#Thermoelectric Material to Hit Market Later This Year California-based Alphabet Energy plans to begin selling a new type of material that can turn heat into electricity.
Thermoelectric materials can turn a temperature difference into electricity by exploiting the flow of electrons from a warmer area to a cooler one.
But an efficient thermoelectric material has to conduct electricity well without conducting heat well, because otherwise the temperature across the material would soon equalize.
and the few materials researchers have been able to develop with good thermoelectric properties have been rare, expensive, or toxic.
Alphabet Energy solution is tetrahedrite: an abundant, naturally occurring mineral that also happens to be more efficient on average than existing thermoelectric materials.
Ali Shakouri, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, says that tetrahedrite has promise
says MIT professor Mildred Dresselhaus. Other materials are made from elements so rare that they wouldn be available for widespread use.
According to data released by Alphabet Energy tetrahedrite costs about $4 per kilogram, whereas other thermoelectric materials cost between $24 and $146 per kilogram.
For now, the company is focusing on stand-alone generators, but founder and CEO Matt Scullin says it currently working with car companies to see
if tetrahedrite can be used to harness heat from car exhaust. Scullin says that other thermoelectric materials have achieved typically about 2. 5 percent efficiency in cars,
but tetrahedrite could reach 5 to 10 percent efficiency. hese aren incremental improvements, he says. heye really huge improvements that make really significant impact. l
#British Government Picks Illumina to Sequence 100,000 Genomes The british government says that it plans to hire the U s. gene-sequencing company Illumina to sequence 100,000 human genomes in
what is the largest national project to decode the DNA of a populace. In a regulatory filing with the U s. Securities and exchange commission, Illumina said it had been picked as the referred partnerfor the £100 million project.
Genomics England confirmed that it had chosen the California company to carry out the sequencing project. ee been through the ake-offprocess to find the right company to do the sequencing
The U k. project will focus on people with cancer, as well as adults and children with rare diseases.
Because all Britons are members of the National Health service, the project expects to be able to compare DNA data with detailed centralized health records (see hy the U k. Wants a Genomic National Health service.
While the number of genomes to be sequenced is 100 000, the total number of Britons participating in the study is smaller, about 70,000.
That is because for cancer patients Genomics England intends to obtain the sequence of both their inherited DNA as well as that of their cancers.
Genomics England began talking early this year to potential bidders, including Chinese company and Illumina rival BGI (see nside China Genome Factory.
At the time, the average cost of completing a genome was about $3, 000 to $4, 000.
Completing all 100,000 genomes would have cost more than twice Genomics England budget. The agency said in December it intended to use its negotiating power to drive prices down.
Illumina reacted by releasing a new system the Hiseq X Ten, which it says would be able to sequence genomes for $1, 000 each,
crossing a long-anticipated price barrier (see oes Illumina Have the First $1, 000 Genome?.
That system is actually 10 machines, each costing $1 million. By requiring buyers to invest at least $10 million in equipment,
Illumina made sure the lower costs of its new system did not widely affect prices in other parts of the sequencing market,
while letting it capture big national jobs like the one in the U k. According to users of the new Illumina system,
the price per genome is still closer to $2, 000 than $1, 000. Parry says Illumina will carry out the sequencing on behalf of Genomics England,
and that the two would finalize negotations over the next two weeks. t an enormously exciting project
which is at the edge of technology. It not something that people have done before says Parry. e will be at the limits of the technology.
Illumina will carry out sequencing on behalf of Genomics England of 100,000 genomes. An earlier version of this article said incorrectly that Genomics England intended to sequence the DNA of 100,000 distinct individuals
Nicholas Law and pals at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill, say they are developing just such a piece of kit.
Each one focuses light onto 29 megapixel chip. The dome is designed so that the fields of view of each of the small telescopes overlap to cover around 10,000 square degrees of sky simultaneously
That will produce 700 megapixel images every two minutes at a data rate of 5 MB per second.
This will be stored on a 20 TB storage unit that should help to handle three months of data,
The small telescopes themselves are simplessentially camera lenses sitting on top of CCD chips. Law and co have been experimenting with Canon 50mm and 85mm F/1. 2 lenses.
That could do some valuable work. Law and co say their Evryscope should be able to search for exoplanets around nearby bright stars
And because Law and co intend to store all the data produced by the Evryscope, it should also be handy for after-the-fact study of any event in the night sky.
and objects on minute-by-minute timescales in archival data, say Law and co. And they should do at the relatively low cost in the near future. e expect to deploy a prototype of the Evryscope system in early 2015,
whose police forces are overextended already fighting eal-worldcrimes and who lack the resources and expertise to investigate online activity.
hacktivists, and governments who can invest big money to craft attacks that deliver massive payoffs.
Bitcoins Bitcoins only have value when the transactions are confirmed by at least six members of the peer-to-peer network.
Users who participate in transaction confirmations are rewarded with Bitcoins, a process that is called mining. As the value of a Bitcoin has increased,
mining has become harder, because more people want to do it. Today, to make real money at mining Bitcoins,
you need powerful computers but those computers don necessarily have to be yours. Some of the largest botnets run by online criminals today are monetized by mining.
So an infected home computer of a grandmother in Barcelona for example, may be mining Bitcoins worth tens of thousands of dollars a day for a Russian cybercrime gang.
Cyber-spies Companies and governments spend money on espionage. Cyber-spies use rojansand ack doorsto access data on their targetscomputer networks,
remotely monitor them, and perform actions on them, such as keylogging to collect passwords or eavesdropping through the infected computer microphone.
The most effective method to protect data against cyber-spying is to process confidential information on dedicated computers that are connected not to the Internet.
Critical infrastructure should be isolated from public networks. Exploits Cyber attacks rely on exploitation of ulnerabilitiesbugs in the source code of commonly used software to infect target computers.
When professional criminals and governments got into the cyber attack game demand for new xploitsgreatly increased,
and boutique companies sprang up to find and sell these exploitable bugs. Some U s.-based defense contractors are openly advertising positions for people with Top Secret/SCI clearance to create offensive exploits targeting iphones, ipads, and Android devices.
As the U s. has engaged in offensive cyber attacks on other countries, other countries have followed suit, creating a cyber arms race that will continue to increase demand for exploits.
Government surveillance The two most important inventions of our time, the Internet and the mobile phone, changed the world
but they also have turned out to be perfect tools for the surveillance state. And in a surveillance state
everybody is assumed guilty. PRISM, one of the governmental surveillance programs unveiled by Edward Snowden, monitors people known to be innocent and builds dossiers on everyone based on their Internet activity.
Because the U s. is home to the most ubiquitous Internet services, search engines, webmail sites, browsers,
and mobile operating systems, it can basically spy on the whole world at a level no other country can.
However, the same advancements in computing power and data storage that have made wholesale surveillance possible have made also leaking possible.
Leaking has become so easy that that it will keep organizations worrying about getting caught in any wrongdoing
and maybe even force them to avoid unethical practices. The governments that watch over us know that we are also watching over them a
#How to Clean the Gas and Oil industries Most Contaminated water In a nondescript site in Midland, Texas, an inexpensive new process is cleaning up some of the most contaminated water aroundhe extremely salty stuff that comes up with oil at wells. By the end
of next month the technology is expected to be chugging 500,000 gallons per day, furnishing water that sufficiently clean to use in hydraulic fracturing,
or fracking, for oil and natural gas production (see atural Gas Changes the Energy Map. The technology may provide a way to deal with the increasing amounts of contaminated water the fossil fuel industry is generating as it pursues more and more difficult-to-reach deposits.
Many oil formations can produce as much as five barrels of contaminated water for every one barrel of oil.
And the volume of this so-called roducedwater is rising as the industry pumps water into nearly depleted wells to enhance oil recovery.
a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT who heads MIT Center for Clean water and Clean energy, where the technology was developed.
The remaining waste is disposed then as sludge in landfills. The project is being done with Pioneer Natural resources, an oil company in Texas. Anurag Bajpayee,
#How An Intelligent Thimble Could Replace the Mouse In 3d Virtual reality Worlds The way in
which humans interact with computers has been dominated by the mouse since it was invented in the 1960s by Doug Engelbert.
A mouse uses a flat two-dimensional surface as a proxy for a computer screen. Any movements of the mouse over the surface are translated then into movements on the screen.
These days a mouse also has a number of buttons and often scroll wheel that allow interaction with on-screen objects.
The mouse is a hugely useful device but it is also a two-dimensional one. But what of the three-dimensional world and the longstanding but growing promise of virtual reality.
What kind of device will take the place of the mouse when we begin to interact in three-dimensions?
Today we get to see one idea developed at the University of Wyoming in Laramie by Anh Nguyen and Amy Banic.
These guys have created an intelligent thimble that can sense its position accurately in three-dimensions
and respond to a set of preprogrammed gestures that allow the user to interact with objects in a virtual three-dimensional world.
The problem of interacting in three dimensions is by no means new. It s been possible to buy a computer mouse for some time that senses its position in three dimensions.
However these tend to have limited resolution and application. Anybody who has a modern computer game console such as an Xbox Kinect
or a Nintendo Wii will be aware of the way these devices capture three-dimensional movements and translate them onto 2-D screen.
The problem here is that these devices are locked to a particular technology and cannot be transferred to a PC or Mac for example.
Then there is the Leapmotion which measures the movement of an entire hand in three-dimensional space.
instead to create a cheap device that works as a universal input for more or less any computing device.
The result is the 3dtouch a thimble-like device that sits on the end of a finger equipped with a 3d accelerometer a 3d magnetometer and 3d gyroscope.
That allows the data from each sensor to be compared and combined to produce a far more precise estimate of orientation than a single measurement alone.
In addition the 3dtouch has an optical flow sensor that measures the movement of the device against a two-dimensional surface exactly like that inside an ordinary mouse.
which combines the data from all the sensors. The fused data is streamed then to a conventional laptop.
However Nguyen and Banic recognised the bulkiness of this set up. This wired connection later could be replaced by a wireless solution using a pair of XBEE modules they say.
Nguyen and Banic have built also in a number of mouselike gestures that allow a user to interact with 3-D objects by selecting
And they say they know what modifications could easily improve it such as a more reliable optical sensor.
Nguyen and Banic say it will work with existing devices such as a desktop PC or a Cave Autonomous Virtual Environment.
But in recent months a number of practical virtual reality devices have begun to emerge such as the Oculus Rift and Google cardboard.
arxiv. org/abs/1406.5581#3dtouch: A Wearable 3d Input device With An Optical Sensor And A 9-DOF Inertial Measurement Uni U
#Super-Slick Material Stops Ice from Forming A super-slick new material, inspired by the treacherous mouth of the carnivorous pitcher plant, has been developed by researchers at Harvard university.
a professor of chemistry and chemical biology, turned to nature for an alternative approach, taking inspiration from the pitcher plant,
The lubricant clings to the nanostructures and forms an extremely thin liquid film on the surfaces that is perfectly smooth,
or eliminate defrost cycles in freezers, which accounts for about a quarter of the appliance total energy consumption.
Initial tests of actual freezer components showed that the material can reduce defrosting energy consumption by 40 percent,
says Aizenberg. She expects that figure to go up as the researchers optimize the system. Freezers may be the first application of the technology,
but it could also work for larger applications like airplanes, decreasing the need for time-consuming and expensive deicing treatments.
and stop generating electricity. Ice can take whole wind farms offline and wreak havoc on the grid in places such as Colorado,
where wind power now accounts for a large fraction of the total electricity supply r
#Facebook s Emotional Manipulation Study Is Just the Latest Effort to Prod Users With emotion-triggering effort, Facebook pushes beyond data-driven studies on voting, sharing,
and organ-donation prompts, to make people feel good or bad. Facebook controversial study exploring
whether it could manipulate people moods by tweaking their news feeds to favor negative or positive content produced a particularly negative emotional response,
but it is far from the social network first effort to control user behavior. With huge amounts of data flooding in from more than a billion users, the company has a unique position to study their every move
and to perform experiments by measuring how behavior changes under different conditions (see hat Facebook Knows.
This helps Facebook persuade users to spend more time on the site. But in the past three years it has also been probing everything from voting to the effect of encouraging people to make organ donations.
The company has a data science team dedicated to running experiments, both to advance its business aims
and to do social-science research on the side, often with collaborators in academia. Other academics perform research on Facebook without collaborating with the companyither by simply observing users
or creating apps that ask them to take part in a project. The recent study, done in January 2012
but published only recently, hit a nerve partly because it had a negative effect on some users,
but also because the affected users were asked not for permission to participate (agreeing to Facebook terms
and conditions was taken as consent). hat different about this study is did that participants not explicitly consent to being part of an experimental manipulation for the study,
and that the results were published, says Lorrie Cranor a computer scientist at Carnegie mellon University, where she directs the Cylab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory.
Facebook ran an experiment on 689,003 users to see if it could manipulate their emotions by varying the selection of posts in their news feeds.
One group had stories with positive words filtered out; another experimental group had stories with negative words filtered out.
Past Facebook studies have shown that relatively minor restructuring of its pages and prompts can have significant social effects.
when Facebook posted reminders to vote, that action prompted 340,000 more people to vote than otherwise would have (see ow Facebook Drove Voters to the Polls.
And in 2012 Facebook showed it might have the power to get people to donate their organs.
The company put a clickable box on Timeline pages to let people indicate that they were registered donorshe campaign was associated with a huge boost to donor enrollments.
though, extensive media coverage of Facebook effort complicated the analysis of whether Facebook effort directly caused the increased enrollments.)
In some ways, Facebook published research is just part of a vast ongoing effort at Web-based manipulation. hat far more concerning is the lack of transparency about Facebook practices overall,
says Zeynep Tufeki, an assistant professor at the University of North carolina, Chapel hill, and a former fellow at the Center for Information technology Policy at Princeton university. concerned about these practicesesting and manipulating the user experience every day.
What else does Facebook do every day? We have no idea. Mining personal data is a billion-dollar business (see he Data Made
Me Do it designed to elicit purchases, garner eyeballs, and shape behavior. dvertising and the media work to manipulate our emotions all the time,
so I don find this study to be particularly problematic, Cranor says. e are all laboratory rats without being aware of it.
The real issue, Cranor and others say, may be that when academic institutions are involvedesearchers at Cornell University and the University of California,
San francisco, participated in the emotion studyheir academic institutional review boards should take a closer look.
Currently this is mainly done when federal funds are involved. Federal policy for protecting human subjects in federally funded research
Facebook data use policy is far more vague, saying that it might use your data for nternal operations,
including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, and service improvement. This lack of consent is concerning to Antonio Damasio,
a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who has made key findings in the understanding of the brain processes underlying emotion. agree that emotion manipulation is quite common,
not only on the Web but in daily life, he says. hat is what advertising in general
and marketing in particular are about, but that does not authorize researchers to conduct experiments without proper consent.
On Monday Facebook said it had nothing to add beyond the apology its researcher, Adam Kramer, posted on the matter e
#Google Makes Its Search engine a Remote control for Some Mobile Apps Getting stuff done using a smartphone often involves swiping through a jumble of icons looking for just the right app then navigating within it to find what you want.
Google aims to change that by creating search results that take you somewhere specific within an app or trigger a function like playing music by a specific artist.
If successful the move could change the way people interact with smartphones and tablets. So far aimed only at devices running Google s mobile operating system Android the new system also expands the company s vision for mobile voice-operated functionality that competes with Apple s Siri and Microsoft
s Cortana. It could help extend Google s lucrative search ads business in an increasingly mobile app-defined world.
Google began experimenting with search results that point inside apps late last year together with a few partner companies such as Pinterest Tumblr and IMBD.
On Thursday at the Google I/O conference for software developers in San francisco the company announced that its search engine will now index any
and all apps that allow it to do so. Lawrence Chang a product manager at Google said the change would make mobile devices easier to use
and likened it to the arrival of Google search on the Web. It makes a seamless experience he said.
For the first time we re treating apps you ve installed on your device on the same level as websites.
Chang showed how Google s mobile search app can list results from the Web and from inside apps running on the same device.
Searching for a phrase related to a recent news story returned a direct link to an article inside the Huffington Post app.
Now if you search for the name of a musical artist Google s search app responds by offering icons for the music apps installed on a device
Supported apps include Spotify Youtube and Tunein. I have instant access to my music apps whenever
I search for music artists on Google said Jason Douglas a product manager for Google search.
and that it was powered by Google s database of facts and relationships known as Knowledge Graph (see How a Database of the World s Knowledge Shapes Google s Future).
We will be expanding over time he said. Chang said the company was interested in eventually rolling out the new features to devices based on Apple s ios operating system
but didn t give details of how that would work. We re focused naturally right now on Android he said
but Google users are on all different platforms and that s really important to us.
The key to searching inside apps is modified a version of the Googlebot software that constantly trawls the Web.
This version uses a new variety of URL known as deep links which point to places inside mobile apps
and have so far been used mostly for mobile advertising (see The Ad Industry Reinvents the Hyperlink for the Mobile Era).
Google is not the only company encouraging use of deep links. Facebook for example has launched a program called App Links designed to help spread the practice on both Android
and ios devices and a well-funded startup recently announced its own plans for a search engine focused on searching inside apps (see A Search engine for the App Era
#Aereo Ruling Means Uncertainty for Cloud Streaming Services In the U s. Supreme court smackdown of Internet TV upstart Aereo today, some legal watchers see a threat to other cloud storage and content-streaming models,
even though the court tried to tailor its decision as narrowly as possible to the broadcasting context.
capture free over-the-air TV broadcasts on tiny antennas in data centersne antenna per customernd send that content over the Internet to individual subscribers,
except that cable TV companies pay broadcasters fees and Aereo does not. The court also found that Aereo was in effect enabling a public rebroadcast of copyrighted works.
It was a major blow and a spectacular turnaround, for the startup (see ereo on a Roll.
At multiple points in the ruling, the court tried to make clear that it was only talking about television broadcasting, not other cloud streaming models.
when the user of a service pays primarily for something other than the transmission of copyrighted works,
Yet John Bergmayer, a staff attorney at Public knowledge, a think tank in Washington, D c.,predicts that enterprising lawyers could find plenty in the ruling with which to attack other cloud services.
because there is enough ammunition in there for future lawsuits. In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said the opinion was uilt on the shakiest of foundations,
is skeptical of worries that copyright holders could say a storage service like Google, Dropbox,
when a user accesses his or her own content. think the Supreme court did the best job they could at making this as narrow an opinion as they could,
#3-D Mammography Shown to Improve Detection of Invasive Breast cancer A new 3-D imaging technology that typically isn covered by health insurance allows radiologists to detect more cases of invasive breast cancer than traditional mammography,
In an analysis of nearly half a million women published in the June 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association,
was linked to a 41 percent increase in the detection of invasive cancers as well as a 15 percent drop in the recall rate,
Daniel Kopans, who founded the breast imaging division at Massachusetts General Hospital and developed tomosynthesis, says the latest evidence could push hospitals to move toward the new screening method. ltimately,
radiologists will recognize that if they miss a cancer because they weren using tomosynthesis, they could end up being sued by someone who said,
hy didn you use tomosynthesis? Why did you do my screening as a 2-D mammogram??
he says. Currently in the United states, doctors recommend that women over 40 get screened for breast cancer every year,
but some researchers argue that the rate of false positives causes patients undue anxiety and creates a burden on the health system.
Some medical groups say screening is overused and should instead occur every two years starting at age 50.
Traditional mammography uses side-to-side and top-to-bottom x-rays of the breast. Such 2-D mammograms can create superimposed shadows that look like cancer,
and they sometimes fail to detect cancer lesions behind normal tissue. In tomosynthesis approved by the FDA in 2011, a series of x-ray images are taken in an arc across the breast,
resulting in pictures from multiple angles. A computer algorithm then creates a stack of thin layers that a radiologist can read, much like the pages of a book.
The JAMA study was funded by Hologic, which is currently the only company to have approved an FDA tomosynthesis system in the U s. General electric sells a system in Europe).
The 3-D systems cost about $400, 000 to $450, 000, compared with about $300,
Kopans says the cost of the equipmenthich works out to around $15 per patient screenedhould be weighed against the cost of treating a woman who develops advanced breast cancer,
Etta Pisano, dean of the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South carolina, says there still isn enough evidence to say
or even how often women should be screened. aybe radiologists should have a mixture of technologiesomo might just make sense for women with dense breasts,
Some doctors say 2-D mammography isn going to be retired, since it better at detecting the tiny calcium deposits that are evidence of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), one of the earliest forms of breast cancer.
so radiologists can more accurately analyze the size, shape, and location of any abnormalities and judge whether the tumors are invasive. ight now the prohibitive issue is the costatients can afford to pay for this expensive technology,
and there no reimbursement to the health-care system, says Emily Conant, professor and chief of the breast imaging division at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
and senior author of the JAMA study. think the data supports implementing tomosynthesis for screening,
but the financial issue is really tough. b
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