Updated: 2010-10-28 17:11
BEIJING - China's Tianhe-1 has overtaken Nebulae to regain top spot as China's fastest computer according to a new list of China's Top 100 supercomputers released Thursday.
On the biannual world TOP 500 list published in June, China's Nebulae machine took the second spot only after the US' Jaguar system, while Tianhe-1 took seventh place.
Housed at the National Center for Supercomputing in northern port city of Tianjin, Tianhe-1, meaning Milky Way, has a sustained computing speed of 2,507 trillion calculations, or 2.507 petaflops, per second.
It has a theoretical speed of 4.7 petaflops per second, according to a R&D research member of Tianhe-1. A petaflop is equivalent to 1,000 trillion calculations.
Nebulae housed in Shenzhen is capable of sustained computing of 1.271 petaflop per second (PFlop/s) on the Linpack benchmark, a measure for ranking supercomputers in world Top 500 list.
The US leads the world in supercomputing and is home to more than half of the top 500 supercomputers. The Jaguar system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has a speed of 1.75 PFlop/s.
The enhanced Tianhe-1 has upgraded Intel CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and new domestically developed Feiteng-1000 CPUs have been installed, the developer the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) said.
Tianhe-1 has begun trial use among target clients including Tianjin Meteorological Bureau and the National Offshore Oil Corporation data center. "It can also serve the animation industry and bio-medical research," said Liu Guangming, director of the National Center for Supercomputing in Tianjin.
In September 2009, the NUDT created Tianhe-1 with a sustained computing speed of 0.5631 PFlop/s, the fastest supercomputer in China at that time.
The new technical data of Tianhe-1 has been submitted to the world Top 500 list and the next list will be released in November.
Related readings:
Supercomputer ranks second fastest in world
Chinese supercomputer ranked second-fastest
Xinhua
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Technology China's fastest supercomputer Tianhe-1 sets new record
Friday, October 1, 2010
China Launches Second Robotic Moon Probe
SPACE.com Staff
space.com – Fri Oct 1, 9:45 am ET
An unmanned moon probe blasted off from China Friday (Oct. 1) to begin the country's next phase of lunar exploration and set the stage for even more ambitious spaceflights to come.
The Chinese moon probe, called Chang'e 2, launched at 6:59:57 a.m. EDT (1059:57 GMT) from the Xichang Space Center in southwestern China's Sichuan province, according to state media reports. It should take about five days for the spacecraft to enter orbit around the moon.
The Chang'e 2 spacecraft soared into space atop one of China's Long March 3C rockets. It launched on Oct. 1, National Day in China – a holiday that commemorates the 61st anniversary of Communist rule in the country.
Chang'e 2 is the second step in China's three-phase Chang'e moon exploration program, which is named after China's mythical moon goddess. Chang'e 2 will test out technology and collect data on possible landing sites for the Chang'e 3 spacecraft, which is scheduled to land on the moon in 2013, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency has reported.
According to media reports, the mission has a cost of about $134 million.
Chang'e 2 will eventually swoop down to an orbit just 9 miles (15 km) above the lunar surface to take high-resolution pictures of landing areas for the Chang'e 3 mission, Xinhua has reported.
After snapping the photos, Chang'e 2 will retreat to an altitude of about 62 miles (100 km) to conduct a study of the lunar surface and dirt.
The Chang'e 1 probe launched in October 2007 and conducted a 16-month moon observation mission, after which it crash-landed on the lunar surface by design, in March 2009.
The Chang'e missions are just one prong of China's burgeoning space program, which has seen three successful manned spaceflights, including the nation's first spacewalk on the most recent mission, the Shenzhou 7 flight of 2008.
SPAC
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Bionic legs allow paralysed man to walk again
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 7:26 AM on 16th July 2010
When Hayden Allen suffered a spinal cord injury in a motorbike accident five years ago, doctors told him he’d never walk again.
But today a revolutionary product developed by a New Zealand biotech company has enabled him to do just that.
Mr Allen has been one of the first people in the world to use Rex, the Robotic Exoskeleton - a pair of robotic legs that supports and assists a person who usually uses a wheelchair.
It lets them stand, walk and go up and down steps and slopes.
‘I’ll never forget what it was like to see my feet walking under me the first time I used Rex,' said Mr Allen.
‘People say to me, "Look up when you’re walking" but I just can’t stop staring down at my feet moving.’
Rex users move from their chair into Rex, strap themselves in and control their movements using a joystick and control pad.
The equipment weighs 38kg (84lb) and is individually made for each user.
It is powered by a lightweight, long-life rechargeable battery.
Mr Allen, a mechanic, also spoke of how liberated he felt around his workshop as he now has far more access to machinery - and he can finally talk to people at eye level again.
Dr Richard Roxburgh, Auckland neurologist and medical adviser to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, said: ‘For many of my patients, Rex represents the first time they’ve been able to stand up and walk for years.
‘There are obvious immediate benefits in terms of mobility, improved social interaction and self-image.
'There are also likely to be major long-term health and quality of life benefits through reducing the complications of being in a wheelchair all the time.
‘I think that this will also enable people to stay well longer; this means that those who have conditions where disease-modifying treatments are coming over the next five to ten years will be in better shape when those treatments finally arrive.'
Each Rex battery-powered machine will last for one day’s typical use.
Potential customers must complete a medical appraisal including checks with their own doctor to ensure their general health and suitability before they can begin the process of fitting and training.
Rex is expected to cost about $150,000 (£98,000).
CEO of Rex Bionics, Jenny Morel, says they expect to conclude internal testing of Rex shortly and will then have a preliminary release in Auckland, New Zealand to allow the company to track what happens when people take Rex home.
Sales are expected to commence in New Zealand by the end of 2010 and elsewhere in the world by the middle of 2011.
Original source
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Pi buster: French software whiz claims record
Fri Jan 8, 10:08 am ET
PARIS (AFP) – A French software engineer said on Friday he was claiming a world record for calculating Pi, the constant that has fascinated mathematicians for millennia.
Fabrice Bellard told AFP he used an inexpensive desktop computer -- and not a supercomputer used in past records -- to calculate Pi to nearly 2.7 trillion decimal places.
That is around 123 billion digits more than the previous record set last August by Japanese professor Daisuke Takahashi, he said.
Takahashi, using a T2K Open Supercomputer, took 29 hours to crunch Pi to 2.577 billion digits.
Bellard took 131 days, comprising 103 for the computation in binary digits, 13 days for verification, 12 days to convert the binary digits to a base of 10 and three final days to check the conversion.
The gear cost "a bit less than 2,000 euros" (3,000 dollars), Bellard, who earns a living as a software consultant in digital television in Paris, said in an email exchange.
"It is a completely standard PC. The only unusual thing is that it has five 1.5-teraoctet hard disks. Mainstream PCs generally have only one 1-teraoctet disk."
Bellard has placed on his website details of the achievement, including the use of a high-powered mathematical engine called the Chudnovsky algorithm that chewed through the computation.
Extracts of the 2,699,999,990,000-digit outcome have been published so that they can be compared to preceding records in order to gain independent verification, Bellard told AFP.
Files containing the digits are also being offered to any outside organization keen on hosting the record, he said.
Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, kicks off with 3.14159... in a string whose digits are believed never to repeat or end.
Bellard said he was "not especially interested" in Pi's digits but more in taking up the gauntlet of writing the software to carry out the arithmetic.
"Optimising these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge," he wrote.
AFP News
Monday, May 25, 2009
'Five Dimensional' Discs With A Storage Capacity 2,000 Times That Of Current DVDs
ScienceDaily (May 21, 2009) — Futuristic discs with a storage capacity 2,000 times that of current DVDs could be just around the corner, thanks to new research from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.
For the first time researchers from the university’s Centre for Micro-Photonics have demonstrated how nanotechnology can enable the creation of ‘five dimensional’ discs with huge storage capacities.
The research, carried out by Mr Peter Zijlstra, Dr James Chon and Professor Min Gu was published today in the scientific journal Nature.
The Nature article describes how the researchers were able to use nanoscopic particles to exponentially increase the amount of information contained on a single disc.
“We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc,” Gu said.
Discs currently have three spatial dimensions, but using nanoparticles the Swinburne researchers were able to introduce a spectral – or colour – dimension as well as a polarisation dimension.
“These extra dimensions are the key to creating ultra-high capacity discs,” Gu said.
To create the ‘colour dimension’ the researchers inserted gold nanorods onto a disc’s surface. Because nanoparticles react to light according to their shape, this allowed the researchers to record information in a range of different colour wavelengths on the same physical disc location.
This is a major improvement on current DVDs that are recorded in a single colour wavelength using a laser.
The researchers were also able to introduce an extra dimension onto the disc using polarisation. When they projected light waves onto the disc, the direction of the electric field contained within them aligned with the gold nanorods. This allowed the researchers to record different layers of information at different angles.
“The polarisation can be rotated 360 degrees,” Chon said. “So for example, we were able to record at zero degree polarisation. Then on top of that, we were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarisation, without them interfering with each other.”
Some issues, such as the speed at which the discs can be written on, are yet to be resolved. However the researchers – who have already signed an agreement with Samsung – are confident the discs will be commercially available within 5 – 10 years.
The discs are likely to have immediate applications in a range of fields. They would be valuable for storing extremely large medical files such as MRIs and could also provide a boon in the financial, military and security arenas.
The researchers’ ground breaking achievements would not have been possible without the long-time support of the Australian Research Council.
Credit: Peter Zijlstra, James W. M. Chon, Min Gu (Nature Journal).
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Scientists start to unlock secrets of bird flight
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
Thu Apr 9, 5:21 pm ET
WASHINGTON – For millennia, people have watched the birds and bees and wondered: "How do they do that?" Thanks to high-speed film and some persistent scientists, at least one of the secrets of flight is now revealed. When birds, bats or bugs make a turn, all they have to do is start flapping their wings normally again and they straighten right out.
That came as a surprise to researchers who thought turning and stopping took more steps.
Lead researcher Tyson L. Hedrick of the University of North Carolina compared it to sitting at a desk chair and turning left. It's a three-step process, launch the turn by pushing with one foot, turn, then stop by pushing with the other.
It's a simpler, one-step process for flying animals, he explained in a telephone interview, launch a turn and then simply flap normally to end it and fly away.
The findings are reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
"We didn't expect things to fall out this neatly," he said, particularly since the process is the same for animals of all sizes from the fruit fly to the bat to the cockatoo.
"It's sort of unusual" to find a general rule to cover six orders of magnitude in size, he said.
The findings should help in the development of robotic flying machines, he said.
But, of course, this study focuses only on one type of maneuver, turning left or right, which is known as yaw in aviation.
There's still pitch — nose up or nose down — and roll, which is tilting left or right, to be dealt with.
"We picked basically the simplest turn you can imagine to make comparison," Hedrick said.
The situation does become more complicated with more complex maneuvers, "and that is clearly the next step," he said.
The report was welcomed by Bret W. Tobalske of the University of Montana, who said "the results will inform all future research into maneuvering flight in animals and biomimetic flying robots."
"Now that technology has developed to the point where detailed measurements of flapping maneuvers have become feasible, a world of comparative research is opening," Tobalske, who was not part of the research team, said in a commentary on the paper.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Monday, March 16, 2009
How to tell, what to do if computer is infected
Posted on Sun Mar 15, 2009 12:46PM EDT (AP)
Computer-virus infections don't cause your machine to crash anymore.
Nowadays, the criminals behind the infections usually want your computer operating in top form so you don't know something's wrong. That way, they can log your keystrokes and steal any passwords or credit-card numbers you enter at Web sites, or they can link your infected computer with others to send out spam.
Here are some signs your computer is infected, tapped to serve as part of "botnet" armies run by criminals:
• You experience new, prolonged slowdowns. This can be a sign that a malicious program is running in the background.
• You continually get pop-up ads that you can't make go away. This is a sure sign you have "adware," and possibly more, on your machine.
• You're being directed to sites you didn't intend to visit, or your search results are coming back funky. This is another sign that hackers have gotten to your machine.
So what do you do?
• Having anti-virus software here is hugely helpful. For one, it can identify known malicious programs and disable them. If the virus that has infected your machine isn't detected, many anti-virus vendors offer a service in which they can remotely take over your computer and delete the malware for a fee.
• Some anti-virus vendors also offer free, online virus-scanning services.
• You may have to reinstall your operating system if your computer is still experiencing problems. It's a good idea even if you believe you've cleaned up the mess because malware can still be hidden on your machine. You will need to back up your files before you do this.
How do I know what information has been taken?
• It's very hard to tell what's been taken. Not every infection steals your data. Some just serve unwanted ads. Others poison your search result or steer you to Web sites you don't want to see. Others log your every keystroke. The anti-virus vendors have extensive databases about what the known infections do and don't do. Comparing the results from your virus scans to those entries will give you a good idea about what criminals may have snatched up.
(AP)
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Energy vampires: Fact versus fiction
By Lori Bongiorno Which electronic devices waste the most energy when they are turned off but still plugged in? Set-top cable boxes and digital video recorders are some of the biggest energy hogs. Unfortunately, there's little consumers can do since television shows can't be taped if boxes are unplugged. It also typically takes a long time to reboot boxes. However, some of the other major consumers of standby power are more easily dealt with: computers, multifunction printers, flat-screen TVs, DVDs, VCRs, CD players, power tools, and hand-held vacuums. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) measured standby power for a long list of products. While it's true each individual product draws relatively little standby power, the LBNL says that when added together, standby power can amount to 10% of residential energy use. Why do electronic devices use energy when they are switched off? Electronics consume standby power for one of two reasons, says Chris Kielich of the Department of Energy. They either have an adapter that will continue to draw electricity, or they have devices (such as clocks and touchpads) that draw power. Anything with a remote control will also draw standby power, she says, since the device needs to be able to detect the remote when it's pushed. Does everything suck energy when it's plugged in and turned off? No. If your coffeemaker or toaster doesn't have a clock, then it's probably not using standby power, says Kielich. Chances are your hair dryer and lamps (although they may have a power adapter for the dimmer) are not drawing standby power either, she says. Devices with a switch that physically breaks the circuit don't consume standby power. Will switching things on and off shorten their life? Probably not, says Kielich. You'd have to turn devices on and off thousands of times to shorten their lives. The real downside, she says, to unplugging electronics is that clocks and remotes will not work, and you do have to reset everything. Can you ruin batteries by unplugging battery chargers and causing batteries to completely discharge? It could be a possibility, says Kielich. Her advice: Don't let batteries get completely drained. But you don't need to have things like hand-held power vacuums and drills plugged into the charger when it's 100% charged, or even 50% charged. Power Strip FAQs Plugging electronics into a power strip and turning it off when you're not using it is a widely prescribed solution for curbing vampire power. Here are answers to common questions:
Posted Thu Feb 26, 2009 2:52pm PST
It's well-known that most electronic devices in our homes are sucking up energy even while they are turned off. But for all the information out there, many questions remain. I got hundreds of reader questions after writing the post What's wasting energy in your home right now. Below are answers to the five most common inquiries:
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Solar storms could lead to IT blackouts
Wednesday, January 14 02:30 am
By Iain Thomson in San Francisco
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has been consulting with experts on the likely damage to the worlds internet infrastructure in 2012, when the solar storms are expected to peak.
Solar storms pump vast amounts of electromagnetic radiation into the solar system. Storms in 1859 burnt out telegraph wires while similar storms in 1989 took down part of the Canadian energy grid. In 2005 US systems also suffered solar damage.
The world could look forward to "disruption of the transportation, communication, banking, and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure; and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of lack of refrigeration," according to the report.
The report estimates damages of "$1 trillion to $2 trillion during the first year alone ... for the societal and economic costs of a 'severe geomagnetic storm scenario' with recovery times of four to 10 years."
A report by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich estimated that if the countrys internet infrastructure went down it would harm the economy by 1.2 per cent of GDP a week.
While much has been done to strengthen parts of the national IT backbone and shield it from effects individual companies are vulnerable, particularly those with extended networking to data centres.
Systems based around GPS will also be vulnerable the report found. If signals are lost from the GPS satellites around the world businesses which rely on them for tracking inventory and staff will face severe difficulties.
vnunet.com
More: Space weather
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Major flaw revealed in Internet Explorer; users urged to switch
Tue Dec 16, 2008 11:49AM EST Virtually all security experts (as well as myself) are counseling users to switch to any other web browser -- none of the others are affected, including Firefox, Chrome, and Opera -- at least for the time being, though Microsoft has stubbornly said it "cannot recommend people switch due to this one flaw." Microsoft adds that it is working on a fix but has offered no ETA on when that might happen. Meanwhile it offers some suggestions for a temporary patch, including setting your Internet security zone settings to "high" and offering some complicated workarounds. (Some reports state, however, that the fixes do not actually work.) Expedient patching or switching are essential. Security pros fear that the attack will soon spread beyond the theft of gaming passwords and into more criminal arenas, as the malicious code can be placed on any website and can be adapted to steal any password stored or entered using the browser. It's now down to the issue of time: Will Microsoft repair the problem and distribute a patch quickly enough to head off the tsunami of fraud that's about to hit or will it come too late to do any good? Meanwhile, I'll reiterate my recommendation: Switch from Internet Explorer as soon as you can. You can always switch back once the threat is eliminated. Links for other browsers to try: Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
The major press outlets are abuzz this morning with news of a major new security flaw that affects all versions of Internet Explorer from IE5 to the latest beta of IE8. The attack has serious and far-reaching ramifications -- and they're not just theoretical attacks. In fact, the flaw is already in wide use as a tool to steal online game passwords, with some 10,000 websites infected with the code needed to take advantage of the hole in IE.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Doctor's Advice: Leave the Toilet Seat Up
LiveScience Staff
LiveScience.com
Thu Dec 11, 3:42 pm ET
One of the longest-running spousal debates may now be settled in favor of men and for the sake of little boys.
Leave the toilet seat up, some British doctors now say. The reason: a rising trend for heavy wooden and ornamental toilet seats to fall down onto the penises of unsuspecting (and just potty-trained) toddlers.
Dr. Joe Philip and his colleagues of Leighton Hospital, Crewe, in England detail such penis-crush injuries in the December issue of the journal BJU International. The team reports on four boys between the ages of 2 and 4 who were admitted to hospitals with injuries serious enough to require an overnight stay.
The doctors say the injuries have implications for holiday travel and at-home toilet safety for parents with male toddlers.
"As Christmas approaches many families will be visiting relatives and friends and their recently toilet-trained toddlers will be keen to show how grown-up they are by going to the toilet on their own," Philip said. "It is important that parents check out the toilet seats in advance, not to mention the ones they have in their own homes, and accompany their children if necessary."
The team found that all four toddlers had been potty trained and were using the toilet on their own when the incidents occurred. Each had lifted the toilet seat, which fell back down and crushed his penis. Three of the toddlers showed a build-up of fluid in the foreskin, but they were still able to urinate. The fourth had so-called glandular tenderness.
Luckily, the doctors say, the toddlers showed no injuries to the urethra (the tube in the penis that carries urine out) and no bleeding. All four toddlers were able to leave the hospital the next day.
To keep toddlers safe during their journey in the bathroom, the doctors suggest the following tips:
* Parents should consider using toilet seats that fall slowly and with reduced momentum, which would reduce the risk and degree of injury.
* Heavier toilet seats could be banned in houses with male infants.
* Households with male infants should consider leaving the toilet seat up after use, even though it contradicts the social norm of putting it down.
* Parents could educate their toddlers to hold the toilet seat up with one hand while urinating. During such a feat, parents should keep an eye on toddlers until the toddler can do this by himself.
"As any parent knows, toilet training can be a difficult time with any toddler," Philip said. "We are concerned that the growing trend of heavy toilet seats poses a risk not only to their health, but to their confidence."
- Penis Myths Debunked
- How to Solve Toddler Tantrums: Think Like a Neanderthal
- Video - A Mother's Touch
- Original Story: Doctor's Advice: Leave the Toilet Seat Up
Elephants live longer in wild than zoos
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON – Zoo elephants don't live as long as those in the wild, according to a study sure to stir debate about keeping the giant animals on display. Researchers compared the life spans of elephants in European zoos with those living in Amboseli National Park in Kenya and others working on a timber enterprise in Myanmar. Animals in the wild or in natural working conditions had life spans twice that or more of their relatives in zoos.
Animal care activists have campaigned in recent years to discourage keeping elephants in zoos, largely because of the lack of space and small numbers of animals that can be kept in a group. Debates have been especially vocal in Dallas and Los Angeles.
The researchers found that the median life span for African elephants in European zoos was 16.9 years, compared with 56 years for elephants who died of natural causes in Kenya's Amboseli park. Adding in those elephants killed by people in Africa lowered the median life span there to 35.9 years. Median means half died younger than that age and half lived longer.
For the more endangered Asian elephants, the median life span in European zoos was 18.9 years, compared with 41.7 years for those working in the Myanmar Timber Enterprise. Myanmar is the country formerly known as Burma.
There is some good news, though. The life spans of zoo elephants have improved in recent years, suggesting an improvement in their care and raising, said one of the report's authors, Georgia J. Mason of the animal sciences department at the University of Guelph, Canada.
But, she added, "protecting elephants in Africa and Asia is far more successful than protecting them in Western zoos."
There are about 1,200 elephants in zoos, half in Europe, Mason said in an interview via e-mail. She said researchers concentrated on female elephants, which make up 80 percent of the zoo population.
"One of our more amazing results" was that Asian elephants born in zoos have shorter life spans than do Asian elephants brought to the zoos from the wild, she added in a broadcast interview provided by the journal Science, which published the results in its Friday edition.
She noted that zoos usually lack have large grazing areas that elephants are used to in the wild, and that zoo animals often are alone or with one or two other unrelated animals, while in the wild they tend to live in related groups of eight to 12 animals.
In Asian elephants, infant mortality rates are two times to three times higher in zoos than in the Burmese logging camps, Mason said via e-mail. And then, in adulthood, zoo-born animals die prematurely.
"We're not sure why," she said.
The study confirms many of the findings of a similar 2002 analysis prepared by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. One of the authors of the new study, Ros Clubb, works for the society.
Steven Feldman, a spokesman for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, contended the report did not reflect conditions in North America. In addition, he said, it is hard to compare conditions in zoos and in the wild. "Every event in a zoo is observed," he said, while scientists can study only a small number of events in nature.
The project, or individual researchers, received financial support from Canada's National Science and Engineering Research Council, Prospect Burma Foundation, Charles Wallace Burma Trust, Three Oaks Foundation, Whitney-Laing Foundation, Toyota Foundation, Fantham Memorial Research Scholarship and University College, London.
Among the researchers, Mason has served as a paid consultant to Disney's Animal Kingdom USA and one of authors, Khyne U. Mar, has been a paid consultant for Woburn Safari Park, about an hour north of London.
AP Associated Press
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
2008 Will Be Just a Second Longer
Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
LiveScience.com
Mon Dec 8, 3:24 pm ET
On Dec. 31 this year, your day will be just a second longer.
Like the more well-known time adjustment, the leap year, a "leap second" is tacked on to clocks every so often to keep them correct.
Earth's trip around the sun - our year with all its seasons - is about 365.2422 days long, which we round to 365 to keep things simpler. But every four years, we add 0.2422 x 4 days (that's about one day) at the end of the month of February (extending it from 28 to 29 days) to fix the calendar.
Likewise, a "leap second" is added on to our clocks every so often to keep them in synch with the somewhat unpredictable nature of our planet's rotation, the roughly 24-hour whirl that brings the sun into the sky each morning.Historically, time was based on the mean rotation of the Earth relative to celestial bodies and the second was defined from this frame of reference. But the invention of atomic clocks brought about a definition of a second that is independent of the Earth's rotation and based on a regular signal emitted by electrons changing energy state within an atom.
In 1970, an international agreement established two timescales: one based on the rotation of the Earth and one based on atomic time.
The problem is that the Earth is very gradually slowing down, continually throwing the two timescales out of synch, so every so often, a "leap second" has to be tacked on to the atomic clock.
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service is the organization that monitors the difference in the two timescales and calls for leap seconds to be inserted or removed when necessary. Since 1972, leap seconds have been added at intervals varying from six months to seven years - the most recent was inserted on Dec. 31, 2005.
In the United States, the U.S. Naval Observatory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology keep time for the country. The Naval Observatory keeps the Department of Defense's Master Clock, an atomic clock located in Washington, D.C.
The new extra second will be added on the last day of this year at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time - 6:59:59 pm Eastern Standard Time.
Mechanisms such as the Internet-based Network Time Protocol and the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) depend on the accurate time kept by atomic clocks.
- Original Story: 2008 Will Be Just a Second Longer
Friday, December 5, 2008
Firefox Users Targeted by Rare Piece of Malware (PC World)
Posted on Fri Dec 5, 2008 7:11AM EST
Researchers at BitDefender have discovered a new type of malicious software that collects passwords for banking sites but targets only Firefox users.
The malware, which BitDefender dubbed "Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A" sits in Firefox's add-ons folder, said Viorel Canja, the head of BitDefender's lab. The malware runs when Firefox is started.
The malware uses JavaScript to identify more than 100 financial and money transfer Web sites, including Barclays, Wachovia, Bank of America, and PayPal along with two dozen or so Italian and Spanish banks. When it recognizes a Web site, it will collect logins and passwords, forwarding that information to a server in Russia.
Firefox has been continually gaining market share against main competitor Internet Explorer since its debut four years ago, which may be one reason why malware authors are looking for new avenues to infect computers, Canja said.
Users could be infected with the Trojan either from a drive-by download, which can infect a PC by exploiting a vulnerability in a browser, or by being duped into downloading it, Canja said.
When it runs on a PC, it registers itself in Firefox's system files as "Greasemonkey," a well-known collection of scripts that add extra functionality to Web pages rendered by Firefox.
BitDefender has updated its products to detect it, and other vendors will likely follow suit quickly, Canja said. Users could avoid it by only downloading signed, verified software, but that's a measure that restricts the usability of a PC, he said.
The malware is not present in Mozilla's repository of add-ons, Canja said. Mozilla had taken steps to ensure that its official site hosting add-ons -- also called extensions -- are free from malware.
In May, Mozilla acknowledged that the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox contained a bit of unwanted code. Although widely reported as a virus, the language actually contained a line of HTML code that would cause users to view unwanted advertisements.
Mozilla now scans new add-ons for malware. However, those scans will only detect known threats, and there was no signature in the security software Mozilla was using at the time that could detect the code.
Mozilla said the code probably ended up in the language pack after the PC of its developer became infected. More than 16,000 people downloaded the language pack, but only about 1,000 people regularly use it.
After the incident, Mozilla said it would scan add-ons in its repository when antivirus signatures were updated.
PC World
Friday, November 28, 2008
Shuttle astronaut invents zero-gravity cup
By Irene Klotz Irene Klotz – Thu Nov 27, 4:52 pm ET
Space Shuttle Endeavour astronauts Don Pettit (L) and Stephen Bowen drink after making a Thanksgiving toast from aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in this November 27, 2008 image from NASA TV.
(NASA TV/Reuters)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Future space travelers may be drinking their own urine, thanks to the International Space Station's new water recycler, but they can now do so with a touch of class.
Endeavour astronaut Don Pettit, a self-described tinkerer who served as the space station's flight engineer in 2003, invented a zero-gravity cup that wicks liquids along the sides of a piece of folded plastic, eliminating the need for a straw.
Because liquids typically form spherical blobs in weightlessness, astronauts drink from sealed pouches using straws. Pettit, a huge coffee fan, didn't like sipping his java, and created the cup from a sheet of transparent plastic used in overhead projectors by folding it into the shape of an airplane wing and taping it in place.
"The way this works is the cross-section of this cup looks like an airplane wing. The narrow angle here will wick the coffee up," Pettit explained in a video radioed to NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston and broadcast on NASA TV.
"We can sip most of the fluid out of these cups and we no longer have to drink our beverages sucking through a straw in a pouch," Pettit said.
On Thursday, Petit made another cup for crewmate Stephen Bowen and proposed a toast to the Thanksgiving holiday, space exploration and "just because we're in space and we can."
One of the Shuttle's main mission was to install a $250 million water recycling system enables the Space Station crew to recycle urine and other wastewater into drinking water.
The astronauts were scheduled to share a Thanksgiving meal of dehydrated turkey with their space station hosts before closing the hatches between the two ships in preparation for Endeavour's departure on Friday.
The shuttle, which delivered a water-purification system to the station among other gear, is due back at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday after a 16-day mission.
(Editing by Sandra Maler)
Friday, November 21, 2008
E=mc2: 103 years later, Einstein's proven right
Thu Nov 20, 6:56 pm ET (AFP)
People walk past a giant sculpture featuring Albert Einstein's formula "E=mc2" in front of Berlin's Altes Museum in 2006. It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula E=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.
(AFP/File/John Macdougall)
PARIS (AFP) – It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula E=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.
A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.
According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.
The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?
The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.
In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.
The E=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass.
By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic weapons.
But resolving E=mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic particles -- in equations called quantum chromodynamics -- has been fiendishly difficult.
"Until now, this has been a hypothesis," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said proudly in a press release.
"It has now been corroborated for the first time."
For those keen to know more: the computations involve "envisioning space and time as part of a four-dimensional crystal lattice, with discrete points spaced along columns and rows."
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Teen lives 4 months with no heart, leaves hospital
By RASHA MADKOUR, Associated Press Writer
MIAMI – D'Zhana Simmons says she felt like a "fake person" for 118 days when she had no heart beating in her chest. "But I know that I really was here," the 14-year-old said, "and I did live without a heart." As she was being released Wednesday from a Miami hospital, the shy teen seemed in awe of what she's endured. Since July, she's had two heart transplants and survived with artificial heart pumps — but no heart — for four months between the transplants.
Last spring D'Zhana and her parents learned she had an enlarged heart that was too weak to sufficiently pump blood. They traveled from their home in Clinton, S.C. to Holtz Children's Hospital in Miami for a heart transplant.
But her new heart didn't work properly and could have ruptured so surgeons removed it two days later.
And they did something unusual, especially for a young patient: They replaced the heart with a pair of artificial pumping devices that kept blood flowing through her body until she could have a second transplant.
Dr. Peter Wearden, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh who works with the kind of pumps used in this case, said what the Miami medical team managed to do "is a big deal."
"For (more than) 100 days, there was no heart in this girl's body? That is pretty amazing," Wearden said.
The pumps, ventricular assist devices, are typically used with a heart still in place to help the chambers circulate blood. With D'Zhana's heart removed, doctors at Holtz Children's Hospital crafted substitute heart chambers using a fabric and connected these to the two pumps.
Although artificial hearts have been approved for adults, none has been federally approved for use in children. In general, there are fewer options for pediatric patients. That's because it's rarer for them to have these life-threatening conditions, so companies don't invest as much into technology that could help them, said Dr. Marco Ricci, director of pediatric cardiac surgery at the University of Miami.
He said this case demonstrates that doctors now have one more option.
"In the past, this situation could have been lethal," Ricci said.
And it nearly was. During the almost four months between her two transplants, D'Zhana wasn't able to breathe on her own half the time. She also had kidney and liver failure and gastrointestinal bleeding.
Taking a short stroll — when she felt up for it — required the help of four people, at least one of whom would steer the photocopier-sized machine that was the external part of the pumping devices.
When D'Zhana was stable enough for another operation, doctors did the second transplant on Oct. 29.
"I truly believe it's a miracle," said her mother, Twolla Anderson.
D'Zhana said now she's grateful for small things: She'll see her five siblings soon, and she can spend time outdoors.
"I'm glad I can walk without the machine," she said, her turquoise princess top covering most of the scars on her chest. After thanking the surgeons for helping her, D'Zhana began weeping.
Doctors say she'll be able to do most things that teens do, like attending school and going out with friends. She will be on lifelong medication to keep her body from rejecting the donated heart, and there's a 50-50 chance she'll need another transplant before she turns 30.
For now, though, D'Zhana is looking forward to celebrating another milestone. On Saturday, she turns 15 and plans to spend the day riding in a boat off Miami's coast.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Which Came First? Eggs Before Chickens, Scientists Now Say
LiveScience.com jeanna Bryner
senior Writer
livescience.com
Reuters – Imprints of eggs and their broken shells, part of a 77-million-year-old dinosaur nest, are displayed …
A rare fossilized dinosaur nest helps answer the conundrum of which came first, the chicken or the egg, two paleontologists say.
The small carnivorous dinosaur sat over her nest of eggs some 77 million years ago, along a sandy river beach. When water levels rose, Mom seems to have fled, leaving the unhatched offspring.
Researchers have now studied the fossil nest and at least five partial eggs. The nest is a mound of sand that extends about 1.6 feet (half a meter) across and weighs as much as a small person, or about 110 pounds (50 kg).
"Some characteristics of the nest are shared with birds, and our analysis can tell us how far back in time these features, such as brooding, nest building, and eggs with a pointed end, evolved - partial answers to the old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg," said researcher Francois Therrien, curator of dinosaur paleoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada.
The answer?
Well, it's still unclear whether chicken eggs or chickens came first (the intended question in the original riddle), said Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist of the University of Calgary in Alberta who was the first scientist to closely analyze the dinosaur nest.
But interpreted literally, the answer to the riddle is clear. Dinosaurs were forming bird-like nests and laying bird-like eggs long before birds (including chickens) evolved from dinosaurs.
"The egg came before the chicken," Zelenitsky said. "Chickens evolved well after the meat-eating dinosaurs that laid these eggs."
So the original riddle might now be rephrased: Which came first, the dinosaur or the egg? Meanwhile, the new nest provides some of the strongest evidence in North America in favor of the bird-like egg over the chicken.
Rare dino nests
The fossil nest was collected in the 1990s and kept at Canada Fossils Limited in Calgary, Alberta. That's where Zelenitsky first spotted the remains, which were labeled at first as belonging to a duck-billed dinosaur, an herbivore. (In 2007, the fossil was acquired by the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta.)
Zelenitsky realized that the nest and eggs actually belonged to a small theropod, a meat-eating dinosaur. In particular, the egg-layer was likely a maniraptoran, the group of theropods that paleontologists think birds derived from some 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.
"Nests of small theropods are rare in North America and only those of the dinosaur Troodon have been identified previously," said Zelenitsky. "Based on characteristics of the eggs and nest, we know that the nest belonged to either a caenagnathid [a family of maniraptorans] or a small raptor, both small meat-eating dinosaurs closely related to birds."
She added, "Either way, it is the first nest known for these small dinosaurs."
The only other egg clutch identified to date from a maniraptoran in North America belonged to Troodon formosus.
Egg-laying behaviors
The analysis of the nest, detailed in the latest issue of the journal Palaeontology, provides paleontologists with information about egg-laying in this particular dinosaur and others, along with the evolution of various egg-laying behaviors, Therrien said.
"Our research tells us a lot about the dinosaur that laid the eggs and how it built its nest," he said.
For instance, the position and spacing of the eggs suggest the original clutch contained at least 12 eggs arranged in a ring around the mound's flat top, where the theropod would have sat and brooded its clutch. The eggs were about 5 inches (12 cm) long and, like bird eggs, they were pointed at one end.
The analysis also suggests the dinosaur laid its eggs two at a time on the sloping sides of the mound. That's unlike, say, crocodiles, which lay all their eggs at once, and more like birds, which lay one egg at a time. (The ancestors of crocodiles gave rise to dinosaurs and later on, birds.)
As if figuring out the chicken-egg puzzle weren't enough, the researchers also have another objective: "To find the same kind of nest with babies inside," Zelenitsky told LiveScience. "There are dinosaur eggs from North America with baby bones preserved inside of them. It's entirely possible, but again these types of nests (from small meat-eating dinosaurs) are fairly rare."
The research was funded by Richard and Donna Strong, the Alberta Ingenuity Fellowship Fund and the Killam Fellowship Fund.
Mystery solved: How bleach kills germs
Thu Nov 13, 2:46 pm ET
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Bleach has been killing germs for more than 200 years but U.S. scientists have just figured out how the cleaner does its dirty work.
It seems that hypochlorous acid, the active ingredient in bleach, attacks proteins in bacteria, causing them to clump up much like an egg that has been boiled, a team at the University of Michigan reported in the journal Cell on Thursday.
The discovery, which may better explain how humans fight off infections, came quite by accident.
"As so often happens in science, we did not set out to address this question," Ursula Jakob, who led the team, said in a statement.
The researchers had been studying a bacterial protein called heat shock protein 33, which is a kind of molecular chaperon that becomes active when cells are in distress, for example from the high temperature of a fever.
In this case, the source of the distress was hypochlorous acid or hypochlorite.
Jakob's team figured out that bleach and high temperatures have very similar effects on proteins.
When they exposed the bacteria to bleach, the heat shock protein became active in an attempt to protect other proteins in the bacteria from losing their chemical structure, forming clumps that would eventually die off.
"Many of the proteins that hypochlorite attacks are essential for bacterial growth, so inactivating those proteins likely kills the bacteria," Marianne Ilbert, a postdoctoral fellow in Jakob's lab, said in a statement.
The researchers said the human immune system produces hypochlorous acid in response to infection but the substance does not kill only the bacterial invaders. It kills human cells too, which may explain how tissue is destroyed in chronic inflammation.
"Hypochlorous acid is an important part of host defense," Jakob said. "It's not just something we use on our countertops."
(Editing by Maggie Fox and John O'Callaghan)
Thursday, November 13, 2008
World's Largest Truck Goes Robotic
Eric Bland, Discovery News
Nov. 6, 2008 -- The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world. Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up with engineers from Caterpillar to automate the 700-ton trucks, which are made to haul loads up to 240 tons from mines.
That's nearly two million pounds of metal, fuel and stone powered by a 3,550-horsepower, 24-valve engine moving at up to 42 miles per hour, with software and a robot at the wheel.
"Autonomous vehicle technology is pretty much in its infancy," said Tony Stentz, a professor at CMU involved in the project. Stentz expects that over the next five to 10 years, the technology will expand to areas beyond mining, eventually finding its way into consumer cars and trucks.
Catepillar's soon-to-be-automated hauling trucks will be the largest but not the first. Caterpillar's rival, Japan-based Komatsu, already runs automated trucks at the Gaby mine in Chile. Rio Tinto, a British/Australian mining company, recently announced plans to fully automate its Pilbara iron ore mines in Australia, including its Komatsu trucks, by this November.
The Caterpillar trucks will be equipped with numerous high-tech gadgets and software to keep them on the road. GPS receivers would continuously monitor the location and direction of the trucks.
Laser range finders would sweep the road in front of the trucks to identify large objects. Video equipment would then determine if the object is a hazard, such as a rock, or not. All of the information would then be run through a computer program that would tell the robotic driver to avoid the obstacle or not and by how much.
The software to run the trucks will be adapted from CMU's part in the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Urban Challenge, a competition that required unmanned vehicles equipped with sensors and artificial intelligence systems to navigate through an urban environment filled with obstacles. The software will require some changes to adapt to mines, Stentz said, but he wouldn't elaborate on the details.
Fully automated mining trucks promise to reduce maintenance costs while increasing productivity. While being careful not to say what Caterpillar's performance expectations will be, Stentz offered a "very rough calculation" that by running at peak capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the trucks could be up to 100 percent more productive.
Mines are also dangerous, and removing humans from dangerous jobs will help save lives, said Mark Campbell, another DARPA Urban Challenge participant from Cornell University.
"I personally think this is a good idea," said Campbell. "The safety of miners will be greatly improved because of the lighting issues, fog, dust and other conditions that make driving around a mine difficult."
While mines have tough conditions, they are much easier to navigate compared to the urban areas both Cornell and CMU faced in the Urban Challenge.
Fully automated consumer vehicles aren't likely to arrive any time soon. Bits and pieces of the technology, like self-parking cars and backup warning systems, already exist. More devices will be added as costs come down, the sensors become better refined, and drivers come to rely on them more.
But drivers are still needed, at least for now, says Campbell: "The sensors would give the driver more information, so the human operators are still in charge or at least in control."
