Jon Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc., outside Minneapolis, may have set a new standard in Data Recovery: He found information on a melted disk drive which had fallen from space when shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003.

In the past Edwards has recovered data from computers wrecked in floods and fires, but when it came to recovering the data from a melted hard drive which had been aboard the space shuttle Columbia, Edwards was pessimistic.

Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated in during re-entry into the atmosphere on Feb. 1st, 2003, scattering it debris - including the mangled disk drive - over Texas.

It was six months later when NASA sent the disk drive to Kroll Ontrack, which specializes in data recovery. Edwards’s recalls,

“When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn’t even tell it was a hard drive. It was burned and the edges were melted,

“It looked pretty bad at first glance, but we always give it a shot.”

Edwards had reason for his pessimism.

The drive’s metal and plastic elements were scorched and the protective seal on the side which keep out dirt and dust had also melted.

Without the protective seal, the disk drive was vulnerable to tiny particles which can scratch the materials inside rendering the ability to retrieve the binary data.

However, once the disk drive had been opened, Edwards found that spinning metal platters that store the endless amounts of 1’s and 0’s had not been warped. Although the platters had been gouged and pitted, the 340-megabyte drive was only half full and the damaged had occurred where the data had not yet been written.

In another lucky twist, Edwards explains that the ancient DOS operating system which the computer had been using, helped their efforts in recovering the data, because unlike more recent operating system’s which scatter data all over the drive, DOS stores data with a linear approach.

After cleaning the platters with a chemical solution, Edwards used them to build a new drive. The whole recovery process took two days and Edwards was able to captured 99% of the drives information.

Most of the information gathered by space shuttle Columbia was radioed back to Earth during the voyage however, the data stored on the melted drive was crucial in completing the results from a scientific experiment on the properties of liquid xenon.

The data that Edwards was amazingly able to recover, allowed researchers to publish the results of the liquid xenon experiment in the April issue of a science journal, Physical Review E.

A collaborative research team with members from Duke University and Boston College has developed a metamaterial that can absorb 100% of the light reflected upon it.

The metallic material can absorb both magnetic and electrical properties of electromagnetic waves over a certain frequency range and turn this light into heat.

Heat is known as one of the most efficient energy sources thus, this new metamaterial is capable of generating even more energy than solar cells.

The material is black, with currently rules out any camouflaging options but researchers are sure that there are many uses for this new metamaterial.

The fact that scientist are still searching for news to produce electricity shows that we have much to learn about producing electricity efficiently. It will be extremely interesting to see how this technology develops and where it takes us.

The scientists who pioneered the internet have developed a new network dubbed the ‘grid’ which is capable of downloading at speeds almost 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband internet connection.

The latest spin-off from CERN, the particle physics center that created the web, will be able to transfer large amounts of data worldwide extremely fast, allowing a movie to be downloaded in just 5 seconds. The grid could also provide enough power to transmit holographic images, offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionize” society.

“With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,”

The grid was developed to deal with the large amounts of data that will be produced by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - a new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe.

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A student from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has invented a device that could replace one of the most commonly used pieces of technology in the world, the silicon transistor.

Weixiao Huang graduated his doctorates just this month, but his new gallium nitride (GaN) transistor has been drawing the attention major American and Japanese automobile companies for sometime now.

The new GaN transistor promises reduced power consumption and improved efficiency for all power electronics systems; this will include everything from motor drives and hybrid vehicles to house appliances and defense equipment.

“Silicon has been the workhorse in the semiconductor industry for last two decades,” Huang said. “But as power electronics get more sophisticated and require higher performing transistors, engineers have been seeking an alternative like gallium nitride-based transistors that can perform better than silicon and in extreme conditions.”

Almost every electrical device contains a silicon metal/oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (silicon MOSFET). To convert the electric energy to other forms as required, the silicon transistor acts as a switch, allowing or disallowing the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have long known that gallium nitride and other gallium-based materials have extremely good electrical properties but until now, no useful GaN transistor has been developed.

Huang developed a new process that demonstrates an excellent GaN MOS (metal/oxide/GaN) interface. According to Huang, his GaN MOSFET is one of its kind and has already shown world-record performance

Huang has also shown that his invention is able to integrate several important electronic functions onto one single chip like never before.

“This will significantly simplify entire electronic systems,”

Huang has also designed and experimentally demonstrated several new high-voltage MOS-gated FETs which have shown superior performance in terms of lower power consumption, smaller chip size, and higher power density when compared to silicon MOSFET.

The new transistors may greatly reduce energy loss, helping to make energy conversion more efficient.

“If these new GaN transistors replaced many existing silicon MOSFETs in power electronics systems, there would be global reduction in fossil fuel consumption and pollution,” Huang said.

The new GaN transistors can also allow the electronics device to operate in extremely hot, harsh, and high-power environments and even those that produce radiation.

“Because it is so resilient, the device could open up the field of electronic engineering in ways that were not previously possible due to the limitations imposed by less tolerant silicon transistors,”

The Slingbox PRO allows you to watch and control up to four video sources—including one HD video source (when used with HD Connect)—from anywhere in the world on your laptop or cell phone. That means you can virtually take your entire home theater with you, including your DVR, digital cable, satellite receiver, and DVD player. With the Slingbox PRO, you’ll be at home wherever you roam.

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For the last 18 months Google has been working to develop their personal health records solution. So far we haven’t been given much insight into what the product will be like, however there is promise that it will be comprehensive and user-friendly.

As of last month Google received a large endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic to help in the development of the technology.

The big medical center has now started a pilot project to begin linking the health information for some of its patients with Google’s personal health records.

Cleveland Clinic currently employs a sophisticated IT system to store their 100,000+ patient’s personal health records.

But a sizeable portion of those patients are retirees that may spend four or more months elsewhere, typically in Florida or Arizona. When these patients travel, their electronic health records don’t follow them explains Dr. C. Martin Harris, the clinic’s chief information officer.

“It forces the patient to become his or her own medical historian,

“Google personal health record is a solution to that problem”

Using Google’s technology, a person can approve the transfer of their medical records from the clinics computers to series of secure Web pages.

The pilot project is scheduled to last six to eight weeks, and will involve approx 10,000 patients.

Marissa Mayer, a vice president, who took over management of the health team six months ago said, “The project with Cleveland Clinic is “a milestone” for Google”.

Google’s personal health records is still in development, and it will be introduced publicly and made widely available, after the pilot project is concluded, Ms. Mayer said.

With Cleveland Clinic being at the forefront of health information technology, the recent endorsement is more promise that Google’s Personal Health Records will provide a one-stop solution for all health records.

Although we may not know much until the release of the product, what we do know is that Google will offer a fresh new user-interface as well as automated data links, so the patient does not have to type in personal data, as is required with some personal health records.

The recent endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic has also prompted other medical centers to sign up.

“This is truly a patient-controlled health record, and that’s a very significant step in the drive toward a more consumer-oriented system of health care,” said Dr. John D. Halamka, chief information officer of the Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Halamka is also chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, which plans to link its electronic patient records with Google personal health pages.

The forthcoming TeraDisk (developed by Mempile) promises to leave Blu-ray in its wake by offer a massive 1TB (1000GB) of space on a regular sized (CD/DVD) optical disk.

How it this possible? Existing optical media records and reads data on semi-transparent layers; a CD uses just one layer, whilst Blu-Ray uses up to eight. The layers are restricted to a certain depth because as the light passes through, it becomes distorted and unable to read/write.The TeraDisk uses 200 layers, each storing 5GB of data. The disks are made from the same Plexiglas material used in other disks so the support will stay the same; it is only the read and write technology which will be new.

“Teradisk uses traditional chemical synthesis along with advanced quantum mechanical calculations and cutting-edge photophysical laboratory experiments to design molecularly-engineered nonlinear optical chromophores”

In laymen’s terms, the chromophores which are injected into the layers change their chemical structure upon the two-photon interaction with red laser. This change causes the two-photon fluorescence signal to modulate without affecting the liner optical properties of the material. Thus allowing for massively multilayer data to be accessed on what appears to be a regular optical disk

The molecules have been optimized not only for their two-photon response, but also for other desired capabilities such as data lifetime, cost, chemical stability, and processability (for manufacturing).

Developers say the new technology will be cheap and should be available to the public in 2010.

Touch Screen interfaces are paving way for the new generation of display units. Already featured in many devices such as ATMs, phones and PDAs, the simplicity of touch screen is user-friendly and extremely appealing to most.

A demo at the recent 2008 CeBIT Expo, shows what the future of multi-touch touch-screen displays will look like. The display closely resembles the touch screen display used by Tom Cruise in the popular film Minority Report.

Although it may not be the first attempt at this kind of multi-touch, the demo of a fully working unit on display to the public is certainly a first.CeBIT (Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik; German for “Centre of Office and Information technology”) was traditionally the computing part of the Hanover Fair, a big industry trade show held every year in Germany.

In the 1986s the IT and telecommunications section was straining the resources of the industry fair so much that it was given a separate trade show held four weeks earlier than the main Hanover Fair. CeBIT expo’s have since become world renowned and are also held in Shanghai, Sydney and Istanbul.

Another Multi-Touch Display causing a stir has been incorporated into the surface of bar. iBar as the display is know, gives your bar a crazy multi-touch effect which will either provide you with hours of visual entertainment, or make you dizzy after one too many….

Sun and the Texas Advanced Computing Center recently unveiled a new supercomputer dubbed ‘Ranger,’ that can process 500 teraflops or 500 trillion floating point instructions per second.

The 500 teraflops of power will enable Ranger to process simulations and computations beyond anything we have seen before. This ability will give way to scientific breakthroughs and economic growth in all areas of society from weather forecasting to astrophysics.

Sun Constellation Linux Cluster

System Name: Ranger
Host Name: ranger.tacc.utexas.edu
IP Address: 129.114.50.163
Operating System: Linux
Number of Nodes: 3,936
Number of Processing Cores: 62,976
Total Memory: 123TB
Peak Performance: 504TFlops
Total Disk: 1.73PB (shared); 31.4TB (local)

The Ranger is based on Sun’s Constellation System which ushers in the new era of “petascale” computing in which high performance supercomputers approach one petaflop (one quadrillion floating point instructions) per second.

Using petascale architecture reduces switching elements by a factor of 300, cabling by a factor of six, and system footprint by up to 20%.Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Jay Boisseau says,

“Without a doubt, Ranger is the most powerful general-purpose supercomputing system for research ever.”

At the heart of Ranger are 72 Sun Fire X4500 storage servers, each with 48 500GB drives, yielding 1.7 petabytes of raw storage capacity and125 terabytes (TB) of memory.

Ranger also links two Sun Datacenter Switch 3456s, the world’s fastest InfiniBand switch to achieve an aggregate bandwidth of up to 110 terabits.

The system’s ultra-dense unibody chassis saves about 500 lbs. per rack when compared with traditional chassis and rack combinations. It also gives you 50 percent more compute power than its nearest competitor from HP, and 71 percent more than an IBM rack.

Check out these great Sony Vaio concept designs that have been popping up on the net, they are certainly a step a head of the iMac concept designs we featured in January’s posts (click here to read iMac Concept Designs).

Although not official, these new Sony Vaio concept designs are really worth a mention. They feature a holographic glass screen that can go transparent and a keyboard that turns opaque when turned off.

Some of technology featured here is a way from being mastered to really perform well but the designs are certainly an interesting peek of things to come. Perhaps Sony will think about taking these ideas on board for their future range of Vaio laptops.

Sony Viao Laptop Computer Notebooks Finance

A joint project is developing the Cell Chip from the PS3 to help improve medical Imaging

IBM has recently teamed up with the Mayo Clinic to develop a research facility aimed at advancing medical imaging.The joint venture into improving the way we view medical images is developing the cell chip from the PS3 to hopefully enable doctors and radiologists to track patients’ health and treatment more effectively.

Bradley Erickson, chairman of radiology at the Rochester-based Mayo Clinic said that researchers are specifically looking at how the PS3 Cell chip - which was collaboratively developed by Sony Corp., IBM and Toshiba Corp. - could speed up the imaging process.

“It changes how we think about things…..We are facing significant problems in medical imaging because the number of images produced in CT scanners basically tracks Moore’s Law. My eyes and brain can’t keep up. I see more and more images I have to interpret….

Erickson said,

“The innovation here is to take computer chips and extract the information in these increasing number of images and help present it usefully to the radiologist.”

With the computer the Mayo Clinic is now using, it would take a few minutes to run the algorithm and get the new and old images lined up successfully. Using the PS3 Cell chip, which is extremely efficient at doing raw computations, the process could be done in a second.

This time saved can mean a great deal when it comes to treating patients with life threatening conditions.

“This is focusing on the quality of the medicine” Erickson explains,

“We might take an image of someone’s brain tumor to see if it’s getting better or worse or staying the same. We’re looking for really subtle changes. You might find out after two months of radiation that it’s not working, and you want to switch their treatment. If you have a human interpret that image, they may not see any difference, and the doctor will have them keep on with that same treatment, which in reality is not helping. … We can have a computer take that image and focus more quickly on what areas need attention.”

He added that it’s not unusual to be thinking about using a gaming processor in a medical imaging machine. He noted that a lot of high-powered graphics cards and other gaming technologies are have previously been used in medical imaging.

Scientists believe to have made a break through discovery that could one day allow us to charge or power electrical devices such as cell phones, by converting body heat to electricity.

A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have been working with silicon nanowire-based converters and recently announced that they may have found a way to use to increase the conversion efficiency by a factor of 100.Using a process called “electroless etching” the scientist are able synthesize silicon nanowires in an aqueous solution on the surfaces of wafers. The “technique involves the galvanic displacement of silicon through the reduction of silver ions on a wafer’s surface” the team explain in their paper.

This technique of creating the nanowires results in vertically aligned wires that feature a rougher surface than normal nanowires. It is believed that the rough surface of the nanowires is to account for the high thermoelectric efficiency.

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THE END IS NEAR!

Of the month that is. Love it or hate it - we all respect it. Nuclear energy offers a memorizing display of force as seen in the video above. The most powerful and destructive force that man has ever been able to achieve so far. With countries and terrorist threatening to use this power for evil, where does this leave the nuclear future?

South Africa may offer insight and a staging point for the future revolution of nuclear energy. The continents only nuclear power plant is located on its southern tip in no man’s land of Cape Town. It is an obsolete, water cooled reactor that is run by the State. However Eskom is ready to change all that and become the world’s first pebble bed reactor.

Pebble bed reactor promises safer, cleaner, smaller and more affordable power than conventional nuclear power plants. They even say this style reactor is “meltdown-proof” and “walk-away safe.”

“It is physically impossible for it to suffer the kind of accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl,” Ferreira says.

(Click Here To Read More…)

A Japanese company recently unveiled a new device that will allow people “speak” through their ear so they can use their mobile telephones in noisy places.

The device - named “e-Mimi-kun” (good ear boy) - doubles as an earphone and a microphone by detecting air vibrations inside the ear, developer NS-ELEX Co. said.The ear piece and the accompanying device can be connected to a mobile phone, or wirelessly to a Bluetooth handset, so users no longer have to cover their mouths when speaking in a loud environment.

“Exterior noise is reduced six-fold by the ear piece, while a chip developed by Sanyo Electric for the accompanying device reduces sound levels ten-fold.”

NS-ELEX believes the product would be useful for people working in places such as factories, restaurants and amusement parks.

There isn’t really much left to comment on regarding this neat concept iMac, a picture really does say a thousand words. The concept design by Adam Benton is based on, “current Apple design trends, as well as the previous iMac incarnation” and pitches a 30 inch transparent screen which can be set to different levels of transparency and is totally transparent when switched off. The keyboard, also transparent is ergonomically designed with light sensitive illuminated keys and the whole set-up is of course wireless. No word yet on whether this design will go to production, we’ll just have to wait and see!

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