Tech

WASHINGTON, March 16— To cut the cost of bringing high-speed Internet to rural areas, Dr. Ka Lun Lee and colleagues at the University of Melbourne and NEC Australia in the state of Victoria are experimenting with a way to boost the reach of existing technology. Their results, which show a new way to cheaply cover 99 percent of those living in this province, will be presented during the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC), taking place March 22-26 in San Diego.

The next time an overnight snow begins to fall, take two bricks and place them side by side a few inches apart in your yard.

In the morning, the bricks will be covered with snow and barely discernible. The snowflakes will have filled every vacant space between and around the bricks.

What you will see, says Ivan Biaggio, resembles a phenomenon that, when it occurs at the smallest of scales on an integrated optical circuit, could hasten the day when the Internet works at superfast speeds.

CORAL GABLES, FL. (March 11, 2009)—Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, Japan, have been able to prove the existence of a "spin battery," a battery that is "charged" by applying a large magnetic field to nano-magnets in a device called a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ).

The creation of long platinum nanowires at the University of Rochester could soon lead to the development of commercially viable fuel cells.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--MIT engineers have created a kind of beltway that allows for the rapid transit of electrical energy through a well-known battery material, an advance that could usher in smaller, lighter batteries — for cell phones and other devices — that could recharge in seconds rather than hours.

The work could also allow for the quick recharging of batteries in electric cars, although that particular application would be limited by the amount of power available to a homeowner through the electric grid.

Lights, Camera, Ka-Boom!

Cheap, lightweight cameras could help protect mass transit, but would they survive a big costly blast?

That was the question on the minds of Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) scientists and managers watching from behind three feet of reinforced concrete.

"30 seconds…" came the countdown voice in an adjacent room.

**Lights, Camera, Ka-Boom!**

Cheap, lightweight cameras could help protect mass transit, but would they survive a big costly blast?

That was the question on the minds of Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) scientists and managers watching from behind three feet of reinforced concrete.

**"30 seconds…"** came the countdown voice in an adjacent room.

An analysis of the engineering and economics for a solar water-heating system shows it to have a payback period of just two years, according to researchers in India. They report, in the International Journal of Global Energy Issues, on the success of the 1000-liter system operating at a university hostel.

Car doors are usually assembled from several sections of sheet metal which are welded together by laser. The laser beam moves over the slightly overlapping sheets and melts them in a spot measuring several tenths of a millimeter, producing a so called full penetration hole that closes again when the laser beam moves on. It is most important for the laser output power to be set correctly – if it is too low the strength of the welding connection is reduced because it does not extend over the full cross section of the metal sheets, if it is too high the laser cuts right through them.

A skier gives her all, closely races past the gates in the giant slalom to the final stretch. Yet, upon reaching the bottom, the disappointment is great: Too slow once again. How come? Until now, coaches and athletes have analyzed videos to identify weaknesses in technique. "An analysis was based more on instinct than concrete measured values," explains Dr. Klaus Richter, Expert Group Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF in Magdeburg.

The possibility of remote monitoring for chronically ill patients will soon become a reality. Now, researchers in South Africa and Australia have devised a decentralized system to avoid medical data overload. They describe the peer-to-peer system in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Putting idle servers to sleep when they're not in use is part of University of Michigan researchers' plan to save up to 75 percent of the energy that power-hungry computer data centers consume.

Data centers, central to the nation's cyberinfrastructure, house computing, networking and storage equipment. Each time you make an ATM withdrawal, search the Internet or make a cell phone call, your request is routed through a data center.

WASHINGTON, March 5—A freak wave at sea is a terrifying sight. Seven stories tall, wildly unpredictable, and incredibly destructive, such waves have been known to emerge from calm waters and swallow ships whole. But rogue waves of light -- rare and explosive flare-ups that are mathematically similar to their oceanic counterparts -- have recently been tamed by a group of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

J.K. Rowling may not have realized just how close Harry Potter's invisibility cloak was to becoming a reality when she introduced it in the first book of her best-selling fictional series in 1998. Scientists, however, have made huge strides in the past few years in the rapidly developing field of cloaking. Ranked the number five breakthrough of the year by Science magazine in 2006, cloaking involves making an object invisible or undetectable to electromagnetic waves.

Health professionals send genes and healthy cells on their way through the bloodstream so that they can, for example, repair tissue damage to arteries. But do they reach their destination in sufficient quantities? Scientists of the PTB have developed a highly sensitive measuring method with which the efficiency of this therapy can be investigated: Small magnetic particles which are situated on the planted gene or on the planted cell can with the aid of an external magnetic field be specifically directed to the location of the damage.