The Hard Rain That’s Falling on Capitalism - New York Times

The Hard Rain That’s Falling on Capitalism - New York Times: "A FEW evenings ago, my wife and I were standing in the kitchen of our home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., feeding our voracious hounds, when a song came on the radio. It goes, “If only you believe in miracles, baby, so would I ... ”

Suddenly a flood of thoughts came into my head. I put on my swim trunks, and even though it was 42 degrees outside, I got into my superheated pool and swam, looking up at the stars, and this is what I thought:

My whole life is a miracle so far. I live in glorious houses — tar-paper shacks by hedge fund standards, but plenty for me. I have a great American-made car. Above all, I have the most wonderful wife and the handsomest son on the planet. "

How Does Your Brain Respond When You Think about Gambling or Taking Risks?

How Does Your Brain Respond When You Think about Gambling or Taking Risks?:

Should you leave your comfortable job for one that pays better but is less secure? Should you have a surgery that is likely to extend your life but poses some risk that you will not survive the operation? Should you invest in a risky startup company whose stock may soar even though you could lose your entire investment? In the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Science, UCLA psychologists present the first neuroscience research comparing how our brains evaluate the possibility of gaining versus losing when making risky decisions.

Technorati tags: human brain, gambling

Vaccines set to target immune panic button - health - 27 January 2007 - New Scientist

Vaccines set to target immune panic button - health - 27 January 2007 - New Scientist:

A new generation of vaccines that exploit natural "alarm bells" in the immune system could be turned against killer diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV.

To press the panic button, the vaccines use adjuvants - substances that put the immune system on alert, making it more likely to notice the vaccine. Some vaccine injections are already augmented with adjuvant chemicals such as aluminium hydroxide, but the new vaccines have built-in genes for making their own adjuvants.

Technorati tags: vaccines

The Large Hadron Collider: Bring it on! - fundamentals - 27 January 2007 - New Scientist

The Large Hadron Collider: Bring it on! - fundamentals - 27 January 2007 - New Scientist:

IT'S official: 2007 is the year of the LHC. In case you haven't heard, the initials stand for the Large Hadron Collider, which is nearing completion at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Just a snowball's throw from Mont Blanc, it is not only the hottest thing in physics but also the largest, most elaborate scientific instrument of all time.

Technorati tags: LHC, string theory, high energy particle physics

Marketers Pursue the Shallow-Pocketed - WSJ.com

Marketers Pursue the Shallow-Pocketed - WSJ.com:

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Shortly after adman Luca Lindner took over Latin American operations for Interpublic Group's McCann World Group in 2005, he polled 15 of its major advertising clients. What did they see as their biggest marketing opportunities?

One surprising answer: people with low incomes.

While many advertisers lavish dollars targeting well-off consumers, in Latin America the vast majority of people have far less money. According to the World Bank, 25% live on less than $2 a day, and many millions of others earn only a few hundred dollars a month. Increasingly, big brands are deciding that people once thought too poor to buy their products may be their biggest growth market.

Technorati tags: advertising

Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power - New York Times

Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power - New York Times:

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors.

Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.

Technorati tags: microprocessors

Reactivated gene shrinks tumors

Reactivated gene shrinks tumors:

Many cancers arise due to defects in genes that normally suppress tumor growth. Now, for the first time, MIT researchers have shown that re-activating one of those genes in mice can cause tumors to shrink or disappear.

The study offers evidence that the tumor suppressor gene p53 is a promising target for human cancer drugs.

"If we can find drugs that restore p53 function in human tumors in which this pathway is blocked, they may be effective cancer treatments," said David Kirsch of MIT's Center for Cancer Research and Harvard Medical School, one of the lead co-authors of the paper.

The study will be published in the Jan. 24 online edition of Nature. It was conducted in the laboratory of Tyler Jacks, director of the Center for Cancer Research, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

P53 has long been known to play a critical role in the development of many tumors-it is mutated in more than 50 percent of human cancers. Researchers have identified a few compounds that restore p53 function, but until now, it has not been known whether such activity would actually reverse tumor growth in primary tumors.

Technorati tags: cancer, molecular medicine

New Theory of the Universe Marries Two of its Biggest Mysteries

New Theory of the Universe Marries Two of its Biggest Mysteries:

Physicists have devised a theory that unifies two widely studied mysteries of the universe: why there is an imbalance between regular matter and anti-matter (scientists expect to see equal amounts of each, but observe less anti-matter), and the identity of “dark matter” – the enigmatic particles thought to account for the extra gravitational pull observed in distant galaxies.


“We propose that at some point in the very early universe, dark matter interacted with regular matter in a particular way so as to shift the balance between matter and anti-matter ever so slightly towards matter, a process known as baryogenesis,” said Jeff Jones, a University of California-Santa Cruz physicist involved in the work, to PhysOrg.com. “We have proposed a new mechanism for baryogenesis that ties together these two mysteries, which are usually assumed to be unrelated.”

The prefix “baryo” in baryogenesis comes from “baryon,” a class of particles made of three quarks. Protons and neutrons are the most common examples of baryons. By extension, ordinary matter – atoms, in other words, which are primarily protons and neutrons – is therefore essentially made of baryons. Similarly, anti-matter is mostly anti-baryons.

The Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, father of the Russian hydrogen bomb and advocate of peaceful coexistence between the Soviet and western systems, pointed out in the 1960s that in order for baryogenesis to take place there had to be a violation of CP symmetry.” CP symmetry is a physics concept stating that if ordinary particles are replaced by anti-particles in any physical process, and the particles' “handedness” is simultaneously reversed (sort of like how I'm right-handed but my mirror image, my “anti-self,” is a lefty), the result should be an equally feasible process occurring at the same rate as the first. Of the four known fundamental forces – strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravity – scientists have only seen the weak force violate CP symmetry in experiments. However, when that violation results in the production of baryons, it also always generates anti-baryons. So there is no imbalance produced.

Technorati tags: cosmology

Physicists Develop Test for 'String Theory'

Physicists Develop Test for 'String Theory':

For decades, scientists have taken issue with “string theory”—a theory of the universe which contends that the fundamental forces and matter of nature can be reduced to tiny one-dimensional filaments called strings—because it does not make predictions that can be tested.

But researchers at the University of California, San Diego, Carnegie Mellon University, and The University of Texas at Austin have now developed an important test for this controversial “theory of everything.”

Described in a paper that will appear in the January 26 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, their test involves measurements of how elusive high-energy particles scatter during particle collisions. Most physicists believe those collisions will be observable at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, a subatomic particle collider scheduled to be operating later this year at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN.

“Our work shows that, in principle, string theory can be tested in a non-trivial way,” explained Ira Rothstein, co-author of the paper and professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon.

Technorati tags: string theory, high energy physics

Military to beam in nonlethal ray guns - Los Angeles Times

Military to beam in nonlethal ray guns - Los Angeles Times:

MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, GA. — The military calls its new weapon an "active denial system," but that's an understatement. It's a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire.

The technology is supposed to be harmless — a nonlethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons. Military officials say it could save the lives of civilians and service members in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said.

Technorati tags: beam weapons

Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold - earth - 25 January 2007 - New Scientist

Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold - earth - 25 January 2007 - New Scientist:

There's a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years - exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star's core.

Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, modelled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior. According to the standard view, the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion. However, Ehrlich believed that slight variations should be possible.

Technorati tags: global warming

Toward Building Molecular Computers

Toward Building Molecular Computers

A team of UCLA and California Institute of Technology chemists reports in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Nature the successful demonstration of a large-scale, "ultra-dense" memory device that stores information using reconfigurable molecular switches. This research represents an important step toward the creation of molecular computers that are much smaller and could be more powerful than today’s silicon-based computers.

The 160-kilobit memory device uses interlocked molecules manufactured in the UCLA laboratory of J. Fraser Stoddart, director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), who holds UCLA’s Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences and who was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II less than a month ago.

A bit, or binary digit, is the basic unit of information storage and communication in digital computing. A kilobit is equal to 1,000 bits and is commonly used for measuring the amount of data that is transferred in one second between two telecommunication points.

A scorching future - Los Angeles Times

A scorching future - Los Angeles Times: "Imagine a world in which the best sparkling wines come from Surrey in southern England, not Champagne. A world where Monterey Bay is home to California's best Cabernet Sauvignons and Sweden produces world-class Rieslings.

It's not science fiction. A growing number of climatologists are warning that by the turn of the next century, such a radically altered wine map could be the new reality. They say man-made greenhouse gases warming the planet are expected to shift viticultural regions toward the poles, cooler coastal zones and higher elevations."

Google plots e-books coup - Home - Times Online

Google plots e-books coup - Home - Times Online: "GOOGLE and some of the world’s top publishers are working on plans that they hope could do for books what Apple’s iPod has done for music.


The internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry."

Wired News: Make Beautiful Brain Music

Wired News: Make Beautiful Brain Music: “Move over, woodwind and strings -- in the future, the ultimate musical instrument could be the human brain.

Artist Luciana Haill uses medical electroencephalogram, or EEG, monitors embedded in a Bluetooth-enabled sweatband to record the activity of her frontal lobes, then beams the data to a computer that plays it back as song.

Now Haill is taking her gig on the road, joining 30 experimental artists this week to showcase creative and wacky new audio technologies on the Future of Sound tour of England. Audience members will be asked to don the electrodes so they can jointly think up a harmony.

"The brain operates in the same units sound waves are measured in -- hertz," said Haill. "You're getting raw data from the prefrontal cortex but feeding it through software -- a little bit from the left hemisphere and a little bit from the right."”

Technorati tags: mind music

Wired News: Requiem for the Magic Bullets

Wired News: Requiem for the Magic Bullets:

The golden age of antibiotics began in 1944 with the widespread use of penicillin in Europe, which saved many thousands of lives during World War II. But the first sign that this new era of easily treatable bacterial infections would not last appeared just a couple of years later, with the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a wide variety of ailments, from skin infections to fatal pneumonia.

In 'forty jumps,' scientists model scales of quarks to quasars

In 'forty jumps,' scientists model scales of quarks to quasars: "Comprehending the smallness of a quark or the hugeness of the observable universe is a challenge that most of us find difficult, yet captivating. Placing vastly different scales side by side to explore their relationship amounts to a task not even computers have mastered efficiently. Recently, scientists Chi-Wing (Philip) Fu and Andrew Hanson have developed a visualization system of the universe that may help scientists, educators and film viewers better understand size on a journey through the universe."

Sentient Developments: Must know terms for today's intelligentsia

Sentient Developments: Must know terms for today's intelligentsia


At the dawn of European humanism, Florentines believed that reading Dante while ignoring science was ridiculous. Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo both recognized the great importance of understanding science, technology and engineering.

Despite these trail-blazers, not much has changed since then; a startling number of so-called 'intellectuals' remain grossly ignorant of pending technologies and the revealing sciences (the postmodernists immediately come to mind). Today's intelligentsia, in order to qualify for such a designation, must have the requisite vocabulary with which to address valid social concerns and effectively assess the future.

How brain protein turns toxic in Alzheimer's disease - health - 21 January 2007 - New Scientist

How brain protein turns toxic in Alzheimer's disease - health - 21 January 2007 - New Scientist: "The long-suspected link between Alzheimer's disease and abnormalities in the way amyloid protein is processed in the brain has been confirmed at last.

Usually harmless, the amyloid protein is thought to trigger neurological damage when it is broken down and transformed into toxic fragments of beta-amyloid. Previous studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's have reduced levels of several proteins involved in processing amyloid."

Google's Next Ad Frontier May Be Inside Videogames - WSJ.com

Google's Next Ad Frontier May Be Inside Videogames - WSJ.com: "Google Inc.'s efforts to broker advertisements beyond the Web could soon expand into ads that appear in videogames.

The Mountain View, Calif., company is in talks to acquire Adscape Media Inc., a closely held San Francisco company whose technology allows for the delivery of advertising over the Internet and placement within videogames, according to people familiar with the matter. They added that a deal could be reached as early as next week.

While the possible terms of a deal aren't known, Microsoft Corp. last year acquired Massive Inc., a company that delivers in-game ads, for close to $200 million.

An acquisition of Adscape, if completed, would allow Google to offer the hundreds of thousands of advertisers who currently buy online ads through its system to also buy ads that appear within videogames. The market for delivering ads into games -- such as a virtual billboard on a racetrack or a poster in a boxing arena -- is still in its infancy, but major games publishers such as Electronic Arts Inc. believe it could be a lucrative business and many are pursuing it aggressively. Sending ads over the Internet is just now becoming more feasible through new game consoles such as Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360, which are designed to be connected to the Internet."

Improved Nanodots Could Be Key to Future Data Storage

Improved Nanodots Could Be Key to Future Data Storage: "The massive global challenge of storing digital data--storage needs reportedly double every year--may be met with a tiny yet powerful solution: magnetic particles just a few billionths of a meter across. This idea is looking better than ever now that researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and collaborators have made nanodot arrays that respond to magnetic fields with record levels of uniformity.


The work enhances prospects for commercially viable nanodot drives with at least 100 times the capacity of today's hard disk drives.

A nanodot has north and south poles like a tiny bar magnet and switches back and forth (or between 0 and 1) in response to a strong magnetic field. Generally, the smaller the dot, the stronger the field required to induce the switch. Until now researchers have been unable to understand and control a wide variation in nanodot switching response. As described in a new paper,* the NIST team significantly reduced the variation to less than 5 percent of the average switching field and also identif"

Start of the hologram wars? - tech - 18 January 2007 - New Scientist Tech

Start of the hologram wars? - tech - 18 January 2007 - New Scientist Tech: "As the war rages over what format will make up the next generation of DVDs, signs of an impending battle over their successors are already in the air.

A new type of disc that promises to cram in up to 300 times as much data as today's DVDs is poised to hit the market, and a similar, rival disc whose data is recorded and read differently is to be released within a few years.

The new discs use a holographic technique to store data in three dimensions. At first they will be used by businesses and governments to back up their vast archives, but in a few years they could hit the consumer market, with one disc able to store multiple high-definition movies. 'We expect holographic storage to be really huge,' says Mukul Krishna, an analyst with Frost and Sullivan based in San Antonio, Texas, who specialises in digital media."

In Granular System, Tiniest Grains Absorb Shocks 'Like a Sponge'

In Granular System, Tiniest Grains Absorb Shocks 'Like a Sponge': "Published in October in Physical Review Letters, the research is relevant not only to questions of shock-absorption in these structures, but also to life-saving improvements in tanks and aircraft carriers, as well as bullet-proof vests and other protective clothing for soldiers, law enforcement officers and even outdoor enthusiasts.

The simulations are of critical importance because they allow researchers and manufacturers to see how a potential system might work without having to painstakingly construct the systems and spend $40,000 to conduct a single blast in a test facility.

In earlier UB research by the same scientists, granular systems composed of individual spheres of gradually reduced size -- a 'tapered' chain in a casing -- proved to be capable of efficiently absorbing well over 80 percent of input energy.

The main findings of the current research are that it is possible to retain the scalability of the system, reduce its size by a factor of five and make it far more capable of absorbing shock. "

Ultra-Dense Optical Storage -- on One Photon

Ultra-Dense Optical Storage -- on One Photon: "While the initial test image consists of only a few hundred pixels, a tremendous amount of information can be stored with the new technique.

The image, a 'UR' for the University of Rochester, was made using a single pulse of light and the team can fit as many as a hundred of these pulses at once into a tiny, four-inch cell. Squeezing that much information into so small a space and retrieving it intact opens the door to optical buffering—storing information as light.

'It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we're storing an entire image,' says John Howell, associate professor of physics and leader of the team that created the device, which is revealed in today's online issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. 'It's analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera—this is like a 6-megapixel camera.' "

Neural 'extension cord' developed for brain implants - tech - 19 January 2007 - New Scientist Tech

Neural 'extension cord' developed for brain implants - tech - 19 January 2007 - New Scientist Tech: "A 'data cable' made from stretched nerve cells could someday help connect computers to the human nervous system. The modified cells should form better connections with human tissue than the metal electrodes currently used for purposes such as remotely controlling prosthetics (see Brain implant enables mind over matter).

'The nervous system doesn't like nasty hard metal or plastic,' says Doug Smith, who is developing the cell-based cable at the University of Pennsylvania, US. Nerve tissue can develop scarring or shrink away from contact with metal and other non-biological materials, he says.

'Nerve cells will happily grow to form new connections with new nerve cells though,' Smith adds, 'we want to try that as an alternative to ramming something into a nerve or the brain. The idea is to make a kind of extension cord.' Prototype cables developed by his team have already been shown to transmit simple signals effectively."

Wired News: Why Joost Is Good for TV

Wired News: Why Joost Is Good for TV: "In a 10th-floor office a few block south of New York's Union Square, gangly Janus Friis folds himself into an undersize chair. He's here from London for a couple of days, toting a ThinkPad with demo aboard. A little white sticker on the machine's lid reads in retro-shiny silver letters: THE VENICE PROJECT.

Friis, 30, is half of the most feared digital tag team since Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page marched across the Net. He's the visionary, a shy Dane in beat-up jeans and loud shirts. Niklas Zennström, an amiable 40-year-old Swede, wears the suit. Together, the pair has spent the past six years bit-bombing the Net's biggest and most vulnerable targets. Kazaa, their free file-sharing network, mushroomed amid the wreckage of the original Napster; it was managing 3 million downloads a month in 2001 when entertainment industry lawyers moved in. Next they built Skype, the free voice-over-IP telephone system, and sold it to eBay just over a year ago for $2.6 billion. That figure alone guarantees that their calls get returned."

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers - health - 17 January 2007 - New Scientist

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers - health - 17 January 2007 - New Scientist: "It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks."

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers - health - 17 January 2007 - New Scientist

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers - health - 17 January 2007 - New Scientist: "It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks."

Memories are made of this molecule - being-human - 15 January 2007 - New Scientist

Memories are made of this molecule - being-human - 15 January 2007 - New Scientist: "How are memories formed? The question has perplexed scientists for years, but now it seems we're a step closer to solving it.

The leading candidate is a process called long-term potentiation (LTP), in which the connections between individual brain cells get stronger the more often they are used, such as during learning. But while LTP has often been observed in slices of brain in the lab, it has been difficult to record in a living brain as learning was taking place.

Now Liliana Minichiello and her colleagues at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Monterotondo, Italy, and the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain, appear to have done just that by isolating a molecule that initiates a signalling pathway for LTP in the brain of a living mouse. The finding builds on a technique they developed last year to record LTP in a mouse hippocampus - a brain region involved in learning - while the animal was being trained to blink in response to a tone."

New AIDS drug shows 'phenomenal' results

New AIDS drug shows 'phenomenal' results: "Clinical studies of the drug, called an integrase inhibitor, showed that, when combined with two existing drugs, it reduced the virus to undetectable levels in nearly 100 percent of HIV patients prescribed a drug regimen for the first time, The Los Angeles Times said Tuesday. It had a similar effect in 72 percent of salvage therapy patients, who take a mixture of existing medications aimed at stalling the virus until new drugs appear.

The drug essentially prevents the virus' DNA from integrating with a host's cells, inhibiting its ability to replicate itself.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should approve it in mid-2007. Manufacturer Merck & Co. is making it available sooner to patients in desperate straits.

'They tested it on some people who were in deep, deep salvage therapy, and even those people did remarkably well,' Dr. Steven Deeks, a University of California, San Francisco salvage therapy authority, told the Times. 'It seems to be a truly phenomenal drug that ... is changing the whole way we think about the management of these patients.' "

Scientists find potential 'off-switch' for HIV virus

Scientists find potential 'off-switch' for HIV virus: "Princeton scientists Leor Weinberger and Thomas Shenk hope their work will illuminate the processes by which human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other viruses transition into dormant phases in their hosts. The researchers have discovered a specific genetic trigger that makes HIV fall into its latent phase, where the virus essentially hibernates, relatively harmlessly, but awaiting an opportunity to re-emerge and wreak havoc.

Weinberger and Shenk studied how an HIV protein, called Tat, plays a major part in initiating and also interrupting the cascade of chemical reactions that leads to full-blown infection. Based on their work and previous studies by others, they have proposed that the Tat protein and the enzymes that modify it serve as a 'resistor,' a component of an electrical circuit that reduces the flow of current.

'The resistor paradigm is a helpful way to think about how HIV enters and exits latency, and it might serve as a useful model for latent infections by other viruses, as well,' said Shenk, Princeton's James A. Elkins Jr. Professor in the Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology. 'Understanding how to activate the Tat resistor to interrupt the reactions leading to viral infection could one day have repercussions in both the lab and the clinic.' "

Bilingualism delays onset of dementia - health - 12 January 2007 - New Scientist

Bilingualism delays onset of dementia - health - 12 January 2007 - New Scientist: "People who are fully bilingual and speak both languages every day for most of their lives can delay the onset of dementia by up to four years compared with those who only know one language, Canadian scientists said on Friday.

Researchers said the extra effort involved in using more than one language appeared to boost blood supply to the brain and ensure nerve connections remained healthy – two factors thought to help fight off dementia.

'We are pretty dazzled by the results,' Professor Ellen Bialystok of Toronto's York University said in a statement."

Hybrid Structures Combine Strengths of Carbon Nanotubes and Nanowires

Hybrid Structures Combine Strengths of Carbon Nanotubes and Nanowires: "The impressive conductivity of carbon nanotubes makes them promising materials for a wide variety of electronic applications, but techniques to attach individual nanotubes to metal contacts have proven challenging. The new approach allows the precise attachment of carbon nanotubes to individual metal pins, offering a practical solution to the problem of using carbon nanotubes as interconnects and devices in computer chips.

[Hybrid Structures Combine Strengths of Carbon Nanotubes and Nanowires]
An electron microscope image of a hybrid structure made from a gold nanowire (middle) and carbon nanotubes. Credit: Rensselaer/Fung Suong Ou
“This technique allows us to bridge different pieces of the nanoelectronics puzzle, taking us a step closer to the realization of nanotube-based electronics,” said Fung Suong Ou, the paper’s corresponding author and a graduate student in materials science and electrical engineering at Rensselaer. "

Wired News: PCs Get Set to Scream in 2007

Wired News: PCs Get Set to Scream in 2007: "Flash-memory-aided hard drives and software that harnesses the full power of multi-core CPUs will make PCs speedier and more convenient in 2007.
Next-gen computers will boot up and load applications more quickly as speedy flash memory helps alleviate the bottleneck caused by the slower rotations of a traditional hard disk's components."

Scientists discover new class of polymers

Scientists discover new class of polymers: "For years, polymer chemistry textbooks have stated that a whole class of little molecules called 1,2-disubstituted ethylenes could not be transformed into polymers--the stuff of which plastics and other materials are made.

[Scientists discover new class of polymers]
This photo shows an ultra-thin polymer film of fumaronitrile, which formerly was believed to be 'unpolymerizable,' on a tantalum foil. The film is circular due to the shape of the window where ultraviolet light is emitted into the vacuum chamber during the film deposition process. Photo courtesy of Lauterbach Laboratory, University of Delaware
However, the UD scientists were determined to prove the textbooks wrong. As a result of their persistence, the researchers have discovered a new class of ultra-thin polymer films with potential applications ranging from coating tiny microelectronic devices to plastic solar cells. "