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 | Herculean Device for Molecular Mysteries | 7.8.2008 | A privately financed team of scientists and engineers is nearing completion of a special-purpose supercomputer intended to offer more than a thousandfold increase in performance for complex molecular simulations.
The machine, named Anton, in homage to Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a pioneer in microbiology, is a bold gamble to jump ahead of the most powerful general-purpose supercomputers by as much as a half decade.
It could be used to investigate problems of great scientific interest, like the folding of protein molecules, and in the design of drugs based on the simulated biological activity of different molecules.
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Anton is massively parallel, with 517 specialized processors working simultaneously. The processors are called application-specific integrated circuits, and in this case their specialty is the calculation of the three-dimensional characteristics of molecules. Despite the publication of a detailed technical description of his computer, Mr. Shaw declined to be interviewed about the project. “At this stage of our research, though, we’ve been trying to communicate our results largely through academic talks and peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals,” he wrote in an e-mail message.
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By looking at time scales that last several orders of magnitude longer than today’s simulations, the Anton team is hoping to discover new kinds of biological processes that would not otherwise be observable. “If you can do 1,000 times longer, real proteins come into play,” Mr. Shaw said in a technical lecture in 2006 at Stanford describing his work.
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| | Source: New York Times | Posted By: Sangoma |
| Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight | 6.17.2008 | In Silicon Valley, the stars have long been charismatic marketing visionaries and cool-nerd software wizards. By contrast, mechanical engineers who design and run computer data centers were traditionally regarded as little more than blue-collar workers in the high-tech world.
For years, they toiled in relative obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems. Their mission was to keep the computing power plants humming, while scant thought was given to rising costs and energy consumption.
Today, data center experts are no longer taken for granted. The torrid growth in data centers to keep pace with the demands of Internet-era computing, their immense need for electricity and their inefficient use of that energy pose environmental, energy and economic challenges, experts say.
That means people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. Their status is growing, as are their salaries — climbing more than 20 percent in the last two years into six figures for experienced engineers.
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| | Source: New York Times | Posted By: Sangoma |
| Military Supercomputer Sets Record | 6.10.2008 | An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.
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| | Source: New York Times | Posted By: Sangoma |
| Been Up, Been Down. Now? Super. | 4.29.2008 | LOOK at him standing there, a great big movie star in a great big movie, the Iron Man with nary a trace of human frailty. A scant five years ago the only time you saw Robert Downey Jr. getting big play in your newspaper came when he was on a perp walk.
Yet when it came time for Marvel Studios to cast the lead for a huge franchise film, “Iron Man,” it bet on Mr. Downey. He is not only back in the game but at the top of it. Is this a great country or what?
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| | Source: New York Times | Posted By: Sangoma |
| Making Money, the How-To Way | 4.23.2008 | Learning how to turn a flashlight into a laser is not a top priority for most people. Yet Kip Kedersha’s step-by-step instructional video that teaches how to do just that has been seen online by more people (1.88 million) than live in Manhattan (about 1.6 million).
Mr. Kedersha’s online library of 94 videos includes tips on how to chill a Coke in two minutes, simulate a gunshot wound and start up a PC quickly.
Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000.
That puts Mr. Kedersha, a 50-year-old video producer from St. Petersburg, Fla., near the front of the latest online stampede: the rush to capitalize on the popularity of how-to videos on the Web.
“You never know when something like this is going to go away,” Mr. Kedersha said. “I better ride the wave.”
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Flashlight Hack |
| | Source: New York Times | Posted By: Sangoma |
| Physicists Make Artificial Black Hole Using Optical Fiber | 4.4.2008 | 7 March 2008—Physicists at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, report that they have created an analogue to a black hole in their lab. Such a tabletop black hole, made from a length of optical fiber and laser light, may prove invaluable in understanding the characteristics of these exotic astronomical objects, scientists say.
“About three and a half years ago, in August of 2004, I realized that it is possible to use optical fibers to create an analogue of a black hole,” says Ulf Leonhardt, who reported the research today in the journal Science. “It took us a while to do the experiment because it was very hard to get funding.”
Leonhardt’s work is being feted by photonics experts, such as Ian Walmsley at Oxford University, as “breaking new ground” in the field of nonlinear optics.
Black holes are some of the most exotic objects in the universe. They are incredibly dense, with powerful gravitational fields. One of the key characteristics of a black hole is its event horizon—a boundary that demarcates the region inside the black hole where the gravitational field is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape.
Full Article |
| | Source: IEEE Spectrum | Posted By: Sangoma |
| Nerve-tapping neckband used in 'telepathic' chat | 3.14.2008 | A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.
With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.
Full Article
Ambient Corporation |
| | Source: New Scientist | Posted By: Sangoma |
| Gary Gygax, Game Pioneer, Dies at 69 | 3.10.2008 |  Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Gail Gygax, who said he had been ailing and had recently suffered an abdominal aneurysm, The Associated Press reported.
As co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, the seminal role-playing game introduced in 1974, Mr. Gygax wielded a cultural influence far broader than his relatively narrow fame among hard-core game enthusiasts.
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| | Source: New York Times | Posted By: Sangoma |
| Star Wars: The Clone Wars In Theaters and on Television in 2008 | 2.15.2008 | A new era of Star Wars entertainment begins in 2008 when Star Wars: The Clone Wars, from creator George Lucas, premieres as an all-new feature film in August, followed by the television series debut in the fall, in a partnership announced today between Lucasfilm Ltd., Warner Bros. Pictures and Turner Broadcasting System Inc.
Produced by Lucasfilm Animation, Star Wars: The Clone Wars takes audiences on incredible new Star Wars adventures, combining the legendary storytelling of Lucasfilm with an eye-popping, signature animation style. Star Wars: The Clone Wars will open in North American theaters Friday, August 15. International release dates will be announced soon.
"I felt there were a lot more Star Wars stories left to tell," said George Lucas, executive producer of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. "I was eager to start telling some of them through animation and, at the same time, push the art of animation forward."
The theatrical debut of Star Wars: The Clone Wars is only the beginning of all-new Star Wars adventures that continue in the fall when the long-awaited television series premieres on Cartoon Network, followed by airings on TNT. Details regarding international broadcasts will be announced shortly. Star Wars: The Clone Wars showcases an entirely new look and feel to the galaxy far, far away -- combining the expansive scope of the Star Wars Saga with state-of-the-art computer-generated animation. Each week, viewers will see a thrilling, 30-minute "mini-movie" created by the talented artists at Lucasfilm Animation.
On the front lines of an intergalactic struggle between good and evil, fans young and old will join such favorite characters as Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Padmé Amidala, along with brand-new heroes like Anakin's padawan learner, Ahsoka. Sinister villains -- led by Darth Sidious, Count Dooku and General Grievous -- are poised to rule the galaxy. Stakes are high, and the fate of the Star Wars universe rests in the hands of the daring Jedi Knights. Their exploits lead to the action-packed battles and astonishing new revelations that fill Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Full Article |
| | Source: StarWars.com | Posted By: Sangoma |
| Building a better virtual world, one tree (or millions) at a time | 2.5.2008 | 
When Stanford computer scientist Vladlen Koltun decided to build a better virtual world, he began with 3-D trees—millions of them. Now he wants to give them away.
Trees, like almost all objects in virtual worlds, whether in video games or Internet social communities like World of Warcraft or Second Life, are enormously difficult and expensive to build.
"There is a very, very tiny community of people around the world who are skilled at creating three-dimensional objects," Koltun said. "And they are the ones who do it all. Which is one of the reasons why you don't see three-dimensional content on the web; because nobody can create it."
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When Koltun, an assistant professor of computer science, set out with his Stanford Virtual Worlds Group to prove that object construction can be sophisticated without being difficult, they began with trees.
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The result is a new, intuitive way for individual users to create unique trees by simply using a mouse to seamlessly navigate through the entire "space of trees," changing appearances by changing direction. Koltun's software, Dryad (a tree nymph in Greek mythology,) lets users move through the 100-attribute tree space in a fashion similar to navigating city streets on Google Maps.
Full Article
Dryad Homepage
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| | Source: Stanford News Service | Posted By: Sangoma |
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