Micro-origami lets scientists get a grip

Picking up dropped sewing needles can be tricky enough, so imagine the problems of manipulating objects on the microscale.

To try and make such tasks easier, US scientists have now developed a mechanical gripper the size of an amoeba, and used it to pick up and drop microscopic beads, wires and tubes.

The microgripper is shaped like a star, with six arms equally spaced around a hexagonal centre. Constructed from gold-plated nickel, it is around 700 micrometres wide when fully open, shrinking to 200 micrometres with the arms folded.

Each of the arms is attached by a three-layered joint comprised of a very thin layer of chromium, just 50 nanometres thick; a thicker layer of copper (250 nm); and a much thicker layer of polymer resin (3500 nm).

The secret to the device's gripping action is that the copper layer is under tension - naturally bent but restrained in a flattened form by the polymer layer.

Look, no wires

In its idle state, the microgripper is open. To close it, David Gracias and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, simply expose it to acetic acid - the key ingredient in vinegar.

The restraining polymer resin is dissolved by the acid, freeing the springy copper to bend, and causing the device to close.

To then relax the hold, Gracias exposes the microgripper to hydrogen peroxide, a common bleaching agent, which dissolves the copper layer. This leaves behind just the thin chromium layer, which folds the arms flat once more.

Using a magnet to move the metallic microgrippers around, Gracias has shown how they can securely hold a range of glass beads, wires and tubes - roughly 200 micrometres in size - and release them on command at desired locations.

Moving small objects around with such fine precision should prove very handy for "lab-on-a-chip" devices and micro-manufacturing, says Gracias.

And because the microgripper is controlled by chemical rather than electronic signals, many of them could be opened and closed at the same time without needing to connect them to a power supply.

Disposable drawback

James Burdess of Newcastle University's Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology agrees. "This is an interesting idea and there is a need to develop devices which can grip a microstructure for placement elsewhere," he told New Scientist.

Burgess says his own research has required a microneedle to be grabbed and placed onto another device - it proved no easy task.

But the technique does have limitations, he points out. One is that, unlike many other micromachines, each microgripper can be used only once; the other is that the chemicals used to open and close the grippers are not biologically friendly.

Gracias says that he has already overcome the latter problem, having recently developed microgrippers that can open and close under biological conditions, so they could potentially be used to examine living tissue.

2008 to be extended by one second

Those eager to see 2008 come to a close will have to wait a second longer. A single leap second will be added at the end of the year to accommodate a subtle slow-down in the Earth's rotation.

The decision, made earlier this year by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, will adjust coordinated universal time (UTC), which is used to calibrate national and regional clocks around the world.

The leap second will be added on 31 December 2008 at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds UTC.

UTC time is counted by atomic clocks, but it is adjusted occasionally to accommodate changes in the length of the Earth's day.

Tugs from the Sun and Moon are gradually slowing the Earth's spin and causing its days to get longer. But this deceleration occurs unevenly.

The speed of the Earth's rotation sometimes gets a subtle boost due to a complex coupling between the Earth's mantle and core, which are thought to spin at somewhat different rates.

To accommodate the unevenness of this slow-down, leap seconds can be added twice a year - at the end of June and at the end of the December.

This leap second will be the 24th added to the world's clocks since 1972, and the first one added since the end of 2005. No leap seconds were added between the end of 1998 and the end of 2005 due to a slight, temporary acceleration in the Earth's rotation.

Life-saving lab made from paper and sticky tape

Origami artists can turn paper into all manner of ingenious objects. It's unlikely, though, that anyone has tried to make a functioning medical lab that way - until now. With the help of some bits of carpet tape, a portable testing kit made of paper could transform medical care in poor countries.

Much diagnosis depends on tests of body fluids, such as for sugar in urine or viral proteins in mucus. Some such tests are now automated in "labs on a chip" that pipe biological samples through tiny channels into cavities containing reagents that change colour to reveal the result. The trouble is that these microfluidic devices are expensive and fragile.

George M. Whitesides and his Harvard University colleagues cut precise patterns of tiny channels in sheets of paper and interleaved them with double-sided carpet tape laser-drilled with corresponding patterns of holes.

The paper wicks water along the channels, making pumps unnecessary, and the holes connect paper layers to form a three-dimensional maze. Samples applied to one side of the device end up in chambers pre-packed with reagents for different substances. The team's prototype measured sugar in urine, but in principle the device could do many tests at once (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A photo of the coloured dots that reveal the results could be sent by cellphone to a specialist centre for diagnosis, and the devices are light, cheap and rugged - good news for healthcare in poor countries.

What are Satellite Phones?

A brief detail of Satellite Phones which are extensively being used in Anti-Social groups especially by Terrorists.





A satellite , satellite phone, or satphone is a type of mobile phone that connects to orbiting satellites instead of terrestrial cell sites. Depending on the architecture of a particular system, coverage may include the entire Earth, or only specific regions.


Satellite phone (Inmarsat)
The mobile equipment, also known as a terminal, varies widely. Early satellite phone handsets had a size and weight comparable to that of a late 1980s or early 1990s mobile phone, but usually with a large retractable antenna. More recent satellite phones are similar in size to a regular mobile phone while some prototype satellite phones have no distinguishable difference from an ordinary smartphones. Satphones are popular on expeditions into remote areas where terrestrial cellular service is unavailable.
A fixed installation, such as used shipboard, may include large, rugged, rack-mounted electronics, and a steerable microwave antenna on the mast that automatically tracks the overhead satellites. Satellite phones have notoriously poor reception indoors, though it may be possible to get a consistent signal near a window or in the top floor of a building if the roof is sufficiently thin. The phones have connectors for external antennas that are often installed in vehicles and buildings. Some systems also allow for the use of repeaters, much like terrestrial mobile phone systems.
In some countries ruled by oppressive regimes such as Burma possession of a satellite phone can be illegal as their signals will usually bypass local telecoms systems hindering censorship and wiretapping attempts.

Satellite phone networks

Geosynchronous services

Some satellite phones use satellites in geosynchronous orbit. These systems can maintain near-continuous global coverage with only three or four satellites, reducing the launch costs. However the satellites used for these systems are very heavy (approx. 5000kg) and therefore very expensive to build and launch. The satellites sit at an altitude of about 22,000 miles (35,000 km) and therefore a noticeable delay is present while making a phone call or using data services. The amount of bandwidth available on these systems is substantially higher than that of LEO systems, all three active systems provide portable satellite internet using laptop-sized terminals with speeds ranging from 60 kbits to 512 kbits.
Another disadvantage of geostationary satellite systems is that in many areas, even where a large amount of open sky is present, the line of sight between the phone and the satellite is broken by obstacles such as steep hills and forest and the user will need to find higher ground before being able to use the phone. This is not the case with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) services - even if the signal is blocked by an obstacle one can wait a few minutes until another satellite passes overhead.

ACeS - This small regional operator provides voice and data services in East Asia using a single satellite.

Inmarsat - The oldest satellite phone operator, founded in 1979 it originally provided large fixed installations intended for use on ships but has only recently started to enter the market of hand-held phones in a joint venture with ACeS. The company operates eleven satellites with another planned for launch in 2008. Coverage is available on most of the earth's surface except polar regions.

Thuraya - A system based in the UAE which until recently operated a single satellite. Two satellites are currently in active service providing coverage to the most of Eurasia, Africa and Australia with some degree of coverage overlap between the two satellites

MSAT / Mobile Satellite Ventures - An American satellite phone company which uses equipment similar to INMARSAT but plans to launch a service using hand-held devices similar to Thuraya in the Americas


Low Earth orbit

LEO telephones utilizes LEO (low Earth orbit) satellite technology. The advantages include providing worldwide wireless coverage with no gaps. LEO satellites orbit the earth at high speed, low altitude orbits with an orbital time of 70–90 minutes, an altitude of 640 to 1120 kilometres (400 to 700 miles), and provide coverage cells. Since the satellites are not geosynchronous, they must fly complete orbits and thus further guarantee complete coverage over every area by at least one satellite at all times.
Two such systems, both based in the United States started up in the late 1990s but soon went into bankruptcy after they failed to gain the number of subscribers required to fund the large satellite launch costs. They are now operated by new owners who bought the assets for a fraction of their original cost and are now both planning to launch replacement constellations supporting higher bandwidth. Data speeds for current networks are between 2200 bit/s and 9600 bit/s using a satellite handset.

Globalstar - A network covering most of the world's landmass using 44 active satellites however many areas are left without coverage due to the fact that a satellite must be in range of an earth station. Satellites fly in an inclined orbit of 52 degrees and therefore polar regions are not covered either. The network went into limited commercial service at the end of 1999.

Iridium - A network operating 66 satellites in a polar orbit that claims coverage everywhere on the earth's surface. Commercial service started in November 1998 and fell into bankruptcy soon after. Notably radio cross-links are used between satellites in order to relay data to the nearest satellite with a connection to an earth station.

Tracking
LEO systems have the ability to track a mobile unit's location using doppler shift calculations from the satellite however these can be inaccurate by tens of kilometers. On Iridium some hardware the coordinates can be extracted using AT commands while recent Globalstar handsets will display them on the screen

Proposed systems

ICO Satellite Management - A satellite phone company which has launched a single geosynchronous satellite which is not yet in active service.

Teledesic - An ill-fated company backed by Microsoft which planned to provide broadband internet using a network of 840 LEO satellites, it ended up launching only one test satellite.

Terrestar - Proposed satellite phone system for North America

Ellipso - Start up that entered a partnership with ICO

One-way services

Some satellite phone networks provide a one-way paging channel to alert users in poor coverage areas of an incoming call. When the alert is received on the satellite phone it must be taken to an area with better coverage before the call can be accepted.
Globalstar provides a one-way data uplink service, typically used for asset tracking.
Iridium operates a one-way pager service as well as the call alert feature.

Cost of a satellite phone


While it is possible to obtain old handsets for the Thuraya, Iridium, and Globalstar networks for approximately $200, the newest handsets are still quite expensive. The iconic Iridium 9505A, although released in 2001, still sells for well over $1,000 new. Since satellite phones are purpose-built for one particular network and cannot be switched to other networks, the price of handsets varies with the performance of the network. If a satellite phone provider encounters trouble with its network the handset prices will fall, then increase once new satellites are launched. Similarly, handset prices will increase when calling rates are reduced.
Among the most expensive satellite phones are BGAN terminals, often costing several thousand dollars. However these satphones provide broadband Internet as well as voice communications. Satellite phones are sometimes subsidised by the provider if one signs a post-paid contract but subsidies are usually only a few hundred dollars or less.
Since most satellite phones are built under license or the manufacturing of handsets is contracted out to OEM's, operators have a large influence over the selling price. Satellite networks operate under proprietary closed standards, making it difficult for manufacturers to independently make their own handsets.

Eco-problems of the 80s return to haunt us

As much a feature of the 1980s as the smiley, acid rain was thought to be a problem that was going away. Now research indicates global warming is exacerbating old acid damage
Not only are 1980s garish clothes and synthpop music back in fashion, but it seems the era's environmental problems are also returning to haunt us.

One of the first empirical studies to look at how global warming is affecting ecosystem health has found that the wet winters of recent years have hampered the recovery of streams from damage caused by acid rain decades ago.

We are going to find more and more cases where climate change exacerbates other forms of environmental degradation, says Peter Kareiva of US environment charity The Nature Conservancy.

"Previous achievements in environmental sustainability can be overturned when climate disruption piles on," he says. "There is a good chance that the climate's interactions with other environmental stresses may end up being the greatest risk we face, as opposed to the direct impacts of global warming."

Acid rain was one of the defining environmental issues of the 1980s, causing acid deposition in streams and rivers, making them uninhabitable for many species. But with increasing efforts to clean up sources of acid rain, acidity levels in the water had been steadily dropping.

Wet, wet, wet

Steve Ormerod and colleagues at Cardiff University in the UK have monitored the temperature and acidity levels of 14 Welsh streams - as well as the insects living there - for the past 25 years.

With the reduction in acid rain, they expected to see many insect species recolonising the streams. But their findings revealed that the aquatic ecosystems hadn't recovered as well as expected.

The researchers blame the recent increase in rainfall during the winter months. According to Ormerod, up to 40% of the last 25 years-worth of improvements have been cancelled out as a result of the recent weather changes.

"It looks as though wetter winter conditions are a problem, and given that the prediction is for rainfall volumes to go up by about 30%, there is this potential for knocking out recovery from things like acidification," he says.

Dead or alive

Increased rainfall reduces the buffering capacity of river systems by diluting base ions in the water and increasing acid ion input by increasing run-off from soils. "This is sufficient to push things in the acid direction again," Ormerod says. "So even though we've fixed an awful lot of the acid deposition problem, we still get the kind of acid episodes that are knocking out sensitive organisms."

Other environmental pollutants, such as nitrates are also affected by weather changes. In drought conditions, the flow volumes of rivers go down, and nitrates and other pollutants being discharged into rivers can have a greater ecological impact.

The spread of invasive species, sediment mobilisation, and the management of land use could all potentially be affected by climate change, says Ormerod. "Our work really emphasises that those predictions are being upheld," he says.

Experts told New Scientist that they are concerned that Ormerod's study might be just one example of a wider phenomenon where recent changes to the climate are exacerbating other environmental problems.

Crowded house

Tony Janetos, of the Joint Global Change Research Institute in Baltimore says there are many ways in which climate change can amplify existing environmental stress. For example, the rise in sea levels and the consequent rise in storm surges make the challenge of coastal erosion and property damage much more costly.

Also, "the expected increases in drought frequency in the western US make existing water management challenges more severe, and are already leading to an increase of wildfires and pest infestations in the regions forests - both of which have long-term implications for ecosystem integrity and economic impacts."

Ecologist Tim Seastedt of the University of Colorado says the warmer temperatures, combined with a longer growing season, elevated carbon dioxide concentrations, and higher inorganic nitrogen inputs are boosting the success of invasive species.

"This has expressed itself with the emergence of annual plants as significant cover components in our grasslands, something not seen in the past," he says. "Our native perennial species have not, to date, been able to keep up with these changes."

Seastedt says we need to be proactive in establishing desirable species in the appropriate habitats. "Just treating past problems is no longer sufficient," he says.

Cleaner air to turn iconic buildings green

The coming century will see iconic limestone structures like the Empire State building turn yellow, reddish-brown, and even green with lichen and moss





For buildings the future is bright - bright green, that is. New research into how stone facades will be altered by changes in the atmosphere suggests that the days of smutty grey and black buildings are gone.

The coming century will see iconic limestone structures like the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and the gothic cathedrals of Europe and the US turn yellow, reddish-brown, and even green with lichen and moss.

Cities will become more colourful as pollution patterns change and wind-swept rain washes away the black coal soot typical of the 20th century. What's more, legal requirements to use clean fuels are likely to mean lichens and mosses will grow more easily, turning buildings green in parts.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, cities in Europe and the US were dominated by dark grey and black buildings. These were often made of cream-coloured stones like limestones, covered in a black crust of coal soot. According to Peter Brimblecombe and Carlotta Grossi of the University of East Anglia in the UK, the era where atmospheric pollution determined the damage to building materials is over.

The pair recently completed an assessment of how damage to buildings in London has varied over the past 900 years and how it is likely to evolve over the coming century - when soot from coal-burning stoves is unlikely to be a concern, but climate change is.

They used historical climate and pollution data, combined with equations that describe how different climates and different types of pollution affect building materials. For instance, archive tax records show how much fuel was used through the centuries, which can be used to estimate historical pollution levels.

Sooty anomaly

With estimates of how much black carbon soot deposited on buildings at different times, the researchers can calculate the reflectivity of buildings, which indicates how black they were. It turns out that for most of the 900 years, buildings were clean.

"It seems the past two centuries [of blackened buildings] were a bizarre anomaly," says Brimblecombe. "In a sense, we are now back in medieval England."

A study on a limestone building known as the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, using pictures taken throughout its 20th century construction, shows that the cream-coloured façade was black even before the structure was completed in the 1930s.

In subsequent decades, however, air-quality regulations meant black crusts of soot became less of a problem, and parts of the building that get most soaked with rain have been naturally cleaned.

Climate models predict that temperate regions are likely to receive more rain with climate change, meaning cities like London will become lighter. But the natural removal of black and grey deposits is likely to reveal other changes in the stone, says Grossi.

Already, she and Brimblecombe have shown that switching away from coal fuels has made the Tower of London slightly yellow and reddish-brown hues. This is the result of the oxidisation of organic compounds in diesel and petrol fumes. On this and other buildings, the hues may have been there for some time, but would have been hidden by the black carbon crusts.

Moss invasion

Cliff Davidson of Carnegie Mellon University, who carried out the Cathedral of Learning study, says these changes in hue could be boosted by warming climates. "This will cause a greater fraction of [organic fuel compounds] to become gases rather than particles," he says. "Gases may deposit more quickly on buildings."

Fossil fuels are changing too. Crucially, car and truck fuels now emit less sulphates than they used to. Sulphates suppress the growth of lichens and mosses, so cleaner fuels are likely to mean greener buildings.

According to Grossi, buildings will not be homogenously green, or yellow, or reddish-brown, but different colours in different places. Mosses and lichen, for instance, prefer humid environments and will probably colonise cracks and corners.

Whether or not we notice the subtle changes remains to be seen. Grossi has carried out surveys on visitors to a cathedral in Norwich in the UK. The results suggest that we are likely to notice if a building becomes darker or lighter, but are more oblivious to hue changes.

With lighter, cleaner buildings overall, though, she believes we may become more sensitive to the yellows, browns, and greens.

Hunting new Earths and the edge of the universe

LAST month, we got our best ever view of planets orbiting nearby stars. Though this is a great achievement, the planets are much bigger than Jupiter and are in orbits that range from 24 to 119 astronomical units (AU), where one AU equals the distance between Earth and the sun.

The dream is to be able to see planets as small and as close to their host star as Earth is to the sun. That requires a telescope that can see objects nearly 3000 times smaller than those seen last month, and one that is not blinded by the host star's light - feats that are not possible with even the largest telescope today, the 10.4-metre Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain's Canary Islands. But in less than a decade, a trio of gigantic telescopes will be able to carry off the task with ease.

The 24.5-metre Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), the accurately named Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the 42-metre European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will each collect enough light from these extrasolar planets to allow astronomers to study the composition of their atmospheres using spectroscopy. "Are there Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars? That is one of the big questions we'd like to answer," says Markus Kissler-Patig, who works on the E-ELT at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.

The telescopes might also be able to study supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies, by mapping in detail the velocity of stars in their vicinity. Today's telescopes can only carry out such measurements on the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. "With the TMT, there should be quite a few black holes at the centre of nearby galaxies that we ought to be able to study," says TMT scientist Jerry Nelson of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The telescopes might even be able to directly measure the expansion of the universe .

Although the three telescope teams share the same goals, they are taking radically different approaches to achieving them, either in the design of their primary mirror or in the technology used to remove the blurring or "twinkling" caused by atmospheric turbulence.

The main challenge in building any telescope is its biggest mirror: the primary, the size of which determines the telescope's resolution. The primary collects starlight and focuses the wide beam of light it receives towards a smaller secondary mirror. This then focuses the light further and sends it on to a tertiary mirror, which directs the beam towards one of the telescope's detectors.

The biggest primary mirror that can be cast from a single block of glass today is 8.4 metres across, partly because a mirror any wider would be too heavy and difficult to manoeuvre. Also the greater depth of a larger mirror makes it almost impossible to ensure that it is the same temperature throughout. That is a problem because if different parts of the mirror are at different temperatures the image quality will degrade. The only way, then, to build a bigger telescope is to have a primary consisting of a mosaic of smaller mirrors.

The GMT will have seven very large mirrors (see "Future telescopes"), each made of a Pyrex-like material with a honeycomb structure, which reduces weight while providing strength. Air at a controlled temperature will be pumped into the honeycomb, bringing the entire mirror into thermal equilibrium in 20 minutes. That's not bad, considering that the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson in California, which saw first light in 1917, took a whole night for its 33-centimetre-thick primary mirror to reach a uniform temperature.

The TMT's and E-ELT's primaries will have much smaller segments than the GMT, inspired by the success of the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Going with smaller segments has its advantages, not least that each piece is thinner and easier to manufacture. The downside is that it's much harder to keep all the segments in perfect alignment as the telescope moves. So-called edge sensors are needed to keep track of any displacement between the segments, while large numbers of pistons, or actuators, will push or pull each segment to keep the primary mirror's curvature precise to within a few nanometres.

The other significant technology that these telescopes will be exploiting is adaptive optics (AO). The various layers of the atmosphere, which are at different temperatures or move at different speeds, can distort the light reaching the telescope.

Today's telescopes have add-on AO systems that monitor either a guide star or an artificial star created by firing a laser into the upper atmosphere. Software compares the image of the star with the expected image to work out the atmospheric aberrations, which are then corrected for in real time using a deformable mirror. This mirror comes after the tertiary and is thin, flexible and usually a few tens of centimetres across. It changes shape between 50 and 100 times a second to compensate for the effects of the atmosphere.

Search for 'God particle' hit by huge repair bill

In September this image was recorded when some of the first protons to be accelerated inside the Large Hadron Collider smashed into an absorbing device called a collimator at near light speed, producing a shower of particle debris. After a fault just nine days later, the accelerator faces a $29 million repair bill and will be working again in late summer 2009 at the earliest. (Image: CERN)

Repairing the giant particle collider built to simulate the big bang could cost up to 35 million Swiss francs (£20 million or $29 million), says the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

The announcement comes in the same week an internal report revealed that the planned spring start-up won't now happen until late July 2009 at the earliest.

Repairs will cost 15 million Swiss francs, and spare parts another 10-20 million Swiss francs, says CERN spokesman James Gillies.

The massive collider, the largest and most complex machine ever made, has already cost £5.7 billion ($8 billion) - cash which came from CERN's 20 European member states, as well as other nations including the United States and Russia.

"We will not be going to our member states asking for more money, we will deal with it within the current CERN budget," Gillies says.


The news comes less than three months after the world's most complex machine was switched on and produced its first images. Its massive detectors were designed to listen out for never-before-seen particles produced when two beams of protons collide at near light speed.

Those collisions are intended to recreate conditions just after the big bang, some 13.7 billion years ago. The accelerator will create higher energies than any accelerator before, which some physicists think will flush out the so-called "God particle", the Higgs-Boson.

At the much-ballyhooed September switch on, beams were fired through the complete 27-km (17-mile) underground tunnel. But just nine days later, an electrical fault broke a hole in a tank containing liquid helium. It quickly vaporised, causing a burst of pressure that damaged nearby equipment.

Gillies says that helium leak caused "quite considerable mechanical damage to the accelerator." Repairing it will require 53 of the 57 magnets in the collider's tunnel, buried under the Swiss-French border near Geneva, to be removed and then reinstalled.

Some 28 have already been removed, and all the magnets should be back in place by the end of March, Gillies says. CERN now expects the machine to be powered up again for tests by June, after which particle beams can be sent around again. "We don't have a precise date for it yet," said he adds.

Over-budget Mars rover mission delayed until 2011

NASA will postpone the launch of its over-budget Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover by two years, to 2011. The delay will add another $400 million to the cost of the mission and will probably force the delay of other agency missions, officials say.

The SUV-sized, nuclear-powered rover, which aims to test whether the planet is or once was capable of supporting life, was originally set to launch in October 2009.

But lingering technical problems will push lift-off until the next Mars launch window in late 2011.

The rover will be delayed to address a "backlog of unresolved work" and undiagnosed problems with the rover's actuators, motor-driven gears that move the spacecraft's wheels, bend its robotic arm, and drive its drill, NASA administrator Mike Griffin told reporters.

Fixing such issues might only take a few months, and with additional funding, the agency might have rushed to attempt a 2009 launch.

"But we've determined that trying for '09 would require us to assume too much risk - more than I think is appropriate for a flagship mission like Mars Science Laboratory," Griffin said.



The added delay will bring the total lifetime cost of the rover mission to more than $2.2 billion. MSL is already $300 million over its proposed 2006 budget of $1.6 billion.

Former NASA science chief Alan Stern criticised such overspends in a recent editorial in the New York Times, arguing that they sharply limit the number and capability of missions the agency can undertake.

But Griffin said the growth in cost is a natural part of ambitious projects with unforeseen difficulties. "We know how to control cost - just build more of what you built the last time," Griffin said.

Citing the Hubble Space Telescope and the COBE satellite, which cost more than twice as much as their original budgets, Griffin added that "some of the things NASA has done of which we in the nation and indeed the world are most proud are things where we had far more troubles than we're having on Mars Science Lab."

Canadian School teaches Innovation

Sudbury Catholic District School Board, one of a handful of school boards outside of Toronto to embrace programs run by The Learning Partnership, will offer a third program to its students starting in January 2009.

The Learning Partnership is a non-profit group that champions public education and creates a culture in which students love learning and grow to their maximum potential.

Besides Welcome to Kindergarten and Entrepreneurial Adventure, the board will offer Grade 7 and 8 students Investigate! Invent! Innovate!, a science and technology program for young inventors.

Students are asked to identify a problem in their life or someone else’s life, then invent a product that solves that problem, said Lisa Alsop of The Learning Partnership. For example, one student invented an inflatable bag they could put valuables in and check as baggage on an airplane.

Students work on their inventions for four months and showcase them to the business community or the public at an invention convention.

Students make inventions that address everyday Problems

Meneley teacher Cathy Hackler, organizer of the school’s annual invention convention, said the event gives students the opportunity to problem solve and look at the world in new ways.

“Students were asked to think about problems in their lives, or in the life of someone they knew, that could be solved with an invention or innovation of an existing product,” she said. “They had to think about how to make the world better, and that helped them see the world from different perspectives.”

Fifth-grader Claire Christopher, 11, swims four times a week with the Douglas Dolfins. She loves swimming, but she hates it when her goggles fog up.

“So I invented the Fog-Free Goggles,” she said.

Claire fashioned a lever on the side of her goggles, attaching it to a pair of zip ties above the lenses.
“You move the little bars up and down and they wipe the fog off,” she said.

Fourth-grader Dean Cummins, 9, made a model of his idea, the Family Home Trash Chute.

“I came up with the idea watching my mom take out the trash,” he said.

His model, made of cardboard and tin foil, showed how a laundry chute-like structure could be built under a kitchen sink and run through the exterior of a house to a trash can outside.

“My mom’s sick of taking out the trash, I’m sick of taking out the trash, but with this invention, you won’t have to take out the trash any more,” Dean said.

“These students have to think these whole things out, and it’s really a process,” he said. “They have to make changes and revisions, and that requires a great deal of thought, of going beyond and engaging. They no doubt feel good about themselves.”

Invention saves Time and Water in Shower

Randy Sonderhouse says he knows how easy it is to waste time —- and water —- in the shower. After his wife noticed he was taking unusually long showers, the Murrieta resident decided to invent a solution.

That solution, a water-proof alarm timer Sonderhouse designed, the Shower Professor, is now for sale for $10.

Sonderhouse said the device has helped him reduce his shower time from 15 or 20 minutes down to just 5 minutes. That saves about 25 gallons of water per day, he estimates, as well as the energy used to heat the water.

“The device changes behavior because your time is right in front of you,” Sonderhouse said.

The Shower Professor is made to be simple, Sonderhouse said. It has a digital screen and four buttons. Three buttons are for shower times: 5 minutes, 7 minutes, and 10 minutes. The fourth gives you an extra minute.

Five seconds before the time is up, the alarm goes off —- audible but not annoying, Sonderhouse said.

New Look Google Reader

Visual clutter removed and multiple bundled feeds added


After giving a makeover to Gmail with the customizable themes, Google has set its eye on another of its products, the Reader. The old light-dark blue color scheme has made way for a slick, cleaner white-blue scheme. The new design looks professional. The Reader has become more intuitive and faster as compared to the earlier version.

The new features added along with the makeover are as follows:
Collapsible navigation: Each section in the navigation pane is collapsible and has its own options. Users can also hide unread counts of the subscribed feeds.

Friends: Google has advanced the Friends shared items to a new navigation pane.

Feed bundles: Feed bundles are an excellent way to start for first-time RSS users or a way to find worthy sites for experienced users. Initially, the Reader team would sift through the feeds manually to provide a bundle. Now, with the new algorithmic feed bundles, a user can subscribe to a wide variety of bundles ranging from Beauty to Sports to Career to Technology.

UK University To Develop DRAM-like Memory

To combine the speed and price of dynamic memory with the non-volatility of flash memory

UK-based Nottingham University is embarking on a new research project called the "Project Nanodevice," which is aimed at developing a new carbon nanotube data storage device.

In simpler terms, the goal of the researchers is to build a memory that is non-volatile in nature based on nano-sized carbon structures called nanotubes. According to the university, they are working on "a new device for storing information made entirely of carbon nanotubes and combining the speed and price of dynamic memory with the non-volatility of flash memory.
"To explain how this works, the diagram below should be of help. To start with, the entire set-up consists of two nanotubes with different circumferences. The tubes are designed in such a way that one can fit inside the other. The set-up starts working when an electrical current is passed through the outer tube. This forces the inner tube to telescope in and out. When the inner tube is out, it contacts a remote electrode and thereby completes a circuit. This is registered as a binary "1." Once the tube retracts, the circuit is broken, which in turn is registered as a binary "0."




This will be, in fact, the first type of memory to actually have moving components as the basic framework - albeit nano-sized. The moving parts will consist of tiny rolled sheets of graphene. As mentioned earlier, the system will be non-volatile like flash memory; for the same reason, it will not need constant power supply, and it will not lose data in the event of a power failure. You can compare it to a 2GB USB drive, which does not lose data when the power fails.

Apart from its non- volatility, it is also projected to be much more "abuse friendly," thanks to its extreme resistance to G-force-induced forces that usually are the nemesis of current memory products.

Dr. Elena Bichoutskaia who leads the project quips, "The electronics industry is searching for a replacement to silicon-based technologies for data storage and computer memory. Existing technologies such as magnetic hard discs cannot be used reliably at the sub-micrometre scale and will soon reach their fundamental physical limitations.

"With developments in similar technologies, the computers of the future might not need separate memories for storage and computing processes.