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China XLX Bollinger Bands Hourly Support and Resistance - TACT Tuesday, December 15, 2009

2010-01-24T15:23:00.002+08:00

Price moving between lower and upper hourly Bollinger Bands. As at 4.00 pm the immediate support is the blue mid Bollinger band and violet support area. Rebounce from here will retest green upper Bollinger band and pink resistance zone. If violet support is broken price will drop towards red lower Bollinger band and light blue support zone. Take note of the different colour support and resistance zones.
Posted by Tact at 4:05 PM 0 comments

Sinotel clears resistance turned support trendline - TACT Friday, December 11, 2009

2010-01-24T15:18:00.003+08:00

After crossing above the red bold resistance turned support trendline a shooting star has formed at mid-day closing. Immediate resistance is the orange zone. Need to clear this resistance and stay above the red bold trendline to challenge and retest next light blue resistance zone. Stochastics in overbought region short term traders may want to take profit. RSI just below 70 and may cross above 70 if buyers return after lunch break. Those with greater appetite for risk may wait and see how price trades towards late afternoon.
Posted by Tact at 12:24 PM 0 comments

Capitaland retesting support turned resistance trendline - TACT Thursday, December 10, 2009

2010-01-24T15:13:00.003+08:00

Failed to clear support turned resistance bold red trendline yesterday. A breakout above this resistance line will push price into pink resistance zone. Need to clear $4.30 to retest 26 Oct 2009 peak at $4.46 . Stochastics approaching overbought region while RSI hovering around previous resistance levels 58 to 60. Immediate support is green zone followed by blue zone. Live chart snapshot taken at 2.58 pm.

DJIA comparison between 1929 daily chart and 2009 weekly chart - Tact Monday, December 7, 2009

2010-01-24T15:04:00.004+08:00

In 1929 the DJIA peaked on 3rd September at 386.1 and subsequently fell to the 195.35 low on 13th November. This first down swing only took about 2.5 months and was followed by an upward retracement of 53.42% to 297.25 on 16th April 1930. A rising wedge formation was formed giving an early warning of impending trend reversal. What happened after the breakdown from this wedge was a major downtrend that lasted about 2 years 3 months. The DJIA finally stop declining in July 1932.

As December 2009 begins DJIA is currently approaching a major downtrend resistance line as shown by the red bold line. It is also moving closer to the 53.42% retracement denoted by the red dotted line. There is also a rising wedge formation just like in 1929. Will history repeat itself? Is there going to be a major fall that lasts longer the fall from October 2007 to March 2009? Monitor closely the rising wedge breakdown and the critical support at 6440.08 formed on March 2009.

What is Technical Analysis? Tact - Sunday, November 8, 2009

2010-01-24T14:52:00.004+08:00

The forecasting of future financial price directions based on the study of past price movement is known as Technical Analysis.

Although it does not provide an absolute 100% prediction about the future, it anticipates what is probably going to happen to price over time.

Technical Analysis use charting tools to describe and project future price movement on a variety of trading instruments like stocks, forex, indices, ETFs and commodities.

With proper training and discipline traders can increase their probability of having greater winning trades and their profitability.

Successful traders plan ahead and follow their plans without emotions. They take profit when the signals alert them and cut losses early when price fails predetermine levels.

Video card

2010-01-07T02:19:00.002+08:00

A danny head, video adapter, graphics-accelerator card, display adapter or graphics card is an expansion card whose function is to generate and output images to a display. Many video cards offer added functions, such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, video capture, TV-tuner adapter, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding, FireWire, light pen, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors (multi-monitor), while other modern high performance cards are used for more graphically demanding purposes such as PC games.

Video hardware can be integrated on the motherboard, as it often happened with early computers; in this configuration it was sometimes referred to as a video controller or graphics controller.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_card

How OLED Works

2009-03-18T12:30:00.001+08:00

The earliest solid-state light-producing device to hit the market was the Light-Emitting Diode, or LED. This semiconductor device was found to emit a bright light when current was passed through it. Being solid-state, it lacked a filament to burn-out and so it was seen to be a very reliable, long lasting light source. Soon all manner of displays appeared using this technology, most of which were alpha-numeric. They showed up on our wrist-watches, our radio dials, and even our automobile dashboards. In the middle 1970s, Sony started using LEDs in very large screen TV monitors for stadiums, auditoriums and concert halls, but they were never able to make an LED-based video display that was practical for home use because of the size and power requirements of the then current LED technology. It took a passive system, the LCD, to make the breakthrough to home and office electronics. LCD is a very low-power technology and the individual pixel size is a function of manufacturing processes so it lends itself to a myriad of tasks and screen resolutions. Unfortunately, LCD is non-emissive, that is to say that it doesn't produce any light in and of itself, but merely controls the amount of light that actually reaches our eyes from a supplied light source located behind the screen. The need for a flat, uniformly bright back-light over the entire screen area has made the low-power characteristics of the LCD somewhat moot. The backlight accounts for most of the power budget in these displays. That's why your digital camera batteries go flat so quickly when you use the LCD viewfinder.

What is needed is an emissive technology that has low power consumption and that can be made with manufacturing techniques akin to those producing LCD screens. In other words, instead of individual LED devices, this technology needs to be producible as a continuous film containing all three primary additive colors (Red, Green, Blue) in a matrix containing as many pixels as are needed for the application in question. OLED meets these requirements by placing a series of organic thin films between two transparent electrodes. An electric current causes these films to produce a bright light. By using semiconductor technology, each pixel can be addressed individually thus controlling the patterns of light and color which combine to form a picture

The organic process used in OLED is called electrophosphorescence and is a biological phenomenon that has been noted and wondered at for eons. Fireflies, plankton, and many sea creatures all possess this characteristic naturally. But it's only in the last few years that researchers have been able to synthesize it non-biologically.

Even though these OLED panels are made up of several layers of doped fluorocarbon polymers, the result is a system which is very thin, usually less than 0.5 thousandths of a millimeter thick. These OLEDs produce self-luminous displays that do not require backlighting and can operate at very low current with only 2-10 volts. These thin displays can be made flexible, and have a wide viewing angle of up to 170 degrees.

http://www.hdtvsolutions.com/oled_tv_technology.htm

OLED TV - An Emerging Technology

2009-03-18T11:39:00.000+08:00

For decades we were told that flat TV screens, those darlings of science fiction writers past and present were just around the corner. When they finally arrived, the technologies quickly multiplied. First there was Liquid Crystal Display technology (LCD) then there was plasma, then Surface-conduction Electron-emitter (SED). Now these three are about to be joined by a fourth flat screen technology, one that has the potential of being the roll-up, wallpaper screen of fiction. It's called OLED or Organic Light Emitting Diode technology and it promises to revolutionize almost everything that uses displays from cell phones, PDAs and keyboards, to computer monitors and HDTVs.

The first OLEDs were developed by Kodak in the late 1980s and since then, companies such as Samsung and Sony have been working to perfect both the technology itself and its manufacturability. This work is now beginning to bear fruit and products using this technology are right around the corner.

http://www.hdtvsolutions.com/oled_tv_technology.htm

Sony OLED-TV

2009-03-18T11:37:00.000+08:00

Sony is demonstrating two slim TVs that incorporate OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology at CES 2007 in Las Vegas .

The 11- and 27-inch TVs are about 3mm and less than 10mm thin, respectively, according to a company press release. The 27-inch model features a full high-definition (HD) panel while the 11-inch TV is designed with a wide-SVGA panel.

The resolution of the 27-inch OLED TV is 1920x1080, the contast ratio is greater than 1,000,000:1, brightness : all white 200cd/m2, peak greater than 600cd/m2. Colors - 10 bit RGB.

11" - The resolution is 1024x600, the other technical data like the 27-inch OLEDSony sees the chance to bring OLED Tv on the market in 2007.

Sony has put the ultra-thin display on a pedestal with a flexible arm. At 11 inch the Sony XEL-1 is a nice stylish desk accessory.The latest OLED TV (XEL-1), which weighs two kilograms and is about 3mm thin, features a resolution of 940×540 and contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1, stated Sony.

http://www.oled-display.net/oled-television

Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking - Neil Browne

2009-03-17T20:15:00.001+08:00

"I have assigned ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS to a wide range of students in a wide range of courses over my fourteen years as a college professor. First-year college students have used the book to analyze and evaluate arguments about contemporary business issues. College juniors and seniors have used the book to analyze and evaluate legal arguments, and issues related to race and gender. ... Many of my students tell me the book has changed the way they read, write, and argue." - Andrea Giampetro-Meyer, J.D., Loyola College in Maryland "I think ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS is one of the most valuable resources currently available for higher education courses as well as for other contexts... Virtually any course could benefit from the addition of this book and the integration of the authors' approach to critical thinking. I myself have used the book for several years in a variety of courses and know that it has truly enhanced my students' rational thinking processes." - Norrine L. Ostrowski, Ph.D., University of Minnesota-Morris "As an instructor I like the approach ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS takes. It is practical and uses a cross-disciplinary approach. Asking the "right" questions is a technique that can be used in any discipline at any level."- Valeri Farmer-Dougan, Illinois State University

The habits and attitudes associated with critical thinking are transferable to consumer, medical, legal, and general ethical choices. When our surgeon says surgery is needed, it can be life sustaining to seek answers to the critical questions encouraged in Asking the Right Questions This popular book helps bridge the gap between simply memorizing or blindly accepting information, and the greater challenge of critical analysing the things we are told and read. It gives strategies for responding to alternative points of view and will help readers develop a solid foundation for making personal choices about what to accept and what to reject.

http://www.amazon.com/Asking-Right-Questions-Critical-Thinking/dp/0132203049/ref=pd_sim_b_2

Critical Thinking - Alec Fisher

2009-03-17T20:12:00.001+08:00

In this book, Alec Fisher aims to teach directly an important range of thinking skills. The skills are fundamental critical (and creative) thinking skills, and they are taught in a way which expressly aims to facilitate their transfer to other subjects and other contexts. The method is to use 'thinking maps' which help improve thinking by asking key questions of students when they are faced with different types of problems. Alec Fisher explains the language of reasoning, how to understand different kinds of arguments and how to ask the right question. Other topics include: different patterns of reasoning and standards which apply in different contexts, how to clarify and interpret ideas, how to judge the credibility of claims, and how to decide whether a person really justifies their conclusions, given their audience. Particular attention is given to understanding casual explanations and evaluating decisions. THe book includes many examples and exercises which give extensive practice in developing critico-creative thinking skills.

http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Thinking-Alec-Fisher/dp/0521009847/ref=pd_sim_b_1

Critical thinking

2009-03-17T20:09:00.000+08:00

Critical thinking is the careful, deliberate determination of whether we should accept, reject, or suspend judgment about a claim and the degree of confidence with which we accept or reject it.[1] It is a purposeful and reflective judgment about what to believe or what to do in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments. Critical thinking might involve determining the meaning and significance of what is observed or expressed, or, concerning a given inference or argument, determining whether there is adequate justification to accept the conclusion as true. Hence, Fisher & Scriven define critical thinking as "Skilled, active, interpretation and evaluation of observations, communications, information, and argumentation."[2]

Critical thinking gives due consideration to the evidence, the context of judgment, the relevant criteria for making the judgment well, the applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment, and the applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the nature of the problem and the question at hand. Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance and fairness.

In contemporary usage "critical" has the connotation of expressing disapproval,[3] which is not always true of critical thinking. A critical evaluation of an argument, for example, might conclude that it is good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

Which plasma?! Pioneer PDP4280XD, Pioneer PDP428XD or Pioneer PDPSX4280D?!?!

2008-06-17T21:06:00.001+08:00

Hi Guys,

My home cinema is about to undergo some major surgery and after trawling through about a billion posts I have finally decided to go for the new 42" Kuro In fact, I went shopping for one today!

The PDP4280XD has got great reviews everywhere and in every shop I went to was clearly better than the other panels around it - both LCD and plasma, and both HD ready and 1080p. Cool, so that helps me ignore the price then. Sweet Trouble is, there are three of them..!

The 4280XD is the most common and in places like John Lewis is £1799 with a 5 year guarantee (and a 1 week wait). Thats what I thought I would get.

Then I saw a SX4280D in Richer Sounds for £1499 (in stock now) but only a 1yr guarantee. A 5 year guarantee is £300 extra... so same price, doh!

I quite like the idea of a long guarantee as this is my first flat panel (its replacing a 35" tosh picture frame CRT) so I am a bit nervous! As far as I can tell, the only difference between the two is that the SX4280D has an aluminum edge around the sides and along the bottom lip of the gloss black instead of a matt black surround. And I think it looks better.

Then to top it all off, my preferred hi-fi shop has a 428XD - this also has a 5yr guarantee and the dull black surround - and a 1 week wait - plus some extra features but costs £100 more:

1. dynamic brightness (sounds like a bad idea to me...)
2. USB slot for photo slideshows (sounds like a fun gimmick)
3. SW output (who cares, I have a great amp)
4. and ISF calibration (umm, sounds posh, but does it really matter?!)

Ignoring haggling and everything else for the moment, is the 428XD worth an extra £100? The ISF calibration sounds like a single use item that I wont really need (based on the reviews of the 4280) and the USB slot is just a gimmick.

Am I wrong about the ISF calibration?
And does the 428XD have any other extra features I've missed that could sway my decision?

Comments from more experienced people would be very gratefully received!

Cheers,
--
Jelly

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=656660

AusGroup Internal Downtrend Resistance

2008-05-12T13:23:00.004+08:00

Price upward movement blocked by black internal downtrend resistance line. 37 days EMA resistance must be cleared to challenge next resistance at red downtrend line followed by 80 days EMA resistance line. Immediate support is 80 cents. If support here does not hold next support is the pink line.

Capitaland Testing Gap Support

2008-05-09T12:05:00.002+08:00

Gap resistance at $6.47 being tested. Next resistance is the red boldline mid channel support. Hammer candlestick bar formed yesterday not confirm so far. Possible formation of clone inverted hammer doji at closing today. Upward movement immediate resistance is $6.68 followed by 20 days and 200 days EMA resistance lines.

Cosco Symmetrical Triangle

2008-05-08T15:46:00.002+08:00

Symmetrical Triangle breakout will show the direction of the next major trend. Breakout above the upper resistance line of the symmetrical triangle will propel price towards $4.00 followed by a test of 200 days EMA resistance line. Conversely, a breakdown below the lower support of the triangle will see a retest of $3.05 support.

Sony KDL40D3500 Review

2008-05-02T00:17:00.002+08:00

Sony has recently upgraded their D3000 with the new Bravia D3500 series which includes a number of upgrades and enhancements over the previous models, brining the overall spec up to a higher end. The Sony KDL40D3500 is a middle range 40-inch LCD HDTV with a full HD 1080p screen for the highest HD format, offering some great features at a very reasonable price.

The Sony KDL40D3500 might still cost more than some other manufacturers, but they might not be so well equipped as the KDL-40D3500. The KDL40D3500 provides a great high to middle range 40-inch full HD HDTV at around Â£750 ($1500), much cheaper than their KDL40W3000.

The 40-inch Sony KDL40D3500 provides many great new features commonly only found on top of the range models, such as a full HD screen, 24p support for true film frame rates, a high dynamic contrast ratio of 16,000:1 for superior colours and black levels. Along with Sony’s Bravia Engine to enhance image quality, contrast and reduce noise, and Live colour creation provide very impressive image quality. TrustedReviews say, another benefit of the KDL40D3500: its exceptional sharpness. Fine details are rendered with total, noiseless precision, giving the image exactly the sort of the snap’ we love to see with our HD stuff. Plus the image tends to look more three-dimensional thanks to all the background detail that’s resolved.

http://www.hdtvlounge.net/sony/kdl40d3500-review/

Philips' Aurea LCD TV Shines

2008-04-14T17:55:00.001+08:00

Taking 'Ambilight' technology to its most advanced point yet, the Dutch electronics giant Philips has introduced us all to its 'Aurea' technology on an LCD TV.

If the marketing blurb is to be believed, Philips is in the process of creating a sea change in the experience of viewing moving pictures in your own home, with their Executive Vice-President Rudy Provost calmly stating at this years IFA technology show in Berlin that Aurea is about providing - "a totally different home entertainment experience, one that addresses a consumer's emotional wellbeing, as much as providing a great entertainment platform"

In purely technological terms, Aurea technology is a little less profound, being an LCD TV with a luminous bezel which changes colour depending on what the screen is showing, an extension of Philips' 'Ambilight' technology.

Ambilight works by emitting coloured ambient light along the sides of the panel which is reflected on to the wall behind the TV. This 'ambient' light is determined by what is on the TV at any given time and Philips claim the effect is less eye strain with improved colour, detail and contrast.

Aurea builds upon ambilight with a fully back-lit LED which glows through the purpose built frame surrounding the LCD panel. With light actually shinning through the frame, Philips describes the effect as "bringing light and color to life in an unparalleled, highly visual and immersive fashion, drawing the audience into the full emotional experience".

Philips' 42in 42PFL9900D LCD with Full 1080p resolution and 8000:1 equipped with 'Aurea' technology is now available. Early indications are that picture quality is superb, but that the constantly changing frame of light around the screen is not to everyone's tastes.

While it remains to be seen whether or not Aurea can impress in the marketplace, Philips' ambilight technology has developed a growing following with highly acclaimed implementations on many of their LCD TV's.

http://hdtvorg.co.uk/news/articles/2007122301.htm

More for less with Toshiba's 40XF355D LCD

2008-04-14T17:51:00.001+08:00

Even at 40in, the 40XF355 sporting Toshiba's ultra-slim 'picture-frame' takes up less space than the companies own 37in C-series LCD TV's.

Certainly with one eye on the visual impact of the 40XF355, the bezel of Toshiba's ultra-slim panel measures a mere 2.3cm wide. The dimensions also have the practical advantage of tempting consumers who would not normally have considered such a large screen.

The Toshiba 40XF355D is certainly not relying on its stunning profile to make its way in the world, as the spec sheet confirms. The 40XF355D sports a 10-bit panel for a broader range of colours along with a Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution. It is generously equipped with 3 HDMI as well as the usual component, Composite and S-video inputs.

As we expected with its similar spec, the performance of the 40XF355D is in many ways like the Toshiba 42X3030D. To get the negative out of the way, colours were often over-saturated with Standard Definition (SD) sources, and although we tweaked settings to achieve good results for any particular source, we could not find a setting we were content with in all situations.

Plug in a High Definition (HD) source however, and it becomes immediately apparent where this TV excels. HD pictures are quite sumptuous, with a sharpness and clarity that places it firmly in the leading pack of LCD TV's in this respect. Fast action sporting or movie action shows just how capable a screen this is. There is almost a total lack of motion judder, with one of the most natural looking fast action displays we have seen. Colours were deep and vibrant with a naturalism that was impressive in all situations whether the scenes were dark or bright.

http://hdtvorg.co.uk/news/articles/2007122401.htm

membrane separation technology

2008-03-23T01:56:00.000+08:00

After the bacterial fermentation to ethanol, the ethanol must be separated out of the solution mixture and converted into a fuel-grade ethanol at 99+% purity.
As syngas fermentation leads to lower ethanol concentrations than corn fermentations, the energy and cost to separate the ethanol from water is proportionally higher. To reduce this differential, Coskata has exclusively licensed membrane separation technology to reduce the energy requirements by over 50%.
The vapor permeation process is amenable to separating ethanol from biofermentation broth because of the very low solids content of the broth relative to other fermentation processes.

http://www.coskata.com/ProcessSeparations.asp

GM, Coskata partnership builds on OSU biofuels research

2008-03-23T01:53:00.000+08:00

The Oklahoma State University Biofuels Team’s ability to think small – microscopic, actually – stands to provide great dividends for consumers, a renewable energy company and one of the nation’s foremost automakers.

Biology based renewable energy company Coskata Inc. and automotive giant General Motors announced their cooperative plans to reduce fossil fuel consumption this past weekend, thanks in part to Coskata’s “next generation ethanol” process based on research and technology developed by the OSU Biofuels Team and licensed exclusively to Coskata.

“Coskata’s unique three-step conversion process addresses many of the constraints lodged against current renewable energy options, including environmental, transportation and land-use concerns,” said Wes Bolsen, chief marketing officer and vice president of business development for Coskata.

In the three-step process, carbon-based materials are converted into synthesis gas using well-established gasification technologies. After the chemical bonds are broken using gasification, microorganisms licensed to Coskata as part of the OSU Biofuels research convert the resulting syngas into ethanol by consuming carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the gas stream. Once the gas-to-liquid conversion process has occurred, the resulting ethanol is recovered from the solution using “vapor permeation technology.”

“The Coskata process has the potential to yield more than 100 gallons of ethanol per dry ton of carbonaceous feedstock, reducing production costs to less than $1 per gallon,” Bolsen said.

According to an independent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, Coskata’s process – using the OSU Biofuels Team microorganisms – can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 84 percent compared to conventional gasoline.

The process also has no back-end solid waste to dry and handle like enzymatic approaches to ethanol production and uses less than one gallon of fresh water per gallon of ethanol produced, according to Coskata.

Corn-based systems typically use three gallons to four gallons of fresh water per gallon of ethanol produced, and enzymatic approaches can use as much as seven gallons of fresh water per gallon of ethanol produced.

Development of the technology licensed to Coskata is the result of OSU’s longstanding commitment to biofuels development, said Robert E. Whitson, vice president, dean and director of the university’s Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources.

“DASNR scientists and engineers have been breeding improved feedstock with an eye toward biofuels development since the early 1990s. Our first cellulosic ethanol team was put together in 1998, and has been making great strides in technology development ever since,” Whitson said. “Biofuels has come into widespread public consciousness only recently, but we’ve been addressing renewable energy concerns for many years.”

The OSU Biofuels Team quickly became a multi-college, multi-institutional effort, with the current team encompassing scientists and engineers with DASNR; the OSU College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology; the University of Oklahoma and Brigham Young University.

“We in the division have long believed and promoted that an interdisciplinary outlook is the best way to develop solutions to the challenges facing society, and solving real-world issues is a vital part of the land-grant mission and the reason why OSU exists,” Whitson said.

Vinod Khosla and Advanced Technology Ventures, the leading renewable energy investors in the country, recognized the potential of the work being done by the OSU Biofuels Team and wanted to invest in the technology. The technology was exclusively licensed to Coskata Inc. for the production of biofuels.

The licensing agreement between OSU and Coskata includes the microorganisms used in syngas fermentation, with a companion research agreement for any aspects of the syngas fermentation technology that would aid them in production. Since providing the initial three strains of microorganisms in 2006, Coskata-funded research with the OSU Biofuels Team has provided two additional microorganisms for the company.

Bolsen likened it to “running the Kentucky Derby, with the OSU Biofuels Team helping to put horses in the race to reduce this country’s dependence on oil.”

“Our system is somewhat unique in that we’re not considering a single feedstock or competing with agricultural food, feed or fiber needs; we’re using the entire plant in underutilized biomass,” said Ray Huhnke, OSU Biofuels Team leader and agricultural engineer.

According to Coskata, the proprietary microorganisms do what syngas conversion from chemical catalysis cannot do, which is make a pure stream of ethanol at the lowest cost target in the industry.

In addition, the process is net energy positive, providing up to 7.7 units of ethanol energy per unit of fossil fuel input, compared to 1.3 units provided by corn ethanol and 0.8 units from gasoline, according to the Argonne National Laboratory.

“OSU is proud to be part of a technology that will not compete with food for the production of ethanol,” said Stephen McKeever, OSU vice president for research and technology transfer. “Use of alternative feedstocks such as switchgrass and municipal solid waste will be of ultimate benefit to the consumer.”

http://osu.okstate.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=866&Itemid=90

GM, Coskata partnership builds on Oklahoma State University biofuels research

2008-03-23T01:47:00.000+08:00

The Oklahoma State University Biofuels Teams ability to think small microscopic, actually stands to provide great dividends for consumers, a renewable energy company and one of the nations foremost automakers.

Biology based renewable energy company coskata Inc. and automotive giant General Motors announced their cooperative plans to reduce fossil fuel consumption this past weekend, thanks in part to coskatas next generation ethanol process based on research and technology developed by the OSU Biofuels Team and licensed exclusively to coskata.

Coskatas unique three-step conversion process addresses many of the constraints lodged against current renewable energy options, including environmental, transportation and land-use concerns, said Wes Bolsen, chief marketing officer and vice president of business development for coskata.

In the three-step process, carbon-based materials are converted into synthesis gas using well-established gasification technologies. After the chemical bonds are broken using gasification, microorganisms licensed to coskata as part of the OSU Biofuels research convert the resulting syngas into ethanol by consuming carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the gas stream. Once the gas-to-liquid conversion process has occurred, the resulting ethanol is recovered from the solution using vapor permeation technology.

The coskata process has the potential to yield more than 100 gallons of ethanol per dry ton of carbonaceous feedstock, reducing production costs to less than $1 per gallon, Bolsen said.

According to an independent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Energys Argonne National Laboratory, coskatas process using the OSU Biofuels Team microorganisms can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 84 percent compared to conventional gasoline.

The process also has no back-end solid waste to dry and handle like enzymatic approaches to ethanol production and uses less

http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-1/GM--Coskata-partnership-builds-on-Oklahoma-State-University-biofuels-research-1928-1/

GM And Renewable Energy Company Coskata Partner On Biofuel Research

2008-03-23T01:43:00.001+08:00

The Oklahoma State University Biofuels Team's ability to think small - microscopic, actually - stands to provide great dividends for consumers, a renewable energy company and one of the nation's foremost automakers. Biology based renewable energy company Coskata and automotive giant General Motors announced their cooperative plans to reduce fossil fuel consumption this past weekend, thanks in part to Coskata's "next generation ethanol" process based on research and technology developed by the OSU Biofuels Team and licensed exclusively to Coskata.

"Coskata's unique three-step conversion process addresses many of the constraints lodged against current renewable energy options, including environmental, transportation and land-use concerns," said Wes Bolsen, chief marketing officer and vice president of business development for Coskata.

In the three-step process, carbon-based materials are converted into synthesis gas using well-established gasification technologies. After the chemical bonds are broken using gasification, microorganisms licensed to Coskata as part of the OSU Biofuels research convert the resulting syngas into ethanol by consuming carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the gas stream. Once the gas-to-liquid conversion process has occurred, the resulting ethanol is recovered from the solution using "vapor permeation technology."

"The Coskata process has the potential to yield more than 100 gallons of ethanol per dry ton of carbonaceous feedstock, reducing production costs to less than $1 per gallon," Bolsen said.

According to an independent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, Coskata's process - using the OSU Biofuels Team microorganisms - can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 84 percent compared to conventional gasoline.

The process also has no back-end solid waste to dry and handle like enzymatic approaches to ethanol production and uses less than one gallon of fresh water per gallon of ethanol produced, according to Coskata.

Corn-based systems typically use three gallons to four gallons of fresh water per gallon of ethanol produced, and enzymatic approaches can use as much as seven gallons of fresh water per gallon of ethanol produced.

Development of the technology licensed to Coskata is the result of OSU's longstanding commitment to biofuels development, said Robert E. Whitson, vice president, dean and director of the university's Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources.

"DASNR scientists and engineers have been breeding improved feedstock with an eye toward biofuels development since the early 1990s. Our first cellulosic ethanol team was put together in 1998, and has been making great strides in technology development ever since," Whitson said. "Biofuels has come into widespread public consciousness only recently, but we've been addressing renewable energy concerns for many years."

The OSU Biofuels Team quickly became a multi-college, multi-institutional effort, with the current team encompassing scientists and engineers with DASNR; the OSU College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology; the University of Oklahoma and Brigham Young University.

"We in the division have long believed and promoted that an interdisciplinary outlook is the best way to develop solutions to the challenges facing society, and solving real-world issues is a vital part of the land-grant mission and the reason why OSU exists," Whitson said.

Vinod Khosla and Advanced Technology Ventures, the leading renewable energy investors in the country, recognized the potential of the work being done by the OSU Biofuels Team and wanted to invest in the technology. The technology was exclusively licensed to Coskata Inc. for the production of biofuels.

The licensing agreement between OSU and Coskata includes the microorganisms used in syngas fermentation, with a companion research agreement for any aspects of the syngas fermentation technology that would aid them in production. Since providing the initial three strains of microorganisms in 2006, Coskata-funded research with the OSU Biofuels Team has provided two additional microorganisms for the company.

Bolsen likened it to "running the Kentucky Derby, with the OSU Biofuels Team helping to put horses in the race to reduce this country's dependence on oil."

"Our system is somewhat unique in that we're not considering a single feedstock or competing with agricultural food, feed or fiber needs; we're using the entire plant in underutilized biomass," said Ray Huhnke, OSU Biofuels Team leader and agricultural engineer.

According to Coskata, the proprietary microorganisms do what syngas conversion from chemical catalysis cannot do, which is make a pure stream of ethanol at the lowest cost target in the industry.

In addition, the process is net energy positive, providing up to 7.7 units of ethanol energy per unit of fossil fuel input, compared to 1.3 units provided by corn ethanol and 0.8 units from gasoline, according to the Argonne National Laboratory.

"OSU is proud to be part of a technology that will not compete with food for the production of ethanol," said Stephen McKeever, OSU vice president for research and technology transfer. "Use of alternative feedstocks such as switchgrass and municipal solid waste will be of ultimate benefit to the consumer."

Ethanol from Garbage and Old Tires

2008-03-23T01:34:00.001+08:00

A versatile new process for making biofuels could slash their cost.

Ethanol Factory: Coskata vice president Richard Tobey (above) stands before bales of hay, a feedstock that his company’s new technology can efficiently convert into ethanol. He’s holding the centerpiece of that technology, a bioreactor.
Credit: Thomas Chadwick

Multimedia

•	William Roe, Coskata's president and CEO, and Vinod Khosla, one of the company's main investors, describe the benefits of its technology.
•	View the process for making biofuels.

As he leads a tour of the labs at Coskata, a startup based in Warrenville, IL, Richard Tobey, the company's vice president of research and development, pauses in front of a pair of clear plastic tubes packed with bundles of white fibers. The tubes are the core of a bioreactor, which is itself the heart of a new technology that Coskata claims can make ethanol out of wood chips, household garbage, grass, and old tires--indeed, just about any organic material. The bioreactor, Tobey explains, allows the company to combine thermochemical and biological approaches to synthesizing ethanol. Taking advantage of both, he says, makes Coskata's process cheaper and more versatile than either the technologies widely used today to make ethanol from corn or the experimental processes designed to work with sources other than corn.

Tobey's tour begins at the far end of the laboratory in two small rooms full of pipes, throbbing pumps, and pressurized tanks--all used to process synthesis gas (also known as syngas), a mixture of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen. This is the thermochemical part of Coskata's process: in a well-known technique called gasification, a series of chemical reactions carried out at high temperatures can produce syngas from almost any organic material. Ordinarily, chemical catalysts are then used to convert the syngas into a mixture of alcohols that includes ethanol. But making such a mixture is intrinsically inefficient: the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that go into the other alcohols could, in principle, have gone into ethanol instead. So this is where Coskata turns from chemistry to biology, using microbes to convert the syngas to ethanol more efficiently.

Down the hall from the syngas-processing equipment, Tobey shows off the petri dishes, flasks, and sealed hoods used to develop species of bacteria that eat syngas. The bioreactors sit at the far end of the room. Inside the bioreactors' tubes, syngas is fed directly to the bacteria, which produce a steady stream of ethanol.

Coskata's technology could be a big deal. Today, almost all ethanol made in the United States comes from corn grain; because cultivating corn requires a lot of land, water, and energy, corn-derived ethanol does little to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and can actually cause other environmental damage, such as water pollution. Alternative ethanol sources, such as switchgrass, wood chips, and municipal waste, would require far fewer resources. But so far, technology for processing such materials has proved very expensive. That's why Coskata's low-cost technique has caught the attention of major investors, including General Motors, which earlier this year announced a partnership with the startup to help deploy its technology on the commercial scale worldwide.

Sipping Ethanol
Combining thermochemical and biological approaches in a hybrid system can make ethanol processing cheaper by increasing yields and allowing the use of inexpensive feedstocks. But Coskata's process has another advantage, too: it's fast. Though others have also developed syngas-fed bioreactors, Tobey says, they have been too slow. That's because the bacteria are suspended in an aqueous culture, and syngas doesn't dissolve easily in water. Coskata's new bioreactor, however, delivers the syngas to the bacteria directly.

The thin fibers packed into the bioreactor serve two functions. First, they act as scaffolding: the bacteria grow in biofilms on the outside of the fibers. Second, they serve as a delivery mechanism for the syngas. Even though each fiber is not much bigger than a human hair, Tobey says, it acts like a tiny plastic straw. The researchers pump syngas down the bores of the hollow fibers, and it diffuses through the fiber walls to reach the bacteria. Water flows around the outside of the fibers, delivering vitamins and amino acids to the bacteria and carrying away the ethanol the bacteria produce. But the water and the syngas, Tobey says, never meet

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20199/

High-Def Camcorders Go Small and Light

2008-03-23T00:00:00.001+08:00

Newest models use flash memory, have high still-image resolutions.

Camcorders don't usually cause much buzz at CES. This year was different, because the products on show could finally capture the imagination of long-wary consumers.

Over the years, camcorders have been of only modest interest to most consumers, due to the devices' bulk and weight. It also hasn't helped that most decent still cameras can take short video clips.

Such resistance could fade now. Sony, for example, debuted two small high-definition camcorders: the HDR-SR12 ($1400), which includes a 120GB hard drive, and the HDR-SR11 ($1200), which has a 60GB hard drive. Both can take 10-megapixel photos--more than enough resolution for you to use the camcorder as your still camera. And, of course, both can record in high definition at 1920 by 1080. Both models will be available in March.

In addition, the two camcorders have another great feature in face-detection technology that automatically identifies up to eight faces and corrects focus, exposure, and color controls for both video and still photos.

Flash Memory Takes Center Stage

Faster operation and the use of flash-memory cards have allowed the major camcorder companies to reduce the size of their products to unheard-of dimensions for high-performance consumer camcorders.

Samsung's SC-HMX20C records video and stills to 8GB of built-in flash memory, instead of to a hard drive or DVD. As a result, the camcorder is smaller than a soda can and weighs only 10.9 ounces. The SC-HMX20C will take removable SDHC/MMC+ cards if you want extra storage.

Flash memory also means that the SC-HMX20C will start up a lot faster than competitors that use other media. Samsung says it will start in under 3 seconds, a claim the company verified on the show floor. Though the SC-HMX20C isn't in the same league as Sony's models on the still-photo front, it can take 8-megapixel stills, which is very good. Pricing is expected to be between $1000 and $1100, and the camcorder should be available in May.

Flash memory, specifically SD Card memory, allowed Panasonic to slim its HDC-SD9 down to a mere 0.606 pounds, or about 9.7 ounces. The HDC-SD9's heavier and bulkier relative, the HDC-HS9, is a hybrid model that can record either to SD (or SDHC) media or to its built-in 60GB hard disk.

Both camcorders have face-detection technology and offer Panasonic's Intelligent Shooting Guide, which will detect when shooting conditions are poor and then show tips on the LCD to help the user correct the error before recording the content.

The two models will be available in March with manufacturer-suggested retail prices of $800 for the HDC-SD9 and $1100 for the HDC-SH9.

nnovations From Canon, Sanyo

Canon, too, has taken the flash-memory route, using what the company calls Dual Flash Memory in its new top consumer camcorder, the Vixia HF10.

Dual Flash Memory allows the user to record to the camcorder's internal flash drive even if they don't have a spare SDHC memory card. This particular model has 16GB of internal flash, the largest capacity seen at CES. A second, lower-end version, the HF100, features an SDHC memory-card slot only.

Also included in the two camcorders are a newly designed Canon 12x HD video lens and a Canon 3.3-megapixel Full HD CMOS image sensor.

Both are expected to be available in April. Prices were not announced.

If weight is a concern for you, Sanyo's new Xacti HD1000 could be what you're seeking in a camcorder.

It weighs just 9.5 ounces and has a total volume of only 16.6 cubic inches, which the company says makes it the world's smallest and lightest digital camcorder capable of Full HD recording (1920 horizontal and 1080 vertical pixels).

How do they do it? If you've been following along, you already know: with an 8GB SDHC memory card.

A Word From a Memory Maker

The majority of the camcorders that drew the most attention at CES were able to shrink because of the use of flash memory, either built in or taking the form of removable SD media. But not just any SD media.

For most of these high-def camcorders to work properly, they must use SDHC cards, which operate more quickly than a standard SD memory card does. SanDisk, a leading SD Card seller, recommends SDHC, which can handle data transfers of up to 40 mbps. The 4GB version retails for $80, while the 8GB version retails for $140.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,141238-page,2-c,ces/article.html#

Panasonic TH-42PH10UKA 42" Plasma Display

2008-03-22T23:51:00.002+08:00

(Widescreen, 1366x768, 400:1, HDTV - MPN: TH42PH10UKA)

Price Range: $846.90 - $1,499.00 from 16 Sellers

Description: The Panasonic TH-42PH10UKA is a 42" plasma display designed for the most demanding home theater and professional applications. It contains technology that improves color rendition, brightness, and contrast, while achieving standards in power efficiency and functional lifetime. It can be used as the ultimate home theater display or as a panel for corporate presentations and commercial signage. The compact frame ensures that the monitor can be placed in confined spaces with no hassle.

http://camcorderinfo.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=55232061/st=pop/sv=title

Sony HDR-SR7 First Impressions Review

2008-03-22T23:48:00.000+08:00

In a world where AVCHD camcorders are multiplying like rabbits, Sony has proved itself yet again as the prime contributor. The HDR-SR7 ($1400 MSRP) appears to show enormous potential as Sony’s leader of the AVCHD HDD pack with a 60GB hard drive, mic and headphone jacks, and multifunction cam control dial. Both this and the next model-down, the HDR-SR5, offer 1/3” ClearVid CMOS sensors, but the SR7 packs in significantly more pixels, making for better resolution but possibly worse low light performance. Sony's latest round of announcements marks seven AVCHD camcorder releases since last July, but can the SR7 match their initial HDD model, the HDR-SR1 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $1119.99), for handling? Trading out the control ring for a small dial is a bad start, but we're willing to give it the benefit of a doubt. Let's take a closer look.

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Sony-HDR-SR7-First-Impressions-Review-29388.htm

Panasonic announces two new, compact AVCHD camcorders

2008-03-22T23:44:00.000+08:00

(Credit: Panasonic)

Panasonic kicked off its CES digital imaging announcements with two new high-definition camcorders. Eschewing both tapes and DVDs, the Panasonic HDC-HS9 and HDC-SD9 record 1080/24p video directly to SD/SDHC cards.

According to Panasonic, the HDC-SD9 is the smallest, slightest 3CCD 1080/24p camcorder yet, weighing in at less than 0.7 pound. It writes AVCHD video to SD and SDHC cards, storing up to 6 hours of high-def footage to a 16 GB card. With the company's newly announced 32 GB SDHC card, the space doubles to up to 12 hours.

The 3CCD HDC-HS9 can also record footage to SD and SDHC cards, and adds a 60 GB hard drive to provide even more shooting time. While it's not quite as small or light as the SD9, the HS9 can record up to 23 hours of AVCHD video directly to its hard drive, Panasonic claims.

Both camcorders feature Panasonic's Optical Image Stabilization system, 5.1-channel surround sound with a zoom microphone function, and face-detecting auto-exposure systems. They also include Panasonic's Intelligent Shooting Guide and Intelligent Shooting Selection Playback, two features that Panasonic claims can detect various shooting errors like out-of-focus shots or rapid panning, and either warn users about them or skip them entirely. Finally, both models are also Viera Link compatible, letting users connect them directly with Panasonic's new Viera series of HDTVs.

The Panasonic HDC-SD9 and HDC-HS9 ship in March, with suggested retail prices of $800 and $1100, respectively.

http://ces.cnet.com/8301-1_1-9841750-67.html?tag=more

Sony gives hard-disk HD camcorders a boost

2008-03-22T23:36:00.001+08:00

Sony Handycam HDR-SR12

(Credit: Sony Electronics)

It seems like Sony's saved the zing in its camcorder announcements for its AVCHD products, which generally offer significant enhancements over last year's. For one, all the models (like their DVD equivalents) finally support true 1,920x1,080 recording, albeit at the same bit rates as the previous 1,440x1,080 capture. They also mark the addition of Memory Stick Duo support for video--a feature of lesser importance for the hard-disk models than others--which Sony dubs "Hybrid" recording.

The two top-of-the-line models, the SR11 and SR12, both incorporate Sony's highest-resolution 1/3.15-inch 5-megapixel ClearVid CMOS sensor and the Face Detection capabilities which debut in the 2008 camcorders. Other specs include a 12X zoom lens and 3.2-inch LCD. The two models differ only by hard disk size: 60GB for the $1,199 SR11 and 120GB for the $1,399 SR12. Both are slated to ship in March.

Sony Handycam HDR-SR10

(Credit: Sony Electronics)

Replacing the SR5 at the $999 price point, the SR10 keeps the same 2-megapixel CMOS sensor and 2.7-inch LCD of its predecessor, but ups the zoom to 15x. It too should ship in March.

Unfortunately, though the hardware's making some advances, as far as I can tell, the software still remains behind the times.

http://ces.cnet.com/8301-1_1-9841036-67.html?tag=more

Canon's video Vixia

2008-03-22T23:31:00.000+08:00

Canon Vixia HF10

(Credit: Canon USA)

Late to market with its first SD-based camcorders--Panasonic and Sony both announced third-generation models this week--Canon nevertheless makes up for lost time with a couple of attractively specced models for 2008. They join the modestly revved HV30 HDV model and the currently shipping HG10 and HR10 under the Vixia brand umbrella for HD camcorders.

At the top of the product line, the HF10 incorporates 16GB built-in flash memory--the largest capacity we've heard about thus far--and a slot for SDHC removable flash. According to Canon, it records AVCHD video at a maximum bit rate of 17 megabits per second, and can hold up to 6 hours of video, thought that's probably at the lowest bit rate. The new models capture at 1,920x1,080 compared with 1,440x1,080 for older AVCHD camcorders, and support 30p progressive capture.

Canon Vixia HF100

(Credit: Canon USA)

The HF100, its less expensive sibling, lacks the internal memory: SDHC recording only. Otherwise, the two are identical, using the same 1/3.2-inch 3.3-megapixel sensor, 2.7-inch LCD, a new 12x zoom lens, a redesigned mini accessory shoe and Canon's SuperRange optical image stabilization.

Canon Vixia HV30

(Credit: Canon USA)

Changes to the HV30, the replacement for the HV20, are more subtle. It has a sleeker-looking black body, for one, and now supports 30p progressive mode and the high-capacity BP-2L24H lithium ion battery. If you can find the HV20 for less than the HV30's $999 price, it's not really worth waiting until the end of February when it's expected to ship.

The HF10 will cost $1,099 and the HF100, $899, when they ship at the end of April.

http://ces.cnet.com/8301-1_1-9842073-67.html?tag=more

Canon's new DW-100 DVD burner

2008-03-22T23:21:00.001+08:00

(Credit: Canon)

Back when all video was recorded to tape, archiving was somewhat simple. If you used a decent grade tape, you could store it for a while and then dub it if you worried about the ravages of time. Now that more video is being recorded to hard-drives and flash memory, computer-phobic videographers find themselves in a slight pickle. To accompany the company's latest HDD and flash camcorders, Canon has introduced the DW-100 DVD Burner. The DW-100 will be able to burn both standard definition DVDs and AVCHD DVDs. The latter can be played back on those Blu-Ray players that support the AVCHD codec. Controls are kept simple, with only a few buttons on top of the burner. When used with Canon's Vixia HF10, HF100, or HG10 camcorders, the DW-100 can also connect to a TV through the camcorder and act as a player. Canon expects to sell the DW-100 for about $270 when it hits stores this April.

http://ces.cnet.com/8301-1_1-9842895-67.html?tag=more

Philips 42PFP5532D

2008-03-11T16:45:00.001+08:00

Manufacturer: PhilipsEAN: 8712581301699
Brightness in Candela/m²: 1500Contrast Ratio (X:1): 15000

Depth in cm: 10.7DVB-C: No
DVB-S: NoDVB-T: Yes

DVD Player / Recorder: NoDVI Interface: No
Electronic Program Guide (EPG): YesFrequency: 50 Hertz

Front AV Interface: NoFull HD: No
HD ready: YesHD Tuner: No

HDMI Interface: YesHeadphone Output: Yes
Height in cm: 70.1 cmHorizontal Resolution in Pixel: 1024
Loudspeakers: with LoudspeakersMemory Stick: No

Number of Scart Interfaces: 2PC-Connection: Yes
Picture and Picture (PAP): NoPicture and Text (PAT): No

Picture in Picture (PIP): NoPower Consumption in W: 250
Power Consumption Standby in W: 0.9Reflection Angle: 160 degree(s)
Response Time in ms: 3RMS Wattage: 20

Screen Format: 16:9Screen Size in cm: 107 cm
Screen Size in Inches: 42 inSecure Digital Card: No
Type of Monitor: PlasmaUSB: No

Vertical Resolution in Pixel: 768VGA / D-Sub Interface: No
Weight in kg: 31.5Width in cm: 104.7
YUV Interface: Yes

http://www.ciao.co.uk/Philips_42_PFP_5532_D__Review_5704265

Will New Blu-ray Drives Suck Your Laptop Battery Dry?

2008-03-11T12:06:00.001+08:00

Now that Sony’s Blu-ray technology has won the high-def format war, computer manufacturers must tackle its power-hungry playback performance. Everyone's idle/Flickr

Watching a Blu-ray movie in all its high-definition glory on your laptop may finally become an affordable prospect this year. Just don't wander too far from a power outlet.

With the Sony-backed HD format emerging victorious from a two-year showdown with Toshiba's HD DVD, many laptop manufacturers are now scrambling to add Blu-ray drives in their desktop and notebook lineups. Next month, Dell will even introduce a sub-$1,000 Blu-ray notebook, according to Brian Zucker, a technology strategist for the company.

But the promise of viewing an increasing variety of HD movies on your laptop may be overshadowed by ongoing concerns over the technology's vampiric effect on battery life. Indeed, if the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, you might not get more than halfway through that movie before running out of juice completely, analysts say.

"Blu-ray battery life is obviously a huge concern," says Yankee Group analyst Josh Martin.
"If you bought an iPhone and you couldn't watch a two-hour movie, which you barely can now, that would be a huge problem," Martin continued.

Granted, batteries suck (along with other annoyances like spam filters and plastic packaging). That's largely because there is no Moore's Law for batteries. If battery power capacity improves 1 percent a year, that's considered pretty good. Batteries are more often afterthoughts for an industry obsessed with cramming as many new features into a notebook as possible.

Introducing Blu-ray drives to the mobile mix certainly isn't going to help matters. For now, the laptop manufacturers that have offered Blu-ray drives have also avoided revealing the precise effects of Blu-ray playback on battery life. That's probably for a very good reason, as some claim battery life can top out at one hour in some cases.

"The laser that runs the show [in Blu-ray players] is a very high-power laser," notes Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. That laser is one of the main things that conspire to raise power consumption.

The other part of the equation has to do with the process of decoding data from a Blu-ray disc and turning it into moving images on your screen. When Blu-ray was first introduced, this process was all done in software, which is very taxing on the CPU, eating up processing cycles and power.

"Any time you introduce a new technology like this, the initial products tend to be more power-hungry," McCarron says. "Once you get to a certain point, though, the industry usually starts the refinement process."

That process is actually well underway, according to the Blu-ray Disc Association. "In the first generation of laptops that had Blu-ray drives, [power drain] was an issue," a Blu-ray spokesperson said, "but that's been resolved."

The solution has come by offloading some of the decode process onto other system hardware, namely the graphics processing unit, according Dell's Zucker, who also sits on a committee of the Blu-ray Association.

"We looked at playing DVDs and Blu-ray discs, and our early data showed that it could knock [battery life] down to half when playing a Blu-ray disc," Zucker says. He also points out that the main reason we've only seen Blu-ray drives in high-end laptops to date is because you also need a high-end processor to do that decoding.

"All that's changed now, because we have decode assistance from the graphics core," Zucker says, thanks to sophisticated new graphics cards from Nvidia and ATI.

There are some Blu-ray laptops that have sufficient battery capacity for playback of two movies back-to-back on one charge, Zucker says, declining to give specifics. Two models might be Dell's XPS M1530 and Inspiron 1420, which the company claims will support 4½ hours of Blu-ray playback.

Many analysts contacted by Wired.com note that even though laptop makers will be eager to add Blu-ray drives into their lineups, the desktop will likely remain the logical home for Blu-ray in the near term. On the desktop, most consumers won't have to worry about power issues and will also have larger monitors to enjoy all that high-definition content.

Ultimately, McCarron expects a scenario similar to what happened with the first DVD drives. Substantial power drain will be an issue at first, but the technology will be refined in the desktop and then ported to the notebook, eventually eliminating power-consumption problems.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/pcs/news/2008/02/bluray_power

Enterprise resource planning

2008-03-10T22:35:00.003+08:00

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems attempt to integrate several data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules.

Origin of the term

MRP vs. ERP — Manufacturing management systems have evolved in stages over the past 30 years from a simple means of calculating materials requirements to the automation of an entire enterprise. Around 1980, over-frequent changes in sales forecasts, entailing continual readjustments in production, as well as the unsuitability of the parameters fixed by the system, led MRP (Material Requirement Planning) to evolve into a new concept : Manufacturing Resource Planning (or MRP2) and finally the generic concept Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)^[1]

The initials ERP originated as an extension of MRP (material requirements planning then manufacturing resource planning).^[2] ERP systems now attempt to cover all basic functions of an enterprise, regardless of the organization's business or charter. Non-manufacturing businesses, non-profit organizations and governments now all utilize ERP systems.

To be considered an ERP system, a software package must provide the function of at least two systems. For example, a software package that provides both payroll and accounting functions could technically be considered an ERP software package.

However, the term is typically reserved for larger, more broadly based applications. The introduction of an ERP system to replace two or more independent applications eliminates the need for external interfaces previously required between systems, and provides additional benefits that range from standardization and lower maintenance (one system instead of two or more) to easier and/or greater reporting capabilities (as all data is typically kept in one database).

Examples of modules in an ERP which formerly would have been stand-alone applications include: Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Financials, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resources, Warehouse Management and Decision Support System.

Overview

Some organizations — typically those with sufficient in-house IT skills to integrate multiple software products — choose to implement only portions of an ERP system and develop an external interface to other ERP or stand-alone systems for their other application needs. For example, one may choose to use human resource management system from one vendor, and the financial systems from another, and perform the integration between the systems themselves.

This is very common in the retail sector^{[citation needed]}, where even a mid-sized retailer will have a discrete Point-of-Sale (POS) product and financials application, then a series of specialized applications to handle business requirements such as warehouse management, staff rostering, merchandising and logistics.

Ideally, ERP delivers a single database that contains all data for the software modules, which would include:

Manufacturing: Engineering, Bills of Material, Scheduling, Capacity, Workflow Management, Quality Control, Cost Management, Manufacturing Process, Manufacturing Projects, Manufacturing Flow
Supply Chain Management: Inventory, Order Entry, Purchasing, Product Configurator, Supply Chain Planning, Supplier Scheduling, Inspection of goods, Claim Processing, Commission Calculation
Financials: General Ledger, Cash Management, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets
Projects: Costing, Billing, Time and Expense, Activity Management
Human Resources: Human Resources, Payroll, Training, Time & Attendance, Rostering, Benefits
Customer Relationship Management: Sales and Marketing, Commissions, Service, Customer Contact and Call Center support
Data Warehouse: and various Self-Service interfaces for Customers, Suppliers, and Employees

Enterprise Resource Planning is a term originally derived from manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) that followed material requirements planning (MRP).^[3] MRP evolved into ERP when "routings" became a major part of the software architecture and a company's capacity planning activity also became a part of the standard software activity.^{[citation needed]} ERP systems typically handle the manufacturing, logistics, distribution, inventory, shipping, invoicing, and accounting for a company. Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP software can aid in the control of many business activities, like sales, marketing, delivery, billing, production, inventory management, quality management, and human resource management.

ERP systems saw a large boost in sales in the 1990s as companies faced the Y2K problem in their legacy systems. Many companies took this opportunity to replace their legacy information systems with ERP systems. This rapid growth in sales was followed by a slump in 1999, at which time most companies had already implemented their Y2K solution.^[4]

ERPs are often incorrectly called back office systems indicating that customers and the general public are not directly involved. This is contrasted with front office systems like customer relationship management (CRM) systems that deal directly with the customers, or the eBusiness systems such as eCommerce, eGovernment, eTelecom, and eFinance, or supplier relationship management (SRM) systems.

ERPs are cross-functional and enterprise wide. All functional departments that are involved in operations or production are integrated in one system. In addition to manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and information technology, this would include accounting, human resources, marketing, and strategic management.

ERP II means open ERP architecture of components. The older, monolithic ERP systems became component oriented.^{[citation needed]}

EAS — Enterprise Application Suite is a new name for formerly developed ERP systems which include (almost) all segments of business, using ordinary Internet browsers as thin clients.^{[citation needed]}

Before

Prior to the concept of ERP systems, departments within an organization (for example, the human resources (HR)) department, the payroll department, and the financial department) would have their own computer systems. The HR computer system (often called HRMS or HRIS) would typically contain information on the department, reporting structure, and personal details of employees. The payroll department would typically calculate and store paycheck information. The financial department would typically store financial transactions for the organization. Each system would have to rely on a set of common data to communicate with each other. For the HRIS to send salary information to the payroll system, an employee number would need to be assigned and remain static between the two systems to accurately identify an employee. The financial system was not interested in the employee-level data, but only in the payouts made by the payroll systems, such as the tax payments to various authorities, payments for employee benefits to providers, and so on. This provided complications. For instance, a person could not be paid in the payroll system without an employee number.

After

ERP software, among other things, combined the data of formerly separate applications. This made the worry of keeping numbers in synchronization across multiple systems disappear. It standardized and reduced the number of software specialties required within larger

Best Practices

This section does not cite any references or sources. (December 2007)
Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

^{This short section requires expansion.}

Best Practices were also a benefit of implementing an ERP system. When implementing an ERP system, organizations essentially had to choose between customizing the software or modifying their business processes to the "Best Practice" function delivered in the vanilla version of the software.

Typically, the delivery of best practice applies more usefully to large organizations and especially where there is a compliance requirement such as IFRS, Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel II, or where the process is a commodity such as electronic funds transfer. This is because the procedure of capturing and reporting legislative or commodity content can be readily codified within the ERP software, and then replicated with confidence across multiple businesses who have the same business requirement.

Where such a compliance or commodity requirement does not underpin the business process, it can be argued that determining and applying a Best Practice actually erodes competitive advantage by homogenizing the business as compared to everyone else in the industry sector.

Implementation

Because of their wide scope of application within a business, ERP software systems are typically complex and usually impose significant changes on staff work practices.^{[citation needed]} Implementing ERP software is typically not an "in-house" skill, so even smaller projects are more cost effective if specialist ERP implementation consultants are employed.^{[citation needed]} The length of time to implement an ERP system depends on the size of the business, the scope of the change and willingness of the customer to take ownership for the project.^{[citation needed]} A small project (e.g., a company of less than 100 staff) may be planned and delivered within 3-9 months; however, a large, multi-site or multi-country implementation may take years.^{[citation needed]}

To implement ERP systems, companies often seek the help of an ERP vendor or of third-party consulting companies. These firms typically provide three areas of professional services: consulting, customization and support.

Process preparation

ERP vendors have designed their systems around standard business processes, based upon best business practices. Different vendors have different types of processes but they are all of a standard, modular nature. Firms that want to implement ERP systems are consequently forced to adapt their organizations to standardized processes as opposed to adapting the ERP package to the existing processes.^[5] Neglecting to map current business processes prior to starting ERP implementation is a main reason for failure of ERP projects.^[6] It is therefore crucial that organizations perform a thorough business process analysis before selecting an ERP vendor and setting off on the implementation track. This analysis should map out all present operational processes, enabling selection of an ERP vendor whose standard modules are most closely aligned with the established organization. Redesign can then be implemented to achieve further process congruence. Research indicates that the risk of business process mismatch is decreased by:

- linking each current organizational process to the organization's strategy;

- analyzing the effectiveness of each process in light of its current related business capability;

- understanding the automated solutions currently implemented.^[7] ^[8]

A disadvantage usually attributed to ERP is that business process redesign to fit the standardized ERP modules can lead to a loss of competitive advantage. While documented cases exist where this has indeed materialized, other cases show that following thorough process preparation ERP systems can actually increase sustainable competitive advantage.^[9]^[10]

Configuration

Configuring an ERP system is largely a matter of balancing the way you want the system to work with the way the system lets you work. Begin by deciding which modules to install, then adjust the system using configuration tables to achieve the best possible fit in working with your company’s processes.

Modules - Most systems are modular simply for the flexibility of implementing some functions but not others. Some common modules, such as finance and accounting are adopted by nearly all companies implementing enterprise systems; others however such as human resource management are not needed by some companies and therefore not adopted. A service company for example will not likely need a module for manufacturing. Other times companies will not adopt a module because they already have their own proprietary system they believe to be superior. Generally speaking the greater number of modules selected, the greater the integration benefits, but also the increase in costs, risks and changes involved.

Configuration Tables – A configuration table enables a company to tailor a particular aspect of the system to the way it chooses to do business. For example, an organization can select the type of inventory accounting – FIFO or LIFO – it will employ or whether it wants to recognize revenue by geographical unit, product line, or distribution channel.

So what happens when the options the system allows just aren’t good enough? At this point a company has two choices, both of which are not ideal. It can re-write some of the enterprise system’s code, or it can continue to use an existing system and build interfaces between it and the new enterprise system. Both options will add time and cost to the implementation process. Additionally they can dilute the system’s integration benefits. The more customized the system becomes the less possible seamless communication becomes between suppliers and customers.

Consulting Services

Consulting team is typically responsible for your initial ERP implementation and subsequent delivery of work to tailor the system beyond "go live". Typically such tailoring includes additional product training; creation of process triggers and workflow; specialist advice to improve how the ERP is used in the business; system optimization; and assistance writing reports, complex data extracts or implementing Business Intelligence.

The consulting team is also responsible for planning and jointly testing the implementation. This is a critical part of the project, and one that is often overlooked.

Consulting for a large ERP project involves three levels: systems architecture, business process consulting (primarily re-engineering) and technical consulting (primarily programming and tool configuration activity). A systems architect designs the overall dataflow for the enterprise including the future dataflow plan. A business consultant studies an organization's current business processes and matches them to the corresponding processes in the ERP system, thus 'configuring' the ERP system to the organization's needs. Technical consulting often involves programming. Most ERP vendors allow modification of their software to suit the business needs of their customer.

For most mid-sized companies, the cost of the implementation will range from around the list price of the ERP user licenses to up to twice this amount (depending on the level of customization required). Large companies, and especially those with multiple sites or countries, will often spend considerably more on the implementation than the cost of the user licenses -- three to five times more is not uncommon for a multi-site implementation.^{[citation needed]}

Customization Services

The Customization is the process of extending or changing how the system works by writing new user interfaces and underlying application code. Such customisations typically reflect local work practices that are not currently in the core routines of the ERP system software.

Examples of such code include early adopter features (e.g., mobility interfaces were uncommon a few years ago and were typically customised) or interfacing to third party applications (this is 'bread and butter' customization for larger implementations as there are typically dozens of ancillary systems that the core ERP software has to interact with). The Professional Services team is also involved during ERP upgrades to ensure that customizations are compatible with the new release. In some cases the functions delivered via a previous customization may have been subsequently incorporated into the core routines of the ERP software, allowing customers to revert back to standard product and retire the customization completely.

Customizing an ERP package can be very expensive and complicated, because many ERP packages are not designed to support customization, so most businesses implement the best practices embedded in the acquired ERP system. Some ERP packages are very generic in their reports and inquiries, such that customization is expected in every implementation. It is important to recognize that for these packages it often makes sense to buy third party plug-ins that interface well with your ERP software rather than reinventing the wheel.

Customization work is usually undertaken as bespoke software development on a time and materials basis. Because of the specialist nature of the customization and the 'one off' aspect of the work, it is common to pay in the order of $200 per hour for this work. Also, in many cases the work delivered as customization is not covered by the ERP vendors Maintenance Agreement, so while there is typically a 90-day warranty against software faults in the custom code, there is no obligation on the ERP vendor to warrant that the code works with the next upgrade or point release of the core product.

One often neglected aspect of customization is the associated documentation. While it can seem like a considerable -- and expensive -- overhead to the customization project, it is critical that someone is responsible for the creation and user testing of the documentation. Without the description on how to use the customisation, the effort is largely wasted as it becomes difficult to train new staff in the work practice that the customization delivers.

Maintenance and Support Services

Once your system has been implemented, the consulting company will typically enter into a Support Agreement to assist your staff to keep the ERP software running in an optimal way. To minimize additional costs and provide more realism into the needs of the units to be affected by ERP (as an added service to customers), the option of creating a committee headed by the consultant using participative management approach during the design stage with the client's heads of departments (no substitutes allowed) to be affected by the changes in ERPs to provide hands on management control requirements planning. This would allow direct long term projections into the client's needs, thus minimizing future conversion patches (at least for the 1st 5 years operation unless there is a corporate-wide organizational structural change involving operational systems) on a more dedicated approach to initial conversion.

A Maintenance Agreement typically provides you rights to all current version patches, and both minor and major releases, and will most likely allow your staff to raise support calls. While there is no standard cost for this type of agreement, they are typically between 15% and 20% of the list price of the ERP user licenses.

Advantages

In the absence of an ERP system, a large manufacturer may find itself with many software applications that do not talk to each other and do not effectively interface. Tasks that need to interface with one another may involve:

design engineering (how to best make the product)
order tracking from acceptance through fulfillment
the revenue cycle from invoice through cash receipt
managing interdependencies of complex Bill of Materials
tracking the 3-way match between Purchase orders (what was ordered), Inventory receipts (what arrived), and Costing (what the vendor invoiced)
the Accounting for all of these tasks, tracking the Revenue, Cost and Profit on a granular level.

Change how a product is made, in the engineering details, and that is how it will now be made. Effective dates can be used to control when the switch over will occur from an old version to the next one, both the date that some ingredients go into effect, and date that some are discontinued. Part of the change can include labeling to identify version numbers.

Some security features are included within an ERP system to protect against both outsider crime, such as industrial espionage, and insider crime, such as embezzlement. A data tampering scenario might involve a disgruntled employee intentionally modifying prices to below the breakeven point in order to attempt to take down the company, or other sabotage. ERP systems typically provide functionality for implementing internal controls to prevent actions of this kind. ERP vendors are also moving toward better integration with other kinds of information security tools.^[11]

Disadvantages

Many problems organizations have with ERP systems are due to inadequate investment in ongoing training for involved personnel, including those implementing and testing changes, as well as a lack of corporate policy protecting the integrity of the data in the ERP systems and how it is used.

Limitations of ERP include:

Success depends on the skill and experience of the workforce, including training about how to make the system work correctly.
Small enterprises are often undercapitalized & are also not updated about the latest offerings in the market
Personnel turnover; companies can employ new managers lacking education in the company's ERP system, proposing changes in business practices that are out of synchronization with the best utilization of the company's selected ERP.
Customization of the ERP software is limited. Some customization may involve changing of the ERP software structure which is usually not allowed.
Re-engineering of business processes to fit the "industry standard" prescribed by the ERP system may lead to a loss of competitive advantage.
ERP systems can be very expensive to install often ranging from 30,000 US Dollars to 500,000,000 US Dollars for multinational companies.
ERP vendors can charge sums of money for annual license renewal that is unrelated to the size of the company using the ERP or its profitability.
Technical support personnel often give replies to callers that are inappropriate for the caller's corporate structure. Computer security concerns arise, for example when telling a non-programmer how to change a database on the fly, at a company that requires an audit trail of changes so as to meet some regulatory standards.
ERPs are often seen as too rigid and too difficult to adapt to the specific workflow and business process of some companies—this is cited as one of the main causes of their failure.
Systems can be difficult to use.
Systems are too restrictive and do not allow much flexibility in implementation and usage.
The system can suffer from the "weakest link" problem—an inefficiency in one department or at one of the partners may affect other participants.
Many of the integrated links need high accuracy in other applications to work effectively. A company can achieve minimum standards, then over time "dirty data" will reduce the reliability of some applications.
Once a system is established, switching costs are very high for any one of the partners (reducing flexibility and strategic control at the corporate level).
The blurring of company boundaries can cause problems in accountability, lines of responsibility, and employee morale.
Resistance in sharing sensitive internal information between departments can reduce the effectiveness of the software.
Some large organizations may have multiple departments with separate, independent resources, missions, chains-of-command, etc, and consolidation into a single enterprise may yield limited benefits.
There are frequent compatibility problems with the various legacy systems of the partners.
The system may be over-engineered relative to the actual needs of the customer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Resource_Planning

UK launch for Sharp Ultra Slim LCD TV's

2008-03-10T22:32:00.000+08:00

Sharp have announced that their ultra slim X Series LCD TV's will be available to UK consumers this September.

At just 34mm at their thickest point, the 37in, 42in and 46in screens are not quite as impressive as the early 20mm prototypes but will still be the slimmest commercially available screens in the UK.

The new X Series represent not only the ultimate in 'style' one-upmanship, but are also a vehicle for some of Sharp's most advanced technological wizardry.

The AQUOS X Series feature Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution panels, 120Hz processing, thin-profile 3-way 8-speaker system and 1-Bit digital amplifier along with 3 HDMI (v1.3) inputs.

Consuming just 0.5 watts in standby mode, these are some of the most environmentally friendly screens around.

Already available to Japanese consumers, we will have to wait a little longer to get our hands on them here in the UK. No firm indication of prices as yet.

http://hdtvorg.co.uk/news/articles/2008021201.htm

Ultra Slim LCD TV's from Sharp

2008-03-10T22:24:00.001+08:00

At a mere 3.44 cm wide, three new Aquos LCD TV's from Sharp are destined to become the slimmest screens commercially available, for a while at least.

The 37in, 42in and 46in screens represent a trend in demand for larger slimmer panels which owe as much to consumer demand for high style as for the latest technological wizardry. This is not to say that the new panels from Sharp are not very well specified.

The AQUOS X Series feature Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution panels, 120Hz processing, thin-profile 3-way 8-speaker system and 1-Bit digital amplifier along with 3 HDMI (v1.3) inputs.

Available to Japanese consumers this March it looks like that the X series will be available in the UK some time this year. No dates or prices available as yet.

http://hdtvorg.co.uk/news/articles/2008012901.htm

Sharp to Introduce 16 New Slim, Compact G-Series AQUOS LCD TVs in 26V- to 52V*1-inch Screen Sizes

2008-03-10T22:18:00.001+08:00

New Slim Design (Industry's Thinnest^*2) Makes Wall-Mounting Easy All Models Equipped with Double-Speed 120-Hz Frame Rate LCD Panels for Superior Fast-Motion Image Processing

Sharp Corporation will introduce 16 new G-Series AQUOS models featuring an elegant, slim, compact design that takes advantage of the industry's thinnest profile of 8.1 cm and the light weight unique to LCD panels to be readily adaptable to a wide range of installation situations, in particular, for wall-mounting applications. Sharp equipped to all models use the Advanced Super View LCD Panel to reproduce smooth pictures even with fast-motion images, and strengthened picture quality, design, audio quality, and environmental performance.

LCD TVs are rapidly entering widespread use and replacement demand for flat-panel TVs, that is, replacing older living room models by purchasing new TVs with larger screens and higher resolution, is growing.

All models in this G Series feature a new compact design with a slimmer profile of 8.1 cm, the industry's thinnest, and offer a "small footprint with a big screen" that pushes the
meaning of space-saving to a new level. For example, a large 52-inch model^*3 can be
installed in the same width as our previous 43V-inch LCD TV^*4 model, giving the user approximately 10 inches more in screen size.

Plus, all models use the Kameyama Double-Speed Advanced Super View LCD Panel to reproduce smooth pictures even with fast-motion images, and feature high definition, fast response times, and wide viewing angles. In addition, they deliver a living room contrast^*5 of 900:1 (dark room contrast ratio of 2000:1) that reproduces crisp, clear, vivid pictures with pure, velvety blacks even in bright living room environments, enabling viewers to truly enjoy the full picture quality a video source has to offer, such as TV programs or movies and videos.

Further, these models also include a diverse range of other attractive features, including 1-Bit Digital Amplifier that reproduces clear, natural sound, and the AQUOS Familink^*6, an advanced interface that enables the viewer to comfortably use easily to operate AQUOS Blu-ray Disc Player, AQUOS HD Recorder, and AQUOS Audio System connected to the AQUOS TV.

By constantly pursuing picture quality, audio quality, design and environmental performance as the pinnacle of flat-panel TVs, the AQUOS is aiming to be the "entertainment TV of choice," offering new audio/visual lifestyles in sizes ranging from living room units to personal models.

Product name	Terrestrial/BS/CS110°Digital HD LCD TV
Nickname	AQUOS
Model name	LC-52GX3W	LC-52GX35	LC-46GX3W	LC-46GX35	LC-42GX3W	LC-37GX3W	LC-32GH3	LC-26GH3
Dot count (H x V)	1,920 x 1,080						1, 366 x 768
Design type	Bottom-speaker design
Suggested retail price	Open
Date of introduction in Japan	August 21, 2007
Monthly initial production	5,000 units		6,000 units		7,000 units	15,000 units	16,000 units	9,000 units

Product name	Terrestrial/BS/CS110°Digital HD LCD TV
Nickname	AQUOS
Model name	LC-52GX4W	LC-52GX45	LC-46GX4W	LC-46GX45	LC-42GX4W	LC-37GX4W	LC-32GH4	LC-26GH4
Dot count (H x V)	1,920 x 1,080						1,366 x 768
Design type	Side-speaker design
Suggested retail price	Open
Date of introduction	August 21, 2007
Monthly initial production	5,000 units		6,000 units		5,000 units	10,000 units	6,000 units	3,000 units

Note:

The LC-52GX35/45 and 46GX35/45 are wall-mount type models (table stand is not applied)

http://sharp-world.com/corporate/news/070702.html

Sharp presents Mobile Advanced Super View LCD. Slim and sharp.

2008-03-10T22:14:00.001+08:00

Sharp Corporation created a 2.2-inch super-thin LCD for mobile devices with only 0.68 mm thick. This new delivers superior image quality approaching that of an LCD TV thanks to a high contrast ratio of 2000:1, wide viewing angle of 176°, and fast response speed of 8 ms, which are among the highest levels in the industry.

Sharp Mobile Advanced Super View LCD will be exhibited at FPD International 2007 to be held at Pacifico Yokohama on October 24 to 26.

http://www.gadgetsmonkey.com/sharp-presents-mobile-advanced-super-view-lcd-slim-and-sharp/

Sharp touts ultra-slim LCD TV

2008-03-10T22:05:00.001+08:00

Sharp has lowered the bar for the thickness of an LCD TV. It has developed a prototype 52in telly that's as little as 2cm thick.

Sharp's super-thin prototype LCD

Admittedly, it does incorporate components to its rear that make some areas stick out a further 0.9cm, but who's counting? By comparison, today's comparably sized LCD TVs range in thickness from 8cm up to 14cm - four to seven times as thick as the Sharp prototype.

Sharp's screen impressive contrast ratio of 100,000:1, which is a significant improvement over existing LCDs of a similar size, which tend to range from 1000:1 to 3000:1. However, it's a significant drop from Sharp's own ASV Premium LCD 37in display, which boasts a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.

The display weighs 25kg and it's been rumoured that the set also incorporates wireless transmitter and receiver technology for HD-capable home video streaming.

Sharp hasn't released much further technical information about the set yet and hasn't confirmed when - or even if - it might appear on the market, or how much it might retail for. So for the time being we'll just have to make do with thicker and more power-hungry LCDs with lower contrast ratios. Sob.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/08/27/sharp_super_slim_lcd/

Sharp Pushes Slim LCD Contrast to 100,000:1

2008-03-10T21:59:00.001+08:00

New prototype LCD from Sharp push contrast ratios to 100,000:1, but come in a frame that - at its thickest! - measures just 1.1 inches.

Electronics manufacturers always have to keep an eye on their product lines, but also on what their product lines are going to be in a year from now, two years from now, and even five years from now. With that in mind, Japan's Sharp has developed new 52-inch prototype LCD displays that aim to define the future of television, combining high resolution, high contrast, and super-thin designs in ways which consume as little power as possible.

The prototype display offer contrast ratios of an astonishing 100,000:1, while boasting super-thin profiles that measure just 1.1 inches at their thickest, and barely over three-quarters of an inch in the main display section. Further, the units are more environmentally friendly than current LCD displays, with a 50-inch set consuming around 140 kWH/year, based on an average of 4.5 hours of viewing time a day.

Unfortunately, there's no word when Sharp's technological advances might reach the consumer marketplace, but if the technology scales to manufacturing, it wouldn't be unreasonable to see some elements drift into units in 2008 or 2009, with maybe the super-thin displays finally reaching users in 2010. To save power until then, just watch less than 4.5 hours of television a day.

http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/13955/sharp_pushes_slim_lcd_contrast_to_1000001

Sharp XL2E and X20E range Aquos Ultra Slim LCD HDTV

2008-03-10T21:56:00.000+08:00

Sharp have moved up a gear when it comes to LCD TVs with the news of two new ranges of Aquos Ultra-Slim televisions, these are the XL2E and X20E range of HDTV’s. Both of them are Full HD 1080p which make them ideal for watching HD DVD or Blu-Ray.

Both ranges have integrated Freeview, what also makes the Sharp XL2E and X20E range of Aquos TV’s even better is the contrast ratio of 10,000:1 and also three HDMI inputs. The XL2E has the higher spec which comes in 42-inch, 46-inch, and 52-inch screens and all three have 100Hz technology to make the picture smoother.

The XL20E range has five models in its range that match the screen size as the XL2E with the addition of 32-inch and 37-inch models. We will have to wait a few weeks until Sharp announce the release date and also pricing.

http://www.cheaptv.org.uk/sharp-xl2e-and-x20e-range-aquos-ultra-slim-lcd-hdtv/

Sharp AQUOS Red 32" 16:9 6ms 1080p LCD HDTV Model LC-32GP3U-R

2008-03-10T21:52:00.000+08:00

The AQUOS LC-32GP3U models, in a choice of black, white or red cabinet, is a dream come true for game players. This is a second generation LCD TV series designed from the ground up to be optimized for today's state-of-the-art video games. The unique Vyper Drive game mode eliminates any perceptible lag between the video game and the TV. Side-mounted terminals provide easy connections to games. A custom remote control includes an innovative "Game" button that quickly jumps into Vyper Drive and activates the side terminals. Subwoofer audio output allows active subwoofer connection for a strong bass sound and a more powerful gaming experience. Five 1080p-compatible terminals (3 HDMI, 2 component) ensure the images from your game console's 1080p outputs will be as clear as possible.Finally,the GP3U's incredible 6ms response time and 10,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio,combined with Full HD 1080p resolution,provide the best picture quality money can buy.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16889101149&ATT=89-101-149&CMP=OTC-Froogle&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-LCD+TV-_-Sharp-_-89101149

KepCorp Head and Shoulders Formation

2008-03-09T23:22:00.002+08:00

Support Failure at $9.80 imminent and will see a test at next gap support zone$9.20 to $9.00.
If support here fails next support is $8.80 the measured move projection from the neckline of the head and shoulders formation.

Dow Jones Industrial Index Next Support 11644.8

2008-03-09T22:08:00.004+08:00

Next Support 11644.80 may fail and trigger a slide towards the green line parallel support. Support failure here will required a major review on long term bearish market.

Graphene Transistors

2008-03-07T19:29:00.001+08:00

Predicted electronic properties that have made researchers excited about a new material have now been demonstrated experimentally.

Speedy carbon: Thin ribbons of graphene (left) could be useful for future generations of ultra-high-speed processors (scale bar is 100 nanometers). Graphene is made of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons (right).
Credit: Hongjie Dai

A researcher at Stanford University has provided strong experimental evidence that ribbons of carbon atoms can be used for future generations of ultrafast processors.

Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford, and his colleagues have demonstrated a new chemical process that produces extremely thin ribbons of a carbon-based material called graphene. He has demonstrated that these ribbons, once incorporated into transistors, show excellent electronic properties. Such properties have been predicted theoretically, Dai says, but not demonstrated in practice. These properties make graphene ribbons attractive for use in logic transistors in processors.

The discovery could lead to even greater interest in the experimental material, which has already attracted the attention of researchers at IBM, HP, and Intel. Graphene, which consists of carbon atoms arranged in a one-atom-thick sheet, is a component of graphite. Its structure is related to carbon nanotubes, another carbon-based material that's being studied for use in future generations of electronics. Both graphene and carbon nanotubes can transport electrons extremely quickly, which could allow very fast switching speeds in electronics. Graphene-based transistors, for example, could run at speeds a hundred to a thousand times faster than today's silicon transistors.

But graphene sheets have one significant disadvantage compared with the silicon used in today's chips. Although graphene can be switched between different states of electrical conductivity--the basic characteristic of semiconductor transistors--the difference between these states, called the on/off ratio, isn't very high. That means that unlike silicon, which can be switched off, graphene continues to conduct a lot of electrons even in its "off" state. A chip made of billions of such transistors would waste an enormous amount of energy and therefore be impractical.

Researchers had theorized, however, that it might be possible to dramatically improve these on/off ratios by carving graphene sheets into very narrow ribbons just a few nanometers wide. There had been early evidence supporting these theories from researchers at IBM and Columbia University, but the ratios produced were still much lower than those in silicon.

Dai decided to take a different approach to making thin graphene ribbons. Whereas others had used lithographic techniques to carve away carbon atoms, Dai turned to a solution-based approach. He starts with graphite flakes, which are made of stacked sheets of graphene. Then he chemically inserts sulfuric acid and nitric acid molecules between these flakes and rapidly heats them up, vaporizing the acids and forcing the graphene sheets apart. "It's like an explosion," Dai says. "The sheets go separate ways, and the graphite expands by 200 times."

Next, he suspends the now-separated sheets of graphene in a solution and exposes them to ultrasonic waves. These waves break the sheets into smaller pieces. Surprisingly, Dai says, the sheets fracture not into tiny flakes but into thin and very long ribbons. These ribbons vary in size and shape, but their edges are smooth--which is key to having consistent electronic properties. The thinnest of the ribbons are less than 10 nanometers wide and several micrometers long. "I had no idea that these things could be made with such dimensions and smoothness," Dai says

When Dai made transistors out of these ribbons, he measured on/off ratios of more than 100,000 to 1, which is attractive for transistors in processors. Previously, room-temperature on/off ratios of graphene ribbons had been measured at about 30 to 1.

Still, many obstacles remain to making graphene processors using Dai's methods, says Walter de Heer, a physics professor at Georgia Tech. The ribbons made with Dai's process have to be sorted. Pieces that are too large or not in the shape of ribbons have to be weeded out. There also needs to be a way of arranging the ribbons into complex circuits.

However, researchers already have ideas about how to address these challenges. For example, graphene ribbons have more exposed bonds at their edges, so chemicals could be attached to these bonds that would direct the ribbons to bind to specific places to form complex circuits, de Heer says.

The best way to make graphene electronics, however, may be to take advantage of the fact that graphene can be grown in large sheets, says Peter Eklund, a professor of physics at Penn State. If better lithography methods are developed to pattern these sheets into narrow ribbons and circuits, this could provide a reliable way of making complex graphene-based electronics.

Ultimately, the most important aspect of Dai's work could be the fact that it has demonstrated electronic properties that were only theoretical before, Eklund says. And this could lead to even more interest in developing graphene for next-generation computers. "Once you get a whiff of narrow graphene ribbons with a high on/off ratio, this will tempt a lot of people to try to get in there and either make ribbons by high-technology lithographic processes, or try to improve the approach developed by Dai," says Eklund.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20119/page2/

LG 50PC55 Review

2008-03-07T19:25:00.000+08:00

50in Plasma

Picture
Sound
Features
Usability
Value

There are better performing panels out there, but very few for the price.

HD Ready:

yes

Resolution:

1366 x 768

Rating:

82%

Design

LG have realised that style sells and have employed an Italian design studio to improve on the rather clunky look of LG's of the past.

With its piano black minimalist look complemented by a stand in the same style, the 50PC55 looks like it could actually claw back sales that were lost as a result of previous models rather 'clunky' style. The finishing slim silver strip which separates the screen frame from the full length horizontal speaker at the units base completes a rather chic piece of kit that won't look out of place even in the most fashion conscious of households.

Features

Connectivity on the LG 42PC55 is adequate rather than outstanding, with 2 HDMI inputs along with 2 Scarts and the usual Composite video input, Component video input, S-video and PC input.

Screen: 50in 16:9

Tuner: Digital

Sound System: Nicam

Resolution: 1366 x 768

Contrast Ratio: 15,000:1

Brightness: 1500cd/m2

Other Features: XD Image Processing Engine, MPEG Noise Reduction, Digital Comb Filter .

Sockets: 2 HDMI, 2 SCART, Component Video, Composite Video, PC input.

Picture processing technology on the 50PC55 comes in the shape of LG's proprietary XD engine. The XD Engine brings together a range of picture processing enhancements under the XD umbrella, and amongst other things focuses on improving the input signal quality.

The XD engine is complimented by MPEG Noise Reduction processing which has been designed to eliminate video noise once it hits the screen.

The 50PC55 is equipped with Clear Filter Pro, an advanced thin film filter designed to improve brightness, contrast, and more importantly to reduce screen reflections.

Also featuring a Digital Comb Filter, LG's 50PC55 separates TV signals into Brightness and Colour components, aiming to provide softer and cleaner images.

Performance

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the LG 50PC55's performance considering its budget status is its black level ability. It can't match the benchmark 'Kuro' screens from Pioneer, but nevertheless puts in a wholly convincing performance that is the equal of most LCD TV's. Darker scenes look genuinely black, and only reveal a certain amount of greyness on closer inspection.

Disappointingly however some of the detailing on darker scenes lacked the subtlety possessed by more accomplished performers. Instead of a smooth colour transition, we were often faced with a 'graduated' transition.

Like its smaller brother the 42PC55, it is the High Definition (HD) performance of the 50PC55 that makes it such a serious contender for best budget home cinema screen. Pictures posses all the detail and sharpness you will ever need, and the depth of colour on such a reasonably priced piece of kit is a revelation.

Unfortunately, the 50PC55 is not quite as accomplished as we would have liked with fast motion sequences. Although the effect does not intrude to any great degree on the viewing experience, there is a noticeable amount of 'blocking' with faster action.

Inevitably, there is a fair amount of grain and video noise with Standard Definition (SD) sources. To a degree this is a reflection of the 50PC55's size, but it is also a reflection of the budget status of the kit.

The acoustic ability of the LG 50PC55 is nothing more and nothing less than adequate. Lack of bass is the main problem, and as the majority of buyers will probably be upgrading the sound capability on this unit, it won't be a problem.

Conclusion

There are better LCD's and Plasma's out there, but the LG 50PC55 offers a level of performance that is hard to beat for the price. An excellent choice for a budget home cinema system.

http://www.hdtvorg.co.uk/reviews/plasma/lg_50pc55.htm

Sony Bravia KDL-40D3500 40in LCD TV

2008-03-07T19:23:00.000+08:00

So how come the 40D3500 only earns a 7 for picture quality? Because it suffers more than it really should from that old LCD bugbear of motion blur. And so while static images look superb, whenever anything moves around the screen at any sort of speed - especially if you're watching standard definition - the picture starts to look smeared and indistinct. And no matter what we did with the image's various settings, there wasn't a single thing we could do about it. Grrr.

Moving on to the 40D3500's audio, there's enough raw, distortion-free power to give at least a modicum of satisfaction when watching even a pretty intense action movie. Voices remain clear no matter how loud everything else in the mix is, though as with many LCD TVs, bass feels a little ‘poppy', lacking the sheer depth to really make a good, meaty explosion sound convincing.

Verdict

In some ways - black levels and colours, at any rate - the 40D3500 continues Sony's forward progression with LCD. But it needs to get its head around this motion-handling business too if it's really to start challenging the very top LCD dogs.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/tvs/review/2008/02/24/Sony-Bravia-KDL-40D3500-40in-LCD-TV/p3

BRAVIA

2008-03-07T19:17:00.001+08:00

BRAVIA is a Sony brand used to market its high-definition LCD televisions as well as front and rear projection TVs. The name is an acronym of "Best Resolution Audio Visual Integrated Architecture". All new Sony high-definition flat-panel LCD televisions in North America now carry the BRAVIA logo. The BRAVIA brand is also used on mobile phones, including the FOMA SO903iTV, developed by Sony Ericsson for NTT DoCoMo.^[1]^[2]

The name BRAVIA replaces the "LCD WEGA" brand name which Sony LCD TVs used up until Summer 2005 (early promotional photos exist of the first BRAVIA TVs still bearing the WEGA name).

Usage and capabilities

Like other high definition television lines the various Bravia models differ in capability as well as screen size. Display capability depends on which high definition outputs are supported, and the input signal supplied to the television. Bravia televisions can display video from a variety of sources. The quality of the picture depends on the quality of the input.

The coax connector can receive regular television broadcasts, cable, and VCR/DVD output and will also receive and decode whatever high definition content is available on broadcast or cable television. Most high definition television which is broadcast is in the lower resolution high-definition formats.

Other traditional VCR/DVD outputs such as S-Video or Composite video deliver the traditional television resolution that is no better than the resolution displayed by traditional television.

The HDMI input delivers the highest quality signal to the television and produces the highest quality high definition television picture, to the limits of the capabilities of the television. However, all HDMI has the HDCP content protection system built-in and this will degrade resolution of the display should the HDCP detect the presence of an unauthorized device. This limits the devices which deliver high definition TV content to those which are unable to record or otherwise duplicate protected content.

A VGA style computer connection is available, however the resolution of the video signal received from a computer may be limited to resolutions below the capability of the television depending on the capabilities of the computer's graphics card.

Purists will want to adjust the display on installation. The default configuration artificially enhances the color and contrast of the image to produce a more eye-catching, "vivid", display. This is easily done via a menu selection.

Some of the higher end XBR models include MotionFlow 120 Hz, Sony's name for frame interpolation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAVIA

Sony LCD HDTV S Series - KLV-32S310A/B

2008-03-07T19:08:00.002+08:00

The 32” (81cm) S-Series BRAVIA features S-FORCE Front Surround to deliver amazing virtual surround sound with built-in television speakers. Other features such as PC input allow the user to connect a PC for viewing content in a 16:9 high resolution environment.

HD Ready
BRAVIA Engine
S-FORCE Front Surround
Advanced Contrast Enhancer (ACE)
2 HDMI Connections
BRAVIA Theatre Sync
1 Tuner PAP

http://www.sony.com.sg/product/klv-32s310a?site=hp_en_SG_i

Canon LV-7585

2008-03-07T18:17:00.002+08:00

Overview

To provide the most powerful, bright and feature-rich projector for situations which call for permanent installation, Canon is proud to present the LV-7585. With new design details to enhance its efficiency in mounting and operation and its brilliant 6500 ANSI lumens, the LV-7585 is ideal for the most demanding boardroom or theater installations. HDTV and HD compatible, it has been designed and built to provide the range of image controls and versatility you need for the most demanding circumstances. And of course with the optical performance you can only get in a Canon projector.

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=132&modelid=16040

Canon EOS 40D

2008-03-07T18:09:00.001+08:00

As anticipated Canon has today announced the successor to the hugely popular EOS 30D digital SLR. Enter the EOS 40D, headline improvements are a more robust build with weather-proofing, ten megapixel CMOS sensor, DIGIC III and 1D style menus, 6.5 fps continuous shooting, three custom user modes on mode dial, 3.0" LCD monitor, Live View with optional mirror-drop auto-focus, larger brighter viewfinder with interchangeable focusing screens, much shorter viewfinder blackout and a quieter mirror mechanism, a all new AF system with all nine points cross-type with F5.6 or faster lens and a new optional combo vertical / WiFi grip.

Canon EOS 40D brings new EOS platform toadvanced amateur market

Amstelveen, The Netherlands, 20 August, 2007: Canon today introduces its latest digital SLR for advanced amateurs and semi-professionals: the EOS 40D. With a 10.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor, 6.5 frames per second burst performance, a newly developed AF system and 3.0” LCD with Live View mode, the EOS 40D makes significant advances in both performance and versatility.

The camera benefits from the new EOS technology platform introduced earlier this year with the professional EOS‑1D Mark III. Canon’s DIGIC III processor delivers responsive operation, improved colour rendering and near-instant start-up time. The EOS Integrated Cleaning System combats sensor dust, while a strong magnesium alloy body with weather resistance ensures lasting durability.

“The EOS 40D represents an important step in the development of EOS for the advanced amateur market. It incorporates many of the technologies pioneered in our latest EOS-1 series cameras,” said Mogens Jensen, Head of Canon Consumer Imaging, Europe. “For digital photographers, the benefits of upgrading to the EOS 40D are real and significant. For analogue SLR users, there’s never been a more compelling reason to make the switch.”

Key features

10.1 Megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor
6.5 fps continuous shooting, max. burst 75 JPEGs
New AF system with 9 cross-type sensors
DIGIC III processor
3.0” LCD with Live View mode
EOS Integrated Cleaning System
Clear and bright viewfinder
Customisable Picture Style processing parameters
Speed and image quality

Canon’s third generation CMOS sensor improves on its predecessor with redesigned pixels that keep noise to a minimum. The EOS 40D maintains high image quality up to ISO 1600, expandable to H:3200 for situations where flash use is not permitted or desired. Highlight Tone Priority mode gives wedding and landscape photographers the option to boost dynamic range for highlights when shooting above ISO 200 – reproducing more tonal detail from wedding dresses, clouds and other light coloured objects.

The DIGIC III processor powers a burst rate of 6.5 fps, working with the image buffer to handle up to 75 Large JPEGs (17 in RAW) without pause. Images are processed at 14-bits for a greatly expanded colour depth, providing smoother gradations and exceptionally accurate colour reproduction.

New cross-type AF system

A key advancement of the EOS 40D is its new 9-point cross-type AF system. All nine AF points can achieve focus on both horizontal and vertical planes. A central AF point is capable of accurate focusing up to aperture f/2.8, with eight outer points working up to f/5.6. In response to requests, the dedicated AF Start (AF-ON) button allows photographers to execute auto focus with their thumb.

LCD with Live View mode

The Live View mode simplifies shooting from awkward angles such as ground-level macro or mounted tripod shots. The 3.0” LCD displays a real-time image in Live View mode, including a selectable grid overlay and a live histogram that simulates image exposure. The AF-ON button can be configured to flip the camera mirror momentarily and engage auto focusing. For the studio environment, remote Live View lets the photographer compose, adjust settings and capture the shot from a PC using the supplied EOS utility software.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0708/07082010canoneos40d.asp

Higher-Capacity Memory

2008-03-06T18:54:00.000+08:00

A new type of memory could soon be available to device makers.

Sharp memory: Ultrasharp silicon tips like this one, which is just 10 nanometers wide, are the core of a new memory technology that could soon provide an alternative to flash.
Credit: Nanochip

An alternative to the flash memory that stores and retrieves data with arrays of microscopic probes could soon be on the market. Nanochip, a company based in Fremont, CA, has recently raised $14 million to complete work on prototypes that it hopes to ship to electronics device makers for evaluation next year.

Nanochip's technology offers advantages to flash memory, both in terms of the amount of data that can be stored and the cost per memory chip, says Gordon Knight, the company's CEO. The first prototypes will store about 100 gigabytes, he says--more than the tens of gigabytes stored on flash memory cards today. Eventually, the devices could store terabytes' worth of data, he says. That's likely out of the reach of flash-type memory, says Stefan Lai, formerly the director of flash memory technology at Intel and now a scientific advisor to Nanochip.

In flash memory, information is stored using specialized transistors, each of which is addressed by a grid of conducting wires. The Nanochip technology, in contrast, stores information by writing data to a thin-film material using an array of microscopic cantilevers, each with an extremely sharp tip. The size of each bit will be 15 nanometers in the first devices, but it could theoretically be as small as just a couple of nanometers.

Nanochip's array-based memory provides an alternative to both flash memory and hard drives. In addition to storing more data than flash, it will be cheaper and can be about as fast, Knight says. What's more, it could last longer than flash. Compared with hard drives, the manufacturing processes used will make Nanochip's devices more economical for small portable electronics, Lai says. The company's memory devices would also be more rugged than hard drives and run virtually silently.

The idea of using microscopically sharp tips to store data is not new. In the late 1990s, IBM demonstrated its Millipede technology, which used arrays of a thousand such tips to write and read bits. (See "Bugged about the Future of Magnetic Storage?") The Millipede program is still active at IBM but so far hasn't produced a commercial memory chip. Nanochip uses a similar approach.

However, while IBM's Millipede uses a polymer material, with data stored by heating and indenting the material with the ultrasharp tip, Nanochip uses a material that can be written electronically: applying a voltage through the tip changes the electronic state of the material at the point of contact. That state can later be read using a weaker voltage. Knight says that the electronic process is faster than a thermal process.

A remaining challenge is engineering a complete chip with thousands of cantilevers. The arrays will need to be mounted on a stage that can be moved, using electrostatic forces, over the storage material and combined with electronics that make it possible to control each tip separately. Part of the challenge will be writing the algorithms for controlling the device to optimize how to store data using the moving stage, says William King, professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. (King was part of the Millipede team at IBM and is a scientific advisor to Nanochip.) In both hard drives and flash memory, he says, bits can be accessed sequentially. But in this system, to take advantage of the parallel arrays of tips, methods of storing and retrieving thousands of bits at once will need to be developed.

"It's a big challenge, but it's something I believe can be done," Lai says. "And if you solve the problems, then you have a whole new memory technology that's available."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20192/

The Next Generation of iPhone Hacks

2008-03-06T18:48:00.001+08:00

Apple's plan to release a software kit that lets people create legitimate add-ons for the iPhone could make the device appeal to an even wider audience.

Virtual rock star: An iPhone owner plays a virtual guitar. Shinya Kasatani developed software called pocketguitar that lets a person play a guitar by pressing and strumming the phone’s touch screen. Apple has not approved pocketguitar, like many other third-party applications made for the iPhone. However, this month the company is planning to release a software development kit that will allow developers to make legitimate applications.
Credit: Shinya Kasatani

Multimedia

•	See how the virtual guitar works.

In today's cell-phone market, the iPhone stands out as the shining example of what a handheld device should have: a sleek design, easy-to-use software, and an intuitive interface. But the day Apple released it, geeks found the phone lacking, and they went to work to make their own software for it. These hackers have been crafting clever add-ons that range from instant access to a Blockbuster Online DVD queue to a pocket guitar that takes advantage of the touch screen. In addition, people have found ways to unlock the iPhone from AT&T, so that it can work on other cellular-phone networks.

All of these hacks, however, are done without Apple's blessing or technical support. This month, Apple is expected to release a software development kit (SDK) that will allow programmers to write legitimate software for the phone. This will enable developers to make more reliable software, and it will let the average iPhone owner easily download new programs without needing to follow arduous online instructions from blogs. And importantly, an SDK will likely spawn a new world of applications--possibly even business software--that could extend the reach of the iPhone beyond a user base of four million, as announced in January. "When you have a device like the iPhone that can attract so many people, you also have enterprise developers who want to use that interface," says Mike McGuire, an analyst for Gartner, a market research firm. He says that an SDK will lead to commercial applications for the business sector, "and that's where the real money is."

The average iPhone owner uses the handheld as Apple intended, updating the software and installing media via iTunes. "By default, the only way to get anything on the iPhone is by using iTunes," says Jerry Jones, a developer who has made an iPhone widget that accesses a user's Blockbuster movie queue, as well as a program that lets people adjust the phone's shortcuts so that a double click of the home key launches different applications than Apple's default. But if you want to add these kinds of illegitimate files to your iPhone, you must jump through some technical hoops. "Truthfully, it's not for the faint of heart," Jones says. "If you're not a technology geek, it's not super simple."

Still, there is a large community of people who are hacking their iPhones. One of the most popular programs is a game called Labyrinth that lets a user roll a virtual marble through a maze by tilting the phone (the game accesses the built-in accelerometer). Labyrinth has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, Jones says. Comparatively, his Blockbuster application, which targets a niche market, has been downloaded about 56,000 times. Although these numbers don't indicate how many people have hacked their phone (some people might have downloaded the software more than once to test it, for example), they show that the number of people interested in such software isn't trivial.

One hack that has garnered YouTube notoriety turns an iPhone into a guitar. Shinya Kasatani, who wrote the software, says that it is easy to use for people familiar with a real guitar: the phone's screen is turned into a virtual fret board on which a person can press and pluck. "It's basically a software-based synthesizer with a guitar user interface," Kasatani says. "The audio sample of a guitar string is loaded from a file and stretched to the desired frequency when playing." Since there wasn't an SDK, Kasatani says, he struggled with understanding the intricacies of the iPhone's built-in software. It was difficult to adjust the volume of the sound output and detect the multitouch input without a trial-and-error approach. "We, the developers, definitely need the official SDK and [programming] documentation to build stable applications," he say

When Apple releases its SDK, more applications like this could become available, just as they are on PCs and Macs today. However, details on the upcoming SDK are scant, and McGuire guesses that Apple won't open much of the functionality of the phone. "I suspect that it's not going to be a wide open SDK," he says. Programmers might have access to certain layers of the phone's underlying software, such as the instructions that allow widgets to access the Internet, but Apple may keep the instructions for accessing the accelerometer, for example, under wraps. "Apple likes to keep things locked down," McGuire says.

He adds that the control is essential to ensuring that the iPhone works well for most of the people most of the time. In addition, Apple's control is important for ensuring software stability and security--two important criteria if the phone is to be used in the business setting. "I get the impression that [Apple] wants to make [the iPhone] somewhat corporate friendly," McGuire says. "I think you're going to see a lot of focus on pulling developers in to make form-based applications"--the kind used in a sales environment, for example. He says that he suspects Apple will treat third-party software the same way that it approves iPod accessories: by requiring vendors to register with Apple to acquire a badge noting Apple's approval. In this way, Apple could maintain some control over the quality of outside applications, which could help make them more secure.

Regardless of the access the SDK provides to programmers, and the safety precautions available for certified third-party programs, the hacking community will continue to innovate around the iPhone. "Even without the official SDK," says Kasatani, "it's much more attractive than Windows Mobile." The Mac operating system and user interface are more fun to use, he says, and the multitouch display makes it especially interesting to work with.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20193/?a=f

Robots

2008-03-06T18:45:00.000+08:00

No discussion of cool tech in Japan would be complete without robots. Japanese researchers are leading the world in robot technology, and humanoid bots like Honda's Asimo are especially impressive.

The latest version of Asimo can serve drinks on a tray and has gained the ability to work intelligently with other Asimo robots in the vicinity to get jobs done faster. Two of the robots have spent most of January working at Honda's Tokyo offices, bringing tea or coffee to guests--and almost certainly entertaining the visitors at the same time.

Rival car-maker Toyota has a clutch of robots including one unveiled in December that plays the violin. (It follows a trumpet-playing robot created a year earlier, so perhaps a robot orchestra is in the making?) The company also has Robina, which is intended to serve as a guide in a public space. Toyota put it into use last year at a public hall in Japan and expects robots like Robina will be commercially realistic in the middle of the next decade.

Taking on a much more serious role is Twendy One, a home-help robot developed by Tokyo's Waseda University. It can do many of the basic tasks that a frail person may need help with, such as assisting people out of bed and serving up toast and drinks.

The robot is still under development but could have a bright future. Japan's population is aging fast--already, 22 percent of people are over 65--and the birth rate is slowing. That likely means a future shortage of workers. It's one of the reasons money is being poured into robot technology in this already technology-saturated nation.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142120-page,5-c,electronics/article.html

A new earthquakes warning system

2008-03-06T18:41:00.002+08:00

One area that's taken very seriously by people in Japan is earthquakes and disaster prevention. The problem is, you never know when a quake could strike, right? Well, not necessarily.

A new warning system has just gone into operation that seeks to quickly detect the weak but fast-moving primary waves from a quake and use them to estimate when the slower-moving but destructive secondary waves will hit.

The system won't help people living at the epicenter of an earthquake, since both kinds of waves arrive virtually simultaneously. But in the event of a major quake, warnings of anywhere from a few seconds to up to a minute can be supplied almost instantaneously.

That's enough time to halt trains and bring factory equipment to an emergency stop, and for homeowners to switch off the gas. Most deaths in the Kobe quake of 1995 were from fires that started after the quake, so preventing flameups is important.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142120-page,4-c,electronics/article.html

Connected Cars

2008-03-06T18:39:00.000+08:00

Connected Cars

In Japan, car navigation systems have been a must-have accessory in automobiles for years. Streets in cities like Tokyo often don't have names, so a navigation system can really save you time. But the latest systems, offered by companies like Nissan, come with something extra.

Hook your navigation system to your cell phone, and you have a connection through which you can get the latest road and traffic data. The navigation system already knows where the nearest gas station is, but with the network link it can also tell you where the cheapest station is, thanks to daily updates on gas prices.

When you're driving, the phone can connect you to an operator who will help you on your journey and even remotely reprogram your navigation system so that you never have to take your hands off the wheel.

About 10 percent of streets are covered with sensors that provide information on traffic. Nissan is experimenting with a new service that collects data about the roads you've driven and the speeds you've achieved, and feeds it to a central computer that adds the information to the traffic database for a more complete picture of jams.

High-tech is also being employed in car safety systems like the Round View Monitor. The video from four cameras around the vehicle is processed and brought together into a single image so that you get the illusion of seeing your car from above. It makes backing into tight spaces really easy and is a big-step beyond the single cameras now found on some large cars and trucks.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142120-page,3-c,electronics/article.html

Mobile Wallet Service

2008-03-06T18:37:00.000+08:00

Mobile Wallet Service

Something else that's popular in cell phones these days is the "Osaifu keitai," the mobile wallet service. Phones have smart cards embedded inside, and these cards let you add applications like electronic money, your commuter pass, an airline mileage card, or a credit card just by downloading some software.

The strength of Japan's mobile wallet system is that the industry has settled on a single smart card, Sony's Felica. Once a person's phone has this hardware, he or she can add more functionality with software.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest cellular carrier, gives all its customers an electronic credit card application called DCMX Mini. It has a 10,000-yen ($94) credit limit, and charges appear on the phone bill. Big spenders can apply for more credit and use it just like a regular credit card. All you have to do is bring your phone within an inch of the reader and the transaction can be completed.

Electronic money--something that was tried many times but failed during the dot-com bubble--is now becoming very popular, thanks to "Osaifu keitai."

Of the electronic money systems in Japan, Edy from BitWallet is the market leader, accepted in more than 71,000 convenience stores, bookshops, and coffee chains, and at vending machines. More than 37 million cards and cell phones that support Edy are on the market, and the network handles close to a million transactions per day on average.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142120-page,2-c,electronics/article.html#

Flash Goes Mobile

2008-03-06T18:17:00.002+08:00

Web to go: A new mobile browser has been launched that can display full Flash media content. This makes it possible for users to view far more of the Web on a mobile phone than they could previously.
Credit: Opera

No matter how much money you spend on a cell phone, the Web you see on its small screen isn't quite the same as the one you view on a laptop. Some features often can't run on mobile-phone Web browsers. But the latest version of Opera Mobile could bring more of the Web to your mobile world. Capable of displaying full Flash media content, Opera Mobile version 9.5 makes it possible to use cell phones and handheld computers to view online animations and movies.

Stripped-down versions of the Web have been offered to mobile users in the past. But these have been widely viewed as flops, says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software, based in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. "There is only one Web, and that's what the end user wants," he says.

Recently, there have been improvements in the design of mobile browsers and their user interfaces in an effort to deliver a more complete Web-browsing experience via mobile devices. But even the swanky browser in Apple's iPhone doesn't support Flash, which puts a limit on the content that users can access with the device.

"A full version of Flash inside the browser makes it possible for users to view the normal versions of video-based websites like YouTube or DailyMotion," says Ian Fogg, research director with London-based analyst firm Jupiter Research.

Some phones offer a lightweight version, called Flash Lite--which is how iPhone users are able to access YouTube--but it has reduced sound and video quality, and only a small minority of devices offer it.

Opera Software was spun out of the Norwegian telecom company Telenor in 1995 and is famed for concentrating almost exclusively on mobile browsing. In addition to offering Flash, the company claims that its latest version can run 2.5 times faster than Microsoft's mobile browser. "Speed is our focus," says von Tetzchner. It is something that the company is very proud of, and it's largely due to optimizing the code so that it runs more efficiently on the limited processing resources of a mobile device, he says.

Users of the new browser will also find tabbed browsing (which allows the user to open multiple Web pages at the same time without launching multiple browser windows) and additional mobile features, such as the ability to easily send a Web link to someone as a text message. "There are a lot of improvements," says von Tetzchner. But it's still not the full Web, because there are still applications that Opera does not support, such as Windows Media. But eventually, it will all be supported, von Tetzchner says.

Despite the advantages of Opera Mobile, the company faces significant competition. Historically, Opera's main revenues have come from device manufacturers such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson, which offer the browser on their phones as preinstalled software. "But this model of supplying to the device markets is coming under pressure," says Fogg.

Increasingly, companies like Nokia are turning to open source engines, such as WebKit--the engine behind the browser on Nokia's N-Series devices and iPhones. Similarly, Google's Android platform has been heralded as the software that will bring the "desktop" experience to the mobile Web user, when it eventually comes. But von Tetzchner is pragmatic about it. "There's always going to be competition," he says.

In the meantime, having Flash on your phone may not be all it's cracked up to be. It may give you access to your favorite video websites, but only if the phone's processor and hardware are fast enough to cope. "Often they are not," says Fogg. "This may be one reason that the iPhone does not yet have Flash support."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20198/page1/

Only in Japan: The Best Technologies You Can't Buy

2008-03-06T18:14:00.000+08:00

True mobile TV. Connected cars. Personal robots. The coolest new gadgets and services are still found in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Just a few years ago Japan's lead in all things digital was easy to see. Japanese consumers could buy new domestic gadgets from companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic, often a year or two before they hit the market in other countries. But now things have changed. With gadgets increasingly coming out at the same time around the world, it's no longer the hardware that makes something cool, but what you can do with it.

[Note: To see some of the technology and services described here in action, watch our video, "Made in Japan: Future Tech Today."]

Mobile Digital TV

Take OneSeg, Japan's mobile digital TV system. The entire electronics industry, TV broadcasters, and the government all agreed on a single broadcasting standard, eliminating the technical competition that's holding back such services in the United States and Europe.

The result is a popular service that features all the regular terrestrial channels at no cost. Already, 14 million cell phones with the service have been sold, and the sight of people watching TV is becoming more common on trains and in cafes across Japan.

The latest phones also allow you to record TV shows. And if you're in a public space but forgot to bring your headphones, it's no problem. A couple of button presses brings up the subtitles so you can enjoy the show with the volume turned down. In addition, a companion data service provides information about the current show, promotions from the broadcaster, and, often, a link to the TV station's mobile Internet home page.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142120/article.html#

Trading Technology

2008-03-06T17:01:00.002+08:00

Internet Trading

Internet Trading unleashes the potential of the Internet by providing the broking members of an exchange with the functionality to grant limited / full access to any of their clients.

When making this connection, the broker is guaranteed complete confidentiality and the rules of the exchange are strictly adhered to. The exchange receives bids and offers from the broker, acting as an agent on behalf of a client. Every such bid or offer is checked against limits, SET UP BY THE BROKER, and when any bid or offer is satisfied all other bids and offers are re-checked. Order authorization is totally unnecessary if the order is within the limits set by the broker, however, the facility is available.

The client has a restricted set of ATS functions, for example they cannot make a request for a double, or an RFQ. In real time however, they can bid, offer, hit a bid or offer, view their orders, trades, positions, and margin requirement.

As the Internet ATS server behaves just as a dealer would who receives a call from a client, a dealer who is logged in will see all the client orders as they are created and as they become trades and positions.

The Internet ATS software package consists of three separate modules, each performing specific functions.

ATS Inet server

Provides the interface between the client, broker and the appropriate exchange through which all deals take place. Stores a client database. The ATS Inet server runs at the broker. The broker can add new clients, delete clients or modify existing client data. Adding a client will grant them access to the relevant exchange system via the internet, if the client has the ATS Client Interface installed on their PC and has access to the internet. When a client is added the broker can choose to which degree the client is restricted to deal by setting the margin limits of the client, deciding whether the client can hit only, view depth and whether the client needs authorization to make deals. A client may also be denied dealing at all and will only be able to view the live data that is transmitted from the relevant exchange. If a client is deleted from the database, they will no longer be able to access the relevant financial market via the internet until they are added to the system again. The client's particulars may also be modified so that more/fewer restrictions are placed on them, according to the current wishes of the broker.

ATS Client Interface

Provides the means through which a client of the broker can view live exchange data, provides the means through which a client of the broker can make deals through the internet. The ATS Client Interface runs at the client. The client must be a registered exchange client, have access to the internet and have the ATS Client Interface installed on their PC. The client will have to supply their personal password before they are allowed to connect to the ATS Inet server. They will then be able to see live data streaming in from the relevant exchange on their terminal, and will be able to perform whatever functions their broker has allowed.

Monitor

The main function of the Monitor is to enable the broker to authorize the deals that a client wishes to make. The Monitor runs at the broker. Brokers will be able to see all those deals for which they wish to deny or grant approval, according to the criteria set up in the ATS Inet server for each client. When a client attempts to make a bid or offer that requires such approval, the client's code and details of the transaction will appear on the screen. The broker can then accept or decline the proposed deal at the click of a button.

Security and data integrity

A number of security measures have been built into the Internet ATS:

Encryption / Decryption

Any deals (bids/offers), or password changes made by the client is sensitive data that needs to be secured. The sensitive data is encrypted at the Client Interface and decrypted at the Internet server by making use of a complex encryption/decryption algorithm. The data is encrypted using an untraceable key, which includes random elements and changes daily. The key is calculated independently at both the Client Interface and the Internet server, making use of identical formulae, and is therefore never transmitted with the sensitive data.

Time encapsulation

Potentially, a hacker can intercept a sensitive message and re-send it a number of times to the Inet server without tampering with the message itself. Any number of identical transactions, unwanted by the client, can be performed at the exchange in this way as long as the margin limit of the client is not transgressed. In order to prevent this, the current time is recorded as part of the sensitive message, and is subsequently encrypted at the Client Interface and decrypted at the Internet server.

When a valid sensitive message has been sent (for example a client has made a valid bid) the time that is encapsulated within the message is stored at the Internet server. When the client sends a subsequent sensitive message, the time that is encapsulated in the second message is compared to the time that had been stored previously. Logic dictates that the time encapsulated in the second message must be a copy of an earlier message. Since the time that is encapsulated is also encrypted within the sensitive message, this cannot be tampered with and the potential scenario, as described, will not occur.

Password Issues

Password lengths must be a certain length and must contain at least 5 different characters. The client must change their password regularly. Recent passwords are stored at the Internet server and new passwords are checked against these so that passwords are not re-used often. If consecutive logins are unsuccessful, it is assumed that someone is tampering with the client's system.

In this case the Internet server changes the client's password to a random number, and a message is sent to the client to contact their broker who will be able to notify them what their password had been changed to. The client will then be able to re-iogin and change their password again should they wish to do so. Each time that a sensitive message is sent (for example on making a bid), the client must provide their password. In this way tampering by other people is minimized when the client is away from their computer.

Set out below are our technological specifications for each module of our Internet Automated Trading System:

Internet SERVERS:

100 % IBM compatible 350 Mhz Pentium
64MB RAM
1.4MB stiffy drive 1 GB Hard Drive VGA
Windows NT Server
Windows IIS or equivalent
Novell 32 Client

Internet CLIENTS and MONITOR:

100 % IBM compatible 200 Mhz Pentium
32MB RAM
1.4MB stiffy drive 1 GB Hard Drive
VGA
Windows 95/98/NT

http://www.sttsoftware.co.za/productInternetTrading.html#

Options Trading Technology

2008-03-06T16:58:00.000+08:00

The Optioneer strategy uses proprietary technology that has been formulated to give you two valuable indicators that identify trade entry and exit points.

Probability or "P" Factor: The probability of the market being outside the Strike price by contract expiration date.
Risk or "R" Factor: The risk associated with entering the market.

The tried formulas which enable both "R" and "P" factors to be determined are calculated daily by Optioneer Systems and posted on the web site. Without these two indicators we believe it is very difficult to assess one's position on a daily basis.

Through regular practice in smaller trades, skills can be honed, while at the same time gaining confidence and building market knowledge

http://www.optioneer.com.au/options-trading-technology

Information technology governance

2008-03-06T16:55:00.001+08:00

Information Technology Governance, IT Governance or ICT (Information & Communications Technology) Governance, is a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology (IT) systems and their performance and risk management. The rising interest in IT governance is partly due to compliance initiatives (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley (USA) and Basel II (Europe)), as well as the acknowledgment that IT projects can easily get out of control and profoundly affect the performance of an organization.

A characteristic theme of IT governance discussions is that the IT capability can no longer be a black box. The traditional handling of IT management by board-level executives is that due to limited technical experience and IT complexity, key decisions are deferred to IT professionals. IT governance implies a system in which all stakeholders, including the board, internal customers and related areas such as finance, have the necessary input into the decision making process. This prevents a single stakeholder, typically IT, being blamed for poor decisions. It also prevents users from later complaining that the system does not behave or perform as expected:

A board needs to understand the overall architecture of its company's IT applications portfolio … The board must ensure that management knows what information resources are out there, what condition they are in, and what role they play in generating revenue

Definitions

There are narrower and broader definitions of IT governance. Weill and Ross focus on "Specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behaviour in the use of IT."^[2]

In contrast, the IT Governance Institute expands the definition to include underpinning mechanisms: "… the leadership and organisational structures and processes that ensure that the organisation’s IT sustains and extends the organisation’s strategies and objectives. ^[3]

While AS8015, the Australian Standard for Corporate Governance of ICT, defines Corporate Governance of ICT as "The system by which the current and future use of ICT is directed and controlled. It involves evaluating and directing the plans for the use of ICT to support the organisation and monitoring this use to achieve plans. It includes the strategy and policies for using ICT within an organisation."

Background

The discipline of information technology governance derives from corporate governance and deals primarily with the connection between business focus and IT management of an organization. It highlights the importance of IT related matters in contemporary organizations and states that strategic IT decisions should be owned by the corporate board, rather than by the chief information officer or other IT managers.

The primary goals for information technology governance are to (1) assure that the investments in IT generate business value, and (2) mitigate the risks that are associated with IT. This can be done by implementing an organizational structure with well-defined roles for the responsibility of information, business processes, applications, infrastructure, etc.

Decision rights are a key concern of IT governance, being the primary topic of the book by that name by Weill and Ross.^[4] According to Weill and Ross, depending on the size, business scope, and IT maturity of an organization, either centralized, decentralized or federated models of responsibility for dealing with strategic IT matters are suggested. In this view, the well defined control of IT is the key to success.

After the widely reported collapse of Enron in 2000, and the alleged problems within Arthur Andersen and WorldCom, the duties and responsibilities of the boards of directors for public and privately held corporations were questioned. As a response to this, and to attempt to prevent similar problems from happening again, the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act was written to stress the importance of business control and auditing. Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel-II in Europe have been catalysts for the development of the discipline of information technology governance since the early 2000s. However, the concerns of Sarbanes Oxley (in particular Section 404) have less to do with IT decision rights as discussed by Weill and Ross, and more to do with operational control processes such as Change management.

Following Corporate Collapses in Australia around the same time, working groups were established to develop standards for Corporate Governance. A series of Australian Standards for Corporate Governance were published in 2003, these were:

Good Governance Principles (AS8000)
Fraud and Corruption Control (AS8001)
Organisational Codes of Conduct (AS8002)
Corporate Social Responsibility (AS8003)
Whistle Blower protection programs (AS8004)

In 2005, AS8015 Corporate Governance of ICT was published

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology_governance

A Better Way to Capture Carbon

2008-03-06T16:50:00.001+08:00

New materials provide a potentially cheaper way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Carbon-capturing crystals: This is an optical micrograph of a new material that can pull carbon dioxide from a stream of gases, making it possible to sequester the greenhouse gas.
Credit: Omar Yaghi

Researchers have developed porous materials that can soak up 80 times their volume of carbon dioxide, offering the tantalizing possibility that the greenhouse gas could be cheaply scrubbed from power-plant smokestacks. After the carbon dioxide has been absorbed by the new materials, it could be released through pressure changes, compressed, and, finally, pumped underground for long-term storage.

Such carbon dioxide capture and sequestration could be essential to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, especially in countries such as the United States that depend heavily on coal for electricity. The first stage, capturing the carbon, is particularly important, since it can account for 75 percent of the total costs, according to the Department of Energy.

The new materials, described this week in Science, were created by researchers at UCLA led by Omar Yaghi, a chemist known for producing materials with intricate microscopic structures. They absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide but do not absorb other gases.

Techniques already exist for capturing carbon dioxide from smokestacks, but they use large amounts of energy--15 to 20 percent of the total electricity output of a power plant, according to one estimate, Yaghi says. That is because existing materials, known as amines, need to be heated to release the carbon dioxide they've absorbed. Indeed, capturing and compressing carbon dioxide through these existing methods can add 80 to 90 percent to the cost of producing electricity from coal, says Thomas Feeley, a project manager at the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Feeley says that Yaghi's materials "compare favorably" with other experimental materials that absorb carbon dioxide that are being developed to help bring down these costs. Yaghi says that his materials could lower costs considerably since they use less energy, although exactly how much will require testing the materials at power plants.

Beyond being potentially useful in smokestacks, the materials could be employed in coal gasification plants. In these plants, coal is first processed to produce a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen is then used to generate electricity. The carbon dioxide could be captured using a solvent that increases energy consumption. But as in the smokestack-based process, the new UCLA materials could require less energy.

The materials belong to a class called zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs). They're made of metal atoms bridged by one of a number of ring-shaped organic molecules called imidazolates. Prior to Yaghi's research, 24 types of ZIFs had been developed over the course of 12 years. Yaghi made 25 new versions in just three months. These materials can be extremely versatile, since the metal atoms can act as powerful catalysts, and the organic molecules can serve as anchors for a number of functional molecules.

ZIF proliferation: New automated techniques allow researchers to quickly synthesize dozens of new materials called zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs). Credit: Omar Yaghi

The new materials absorb carbon dioxide in part because they're extremely porous, which gives them a high surface area that can come into contact with carbon dioxide molecules. The most porous of the materials that Yaghi reports in Science contain nearly 2,000 square meters of surface area packed into one gram of material. One liter of one of Yaghi's materials can store all of the molecules of carbon dioxide that, at zero °C and at ambient pressure, would take up a volume of 82.6 liters.

While the exact mechanisms are not fully understood, Yaghi thinks that the slightly negative charge of organic molecules in his material attracts carbon dioxide molecules, which have a slightly positive charge. As a result, carbon dioxide is held in place, while other gases move through the material. This method of trapping carbon dioxide is better than some other methods because it does not involve strong covalent bonds, so it doesn't take much energy to release the gas.

The next step for the materials is commercialization. This means scaling up production and incorporating the materials into a system at a power plant, such as by packing the materials into canisters that can be filled with pressurized exhaust gases--something that the UCLA group says could be possible in two to three years. Yaghi estimates that the materials could easily be made in large quantities, since they are similar to other materials he has developed that can now be made by the ton by BASF, the giant chemical company. "Now it's in the hands of industry," Yaghi says. And he has developed automated techniques that could lead to more materials that could have even better properties.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20295/page1/

Wiring Up DNA

2008-03-06T16:46:00.001+08:00

Measuring the conductivity of DNA could provide a way to detect mutations.

Hot-wired: By placing a double-stranded DNA segment in a gap in a single-walled carbon nanotube, researchers have measured the electrical properties of the biological molecule. Since even a single mismatch in the DNA letters affects the conductivity of the segment, the system could eventually be the basis of chemical sensors to detect mutations in DNA.
Credit: Colin Nuckolls

By wiring up DNA between two carbon nanotubes, researchers have measured the molecule's ability to conduct electricity. Introducing just a single letter change can drastically alter the DNA's resistance, the researchers found, a phenomenon that they plan to exploit with a device that can rapidly screen DNA for disease-linked mutations.

Measuring the electrical properties of DNA has proved tricky because the molecule and its attachments to electrodes tend to be very fragile. But in the new study, Colin Nuckolls, a professor of chemistry at Columbia University, in New York, teamed up with Jacqueline Barton, a professor of chemistry at Caltech, in Pasadena, CA, who's an expert in DNA charge transport. Nuckolls's group had previously developed a method for securely hooking up biological molecules to single-walled carbon nanotubes, which act as the electrodes in a miniscule circuit.

The researchers used an etching process to slice a gap in a carbon nanotube; they created a carboxylic acid group on the nanotube at each end of the gap. They then reacted these groups with DNA strands whose ends had been tagged with amine groups, creating tough chemical amide links that bond together the nanotubes and DNA. The amide linkages are robust enough to withstand enormous electrical fields.

The team estimated that DNA strands of around 15 base pairs (around 6 nanometers) in length had a resistance roughly equivalent to that of a similar-sized piece of graphite. This is a finding that the researchers might have expected since the chemical base pairs that constitute DNA create a stack of aromatic rings similar to those in graphite.

"In my opinion, the results of this work will survive, in contrast to many other publications on this topic," says chemist Bernd Giese, of the University of Basel, Switzerland. Previous estimates of DNA's conductivity have varied dramatically, Giese says, partly because it was unclear if the delicate DNA or its connection to electrodes had become damaged by the high voltages used. "One thinks one has burned the DNA to charcoal," Giese says. "It's extremely complicated experimentally."

Barton and Nuckolls performed two tricks with their wired-up DNA. For their first, they introduced a restriction enzyme that bound and cut the DNA at a specific sequence. When severed, the current running through the DNA vanished. "It's a way of biochemically blowing a fuse," Nuckolls says. It also demonstratesthat the DNA keeps its native structure in the circuit; if it had not, the enzyme would not recognize and cut the molecule.

For their second trick, the researchers introduced a single base-pair mismatch into the DNA so that, for example, a C was paired up with an A (rather than its normal partner, G). This tweak boosted the molecule's resistance some 300-fold, probably because it distorts the double helical structure. They could do this easily by connecting only one of DNA's two strands into the circuit. The second strand - which can either be a perfect match to the first or contain a mismatch - can lift on or off.

Showing the electrical effect of such sequence mismatch and enzyme cutting is the real strength of the experiments, says Danny Porath, of Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, Israel, who has also measured current through DNA. "They play with the parameters and show that conductivity of DNA clearly depends on them, and that's beautiful," he says.

Nuckolls is now working to exploit this discovery to detect single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), the one-letter variations in DNA that are linked to, for example, susceptibility to Alzheimer's, diabetes, and many other major diseases. Nuckolls hopes that his method can be used to identify SNPs more rapidly and with greater sensitivity than existing methods. In such a device, a reference strand of DNA is wired into the circuit and other strands allowed to pair up with it. If the second strand carries a different base at the position of the SNP, this would be enough to trigger a change in the current through a nanoscale circuit, just as the base-pair mismatch did. Nuckolls says that he is already working with electrical engineers to create a sensor that can slot into existing semiconductor chips, making it cheap and readily available. "It's one of our big focuses, and we're pretty close," he says.

The team is likely to have competition. Late last year, a group led by Wonbong Choi, of Florida International University, in Miami, reported that it had strung 80 base pairs of DNA between two carbon nanotubes and sent current through the DNA. Choi says that he is working to create a sensor that can rapidly reveal the presence of specific genetic sequences--such as the avian influenza virus--by looking at changes in current through the tiny circuit.

Barton, meanwhile, is intent on finding out whether the conductivity of DNA serves any biological purpose in the cell. She has evidence that proteins bound to DNA may detect DNA damage by changes in its electrical properties, perhaps triggering repair of the damage. "We think it's something nature takes advantage of," she says. "It's a radical idea, but I think as we get more and more evidence, the case will be built."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20205/page2/

Plucking Cells out of the Bloodstream

2008-03-05T18:31:00.002+08:00

A new implantable device can extract stem cells for therapeutic transplant or program cancer cells to die.

Cell catcher: University of Rochester bioengineer Michael King holds up a section of plastic microtubing lined with proteins that trap cancer and stem cells.
Credit: Richard Baker, University of Rochester

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•	Watch Michael King's new device in action.

Bioengineers have developed an implantable device that captures very pure samples of stem cells circulating in the blood. The device, a length of plastic tubing coated with proteins, could lead to better bone-marrow transplants and stem-cell therapies, and it also shows promise as a way to capture and reprogram cancer cells roaming the bloodstream. The company CellTraffix is commercializing the technology.

When patients get bone-marrow transplants, what they're really receiving are infusions of a type of adult stem cell. Bone-marrow-derived stem cells play a crucial role in renewing the blood throughout adulthood, creating new cells to carry oxygen and fight infections. These adult stem cells can be sampled using the new device.

The new device mimics a small blood vessel: it's a plastic tube a few hundred micrometers in diameter that's coated with proteins called selectins. The purpose of selectins in the body seems to be to slow down a few types of cells so that they can receive other chemical signals. A white blood cell, for instance, might be instructed to leave the circulation and enter a wound, where it would protect against infection. "Selectins cause [some] cells to stick and slow down," says Michael King, a chemical engineer at the University of Rochester who's developing the cell-capture devices. Different types of selectins associate with different kinds of cells, including platelets, bone-marrow-derived stem cells, and immune cells such as white cells.

In an upcoming publication in the British Journal of Hematology, King reports that selectin-coated microtubes implanted in rats can capture very pure samples of active stem cells from circulating blood. He gave a similar demonstration of stem-cell purification with samples taken from human bone marrow last year. Cancer patients often require bone-marrow transplants following harsh chemotherapy and radiation treatments that kill adult stem cells in the blood.

The purity of these transplants can be a matter of life or death. When the transplant is derived from the patient's own bone marrow--extracted before treatment--it's critical that it not contain any cancer cells. When it comes from another person, there's a chance that the donor's immune cells will attack the recipient if they're not filtered out. But current purification methods are slow and inefficient, King says. Those that rely on antibody recognition or cell size and shape typically extract only a small fraction of the stem cells in a blood sample; the rest go to waste.

Twenty-eight percent of the cells captured by King's implants were stem cells. "This is astounding given how rare they are in the bloodstream," says King. Implants would probably not be able to capture enough stem cells for transplant. But King believes that filtering a donor's blood through a long stretch of selectin-coated tubing outside the body, in a process similar to dialysis, would be very efficient. "This technique will clearly be useful outside the body" as a means of purifying bone-marrow-derived stem cells, says Daniel Hammer, chair of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hammer believes that King's devices will also have broader applications as implants that serve to mobilize a person's own stem cells to regenerate damaged tissues. By slowing down cells with selectins and then exposing them to other kinds of signals, says Hammer, King's devices "could capture stem cells, concentrate them, and differentiate them, without ever having to take the cells out of the body." There might be a way to use selectins to extract neural stem cells, too.

"This is a very broad-reaching discovery," says Hammer. Indeed, King says that he has already had some success using selectin coatings to reprogram cancer cells.

Cancer cells appear to highjack selectin pathways in order to spread to other parts of the body, the process known as metastasis. Tumors shed cells into the bloodstream. Some of those cells seem to exit with the help of selectins; ensconced in new tissue, they then establish new tumors. These secondary tumors cause more cancer deaths than initial tumors do.

King says he has unpublished work demonstrating that leukemia cells that roll along a coating of selectins and a cancer-specific signaling molecule will go through a process called programmed cell death. Healthy stem cells also roll across the device because they're attracted to the selectins, but the death signal doesn't affect them. Leukemia is a blood cancer, but King expects that the anticancer coating would work for solid tumors as well. Devices lined with these coatings might be implanted into cancer patients to prevent or slow metastasis.

King hopes to test antimetastasis implants in animals this year. He's collaborating with Jeffrey Karp, a bioengineer at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and Robert Langer, an MIT Institute Professor, to develop selectin coatings that are stable over months rather than days.

CellTraffix CEO Tom Fitzgerald says that the company's first product, a kit that will enable researchers to capture large numbers of stem and cancer cells in the lab, will likely reach the market early next year. The company hopes to begin clinical testing of the anticancer coatings by early 2010.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20204/page1/

Improving Toxicity Tests

2008-03-05T18:22:00.001+08:00

A new initiative will work on cell-based toxicity tests for chemicals.

Credit: Technology Review

As chemical companies develop more pesticides, cleaners, and other potentially toxic compounds, traditional methods of safety testing can hardly keep up. Animal tests, which have been the gold standard for decades, are slow and expensive, and these sorts of tests are increasingly socially unacceptable, too. What's more, the results of animal testing sometimes don't translate to humans, so researchers are eager for better alternatives.

This week, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a multiyear research partnership to develop a cell-based approach that they hope can replace animal testing in toxicity screening. Work has already begun, although it will take years to refine the techniques.

Using systems that are already employed in the search for new drugs, researchers hope to develop quick, accurate methods of toxicity testing for chemicals that are carried out on cells, rather than on whole animals.

That way, instead of having to spend weeks dosing and dissecting roomfuls of rabbits or rats, thousands of chemicals could be tested in a matter of hours using automated systems and human cells grown in a lab. Different kinds of cells could be used as proxies for particular tissues, providing a way for researchers to test the effects of a chemical on the liver, for example, and, ultimately, to predict toxic effects.

The approach "really has the potential to revolutionize the way toxic chemicals are identified," says Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Automated cell-based tests could screen many thousands of chemicals in a single day, compared with the decades spent so far gathering detailed information on a few thousand toxic chemicals.

"We need to be able to test thousands of compounds in thousands of conditions much faster than we did before," says Elias Zerhouni, director of the NIH. The new approach repurposes a technique that's a mainstay in pharmaceutical labs, where high-throughput screening is used to help identify new drugs. Automated systems can test hundreds of thousands of candidate compounds in a single day and identify those that have any effect on cells, and hence may have therapeutic value. The aim of the toxicity-testing research is "to try to turn that around to find compounds that might be toxic," Collins says. Their effects could be assessed according to the number of cells they kill, or by using markers that indicate whether certain functions in a cell are affected.

Because high-throughput screening can handle many thousands of tests at a time, a given chemical can be tested at different concentrations and for different exposure times during a single screening process, producing comprehensive and reliable data that's "not a statistical approximation," says Christopher Austin, director of the NIH Chemical Genomics Center. "It's pharmacology."

"In order to get the answers you want, you need to do all the concentrations, all the times, and that's why you need to have a high-throughput system," Austin says.

Researchers at the NIH have already used high-throughput screening to test several thousand chemicals over a range of 15 concentrations varying by several orders of magnitude, and for exposure times ranging from minutes to days. The chemicals they picked have well-known toxic effects, gleaned from animal studies. By comparing data from high-throughput tests with that from animals, researchers should be able to fine-tune cell-based tests so that they're at least as reliable and as informative as animal experiments.

"Animals are not always giving us the right answer," says John Bucher, associate director of the National Toxicology Program, "so we need to use all the information we can get from different systems."

In a sense, Austin says, this new approach turns the animal-testing procedure "upside down." Rather than giving a rat a chemical and then dissecting the animal and examining its tissues to see the effect of the compound, metaphorically, "we are dissecting the rat first into its component cells, then computationally putting the rat back together."

However, it will take years for researchers to prove--if they can--that cell-based toxicity screening can supercede animal tests so "you cannot abandon animal testing overnight," Zerhouni says. "It will have to be intertwined for a few years."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20294/page1/

Mobile Carriers See Gold in Femtocells

2008-03-05T18:17:00.001+08:00

If consumers buy in to private wireless phone networks, the industry could save money.

Can you hear me now? Airvana's HubBub femtocell (above) could provide better cellular reception inside homes and offices.
Credit: Airvana

On its face, it sounds like a company's technological fantasy: a product sold to customers that will also save the business itself money.

That's roughly the attraction of a young wireless phone technology called femtocells, which promise to give homes and businesses their own private wireless phone networks.

Similar in concept to the Wi-Fi routers that many people use to blanket their homes with wireless Internet access, these little boxes instead provide a network for carrying the voice and high-speed data services of mobile phones. They're designed to give bandwidth-hungry cell-phone subscribers the strongest possible connections at home. But by keeping those customers off the main mobile network and using home broadband connections to transfer data, they could wind up saving the phone companies money, too.

It's no wonder, then, that equipment vendors say that mobile phone companies are rushing into this market--with technology and even commercial trials beginning on both sides of the Atlantic--even before standards have been set or final technological hurdles cleared.

"Usually in the networking business, you build equipment, and then drum up demand," says Paul Callahan, vice president of business development for Airvana, a femtocell equipment vendor. "This time, demand is already really strong."

The femtocell buzz is part of a broader, years-long push by mobile phone companies to persuade their customers to use cell phones instead of landlines for all their communications needs, and increasingly to use their cells for third-generation (3G) applications such as Web surfing, downloading music, and watching videos.

One hurdle, phone companies say, is that mobile phone coverage inside homes and businesses often isn't as good as it is outside. Some homes are in coverage shadows or have thick apartment walls that impede transmissions. In addition, the Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) technology used for 3G services by T-Mobile and AT&T in the United States transmits at a higher frequency than does its predecessor, so it has a harder time penetrating walls.

A femtocell would relieve this problem--in theory. Instead of relying on the mobile phone's nearest cellular tower (known in the industry as a base station), which might also be serving scores of other callers at the same time, a customer would have her own private, high-quality cell-phone connection.

"Our goal is to get to a place where our services are available to all users at all times," says John Carvalho, head of core network innovation for Telefónica O2 Europe, which announced femtocell trials this week.

Boosters of the technology paint femtocell as technology that benefits everyone. Customers get a fast, reliable broadband phone connection at home, and the mobile phone companies get to offload a small piece of their infrastructure investments to their customers.

In effect, every customer who buys and installs his own home femtocell would reduce the load on the carrier's local macro network. The femtocell itself serves as an alternative base station, broadcasting and receiving ordinary wireless signals from cell phones that the femtocell owner permits. This is a strikingly attractive idea, particularly to carriers in big cities that find their networks often overloaded, and find that local regulations or public opinion makes it difficult and costly to set up new antennas.

By using a femtocell, customers will send their voice and data traffic out their own DSL, cable, or fiber connection to the Internet, and then to the carrier's network. This will also reduce the load on the land-based data networks that carry voice and data traffic from the mobile phone companies' base stations to their own central switching facilities. That, in turn, could translate into less infrastructure investment.

Yet all of this will happen only if customers see enough benefit to buying themselves a femtocell--and for now, that's the biggest flaw in this rosy scenario, analysts say.

"What's in it for the user?" asks Keith Nissen, an analyst with the In-Stat research firm. "That's the big question. Right now, there isn't enough."

Broadband subscribers already have fast Internet surfing at home, by definition. Carriers may well offer cheaper cell-phone calls for femto customers using their home connection--but broadband subscribers can already do this using Skype, Vonage, or other voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services. Strong cell signals at home are certainly a plus, but it's not clear how much consumers will pay for this, analysts say.

Without an obvious consumer must-have attraction, demand will likely be tied closely to price, Nissen says. If a femtocell is cheap enough, consumers will latch on to the idea, assuming (and this can be a big assumption) that carriers are able to explain and market it clearly. But this price may be a sticking point for some time.

Today, the equipment cost for femtocells runs in the range of $250 to $300. Sprint, one of the first companies to start commercial trials of the products, is offering them to consumers in Denver and Indianapolis for $50 apiece, along with an offer of lower-priced calling plans--altogether a substantial subsidy.

O2's Carvalho says that he expects equipment costs to come down to between 50 and 80 British pounds (about $100 to $160) once standards are set and mass-manufacturing begins. That's an acceptable price range for consumers used to buying products such as Wi-Fi modems, he says.

The standards process may take several years, however. Different equipment vendors use different techniques for aspects such as security, or for letting the femtocells talk to the carrier's core network. Femtocells have been developed for both rival 3G mobile phone standards--W-CDMA and CDMA2000--but different standards-setting bodies are separately at work on rules for each.

In the long term, analysts expect femtocells to be a fast-growing, successful market. In-Stat forecasts that 40.6 million femtocells will be distributed around the world by 2011. ABI Research is even more optimistic, projecting 70 million in use by 2012.

By that time or shortly afterward, analysts say, femtocell technology may be built into other devices, such as Internet routers for consumers.

Vodafone, T-Mobile, and O2 all announced trials early this year. Equipment vendors say that many other carriers are in undisclosed trials as well. Commercial deployment, in which the products will be distributed to consumers by the phone companies or their retail partners beyond the limited scale of Sprint's two-city experiment, is expected by early next year.

That's all assuming that consumers react positively when they actually get a chance to see how the technology works.

"If it winds up being more expensive, but it provides better data rates, it's probably worth the investment for us," says O2's Carvalho. "If it's more expensive but slower, and it annoys customers, we probably wouldn't take that on."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20293/page1/

Bandwidth on Demand

2008-03-05T18:13:00.001+08:00

An academic internet provides clues about ways to improve the commercial Internet.

Big sender: Internet2’s dynamic circuit network will help provide channels for large quantities of information to flow to and from academic research projects, such as CERN’s hadron collider, above. In the future, the technology may find commercial applications, such as for fast transfer of high-definition online video.
Credit: CERN

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Internet2, a nonprofit advanced networking consortium in the United States, is designing a new network intended to open up large amounts of dedicated bandwidth as needed. For example, a researcher wanting to test telesurgery technologies--for which a smooth, reliable Internet connection is essential--might use the network to temporarily create a dedicated path for the experiment. Called the dynamic circuit network, its immediate applications are academic, but its underlying technologies could one day filter into the commercial Internet, and it could be used, for example, to carry high-definition video to consumers.

"The idea here is to basically look at the network in a different way," says Rick Summerhill, CTO of Internet2. The Internet Protocol (IP) currently used for the Web breaks data into packets that are sent through fiber-optic cables to their ultimate destination. The packets don't have to take a common path through the network; routers act like way stations along the network, examining every packet individually and deciding where it should be sent next. The problem with this system is that large data transfers can clog the routers with packets waiting for direction, and if the packets don't make it to their final destination at the same time, the receiver may experience jitter--interruptions to the data stream that can produce skips in online video, for example.

Summerhill says that, using the dynamic circuit network, a researcher could set up a temporary connection to another location that would work like a phone call: the user's data would be carried directly to that other location, uninterrupted by the traffic of others sharing the network. The result is that large quantities of information could be transferred quickly and clearly.

The dynamic circuit network is really an enhancement of a traditional network, rather than a replacement. Internet2 still has a backbone that uses the standard IP common across the Web. What makes the dynamic circuit network different is that it uses a circuit-switched network, which can be set up so that all the packets follow the same path. Also, those circuits don't have to be in place permanently. Lachlan Andrew, a researcher at Netlab, at the California Institute of Technology, explains that a circuit-switched network determines a pathway for the entire stream of packets, so that at every way station, they can be sent on without having to be individually examined. "Internet2 is developing technology to communicate between nodes, find a path, and construct it," he says.

The idea of the dynamic circuit network, Summerhill says, is that these circuits can be set up on demand, so that traffic needing excellent quality of service can step out of the regular flow. Because data is sent down fiber-optic cables at different frequencies of light, he explains, data from the dynamic circuit network can coexist with IP data and wouldn't require new cable to be laid. Summerhill says that Internet2 is working on software that could eventually be built into network devices to control these different flows and to set up circuits when and where they are needed

Among the current applications for the dynamic circuit network, Internet2 expects to facilitate the transfer of data from CERN's large hadron collider to researchers at other institutions, and it has done trials in which circuits are opened between the collider and the University of Nebraska. In the future, Summerhill says, the researchers hope that commercial applications develop from the technology. "Think of a network that provided hundreds or thousands of high-definition channels and also provided on-demand video capabilities," he says. He foresees a commercial network that needs both high bandwidth and high quality of service, like some current academic requirements. "The methods for supporting that network are under investigation," Summerhill says. Although right now, there are no commercial implementations, he notes that Internet2 works with commercial partners that might eventually be a conduit to bringing the technology into the ordinary Internet.

Clive Davenhall worked on software for academic circuit-switched networks in the United Kingdom, as part of his role as an engineer at the National e-Science Centre, in Edinburgh, which works to improve methods for conducting large-scale science research over the Internet. Davenhall says that, although people have been talking about dynamic circuit networks for a long time, this type of network hasn't had much of an impact on the commercial Internet, partly because of concerns about how it might function in an environment less controlled than academia. For example, if the average person could set up a dedicated circuit on demand, it might be possible to hog resources that could interfere with other users' experience.

Summerhill says that the dynamic circuit network is still in its early stages, and "still has some evolution to do." He recalls the time that IP wasn't considered ready for commercial applications. So far, four universities in four different regional networks are connected to the dynamic circuit network, says Lauren Rotman, public relations manager for Internet2. Rotman adds that it will be easy to add universities in regions that are already connected. The organization hopes to increase the dynamic circuit network's reach significantly in the coming year.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20277/page1/

Blu-ray Disc recordable

2008-03-05T17:42:00.002+08:00

Blu-ray Disc recordable refers to two optical disc formats that can be recorded with an optical disc recorder. BD-R discs can be written to once, whereas BD-RE can be erased and re-recorded multiple times. Disc capacities are 25GB (23.31 GiB) for single layer discs and 50GB (46.61 GiB) for dual layer discs.^[1]

As of January 2008, BD-R/RE drives up to 6x are sold for about US$400 and 2x single-layer BD-R discs,^[2] with a capacity of 25 GB, can be found for as low as US$10. The theoretical maximum for Blu-ray Discs is about 12x, as the speed of rotation (10,000 rpm) causes too much wobble for the discs to be read properly. This is similar to the 20x and 52x respective maximum speeds of DVDs and CDs.

Version

There are three versions of rewritable Blu-ray Discs (BD-RE):^[3]

Version 1.0

unique BD File System
not computer compatible

Version 2.0

UDF 2.5 file system for computer use
the use of AACS
BD-R Version 1.0 follows this specification

Version 3.0

camcorder (8 cm) discs added
backward compatible with Version 2.0
BD-R Version 2.0 follows this specification

Speed

Drive speed	Data rate		Single layer BD write time
1X^[1]	36 Mbit/s	4.5 MiB/s	95 min.
2X	72 Mbit/s	9 MiB/s	47 min.
4X	144 Mbit/s	18 MiB/s	24 min.
8X	288 Mbit/s	36 MiB/s	12 min.
12X	432 Mbit/s	54 MiB/s	8 min.

Optical disc authoring
Optical disc Optical disc image Optical disc drive Authoring software Recording technologies Recording modes Packet writing
Optical media types
Laserdisc Compact Disc (CD): Red Book, 5.1 Music Disc, SACD, PhotoCD, CD-R, CD-ROM, CD-RW, Video CD, SVCD, CD+G, CD-Text, CD-ROM XA, CD-Extra, CD-i Bridge, CD-i MiniDisc DVD: DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-R DL, DVD+R DL, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RW DL, DVD+RW DL, DVD-RAM, DVD-D Ultra Density Optical (UDO) Universal Media Disc (UMD) HD DVD: HD DVD-R, HD DVD-RW, HD DVD-RAM Blu-ray Disc (BD): BD-R, BD-RE
Standards
Rainbow Books File systems ISO 9660 Joliet Rock Ridge Amiga Rock Ridge extensions El Torito Apple ISO9660 Extensions Universal Disk Format Mount Rainier
Further reading
History of optical storage media High definition optical disc format war

A blank rewritable Blu-ray disc (BD-RE)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_recordable

Federal Research Funding Cut

2008-03-05T12:38:00.000+08:00

Financial support for a major international fusion project is one of many casualties.

Cooled fusion: The United States has stopped funding research for an international fusion-reactor project called ITER.
Credit: ITER and Technology Review

It was supposed to be a year bringing sharp increases in federal funding for physical-sciences research. Instead, as a result of the final appropriations bill signed a few weeks ago by Congress, fiscal year 2008 (the federal fiscal year runs October 1 to September 30) brought cuts that will cause hundreds of researchers to lose their jobs, and it's putting the future of two important international projects in jeopardy, including one to make a large-scale fusion demonstration facility.

For most of 2007, as Congress and the Bush administration debated the federal budget, support was strong from both parties for significantly increasing funding for three federal agencies that support the lion's share of basic research in the physical sciences: the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science. Indeed, the president's proposed budget included increased funding for these agencies, as part of a plan to double investment in physical-sciences research over the next 10 years. And early appropriations bills met these targets. But veto threats and one actual veto related to a cap on domestic spending imposed by President Bush kept these bills from becoming law.

Instead, a catch-all appropriations bill was passed in late December, with last-minute cuts that eliminated not only the proposed increases to these agencies, but also funding for some programs within these agencies. The cuts caught researchers by surprise just before the holidays and sent directors of at least two national labs scrambling to find ways to deal with the unexpected shortfalls. As a result of the cuts, hundreds of researchers at Fermilab, in Batavia, IL, and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), in Menlo Park, CA, will be laid off.

What's more, two international projects will receive no funding at all for the remainder of the fiscal year. One endeavor, the International Linear Collider project, is being designed to answer some fundamental questions about the universe, such as those concerning the nature of dark matter. While funding could be restored in the future, layoffs will mean that the labs involved could lose key technical staff, says Persis Drell, the director of SLAC. She says that a particle collider at the lab will also have to shut down due to lack of funds, which will mean that the lab must back out of some international commitments.

"It pains me greatly that at a time when particle physics needs to be ever more international, the political process in the U.S. has resulted in real damage to the relationships with our international partners," Drell said in a speech to the researchers and staff at her lab.

Another important project, a proposed demonstration of nuclear fusion--called ITER--was slated to receive $160 million in federal funding this year; instead, it received no funding. ITER will consist of a 500-megawatt fusion reactor, to be built in the South of France, with which researchers will attempt to demonstrate that fusion can be a practical source of electricity. If all goes well, results of the project will be used to design the first commercial fusion power plants. Fusion projects in general have been delayed in part because of intermittent funding, says Ian Hutchinson, the head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. The ITER project is taking up where research left off in the early 1990s, the last time funding dropped off. If funding had been constant, Hutchinson says, "we could have been at this stage 10 years ago." He calls the current cuts a "complete disaster" in terms of the message it conveys to the international community. "It's completely reversing ourselves from what we've been saying the last four years," he says, given that United States officials have publicly supported the project.

The ITER project could go on without support from the United States, but it will move forward more slowly, Hutchinson says, and when the facility is complete, researchers in this country won't have timely access to the results. He hopes that in the coming year, "cooler heads will prevail" and the funding for ITER will be restored.

The appropriations bill is not bad news across the board for research and development, but it does favor short-term development, which often comes at the expense of long-term research. For example, the DOE overall received an increase in funding compared with both last year and the president's request. But the Office of Science--the basic research arm of the agency--saw nearly a half-billion-dollar cut compared with appropriations bills in Congress earlier in the year. In the DOE, some programs that were slated to be cut in the president's budget will continue to receive funding, such as research on geothermal and hydroelectric energy. Eliminating these proposed cuts added to the overall budget and led to cuts elsewhere.

The cuts in research funding have researchers and organizations such as the American Physical Society calling for Congress to push through new funding this year. But many, including Drell, are preparing for more difficult times ahead: they're anticipating similar budget shortcomings next year.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20085/?a=f

Controlling Cell Behavior with Magnets

2008-03-05T12:34:00.000+08:00

Nanoparticles allow researchers to initiate biochemical events at will.

Cell switch: Immune cells coated with nanoparticles take up calcium in the presence of a magnetic field. Each nanoparticle measures approximately 30 nanometers in diameter. In this image, yellow cells are taking up calcium in response to a localized magnetic field. Cells that are farther away from the field are shown in purple and do not take up calcium.
Credit: Donald Ingber, Harvard Medical School

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated a means of controlling cell functions with a physical, rather than chemical, signal. Using a magnetic field to pull together tiny beads targeted to particular cell receptors, Harvard researchers made cells take up calcium, and then stop, then take it up again. Their work is the first to prove that such a level of control over cells is possible. If the approach can be used with many cell types and cell functions, it could lead to a totally new class of therapies that rely on cells themselves to make and release drugs.

The research, which appeared in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, was led by Donald Ingber, professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and cochair of the Harvard Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Ingber's group demonstrated its method for biomagnetic control using a type of immune-system cell that mediates allergic reactions. Targeted nanoparticles with iron oxide cores were used to mimic antigens in vitro. Each is attached to a molecule that in turn can attach to a single receptor on an immune cell. When Ingber exposes cells bound with these particles to a weak magnetic field, the nanoparticles become magnetic and draw together, pulling the attached cell receptors into clusters. This causes the cells to take in calcium. (In the body, this would initiate a chain of events that leads the cells to release histamine.) When the magnetic field is turned off, the particles are no longer attracted to each other, the receptors move apart, and the influx of calcium stops.

"It's not the chemistry; it's the proximity" that activates such receptors, says Ingber.

The approach could have a far-reaching impact, as many important cell receptors are activated in a similar way and might be controlled using Ingber's method.

"In recent years, there has been a realization that physical events, not just chemical events, are important" to cell function, says Shu Chien, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Diego. Researchers have probed the effects of physical forces on cells by, for example, squishing them between plates or pulling probes across their surfaces. But none of these techniques work at as fine a level of control as Ingber's magnetic beads, which act on single biomolecules.

"Up to now, there hasn't been much control [over cells] at this scale," says Larry Nagahara, project manager in the National Cancer Institute's Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer and a physics professor at Arizona State University.

Many drugs, from anticancer antibodies to hormones, work by activating cell receptors. Once a hormone is in the blood, however, there's no turning it on or off. "This shows that you can turn on and off the signal, and that you can do it instantly," says Christopher Chen, a bioengineer at the University of Pennsylvania. "That's something that's hard to do, for example, with an antibody."

Ingber has many ideas for devices that might integrate his method of cellular control. Magnetic pacemakers could use cells instead of electrodes to send electrical pulses to the heart. Implantable drug factories might contain many groups of cells, each of which makes a different drug when activated by a magnetic signal. Biomagnetic control might lead to computers that can take advantage of cells' processing power. "Cells do complex things like image processing so much better than computers," says Ingber. Ingber, who began the project in response to a call by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for new cell-machine interfaces, acknowledges that his work is in its early stages. In fifty years, however, he expects that there will be devices that "seamlessly interface between living cells and machines."

Other researchers agree. Ingber's biomagnetic control "may represent a new mechanism for man-machine interfaces," says UC San Diego's Chien. But before such interfaces can be developed, says University of Pennsylvania engineer Chen, researchers need to learn a lot more about cells.

"Say we have cells on a chip and we know what behavior we want to elicit," such as getting a stem cell to enter a wound site and initiate repairs, says Chen. "We don't know what signaling events have to happen to put the cell into the right state" so that it will take the desired action.

In the short term, Chen says that Ingber's method could help biologists gain crucial knowledge about cell signaling, such as how these signals are processed chemically and physically by the cell, and how they lead to particular outcomes, from calcium uptake to changes in gene expression. "It provides a tool that lets us tweak the cell and see what happens," says Chen.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20087/page2/

How Important Is the Latest Cloning Feat?

2008-03-05T12:29:00.000+08:00

Scientists have generated early-stage cloned human embryos, but not stem cells.

Human cloning: Shown here is a three-day old cloned embryo, created from a donor egg and the skin cell of an adult male.
Credit: Stemagen

Scientists at Stemagen, a small biotechnology company in La Jolla, CA, reported yesterday that they have for the first time generated cloned human blastocysts--early-stage embryos--from adult skin cells. This is the first step in generating stem cell lines matched to individuals, which are crucial for creating new cellular models of disease and potentially important for future tissue replacement therapies. (See "Next Steps for Stem Cells" and "The Real Stem Cell Hope".) The new findings also confirm that access to fresh eggs from healthy young donors is a key part of successful cloning. Lack of access to human eggs has been the major barrier in the field. (See "Human Therapeutic Cloning at a Standstill".)

Cloned blastocysts have been generated before, but from embryonic stem cells rather than from adult cells. Scientists theorize that embryonic stem cells are easier to turn into blastocysts because of their earlier developmental stage.

Experts in the field have had a mixed reaction to the new work. "It's a nice achievement, but in my view, they haven't crossed the bar," says Evan Snyder, director of the Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine Program at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla. "The real test will be, can you generate cell lines that are stable and self-renewing and normal?" Others applaud the confirmation of the feasibility of human cloning. "The fact that it can be done is important," says Jeanne Loring, a stem cell scientist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. "It wipes away that blot on our scientific integrity," she says, referring to a massive fraud unveiled in 2005 in which South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang claimed to have generated stem cell lines from cloned human embryos. (See "Stem Cells Reborn".)

To clone an embryo, a process also called nuclear transfer, scientists first strip an egg of its genetic material. Then they insert DNA from an adult cell, such as a skin cell, into the egg. Through an unknown process, the egg turns back the clock on the adult DNA and begins to develop as a normally fertilized egg would. From the embryo, researchers could theoretically collect a specialized ball of cells that can be coaxed to turn into stem cells. So far, however, no one has successfully performed this feat.

Stemagen, a relatively unknown player in the field, probably owes its success to access to human eggs through a close association with a local fertility clinic. (The company was founded by a fertility specialist at the Reproductive Sciences Center in La Jolla.) "We were able to get access to high-quality oocytes and have them in the incubator within one to two hours," says Andrew French, Stemagen's chief scientific officer.

Egg donors and the intended parents gave eggs in excess of those needed for in vitro fertilization to the Stemagen scientists for research. Regulations in many states prohibit compensation for donated eggs for ethical reasons, a requirement that has slowed other cloning efforts

Starting with 25 fresh oocytes, French and colleagues generated five blastocysts--five- to six-day-old embryos consisting of 30 to 70 cells. Rather than attempting to generate stem cell lines from the embryos, the researchers sent them to an independent company for genetic confirmation of their results. "They showed we had completely removed the DNA from the egg donor and replaced it with DNA from the skin-cell donor," says French. One blastocyst was confirmed as a clone via two DNA-fingerprinting methods, while genetic analysis of two others indicated the likelihood that they were clones.

The next crucial step will be generating stem cell lines from cloned embryos, which many stem cell scientists speculate will be the most challenging step. "That's likely where Hwang failed," says Synder.

French and colleagues are planning such experiments, with results potentially in the next eight to twelve months. "The quality of our blastocysts improved with each experiment," says French. Based on the success rate of previous attempts to make stem cells from regular embryos, he estimates that Stemagen will be able to generate a stem cell line from between five and ten cloned embryos and report the results in the next year. The company aims to sell or license the lines to pharmaceutical companies and others who would use them to test new drugs or develop new therapies.

While human therapeutic cloning has always been an ethically contentious area of research--partly because it requires the creation and destruction of human embryos--it has recently come under greater fire. After the announcement of new techniques for reprogramming adult cells so that they turn into stem cells without first forming embryos, some opponents called for a halt on embryonic-stem-cell research. (See "Stem Cells without the Embryos".)

However, researchers in the field emphasize the need to pursue all reprogramming techniques. "Even though there are other techniques to reprogram a cell that have gotten a lot of press, we still don't know how those compare with the reprogramming you actually see with nuclear transfer," says Snyder. "My feeling is, if we understand nuclear transfer better, we will be able to do the other kind of reprogramming more efficiently."

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20088/

Sony KDL-46D3500 Review

2008-03-05T12:23:00.000+08:00

46in LCD

Picture
Sound
Features
Usability
Value

Pristine HD pictures tempered by slightly disappointing SD pictures.

HD Ready:

yes

Resolution:

1920 x 1080

Design

The KDL-46D3500 is the embodiment of Sony's design philosophy with a chic matte black understated presence that simply oozes class. Build quality is back to its very best with the Sony looking like it could have been sculpted from a solid block of metal.

Features

Unlike the KDL-40D3500, there is no corresponding 3000 model alongside the KDL-46D3500 in the UK. If you are familiar with the D3000 series from Sony it is worth noting that the 46D3500's spec sheet reads a little different than you would imagine.

Screen: 46in 16:9

Tuner: Digital

Sound System: Nicam

Resolution: 1920 x 1080

Contrast Ratio: 1800:1 (16,000 dynamic)

Brightness: 500cd/m2

Other Features: Bravia Picture Processing Engine, Live Colour Creation, 24p True Cinema.

Sockets: 2 HDMI, 2 SCART, Component Video, Composite Video, PC input.

Sony currently offer a huge range of LCD TV's and the number of different models can seem quite bewildering to those of you who are looking to buy a new LCD TV. The D3500 sits between the slightly higher spec V3000 series and directly above the slightly lower spec T3500 line.

Essentially, the D3500 gains 'True Cinema' over the T3500 but comes equipped with a slightly less sophisticated version of Sony's 'Bravia' picture processing engine than the V3000.

The 46D3500 comes equipped a Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution which can potentially give a marked improvement in the display of sources such as Sky Tv (1080i). The 1080 lines of resolution match the resolution of the screen negating the need for any picture scaling to fit. If you have a device which outputs pictures in the superior 1080p (e.g. Sony's PlayStation 3) the 3500 can accept those pictures in their full glory.

There is no 'Motionflow +100Hz' technology on the 46D3500 (featured on the 40D3000) which doubles the number of frames shown from 50 to 100 by interpolating an extra frame in between each source frame.

The KDL-46D3500 is equipped with '24p True Cinema' which enables the panel to display films at their intended 24fps (frames per second).

Alongside 24p True Cinema is Sony's 'Theatre Mode' technology which adjusts colour, contrast and brightness settings to makes movies look as authentic as the original.

It is worth mentioning that the 24p mode comes into its own with High Definition (Blu-ray or HD DVD) players which allow you to play movies at their original speed. The original 'cine' film is generally recorded at 24 frames per second, which in the absence of '24p True Cinema' is speeded up to 25 (standard for most TV's) frames per second with an accompanying increase in audio pitch.

Colour reproduction on the KDL-46D3500 should offer smoother transitions than previous Sony LCD's with a new 10-bit panel offering 1024 shades of gradation.

Theatre Sync, which is Sony's name for CEC (Consumer Electronic Control), is a control standard that functions over HDMI 1.3. The technology facilitates one-touch control over compatible devices and in practice means that if you fire up your compatible DVD player, the all connected devices such as your LCD TV will also spring into life.

Sonically, the KDL-46D3500 comes equipped with Sony's S-Force Front Surround which is their latest virtual surround sound technology.

Performance

High Definition (HD) is where the Sony KDL-46D3500 excels. Hook up a 1080p capable source and you will be treated with absolutely pristine pictures. The KDL-46D3500 displays a clarity and sharpness that make you want to reach out and touch objects or people as they glide across the screen. Colours are wonderfully vibrant and reach a level of authentic realism to match any LCD.

Although black levels are still behind the best that plasma can offer, the KDL-46D3500 has made great strides in this area from previous Sony's. Shadow detailing now takes on a subtlety which is a match for any 46in LCD currently out there.

Standard Definition (SD) performance suffers to a degree from some of the inconsistencies that creep into a picture as a result of the conversion of a 576p source to an HD ready screen configuration, especially with such a large screen. SD performance is nevertheless very good, and quite an accomplishment for a 46in LCD.

The SD performance can be a little 'grainy' at times with some noticeable degradation in picture quality with faster motion sequences. Simply as a result of the extra size, the KDL-46D3500 can't quite live up to the performance of its smaller 40D3500 brother, but was better than we expected.

Finally, if there is a 46in LCD TV out there with a richer or more precise colour palette, we have yet to see it. The range, depth and subtlety in this respect is simply outstanding. The most intricate of detailing such as skin tone is realised with class leading performance.

Conclusion

The Sony KDL-46D3500 is a another highly accomplished performer when it comes to High Definition material. However, if SD viewing is just as important there are better performers out there.

http://www.hdtvorg.co.uk/reviews/lcd/sony_kdl-46d3500.htm

Microsoft Tests Memory-Making Camera

2008-03-05T12:20:00.000+08:00

The SenseCam is no tourist's point-and-shoot, but may help give Alzheimer's patients a photographic assist.

A digital camera developed by Microsoft is undergoing testing, but you won't see it in any stores soon.

Over the past several years at its research facility in Cambridge, England, the company created a wearable digital camera called the SenseCam. The camera's software is designed to take a low-resolution photo every 30 seconds while dangling from its wearer.

The SenseCam has received increasing attention in the medical field as an experimental tool to help those with memory problems, such as Alzheimer's disease. In 2005 the first trials began, and over time, the SenseCam has been used to help those with more severe memory problems, said Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.

Patient Tests SenseCam

Berry has been working recently with a 68-year-old Cambridge woman, "Mrs. F," who was diagnosed 12 years ago with severe memory impairment. For example, if Mrs. F goes to an art exhibit in the morning, she will not remember the activity the next day, Berry said.

Mrs F. wears the SenseCam on a lanyard around her neck when she and Berry do an activity. The SenseCam will take hundreds of images with its fish-eye lens, which provides a wide-angle view. Then, every two days for two weeks, Mrs. F reviews the images.

"At the end of the two weeks, she has a fantastic recollection of the event," Berry said. "What seems to happen is that when she looks at the images, some images don't bring to mind the events at all, but one or two of the images or maybe 10 of the images will bring it all back to her."

A key factor seems to be the quantity of images, since different images and scenes are more significant for some people than others, Berry said. For one person, the color of another person's shoes captured in an image may be enough to trigger wider recollections, she said.

SenseCam can take plenty of images. It has a 1 G-byte SD memory card and can shoot as many as 30,000 640-by-480 pixel images at Video Graphics Array quality. That spec isn't very impressive compared to today's digital cameras, but it's enough to be useful to jog memory, said Steve Hodges, who manages the SenseCam project at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

"It's remarkable how it appears to trigger your memory for that event," Hodges said. "It seems to bring you back to that original moment."

Tailored Features

SenseCam holds advantages over video recorders, Hodges said. The device is less intrusive for the user to wear, and the snapshots can be viewed at a faster pace later, allowing a person to get to the significant images rather than watching a video clip in real time. SenseCam's battery will last more than a day, and its user must download the images every couple of days.

SenseCam's image-viewing software is easy enough for elderly people to manage and designed to display images in a flip-book fashion, Hodges said. Similar to other photo-viewing software, a person can choose how quickly they want to play back the photos, he said.

The device has other features tailored to its purpose. It will interrupt its 30-second intervals to take a photo when it senses a sudden change in lighting or heat. It's equipped with a passive infrared sensor that can detect when another person is close and can take a photo.

So far, Microsoft isn't working on advancing the hardware specifications and instead is concentrating on engaging the medical community, Hodges said. Microsoft has no plans to commercialize SenseCam, but it has provided US$550,000 in funding for medical research projects using it.

Researchers are still a long way from understanding how memory works. Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the University of Leeds in England have a research project underway using the SenseCam to study autobiographical memory, or how people remember events over their lifetime.

"The jury is out over what part of our brains are involved in autobiographical memory," Berry said.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,141568-c,researchreports/article.html#

Human chromosomes

2008-03-05T11:44:00.000+08:00

Human cells have 23 pairs of large linear nuclear chromosomes, giving a total of 46 per cell. In addition to these, human cells have many hundreds of copies of the mitochondrial genome. Sequencing of the human genome has provided a great deal of information about each of the chromosomes. Below is a table compiling statistics for the chromosomes, based on the Sanger Institute's human genome information in the Vertebrate Genome Annotation (VEGA) database.^[42] Number of genes is an estimate as it is in part based on gene predictions. Total chromosome length is an estimate as well, based on the estimated size of unsequenced heterochromatin regions.

Chromosome	Genes	Total bases	Sequenced bases^[43]
1	3,148	247,200,000	224,999,719
2	902	242,750,000	237,712,649
3	1,436	199,450,000	194,704,827
4	453	191,260,000	187,297,063
5	609	180,840,000	177,702,766
6	1,585	170,900,000	167,273,992
7	1,824	158,820,000	154,952,424
8	781	146,270,000	142,612,826
9	1,229	140,440,000	120,312,298
10	1,312	135,370,000	131,624,737
11	405	134,450,000	131,130,853
12	1,330	132,290,000	130,303,534
13	623	114,130,000	95,559,980
14	886	106,360,000	88,290,585
15	676	100,340,000	81,341,915
16	898	88,820,000	78,884,754
17	1,367	78,650,000	77,800,220
18	365	76,120,000	74,656,155
19	1,553	63,810,000	55,785,651
20	816	62,440,000	59,505,254
21	446	46,940,000	34,171,998
22	595	49,530,000	34,893,953
X (sex chromosome)	1,093	154,910,000	151,058,754
Y (sex chromosome)	125	57,740,000	22,429,293

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome

Chromosomal aberrations

2008-03-05T11:42:00.000+08:00

Main articles: Chromosome abnormalities and aneuploidy

The three major single chromosome mutations; deletion (1), duplication (2) and inversion (3).

The two major two-chromosome mutations; insertion (1) and translocation (2).

In Down syndrome, there are three copies of chromosome 21

Chromosomal aberrations are disruptions in the normal chromosomal content of a cell, and are a major cause of genetic conditions in humans, such as Down syndrome. Some chromosome abnormalities do not cause disease in carriers, such as translocations, or chromosomal inversions, although they may lead to a higher chance of having a child with a chromosome disorder. Abnormal numbers of chromosomes or chromosome sets, aneuploidy, may be lethal or give rise to genetic disorders. Genetic counseling is offered for families that may carry a chromosome rearrangement.

The gain or loss of chromosome material can lead to a variety of genetic disorders. Human examples include:

Cri du chat, which is caused by the deletion of part of the short arm of chromosome 5. "Cri du chat" means "cry of the cat" in French, and the condition was so-named because affected babies make high-pitched cries that sound like a cat. Affected individuals have wide-set eyes, a small head and jaw and are moderately to severely mentally retarded and very short.
Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, which is caused by partial deletion of the short arm of chromosome 4. It is characterized by severe growth retardation and severe to profound mental retardation.
Down's syndrome, usually is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21 (trisomy 21). Characteristics include decreased muscle tone, asymmetrical skull, slanting eyes and mild to moderate mental retardation.
Edwards syndrome, which is the second most common trisomy after Down syndrome. It is a trisomy of chromosome 18. Symptoms include mental and motor retardation and numerous congenital anomalies causing serious health problems. Ninety percent die in infancy; however, those who live past their first birthday usually are quite healthy thereafter. They have a characteristic hand appearance with clenched hands and overlapping fingers.
Patau Syndrome, also called D-Syndrome or trisomy-13. Symptoms are somewhat similar to those of trisomy-18, but they do not have the characteristic hand shape.
Idic15, abbreviation for Isodicentric 15 on chromosome 15; also called the following names due to various researches, but they all mean the same; IDIC(15), Inverted dupliction 15, extra Marker, Inv dup 15, partial tetrasomy 15
Jacobsen syndrome, also called the terminal 11q deletion disorder.[1] This is a very rare disorder. Those affected have normal intelligence or mild mental retardation, with poor expressive language skills. Most have a bleeding disorder called Paris-Trousseau syndrome.
Klinefelter's syndrome (XXY). Men with Klinefelter syndrome are usually sterile, and tend to have longer arms and legs and to be taller than their peers. Boys with the syndrome are often shy and quiet, and have a higher incidence of speech delay and dyslexia. During puberty, without testosterone treatment, some of them may develop gynecomastia.
Turner syndrome (X instead of XX or XY). In Turner syndrome, female sexual characteristics are present but underdeveloped. People with Turner syndrome often have a short stature, low hairline, abnormal eye features and bone development and a "caved-in" appearance to the chest.
XYY syndrome. XYY boys are usually taller than their siblings. Like XXY boys and XXX girls, they are somewhat more likely to have learning difficulties.
Triple-X syndrome (XXX). XXX girls tend to be tall and thin. They have a higher incidence of dyslexia.
Small supernumerary marker chromosome. This means there is an extra, abnormal chromosome. Features depend on the origin of the extra genetic material. Cat-eye syndrome and isodicentric chromosome 15 syndrome (or Idic15) are both caused by a supernumerary marker chromosome, as is Pallister-Killian syndrome.

Chromosomal mutations produce changes in whole chromosomes (more than one gene) or in the number of chromosomes present.

Deletion - loss of part of a chromosome
Duplication - extra copies of a part of a chromosome
Inversion - reverse the direction of a part of a chromosome
Translocation - part of a chromosome breaks off and attaches to another chromosome

Most mutations are neutral - have little or no effect

A detailed graphical display of all human chromosomes and the diseases annotated at the correct spot may be found at [2].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome

study of karyotypes is part of cytogenetics.

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Main article: Karyotype

Figure 3: Karyogram of a human male

In general, the karyotype is the characteristic chromosome complement of a eukaryote species.^[36] The preparation and study of karyotypes is part of cytogenetics.

Although the replication and transcription of DNA is highly standardized in eukaryotes, the same cannot be said for their karotypes, which are often highly variable. There may be variation between species in chromosome number and in detailed organization. In some cases there is significant variation within species. Often there is variation 1. between the two sexes. 2. between the germ-line and soma (between gametes and the rest of the body). 3. between members of a population, due to balanced genetic polymorphism. 4. geographical variation between races. 5. mosaics or otherwise abnormal individuals. Finally, variation in karyotype may occur during development from the fertilised egg.

The technique of determining the karyotype is usually called karyotyping. Cells can be locked part-way through division (in metaphase) in vitro (in a reaction vial) with colchicine. These cells are then stained, photographed and arranged into a karyogram, with the set of chromosomes arranged, autosomes in order of length, and sex chromosomes (here XY) at the end: Fig. 3.

Like many sexually reproducing species, humans have special gonosomes (sex chromosomes, in contrast to autosomes). These are XX in females and XY in males.

Historical note

Investigation into the human karyotype took many years to settle the most basic question: how many chromosomes does a normal diploid human cell contain? In 1912, Hans von Winiwarter reported 47 chromosomes in spermatogonia and 48 in oogonia, concluding an XX/XO sex determination mechanism.^[37] Painter in 1922 was not certain whether the diploid number of man was 46 or 48, at first favouring 46.^[38] He revised his opinion later from 46 to 48, and he correctly insisted on man having an XX/XY system.^[39] Considering their techniques, these results were quite remarkable.

New techniques were needed to definitively solve the problem:

1. Using cells in culture

2. Pretreating cells in a hypotonic solution, which swells them and spreads the chromosomes

3. Arresting mitosis in metaphase by a solution of colchicine

4. Squashing the preparation on the slide forcing the chromosomes into a single plane

5. Cutting up a photomicrograph and arranging the result into an indisputable karyogram.

It took until the mid 1950s until it became generally accepted that the karyotype of man included only 46 chromosomes.^[40]^[41] Rather interestingly, chimpanzees (our closest living relatives) have 48 chromosomes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome

Number of chromosomes in various organisms

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Eukaryotes

These tables give the total number of chromosomes (including sex chromosomes) in a cell nucleus. For example, human cells are diploid and have 22 different types of autosomes, each present as two copies, and two sex chromosomes. This gives 46 chromosomes in total. Other organisms have more than two copies of their chromosomes, such as Bread wheat which is hexaploid and has six copies of 6 different chromosomes - 42 chromosomes in total.

Chromosome numbers in some plants
Plant Species	#
Arabidopsis thaliana	10
Rye	14
Maize	20
Einkorn wheat (diploid)^[22]	14
Durum wheat (tetraploid)^[22]	28
Bread wheat (hexaploid)^[22]	42
Wild tobacco^{[citation needed]}	24
Cultivated tobacco	48
Adder's Tongue Fern (diploid)^[23]	approx 1,440

Chromosome numbers (2n) in some animals
Species	#	Species	#
Common fruit fly	8	Guinea Pig^[24]	64
Dove^{[citation needed]}	16	Garden snail^[25]	54
Earthworm Octodrilus complanatus^[26]	36	Tibetan fox	36
Domestic cat	38	Domestic pig	38
Lab mouse	40	Lab rat	42
Rabbit^{[citation needed]}	44	Syrian hamster	44
Hare^{[citation needed]}	46	Human^[27]	46
Gorillas, Chimpanzees^[27]	48	Domestic sheep	54
Elephants^[28]	56	Cow	60
Donkey	62	Horse	64
Dog^[29]	78	Kingfisher^[30]	132
Goldfish^[31]	100-104	Silkworm^[32]	56

Chromosome numbers in other organisms
Species	Large Chromosomes	Intermediate Chromosomes	Small Chromosomes
Trypanosoma brucei	11	6	~100
Chicken^[33]	8	2 sex chromosomes	60

Normal members of a particular eukaryotic species all have the same number of nuclear chromosomes (see the table). Other eukaryotic chromosomes, i.e., mitochondrial and plasmid-like small chromosomes, are much more variable in number, and there may be thousands of copies per cell.

The 24 human chromosome territories during prometaphase in fibroblast cells.

Asexually reproducing species have one set of chromosomes, which is the same in all body cells.

Sexually reproducing species have somatic cells (body cells), which are diploid [2n] having two sets of chromosomes, one from the mother and one from the father. Gametes, reproductive cells, are haploid [n]: they have one set of chromosomes. Gametes are produced by meiosis of a diploid germ line cell. During meiosis, the matching chromosomes of father and mother can exchange small parts of themselves (crossover), and thus create new chromosomes that are not inherited solely from either parent. When a male and a female gamete merge (fertilization), a new diploid organism is formed.

Some animal and plant species are polyploid [Xn]: they have more than two sets of homologous chromosomes. Agriculturally important plants such as tobacco or wheat are often polyploid compared to their ancestral species. Wheat has a haploid number of seven chromosomes, still seen in some cultivars as well as the wild progenitors. The more common pasta and bread wheats are polyploid, having 28 (tetraploid) and 42 (hexaploid) chromosomes compared to the 14 (diploid) chromosomes in the wild wheat.^[34]

Prokaryotes

Prokaryote species generally have one copy of each major chromosome, but most cells can easily survive with multiple copies.^[35] Plasmids and plasmid-like small chromosomes are, like in eukaryotes, very variable in copy number. The number of plasmids in the cell is almost entirely determined by the rate of division of the plasmid - fast division causes high copy number, and vice versa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome

Chromosomes in prokaryotes

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The prokaryotes - bacteria and archaea - typically have a single circular chromosome, but many variations do exist.^[13] Most bacteria have a single circular chromosome that can range in size from only 160,000 base pairs in the endosymbiotic bacteria Candidatus Carsonella ruddii,^[14] to 12,200,000 base pairs in the soil-dwelling bacteria Sorangium cellulosum.^[15] Spirochaetes of the genus Borrelia are a notable exception to this arrangement, with bacteria such as Borrelia burgdorferi, the cause of Lyme disease, containing a single linear chromosome.

Structure in sequences

Prokaryotes chromosomes have less sequence-based structure than eukaryotes. Bacteria typically have a single point (the origin of replication) from which replication starts, while some archaea contain multiple replication origins.^[17] The genes in prokaryotes are often organised in operons, and do not contain introns, unlike eukaryotes.

DNA packaging

Prokaryotes do not possess nuclei, instead their DNA is organized into a structure called the nucleoid.^[18] The nucleoid is a distinct structure and occupies a defined region of the bacterial cell. This structure is however dynamic and is maintained and remodeled by the actions of a range of histone-like proteins, which associate with the bacterial chromosome.^[19] In archaea, the DNA in chromosomes is even more organized, with the DNA packaged within structures similar to eukaryotic nucleosomes.^[20]^[21]

Bacterial chromosomes tend to be tethered to the plasma membrane of the bacteria. In molecular biology application, this allows for its isolation from plasmid DNA by centrifugation of lysed bacteria and pelleting of the membranes (and the attached DNA).

Prokaryotic chromosomes and plasmids are, like eukaryotic DNA, generally supercoiled. The DNA must first be released into its relaxed state for access for transcription, regulation, and replication.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome

Chromosomes in eukaryotes

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Eukaryotes (cells with nuclei such as plants, yeast, and animals) possess multiple large linear chromosomes contained in the cell's nucleus. Each chromosome has one centromere, with one or two arms projecting from the centromere, although under most circumstances these arms are not visible as such. In addition most eukaryotes have a small circular mitochondrial genome, and some eukaryotes may have additional small circular or linear cytoplasmic chromosomes.

In the nuclear chromosomes of eukaryotes, the uncondensed DNA exists in a semi-ordered structure, where it is wrapped around histones (structural proteins), forming a composite material called chromatin.

Chromatin

Main article: Chromatin

Fig. 2: The major structures in DNA compaction; DNA, the nucleosome, the 10nm "beads-on-a-string" fibre, the 30nm fibre and the metaphase chromosome.

Chromatin is the complex of DNA and protein found in the eukaryotic nucleus which packages chromosomes. The structure of chromatin varies significantly between different stages of the cell cycle, according to the requirements of the DNA.

Interphase chromatin

During interphase (the period of the cell cycle where the cell is not dividing) two types of chromatin can be distinguished:

Euchromatin, which consists of DNA that is active, e.g., expressed as protein.
Heterochromatin, which consists of mostly inactive DNA. It seems to serve structural purposes during the chromosomal stages. Heterochromatin can be further distinguished into two types:
- Constitutive heterochromatin, which is never expressed. It is located around the centromere and usually contains repetitive sequences.
- Facultative heterochromatin, which is sometimes expressed.

Individual chromosomes cannot be distinguished at this stage - they appear in the nucleus as a homogeneous tangled mix of DNA and protein.

Metaphase chromatin and division

See also: mitosis and meiosis

Human chromosomes during metaphase.

In the early stages of mitosis or meiosis (cell division), the chromatin strands become more and more condensed. They cease to function as accessible genetic material (transcription stops) and become a compact transportable form. This compact form makes the individual chromosomes visible, and they form the classic four arm structure, a pair of sister chromatids attached to each other at the centromere. The shorter arms are called p arms (from the French petit, small) and the longer arms are called q arms (q follows p in the Latin alphabet). This is the only natural context in which individual chromosomes are visible with an optical microscope.

During divisions long microtubules attach to the centromere and the two opposite ends of the cell. The microtubules then pull the chromatids apart, so that each daughter cell inherits one set of chromatids. Once the cells have divided, the chromatids are uncoiled and can function again as chromatin. In spite of their appearance, chromosomes are structurally highly condensed which enables these giant DNA structures to be contained within a cell nucleus (Fig. 2).

The self assembled microtubules form the spindle, which attaches to chromosomes at specialized structures called kinetochores, one of which is present on each sister chromatid. A special DNA base sequence in the region of the kinetochores provides, along with special proteins, longer-lasting attachment in this region.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome