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Chronicle of Higher Education: The usual term for capital borrowing by universities is 30 years, but MIT has issued taxable bonds it plans to repay over 100 years, writes Goldie Blumenstyk for the Chronicle of Higher Education. MIT will pay 5.62% interest on the so-called century bonds and plans to use the proceeds to finance projects in its MIT 2030 plan, which calls for renovations and several construction projects, including a new energy and environmental-studies building, a performing-arts center, and a nanotechnology fabrication center. Universities that borrow by issuing taxable debt often have to pay higher interest rates than they do on tax-exempt bonds, but the bonds allow the issuers more flexibility. The success of the MIT deal could fuel more interest in the use of century bonds by other universities, especially those that are treating debt as a permanent part of their financial management plans. Century bonds aren't common, but MIT is not the first to issue them; Yale and Boston Universities did so in the mid-1990s, albeit for deals about one-seventh the size of MIT's.

Guardian: Connie Hedegaard, the European Union's Commissioner for Climate Action, is seeking to extend the EU's renewable energy targets beyond 2020. The renewable energy industry is currently facing intense pressure from lobbyists from the gas industry, who have held a series of high-level meetings with senior members of the European parliament to promote gas as a cheaper green alternative to renewables. To support their claim, the lobbyists have circulated a report by the European Gas Advocacy Forum (EGAF) that appears to show that Europe could meet its 2050 greenhouse gas targets and save €900 billion by using gas instead of renewable energy sources. However, the report was adapted from a previous study that contradicts the claim, and the original study's coauthors, the European Climate Foundation, have disowned the EGAF report.

Chronicle of Higher Education: In a move with implications for inventors and industrialists, the US Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill on Tuesday to reform the US patent system. If enacted, the bill would replace the current "first to invent" criterion for awarding patents with a "first inventor to file" criterion. The new criterion could affect how academics publish potentially patentable research. That's because the first person to invent a new device could lose out on a patent if the second person to invent a similar device published his or her work first.

New York Times: Gains in computer power have come from making circuits smaller. But as the wires, transistors, and other circuit components shrink, their electrical resistance—and therefore their power consumption and heat output—rises. The most powerful supercomputers already consume as much power as a small town. To curb that growth, researchers at Hewlett-Packard have proposed a radical reconfiguration of a computer's two basic elements: processor and memory. As the New York Times's John Markoff reports, HP's new configuration mitigates the energy cost of shuttling information between the processor and memory by placing the two elements on top of each other. Another innovation is the use of nanotech devices known as a memristors to serve as memory stores.

New York Times: Science researchers may make more use of so-called space tourism flights than tourists, writes Kenneth Chang for the New York Times. Within a few years, Virgin Galactic plans to fly its SpaceShipTwo once or twice a day—achieving about four minutes of weightlessness per flight—while XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx could make up to four flights per day. At $100 000 to $200 000 per ticket, the suborbital flights will seem expensive to individuals—but not as expensive to scientists who are used to the millions of dollars that NASA, for example, typically spends to gain access to space. The Southwest Research Institute's space sciences and engineering division in Boulder, Colorado, has already signed a contract and paid the deposit to send two of its scientists up in Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo and is buying six seats from XCOR. It is probable that, in a few years, hundreds of suborbital flights could be taking off every year. As Physics Today reported last October, NASA is also interested in taking advantage of commercial launch opportunities. Through its Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program, the agency pays companies to take experiments into space.

New Scientist: A plan by telecommunications firm LightSquared of Reston, Virginia, to install a network of base stations for the new 4G mobile wireless protocol may cause problems with GPS reception. The new 4G base stations will broadcast much stronger signals and so risk overlapping with GPS such that it "will result in widespread, severe GPS jamming [and] will deny GPS service over vast areas of the United States,” according to Scott Burgett and Bronson Hokuf, engineers with satellite navigation manufacturer Garmin International in Olathe, Kansas, in their report to the FCC last month. LightSquared has until 25 February to submit a plan to the FCC for working with the GPS industry and federal agencies to analyze interference issues, with a final report detailing a solution due by 15 June.

New York Times: Nokia remains the world's largest manufacturer of smartphones, yet it was caught off guard by Apple's slick, user-friendly iPhone and by Google's Android operating system, which last year supplanted Nokia's Symbian as the world's most widely used smartphone OS. Hewlett-Packard remains the world's largest manufacturer of personal computers, yet it was caught off guard by the introduction last year of Apple's iPad tablet computer. Now, as the New York Times's Steve Lohr reports, both Nokia and HP have pledged to become more innovative. Nokia could decide soon whether to abandon Symbian and adopt a new OS, possibly in partnership with another company. HP plans to introduce its own tablet computer, the TouchPad, later this year.

New York Times: A new private launch vehicle is being developed to provide commercial flights to space. Alliant Techsystems (ATK), a longtime NASA contractor, has teamed up with the European aerospace company Astrium to develop the Liberty rocket from parts of NASA’s canceled Ares 1 rocket and Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket. The new rocket would be less expensive to build and could generate jobs at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Travel and Leisure: Joshua Bernstein, writing for Travel and Leisure magazine, profiles some of the world’s most visionary cities. From Seoul’s planned Nam June Paik Media Bridge—with gardens, a library, museum, and stores—to Cleveland’s shopping-mall greenhouse, which grows vegetables for the weekly farmers’ market, some cities are taking unique approaches to redefine how they function. Because traffic is one of the biggest and most visible issues plaguing cities, Hangzhou, China, has implemented a novel bike-share program, and Curitiba, Brazil, has developed a rapid transit bus system that rivals a subway for speed and efficiency.

New York Times: In 2009 Envia Systems of Newark, California, was among 37 companies that shared $151 million in government grants to pursue clean-energy ideas. Though promising, the ideas would require years, even decades, of R&D before becoming marketable products. Now, Envia, which is developing a new kind of cathode for batteries, has secured an order from General Motors. As Matthew Wald of the New York Times reports, six companies in Envia's class have attracted $108 million in private-sector financing, which amounts to about four private dollars for every one dollar of initial government investment. Known as ARPA–E, the program for financing the startups was modeled on DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Chronicle of Higher Education: In a commentary in the Chronicle, Art Padilla, who heads the department of management, innovation, and entrepreneurship at North Carolina State University (NCSU), recounts the history of the Research Triangle, a zone of science and technology R&D centered on Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and NCSU. The Research Triangle was founded in the 1960s, but began to flourish after the state government chose to support and invest in the zone during the financially troubled 1970s. Faced with greater financial challenges today, other states can learn from the Triangle's history. Padilla asserts

The region's successes and attractiveness are not due to chance. What we see today in the Triangle, including the economic vibrancy and opportunities for young people, reflects choices made decades ago by educational, business, and political leaders. What we will see in the future—and what our grandchildren will inherit—depends on the choices we make now.

BBC: Clyde Space, Scotland's largest homegrown space company, has secured investment worth £1 million ($1.6 million) to expand production of its CubeSat line of miniaturized satellites and other products. Based in Glasgow, Clyde Space is an innovator not only in spacecraft design, but also in spacecraft commerce. Customers can buy the company's power subsystems, antennas, and microsatellites from its online shop.

Guardian: Wealthy publishers of the world's most important medical journals are accused of destroying an agreement to allow medics in poor countries to get online access for free, writes Sarah Boseley for the Guardian. Although in 2001 an agreement was made to put the world’s most important medical journals online for free, now in 2011 restrictions have been imposed in 28 of the 64 poorest countries in the world. Elsevier, for example, says it will charge from 2012, arguing that countries like Bangladesh will need to move from free access to affordable but commercial deals. Because other publishers are moving down the same road as well, individuals such as Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, are working to reinforce the work started in 2001 by the Health InterNetwork for Access to Research Initiative set up by the World Health Organization.

Physics Today: Multiple new gadgets are on display today through 9 January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. New Scientist highlights a thought-controlled iPad app by InteraXon, in which headphones equipped with a pair of sensors use electrical signals from the brain to control movement in the iPad game Zenbound. The Daily Mail discusses the many iPad clones that are being unveiled this week at the CES; among them, the Eee Pad Transformer, which initially looks like a laptop but can split in two to function as a tablet. Another Daily Mail article details a new voice-activated car stereo, the Parrot Asteroid, which not only plays what the user tells it to but also can download apps. And TechNewsDaily highlights a computerized telescope, Sky Prodigy, which automatically focuses on stars and other celestial bodies.

New York Times: Qualcomm, the San Diego–based maker of wireless telecommunications equipment, is set to buy Atheros, the San Jose–based chipmaker, for $3.1 billion. Atheros's expertise lies in developing computer chips for wireless networking and mobile phones. Qualcomm's acquisition of Atheros will strengthen Qualcomm's ability to compete in the growing market for smartphones and tablet computers whose low-power operating mode puts a premium on lean, efficient circuitry.

New Scientist: "What started out as a science outreach project for NASA is now a Hollywood movie, with voices provided by stars such as William Shatner, Chris Pine, Samuel L. Jackson, and Amanda Peet," writes Jo Marchant for New Scientist. Written and directed by Harry Kloor, Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey is a three-dimensional animated science-fiction film that centers on the Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn and incorporates various physics principles into its plot. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, who is among the star-studded cast providing voice work, agreed to participate because he "liked the concept and the science in the movie," according to Kloor.

Science: A team of scientists has shown a strong correlation between queries submitted to the internet search giant Google and the weekly fluctuations in stock trading, according to Science's John Bohannon. To predict the market, you need data on what is going through people's minds before they make their financial decisions. One such source of data is the total weekly volume of internet search queries, now available to researchers through Google Trends. Although the Google data could not predict the weekly fluctuations in stock prices, the research team found a strong correlation between internet searches for a company's name and its trade volume—the total number of times the stock changed hands over a given week. The team's findings are to be published later this week in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

New York Times: A quantum computer, if anyone built one, could carry out certain calculations far faster than any existing supercomputer. Physicists have already created a quantum computer's basic building block, the qubit, from ions, atoms, quantum dots, and other tiny objects. They've also yoked qubits together to make logic gates. The biggest remaining challenge is to "scale up" from logic gates to a working computer. The New York Times's John Markoff reports that IBM Corp has decided to invest in a qubit technology, Josephson junctions, that appears to offer a clear path toward scaling up. Unlike trapped ions and some other qubit technologies, Josephson junctions can be made on chips like integrated circuits.

BBC: The newly created UK Space Agency has a modest budget of around $400 million. Surprisingly, the total size of Britain's space industry is far higher—$12 billion—and is growing at an annual rate of 15%, despite the recession. According to a report from Oxford Economics, firms in "downstream" industries, such as space-based communication, have the highest revenues, but "upstream" industries, such as spacecraft manufacturing, are also healthy.

New York Times: Chinese shipments of lanthanum, neodymium, and other rare-earth elements appear to have restarted, reports Keith Bradsher of the New York Times. In a show of strength that lacked an officially avowed motive, the Chinese government had blocked the export of the industrially important minerals to Japan on 21 September and to Europe and the US on 18 October. Although the Chinese gave no explanation for the resumption, Bradsher noted that

The decision came a day and a half after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced plans to visit China on Saturday. She met on Wednesday in Honolulu with Japan’s foreign minister, Seiji Maehara, and said afterward that the suspension of shipments had been a “wake-up call” and that both countries would have to find alternative suppliers.

Washington Post: This year's physics Nobel went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for discovering in 2004 how to make graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon. The discovery excited physicists and engineers because of graphene's superb electrical and mechanical properties. Writing in the Washington Post, Brian Palmer examines when those properties will prove profitable. The main source of delay lies in finding a way to make the material cheaply and in large batches. Palmer concludes:

As chic as graphene is today, it's still really a material of the future. But there's so much money and excitement in graphene research, the future may be soon.

New York Times: The publicly traded disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology has received several buyout offers from private equity firms, the latest coming yesterday from TPG and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Seagate, which is based in Scotts Valley, California, shipped close to 200 million units this past year, generating revenue of $11 billion and profits of $1.6 billion. Last month the company announced the world's first portable 1.5-terabyte disk drive.

New York Times: There are two main kinds of solar panel: crystalline and thin film. Thin-film panels are potentially cheaper to make and more efficient to run. Despite those advantages, the panels' US manufacturers are facing strong competition from Chinese companies that can make the older, less-efficient crystalline panels cheaply and abundantly. The New York Times's Todd Woody reports on the technical, economic, and political factors in the global market for solar panels.

New York Times: For three weeks, Hitachi, Sony, and other Japanese electronics companies have not received any shipments of lanthanum, neodymium, and other rare earths from China. The export embargo, thought to be provoked by Japan's arrest at sea of a Chinese trawler captain, is neither acknowledged nor documented, which, as the New York Times's Keith Bradsher explains, makes it hard for Japan to respond through the World Trade Organization and other official channels. Trade officials in Japan, the US, and other countries are considering alternative methods for dealing with what could become a threat to their economies.

BBC: In the UK, consumer products increasingly bear labels that display the amount of carbon used to make, market, and distribute them. As the BBC's Mark Kinver reports, the values, which are accredited by the Carbon Trust, were launched in 2007 and initially greeted with skepticism. However, carbon-labeled goods are selling at a rate of £2 billion ($3.2 billion) a year, which suggests that the labels are influencing consumers' behavior.

Computerworld: Since its founding as Xerox PARC in 1970, Palo Alto Research Center has been home to several of computing's most important inventions and technological advancements. Thousands of researchers and scientists from a wide range of disciplines have gathered at PARC over the past 40 years, sharing their theories on everything from how computers can better talk to each other to how clean technologies can be used to address critical manufacturing problems.

Computerworld takes a closer look at some of the breakthroughs at PARC that have had such an influential impact on the modern world.

Washington Post: The Florida-based Lighting Science Group designs and makes lightbulbs that use light-emitting devices. In a news feature, the Washington Post's Peter Whoriskey reports on pros and cons that the company's boss Fred Maxik must weigh as he decides where to manufacture his products: inside or outside the US. Although the US provides incentives to manufacturers in the form of federal grants and local tax breaks, the incentives that Mexico, China, and other countries provide are more generous and easier to obtain.

Most Chinese journals make their money through funding from their host institutions, and by charging authors per-page publishing fees. "Most are never cited. Who knows if they're even really published. They're ghosts," says one publisher, who declined to be named. Wu Haiyun, a cardiologist at the Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing, says that only 5-10% of these journals are worth saving, and the rest are "information pollution."

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.

New York Times: On Wednesday this week, for the first time in the two companies' history, Apple Inc's total value on NASDAQ overtook Microsoft Corp's. Apple is now the world's most valuable publicly traded tech company. Among US companies of any kind, only Exxon Mobil Corp is now worth more. Apple's recent success is attributed to its introduction of a series of innovative consumer products, starting with the iPod (2001) and followed by the iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010). Microsoft, however, is currently more profitable than its rival.

Physics Today: At a cabinet meeting yesterday, President Barack Obama asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu to help BP contain and mitigate the oil slick spreading from the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. Chu will lead a team of government scientists and officials that will meet in Houston for discussions with BP officials.

SiliconValley.com: A group of equipment manufacturers and other interested parties has released a proposal to boost the performance of Wi-Fi by raising its operating frequency from the current 4 GHz to 60 GHz. The proposal from Wireless Gigabit Alliance is among several that tackle the problem of quickly downloading large files.

Space.com: Many existing space technologies play dual roles in both military and civilian life. A US Air Force space plane and a failed hypersonic glider tested by the Pentagon represent the latest space missions to raise concerns about weapons in space. But while their exact purpose remains murky, they join a host of new space technology tests that could eventually bring the battlefield into space.

Nature News: In 2002, bioinformatician Mark Gerstein and his colleagues set up a server to host some commonly used genomics databases to monitor any anomalies in web traffic or surreptitious scans.

Seven months later, the picture that emerged was one of a network under siege. Not all of these visits were attacks, Gerstein notes, but many were.

Protecting research data presents particular challenges. Most information-technology (IT) professionals suggest ensuring that large or sensitive data stores are managed by a centralized IT team that can monitor and administer systems, keeping a close watch over traffic and limiting access.

But this can conflict with the ethos of researchers who need such systems to be accessed by a wide variety of students, postdocs, and collaborators.

SPACE.com: An adrift Intelsat satellite that stopped communicating with its ground controllers last month remains out of control and has begun moving eastward along the geostationary arc, raising the threat of interference with other satellites in its path, Intelsat and other industry officials said.

Various: A 1999 report commissioned by the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling suggests failures of underwater blowout preventers designed to stop oil spills like the massive one threatening the Gulf Coast are not unprecedented, as claimed by BP CEO Tony Hayward in an interview with NPR, and are far from unknown, reports McClatchy Newspapers' Les Blumenthal.

Moreover, the tragic failure to contain the deep-seated pressures 7 kilometers beneath the Gulf of Mexico was not likely the result of overreaching, says ScienceNow's Richard Kerr. In wells 65 kilometers off the coast of Louisiana, "the depths and pressures are rather routine" for the oil industry, says petroleum engineer Kenneth Gray of the University of Texas, Austin.

Meanwhile BP, the rig's owner, is preparing three different techniques to reduce the flow of oil, says Hayward. One involves placing a dome over the leak and channeling the oil to the surface, which has never been done at this depth; the second involves drilling a new hole nearby to relieve the pressure at the existing site; and the third requires eight robotic submarines to fix the well's blowout preventer.

Former New York Times editor Andrew C. Revkin is also compiling other alternatives and explanations for the difficulty in sealing the well, at his Dot Earth blog.

symmetry: Business in the particle accelerator world is booming, as is business at Advanced Energy Systems, where Tony Favale is president. His company is doing research and design work for the next generation of accelerators, which will be employed in electron lasers for the Navy, radiation detectors for the Department of Homeland Security, and more efficient particle colliders at US national laboratories.

But of the seven positions he was advertising in November, three were still unfilled in mid-March because Favale can't find enough qualified accelerator scientists.

CNET News: Solar-panel manufacturer First Solar announced Wednesday it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase solar-project developer NextLight Renewable Power for approximately $285 million.

FT.com: When China joined the World Trade Organization seven years ago, the move was applauded by companies from other industrialized countries as a way of protecting their intellectual property rights—Chinese companies could no longer copy designs or technology and export the results abroad at drastically reduced prices, without, in theory, being taken to court.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. A rising Chinese electronics company is suing technology groups Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba over alleged infringements of its patents. It is part of a growing trend in China of lawsuits from Chinese groups asserting their own intellectual property rights.

Beijing Huaqi Information Digital Technology, better known by its brand name Aigo, has accused HP and Toshiba of violating six patents for USB Plus, a storage port technology used in many laptop computers.

NYTimes.com: The Russian government, hoping to diversify its economy away from oil, is building the first new scientific city since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even more improbably, it is modeled, officials say, on Silicon Valley.

The site, still nameless and near a village outside Moscow, is conceived not as a secretive, numbered city in Siberia but as an attempt to duplicate the vibrancy and entrepreneurial spirit of America's technology hotbed.

Wired UK: This wreck image attached is not computer generated. It's the sonar image of Russian nuclear submarine B-159 (called K-159 before decommissioning), which has been lying 248 meters down in the Barents Sea, between Norway and Russia, since 2003. The Russian Federation hired Adus, a Scottish company that specializes in high-resolution sonar surveying, to evaluate if it would be possible to recover the wreck.

Nature News: The reasons for the current financial crisis have been picked over endlessly, but one widespread view is that it involved failures in risk management. Facing up to these failures could prompt the bleak conclusion that trying to anticipate the economic future is an impossible task. That's the position taken by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his influential book The Black Swan, which argues that big disruptions in the economy can never be foreseen, and are much more common than is evident from conventional theory.

How should those still working in financial markets absorb this pessimistic message? In a preprint on arXiv, Andrew Lo and Mark Mueller of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, in Cambridge, suggest that what economists grappling with uncertainty need is a proper taxonomy of risk. In this way, they state, risk assessment in economics can be united with the way uncertainties are handled in the natural sciences. It may then become clearer where conventional economic theory is a reliable guide to planning and forecasting, and where its predictive value fails.

Chemistry World: Researchers in the US have shown that perovskites—a class of mixed oxide minerals—can perform as well as platinum in certain types of catalytic converter for removing pollutants from diesel exhaust. Although it is early days in the research, the finding could eventually result in cheaper, more robust catalytic converters for diesel engines that do not rely on expensive and scarce platinum group metals.

Related link
Strontium-doped perovskites rival platinum catalysts for treating nox in simulated diesel exhaust

Physics Today: In April 2009, Boeing Co was awarded an Office of Naval Research contract valued at up to $163 million—with an initial task order of $6.9 million—to begin developing a free-electron laser (FEL) weapon system.

The company finally presented its design of a 100-kW FEL last week to the US Navy at a Boeing facility in Arlington, Virginia.

Physics Today: USEC Inc. has taken a major step forward towards building the first new uranium enrichment plant in the US in decades.

Nature News: Scientists are foreseeing unprecedented opportunities to send up research payloads on anything from a suborbital trip of a few minutes to a sojourn lasting several weeks on a commercial space station by using a new generation of commercial space launchers such as the Falcon 9.

"We have never had a capability like this in 50 years of human space exploration," says planetary scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Stern is a former science chief for NASA and is helping to organize the first meeting dedicated to research opportunities in suborbital space, to be held on 18–20 February in Boulder.

Physics Today: IBM researchers demonstrated a radio-frequency graphene transistor with the highest cut-off frequency achieved so far for any graphene device—100 billion cycles/second (100 gigahertz).

The high frequency record was achieved using wafer-scale, epitaxially grown graphene using processing technology compatible to that used in advanced silicon device fabrication.

"A key advantage of graphene lies in the very high speeds in which electrons propagate, which is essential for achieving high-speed, high-performance next generation transistors," said T. C. Chen, vice president of science and technology, IBM Research. "The breakthrough we are announcing demonstrates clearly that graphene can be utilized to produce high performance devices and integrated circuits."

Graphene is a single atom-thick layer of carbon atoms bonded in a hexagonal honeycomb-like arrangement. This two-dimensional form of carbon has unique electrical, optical, mechanical, and thermal properties, and its technological applications are being explored intensely.

Uniform and high-quality graphene wafers were synthesized by thermal decomposition of a silicon carbide (SiC) substrate.  The graphene transistor itself utilized a metal top-gate architecture and a novel gate insulator stack involving a polymer and a high dielectric constant oxide. The gate length was modest, 240 nanometers, leaving plenty of space for further optimization of its performance by scaling down the gate length.

The frequency performance of the graphene device already exceeds the cut-off frequency of state-of-the-art silicon transistors of the same gate length (~ 40 GHz).  

NPR: Airlines are paying extra attention to the weather these days: the weather in space.

That's because more commercial flights are using shortcuts that take them near the North Pole or the South Pole. And in polar regions, flights are vulnerable to cosmic storms that can interfere with communication and navigation systems, or even expose travelers to doses of radiation above usual safety levels.

Wired.com: Bill Gates has sunk at least $4.5 million of his personal wealth into geoengineering research.

While it’s only a small chunk of his vast personal fortune, it’s a sign that the founder of Microsoft thinks we should at least be looking into the controversial practice of intentionally altering Earth’s climate on a global scale.

Science: In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell the 1 billion cubic meters of gaseous helium—specifically the heavier isotope, helium-4—that the country had stockpiled.

But conditions it imposed on the sales are keeping the price of helium artificially low and encouraging waste of a substance indispensable for numerous scientific and technological applications, says a National Research Council report released last week.

Related link
Selling the nation's helium reserve NRC report

The Economist: Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) are usually associated with warfare.

In a less extreme fashion, however, EMPs have peaceful uses. They are already employed industrially to shape soft and light metals, such as aluminum and copper.

Now a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, has found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through industry’s metallic heavyweight—steel. This could transform manufacturing by doing away with the need to use large, heavy presses to make goods ranging from cars to washing machines.

FT.com: The connection between hard-up truck drivers in Russia and Edinburgh-based Canongate Technology which makes beer flow-sensors is not immediately obvious.

Canongate has adapted the sensors it produces to a new use: instead of monitoring the level of beer in brewery tanks its technology is now also used to detect whether people driving trucks across Russia are siphoning off fuel for illicit sale.

Canongate’s move is part of a trend known as “soft diversification,” in which companies use specific technological know-how as a platform to set up new operations in a related field.

While this way of entering new fields is not especially new, the number of companies adopting it is growing, as more businesses seek to exploit ownership of their existing technologies.

NYTimes.com: OmniVision has announced a new image sensor chip that uses a technique called BSI, or backside illumination, that basically turns the camera chip upside down so that the light is collected through the back of the chip. In a more typical image sensor, light has to pass through a series of layers on the image chip before reaching the sensor. BSI provides better performance, particularly in low-light conditions.

Both NASA and the National Security Agency have been using BSI image technology in satellites for years, but this OmniVision chip is one of the first made available to consumers.

The chip, which will most likely appear in a mobile phone, is capable of recording 14.6 megapixel single images, or full 60-frames-per-second 1080p high-definition video.

Related Link
OmniVision adopts backside illumination technology for CMOS imager (description of an earlier BSI chip)

NPR: At a once-defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the lights are on again and a new industry is rising up inside the ruins of an old one.

The company Konarka makes solar panels, but not the kind most people have seen. These are thin, lightweight, flexible plastic sheets, and that enables them to be used in all sorts of new ways.

"We make what's called plastic solar cells; we call it 'power plastic,' " says Rick Hess, Konarka's chief executive officer.

Related news story
Solar panel thefts heating up

washingtonpost.com: Of the 84,000 chemicals in commercial use in the US—from flame retardants in furniture to household cleaners—nearly 20% are secret, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, their names and physical properties guarded from consumers and virtually all public officials under a little-known federal provision.

The policy was designed 33 years ago to protect trade secrets in a highly competitive industry. But critics—including the Obama administration—say the secrecy has grown out of control, making it impossible for regulators to control potential dangers or for consumers to know which toxic substances they might be exposed to.

Scientific American: Sixty Sun-powered Stirling engines are about to begin generating electricity outside Phoenix, Arizona, for the first time.

Such engines, which harness heat to expand a gas and drive pistons, are not used widely today other than in pacemakers and long-distance robotic spacecraft. Scientific American's Cynthia Graber looks at the pros and cons of using stirling engines in solar power.

Wired.com: As much as the 787 Dreamliner looks like the jet that carried you on that cramped, uncomfortable flight last month, almost everything about it is new.

From the extensive use of composite materials and advanced aerodynamics to its fuel-efficient Rolls Royce engines and all-electric systems, Boeing is betting the 787 will be the plane to usher in a cleaner, greener future for the airline business.

Boeing claims the 787 is 20 percent more fuel-efficient than comparably sized jets. With fuel being airlines' number one cost after payroll, Boeing's plan to build a thriftier airplane came at just the right time, said analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group.

Wired.com: Inspired by videos of renowned hacker Johnny Chung Lee who turned the $40 Nintendo Wiimote remote controller into a finger-tracking device and a touchscreen white board, physicist Rolf Hut of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has built a Wiimote wind sensor.

"It was just a bendy pole with an empty bottle on top with an LED light on the bottle," Hut said. "And it swayed in the wind."

The Wiimote can track just about anything: All that's needed is an LED light. Hydrologist Willem Luxemburg, also from Delft University of Technology demonstrated a hacked water-level sensor made from a Wiimote and a plastic boat at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Physics Today: Google is working on developing a quantum computer, announced Google's Hartmut Neven at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2009) in Vancouver, Canada, last week.

Neven, who is the company's technical lead manager for image recognition, gave details of the presentation on the Google research blog.

The reason for Google's interest in quantum computing is speed. As the size of the internet increases exponentially it is becoming harder and harder for Google to maintain the fast speed of the service without having to resort to building massive server farms.

A quantum-based computer could speed up searches dramatically and add a new layer of features to google's existing features, especially on images. As Neven states in the blog:

Assume I hide a ball in a cabinet with a million drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the ball? Sometimes you may get lucky and find the ball in the first few drawers but at other times you have to inspect almost all of them. So on average it will take you 500,000 peeks to find the ball. Now a quantum computer can perform such a search looking only into 1000 drawers. This mind boggling feat is known as Grover's algorithm.

The company has spent three years working on quantum adiabatic algorithms with the Canadian company D-Wave providing the hardware.

D-Wave's processors work by magnetically coupling superconducting loops called rf-SQUID flux qubits. "It is not easy to demonstrate that a multi-qubit system such as the D-Wave chip indeed exhibits the desired quantum behavior," says Neven.

At NIPS 2009 Neven demonstrated what google had achieved so far. The company built a detector that has learned to spot cars by looking at example pictures. "There are still many open questions," says Neven, "but in our experiments we observed that this detector performs better than those we had trained using classical solvers running on the computers we have in our data centers today."

Related Links
Primer in quantum algorithms
Training a large scale classifier with the quantum adiabatic algorithm
NIPS 2009 demonstration: Binary classification using hardware implementation of quantum annealing

Science: Conventional solar technologies produce electricity, but most transportation fuel comes from oil. A new class of solar chemical reactors aims to make liquid fuels from air, water, and sunshine.

ARN: Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) showed off a number of flexible display screen technologies in Taipei last week as part of a show promoting e-readers and e-paper.

One of the newest technologies from ITRI was a flexible 4.1-inch color OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display.

"This is the first time we've showcased this OLED technology. It's more flexible and softer than before. It's for the next-era of portable devices," said John Chen, general director of the Display Technology Center at ITRI.

Wall Street Journal: A recent study by consultancy Booz & Co of 1000 of the world's biggest research-and-development spenders found they are focusing on products with quick revenue opportunities, and killing less-promising projects. Nearly half of the respondents said they have tightened criteria for approving new projects.

The survey found a shift away from basic research and toward applying existing technology to new products. That is a longstanding trend in corporate labs and has accelerated during the recession, says Booz partner Barry Jaruzelski.

Wired.com: BMW has revealed the early results of field tests of its electric Mini which it leases to 450 people for nearly $900 per month.

Displaying considerable candor, BMW North America manager of electric vehicle operations and strategy Rich Steinberg said the small-scale rollout was more difficult than expected.

The biggest problem, he said at the company's headquarters here, is infrastructure.

Installing the chargers in homes and buildings was more difficult and took longer than the company expected, he said. And even though the car, which BMW is leasing to customers in what is a big R&D project, offers 100 miles on a charge, people still worry about the battery dying.

Eight key factors would ease the acceptance of electric cars, according to Steinberg's interpretation of the Mini E field test data:

In terms of the environmental impact the electric version generated only 45 percent as much CO₂ per mile as the gas version, even though the battery ads 573 pounds to the Mini's overall weight (and loses the back seat).

Electric cars generate 1.7 times more CO₂ per unit of energy than gasoline, but use that same unit of energy 3.1 times more efficiently than gas cars, according to John DiCiccio of the University of Michigan.

NYTimes.com: The Department of Homeland Security has spent $230 million to develop better technology for detecting smuggled nuclear bombs but has had to stop deploying the new machines because the United States has run out of helium-3.

“I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,” said Representative Brad Miller, Democrat of North Carolina, who is the chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem.

The demand for helium 3 appeared to be 10 times the supply.

Related Physics Today article
US government agencies work to minimize damage due to helium-3 shortfall October 2009
Helium shortage hampers research and industry June 2007

The Register: Ericsson is pulling out of its R&D facility at Ansty Park, in the UK, jeopardizing 700 jobs in the process despite only moving in six months ago.

NYTimes.com: Despite a six-year effort to build trusted computer chips for military systems, the Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 % of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear.

That shortfall is viewed with concern by current and former US military and intelligence agency executives who argue that the menace of so-called Trojan horses hidden in equipment circuitry is among the most severe threats the nation faces in the event of a war in which communications and weaponry rely on computer technology.

The Daily Telegraph: Growers are using powerful cameras on board a satellite 500 miles above Earth's surface to take images of their vineyards, showing them where to plant vines and when to harvest the grapes.

The high-resolution pictures are so accurate they can calculate the number of leaves per square meter which is directly proportional to the quality and yield of grapes.

Farmers will also be able to scan surrounding areas to see what land may be good for cultivation and so help the industry expand.

The technology known as Oenoview is developed by Infoterra, a division of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, and has already been used in various wine-growing areas of France.

It works by calculating the density of foliage on vines by analyzing the light that reflects off them.

WSJ.com: The H1-B visa program that feeds skilled workers to top-tier US technology companies and universities is on track to leave thousands of spots unfilled for the first time since 2003, a sign of how the weak economy has eroded employment even among highly trained professionals.

Last year, even as the recession began to bite, employers snapped up the 65,000 visas available in just one day. This year, however, as of 25 September—nearly six months after the US government began accepting applications—only 46,700 petitions had been filed.

In addition to the weak economy, companies have curbed applications in the face of rising costs associated with hiring foreign-born workers.

While the number of visa holders is small compared with the US work force, their contribution is huge, employers say. For example, last year 35% of Microsoft's patent applications in the US came from new inventions by visa and green-card holders, according to company general counsel Brad Smith.

guardian.co.uk: The chief executive of defense research technology firm QinetiQ has quit the company just hours after it was criticized by the official report into a 2006 Nimrod plane crash in Afghanistan, which claimed 14 lives.

Graham Love, who has run the company for the last four years, is departing on 30 November. His replacement, Leo Quinn, is the former chief executive of bank-note maker DeLaRue.

"We have been looking at succession planning for over a year," a company spokesman said. "[It is] mistaken to directly link the two events."

Thestar.com: What do Canada Post and the Mars Rover have in common with mammograms and video games? All use image sensors designed and made by the Canadian company DALSA Corp.

DALSA Corp was set up by Savvas Chamberlain, who also created the first microelectronics lab at the University of Waterloo in Canada shortly after the charge-coupled device was invented by Willard Boyle and George Smith in 1969.

Forty years later, Boyle and Smith were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Meanwhile, Chamberlain has built his company into a global leader in high-performance imaging, with 1000 employees worldwide and revenues of more than $200 million annually.

USA Today: Ever since the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which gave federally funded university researchers the right to license their inventions as a way to spur innovation and economic growth, technology transfer offices have sprung up all over, with steady growth.

In 1991, US universities filed 1,335 patents and received $130 million in royalties. In 2005, they filed 9,306 patents and received $1.8 billion in royalties.

At some universities, the policy on who owns inventions created using university resources required researchers, at some future date, to "agree to assign" ownership rights to the university.

But contracts researchers have with industry may be worded slightly differently and state an inventor "will assign and do hereby assign" his or her rights to the funder, which can lead to court cases arising over who owns the innovation rights.

Related news story
Painful lesson on patents Inside Higher Ed

Physics Today: Batteries can power anything from small sensors to large systems. University of Missouri researchers are developing a nuclear energy source that is smaller, lighter and more efficient.

"To provide enough power, we need certain methods with high energy density," said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. The radioisotope battery can provide power density that is six orders of magnitude higher than chemical batteries.

Kwon and his research team have been working on building a small nuclear battery, currently the size and thickness of a penny, intended to power various micro/nanoelectromechanical systems. Although nuclear batteries can pose concerns, they are safe are already powering a variety of devices, such as pace-makers, space satellites and underwater systems.

Kwon's innovation is not only in the battery's size, but also in its semiconductor. Kwons battery uses a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor.

The critical part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor, said Kwon. By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem.

Kwon has been collaborating with J. David Robertson, chemistry professor and associate director of the MU Research Reactor, and is working to build and test the battery at the facility.

In the future, they hope to increase the battery's power, shrink its size and try with various other materials. Kwon said that the battery could be thinner than the thickness of human hair.

Wall Street Journal: Hamid Biglari went from physics to finance. Now, he's helping lead efforts to revive Citigroup Inc. Born and raised in Tehran, Hamid Biglari came to the US in 1977 to study mathematics and physics at Cornell University.

Biglari planned to return to Tehran after getting his degree, but the 1979 Iranian Revolution derailed his plans. He realized that his career opportunities would be better in the US so filed for permanent residency.

After earning his PhD in astrophysics at Princeton in 1987 he became a theoretical physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, writing one of the most cited papers in Tokamak fusion research.

But research budget cuts made Biglari consider a career in finance.

He had no business experience, but he cold-called management consultancy McKinsey & Co., and successfully persuaded them to hire him, based on his analytical and computational skills.

After moving to Citigroup in 2000, earlier this year Biglari became vice chairman in charge of strategy and resource allocation, a key post in reframing the company after last year's billion-dollar loss.

Science: Current computer-aided design tools are not making it easy for architects to design buildings for energy efficiency. New software is needed.

Related News Story
Training to climb an Everest of digital data New York Times

Inside Science: Early on Tuesday morning, 1977 Nobel Prize–winning physicist Philip Anderson's home phone rang. When the Princeton University emeritus professor answered, it was William Brinkman, director of the Office of Science for the US Department of Energy.

"Score another one for Bell Labs," Brinkman said, referring to the just-announced winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. Two of three winners of the 2009 prize did their research in 1969 at Bell Labs, the research arm of the then giant telephone monopoly AT&T. That brings to 13 the number of Bell Labs scientists who have won a share of the seven Nobel Prizes for work done at what was once considered the preeminent research lab in the world.

Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, NJ, still exists as part of the French-based Alcatel-Lucent telecommunications company, but it is no longer the hotbed of basic research in the physical sciences where researchers worked for decades on projects that often produced great science, but not necessarily products, for the parent company. "You're reaching pretty far back for those," Anderson said of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners.

Physics Today: [First published 6:10am EST 10/6/09, last updated 11:33am EST] The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half of the $1.4 million to

Charles K. Kao
Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong

"for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"

and the other half jointly to

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

"for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor."

"The [transfer of] information in society today is completely based on [this research]," said Joseph Nordgren, the chair of the Nobel Prize committee in a press conference announcing the prize. "The practical implications for this research were enormous...It is something that has changed our life, not just in science but in society as whole."

Fred Dylla, CEO of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today, concurs. "When combined with the laser and the transistor, the invention of an efficient, low-loss optical fiber has made nearly instantaneous communication possible across the entire globe. This mode of communication is essential for high-speed internet and forms the optical backbone of 21st century commerce. The CCD sensor has revolutionized technical, professional, and consumer photography in the last few decades. Taken together these inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half century."

"Optics technologies are exceptionally significant for scientific developments in today’s world," said Elizabeth Rogan, CEO, of the Optical Society of America. "We congratulate Kao, Boyle and Smith on this much-deserved recognition."

Kao

In 1966, Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. "It was the impurities, and other limiting factors such as scattering, atomic motion, that limited glass fibers in the 1960s," said Nordgren.

Kao presented his research at the 1966 London meeting of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970 by the Corning company.

"The Nobel Prize isn't awarded for lifetime achievement, it is given for diverse research, clearly Kao's work achieved a breakthrough that led to a whole new research and technology field," said Nordgren.

Boyle and Smith

In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (charge-coupled device).

The two researchers came up with the idea in just an hour of brainstorming, according to Boyle who spoke during a press conference today. "It is amazing that a [the CCD device] was created so quickly," said Nordgren. "There are so many breakthroughs that came out of research at Bell labs...it's unfortunate that during the 80s, US companies abandoned the idea of having a scientific environment such as Bell labs," said Nordgren.

Boyle said that to him, the biggest achievement of his work was seeing images transmitted back from Mars. "It wouldn't have been possible without our invention," he said.

The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge, when designing an image sensor, was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized how images were collected from spacecraft, by telescopes, and in medical imaging, and has eventually replaced the film camera in every aspect of photography.

Related Physics Today articles on fiber optics
Maurer and Kao win Ericsson Prize, May 1979
An Overview of Lightguide communication, Solomon J. Buchsbaum, May 1976
The fiber lightguide, Alan G. Chynoweth, May 1976
Fiber optics, Alastair M. Glass, October 1993
The golden age of optical fiber amplifiers, Emmanuel Desurvire, January 1994

Related Physics Today articles on CCDs
Charge-coupled devices would be cheap, compact Gloria B. Lubkin, October 1970
From photons to bits, Rajinder P. Khosla, December 1992

Other Related Physics Today Resources
Industrial R&D in transition, R. Joseph Anderson and Orville R. Butler, July 2009
The bell tolls for Bell Labs Toni Feder, October 2008
Industry R&D forecast is bullish despite concerns over talent dearth, Jermey N. A. Matthews, April 2008
Bell Labs fissions, yielding AT&T Bell Labs and Bellcore, Gloria B. Lubkin, May 1984

Related Resources
2009 Physics Nobel Prize Resources American Institute of Physics
A 2004 oral history interview with Charles K. Kao IEEE History Center
A 2001 oral history interview with George E. Smith IEEE History Center

Related News Stories
3 Americans share 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Associated Press
Communication pioneers win 2009 physics Nobel Reuters
Nobel awarded for advances in harnessing light New York Times
Nobel prize in physics goes to Briton who harnessed the power of light The Guardian
Fiber optics, imaging pioneers win physics Nobel NPR
Light work wins Nobel for electronics pioneers New Scientist
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to light pioneers Nature
Pioneers of fiber optics, semiconductors win Nobel NPR
3 Americans win Nobel in physics LA Times
2009 Physics Nobel Winners See the Big Picture ScienceNow
Nobel winners who probably changed your life Washington Post

Nature: In 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a spy walked into the US embassy in Warsaw and offered to sell the CIA the real and code names of all intelligence agents from the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung)—the foreign department of the Stasi, the East German Ministry for State Security. The CIA bought the highly sensitive information for a mere US$75,000.

The spoils—released to the Berlin Stasi archive and made available to history professor Kristie Macrakis at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 2005—have the potential to alter popular perceptions of the activities of the East German intelligence agency and secret police.

Macrakis's analysis of the CIA material reveals that about 40% of all HVA sources planted in West German companies, research institutions, and universities were stealing scientific and technical secrets.

Physics Today: Earlier this week Alan Taub became the new vice president of Research and Development for General Motors. Despite going into and out of bankruptcy, GM is still one of the largest companies in the US that conducts industrial R&D.

Taub (see left image) has run GM's eight science labs for the last nine years and was a key player in building GM's newest R&D lab in Shanghai that officially opened last month.

In his new role, Taub will still coordinate all the advanced technical work within GM, but will be more closely involved in managing GM's collaborative R&D ventures with academia, the Department of Energy, and other strategic partners.

Physics Today Online was lucky enough to ask some questions in a public webcast held on Tuesday. An edited transcript is below.

[Question]: What is the future of fuel cells within the new GM, do we have enough funds to run them?

Taub: Fuel cells are still an important activity for General Motors. And part of the solution to diversifying the energy source for vehicles. We remain committed to developing the technology but as we approach early commercialization, the costs of development are increasing.

[Question]: How do you envision the global R&D organizations work together? How will "who does what" be determined?

Taub: Working with my leadership team, we select the competencies to be developed at each of the eight R&D labs'. Multidisciplinary teams then integrate the labs programs globally to gain the most effective results. The competency selection for each site is based on availability of talent.

[Question]: Why do you believe globalization of GM's R&D activities is necessary?

Taub: Innovation and breakthrough research are enabled by diversity—diversity of education, the working environment and the local marketplace. We have been successful at having researchers located in different sites globally and bringing their ideas together so the team has more perspectives for new ideas.

[Question]: The easiest way to improve fuel efficiency is to cut down on weight. The New York Times had an article on how 60% of the weight of a car is due to steel, and how new types of steel are going into cars to provide safety and lightness. What is GM doing in this area, do you do the basic R&D yourself or do you rely on your partners?

Taub: In the past 15 years, we have dramatically changed the [steel] material mix on vehicles. For example, GM is increasing it's usage of high-strength steels to the point that in the next 10 years we will see very little low-carbon steel in the structural bodies of GM vehicles.

As well as changing the steel mix, GM is also increasing usage of aluminum and magnesium. This is accomplished by collaborations of GM and supplier engineers as well as precompetitive research with Ford and Chrysler in US.

[Question]: Battery technology seems to have significant limitations. Is GM looking at ultra-capacitors as well?

Taub: Yes, we are looking at batteries, fuel cells and ultracapacitors as energy storage devices. We see a role for each.

[Question]
Will you use the plugin technology from the canceled Saturn Vue "two-mode" hybrid in any other small SUVs in the future?

Taub: All we said so far is that the technology will go into another GM product. Stay tuned.

[Question]: To succeed, GM needs world class scientists. After bankruptcy, how does it propose to attract and retain them?

Taub: We have been successful at attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to the various GM global laboratories. People are intrigued by the combination of deep technical assignments on products that make a difference to consumers everywhere.

[Question]: We've seen impressive demos on Vehicle to Vehicle communications technology from GM. What are the remaining obstacles to introducing this technology into the marketplace?

Taub: We are continuing "harden" the technology in order to enable commercialization. Because this is a safety-related technology, it must be robust. It also requires standards for all of GM's suppliers since the vehicle parts needs to interact. There is progress being made on all fronts.

[Question]: What do you see as the biggest challenge in transitioning to wide-spread electric vehicle use?

Taub: Two things. Getting the cost down and the supply base ready.

[Question]: What is your personal favorite research topic at the moment?

Taub: Clearly, it is the electrification of the vehicle. Batteries, motors, hydrogen fuel cells are dominating the research portfolio. At the same time, the connected vehicle (e.g. navigation, OnStar, infotainment) is probably the most fun because we get to implement it at consumer electronics speed.

[Question]: Do you envision GM R&D researchers doing fundamental researchers? Or do you see the researchers act as project managers, and the universities act as the actual researchers?

Taub: The answer is both. Inside GM, we have the world's best individual contributors performing leading edge research on critical automotive applications. They do their work inside our walls while collaborating with the best professors and engineers in universities and national labs.

[Question]: Can you speak to GM's R&D center in Honeoye Falls, New York, the role its played so far, and the type of role it might play moving forward?

Taub: Honeoye Falls is the site of one of our eight global laboratories. It is our main site for fuel cell stack research and more recently battery system research. It will continue to be an important element of our research infrastructure.

[Question]: How's that shape-changing NiTinol material coming along. Any production plans on the horizon?

Taub: Our first application is being deployed as we speak. I just can't tell you at this time what that vehicle is.

[Question]: I wonder what makes fuel cells expensive? It seems very affordable for a new technology. If a fuel cell car has 100 grams of platinum, which is about $3000-4000, the rest of the materials involved is not that much expensive.

Taub: There are many elements that contribute to the cost of vehicle components. Raw material is only one aspect. On the fuel cell stack, our next-generation technology dramatically reduces the platinum loading, making it competitive with that on after-treatment for internal combustion engines.

[Question]: What is the research focus of the science lab in China?

Taub: Glad you asked. I am just back from Shanghai and the jet lag is almost gone. The initial areas of attention are improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines, lightweight materials and the joining technology for those materials, emerging market safety, consumer research methodologies and batteries.

[Question]: How far into the future do think it will be before we see automated cars driving on the expressway?

Taub: I'm on the record for promising limited autonomy driving on highways by 2015. This is enabled by a combination of lane keeping and stop-and-go adaptive cruise control.

[Question]: How does GM R&D foster a culture of innovation and creativity while simultaneously having researchers be accountable for their work and in tune with the overall cost of their projects?

Taub: Welcome to the challenge of leading an industrial research laboratory. We pull on our researchers to solve the tough problems facing the industry while adding to the world's scientific knowledge base. We lead the industry in patents—we filed more than 600 within R&D alone last year—and lead in technology implementation in the product.

[Question]: In your introduction you talked about "mainstreaming R&D." What does this mean and is GM allowing other employees to contribute ideas?

Taub: R&D is now fully integrated into Product Development at GM. That is allowing us to get more streamlined in our technology development and implementation activities. We are always looking for good ideas from both inside and outside the company. Feel free to contact any of our group managers, lab directors or me if you don't know who else to email.

[Question]: The development of the next generation of fuel-efficient vehicles requires advancements and a deep understanding across a wide range of materials (electrode materials for batteries, catalysts for fuel cells). How do you draw the line between what GM can develop and what must be developed by others to make a particular technology successful? Basically how deep into basic research does GM want to go?

Taub: The make-buy decision is different for every technology. For example, stamping of metals for the key components of the vehicle is a core technology within GM. The plastic parts are generally purchased from suppliers. The recent decision to vertically integrated into battery pack manufacturing does not mean we would be manufacturing our own battery cells. However, we are working internally on next-generation cell technology in collaboration with various suppliers.

The Boston Globe: For more than two decades, scientists have strived to build an artificial nose that can mimic what is sometimes called our most elusive sense. Now, with a growing slate of potential applications—detecting cancer in a breath, say, or identifying airborne toxins on the battlefield—the technology is advancing and efforts are proliferating.

In North Grafton, a small startup company, CogniScent, is working on an electronic nose that resembles a yellow Dustbuster and sniffs out everything from molds to dangerous chemicals. At MIT, researchers are working on "RealNose," a Pentagon-funded project inspired by dog noses that aims to use actual biological parts—the smell receptors that recognize odor molecules. And, further afield, the Space Shuttle just returned to Earth carrying an "ENose," that spent about six months gathering scent data on the International Space Station.

The work is beginning to pay off, in prototypes of devices that are showing their promise in lab experiments.

Building magazine: After dominating the architecture scene for 40 years, Norman Foster seems to have decided that the world is not enough: his practice has joined a European consortium to look into how future structures could be built on the Moon as part of the European Space Agency's Aurora programme.

Wired.com: A Texas team called Armadillo Aerospace is the first to qualify for the top prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge after flying its moonship twice in two hours to simulate a moon landing. Armadillo Aerospace is one of three teams in the hunt for the $1 million award.

The Texans saw their craft, Scorpius, easily meet the requirements for Level 2 of the challenge, which require ascending to at least 50 meters, flying horizontally, and landing on a rocky replica of the lunar surface 50 meters away then making a return flight.

Each flight, made last weekend in Caddo Mills, Texas, had to last 180 seconds. John Carmack, the legendary coder behind Doom and Quake who leads Armadillo Aerospace, said Scorpius is capable of much greater altitude.

"Our Scorpius vehicle actually has the capability to travel all the way to space," he said, adding that Armadillo plans flights to 6,000 feet soon at its base in Texas before heading to New Mexico to achieve greater heights. Fully loaded with ethanol and liquid oxygen fuel, the craft weighs about 1,900 pounds.

Related Link
Engine leak stalls Xombie rocket's bid for NASA cash

NYTimes.com: In good times or bad, the pace of technological change never seems to let up. This relentless engine of innovation, economists agree, is the wellspring of the nation’s long-run prosperity. But it presents a daunting challenge to science and technology professionals who are trying to stay ahead, seeking a career that is unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.

The sour economy has only intensified those pressures. So colleges across the country are reporting a surge in applications since last fall, up as much as 50 percent, for continuing education programs intended for people with science and engineering backgrounds. The offerings, in classroom settings and online, range from short courses of a few days to graduate degree programs that span years.

Science: China was late to join the race to develop novel rare-earth materials. "We lag behind the world in applications," says Xu Guangxian of Peking University, a chemist who was detained by the Red Guard in the late 1960s before becoming a pioneer in separating rare earths from other minerals. But Western observers agree that China is catching up fast in areas such as fuel cells and magnetic refrigeration, thanks in part to research efforts now happening here at the Baotou Research Institute of Rare Earths (BRIRE). "Absolutely, they are gaining ground," says Clint Cox, an analyst at The Anchor House, a rare earths consulting firm in Chicago, Illinois. Today, about three-quarters of the world's neodymium magnets are made in China. Domestic industrial demand is rising: Last year, China consumed 60% of all processed rare earths.

That unnerves some industry analysts and US legislators, who have expressed concern about China's dominance of the rare-earth supply. Last year, China satisfied 95% of global demand--now about 125,000 tons per year—and holds more than half of all proven reserves. In the 1990s, China's cheap production costs sent prices plummeting, driving many non-Chinese rare-earth mines out of business. Prices started creeping up in 2005, however, when China began to limit production and slap export tariffs on some rare earths. In a policy paper last month, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology floated the idea of prohibiting export of three scarcer rare earths--europium, terbium, and dysprosium.

If the Chinese government were to implement such a policy, that "would be a big problem for other countries," says Judith Chegwidden, managing director of Roskill Information Services Ltd., a mining analysis company in London. China has a "natural monopoly" over heavier rare earths, she says, simply because few mines elsewhere have ample reserves.

The Independent: Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.

"We've been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on," the company's green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

ScienceNOW: Imagine cardboard-thin TV screens that stretch across entire walls or portable video screens that can be rolled up when not in use. Those are some of the possible applications for tiny, inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that researchers have developed. The new LEDs are just as thin as conventional organic LEDs and liquid-crystal displays, but they're much brighter and more versatile.

Naturejobs: Scientists, postdocs, and students planning to travel to the US to work or study need two things before applying for a visa: time and patience.

Despite recent efforts by federal agencies to improve and accelerate the visa-application process—including adding staff and setting shorter waiting times—it still needs legislative and regulatory reform, say those who are familiar with the system. Many consider it to be a labyrinthine muddle of requirements and regulations. Delays of up to half a year are not uncommon, even with the processing improvements brought in to clear the backlog and speed procedures after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 forced a visa clampdown.

NPR: To build the 787, Boeing took two giant leaps. First, it created the structure not from metal, but from lightweight composite material. And second, it outsourced more than ever before.

Boeing has more than 800 orders for the new jet. It remains the best-selling new aircraft in the company's history.

But Boeing's 787 Dreamliner has also produced a lot of headaches from the outset. There have been a handful of cancellations for the first test flight, which was first scheduled for nearly two and a half years ago. And this week the man in charge of Boeing's passenger jet business was replaced.

NYTimes.com: IBM researcher Frances Ross is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics.

Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster, and more powerful than today's transistors.

The reason that many computer scientists are pursuing this goal is that the shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits.

Daily Telegraph: A draft report by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.

China mines over 95pc of the world's rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.

Rare metals play a vital role in most cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons.

"Edmunds.com: Moinuddin Sarker says that his company, Natural State Research, has developed a way to turn waste plastic into finished oil products for a final cost of less than $1 a gallon.

The process is as simple as heating up the plastic until it becomes vapor, and then letting it condense back into liquid—the way water droplets condense on the cover of a pot of boiling water.

It works because both plastic and oil are made up of carbon molecules, only plastics' molecules are long chains called polymers. Breaking the bonds in the chains, Sarker said, results in smaller carbon-based molecules—the basis for fuels.

Editor's Note: 12/21/2009 Edmunds has updated their news article with the following comment: "It has come to our attention that the claims expressed by Moinuddin Sarker might not be rooted in good science."

ScienceNOW: With $27 billion a year in sales, lithium-ion batteries already dominate the market for rechargeables. But there's always pressure to do better. Now researchers report that they've come up with a way to use nanotechnology to either significantly increase the energy storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries or reduce their weight while maintaining their current energy content. The new work could lead to everything from lighter laptops to electric cars with a considerably longer range.

Environmental News Network: China has started construction of the country's first 10-gigawatt wind power plant in Jiuquan of northwest Gansu province.

It is the first of six planned gigawatt wind farms.

New Scientist: A pack of private teams are racing to send robots to the Moon and claim the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize announced nearly two years ago.

So far 19 teams are registered for the contest, with two more teams—Quantum3 and SCSG—having withdrawn. To win, they must land a rover on the Moon that will then drive 500 meters before turning to photograph its landing site—all before the end of 2012. The team that does it first will pick up $20 million. Second place will earn $5 million and a further $5 million in bonuses will be awarded for finding relics from past US or Soviet Moon missions such as visiting the Apollo 11 landing site.

Physics Today: An engine which blends diesel and gasoline fuels could potentially be 20% more efficient than traditional gas engines, while also lowering the emissions, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The new "hybrid fuel" engine—based on a modified diesel engine from a Caterpillar truck—works via a technique called "fast-response fuel blending," in which the engine's fuel injection mixes the diesel and gas to the perfect ratio for the current combustion conditions.

A fully loaded truck may have a fuel mix of 85% gasoline to 15% diesel; under lighter loads, the percentage of diesel would increase to approximately 50–50.

Normally this type of blend wouldn't ignite in a diesel engine, because gasoline is less reactive than diesel and burns less easily. But in the hybrid fuel engine, just the right amount of diesel is injected to kick-start ignition.

"You can think of the diesel spray as a collection of liquid spark plugs, essentially, that ignite the gasoline," says Rolf Reitz, head of the research group.

This technique has two efficiency and one cost advantage, says Reitz. First, the engine operates at much lower combustion temperatures because of the improved control—as much as 40% lower than conventional engines—which leads to far less energy loss from the engine through heat transfer. Second, because of the burn optimization in the combustion chamber, there is less unburned fuel energy lost in the exhaust, which in turn produces fewer pollutant emissions. Third, the engine can use relatively inexpensive low-pressure fuel injection (commonly used in gasoline engines), instead of more expensive high-pressure injection required by conventional diesel engines.

Reitz's experiments show that the prototype is now the world's most efficient diesel-type engine in the world, with a 53% thermal efficiency, better even than a massive turbocharged two-stroke used in the maritime shipping industry, which has 50% thermal efficiency.

Thermal efficiency is defined by the percentage of fuel that is actually devoted to powering the engine, rather than being lost in heat transfer, exhaust, or other variables.

"For a small engine to even approach these massive engine efficiencies is remarkable," Reitz says. "Even more striking, the blending strategy could also be applied to automotive gasoline engines, which usually average a much lower 25 percent thermal efficiency. Here, the potential for fuel economy improvement would even be larger than in diesel truck engines." Reitz adds that they are already meeting the Environmental Protection Agency's 2010 emissions regulations with the prototype without the addition of expensive additions, such as the urea-injection catalytic reduction used in Mercedes diesel cars and trucks, for example.

The only downside would be the need to have two separate fuel tanks in the truck or car.

The work is funded by Department Of Energy and the College of Engineering Diesel Emissions Reduction Consortium, which includes 24 industry partners.

Reitz presented his findings today at the DOE's 15th Directions in Engine-Efficiency and Emissions Research Conference in Detroit, Michigan.

washingtonpost.com: Coda Automotive employs 41 people. It has a headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., but it doesn't have its own factory. It doesn't have its own dealer network. It doesn't have a coterie of designers. Its chief executive, Kevin Czinger, a one-time college football star and former assistant U.S. attorney, has spent most of his career working in finance.

Yet Coda claims it will beat General Motors and other companies to market with an affordable, all-electric automobile built for the average American. This may not be a completely wild-eyed idea. Czinger was recently driving one of the prototypes—a plain-looking but smooth-running sedan—around the streets of Washington.

Inspired by the prospect of a new market for electric cars, Coda and other small entrepreneurial companies are tapping into the expertise of others in bids to launch new vehicle brands featuring technology they say will leapfrog the major manufacturers.

San Francisco Business Times: Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories—longtime secretive federal agencies working on classified weapons programs—are about to throw open their doors to the private sector.

The labs are pursuing better ways of commercializing their technology with other-than-weapons applications. They are partnering with the private sector in new ways and pushing for an open campus on 50 acres to help the labs better collaborate with the best and brightest.

In addition, the two Livermore-based labs are working with the local business council, consulting with MBA students, and launching a formal “hub” program to partner with the transportation industry.

The shift could mean a transformation of the role the labs play in the Tri-Valley and the Bay Area economy, creating an economic engine with tech transfer capabilities that rival those of University of California, San Francisco and UC Berkeley.

Wall Street Journal: Like many other technology companies, Hewlett-Packard is in the process of making layoffs and other cost cuts. In the quarter ended 30 April, HP’s selling, general and administrative expenses dropped 13% from the same period last year and its research-and-development budget fell by almost 20%.

But when it comes to advanced research—far-reaching projects that might not turn into profits for years—HP says it’s still investing. Next week, the company’s long-term research division, HP Labs, plans to announce an expanded program of grants to university researchers to pursue a variety of projects. HP won’t disclose the amount of money it’s spending on the grants, but says the budget has increased 30% since last year when the program started.

Slate.com: With oil-sands production at more than 1.2 million barrels per day, Canada, which also produces conventional oil, has quietly passed Saudi Arabia to become the top supplier to the US.

US government analysts expect that production could triple again by 2030 and could eventually deliver to the US as much as 37% of imported crude.

The local environmental fallout—in terms of deforestation, water demand, and toxic waste—varies among the dozens of ongoing extraction projects but is often immense.

In other words, US policymakers are now faced with an awkward problem: How do you balance improvements in energy security with worsening climate change, especially when dealing with a resource that isn't yours?

Related Physics Today article
Physics in the oil sands of Alberta

Washingtonpost.com: University of Maryland engineering professor Bruce Jacob had a few songs he wanted to record, tunes that had been jangling around in his head for years. He bought a guitar, but the notes he played never sounded as good as the music he had imagined.

Here's how Jacob, 43, describes the sounds a guitar makes: "If you have a bunch of paints, you can create any paint you want from the three or four fundamental colors. With guitars, it's the exact same thing. You can make any sound you want out of three or four colors. But most guitars have one color."

So Jacob decided to create a better guitar, attacking an elusive aesthetic problem with a series of math equations, a circuit board, and wiring. He and a couple of his students launched Coil, a company that uses the patent-pending electronics they developed to customize the sound in guitars.

The Guardian: Consumers will need to pay more for energy if the UK is to have any chance of developing the technologies needed to tackle climate change, according to a Royal Society report.

The report said that the government must put research into alternatives to fossil fuel much higher among its priorities, and argued that current policy in the area was "half-hearted".

"We have adapted to an energy price which is unrealistically low if we're going to try and preserve the environment," John Shepherd, a climate scientist at Southampton University and co-author of the report said. "We have to allow the economy to adapt to higher energy prices through carbon prices and that will then make things like renewables and nuclear more economic, as carbon-based alternatives become more expensive."

Related Link
Towards a low carbon future

Nature News: Modern refrigerants designed to protect the ozone layer are poised to become a major contributor to global warming because of their future explosive growth in the developing world.

Hydrofluorocarbon chemicals (HFCs) were developed to phase out ozone-depleting gases, in response to the Montreal Protocol. But they can be hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases in trapping heat.

In the new study, a team led by Guus Velders at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in Bilthoven analyzed the latest industry trends and then modeled HFC production to 2050. Their results suggest that HFC emissions could be the equivalent of between 5.5 billion and 8.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2010—roughly 19% of the projected CO₂ emissions if greenhouse gases continue to rise unchecked.

Related Link
The large contribution of projected HFC emissions to future climate forcing

The Economist: A few years ago Yadong Yin was experimenting with tiny beads that changed color when a magnetic field was applied to them. This was interesting but there was no obvious way to turn them into a product

Now Yin and his colleagues at the University of California, Riverside, have come up with possible applications that range from a new type of paint to lipsticks and giant advertising billboards.

Yin’s beads are magnetochromatic microspheres. They are made from tiny blobs of polymer that contain particles of iron oxide. The structure of these particles changes in a magnetic field in a way that produces “interference” colors when light is shone on them.

It is the rearrangement of the particles’ microstructures that produces the pertinent detail.

The new research appears in the 15 June Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Nature News: The US automobile industry is in the midst of a historic makeover as the Obama administration ushers General Motors (GM) and Chrysler, two of the erstwhile "big three" car manufacturers, through bankruptcy. Nature News takes a look at the implications for corporate research and development (R&D), including the future of electric transport.

Nature News: Nanocrystals called quantum dots have promised to revolutionize display technologies, solar power and biological imaging for more than a decade. Yet the quantum-dot market has remained small, with a handful of companies selling dots directly to researchers, using the particles to develop their own products or licensing their technologies to partners.

"Quantum dots have been around for quite a while, but they're taking a really long time to mature," says David Hwang of the market-analysis company Lux Research in New York. A key barrier is price: quantum dots can cost anywhere from US$3,000 to $10,000 per gram, restricting their use to highly specialized applications.

But industry analysts are now predicting extremely rapid growth for the market over the next few years, driven by demand for energy-efficient displays and lighting, and enabled by cheaper, more efficient manufacturing processes. In September 2008, market-research company BCC Research of Wellesley, Massachusetts, predicted that the market for products relying on quantum dots would grow from $28.6 million in 2008 to $721 million by 2013, with particularly rapid growth in the optoelectronics sector from 2010.

New Scientist: Studies over several decades have shown that market fluctuations have a lot in common with processes such as earthquakes that originate in systems that are very much out of equilibrium and naturally subject to abrupt upheavals (Physica A, vol 387, p 3967).

This means price fluctuations on the stock market do not have a bell-shaped "normal" distribution, with the bulk in the mid-range and a steady decline towards each extreme.

In fact, the distribution has a much fatter tail of large price fluctuations, subverting a crucial assumption that underlies much of economic theory.

The implication is that extreme market events, such as a one-day crash capable of wiping out millions of investors, occur naturally in financial markets even in the absence of any extraordinary circumstances.

By contrast, most economists and financial analysts regard such events as strange and unpredictable outliers. "This is, at least in part, because basic market theories can't explain these large fluctuations in any natural way," says physicist Gene Stanley of Boston University, a leader in such analyses.

The Register: British staff at Qinetiq, the company formed from an uneasy mixture of privatised UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) research facilities and profitable US war-tech companies, have voted to strike in protest at pay freezes and redundancies.

Prospect, which represents some 2,000 of Qinetiq's UK staff - whom it describes as "specialists" - says that a strike ballot gave a result of 72 per cent in favour of strike action after management announced a pay freeze for 2009. The union had already said its members were "outraged" after 400 British job losses were announced last month.

The Register: Hewlett Packard has confirmed that yesterday's announcement of UK job cuts will not just hit its manufacturing plant in Scotland, but also HP's research laboratories in Bristol.

The firm will not detail exactly what is happening, but emails from HP staff sent to the Register suggest as many as half its Bristol research staff could be laid off.

"According to various sources and friends, HP has at a single stroke on Thursday HALVED their R&D people based in Bristol, UK on Thursday. 3 entire labs are to be axed. Approx 70 or so positions are to be eliminated - with completion towards the end of this year," says one email.

HP announced 5700 job cuts in Europe earlier this week.

HP said: "HP Labs is streamlining its research portfolio to further sharpen its focus on creating a pipeline of high-impact innovation with a clear path to market that addresses the most important customer challenges. HP is committed to bringing breakthrough innovation to market quickly, and HP Labs will continue to play a significant role in this effort."

In this quickly evolving environment, investors must assess which technologies and companies are best positioned, policy-makers must assess what role PV generation should play in our energy mix, utility planners must assess the impacts this will have on the electric grid, government and industry must decide how to allocate research and development (R&D) funds, and citizens must sort through a barrage of conflicting messages.

The scheme aims to deal with a glut of unemployed postdocs in the nation. The number of academic posts available to them has shrunk since the 1990s, as a result of government streamlining in the university system.

The New York Times: General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size disks to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.

New York Times: They are known as "quants", physicists who have moved to Wall Street to do quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.

This flood seems to be continuing, unabated by the ongoing economic collapse in this country and abroad. Some quants analyze the stock market. Others churn out the computer models that analyze otherwise unmeasurable risks and profits of arcane deals, or run their own hedge funds and sift through vast universes of data for the slight disparities that can give them an edge.

Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, said, "What is amazing to me as I learn about this is how flimsy was the theoretical basis of the claims that derivatives and other complex financial instruments reduced risk, when their use in fact brought on instabilities."

Quants say that they should not be blamed for the actions of traders. They say they have been in the forefront of pointing out the shortcomings OF modern economics.

"I regard quants to be the good guys," said Eric R. Weinstein, a mathematical physicist who runs the Natron Group, a hedge fund in Manhattan. "We did try to warn people," he said. "This is a crisis caused by business decisions. This isn't the result of pointy-headed guys from fancy schools who didn't understand volatility or correlation."

Wired: Swedish supercar builder Koenigsegg brought a model of its solar-electric Quant concept car to the Geneva Motor Show and said the production model would have a range of 300 miles and a recharge time of less than 20 minutes.

But now with the economic crash and a silicon supply glut that's going to get worse before it gets better, the game has changed. Solar venture capitalists will lean away from innovative technologies toward sure bets closer to commercialization, according to a report released Wednesday by Lux Research.

Located at the site of the massive 'Schwarze Pumpe' ('Black Pump') power station in eastern Germany, Sweden's Vattenfall said the new technology has the potential to allow coal to be burnt without releasing harmful greenhouse gases.

'Today industrial history is being written,' Vattenfall Europe's chief executive Tuomo Hatakka told a news conference. 'Coal has a future -- but not the carbon dioxide emissions from it.'

The new method being developed by Vattenfall is called Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, which captures the greenhouse gases produced when fossil fuels are combusted. This prevents the greenhouse gases escaping into the Earth's atmosphere and contributing to global warming. The captured carbon dioxide is compressed until it becomes liquid and then injected deep underground and safely sealed away, Vattenfall says.

In the case of the pilot plant near Spremberg close to the Polish border, the liquid carbon dioxide is taken 350 kilometres in lorries and injected 'for permanent storage' in a gas field in northern Germany. It is the first clean-coal power plant built to a commercial scale.

As a result, on 5 December it terminated the process of selecting a preferred bidder for the construction of the proposed plant.

"I see a whale, I see a six-to-12-volt electric generator that is able to pump 1,000 liters per pulse through more than 108 miles of veins and arteries," he said. The intricate wiring of the whale's heart is being studied as a model for a device called a nanoscale atrioventricular bridge, which will undergo animal testing next year and could replace pacemakers for the millions of people whose diseased hearts need help to beat steadily.

The developers of 'photonic ink' (P-Ink) say that the material could be used in electronic books or advertising displays.

NPR: In rural Ohio, researchers are testing a new bridge made of plastic. Plastic bridges offer low maintenance and long life, but there are questions about how long plastic can stand up to sunlight, changing temperatures and stress.

New York Times: The Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid, will not arrive in showrooms until late 2010. But it is already straining under the weight of an entire company.

Environmental News Network: “As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging in the United States,” says Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, in a recent release, "New Energy Economy Emerging in the United States." "The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced by one powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even a year ago."

Physics Today: After three dramatic failures, the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket has reached low Earth orbit. The fourth flight of the Falcon 1 rocket, which is built by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) lifted off at 4:15 p.m. (PDT) yesterday from the Reagan Test Site (RTS) on Omelek Island at the US Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific, about 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii. "This is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team," said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. "The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion—middle of the bull's-eye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake." The rocket is currently in an elliptical orbit of 500 km by 700 km, 9.2 degrees inclination.

Falcon 1 carried into orbit a payload mass simulator of approximately 165 kg (364 lbs), designed and built by SpaceX, specifically for this mission. Consisting of a hexagonal aluminum alloy chamber 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall, the payload remains attached to the second stage as it orbits Earth.

This was the fourth launch of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle and second flight for the new SpaceX-developed Merlin 1C regeneratively-cooled engine. A "hold before liftoff" system was used to enhance reliability by permitting all launch systems to be verified as functioning nominally before launch was initiated. A single SpaceX-developed Kestrel engine powered the Falcon 1 second stage.

Space X, which was founded in 2002 (see Physics Today March 2005, page 30) is planning a family of launch vehicles intended to increase the reliability and reduce the cost of both manned and unmanned space transportation. The company is the only remaining winner of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services competition (COTS), that aims to develop a cargo delivery vehicle called Dragon to the international space station when the shuttle retires in 2010. Under the existing Agreement, SpaceX will conduct three flights of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft for NASA, culminating in Dragon berthing with the ISS. NASA also has an option to demonstrate crew services to the ISS using the Falcon 9 / Dragon system. The first Falcon 9 will arrive at the SpaceX launch site (complex 40) at Cape Canaveral by the end of 2008 in
preparation for its maiden flight in 2009.

Craig Barrett, who made his "one political statement" at the Intel developers' forum being held in San Francisco, urged US politicians to act.

He told the audience: "Nations are as strong as their educational systems.

"The rest of the emerging world recognises this is the key to staying competitive."

He went on: "It's time our political leaders acknowledged that and declare there is a crisis and do something about it."

ENN: US wind capacity is expected to increase 45% in 2008 although Congress' failure to extend the production tax credit (PTC) for the renewable energy industry threatens to derail further development, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).

Total US installed wind power capacity now stands at 19,549MW, up 2,726MW from the end of 2007, making the US the world leader in wind electricity generation, according to the AWEA's second quarter 2008 market report. Germany has installed generating capacity of about 23,000MW, but the US produces more electricity because of stronger winds, the AWEA said.

The New York Times: Retailers are typically obsessed with what to put under their roofs, not on them. Yet the nation’s biggest store chains are coming to see their immense, flat roofs as an untapped resource.

The Register: The British government plan to build a new generation of nuclear power stations is on hold, after French energy giant EDF's bid to buy the UK's existing nuclear industry was rejected at the last moment. Reports have it that the deal fell through after existing shareholders in British Energy - thought to be large UK pension funds - demanded more than EDF was willing to pay.

The £12 billion acquisition had been seen for some time as a done deal, with the full approval of the government. EDF, which is a major player in the mostly-nuclear French electricity market, was to take over British Energy not so much for its existing plants or expertise, but in order to acquire its nuclear sites. This would avoid much of the red tape, protests and legal disputes that would result from breaking of new ground, and EDF with its French experience would have little difficulty in doing the building.

Now, however, the deal - a vital precursor to the entire plan - appears to have foundered.

New York Times: By lighting all of the building’s exterior and most of its interior with L.E.D.’s, Sentry Equipment Corporation in Oconomowoc, Wis. spent $12,000 more than the $6,000 needed to light the facility with a mixture of incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. But using L.E.D.’s, the company is saving $7,000 a year in energy costs, will not need to change a bulb for 20 years and will recoup its additional investment in less than two years.

USA Today: Semiconductor companies are rushing into the solar power business faster than a Pentium-driven computer, promising to turn a niche form of renewable energy into a mass-market product.

Since May, computer powerhouses Intel, IBM and National Semiconductor have barreled into solar energy, joining hundreds of fellow technology mainstays. Virtually every chipmaker is weighing a solar play, says Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

The Guardian: The French electricity group EDF is ready to unveil a £12bn deal for the takeover of the UK's nuclear power generator British Energy as early as next week.

An agreement - widely expected by those close to the talks - will raise questions about a French takeover of the sector after the French group Areva this month became preferred bidder with two others to takeover management of the Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria.

British Energy is attractive to EDF because the sites could be used to build a new generation of nuclear stations.

Slate.com: Airlines are suffering because of high fuel prices in the worst downturn the industry has seen in 8 years. In the short therm the airlines are raising prices and canceling routes, but over the longer haul, they need to start looking at two kinds of changes: a different kind of plane and a different kind of fuel says reporter Christopher Flavelle.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: A campaign by prominent business groups to drastically increase the number of Americans entering engineering, mathematics, the sciences, and technology-related fields is not making nearly as much progress as its leaders had hoped, according to a report released today.

ENN: The European Union reached a landmark agreement Thursday to cap emissions from aircraft, raising the stakes in an increasingly ferocious battle with the United States over how to regulate global greenhouse gases.

In the first requirement of its kind, all airlines arriving or leaving from airports located in the EU would be obliged to buy some pollution credits beginning in 2012, joining other industrial polluters that trade in the European emissions market. That includes non-European carriers like American Airlines and Singapore Airlines

The New York Times : Honda Motor chose a good week to introduce its new hydrogen-powered car. With gas prices rising above $4 a gallon, we could hardly be more eager for an alternative energy source, especially one that claims to have no bad effects on the environment. A car powered by a ubiquitous, inexhaustible gas that emits nothing worse than water.

The Register: Motorola Labs is to shrink by half as the company struggles to cut costs by laying off 150 researchers and transferring 180 to elsewhere within the company.

BBC: A network of tiny pipes of water could be used to cool next-generation PC chips, researchers at IBM have said.

Science: Steel is the workhorse of our infrastructure. Stronger, tougher steels are always needed to reduce weight and improve safety in transportation, enhance architectural flexibility in construction, and improve performance in heavy machinery. For structural steels to be both strong and tough (resistant to fracture), they must not be used at temperatures below the ductile-brittle transition temperature, T_B, at which the steel loses its toughness and fractures in a brittle mode. This transition results from a competition between plastic deformation and brittle fracture at the tips of cracks or flaws in the steel. It can be controlled by techniques such as grain refinement that inhibit brittle fracture, or by techniques such as controlled delamination that facilitate plastic deformation. In last week's Science magazine, Yuuji Kimura, Tadanobu Inoue, Fuxing Yin, and Kaneaki Tsuzaki show how these approaches can be combined to achieve low T_B and high toughness in an ultrahigh-strength low-alloy steel.

Related Links
Inverse Temperature Dependence of Toughness in an Ultrafine Grain-Structure Steel Science 320 1057 - 1060

The Gazette: Courtney Stadd the former NASA executive and Bethesda-based businessman has created a privately funded team working on an unmanned robotic spaceship to head back to the Moon.

His company, Quantum3 Ventures — which Stadd founded in January along with space industry veterans Paul Carliner of Washington, D.C., and Liam Sarsfield of Deale — is one of 10 entrants from as far away as Romania and Italy competing for the Google Lunar X Prize.

The competition is sponsored by the Mountain View, Calif., search engine giant Google, and the X Prize Foundation, a Santa Monica, Calif., nonprofit institute that wants to ‘‘create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.”

To collect the prize money, a team has to be first to land a robot on the moon that travels at least 500 meters and transmits images and other data back to Earth.

London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:

The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.

We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.

New Scientist: A normal digital camera can take snaps of objects not directly visible to its lens, US researchers have shown. The "ghost imaging" technique could help satellites take snapshots through clouds or smoke.

Physicists have known for more than a decade that ghost imaging is possible. But, until now, experiments had only imaged the holes in stencil-like masks, which limited its potential applications.

Now Yanhua Shih of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues at the US Army Research Laboratory, also in Maryland, have now taken the first ghost images of an opaque object - a toy soldier.

Not everyone agrees that quantum effects are at work in ghost imaging, though. Baris Erkmen and Jeffrey Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, point out in a recent paper that classical physics says light sources produce numbers of uncoordinated photons, not correlated quantum pairs.

They suspect ghost images might be produced without a quantum link between photon pairs, purely because some photons are just similar.

Related Link
Physical Review A (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.77.041801)

Science: Laser technology is present in our daily lives through literally thousands of applications, including surgical instruments, CD and DVD players, optical fiber communications, and even supermarket barcode readers. Despite the fast pace of laser research, the design of most laser devices relies on assumptions in the underlying theory that have barely changed since the early days of laser theory. However, this situation is problematic for two reasons. First, the rapid advance of nanofabrication techniques has led to the development of completely new lasing systems whose description falls outside the scope of conventional laser theory. Of these, random lasers are perhaps the most challenging example. Second, more general models could enable the design of substantially different classes of lasers. With their contribution in this week's Science magazine, Türeci, Ge, Rotter and Stone have substantially changed this picture. By developing a new theory in which the main properties of a laser can be physically understood as the result of strong nonlinear interactions between lasing modes, they have provided a substantially broader perspective of laser physics that unifies the physical description of many possible laser structures.

Related Article
Strong Interactions in Multimode Random Lasers Science 2 May 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5876, pp. 643 - 646