#Super-Dense Computer Memory A novel type of computer memory could, in theory, let you store tens or even hundreds of times as much data on your smartphone.
Researchers at Rice university have demonstrated a more practical way to manufacture it. The type of memory in question, resistive random access memory (RRAM), is being developed by several companies,
but fabrication usually requires high-temperatures or voltages, making production difficult and expensive. The Rice researchers have shown a way to make RRAM at room temperature and with far lower voltages.
Like flash memory, RRAM can store data without a constant supply of power. Whereas flash memory stores bits of information in the form of charge in transistors
RRAM stores bits using resistance. Each bit requires less space, increasing the amount of information that can be stored in a given area.
What more, it should be easier to stack up layers of RRAM, helping to further increase the amount of information that can be packed onto a single chip.
RRAM can also operate a hundred times faster than flash. Some prototypes can store data densely enough to enable a terabyte chip the size of a postage stamp. hy don you have all the movies you would like on your iphone?
It not because you wouldn like to, it because you don have room, says James Tour,
a professor of materials science at Rice university who led the work. Several companies are making progress towards commercializing RRAM.
A startup called Crossbar plans to release its first product, for embedded chipshe type found in car dashboards
and coffee makersy the end of the year (see enser, Faster Memory Challenges Both DRAM and Flash.
Tour says he expects to conclude a licensing deal with an unnamed memory manufacturer within two weeks.
Tour process starts with a layer of silicon dioxide riddled with tiny holesach five nanometers wide.
This porous layer is sandwiched between two very thin layers of metal which serve as electrodes.
A voltage is applied, causing the metal to migrate into the holes, forming an electrical connection between the electrodes.
Finally, the researchers apply another voltage, causing a tiny break to form in the metal inside the pores,
and silicon to form in this gap. Bits can be stored by changing the conductivity of that silicon with a low-voltage pulse.
so it should be easier to integrate the memory storage with other electronics on a chip.
Samsung, for instance, is making a version that could eventually have as many as 24 layers. But the individual memory units on a flash chip require three connections,
which makes forming multiple layers of memory difficult and expensive. The new RRAM design only requires two connections.
each one so thin that the memory chip could still easily fit inside portable electronic products.
The new work is a ajor step forward, says Wei Lu, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan,
and cofounder of Crossbar. But he notes there are several options for next-generation memory chips, and that getting advances to market is challenging. hile you can get many materials to switch,
Lu says, aking a product is a completely different story. s
#Prototype Display Lets You Say Goodbye to Reading Glasses Those of us who need glasses to see a TV
or laptop screen clearly could ditch the eyewear thanks to a display technology that corrects vision problems.
The technology uses algorithms to alter an image based on a person glasses prescription together with a light filter set in front of the display.
The algorithm alters the light from each individual pixel so that, when fed through a tiny hole in the plastic filter, rays of light reach the retina in a way that re-creates a sharp image.
Researchers say the idea is to anticipate how your eyes will naturally distort whatever onscreenomething glasses
Brian A. Barsky, a University of California, Berkeley, computer science professor and affiliate professor of optometry and vision science who coauthored a paper on it, says it like undoing
The technology is being developed in collaboration with researchers at MIT and Microsoft. In addition to making it easier for people with simple vision problems to use all kinds of displays without glasses,
the technique may help those with more serious vision problems caused by physical defects that can be corrected with glasses or contacts,
and a detail of a Vincent Van gogh self-portrait and applied algorithms that warped the image by taking into account the specific eye condition it was told to account for.
to whose display they had affixed an acrylic slab topped with a plastic screen pierced with thousands of tiny, evenly spaced holes.
Gordon Wetzstein, who coauthored the paper while a research scientist at MIT Media Lab, says the screen allows a regular two-dimensional display to work as what known as a ight field display.
This means the screen controls the way individual light rays emanate from the display, leading to a sharper image without degrading contrast.
Wetzstein says the next step is to build prototype displays that people can use in the real worldomething he expects could take a few years.
or requires software that tracks head movement and adjusts the image accordingly. Barsky expects this won be much of a problem,
when we look at a display that doesn look right, we tend to naturally move around to improve the focus.
However, Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab who coauthored the paper, says that
if researchers used a display with a high enough resolutionbout double the 326 pixels per inch of the ipod Touch used in the paperhe technology could be made to be used by more than one person at once t
#More than A hundred Genetic Variants Tied to Schizophrenia To a large extent, schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders are caused illnesses by genes.
Now teams of scientists from research centers around the world, looking at the genetics of nearly 80,000 people, have worked together to identify 108 genetic loci associated with the disorder.
It is the largest genetic study ever conducted of a psychiatric disorder. Researchers are finally beginning to gain some scientific understanding of many common brain disorders,
including schizophrenia. The lack of such understanding to date has meant there hasn been a true new breakthrough drug to treat these disorders in 50 years.
And while wee still far from turning new insights into effective and safe drugs at least the emerging knowledge is giving researchers some options in exploring potential treatments.
In today study, published in Nature, the scientists pointed out that, importantly, the more than 100 variants were distributed not randomly
touted the results as a turning point in how we view brain disorders. ive years ago, we didn know a single gene related to these psychiatric diseases,
not a single pathway, said Eric Lander, Broad director. It was echoed a perspective by Steven Hyman, director of Broad Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research:
ee turned with this Nature paper and related research what had been a scientifically forbidding and featureless landscape into a landscape with toeholds and opportunities and glimmers of hope. i
What if the compass app in your phone didn just visually point north but actually seemed to pull your hand in that direction?
and it suggests possibilities in mobile and wearable technology as well. Tomohiro Amemiya, a cognitive scientist at NTT Communication Science Laboratories, began the Buru-Navi project in 2004, originally as a way to research how the brain handles sensory illusions.
His initial prototype was roughly the size of a paperback novel and contained a crankshaft mechanism to generate vibration,
and relies on a 40-hertz electromagnetic actuator similar to those found in smartphones. When pinched between the thumb and forefinger,
Buru-Navi3 creates a continuous force illusion in one direction (toward or away from the user,
The second device, called Traxion, was developed within the last year at the University of Tokyo by a team led by computer science researcher Jun Rekimoto.
Traxion also generates a force illusion via an asymmetrically vibrating actuator held between the fingers. e tested many users,
Both devices create a pulling force significant enough to guide a blindfolded user along a path or around corners.
This way-finding application might be a perfect fit for the smart watches that Samsung
Google, and perhaps Apple are mobilizing to sell
#Can Technology Fix Medicine? After decades as a technological laggard, medicine has entered its data age.
Mobile technologies, sensors, genome sequencing, and advances in analytic software now make it possible to capture vast amounts of information about our individual makeup and the environment around us.
The sum of this information could transform medicine, turning a field aimed at treating the average patient into one that customized to each person while shifting more control and responsibility from doctors to patients.
The question is: can big data make health care better? here is a lot of data being gathered. That not enough, says Ed Martin,
interim director of the Information Services Unit at the University of California San francisco School of medicine. t really about coming up with applications that make data actionable.
The business opportunity in making sense of that dataotentially $300 billion to $450 billion a year, according to consultants Mckinsey & Companys driving well-established companies like Apple, Qualcomm,
and IBM to invest in technologies from data-capturing smartphone apps to billion-dollar analytical systems.
It feeding the rising enthusiasm for startups as well. Venture capital firms like Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
as well as the corporate venture funds of Google, Samsung, Merck, and others, have invested more than $3 billion in health-care information technology since the beginning of 2013 rapid acceleration from previous years, according to data from Mercom Capital Group.
This MIT Technology Review Business Report looks at the technologies and companies most likely to survive the boom
and the challenges they will face as they push to remake health care. The groups that control the most medical data today are insurance companies and care providers,
and their data analysis is already beginning to change health care. Express Scripts which manages pharmacy benefits for 90 million members in the U s
. and processes 1. 4 billion prescriptions a year, has scoured its data from doctorsoffices, pharmacies, and laboratories to detect patterns that might alert doctors to potential adverse drug interactions and other prescription issues.
Doctors can now know 12 months in advance, with an accuracy rate of 98 percent, which of their patients may fail to take their medicine.
Taking steps to avert that problem could improve patientshealth and reduce the $317 billion spent in the United states each year on unnecessary ER visits and other treatment.
Today many companies and health-care providers are adding other layers of information to create an increasingly precise
patient-specific brand of medicine. New mobile technologies, for example, could provide information about a patient everyday behaviors
and health, creating opportunities for care providers to influence patients far more frequently. Data brought in from electronic health records would add doctorsinsights, test results, and medical history.
Genetic data would offer insight into whether patients are predisposed to certain conditions or how they might react to treatments. e want to believe that most of the things we do in medicine are based on evidence,
says Malay Gandhi, managing director of Rock Health, which funds health-care startups. ome are, but most aren.
The opportunity, he says, is that medicine could become more analytical and evidence-based. Data is also changing the role of patients,
offering them a chance to play a more central part in their own care. One way is by using mobile technology to monitor sleep patterns, heart rate, activity levels, and so on.
In development are advanced even more devices capable of continuously monitoring such key metrics as blood oxygen, glucose levels,
and even stress. And companies like Apple are hoping to become repositories for all this information,
giving consumers new ways to track and perhaps improve their health. This kind of information may be useful and interesting for anyone
but it can become essential for the millions living with chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and depression.
Welldoc makes a prescription-only FDA-approved atient coachingsystem, which advises users on how much insulin they should take in light of information recorded on their smartphones:
blood sugar levels, recent meals, and exercise. It also offers tailored messages of encouragement and provides the patient doctor with treatment recommendations based on the data and established medical guidelines.
A feature under development would enable the system to predict a hypoglycemic reaction and help users avoid it.
Ginger. io uses data collected (with permission) from a phone and other sensors to assess the behavior of people with mental illnesses such as depression.
Are they calling loved ones, or getting enough sleep? When a patient is showing signs of struggling,
someone can be alerted. Over time, both companies will aggregate this information to help doctors study
and improve treatment overall. t like one of the largest clinical trials in history, says Chris Bergstrom, Welldoc chief strategy and commercial officer. nd it not even in an artificial environmentt in real time.
Families affected by Phelan-Mcdermid syndrome, a rare condition in which a deletion on chromosome 22 causes problems such as learning and memory deficits, are building a database of information from genomic tests, clinical medical records, extensive family surveys and histories,
and more. The goal is to create a central repository where researchers can examine multiple sources of data simultaneously.
That increasingly important as researchers begin to see connections between Phelan-Mcdermid, autism, and other conditions.
Another benefit: data that once would have been locked up in one academic researcher lab will now be readily available to many different experts. o much of that data is already out there,
says Megan Ooyle, whose daughter Shannon was diagnosed in 2001, just two years after chromosome 22 was sequenced. t just sitting there waiting to be used. s
#Mathematicians Explain Why Social Epidemics Spread Faster in Some Countries Than Others Psychologists have puzzled always over why people in Sweden were slower to start smoking and slower to stop.
Now a group of mathematicians have worked out why. In January 1964, the U s. Surgeon general Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health published a landmark report warning of the serious health effects of tobacco.
It was not the first such report but it is probably the most famous because it kick-started a global campaign to reduce the levels of smoking and the deaths it causes.
In the 50 years since then the patterns of smoking all over the world have changed dramatically.
In the U s.,the numbers of smokers peaked in 1965 and have fallen precipitously since then.
Similar patterns have occurred in all industrialized countries. But here a curious thing. While the general pattern of smoking has been similarn increase in numbers followed by a decreasehe rate of change has been dramatically different from one country to another.
Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of John Lang at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a couple of pals.
These guys have gathered the largest historical data set on smoking ever compiled and study how its prevalence is correlated with the types of societies involved.
Treating smoking like an epidemic in this way finally reveals what going on. They say their results can explain the rate of change of smoking in various industrialized countries.
And yet the Swedes had access to the same data about the dangers of smoking at more or less the same time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Hofstede surveyed more than 100,000 IBM employees to measure how these dimensions varied in different countries around the world.
The puzzle is that the data on smoking shows exactly the reverse. Sweden was much slower to adopt smoking and much slower to stop.
That an interesting result with significant implications for government health policies. It shows that differences in culture affect the dynamics of social spreading processes in a measurable way.
And that an idea that could influence everything from drugs policy to social network studies to the marketing of beef burgers r
#Flexible, Printed Batteries for Wearable devices A California startup is developing flexible, rechargeable batteries that can be printed cheaply on commonly used industrial screen printers.
Imprint Energy, of Alameda, California, has been testing its ultrathin zinc-polymer batteries in wrist-worn devices
and hopes to sell them to manufacturers of wearable electronics, medical devices, smart labels, and environmental sensors.
The company approach is meant to make the batteries safe for on-body applications, while their small size and flexibility will allow for product designs that would have been impossible with bulkier lithium-based batteries.
Even in small formats the batteries can deliver enough current for low-power wireless communications sensors, distinguishing them from other types of thin batteries.
The company recently secured $6 million in funding from Phoenix Venture Partners, as well as AME Cloud Ventures, the venture fund of Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, to further develop its proprietary chemistry and finance the batteriescommercial launch.
Previous investors have included CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel and Dow chemical. The batteries are based on research that company cofounder Christine Ho began as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley,
where she collaborated with a researcher in Japan to produce microscopic zinc batteries using a 3-D printer.
The batteries that power most laptops and smartphones contain lithium which is highly reactive and has to be protected in ways that add size and bulk.
While zinc is more stable, the water-based electrolytes in conventional zinc batteries cause zinc to form dendrites,
branch-like structures that can grow from one electrode to the other, shorting the battery.
Ho developed a solid polymer electrolyte that avoids this problem, and also provides greater stability,
and greater capacity for recharging. Brooks Kincaid, the company cofounder and president, says the batteries combine the best features of thin-film lithium batteries and printed batteries.
Such thin-film batteries tend to be rechargeable but they contain the reactive element, have limited capacity,
and are expensive to manufacture. Printed batteries are nonrechargeable, but they are cheap to make, typically use zinc,
and offer higher capacity. Working with zinc has afforded the company manufacturing advantages. Because of zinc environmental stability, the company did need not the protective equipment required to make oxygen-sensitive lithium batteries. hen we talk about the things that constrain us in terms of the development of new products, there really two that
I lose the most sleep over these days. One is batteries and one is displays, says Steven Holmes, vice president of the New Devices Group and general manager of the Smart Device Innovation team at Intel.
Despite demand for flexible batteries, Ho says no standard has been developed for measuring their flexibility, frustrating customers who want to compare chemistries.
So the company built its own test rig and began benchmarking its batteries against commercial batteries that claimed to be flexible.
Existing batteries failed catastrophically after fewer than 1, 000 bending cycles, she says, while Imprint batteries remained stable.
Imprint has also been in talks about the use of its batteries in clothes and eird parts of your body like your eye,
Ho says. The company also recently began working on a project funded by the U s. military to make batteries for sensors that would monitor the health status of soldiers.
Other potential applications include powering smart labels with sensors for tracking food and packages n
#Protect Society from Our Inventions, Say Genome-Editing Scientists Scientists working at the cutting-edge of genetics say one possible application of a powerful new technology called genome editing has the potential to cause ecological mayhem and needs
attention from regulators. The technique, referred to as a ene drive, would cause chosen genes,
including man-made ones, to quickly spread through a species as its members reproduce. While gene drives may have commercial and public health uses,
10 scientists published an editorial today in the journal Science calling for more public discussion,
and also more scrutiny by regulators. A news report in Science gives the background: A gene drive involves stimulating biased inheritance of particular genes to alter entire populations of organisms.
It was proposed first more than a decade ago, and researchers have been developing gene drive approaches to alter mosquitoes to slow the spread of malaria and dengue fever.
Although progress has been quite slow, recent advances in gene editing could lead to a rapid application of gene drive approaches to other species. Usually,
the chance of a gene being passed on to offspring is 50 percent, but it possible to engineer an organism chromosomes to alter those odds.
Researchers have used already the idea to design mosquitoes that only make male offspring with the idea of releasing them in the wild to cause a population crash, thereby reducing malaria.
The technology has also been contemplated as a way to spread genes that would make weeds more susceptible to herbicides like Roundup.
Ironically, some weeds have become resistant to the chemical because it is sprayed heavily on crops that had themselves been engineered genetically to resist the spray.
According to the authors of the editorial, who include Kenneth Oye, a political scientist at MIT, as well as James Collins, an expert in genetic engineering at Arizona State university, ene drives present environmental and security challenges.
Even though the idea of driving particular traits to spread through a species isn new what worries the scientists is that new genome editing methods,
known as CRISPR/Cas9, will make it much easier to do. In a separate article, published in another journal today,
scientists from Harvard university, led by George Church, say theye created big advances to the method which people need to start worrying about.
Gene drives may be capable of addressing ecological problems by altering entire populations of wild organisms,
but their use has remained largely theoretical due to technical constraints. With recent improvements in the technology,
however, the possibility of unwanted ecological effects and near-certainty of spread across political borders demand careful assessment of each potential application.
The fear is that the gene drives might run amok and affect wild populations of plants, animals or insects.
Also, the technology could be used to create weapons that destroy agricultural crops or create super pests.
they imposed a voluntary moratorium on their work, until its safety could be understood better. Today, genetic research is moving even faster,
but with few if any constraints on laboratory science. But before this kind of research moves into practice
#Amazon s Zocalo Cloud Service Casts a Shadow over Startups In the 1990s Microsoft became identified with the Death Star partly by enticing developers to build applications (such as Wordperfect
and Lotus 1-2-3) on its platform and then releasing copycat versions that ran more smoothly thanks to proprietary access to the underlying code.
It boasts blue-chip customers including General electric Procter & gamble and Schneider Electric but it faces blistering competition from EMC Syncplicity and Citrix Sharefile as well as Microsoft Onedrive Google Drive and a host of others.
The last thing it needs is pocketed another deep rival gunning for the Fortune 500. It feels immediately threatening to see Amazon enter our business admits Chris Yeh Box s senior vice president of product and platform.
despite extraordinarily rapid revenue growth costs far outpaced receipts ($168 million out $124 million in for the year ending January 31 2014).
The stock market chose the same moment to pound cloud-software companies giving rise to reports that Box would postpone its public offering.
##and in late June accepted a $150 million investment making it one of only a handful of companies in recent years to have raised funds privately after filing to go public.
The cash infusion extends the company s runway for another year at least buying time to sign up more prestigious customers boost revenue and cut expenses.
Box s extraordinary burn rate reflects the brutal economics of storage-as-a-service. The price of hard disk capacity per megabyte plummeted from $700 in 1981 to two-tenths of a cent in 2010.
The cloud offers a plethora of free options: 50 gigabytes at Mega one terabyte at Flickr. This week in fact Box announced that it would offer unlimited storage to customers of its business product.
Companies hoping to grow have little choice but to add value to the documents they store.
That pressure has spurred Microsoft Google and now Amazon to evolve from providing generic file storage to specialized services aimed at large organizations that have real problems
and real money to spend on solving them. It has sparked also a price war that so far has seen Google drop prices
and Microsoft boost per-customer storage allotments. Box for its part can t afford to be drawn into a race to the bottom.
It must continue to move up the value chain while making itself indispensable to customers and unobtrusively making it harder for them to switch to a rival cloud-storage provider.
It offers a programming interface for integrating custom and third-party code metadata tagging to keep document archives organized and high-fidelity file previews to make specific documents easy to identify without having to open them.
For the health-care industry it complies with medical privacy laws. For legal and financial clients it integrates with electronic signature services.
The company has built server farms in Europe Asia and South america to deal with local regulations and provide a responsive experience to international customers and deal with local regulations.
Levie is betting that competitors won t be able to offer such depth of service any time soon.
Given that Amazon web services has become the go-to source of computing power for new-breed online businesses the company may well threaten Google Microsoft
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