Generating Power from Kites

by N. Martinelli Wired News, 10 Oct 2006 Researchers in Italy have high hopes for a new wind-power generator that resembles a backyard drying rack on steroids. Despite its appearance, the Kite Wind Generator, or KiteGen for short, could produce as much energy as a nuclear power plant. Read more

Methods of Using Existing Wire Lines for Totally Secure Classical Communication

by L.B. Kish arXiv.org E-print Archive, 2 Oct 2006 We outline some general solutions to use already existing and currently used wire lines, such as power lines, phone lines, internet lines, etc, for the unconditionally secure communication method based on Kirchoff's Law and Johnson-like Noise. Two different methods are shown. One is based on filters used at single wires and the other one utilizes a common mode voltage superimposed on a three-phase powerline. Read more

Engineers Study 'Morphing Aircraft' Idea

PhysOrg.com, accessed 11 Oct 2006 Modern materials are enabling engineers to take a fresh look at the idea of aircraft that can flex, twist or change shape to make them more maneuverable. NASA and the Defense Department are funding research programs to explore ideas. Scientists hope to gain a better understanding of the basic physics of the components and subsystems that will be needed for the next generation of aircraft. The research includes evaluating flexible-skin concepts that have been proposed to enable wings to change shape, improving tools for simulating how morphing structures behave in flight, and looking at using devices within the wing skins to recover or "harvest" energy as the wings move. Read more

New All-Optical Modulator Paves the Way to Ultrafast Communications and Computing

PhysOrg.com, accessed 11 Oct 2006 In the 1950s, a revolution began when glass and metal vacuum tubes were replaced with tiny and cheap transistors. Today, for the cost of a single vacuum tube, you can buy a computer chip with literally millions of transistors. Today, physicists and engineers are looking to accomplish a similar shrinking act with the components of optical systems -- lasers, modulators, detectors, and more -- that are used to manipulate light. The goal: designing ultrafast computing and communications devices that use photons of light, instead of electrons, to transmit information and perform computations, all with unprecedented speed. Read more

Sensing of Distributed Strain and Damage for Life Prediction and Self Healing

by E.T. Thostenson & T.-W. Chou Advanced Materials, 2 Oct 2006 (online) Composite materials are made by weaving together strong fibres of carbon or glass and embedding them in a matrix of epoxy or other polymer. They are widely used in the construction of aircraft because they offer an unmatched combination of strength and lightness. Their downside is that internal defects that can lead to catastrophic structural failure can be hard to detect. Now engineers at the University of Delaware have shown that carbon nanotubes embedded in composite materials can be used to spot these hidden internal flaws. Read more

Mathematical Parallels between Packet Switching and Information Transmission

by T.T. Lee arXiv.org E-print Archive, 10 Oct 2006 All communication networks comprise of transmission systems and switching systems, even though they are usually treated as two separate issues. Communication channels are generally disturbed by noise from various sources. In circuit switched networks, reliable communication requires the error-tolerant transmission of bits over noisy channels. In packet switched networks, however, not only can bits be corrupted with noise, but resources along connection paths are also subject to contention. Thus, quality of service is determined by buffer delays and packet losses. The theme of this paper is to show that transmission noise and packet contention actually have similar characteristics and can be tamed by comparable means to achieve reliable communication, and a number of analogies between switching and transmission are identified. The sampling theorem of bandlimited signals provides the cornerstone of digital communication and signal processing. Recently, the Birkhoff-von Neumann decomposition of traffic matrices has been widely applied to packet switches. With respect to the complexity reduction of packet switching, we show that the decomposition of a doubly stochastic traffic matrix plays a similar role to that of the sampling theorem in digital transmission. We conclude that packet switching systems are governed by mathematical laws that are similar to those of digital transmission systems as envisioned by Shannon in his seminal 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." Read more

Pipelined Feed-Forward Cyclic Redundancy Check Calculation

by M. Walma arXiv.org E-print Archive, 5 Oct 2006 This paper discusses a method for pipelining the calculation of Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRCs), such as ITU/CCITT CRC32, into a mostly feed-forward architecture. This method allows several benefits such as independent scaling of circuit frequency and data throughput. Additionally it allows calculation over packet tails. Finally it offers the ability to update a CRC where a subset of data in the packet has changed. Read more

Boosting Internet Speeds without Fiber-Optics

CNN.com, 10 Oct 2006 A group of technology and telecoms companies, including Spanish giant Telefonica, joined forces on Tuesday to boost the Internet speeds of copper telephone wires to almost equal that of fiber-optic cable. The new technology, dubbed Dynamic Spectrum Management, promises speeds to rival those of fibre-optic networks, much faster than currently available on broadband. Read more

Future of the Hard Drive Secure

by Chris Long BBC News, 6 Oct 2006 With all the developments in memory technology you could be forgiven for thinking that the lowly hard drive is dead. But although the hard drive is 50 this year, we have seen yet more growth in the technologies around it. The one terabyte drive is more or less here, we have perpendicular recording and they are getting smaller all the time. Read more

Long-Term Power-Law Fluctuation in Internet Traffic

by S. Tadaki arXiv.org E-print Archive, 29 Sep 2006 Scale-free properties of observed Internet packet flow are discussed. The data is obtained by a multi-router traffic grapher system for 9 months. Internet packet flow is analyzed using the detrended fluctuation analysis. By extracting the average daily trend, the data shows clear power-law fluctuations. The exponents of the fluctuation for the incoming and outgoing flow are almost unity. Internet traffic can be understood as a daily periodic flow with power-law fluctuations. Read more

Hybrids with a Power Cord

by Jim Motavalli New York Times, 1 Oct 2006 Are there plug-in hybrid vehicles in America’s future? Such hybrids could travel 10 to 20 additional miles on battery power alone, but until recently automakers have said -- more or less unanimously -- that it was not practical to add a larger battery pack and plug-in chargers to hybrid vehicles because of the added weight, complexity and cost. The public is already confused about hybrids, they say, with many people still believing that these cars (whose batteries are charged by their internal-combustion engines) need to be plugged in. So now hybrids really will have a power cord? Read more

Quantum Teleportation between Light and Matter

by J.F. Sherson et al. Nature, 5 Oct 2006 Quantum teleportation is an important ingredient in distributed quantum networks, and can also serve as an elementary operation in quantum computers. Teleportation was first demonstrated as a transfer of a quantum state of light onto another light beam; later developments used optical relays 7 and demonstrated entanglement swapping for continuous variables. The teleportation of a quantum state between two single material particles has now also been achieved. Here we demonstrate teleportation between objects of a different nature -- light and matter, which respectively represent 'flying' and 'stationary' media. A quantum state encoded in a light pulse is teleported onto a macroscopic object. Deterministic teleportation is achieved for sets of coherent states with mean photon number (n) up to a few hundred. The fidelities are 0.58 ± 0.02 for n = 20 and 0.60 ± 0.02 for n = 5 -- higher than any classical state transfer can possibly achieve. Besides being of fundamental interest, teleportation using a macroscopic atomic ensemble is relevant for the practical implementation of a quantum repeater. An important factor for the implementation of quantum networks is the teleportation distance between transmitter and receiver; this is 0.5 metres in the present experiment. As our experiment uses propagating light to achieve the entanglement of light and atoms required for teleportation, the present approach should be scalable to longer distances. Read more

Robot Cars Will Race in Real Traffic

by W. Knight NewScientist.com, 3 Oct 2006 The first 11 teams for a race in which robot cars will jostle with real ones along mocked-up city streets have been announced. The teams must construct autonomous vehicles to navigate an unfamiliar urban environment in the shortest time possible. The robot racers will face a "simulated" urban course 60 miles in length in November 2007. The course will feature urban obstacles, such as trees and buildings, traffic signs and other moving vehicles. Its location is yet to be disclosed. Read more

'Airblade' Hand Dryer Could Improve Hygiene

by T. Simonite NewScientist.com, 3 Oct 2006 A hand dryer that uses "blades" of air and bacteria-killing filters is more effective and hygienic than conventional drying machines, its inventors claim. Conventional hand dryers use a heater and a motorised fan to evaporate water from a person's hands. The Dyson dryer uses a motor to force unheated air through two thin slots at 400 miles per hour. These jets form so-called "air blades" that force water off a user's hands, as they slowly withdraw them past the blades. Read more

Method Could Help Carbon Nanotubes Become Commercially Viable

Northwestern University Press Release, 4 Oct 2006 Carbon nanotubes are intriguing new materials which have been highly touted for their exceptional mechanical, thermal, optical and electrical properties. Researchers worldwide are striving to apply these nanostructures in electronics, high-resolution displays, high-strength composites and biosensors. A fundamental problem relating to their synthesis, however, has limited their widespread use. Current methods for synthesizing carbon nanotubes produce mixtures of tubes that differ in their diameter and twist. Variations in electronic properties arise from these structural differences, resulting in carbon nanotubes that are unsuitable for most proposed applications. Now, a new method developed at Northwestern University for sorting single-walled carbon nanotubes promises to overcome this problem. Read more

Cooperative Processes for Scientific Workflows

by K. Gaaloul, F. Charoy, & C. Godart arXiv.org E-print Archive, 4 Oct 2006 The work described in this paper is a contribution to the problems of managing in data-intensive scientific applications. First, we discuss scientific workflows and motivate there use in scientific applications. Then, we introduce the concept of cooperative processes and describe their interactions and uses in a flexible cooperative workflow system called Bonita. Finally, we propose an approach to integrate and synthesize the data exchanged by the mapping of data-intensive science into Bonita, using a binary approach, and illustrate the endeavors done to enhance the performance computations within a dynamic environment. Read more

Network Calculus Based FDI Approach for Switched Ethernet Architecture

by B. Brahimi, C. Aubrun, & E. Rondeau arXiv.org E-print Archive, 5 Oct 2006 Networked Control Systems are complex systems which integrate information provided by several domians such as automatic control, computer science, communication network. The work presented in this paper concerns fault detection, isolation and compensation of communication network. The proposed method is based on the classical approach of Fault Detection and Isolation and Fault Tolerant Control currently used in diagnosis. The modelling of the network to be supervised is based on both couloured petri nets and network calculus theory often used to represent and analyse the network behaviour. The goal is to implement inside network devices algorithms enabling to detect, isolate and compensate communication faults in an autonomous way. Read more

Robotic Whiskers Used to Sense Features

byJ.H. Solomon & M.J. Hartmann Nature, 5 Oct 2006 Several species of terrestrial and marine mammals with whiskers use them to sense and navigate in their environment -- for example, rats use their whiskers to discern the features of objects, and seals rely on theirs to track the hydrodynamic trails of their prey. Here we show that the bending moment -- sometimes referred to as torque -- at the whisker base can be used to generate three-dimensional spatial representations of the environment, and we use this principle to construct robotic whisker arrays that extract precise information about object shape and fluid flow. Our results will contribute to the development of versatile tactile-sensing systems for robotic applications, and demonstrate the value of hardware models in understanding how sensing mechanisms and movement control strategies are interlocked. Read more

Cricket Machine Masters Bowling

BBC News, 6 Oct 2006 A machine that can replicate the spin and swing of bowlers has been developed at a U.K. university. The robotic bowler has been created at Loughborough University as part of a virtual reality project to improve match training for cricket. "Cricketers want to be able to face bowlers like Shane Warne," said project lead Dr Andy West. "The machine is helping us to figure out the science of bowling and the mysteries of spin and swing." Read more

NSF Funding Opportunity - Biophotonics

The goal of the Biophotonics Program is to continue exploitation of the power of photonics to advance biomedical engineering. Developing molecularly specific sensing, imaging, and monitoring systems with high optical sensitivity, and resolution would be an enormous accomplishment with powerful applications to both biology and medicine. Low cost diagnostics will require novel integration of photonics, molecular biology, and material science. Complex biosensors capable of detecting and discriminating among large classes of biomolecules could be important not only to biology and medicine, but also to environmental sensing and homeland defense. Read more

NSF Funding Opportunity - Environmental Sustainability

The Environmental Sustainability program supports engineering research with the goal of promoting sustainable engineered systems that support human well-being and that also are compatible with sustaining natural systems, which provide ecological services vital for human survival. The long-term viability of natural capital is critical for many areas of human endeavor, including agriculture, industry, and tourism. Research in Environmental Sustainability considers long time horizons and incorporates contributions from the social sciences and ethics. This program supports engineering research that seeks to balance society’s need to provide ecological protection and maintain stable economic conditions. Research is encouraged to advance the next generation of water and wastewater treatment that will decrease material and energy use, consider new paradigms for delivery of services, and promote longer life for engineered systems. Read more

NSF Funding Opportunity - Environmental Engineering

The Environmental Engineering Program supports research and educational activities across the broad field it serves, with the goal of applying engineering principles to understand and reduce adverse effects of solid, liquid, and gaseous discharges into land, inland and coastal waters, and air that result from human activity and that impair the ecological and economic value of those resources. It fosters cutting-edge research based on fundamental science and four types of engineering tools -- measurement, analysis, synthesis, and design. Read more

NSF Funding Opportunity - Environmental Technology

The Environmental Technology Program provides support to develop and test new technologies across the range of sub-areas and activities in the field of environmental engineering. These include new devices and systems for more effective pollutant removal from air and water, as well as new technologies that minimize or avoid the pollutant generation inherent in older commercial and domestic processes and activities. The program also supports research on the development and refinement of sensors and sensor network technologies that can be used to measure a wide variety of physical, chemical, and biological properties of interest in characterizing environmental systems. The program emphasizes engineering principles underlying pollution avoidance as well as pollution treatment and remediation. Innovative production processes, waste reduction, recycling, and industrial ecology technologies are important to this program. The program supports research on innovative techniques to restore polluted land, water, and air resources. Read more

A Few Powerful Nodes Enhance Mobile Network Connectivity

by X. Shi, C. Adams, & A. Kondoz SPIE Newsroom, accessed 6 Oct 2006 A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a temporary collection of wireless nodes communicating without the benefit of infrastructure. A connection between two nodes may involve several others in what is known as multi-hop routing. MANET can be used in situations in which, for example, soldiers relay and share information on a battlefield or relief workers coordinate efforts during an emergency. A basic requirement of a MANET is that it must maintain higher network connectivity, loss of which could entail severe consequences. Therefore, a principal task is to set up a route that connects source and destination nodes. Due to the dynamic shifts in network topology, multi-hop routing is neither stable nor pre-established. Strategically positioned nodes with extra transmission power can maintain system-wide connectivity in ad hoc networks. Read more

Sandia Releases Optimization Software Free to the Public

Sandia National Laboratory News Release, 4 Oct 2006 Acro 1.0 optimization software, developed by a Sandia National Laboratories team led by Bill Hart, has recently been released to the public and is available at no charge. “Acro puts together different optimization software applications into one large package, making it easier to solve large-scale engineering and scientific problems,” Hart says. Read more

Phase Diagram of Water Revised

Sandia National Laboratories News Release, 3 Oct 2006 Supercomputer simulations by two Sandia researchers have significantly altered the theoretical diagram universally used by scientists to understand the characteristics of water at extreme temperatures and pressures. The new computational model also expands the known range of water’s electrical conductivity. The Sandia theoretical work showed that phase boundaries for “metallic water” -- water with its electrons able to migrate like a metal’s -- should be lowered from 7,000 to 4,000 kelvin and from 250 to 100 gigapascals. Read more

New Wood-Plastic Composites to Boost Industry

Oregon State University Press Release, 2 Oct 2006 Wood science researchers in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University have developed new wood-plastic composites that are stronger and less expensive than any similar products now available -- a major breakthrough for this growing industry. The new wood-plastic composites use superior compatibilizers and an innovative technology for mixing wood and thermoplastics such as nylons, in which the melting temperature of the plastic is higher than the wood degradation temperature. With this approach, the new wood-plastic composites can use very inexpensive plastics such as those found in old carpet fibers -- about 4.4 billion pounds of which are now wasted every year, going into landfills where they are extremely slow to biodegrade and pose a significant waste disposal problem. Read more

Musical Robot Composes, Performs, and Teaches

by M. Abshire CNN.com, 3 Oct 2006 A professor of musical technology at Georgia Tech, Gil Weinberg, enlisted the support of graduate student Scott Driscoll to create Haile -- the first truly robotic musician. In this way, he became a sort of Geppetto creating his musical Pinocchio. Read more

Robots to Race through Traffic for Pentagon Prize

CNN.com, 2 Oct 2006 The winners of last year's Pentagon-sponsored robot race are back to take on another challenge -- this time to develop a vehicle that can drive through congested city traffic all by itself. Read more