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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 in 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.

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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.

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

The Times: Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films - and cost far less to produce.

In a paper published in the current issue of Science, a team at the company's research centre in San Jose, California, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time", and would last for decades.

So-called 'racetrack' memory uses the 'spin' of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives.

New York Times: Jet fuel is now the largest expense for most airlines, and for American carriers each penny increase in price per gallon costs nearly $200 million a year. The industry is also becoming increasingly nervous about what happens when that fuel is burned. Aviation is responsible for about 2 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases, and that share will rise as air travel continues to grow.

So the industry is scrambling to build greener airplanes — to save weight and improve engine efficiency, with an eye toward reducing operating costs and emissions.

In the short term, a revolution in jet engines is about to occur, with radically different designs that use gears to cut fuel consumption, noise and pollutants. And those new engines will power planes built more and more with carbon composite materials, which are lighter and may also be safer than the aluminum they replace.

The biggest change with aircraft is electricity: The 777, a mid-1990s design, can generate up to 270 kilowatts of electricity, enough to run a small neighborhood of houses. The 787, would make five times as much, 1.35 megawatts, in order to power a multitude of motors and pumps that help make the place lighter and safer.

Physics Today: Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), has announced that it will be acquired by EADS Astrium, the space arm of European Aeronautics Defence and Space (EADS).

"On completion, this will represent one of the largest cash spin-outs from any UK university," said Surrey University vice chancellor Christopher Snowden said. "It will also allow the company to realise its full potential as a rapidly growing and leading supplier of small and micro satellites, whilst the university retains the benefit of close interaction with SSTL and its new partner EADS Astrium. By retaining a small stake in SSTL the university shows its commitment to both the future of the company and space research itself."

The Guardian: Energy companies are planning to revive a polluting technology developed by the Nazis to replace dwindling supplies of oil with synthetic fuels derived from coal.

Senior industry figures told a high-level conference in Paris this week that coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology could fuel cars and aircraft for decades to come.

Green campaigners reacted with alarm because the process produces twice as much greenhouse gas as using oil. Supporters say much of the carbon pollution could be captured and stored underground, and that the synthetic fuel burns cleaner than conventional diesel.

Various: Imposing caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prod energy users to conserve or switch to nonpolluting technologies isn't working fast enough to combat an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency say a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy. "It will be too little and come too late," writes Andrew C. Revkin in the New York Times.

What is needed says economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in Scientific American, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which will only come about with greatly increased government spending by what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development.

A different mindset is highlighted by Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post who writes about a public discussion between climate scientist James E. Hansen and Duke Energy CEO James E. Rogers, an energy company company with a number of coal-fied power plants. Hansen was complaining that two new power plants built by Duke Energy did not include any carbon-capture technologies to reduce their emissions.

Rogers, said the scientist's demand reflects a "snap-your-fingers, instant transition of the economy" mind-set. "My requirement is to balance reliability, affordability and clean energy," Rogers said. "He's apparently focused on the clean perspective."

Globally, the number of coal power plants that will have carbon capture and storge units is limited. "You don't have other countries lining up and investing serious funding" in this technology," says Rachel Crisp, deputy director of Britain's cleaner fossil fuels unit to the Washington Post.

The Guardian: Britain and France are to sign a deal to construct a new generation of nuclear power stations and export the technology around the world in an effort to combat climate change.

The pact is to be announced at the "Arsenal summit" next week when prime ministers Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy will meet at the Emirates stadium in north London.

Britain hopes to take advantage of French expertise to build the power stations that do not rely on fossil fuels. Nearly 79% of France's electricity comes from its highly-developed nuclear power industry. The UK's ageing nuclear plants are ready for decommissioning and supply 20% of its energy needs.

Brown hopes the partnership will create a skilled British labour force who would then work in partnership with France to sell nuclear power stations to other countries over the next 15 years.

Christian Science Monitor: Concrete, one of the most common building materials in the world, has an ugly secret: It's a major source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which contribute to global warming.

Roughly 5 to 10 percent of global CO2 emissions are related to the manufacture and transportation of cement, a major ingredient of concrete. "There is not one single cement company on this planet that is not thinking about how to [reduce emissions]," says Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil engineering who researches concrete at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Italy's Italcemente is the world's fifth-largest cement producer. It is looking beyond reducing CO2 emissions by creating a cement that actually breaks down airborne pollutants by adding titanium dioxide, which, in the presence of sunlight, acts as a photocatalyer, hastening the decomposition of such pollutants as nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and ozone.

Ulm points out that the structure of human bones, at the molecular level, is similar to that of concrete. While cement must be heated to 1,200 degrees C (2,200 degrees F.) before it achieves strength and structure, bone is formed at 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F.).

"That makes one think that nature can create at 37 Celsius a material that has similar properties as cement," Ulm says. "Can we mimic that?"

Reuters: South Africa's advanced nuclear reactor technology programme will include U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric as a partner and a new shareholders' contract is expected by the end of the month, an official said last week.

South Africa is currently testing elements of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) and wants to build 24-30 PBMR reactors for its own energy needs.

Lynette Milne, chief financial officer of Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (Pty) Ltd (PBMR) set up in 1999 to develop and market the technology, said a new shareholders' contract will also include South Africa's government, the Industrial Development Corporation and power utility Eskom.

San Francisco Chronicle: The federal government has picked three venture capital firms - two of them from the Bay Area - to take promising energy technology ideas from national laboratories and turn those concepts into companies.

Science: Satellite communications company Iridium is offering space on its next-generation fleet of 66 satellites for researchers to do earth observation. But the $1.6 billion price tag could prove a bit too steep.

Scientific American: A "clean coal" power plant is set to be built in Illinois in 2009; if it works, it could help avoid catastrophic global warming

Los Angeles Times: Pacific Gas & Electric Co. went surfing Tuesday, becoming the first U.S. utility to commit to buying electricity generated by the tumult of the sea.

Reuters: IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.

Guardian Unlimited: Gordon Brown will call for an acceleration of nuclear power today in a speech to business leaders designed to show he is focused on the long term and will not buckle in the face of negative headlines.

The Oregonian : Today, Intel's chief executive oversees the introduction of a breakthrough new chip that represents one of the company's biggest engineering leaps. Otellini said he relies on his technologists to learn what's possible, and then seeks innovations that offer genuine advances for the computer user.

Business Report: The acquisition of IST Nuclear by Westinghouse Electric has expanded the local footprint of the US-based nuclear technology group and will help align its business strategy with South Africa's desire to rekindle a large scale nuclear industry.

USA Today: Solar power has long been the Mercedes-Benz of the renewable energy industry: sleek, quiet, low-maintenance.

The New York Times: The National Science Foundation is planning to award I.B.M. a contract to build the world’s fastest supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, according to documents that were accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week

Renewable Energy Access: University of Delaware-led team sets solar cell record, joins DuPont on $100 million project

PC World: Intel is close to creating chips that transmit data at high speeds using light instead of electrons.

University at Buffalo Reporter: Mention "outsourcing" and people tend to think of fields like manufacturing or telemarketing; theoretical physics isn't even on the list.

Toronto Star: Huckster or genius? An Irish firm is the latest to trumpet a `perpetual-motion machine'

BBC: Industrial groups in Europe are about to look in detail at ideas for a new launch system to put humans in space.

NewsHour (audio): Intel's new computer chip, due out later this year, uses hafnium rather than silicon in its transistors. This innovation will double the number of transistors that can fit on a chip, Intel says, leading to faster and more powerful computers. Meanwhile, other companies such as IBM have their own chip innovations in the works.

The New York Times: A New Zealand company said Monday that it had secured financing from an investor in Silicon Valley to produce ethanol from an untapped source — carbon monoxide gas.

Science: The world's production of oil will peak, everyone agrees. Sometime in the coming decades, the amazing machinery of oil production that doubled world oil output every decade for a century will sputter. Output will stop rising, even as demand continues to grow. The question is when.

The New York Times: Convoluted economics and intense speculation have pushed up the price of uranium to levels not seen since the heyday of the industry in the mid-1970s.

Sci-Tech Today: In detailing the new optical chipset that can transmit data at 160 Gbps, IBM said it provides the highest record ever of transmitted information per unit of physical space. Measuring 3.25 by 5.25 mm, IBM's optical chipset contains both driver and receiver circuits, and was built using complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology.

Wired: How do you get 120 terabytes of data -- the equivalent of 123,000 iPod shuffles (roughly 30 million songs) -- from A to B? For the most part, the old-fashioned way: via a sneakernet. It's not glamorous, but Google engineers hope to at least end the arduous process of transferring massive quantities of data -- which can literally take weeks to upload onto the internet -- with something affectionately called "FedExNet" by the scientists who use it.

The New York Times: American Electric Power, a major electric utility, is planning the largest demonstration yet of capturing carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant and pumping it deep underground.

The New York Times: Silicon Valley’s dot-com era may be giving way to the watt-com era.

news.com: The Nevada Solar One power plant is essentially a tea kettle, just one that happens to take up 300 acres and can provide enough power for 15,000 homes.

The plant, which will start to generate electricity for nearby Las Vegas in April, consists of approximately 184,000 mirrors arranged in long, parabolic arrays that focus the sun's energy on a receiver--a metal tube filled with oil that's encased in specialized glass--from German conglomerate Schott.

The Economist: Technology firms have left the big corporate R&D laboratory behind, shifting the emphasis from research to development. Does it matter?

BBC: UK science has become an unexpected victim of the Rover collapse as funds used to soften the impact of the failure were clawed back from research.

Business Week: IBM, Intel, and AMD are finding ways around the physical problems that have hampered their efforts to make chips faster

AZoNano.com: The boom in Finnish nanotechnology is uncovered by the 'Nanotechnology in Finnish Industry' survey. The biannual survey studied the evolution of the Finnish nanotechnology scene in the period 2004-2006. The 2006 survey identified 129 Finnish companies that either had commercial products or research activities focused on nanotechnology, or who had participated in the Tekes FinNano technology programme. The previous 2004 survey had found 61 companies that had activities related to nanotechnology.

The Boston Globe: Intel Corp. is set to capitalize on a new breakthrough in microchip technology more quickly than its rival AMD, but analysts say the advantage will only be temporary.

The New York Times: On the vanguard of venture capital, the buzzwords of late have been “alternative energy” and “China.” Are the two worlds about to collide?

Seed investors are financing, or considering financing, start-ups in China that are developing equipment for wind and solar power, clean water and food alternatives and technology to promote energy efficiency.

Wired: The search giant joins a growing trend by landscaping its headquarters' parking lots with pole-mounted panels that provide shade and generate clean power in one fell swoop.

The Washington Post: Out on the Hanford nuclear reservation, a fantastically poisoned plateau where the federal government brewed up most of the plutonium for its nuclear arsenal, the cleanup is going rather badly.

Now in its 17th year, the nation's largest and most complex environmental remediation project is costing many billions of dollars more than expected and will continue far longer than experts once predicted.

Scientific American: A German particle physicist has decided to try his hand as a hedge fund manager and is confident that his award-winning algorithm will mean he hits his return target within weeks of launch.

Financial Times: Large companies are pouring money into research and development at an unprecedented rate, in response to growing global competition. The international R&D Scoreboard, published on Monday, shows a 7 per cent increase in spending by the world’s top 1,250 companies.

The Register:
Intel is to close its UK research centre in Cambridge, The Register understands, just three and a half years after it was first opened. The move is part of the streamlining of the company outlined by CEO Paul Otellini earlier this year.

Los Angeles Times: Shares of defense services contractor Science Applications International Corp. added more than 21 percent Friday in the company's trading debut.

Nature: When an advanced prototype train crashed into a maintenance wagon in Germany late last month, 23 passengers were killed. But the accident may have also dealt a mortal blow to the long-touted idea of fast passenger trains that float on magnets, says Ned Stafford.

Wall Street Journal: When he arrived in Australia 18 years ago as a physics student, Shi Zhengrong scraped by on a meager stipend from the Chinese government that he supplemented by working at a restaurant. Now, a doctorate, several patents, two solar- power companies and a $455 million initial public offering later, Shi is now one of the richest people in China with a worth of over $3 billion.