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Supercomputing

Submission + - Carbon transistor possible Silicon successor?

Submitted by dave_the_dodo
dave_the_dodo writes: New Scientist are reporting on a new carbon transistor[newscientisttech.com] 4 times smaller than the smallest silicon transistors. The transistors can be made from sheets of carbon just one-tenth of a nanometre thick. From the article:

The transistors are made of graphene, a sheet of carbon atoms in a flat honeycomb arrangement. Graphene makes graphite when stacked in layers, and carbon nanotubes when rolled into a tube. Graphene also conducts electricity faster than most materials since electrons can travel through in straight lines between atoms without being scattered. This could ultimately mean faster, more efficient electronic components that also require less power.
Hardware

First Graphene Transistor 83

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the cool-under-pressure dept.
An anonymous reader writes "UK researchers are announcing the first ever workable transistor made of graphene — that's one layer of carbon atoms. It's thinner and smaller than a silicon transistor can ever be, and it works at room temperature. When silicon electronics are dead, this is what many speculate is going to take over. There's slight controversy as they decided to announce their results via a review article, rather than wait for their (submitted) peer review paper to come out."
Music

Submission + - RIAA slams FAIR USE Act

Submitted by Tyler Too
Tyler Too writes: The RIAA has weighed in on the just-introduced FAIR USE Act, and to no one's surprise, they're not at all happy with it. 'The FAIR USE Act "would repeal the DMCA and legalize hacking," says the RIAA. "It would reverse the Supreme Court's decision in Grokster and allow electronics companies to induce others to break the law for their own profit."' Looks like the CEA's lobbyists and the RIAA's lobbyists will be battling it out on Capitol Hill.
Data Storage

Submission + - Online Tool to Test for Weak File Formats

Submitted by
AmBirkieboy
AmBirkieboy writes: "Acumetric has released the first online file format rating tool to help individuals, businesses and governments anticipate technical, legal, or economic threats to their information.
Acumetric is calling the free service the One Minute File Format Audit. The founder of Acumetric, John Nesbitt, has described the site as the first of its kind to help people evaluate everything from family photos to reports for the SEC. 'Everyone's valuable electronic assets are stored in file formats that are like cars — there are some big lemons out there when it comes to sharing, archiving, securing and pricing. Our tool is the first step in understanding what is parked in your computer."
The audit tool is available at www.acumetric.com"
Databases

Submission + - Free global virtual scientific library

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organisations from around the world came together to support free access to government funded research, "to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe. The European Commission responded by committing more than $100m (£51m) towards facilitating greater open access through support for open access journals and for the building of the infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories that can store the millions of academic articles written each year. From the BBC article: "Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication. That requirement — called an open access principle — would leverage widespread internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe." Isn't this the way its suppose to be?
Patents

Submission + - Watermark system scours the net for infringement

Submitted by Almond Cookie
Almond Cookie writes: What if all copyrighted material contained watermarks, and software could scan videos and images online for those watermarks in order to report back to the content maker? A new patent filing shows plans for such a system to crawl sites like YouTube and MySpace for images or video that's copyrighted, which seems to focus more on casual piracy than that being done on P2P networks. Will it really work though? From the article:

For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system. Then, in the event that a user capped a broadcast and uploaded it online, the scanner system would eventually find it and report its location online. [...] Generally we've laughed off most watermarking solutions because they seemed like solutions in search of a problem. Now that Google has learned the hard way that content owners want to be paid when their content shows up on YouTube, we may see more of these "solutions" in the future.
Quickies

Submission + - Big 'Ocean' Discovered Beneath Asia

Submitted by anthemaniac
anthemaniac writes: Seismic observations reveal a huge reservoir of water in Earth's mantle beneath Asia. It's actually rock saturated with water, but it's an ocean's worth of water ... as much as is in the whole Arctic Ocean. How did it get there? A slab of water-laden crust sank, and the water evaporated out when it was heated, and then it was trapped, the thinking goes. The discovery fits neatly with the region's heavy seismic activity and fits neatly with the idea that the planet's moving crustal plates are lubricated with water.

Audio Watermark Web Spider Starts Crawling 173

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the now-it-just-needs-to-serve-you-papers-automatically dept.
DippityDo writes "A new web tool is scanning the net for signs of copyright infringement. Digimarc's patented system searches video and audio files for special watermarks that would indicate they are not to be shared, then reports back to HQ with the results. It sounds kind of creepy, but has a long way to go before it makes a practical difference. 'For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system. Then, in the event that a user capped a broadcast and uploaded it online, the scanner system would eventually find it and report its location online. Yet the system is not designed to hop on P2P networks or private file sharing hubs, but instead crawls public web sites in search of watermarked material.'"
Security

Submission + - Solaris Telnet Worm

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The previously discovered Solaris telnet vulnerability is now being used by a worm to spread. In addition, the worm opens up a /bin/sh backdoor and has a payload of sending funny system broadcast messages related to security researchers including one that says "Theo deRaadt SUCKS!" in ASCII art.
NASA

Golf-Ball Sized Hail Damages Shuttle 118

Posted by CmdrTaco from the don't-make-me-stop-this-thing dept.
MattSparkes writes "The Shuttles March launch has been delayed to late April after golf-ball sized hail caused 7000 pits and divots in the foam that shields the fuel tank. NASA say it's the worst damage of its kind that they have ever seen, but hail is not a new problem for the agency. In 1982, a hailstorm damaged the sensitive heat shield tiles on the Columbia's wings. The damaged tiles then absorbed about 540 kilograms of rain. Once in space, the orbiter faced the Sun to allow the tiles to dry out."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Cheap desalinisation using waste heat

Submitted by
hcdejong
hcdejong writes: "Dutch research organisation TNO has developed a desalinisation technique that at last, promises to be inexpensive enough to be used on a large scale.

The process is called Memstill (a contraction of Membrane and deStillation). Salt water is run through a condensor, on which water vapour condenses. Energy from the vapour is transferred to the salt water, which warms up. More energy is then added from an external heat source, making the salt water warm enough for evaporation. In a membrane array, the evaporation escapes through a membrane that allows the vapour to pass through, but which stops liquid water. The vapour ends up at the condensor.

The external heat source can be just about anything. The required temperature is only 50-100 C, which means that e.g. cooling water from an industrial plant can be used. Solar heating also works.

Thanks to this 'free' heat, TNO estimates that a production plant will be able to make freshwater for only $ 0.30-0.40 per cubic metre, lower than any other desalinisation technique, see this PDF for a comparison. The current price for potable water is about 1.50 Euro/cubic metre in the Netherlands.

Memstill is currently in use in a few pilot projects."
Moon

Submission + - NASA put a man on the moon then lost the videotape

Submitted by
sr0tu
sr0tu writes: "Wired has published a story "One Giant Screwup for Mankind" on the search for the missing Apollo 11 moon tapes.

The goal of the Apollo 11 mission wasn't merely to get a man on the moon. It was to send back a live television feed so that everyone could see it. Not long ago, Stan Lebar who had developed the camera that could capture the most memorable moment of the 20th century learned why the footage had looked like mush: The transfer and broadcast had degraded the image badly, like a third-generation photocopy. "What the world saw was some bastardized thing," says Lebar, now 81. "Posterity deserves more than that."

Now Lebar and a crew of seasoned space cowboys are trying to get that original footage and show it to the world. There is just one problem: NASA has lost the tapes."
Biotech

Submission + - well-preserved flu pandemic victim to be exhumed

Submitted by
mid-devonian
mid-devonian writes: "The Guardian Unlimited reports that permission has been granted to exhume the famous diplomat and politician Sir Mark Sykes, who died from bird flu in the 1918-19 pandemic. His body lies in a lead coffin in an English churchyard, and John Oxford, a professor of virology at Queen Mary's College London, believes that the body will be very well preserved, providing a unique opportunity to investigate the mechanism by which bird flu kills."

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