At SC11, Intel Corporation revealed details about the company's next-generation Intel Xeon processor-based and Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC)-based platforms designed for high-performance computing (HPC). The company also outlined new investments in research and development that will lead the industry to Exascale performance by 2018.

During his briefing at the conference, Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Technical Computing, Intel Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said that the Intel Xeon processor E5 family is the world's first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification**. PCIe 3.0 is estimated** to double the interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe* 2.0 specification** while enabling lower power and higher density server implementations. New fabric controllers taking advantage of the PCI Express 3.0 specification will allow more efficient scaling of performance and data transfer with the growing number of nodes in HPC supercomputers.

Memristors are a fourth class of electric circuit, first hypothesized way back in the 1970's, which are a new addition to the transistors, capacitors, resistors etc that go into making a silicon chip. HP has put a great deal of resources into developing this technology and is expected to release memory-like memristor products in 2013, so it's not far off from commercial deployment. Now however, the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have found a way to use memristors to make what they describe as a "fully functional" flexible resistive random access memory (RRAM). This memory is built on a plastic substrate and can be randomly accessed, written to and erased. However, as this substrate is flexible, it can be bent and rolled up easily, opening up possibilities for use that haven't even been thought of yet.

Rice University and Duke University are the latest in a long line of educational institutions to fund research on the effect of using restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM) to try and control levels of so-called "piracy", which is allegedly reducing sales of content-only, infinite goods/virtual products, such as music, movies, computer games and books. (Some observers writing about DRM replace the word "Rights", giving us the phrase Digital Restrictions Management, which seems a more accurate description of what it's really about and removes the veneer of legitimacy from it. When buying DRM'd content, you are buying digital handcuffs, nothing more, nothing less.) The universities sponsored a study called Music Downloads and the Flip Side of Digital Rights Management Protection and what it found is that contrary to popular belief amongst the big content companies, removing DRM can actually decrease levels of piracy and increase sales. The fact is that DRM is always broken by hackers and pretty quickly too, often within a day or two (there isn't a single one still standing) leaving legal users who work within its confinements with all the restrictive hassles that it imposes, while the pirates get an unencumbered product to do with as they please. How is this progress?

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.
The work, led by Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is reported in the March 12 issue of Nature. Because the material involved is not new -- the researchers have simply changed the way they make it -- Ceder believes the work could make it into the marketplace within two to three years.

An innovative and easily implemented technique in which nanoscale elements precisely assemble themselves over large surfaces could soon open doors to dramatic improvements in the data storage capacity of electronic media, according to scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst).
"I expect that the new method we developed will transform the microelectronic and storage industries, and open up vistas for entirely new applications," said co-lead investigator Thomas Russell, director of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at UMass Amherst, visiting Miller Professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Chemistry, and one of the world's leading experts on the behavior of polymers. "This work could possibly be translated into the production of more energy-efficient photovoltaic cells, for instance."

While some would dismiss "cyber sex", or two people pleasuring themselves/each other utilizing technology, as a childish game reserved for hackers and 14-year-old girls from California, a doctor from the University of Portsmouth says that there is much more to cyber sex than just that. A lot more people are having cyber sex than we would like to think, and have a detrimental effect on technology. Dr Trudy Barber decided to investigate what this effect is and how deep it runs. She completed her thesis on "Creative Digital Practice and Theory Mash-up", and will present it on Friday. Until then, The Inquirer was able to interview Dr.Barber on the effect of cyber sex on the world. Much like in real life, the desire for sexual gratification has led to some interesting innovations. AOL Instant Messenger, Webcams, and various services would likely not have seen the success that they have had if not for a lot of people seeking digital sexual gratification. Dr.Barber also asserts that the digital universe allows cyber sex partners to assume roles that they have always wanted to. Please follow the source link for The Inquirer's interview with Dr.Barber.

Microsoft says that it is hard to properly evaluate the way people interact with computers since questioning them at the time is distracting and asking questions later may not produce reliable answers. "Human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions," the company says. Instead, Microsoft wants to read the data straight from the user's brain as he or she works away. They plan to do this using electroencephalograms (EEGs) to record electrical signals within the brain. The trouble is that EEG data is filled with artifacts caused, for example, by blinking or involuntary actions, and this is hard to tease apart from the cognitive data that Microsoft would like to study. So the company has come up with a method for filtering EEG data in such a way that it separates useful cognitive information from the not-so-useful non-cognitive stuff. The company hopes that the data will better enable to them to design user interfaces that people find easy to use. Whether users will want Microsoft reading their brain waves is another matter altogether.

A professor of mathematics at the University of Rochester named Allan Greenleaf has solved a mathematical problem which could bring electromagnetic wormholes (EMW) into existence. These EMWs would create a full invisibility cloak in a tube which surrounds whatever they were employed to hide. Such devices could eventually be employed to make true 3D TV possible, and without special glasses. Researchers themselves admit this is a long way off from practical application. However, scientists are now theorizing about such things and believe that they are ultimately possible.

A few years ago, the $20 million USD X Prize kick-started a race into space. And now, the X Prize is going one step and $10 million USD further. The first private organization to land on the moon, travel 500 meters on the moon, take one gigabyte worth of video/pictures, and stream it back to Earth will win $30 million USD. Anyone can win, assuming that they are not working for any particular government. However, be advised, the cost of building such a craft and launching it is quite possibly much more than $30 million USD.

Anyone interested in visiting the techPowerUp! Forums user DaMulta at the moon base should enter the new space race here.

RFID tags recently have been finding all sorts of interesting uses. An RFID tag inside a pet can be used by animal shelters to figure out who exactly the animal belongs to, leading to a fast, happy reunion. With the recent FDA approval of RFID tagging of humans, businesses are considering using them as an easy way to keep track of employees. However, an independent firm questioned the FDA, and ran some controlled tests of their own. Their results are extremely surprising: test animals with the RFID tags came down with cancer more often than those that did not have the RFID tags. Some RFID manufacturers might acknowledge these results, and try to make a safer RFID tag. However, this may not be possible, as "it is common for inflamed tissue surrounding a foreign object in the body to develop cancerous cells".

Game developers know that it's pretty hard to get gamers into the game sometimes. While some developers create intense graphics, and others create a brilliant/original storyline, scientists are working on an out-of-the-box approach to immersion. In a controlled experiment, scientists made gamers play Pac-Man...with a twist. Whenever a ghost kills Pac-Man, the gamer gets an electric shock in the real world. The results were astounding and unexpected. Whenever a ghost approached Pac-Man, the gamer got scared. As the ghost got closer, gamers brains stopped thinking logically, and started acting on instincts. While this experience does get the gamer into the game, chances are electrodes will not become the next vibrating controller.

The University of Berlin, partnered with the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, as well as Universita Politecnica delle Marche in Italy, have found a way to squish 500GB of data into one HD DVD.

Under normal methods of storage, a Blu-Ray disk holds 25GB of data. An HD-DVD holds 15GB, and a dual layer HD-DVD holds 30GB. However, the universities have managed to modify where the recording laser puts the data. By "using nanostructures inside the disk rather than on the surface as in conventional optical storage systems", the Microholas project has found a way to put 500GB onto one HD DVD. The universities look forward to pushing this project to it's full potential, which could mean a Terabyte of data on a single HD-DVD disk.

Completely changing the way we use electricity, a group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has successfully beamed electricity from a magnetic coil to a 60 watt light bulb 7 feet away. The phenomenon called electromagnetic induction is already used in transformers and electric motors but they must be close enough for power to pass from one another. Dr Soljacic, the lead researcher on the project, discovered that a transmitter could be used to fill a room with a 'non-radiative' electromagnetic field rather than the traditional transmitter/receiver method powering electric devices wirelessly. For a diagram of how WiTricity works follow the link.

IBM's supercomputer Blue Gene/L has been used to run a 'cortical simulator' as complex as half of a mouse brain. The researchers say that their work has shown characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains, and are now working on improving the simulation to allow it to run faster in order to make it more neurobiologically faithful. Blue Gene/L is one of four Blue Gene projects in development and is the fastest computer in the world with a theoretical peak of 360 TFLOPS. Using 4,096 processors, each with 256MB of memory, the team managed to create a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons with up to 6,300 synapses each. Real mouse brains will have about 16,000 neurons which can have up to 8,000 synapses (connections with other nerve fibres) each.

IBM Moves Moore's Law into the Third-Dimension

Armonk, NY - 12 Apr 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a breakthrough chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three-dimensional chips that will extend Moore's Law beyond its expected limits. The technology - called "through-silicon vias" -- allows different chip components to be packaged much closer together for faster, smaller, and lower-power systems.

The IBM breakthrough enables the move from horizontal 2-D chip layouts to 3-D chip stacking, which takes chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side by side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another. The result is a compact sandwich of components that dramatically reduces the size of the overall chip package and boosts the speed at which data flows among the functions on the chip.

Australian professors at the University of NSW have done some significant PowerPoint research. If you ever get bored watching a PowerPoint presentation while someone is talking, then you're not alone, and there's a scientific reason behind this. Scientists have discovered that people learn best when given media on paper or verbal media. A combination of the two tends to cause a brain overload, mixes the two forms of information, and can hurt a lot more than it can help. This is due to the fact that the brain can only handle two or three tasks at once, and otherwise will start to budget time away from some tasks to help others Professor Sweller says that "It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

A new technology called Laser TV could soon be in stores competing against plasma and LCD televisions if California based company Novalux has its way with things. The new laser TVs is designed to be used for either front/rear projection and because it can be used in current rear-projection cabinets it should be cheaper to produce. Not only will it cost less than LCD and plasma, it also boasts double the colour range and uses three-quarters less power, which should attract those who are after the best image quality available. However, the downside of laser technology remains in the design of rear-projection TVs: because of the way they work, they have a much deeper profile than LCD or Plasma TVs, so they are not ideal for hanging on walls. Sony's prototype laser TV (shown below on the left) is estimated to have a depth of between 8" and 10", whilst even large LCD displays are under 5". Novalux already has four designs ready and is in discussions with numerous OEMs, with the company hoping to see the technology go on sale in 2008.

Or so a study of 600 Americans claims. When given a newspaper article, the average American will read 75% of it if it is on a website. This isn't too bad, especially when compared to the 62% of an article in the average reliable newspaper (like The Boston Globe) the average American will read. The same American will read about 57% of an article published in a tabloid-style newspaper, such as The Weekly World News. These numbers are surprising, especially considering how much effort people will put into putting a news story in print. However, if you consider how much longer the average newspaper article is, maybe newspaper-readers do have longer attention spans after all.

New research by Big Blue could see CPUs running up to 40% cooler in the near future, without needing prices to rocket. In a paper released at the IEEE Semi-Therm conference, IBM published ideas designed to make thermal paste more efficient, therefore allowing for an improved cooling capacity leading to cooler processors. According to IBM, current thermal paste techniques can lead to 40% of heat given off by the CPU being absorbed by the particles in the paste, largely caused by the fact that the particles don't spread evenly, leading to the "Magic Cross" shown in the image below and to the left. IBM's new technology involves integrating micro-meter length trenches into the copper cap that sits above the CPU core (below on the right), which will allow thermal paste to be more evenly distributed and will lead to a third less thermal paste being required, as well as halving the pressure required to fit a CPU cooler. IBM still needs to finalise the research, but this relatively in-expensive method could be integrated into new CPUs and coolers before too long. For more detailed information you can read IBM's press release.

At the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference, IBM scientists will reveal a prototype optical transceiver chipset capable of reaching speeds at least eight times faster than optical components available today. The breakthrough could transform how data is accessed, shared and used across the Web for corporate and consumer networks. The transceiver is fast enough to reduce the download time for a typical high definition feature-length film to a single second compared to 30 minutes or more.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif., March 20 -- The world's first computers whose architecture can adopt different forms depending on their application have been developed by Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN).

Dubbed MONARCH (Morphable Networked Micro-Architecture) and developed to address the large data volume of sensor systems as well as their signal and data processing throughput requirements, it is the most adaptable processor ever built for the Department of Defense, reducing the number of processor types required. It performs as a single system on a chip, resulting in a significant reduction of the number of processors required for computing systems, and it performs in an array of chips for teraflop throughput.

German researchers have recently conducted a study to determine the effects of games that promote risky decisions on real-world driving. These researchers took a batch of subjects (both women and men), and divided them into three groups. The first group played first person shooter games, such as Medal of Honor. The second group played more calming/family-oriented games, like Crash Bandicoot. The third group played hardcore racing games such as Need For Speed. All test subjects got to play these games on a Sony PlayStation 2 on a gigantic 72" television. The results of this experiment drew parallels between racing games that promoted violent/risky decisions in the game and violent/risky decisions in real life. First person shooters and family-oriented games did next to nothing to a subject's driving ability. However, racing games did a ton to a subject's actual driving.

The EIAA (European Interactive Advertising Association) has proved in a recent report what we probably could have guessed ourselves. People who own wireless computers (such as the one I'm using right now) are very likely to do things such as contribute to websites (such as this one), make/spread user-generated content (like this), and review/rate content on websites like YouTube. On average, people who own a wireless laptop/device spend 18 hours a week on the internet, as opposed to 11 hours that the average wired user would spend. This is because, you guessed it, wireless users can bring their computer with them, instead of having to come to it.

In 2002, when MIT decided to experiment with placing course contents on the Web for open access, the university's officials knew they were breaking new ground and had no idea how the effort would be received.

On Tuesday, school officials revealed plans to make available the university's entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end. Currently, some 1.5 million online independent learners log on the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site every month and more than 120 universities around the world have inaugurated their own sites for independent learners. MIT has more than 1,500 course curriculums available online to date.

A group of researchers at Keio University in Japan has developed a new technology which uses bacterial DNA as a medium for long-term data storage. Although it's not incredible in terms of data capacity, the technology works by creating artificial DNA carrying information, which is then inserted into the bacterial genome sequence. After this, the DNA will multiply, reproducing the data. This can therefore act as a long-term method of storage because the DNA will be passed down from generation to generation - possibly for thousands of years (current storage methods will only last a few centuries). So far the researchers have only managed to encode "e= mc2 1905!", but there is potential for the future.