June 2010 Archives

The invention is not implemented on a specific apparatus and merely manipulates [an] abstract idea and solves a purely mathematical problem without any limitation to a practical application, therefore, the invention is not directed to the technological arts.

The appeals court upheld the rejection, which was based on applying the so-called machine-or-transformation test. The Supreme Court upheld the rejection. However, even though the test had emerged from previous Supreme Court decisions, the Supreme Court opined that the test should not be the only consideration for patents that involve ideas or processes. As Nature's Heidi Ledford reports, the decision in Bilski v. Kappos has not clarified US patent law as much as some innovators, notably in the medical diagnostics industry, had hoped.

Smithsonian: Sensor-studded clothing, a Band-Aid-sized electrocardiogram machine, and computer screens in contact lenses—such miniature embedded electronics may one day be possible, provided the right power supply can be developed. As Michael Belfiore explains in the August issue of Smithsonian magazine, current batteries are too bulky for those applications. Researchers at MIT are therefore working to harvest thermal and kinetic energy from the human body, which they hope can be converted into electricity and stored in a capacitor on a millimeter-sized chip. So, in future, just walking or nodding your head could power, say, a cell phone implanted in your tooth.

Nature: This week the world's oldest scientific society still in existence, Britain's Royal Society, is throwing parties, staging TV debates, holding public lectures, and otherwise celebrating its 350th birthday. In a news feature, Nature's Colin Macilwain examines how the society has changed from the age of Isaac Newton to the age of Stephen Hawking.

Science: In a Q&A with Science's Eli Kintisch, Wendell Berry, whose writings address life in rural communities, explains why he has decided to remove his personal papers from the University of Kentucky. As Berry sees it, in striving to become a first-rank research university, the University of Kentucky is neglecting its original mission to teach and serve the people of Kentucky, his home state.

New York Times: Speech recognition software is now capable of handling routine conversations at doctors' offices and basic interrogations at military checkpoints—even in foreign languages. Steve Lohr and John Markoff of the New York Times survey recent progress toward creating artificial intelligence that can interpret and act on human speech.

Physics Today: In Thursday's World Cup match between Denmark and Japan,
Japan's Keisuke Honda curled a free kick over a wall of defenders past
the outstretched hand of Danish goalkeeper Thomas Sorensen and into the
net. Honda's goal demonstrated how soccer players can alter the ball's
trajectory by exploiting the Magnus effect. In the Quick Study in the July
issue of Physics Today, John Eric Goff, a physics professor at Lynchburg
College in Virginia, describes the physics behind bending it like
Honda.

New Scientist: The meter-long plastic trumpet known as the vuvuzela has famously—or infamously, depending on your point of view—become the instrument of choice of 2010 World Cup fans. It was introduced a year ago at a previous soccer tournament held in South Africa, the Confederations Cup. Since then, the vuvuzela has spread among fans like a virus. When hundreds of vuvuzelas are blown simultaneously by football fans, the racket can be deafening. Trevor Cox, president of the UK Institute of Acoustics, explains the science behind the noise.

New York Times: It’s long been appreciated that the vivid colors of butterfly wings arise not from pigments, which selectively absorb certain frequencies, but from intrinsic microstructures, which selectively refract certain frequencies. Now, Yale University’s Richard Prum and his collaborators have figured out how those microstructures grow as the butterfly develops inside its chrysalis.

Wired: The small inexpensive laptops known as netbooks run on batteries for much longer than do regular laptops. That’s because netbook processors, being less powerful and less versatile, consume less energy. Now, SeaMicro , a startup company in Santa Clara, California, has found a way to exploit the frugality of netbook chips to build small, cheap computer servers. SeaMicro’s solution, as you might guess, is to yoke a large number of the chips—512 in fact—together.

Science: Airplanes flying through altocumulus clouds can cause localized precipitation. In a paper published by the American Meteorological Society, Andrew Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and colleagues explain that for years, aircraft appeared to punch holes in the clouds; now, they realize, the aircraft have been, in effect, seeding the clouds and making it rain.

Try sharing an iPad. It connects you to your physical and intellectual surroundings, rather than alienating you. Assuming your collaborator returns the iPad, you have executed a very different kind of exchange, one that seems oddly democratic and intimate, the same way you might share an album of family photographs. Only now imagine a doctor and patient sharing an MRI, an accountant and client reviewing a balance sheet, a choreographer and dancer discussing a dance notation.

SPACE.com: The return capsule of Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft landed successfully on Sunday at 10:00am EDT in the Woomera Prohibited Area of South Australia. Launched in 2003, Hayabusa reached asteroid Itokawa in 2005 and, it is hoped, retrieved a sample. Yesterday's return went according to plan.

Three hours before its arrival back on Earth, the return capsule separated from the rest of the spacecraft, which broke up in Earth's atmosphere. The return capsule floated to Earth via parachute and was recovered and sent to Japan where it will be opened and its contents examined.

New York Times: Bill Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft, and Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, belong to a high-powered group calling for the US to triple its spending on energy research. In a report out today, the American Energy Innovation Council argues that such heavy investment is needed to reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels and to boost its international competitiveness.

SPACE.com: Yesterday’s launch of South Korea’s Naro-1 rocket failed when the rocket’s second-stage solid-fuel booster exploded 137 seconds after liftoff. Based on the Russian Angara rocket, Naro-1 is designed to carry South Korean payloads into space. The launch attempt was the second for a Naro-1. The first attempt, which took place last August, also ended in failure.

Science: In her latest Issues & Perspectives column, Science’s Beryl Lieff Benderly examines the plight of young scientists in the US and their nascent efforts to improve their working conditions and job prospects through lobbying the government.

Nature: Subra Suresh, dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been nominated by the Obama administration to run the US National Science Foundation, succeeding nuclear engineer Arden Bement. Assuming Senate confirmation, Suresh will be the first Indian American to head the NSF. His research concerns the mechanical properties of composite materials, from alloys to cell membranes.

New Scientist: The Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg, South Africa, is the site of Saturday's World Cup clash between the US and English soccer teams. At 1500 km above sea level, the Royal Bafokeng is far higher than the stadiums the players usually compete in. In a feature article, Steve Haake and Simon Choppin explore the effect of altitude not only on the players themselves, but also on the flight of the ball.

SPACE.com: Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a private spaceflight company, succeeded on its second attempt to launch its new commercial rocket—Falcon 9—from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 14:45 EDT today. The previous attempt, 90 minutes earlier, failed two seconds before ignition when the rocket went into a safe mode. The rocket is designed to replace the soon-to-be decommissioned space shuttle as a means of hauling cargo to the International Space Station. The use of commercial launchers is a key feature of President Obama's new plan for NASA.

Image credit: SpaceX

Guardian: Six astronauts “blasted off” Thursday on the Mars 500 on a 520-day simulated journey to determine how the crew members cope with the problems and tedium of a long-duration spaceflight. The all-male international group—three are Russian, one French, one Chinese, and one Italian born in Colombia—will spend the next year and a half in a chain of metal capsules in a hangar at Moscow’s Institute for Biomedical Problems, where they will perform daily flight tasks and experiments, participate in a simulated spacewalk on Mars, and deal with “emergency” situations. A real mission to Mars is decades away, however.

Both—scientists denying religion and believers rejecting science—are wrong. Science and religious beliefs need not be in contradiction. If they are properly understood, they cannot be in contradiction because science and religion concern different matters.

Physics Today: The Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) is a network of eight radio observatories—five in the Netherlands, three in Germany—that operate in one of the most challenging spectral regions for astronomy: wavelengths of 1–10 meters. Yesterday the LOFAR collaboration announced it had achieved a significant milestone: its first high-resolution image of a quasar. Observing in the 1-m to 10-m waveband is difficult because of high background and weak signals. It's worthwhile because at the high redshifts of galaxy formation an important tracer of neutral hydrogen, the 21-cm emission line, is redshifted into the waveband.

Chronicle: Although universities are becoming more adept at finding ways to commercialize technologies invented on their campuses, tech transfer remains challenging—especially to the people responsible for making it a success. Five tech-transfer associations have formed a new international group to make the job of tech transfer more professional. Among the group's aims: establish standards of expertise and conduct.

Physics Today: NSF, the National Institutes of Health, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will lead a new initiative to determine how America's investment in science raises employment, improves health, and increases knowledge. The initiative is called STAR METRICS, which stands for Science and Technology in America's Reinvestment: Measuring the Effect of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness, and Science. To assess the investments, STAR METRICS will gather and analyze data from research institutions and funding agencies. Patents, business startups, and other kinds of data will be used to assess the payoffs.

Physics Today: The world's oldest scientific society in continuous existence, Britain's Royal Society, has announced that it will create a new guide for the general public on climate change. In remarks heralding the new guide, Martin Rees, the president of the 350-year-old society, said,

Climate change is a hugely important issue, but the public debate has all too often been clouded by exaggeration and misleading information. We aim to provide the public with a clear indication of what is known about the climate system, what we think we know about it, and, just as importantly, the aspects we still do not understand very well.

New York Times: Two key elements of President Obama's space policy—lowering the priority of a manned mission to the Moon; increasing NASA'S reliance on commercial launch vehicles—involve canceling NASA's costly home-grown launcher, Ares. But if Ares could be made more cheaply, could it survive? The head of NASA's Moon program, Jeffrey Hanley, was pursuing that option when he was removed last week from his position. Two senators, John D. Rockefeller (D-WV) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), have asked NASA's inspector general to “examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives.”

San Jose Mercury News: Stanford University is creating a new "bookless library" from two existing libraries—physics and engineering. The new facility will have a completely electronic reference desk, Kindle 2 e-readers, soft seating, a self-checkout system, and group event space. At the user's fingertips will be 28 online databases and more than 12 000 scientific journals. One reason for going electronic is space: Stanford's campus is running out of room, with nowhere to expand. The new combined library will be half the size of one of its forebears. Another reason is that in the sciences many of the journals and reference works have already been digitized, so users are already accessing them electronically.

BBC: According to a list released yesterday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, two of the world's ten fastest supercomputers are Chinese. By one theoretical benchmark, the Nebulae machine at China's National Super Computer Center in Shenzhen could even be the fastest.

Washington Post: Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish priest and astronomer who proposed that the Earth orbits the Sun, has been reburied with honors at Frombork Cathedral in Northern Poland, five centuries after he advanced his then-controversial theory. His remains had previously lain in an unmarked grave beneath the cathedral's floor. The reburial is the culmination of a six-year effort, initiated by a local bishop, to locate the astronomer's remains and identify them using forensic reconstruction and DNA analysis.