out of their food chain.

But enough with the over-used dinosaur extinction metaphors. What does this actually look like? What exactly are these putative next-generation business models? How do they create real value for customers and shareholders by generating growth, revenue, or other value in some form? Hint: These businesses will only not compete with the corporate giants created in the 20th century but define success on completely new terms the old businesses just can’t relate or even respond to meaningfully.

For the sake of giving these new institutions a name in this discussion, let’s call them edge businesses. The word edge here means that they are not large, monolithic organizations, at least not in the way we regard them today, though we’ll still have the habit of thinking of them that way. Instead, they will be deeply decentralized. Most of their power and value will come from their profound integration into the lives of both the people and businesses that they touch upon and integrate with, and not from some large centralized presence. Again, think of the reCAPTCHA example.

What does a next-generation business consist of?

An “edge business” seems to have several new unique and important hallmarks: 1) It creates and delivers most of its value over the network, usually indirectly (i.e. not centralized production), 2) it consists of a loosely coupled entity of partners comprised of (usually very large number of) customers and suppliers who have as much control over outcomes as any other part of the business, and 3) they will have effective strategies to take advantage of the new balance of abundance and scarcity, along with greatly reduced dependencies on the old ones. In other words, their business models and operating structures are tuned to operate smoothly using the post-Great Recession resource and demand landscape. The trick of course, is to understand what those new resources and demands are and how to tap into them.

And it’s this new balance of resources and demand that companies, if indeed they resemble such entities, will need to completely attune to in order to thrive. Let’s not forget the context here: This is an Internet-powered new business landscape. Self-organizing peer production is the motive force, network effects are the new market share, and social power structures are what drives forward businesses internally and externally, which then become perpetuating communities of self-interested, like-minded individuals.

Related: Reconciling social computing with the enterprise.

Let’s forget for now the legal, societal, and cultural impacts and challenges of all this (indeed, it’s one big and unavoidable reason why this transformation has taken so long, when the Web came out in 1993) and focus on the business side. Here is an attempt to capture the the drivers of edge businesses:

The value drivers of next-generation businesses

• Strategic control over valuable data drives market dominance. The real, irreplaceable value of the knowledge economy is high-value information. It is the currency of the realm on the network, which will always route to the best source. Only the best sources will stand a chance of value extraction and they will have inordinate market power as well. 20th century companies greatly undervalue and underexploit their vast data assets, edge businesses don’t and relentlessly use it to their advantage, including as a high-value revenue stream.
• Peer production as the most efficient and richest source of value creation. Centralized production has value but it’s greatly limited when you can tap into the vast capabilities of the global network for mutual benefit. The network will always greatly outnumber your resources. The problem is that traditional means of enlisting contribution (employment) won’t work, something new will be required. This leads to..
• Social power structures as the means of self-organizing and governing. Social models as a more effective and efficient way to run an organization. Like all of this, we don’t throw everything out with the bathwater and there is still a key role for hierarchy, but this story is about using community-based relationships to drive forward business activities and objectives. While the open source software project is often looked at as an example (including its tie in with a commercial company to drive business forward in a traditional sense), again a better example of reCAPTCHA or strategies such as the Netflix Prize. The full range of Enterprise 2.0 will be involved here from social collaboration to customer communities.
• Mass self-servicing of market niches delivers economic scale. Serving the market using online experiences that allow mass customization is the technique here. Google AdWords is a great example of this, offering incredibly detailed control of their product to a wide spectrum of customer types, all without human intervention on the supply-side. Edge businesses will enable self-service as their primary means of interaction with the market, whether that is integrating with their open data or letting customers (again partners) distribute their functionality to the far corners of the world.
• Cloud and ecosystem-based open supply chains as the basis of growth and agility. The edge business will literally be distributing along the edge of the network, becoming both a volume supplier and a consumer of others best-of-breed services (again, doing it all yourself in the 21st century is a recipe for failure.) Edge business will build upon other best-of-class and trustworthy edge companies, building a vibrant and deeply meshed supply chain while carefully exposing and protecting their strategic data.
• Ability to dynamically adapt and rapidly respond to the current needs of the cloud. Continuing the emergent architecture discussion of this summer, everything continues to point to highly federated business models that enable highly fluid evolution and development based on near real-time market feedback.

Of course, I’m not representing this as a complete and fully-formed vision yet, just what seems to be happening today. I do believe it’s definitely in the right direction however. It’s clear that the business landscape is transforming in a generational way, even if it will take longer than some think. But these changes will almost certainly happen (indeed, are happening) more pervasively than it once seemed, most likely because it’s a more bottom-up and from the side than top-down. And it’s happening a day at a time, every day, so it’s also harder to directly get a sense of discontinuity.

Please share your thoughts on what the business world will look like in ten years from now. Please share them in Talkback below.

An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.

See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

Email Dion Hinchcliffe

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=1076&tag=wrapper;col1

Electromagnetic Fields as Cutting Tools

The bodywork on motor vehicles must be sufficiently stable, but processing the high-strength steels involved — for example punching holes in them — can prove something of a challenge. A new steel-cutting process will save time, energy and money in the future.

Squealing tires and the crunch of impact — when an accident occurs, the steel sheets that form a motor vehicle’s bodywork must provide adequate impact protection and shield its passengers to the greatest extent possible. But the strength of the steels that are used throw up their own challenges, for example when automobile manufacturers have to punch holes in them for cable routing. Struggling to pierce the hard steel, mechanical cutting tools rapidly wear out. And because they also leave some unwanted material on the underside of the steel (burr, as the experts call it), additional time has to be spent on a finishing process. One possible alternative is to use lasers as cutters, but they require a great deal of energy, which makes the entire process time-consuming and costly.

Working together with a number of partners including Volkswagen, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU in Chemnitz have come up with another way to make holes in press-hardened steel bodywork. Dr. Verena Kräusel, head of department at the IWU, explains: “The new method is based on electromagnetic pulse technology (EMPT), which was previously used primarily to expand or neck aluminum tubes. We’ve modified it to cut even hard steels. Whereas a laser takes around 1.4 seconds to cut a hole, EMPT can do the job in approximately 200 milliseconds — our method is up to seven times faster.”

Another advantage is that it produces no burr, thus doing away with the need for a finishing process. Stamping presses become superfluous, and no costs arise from the need to replace worn-out parts.

The pulse generators comprise a coil, a capacitor battery, a charging device and high-current switches. When the switch closes, the capacitors discharge via the coil within a matter of microseconds, producing a high pulsed current. The coil converts the energy stored in the capacitors into magnetic energy. To be able to use this process to cut steel, the researchers simply had to modify the coil to ensure the resulting electromagnetic field is strong enough: the pressure with which the field hits the steel must be so high that it forcibly expels the material from the sheet.

“The impact pressure on the steel is approximately 3,500 bar, which equates to the weight of three small cars on a single fingernail,” says Kräusel. PSTproducts GmbH in Alzenau provided the original EMPT system. With regard to the customer demands the researchers develop now the coils for various cutting geometries.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091209113836.htm

Star Power: Astronomers Recreate Stellar Jet With Laser Blast

The images at top, taken in a few billionths of a second, detail experiments at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics meant to simulate stellar jets and their effects on interstellar materials, as seen in the image above. (Credit: Image courtesy of Rice University)

With the trillions of watts contained in one brief pop of a powerful laser, the universe became a bit less mysterious.

Rice University Professor Patrick Hartigan and a team of laser scientists, physicists, astronomers and technicians used the beams at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics to recreate, on a small scale, the highly supersonic velocities at work in newborn stars and simulated the fiery jets that burst from their poles.

What they got was confirmation that it’s possible to recreate analogs of these stellar jets here on Earth and the ability to use these to help understand how stars form.

Hartigan, a professor of physics and astronomy, wanted to know how stellar jets affect their surroundings and to see if the series of experiments would match computer simulations as the jet impacts an obstacle along its path. He was also eager to compare the laboratory images to his infrared photos of Herbig-Haro 110, a supersonic jet of material driven from an active young star he observed last year using the four-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

If Hartigan went to Rochester anticipating a bit of “Star Wars”-style dazzle, he was in for a disappointment. “You expect the lights to dim or something,” said the enthusiastic professor, recalling one of a number of trips to the big laser. “But what happens is you watch the image of the target on a TV screen, they count down to zero and suddenly the target disappears. It happens too fast to see the laser beams vaporize the target.”

But by using the equivalent of flash photography timed to a precision of a few billionths of a second, Hartigan’s team was able to obtain images of the jet driven into a ball of foam as the laser destroyed the target and compare these with images of a jet driven from the young star. The team, which was led by Hartigan and included Rice graduate student Robert Carver and a host of researchers and technicians from the other institutions, reported its results last month in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal. (Hartigan has a second paper in the journal this month on the forces that launch stellar jets.)

Simulating a stellar jet requires a highly supersonic velocity, and that requires a lot of pressure to launch. One of the few ways to create a scale model of such a jet is to heat something very fast, atomize it and direct the plasma that results. The laser at Rochester filled that bill.

For Hartigan’s experiment, the Omega laser, one of the most powerful in the world, was focused into a dozen fine beams at a target containing a plug of titanium sitting in the center of a gold-covered, half-dollar-sized cone. On the far side was a miniscule ball of foam-covered plastic representing a cloud of interstellar material.

Dozens of firings over several years gave Hartigan’s team a stunning series of images of the shock waves, with the atomized titanium blasting into the foam and deflecting from the plastic ball, creating swirling clouds that look remarkably like the streamers of shocked gas strewn about space by collimated stellar winds. They also bear close similarities to 3-D computer models of deflected jets developed by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the United Kingdom’s Atomic Weapons Establishment and to Hartigan’s observations of Herbig-Haro 110 and other stellar jets.

The laser experiment also gave Hartigan data no single telescope ever could — a three-dimensional look at what happens when a stellar jet slams into something.

A jet traveling hundreds of miles per second should move in a straight line forever. “But the astronomical images we took at Kitt Peak showed something different,” said Hartigan, one of the first to use the observatory’s Extremely Wide-Field Infrared Imager, which went online in early 2007. His images show material being dragged out from a dense obstacle along the path of the jet as well as a series of shock waves that, with the help of the laser experiment, the team determined arose from pulses of high velocity material ejected by the young star.

“It was apparent that the jet was impacting a dense cloud and deflecting from it, and we realized we could construct an experiment with the laser that would do the same thing,” he said. “Now something that takes hundreds of years to unfold in space we can recreate in less than a millionth of a second on Earth. With repeated experiments we can study how jets behave at different times, with various collision distances from the obstacle, viewed from a variety of angles, and follow how the jet mixes with material in the obstacle.

“This phenomenon is a primary way that young stars affect their surroundings, which in turn determines whether or not other stars may form in the same region.”

That the computer and laser simulations match up so well reinforces their value to astrophysicists like Hartigan, who strive to understand the dynamics of these complex flows.

“So now, that’s in the back of my head,” Hartigan said. “Whenever I have an image of an object, like a nebula, I can think about using this technique to analyze it.”

The Department of Energy, National Science Foundation and NASA funded the research. In addition to collaborators at Los Alamos and the Atomic Weapons Establishment, the team also included researchers from the University of Rochester, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and General Atomics in San Diego.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Rice University. Original article written by Mike Williams, Rice News staff.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091208162305.htm

SPACE PHOTOS THIS WEEK: Virgin Galactic Debut and More

Aspiring space tourists got a first look at their future ride late Monday, when Virgin Galactic unveiled the first of its long-awaited SpaceShipTwo planespictured in a hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California Monday with wings folded upward, suspended from the middle of its twin-fuselage launch vehicle.

The craft, dubbed the V.S.S. Enterprise, is intended to provide space tourists with two-and-a-half-hour flights into suborbital space, where they’ll experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth. (Read full story.)

— Photograph courtesy Mark Greenberg, Virgin Galactic

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/photogalleries/091208-week-space-pictures-72-virgin-galactic-spaceship-branson/index.html

The sun glows a sedate blue in this composite of magnetic and UV-light images, a still from a video published December 4 on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Web site. By comparing the images in the video, astronomers were able to tease out details of two active regions on the sun, which otherwise might have gone undetected.

— Image courtesy SOHO/STEREO/NASA

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/photogalleries/091208-week-space-pictures-72-virgin-galactic-spaceship-branson/photo2.html

(Follow the top link for more pictures)

More Efficient Space Engine Uses Carbon Nanotubes

Efficient emitters: A micrograph of square arrays of carbon nanotubes on a one centimeter by one centimeter silicon wafer. The arrays are designed for use in an experimental cathode.   Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

Nanotubes promise better ion-propulsion efficiency.

By Brittany Sauser

Ion-propulsion systems have propelled a handful of Earth-orbiting and interplanetary spacecraft over the past 50 years. Now researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology are developing more efficient ion thrusters that use carbon nanotubes for a vital component.

Ion propulsion works by accelerating electrically charged, or ionized, particles to propel a spacecraft. One of the most common ion engines, known as a “Hall Effect” thruster, ionizes gas using electrons trapped in a magnetic field. The resulting ions are then accelerated using the potential maintained between an anode and a cathode. But some of the emitted electrons must also be used to neutralize the ions in the plume emitted from the spacecraft, to prevent the spacecraft from becoming electrically charged. Existing Hall Effect thrusters must use about 10 percent of the spacecraft’s xenon gas propellant to create the electrons needed to both run the engine and neutralize the ion beam.

The Georgia Tech researchers created a field emission cathode for the thruster using carbon nanotubes. In this type of cathode, electrons are emitted after they tunnel through a potential barrier. The carbon nanotube design is especially efficient because nanotubes are incredibly strong and electrically conductive. “By using carbon nanotubes, we can get all the electrons we need without using any propellant,” says Mitchell Walker, principal investigator of the project and an assistant professor in the High-Power Electric Propulsion Laboratory at Georgia Tech. This means that 10 percent more of the ion thruster’s propellant is available for the actual mission, extending a spacecraft’s lifetime.

“We can pull the electrons from the tip of the material at less than .25 volts per micron,” which makes for a tremendously efficient system, says Jud Ready, coprincipal investigator of the project. In contrast, the hollow cathodes conventionally used in ion thrusters require heavy electronics and need to be heated to thousands of degrees to obtain the ample voltage.

Furthermore, since the nanotubes are thin and lightweight, they can be applied to the surface of the thruster body, potentially allowing the spacecraft to carry larger payloads and fit on smaller launch vehicles. Walker presented a paper on the new cathode earlier this year at the Joint Propulsions Conference and Exhibit in Denver and says the new system could be ready to launch in three to five years.

“The examination of carbon nanotubes for cathodes is a relatively new approach, but one of several that has been investigated over the last decade,” says Michael Patterson, the principal investigator of the new ion-propulsion system that’s part of NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) program. Researchers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center have investigated the use of microstructures made of diamond-like materials, but have had difficulty using them. “Generally they have a short lifetime when subjected to erosive environments or run at very low currents,” says Patterson.

To create the carbon-nanotube cathodes, the Georgia Tech researchers grow the multiwalled carbon nanotubes using plasma instead of conventional chemical vapor deposition. “We need to be able to finely control the height of the carbon nanotubes, which for our design is 10 microns,” says Ready.

Busek, a space propulsion company based in Natick, MA, is also developing carbon-nanotube cathodes that are already space-certified. Ready says the researchers have a good relationship with the company and would be interested in working with it to commercialize their own technology.

The Georgia Tech researchers have demonstrated the durability of their carbon nanotubes by showing they can survive the vibrations experienced during launch. The nanotubes have a lifespan of over 368 hours. The group has received a $6.5 million grant from DARPA, the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, and have begun a second phase of testing.

“Carbon nanotubes are a worthy area of research that could improve the overall system performance,” says Patterson. He adds that carbon-nanotube cathodes may be most suitable for low-power spacecraft and small satellites because the standard cathode technology is most prohibiting on these systems. “A large fraction of the propellant is wasted on the cathode.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24085/?a=f

First Direct Observation of a Planet-Like Object Orbiting Star Similar to Sun

This August 2009 discovery image of GJ 758 B was taken with the Subaru Telescope’s HiCIAO instrument in the near infrared, which measures and records differences in heat. Without the special technique employed here (angular differential imaging), the star’s glare would overwhelm the light from the planet candidates. The planet-like object, GJ 758 B, is circled as B in the lower right portion of the image. An unconfirmed companion planet or planet-like object, C, can be viewed above B. The star, GJ 758, is located at the center of the image, at the hub of the starburst. The graphic at the top compares the orbital distances of solar system planets. (Credit: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)

An international team of scientists that includes an astronomer from Princeton University has made the first direct observation of a planet-like object orbiting a star similar to the sun.

The finding marks the first discovery made with the world’s newest planet-hunting instrument on the Hawaii-based Subaru Telescope and is the first fruit of a novel research collaboration announced by the University in January.

The object, known as GJ 758 B, could be either a large planet or a “failed star,” also known as a brown dwarf. The faint companion to the sun-like star GJ 758 is estimated to be 10 to 40 times as massive as Jupiter and is a “near neighbor” in our Milky Way galaxy, hovering a mere 300 trillion miles from Earth.

“It’s a groundbreaking find because one of the current goals of astronomy is to directly detect planet-like objects around stars like our sun,” said Michael McElwain, a postdoctoral research fellow in Princeton’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences who was part of the team that made the discovery. “It is also an important verification that the system — the telescope and its instruments — is working well.”

Images of the object were taken in May and August during early test runs of the new observation equipment. The team has members from Princeton, the University of Hawaii, the University of Toronto, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Tokyo. The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“This challenging but beautiful detection of a very low mass companion to a sun-like star reminds us again how little we truly know about the census of gas giant planets and brown dwarfs around nearby stars,” said Alan Boss, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the research. “Observations like this will enable theorists to begin to make sense of how this hitherto unseen population of bodies was able to form and evolve.”

Brown dwarfs are stars that are not massive enough to sustain fusion reactions at their core, so they burn out and cool off as they age.

Aided by new varieties of viewing techniques, scientists started finding extrasolar planets (planets beyond the solar system) in 1992 and have located more than 400 planet-like objects so far. Most, however, have not been directly observed, but inferred from viewing the star around which the planet orbits. GJ 758 B is one of the first planet-like objects to be directly seen. Of the others that have been directly viewed, most have been on larger orbits than the distance between GJ 758 B and its star, or around stars with temperatures far above the average temperature of GJ 758 or our sun.

Scientists were able to spot the object even though it was hidden in the glare of the star it orbits by subtracting out that brighter light. To do this, they used the High Contrast Coronagraphic Imager with Adaptive Optics that has been attached to the Subaru Telescope. Also known as HiCIAO, it is part of a new generation of instruments specially made to detect faint objects near a bright star by masking its far more intense light. They also employed a technique known as angular differential imaging to capture the images.

“It’s amazing how quickly this instrument has come online and burst into the forefront,” said Marc Kuchner, an exoplanet scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the work. “I think this is just the beginning of what HiCIAO is going to do for the field.” He added that the discovery also emphasizes that this new method of finding exoplanets — direct detection — is “really hitting its stride.”

The planet-like object is currently at least 29 times as far from its star as the Earth is from the sun, approximately as far as Neptune is from the sun. However, further observations will be required to determine the actual size and shape of its orbit. At a temperature of only 600 F, the object is relatively “cold” for a body of its size. It is the coldest companion to a sun-like star ever recorded in an image.

The fact that such a large planet-like object appears to orbit at this location defies traditional thinking on planet formation. It is thought most larger planets are formed either closer to or farther from stars, but not in the location where GJ 758 is now. Discoveries such as this one could help theorists refine their ideas.

Telescope images also revealed a second companion to the star, which the scientists have called GJ 758 C. More observations, however, are needed to confirm whether it is nearby or just looks that way. “It looks very promising,” said Christian Thalmann, one of the team’s lead scientists. If it should turn out to be a second companion, he said, that would make both B and C more likely to be young planets rather than old brown dwarfs, since two brown dwarfs in such close proximity would not remain stable for such a long period of time.

Researchers from Princeton and NAOJ announced an agreement on Jan. 15 to collaborate over the next 10 years, using new equipment on the Subaru Telescope to peer into hidden corners of the nearby universe and ferret out secrets from its distant past. This research is a part of that collaboration. The HiCIAO team is led by Professor Motohide Tamura of NAOJ.

The partnership, called the NAOJ-Princeton Astrophysics Collaboration or N-PAC, provides for the exchange of scientific resources and supports a variety of long-term research projects in which the scientists from both Princeton and the Japanese astronomical community will participate on an equal basis. The collaboration builds on a decades-long tradition of scientific collaboration between Japanese and Princeton astronomers in a wide range of astronomical fields.

An important part of that partnership is the search for planets, previously hidden by the glare of stars. Finding these planets is a crucial step in answering the age-old question of the existence of extraterrestrial life.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Princeton University. Original article written by Kitta MacPherson.

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Journal Reference:

1. Christian Thalmann, Joseph Carson, Markus Janson, Miwa Goto, Michael Mcelwain, Sebastian Egner, Markus Feldt, Jun Hashimoto, Yutaka Hayano, Thomas Henning, Klaus W. Hodapp, Ryo Kandori, Hubert Klahr, Tomoyuki Kudo, Nobuhiko Kusakabe, Christoph Mordasini, Jun-Ichi Morino, Hiroshi Suto, Ryuji Suzuki, Motohide Tamura. Discovery of the Coldest Imaged Companion of a Sun-Like Star. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2009; (accepted for publication) [link]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091203141909.htm

“Bandwidth hogs” join unicorns in realm of mythical creatures

One analyst has had it with Internet data caps. Bandwidth hogs are a myth, he says, and caps simply penalize heavy users who cause no problems for others. Now, he’s throwing down the gauntlet and challenging ISPs to turn over some data for analysis.

By Nate Anderson

There’s a spectre haunting Internet service providers—the spectre of the “bandwidth hog.” But does the mythical beast really exist? One telecom analyst is dubious, and he’s calling out the ISPs.

Benoit Felten is a Yankee Group analyst who covers fiber to the home issues from Paris, but his “bandwidth hog” challenge is a product of his personal blog, fiberevolution. Felten is a knowledgeable voice on fiber issues, and his blog reliably makes for an interesting read, but it rarely takes the adversarial tone it struck today.

Hunting the mythical bandwidth hog

Felten’s basic critique concerns bandwidth caps—not because they exist, but because he sees them as disingenuous. Carriers can use them as a way to control bandwidth and wean people away from what the marketing department implicitly promises: all-you-can-surf Internet access for one monthly fee. The caps are sold as cutting off “bandwidth hogs” who use “more than their fair share,” but Felten’s take is that ISPs really have no idea if these people are causing any sort of actual congestion at all.

ISPs “claim that bandwidth hogs steal all the bandwidth and cause network congestion, and therefore their behavior harms all the other regular and peaceful law-abiding users,” he writes. “And to add insult to injury, they pay the same price as the others! No, policing and rationing must be applied by the benevolent telco to protect the innocent. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the way that telcos identify the Bandwidth Hogs is not by monitoring if they cause unfair traffic congestion for other users. No, they just measure the total data downloaded per user, list the top 5 percent and call them hogs.”

That is, ISPs are going after “heavy users” simply for being “heavy users,” not necessarily because their usage causes problems for anyone. Imagine that some of these crazed downloaders are BitTorrent fiends (not a real brain-stretcher, that idea) and that they have their client set to do most of its downloading in the wee hours. At the end of the month, they may end up in the top tier of ISP subscribers even without causing problems for anyone. So why cap based on total monthly data transfer, rather than capping or throttling based on actual congestion problems?

Felten doesn’t get into the answer to this question in great detail, though he does say it’s “actually an admission that telcos are uncomfortable with the ‘all you can eat’ broadband schemes that they themselves introduced on the market to get people to subscribe.” One might also suspect that some companies (*cough* Time Warner Cable *cough*) may see low caps as a way to extract more cash from subscribers. (For ISPs like Comcast, with decent 250GB caps that aren’t exceeded by more than a tiny fraction of the company’s subscriber base, this doesn’t currently seem to be a motivator for the caps.)

In any event, Felten wants to see data showing that caps actually relieve congestion, not just punish heavy users. So he throws down a gauntlet to ISPs.

“Here’s a challenge for them: in the next few days, I will specify on this blog a standard dataset that would enable me to do an in-depth data analysis into network usage by individual users. Any telco willing to actually understand what’s happening there and to answer the question on the existence of hogs once and for all can extract that data and send it over to me, I will analyse it for free, on my spare time. All I ask is that they let me publish the results of said research (even though their names need not be mentioned if they don’t wish it to be). Of course, if I find myself to be wrong and if indeed I manage to identify users that systematically degrade the experience for other users, I will say so publicly. If, as I suspect, there are no such users, I will also say so publicly. The data will back either of these assertions.”

If Felten is right, then the “bandwidth hog” is an imaginary creature for the digital age, a sort of postindustrial unicorn. Unlike the unicorn, however, bandwidth hog makes terrific eating; its bacon is the single tastiest kind of bacon imaginable, shot through with the flavors of 4chan, the essence of Twitter, and a small pinch of TechCrunch (warning: it’s pretty pungent). If Felten does slay the mythical beast, Internet hipsters everywhere can rejoice… then slap crispy strips of bandwidth hog bacon into their vodka and ice cream.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/bandwidth-hogs-dont-even-exist-says-analyst.ars

How to Spot Nanoparticles

A new approach to nanoparticle detection can measure the number of particles, their mass, and even their size.

Spotting nanoparticles is an increasingly popular pursuit. Everybody from the makers of solar cells to beauty products are producing products based on nanoparticles, while the atmosphere is filling with aerosols from factories and car exhaust, many of which pose a threat to human health.

So it’s no surprise then that nanotechnologists are racing to build devices that can detect and characterise these particles.

One way to do it is to label the particles with a fluorescent tag that makes them easy to see. But of course, that’s only possible with prior access to the particles.

Then there are various resonating devices in which a nanoparticle landing on a spring board changes the way it vibrates in a way that can be measured by a laser bouncing off the surface.

The trouble with these is that the position of the particle on the spring board influences the change in vibration. Also, the shift in vibration frequency is comparable in size to that caused by noise such as fluctuations in laser intensity and frequency and thermal noise. That makes unambiguous nanoparticle detection a tricky business.

Today, Jiangang Zhu and buddies from Washington University in St. Louis demonstrate another way of doing it that promises to reveal with much greater reliability, not only a particle’s mass but also its radius.

Their new device is a tiny resonating toroid on a stalk, a kind of vibrating micro-mushroom. What’s cool about a toroid is that it can support clockwise and anticlockwise waves at the same time. That’s important because the two waves effectively calibrate each other so that the change in resonance caused by a nanoparticle can be easily distinguished from background noise. With a bit of signal processing, the team say it is also possible to count the number of particles and determine their size.

The new device has the potential to be not only more accurate and reliable than earlier attempts but smaller too: the entire thing could be built into a single chip.

That should have an important impact for a variety of researchers, such as environmental scientists measuring pollution in real time, biotech companies developing nanoparticle-based drugs and just about anybody else fiddling with things on this scale. Handy!

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0912.0078: On-chip Single Nanoparticle Detection and Sizing by Modesplitting in an Ultra-high-Q Microresonator

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24480/