Your TV could soon help cure cancer

By David Worthington

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Intel uses volunteer computing applications to tackle climate change modeling and to help researchers find cures for infectious diseases.

Internet connected devices like game consoles, iPads, smartphones, and televisions, might one day help find a cure for cancer and other deadly diseases.

Processors are everywhere. Even a flat screen TV is a computer; its software connects devices for sharing media and accessing Internet services. The smartphone that sits in your pocket is more complex than the computers that took Apollo astronauts to the moon.

Intel Progress through Processors project lead John Cooney is brainstorming ways to harness the increasingly powerful processors that are found in home electronics and computing appliances for philanthropic causes.

Tens of thousands of donors have already contributed their PC’s unused processing power by installing a volunteer computing program on their PCs over the past decade. When combined, their individual PCs form a massive peer-to-peer grids that rival the world’s fastest super computers.

Projects such as Berkeley’s extraterrestrial seeking SETI@home helped popularize the volunteer computing concept, which is now used by several different organizations to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problem such as cancer, climate change, HIV, malaria, and sustainability.

“In addition to the continued strong growth in the number of personal computer people are buying, people are also adopting other devices such as tablets, netbooks, smart TVs, smart phones, and even game consoles, which all have processors and as such have the potential to contribute to volunteer computing,” Cooney said.

Intel’s Progress through Processors Application has collectively contributed over 143,000gigaflops of computing time since its launch in August 2009. Its processing power is divided amongClimateprediction.net and medical research efforts.

There are currently 30-40 thousand active participants, and the application grid’s computing power would rank it on the top 50 of all top 500 super computers in the world, Cooney said.

“Currently Progress Thru Processors is only available for PC and Mac but that is not to say that it won’t someday be ported to additional devices,” Cooney said. Intel has already leveraged social media, including Facebook, in an effort to solicit new recruits.

I believe that the shift to a post PC world where basic stuff — like checking e-mail and browsing the Web – happens on smart devices is already happening. Intel has a good track record in volunteer computing, and I take it at its word that it will expand the program’s reach

Why Your Battery Life is Terrible, in One Handy Chart

Not every technology is on an endlessly compounding growth trend approaching some kind of technological singularity

The seemingly intractable problem of how to increase the energy density of batteries means that researchers have begun in earnest to think about abandoning them altogether. In other words: How can we harvest energy from sources outside of our devices, whether it's powering our smart phones with ambient light, or running large-scale deployments of wireless sensor networks on vibrations and the movement of our bodies.

The average human expends between 100 and 200 watts of power when exercising vigorously, but your iPhone can only accept up to 2.5 watts when charging. Somewhere, somehow, there's got to be an inexpensive and reliable way to connect these two realities.

via Introduction to Vibration Energy Harvesting (pdf)

German Firm Metaio Demonstrates Real Augmented Reality

How ‘augmented reality’ will make boring cities beautiful

By Christopher Mims | 

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In the near future, as you stroll down the street, billboards and street signs will change to suit your interests. Ghostly arrows will float in the air, pointing you toward your destination. Buildings, vehicles, the apparel of those you pass, and the very fabric of the reality you perceive will all be as changeable as your wardrobe.

That’s the vision of futurists and science fiction authors like Vernor Vinge, and increasingly, it’s the reality brought to us by ever-more-powerful mobile devices. Some day soon, when our cell phones are connected to display systems compact enough to project images on the inside of eyeglasses, the boundaries between the digital and the real world will simply dissolve.

September 26, technologists will gather in Munich, Germany to demonstrate the progress they’ve made toward this vision at the annual insideAR augmented reality conference.

In this video, the folks at augmented reality software company Metaio are showing off what’s possible with the world’s fastest mobile phones. It takes incredible processing power to both recognize the position of a viewer relative to an urban scene and simultaneously overlay it with an arbitrary set of polygons, but that’s exactly what the graphics processing units in the new Tegra-2 powered Android phones can do.

But the technology is less important than its implications. Junaio’s goal is to “make the digital world surrounding us a natural experience,” which means “not just showing some type of information on top of a camera image, but truly embedding the digital information into the real world as a natural experience. That means it has to be accurately aligned to the real world.”

Previously, optical tracking for augmented reality applications was limited to two-dimensional objects. But with better hardware, true augmented reality has begun to emerge. All-visual processing of scenes allows for a more-perfect alignment of the “augmented” reality with the real reality than any other technology — localization via GPS and related technologies just can’t cut it, and the accelerometers meant to tell phones their current orientation in space are primitive at best. As Metaio’s spokesman notes:

“Now, since the real world is three dimensional — it’s not always a magazine or a movie poster — we are moving to 3D optical tracking. Which means that we can take any kind of 3D object. It can be curved, but it can be also, like a city, very complex, and use that as a reference for optical tracking.”

Once augmented reality is widespread, the difference between a great and a mediocre city won’t just be its built environment. To some extent, it will also be the degree to which that environment is a suitable tapestry for the creatives who will paint it with their augmented reality brush. Digital artists who learn to re-appropriate the city with the most innovative augmented reality add-ons won’t just bring themselves fame and fortune — they’ll also be attracting others to the places they love.

Neutrons Become Cubes Inside Neutron Stars

Intense pressure can force neutrons into cubes rather than spheres, say physicists

Inside atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons fill space with a packing density of 0.74, meaning that only 26 percent of the volume of the nucleus in is empty.

That's pretty efficient packing. Neutrons achieve a similar density inside neutron stars, where the force holding neutrons together is the only thing that prevents gravity from crushing the star into a black hole.

Today, Felipe Llanes-Estrada at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and Gaspar Moreno Navarro at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, say neutrons can do even better.

These guys have calculated that under intense pressure, neutrons can switch from a spherical symmetry to a cubic one. And when that happens, neutrons pack like cubes into crystals with a packing density that approaches 100%.

Anyone wondering where such a form of matter might exist would naturally think if the centre of neutron stars. But there's a problem.

On the one hand, most neutron stars have a mass about 1.4 times that of the Sun, which is too small to generate the required pressures for cubic neutrons. On the other, stars much bigger than two solar masses collapse to form black holes.

That doesn't leave much of a mass range in which cubic neutrons can form.

As luck would have it, however, last year astronomers discovered in the constellation of Scorpius the most massive neutron star ever seen. This object, called PSR J1614-2230, has a mass 1.97 times that of the Sun.

That's about as large as theory allows (in fact its mere existence rules out various theories about the behaviour of mass at high densities). But PSR J1614-2230 is massive enough to allow the existence of cubic neutrons.

Astrophysicists will be rubbing their hands at the prospect. The change from spherical to cubic neutrons should have a big influence on the behaviour a neutron star. It would change the star's density, it's stiffness and its rate of rotation, among other things.

So astronomers will be getting their lens cloths out and polishing furiously in the hope of observing this entirely new form of matter in the distant reaches of the galaxy.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1108.1859: Cubic Neutrons

Stick-On Electronic Tattoos

Pinch me: These microelectronics are able to wrinkle, bend, and twist along with skin, even as it is being pinched, without breaking or coming loose.
Credit: John A. Rogers, University of Illinois

COMPUTING

A flexible electronic device stuck on the skin could provide irritation-free monitoring of heart, brain, and muscle activity.

• BY KENRICK VEZINA

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Researchers have made stretchable, ultrathin electronics that cling to skin like a temporary tattoo and can measure electrical activity from the body. These electronic tattoos could allow doctors to diagnose and monitor conditions like heart arrhythmia or sleep disorders noninvasively.

John A. Rogers, a professor of materials science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has developed a prototype that can replicate the monitoring abilities of bulky electrocardiograms and other medical devices that are normally restricted to a clinical or laboratory setting. This work was presented today in Science.

To achieve flexible, stretchable electronics, Rogers employed a principle he had already used to achieve flexibility in substrates. He made the components—all composed of traditional, high-performance materials like silicon—not only incredibly thin, but also "structured into a serpentine shape" that allows them to deform without breaking. The result, says Rogers, is that "the whole system takes on this kind of spiderweb layout."

In the past, says Rogers, he was able to create devices that were either flexible but not stretchable, or stretchable but not flexible. In particular, his previous work was limited by the fact that the electronics portions of his designs couldn't flex and stretch as much as the substrate they were mounted on.

The electronic tattoo achieves the mechanical properties of skin, which can stand up to twisting, poking, and pulling without breaking. Rogers's tattoo can also conform to the topography of the skin as well as stretch and shift with it. It can be worn for extended periods without producing the irritation that often results from adhesive tapes and rigid electronics. Although Rogers's preliminary tests involved a custom-made substrate, he also demonstrated that the electronics could be mounted onto a commercially available temporary tattoo.

The prototype was equipped with electrodes to measure electric signals produced by muscle and brain activity. This could be useful for noninvasive diagnosis of sleep apnea or monitoring of premature babies' heart activity. It also might be possible, Rogers says, to use the tattoos to stimulate the muscles of physical rehabilitation patients, although this use wasn't demonstrated in the paper.

To demonstrate the device's potential as a human-computer interface, Rogers mounted one of the tattoos on a person's throat and used measurements of the electrical activity in the throat muscles to control a computer game. The signal from the device contained enough information for software to distinguish among the spoken words "left," "right," "up," and "down" to control a cursor on the screen.

The device included sensors for temperature, strain, and electric signals from the body. It also housed LEDs to provide visual feedback; photodetectors to measure light exposure; and tiny radio transmitters and receivers. The device is small enough that it requires only minuscule amounts of power, which it can harvest via tiny solar cells and via a wireless coil that receives energy from a nearby transmitter. Rogers hopes to build in some sort of energy-storage ability, like a tiny battery, in the near future. The researchers are also working on making the device wireless.

Ultimately, Rogers says, "we want to have a much more intimate integration" with the body, beyond simply mounting something very closely to the skin. He hopes that his devices will eventually be able to use chemical information from the skin in addition to electrical information.