#Why the Time Seems Right for a Space-Based Internet Service providing Internet access from orbiting satellites concept that seemed to have died with the excesses of the dot-com boomas returned thanks to Spacex founder
(and dot-com billionaire) Elon musk. And while such a service would be expensive and risky to deploy,
recent technological trends mean it no longer so out-of-this-world. Musk has proposed a network of some 4,
000 microsatellites to provide broadband Internet services around the globe. Spacex is partnering with Google and Fidelity Investments,
which are investing $1 billion for a 10 percent stake in the endeavor. Richard Branson Virgin galactic and Qualcomm
meanwhile, are investing in a competing venture called Oneweb, which aims to build a similar network of microsatellites.
In the late 1990s there were plans to deliver similar space services. he dot-com bust dried up their financing
and it never really got off the ground, says Forecast International analyst Bill Ostrove. Those projects might have failed anyway,
though, because it costs $60 million and $70 million to launch a satellite, and there always a decent chance that the payload will be lost to an accident.
Fiber-optic cables, in contrast, are easy and cheap to install even in harsh environments like the ocean floor,
and they can transmit huge amounts of data. Beaming data from a satellite is done by radio,
and is limited by the available spectrum, as well as the amount of power a satellite can get from its solar panels.
Most communications satellites have data-transfer speeds of around a gigabit per second, compared to several terabits per second for the fastest fiber.
But some things have changed since the late 1990s. For one thing, satellite technology has advanced, bringing the cost of deployment down significantly.
Toaster-sized microsatellites can be launched dozens at a time and don have to operate at very high orbits, reducing launch costs,
but they can deliver performance comparable to larger, older satellites at higher altitudes. Spacex and Virgin galactic also hope to ride a different boom by targeting parts of the world where there is little infrastructure and a huge opportunity for Internet growth.
Satellite services remain less economical in areas where fiber-optic networks are in place, but Musk has stated that his Internet service would be aimed primarily at providing service to remote areas of the globe. oue got large swaths of land where there is a relatively low density of users,
Musk told an audience at the opening of Spacex new satellite development center in Seattle last week. pace is actually ideal for that.
Musk and Branson are not alone in recognizing the market potential. Besides investing in Musk project, Google is working on a high-altitude balloon-based Internet delivery system called Loon.
And Facebook is developing high-altitude, high-endurance drones to deliver Internet capability to remote areas.
The Google and Facebook projects would be similar in concept to the space-based systems,
while operating within the Earth atmosphere. Whether, as Musk has suggested, Spacex service could also be a viable alternative for customers in the developed world is less certain.
Ostrove says satellites simply cannot compete with the bandwidth and low cost of fiber-optic cables. The technology could also prove tricky for these newcomers to master.
Spacex, after all, has built rocketsut no satellites yet s
#Google#s Modular Smartphone to Debut in Puerto rico Google vision of cheap modular smartphones made up of interchangeable pieces is getting closer to reality.
The company showed off the latest prototype on Wednesday, and said that it will start selling its first modular phone in Puerto rico later this year.
Google Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group revealed the Spiral 2 on Wednesday during a crowded event for software developers at a Google office in Mountain view, California.
It is a slim handset, its face dominated by a large display and a receiver module for phone calls that includes a light and proximity sensor on the front.
On the back are eight different square and rectangular modules that snap into the phone slim metal skeleton to add different functions to the device.
The modules on the back include a camera, USB charger, Wi-fi, and Bluetooth radios, and the device main processor.
The display and receiver module on the front can also be swapped out. All the modules are held in place by magnets in the device frame.
Google says that this modular approach, which it calls Project Ara, will lead to inexpensive smartphones that can be customized
and upgraded by users depending on their budget or personal requirements. You might want a camera with an optical zoom lens for a sightseeing trip
for instance, a pollution sensor to keep tabs on asthma, or just a simple phone with basic capabilities.
But the Spiral 2 prototype also shows how tricky it will be for Google to make a modular gadget successful.
The latest device comes about nine months after ATAP unveiled the first Project Ara smartphone prototype, Spiral 1,
at a similar conference (see or Project Ara, It Moduleot Appdeas Wanted. That earlier device had Wi-fi but no working cellular connection,
and failed to work when presented to the crowd. Spiral 2 did manage to power up in public
and showed Google android operating system on its display. The Spiral 2 prototype is slimmer and looks more polished than the previous version.
But the handset is still far from being the flashy device with night vision and a slew of other modules imagined in a promotional Project Ara video shown at the conference.
Google prototypes have yet to catch up to existing smartphones on features such as cellular data speeds, for example.
Ara Knaian, the chief mechanical engineer for the project and also its namesake, said one tricky problem now solved is that the modules of the first prototype would disconnect themselves
when a person sat down on the Phone in the newer version, the slots for the modules on the endoskeleton are made more precisely. efinitely wee made a lot of progress,
he said. f course, there still plenty to do. A Spiral 3 prototype is in the works
and expected to be complete before June. Google says that device will be able to wirelessly transfer data between the modules
and endoskeleton, eliminating the need for the spring-pin connectors used currently. The next prototype is slated also to include a redesign of the magnets that keep the modules in place.
Project Ara leader, Paul Eremenko, said the group hopes to get the phone to last for a full day, at least,
though he then said that this might only happen by swapping in another battery at some point (Project Ara aims to let users do this without needing to turn off the phone).
The design of the phone skeleton will need also to be modified so that it can be manufactured easily.
Google plans to start selling Ara phones to customers in Puerto rico as a test market at some point this year, in collaboration with two wireless carriers.
The phones will be sold from trucks that function as mobile stores, as well as over the Internet. Just as third party apps were crucial to the popularity of smartphones,
getting people interested in modular phones will hinge on companies other than Google offering a diverse selection of modules.
Google has started already courting hardware companies to become module developers. On Wednesday the company showed a preview of the online ra Marketplacethat will let developers sell Google-approved modules to consumers.
Google is aiming to have a minimum of 20 modules available when it starts selling phones in Puerto rico. Google has also come up with 11 different reference designs for modules for developers to use.
Electronics giant Toshiba and chip makers Marvell and Nvidia are among those already showing interest;
Toshiba showed off some early camera modules at the conference. But the individual hardware developers I spoke with in the audience were still in the earliest stages of working on modules.
How much Project Ara modules might cost is unclear, but it must be low if Google is to attract people looking for their first smartphone.
Eremenko said in April last year that the bill of materials for a basic Ara handset complete with display, Wi-fi, battery,
and processor modules would run about $50, though he didn put an estimated sale price on it.
On Wednesday he declined to update that figure l
#CES 2015: Nvidia Demos a Car Computer Trained with Deep Learning Many cars now include cameras or other sensors that record the passing world and trigger intelligent behavior,
such as automatic braking or steering to avoid an obstacle. Today systems are usually unable to tell the difference between a trash can
and a traffic cop standing next to it, though. This week at the International Consumer electronics Show in Las vegas, Nvidia, a leading marking of computer graphics chips, unveiled a vehicle computer called the Drive PX that could help cars interpret
and react to the world around them. Nvidia already supplies chips to many car makers but engineers at those companies usually have to write software to collect
and process data from various different sensor systems. Drive PX is more powerful than existing hardware,
and it should also make it easier to integrate and process sensor data. The computer uses Nvidia new graphics microprocessor, the Tegra X1.
It is capable of processing information from up to 12 cameras simultaneously, and it comes with software designed to assist with safety or autonomous driving systems.
Most impressive, it includes a system trained to recognize different objects using a powerful technique known as deep learning (see 0 Breakthrough Technologies 2013:
Deep Learning. Another computer from Nvidia, called the Drive CX, is designed to generate realistic 3-D maps
and other graphics for dashboard displays. t pretty cool to bring this level of powerful computation into cars,
said John Leonard, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, who works on autonomous car technology. t the first such computer that seems really designed for a carn autopilot computer.
The new Nvidia hardware can also be updated remotely, so that car manufacturers can fix bugs or add new functionality.
This is something few car companies, aside from Tesla, do currently. So far Audi has emerged as an early buyer;
at CES, the company showed off a luxury concept car called the Audi Prologue that includes the Drive PX.
A year ago, the company announced at CES that it had developed a compact computer for processing sensor information (see udi Shows Off a Compact Brain for Self-driving cars.
That, too, included Nvidia chips. The introduction of Nvidia product is a landmark moment for deep learning,
a technology that processes sensory information efficiently by loosely mimicking the way the brain works.
At CES, Nvidia showed that its software can detect objects such as cars, people, bicycles and signs, even when they are hidden partly.
Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning researcher at the University of Montreal, says the Nvidia chipset is an important commercial milestone. would not call it a breakthrough,
but more a continuous advance in a direction that has been going for a number of years now,
he said. Yann Lecun, a data scientist at New york University who leads deep-learning efforts at Facebook (see acebook Launches Advanced AI Effort to Find Meaning in Your Posts,
also sees the announcement as an important step: t is significant because current solutions tend to be closed
and proprietary, use custom and inflexible hardware, and tend to be lack boxesthat equipment manufacturers cannot really customize.
At a press event Sunday, Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia CEO, said the devices will provide ore computing horsepower inside a car than anything you have today. e
#Black Phosphorus: The Birth of a New Wonder Material In the last few years, two-dimensional crystals have emerged as some of the most exciting new materials to play with.
Consequently, materials scientists have been falling over themselves to discover the extraordinary properties of graphene, boron nitride, molybdenum disulphide, and so on.
A latecomer to this group is black phosphorus, in which phosphorus atoms join together to form a two-dimensional puckered sheet.
Last year, researchers built a field-effect transistor out of black phosphorus and showed that it performed remarkably well.
This research suggested that black phosphorous could have a bright future in nanoelectronic devices. But there is a problem.
Black phosphorus is difficult to make in large quantities. Today Damien Hanlon at Trinity college Dublin in Ireland,
and a number of pals, say they have solved this problem. These guys have perfected a way of making large quantities of black phosphorus nanosheets with dimensions that they can control.
And they have used this newfound ability to test black phosphorus in a number of new applications,
such as a gas sensor, an optical switch, and even to reinforce composite materials to make them stronger.
In bulk form, black phosphorus is made of many layers, like graphite. So one way to separate single sheets is by exfoliation
simply peeling off layers using Scotch tape or other materials. That is a time-consuming task that severely limits potential applications.
So Hanlon and co have been toying with another approach. Their method is to place the black phosphorus lump in a liquid solvent
and then bombard it with acoustic waves that shake the material apart. The result is that the bulk mass separates into a large number of nanosheets that the team filters for size using a centrifuge.
That leaves high-quality nanosheets consisting of only a few layers. iquid phase exfoliation is a powerful technique to produce nanosheets in very large quantities
they say. One potential problem with black phosphorus nanosheets is that they degrade rapidly when in contact with water or oxygen.
So one of the advances the team has made is to predict that certain solvents should form a solvation shell around the sheet,
which prevents oxygen or other oxidative species from reaching the phosphorus. The team use N-cyclohexyl-2-pyrrolidone or CHP as a solvent and because of this,
the nanosheets are surprisingly long-lived. The big advantage of black phosphorus over graphene is that it has a natural bandgap that physicists can exploit to make electronic devices
such as transistors. But Hanlon and co say the newfound availability of black phosphorus nanosheets has allowed them to test a number of other ideas as well.
For example, they added the nanosheets to a film of polyvinyl chloride, thereby doubling its strength and increasing its tensile toughness sixfold.
So it not just carbon allotropes that can increase strength! They also determined the nonlinear optical response of the nanosheets to a pulsed laser by measuring the amount of light that is transmitted.
It turns out that the amount of light black phosphorus absorbs decreases as the intensity rises, a property known as saturable absorption.
What more, black phosphorus is better at this even than graphene. Finally, they measured the current through the nanosheets
while exposing them to ammonia. They found that the material resistance increased when it came into contact with ammonia,
probably because ammonia donates electrons that neutralize holes in the black phosphorus sheets. That immediately makes black phosphorous a decent ammonia detector.
Hanlon and co say the material could detect ammonia at levels of around 80 parts per billion.
All this could mark an interesting step change in research associated with black phosphorus. Many people will have seen the excitement associated with the remarkable properties of graphene.
If black phosphorous is half as remarkable, there should be an interesting future for material scientists t
#AMD's new High Bandwidth Memory will power the graphics cards of the future Sitting down to talk graphics memory isn't usually anyone's idea of a good time
but these are the chips that underpin everything from GTA V to 4k Netflix -and AMD just unveiled the memory technology it wants to power the GPUS of the future.
Seven years in the making, High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) promises to provide huge improvements over the GDDR5 memory currently sitting inside AMD's top-end graphics cards
and the Playstation 4-it offers greater performance in less space using less power. It changes the layout of memory chips from the ground up-chips are stacked vertically like skyscraper floors in a 3d pattern (not unlike 3d technology used in SSD),
and new interconnector technology ensures low power consumption and high bandwidth capabilities. Temperatures come down too. Graphics cards will soon be shrinking significantly thanks to HBM.
A comparable 1gb graphics chip takes up just 6 percent of the surface area measured against GDDR5,
and smaller power supplies can be used too. That could lead to top-end graphics cards half the size of today's,
AMD says. Key to the potential of HBM-as its name suggests-is the bandwidth,
or the amount of data it can cope with at once. It means CPU and RAM performance can be increased without hitting a bottleneck on the GPU side of the equation."
"We needed a new memory that was far, far better from a power perspective,"said AMD's Joe Macri at a briefing with journalists."
"There's also a massive increase in bandwidth. We have blown basically through the bandwidth-per-watt wall...
I'm astounded at what we've been able to achieve.""With Nvidia working on next-generation graphics technology of its own,
battle between the two graphics giants will be renewed in earnest in the very near future-HBM is slated to appear in AMD's flagship graphics cards later this year.
AMD hasn't said whether that technology might be used or will be used in standard RAM; AMD sells a range of high-performance memory modules s
#Opinion: How Toshiba's new storage device could change the data centre Poor hard disk drive; advances in silicon manufacturing have allowed solid state drives to capture the headlines leaving the traditional spindle-spinning devices in the shadows.
But things are about to get more exciting for the latter. Toshiba made an important announcement yesterday as it unveiled a new solution that essentially is a new class of server (the Japanese company calls it a multi-device storage solution),
one that integrates, in an industry-standard, 3. 5-inch form factor, compute (64-bit,
probably ARM), networking (Gigabit Ethernet) and storage (with a pinch of SSD storage for low latency tasks and onboard RAM).
Future iterations we guess-could include an all-SSD model, a 2. 5-inch one or even, may be,
just may be, a 5. 25-inch model. The whole set is enabled by an unidentified Linux platform that will allow the device to run what Toshiba calls, the next generation of software-defined storage applications.
The HDD becomes the server The implications for the industry are tremendous; such a solution could allow data centres to offer a richer set of scale-out object storage features.
From Toshiba's perspective, adding compute and networking features helps maintain margins while simplifying the overall calculation of total cost of ownership (TCO)
and the infrastructure needed, removing what it calls commodity servers used for storage management. The other announcement that dovetails nicely with it is that Toshiba has committed finally to deploying SMR technology, well after WD and Seagate.
Interestingly, the company managed to produce two products that shows its skills when it comes to cramming bits on a platter.
The Canvio 3tb an external 2. 5-inch hard disk drive, managed to packs four 750gb platters in a tiny 15mm drive using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) only.
In addition, late last year, it debuted a 6tb hard disk drive that apparently squeezed six 1tb platters without the need of helium gas like HGST-or any other exotic technologies.
That drive is likely to be at the heart of Tosihba's new storage solution.
More coming up later Switching to SMR, commonly known as shingles, will increase the storage density significantly perhaps as much as 40%meaning that the Canvio 3tb could pack as much as 4tb.
It will also include a random write penalty though which might explain why it might be useful to pack a small amount of fast-storage
and compute on the drive itself. It is likely that other vendors will follow suit. When we interviewed Seagate's Joe Fagan in March,
he hinted that his company may and more processing power to the hard drive as its remit goes beyond just holding bits.
Adding compute would allow it to take on more tasks like inline de-duplication and real-time compression.
Most enterprise drives already do encryption.""It would need to be done in relationship with the wider industry,
"he added back then. Don't be surprised if WD (or rather its subsidiary HGST) and Seagate do the same as Toshiba's move seems to be motivated by customer demand.
The affordability of compute power, the increasing diversity of compute solutions, maturing technologies (both on the integration and manufacturing sides)
and the rise in competition can only mean good news for storage manufacturers that want to move up the stack s
#Watch this robot learn through trial and error, just like a human A team of researchers at the University of California has put together a robot that can learn how to do tasks through trial and error.
The development is a key milestone in the field of artificial intelligence. The algorithms allow the robot to build its knowledge slowly over time like humans do,
rather than being preprogrammed from their moment of creation. The resulting'neural nets'were inspired by the neural circuitry of the brain."
"The key is that when a robot is faced with something new, we won't have to reprogram it,
"The exact same software, which encodes how the robot can learn, was used to allow the robot to learn all the different tasks we gave it."
the robot was rewarded"with points allocated by the algorithm.""We still have a long way to go before our robots can learn to clean a house
or sort laundry,"said Abbeel, "but our initial results indicate that these kinds of deep learning techniques can have a transformative effect in terms of enabling robots to learn complex tasks entirely from scratch
#Processors do grow on trees: your next phone could be made of wood Engineers hunting for a way to make electronics more sustainable have hit on a novel invention-a semiconductor chip made almost entirely out of wood.
The idea is that instead of making chips from petroleum-based plastic, we'd be able to use cellulose nanofibril-a flexible,
biodegradable material that's made from plants.""The majority of material in a chip is support.
We only use less than a couple of micrometers for everything else, "said Zhenquang Ma, who lead the team.
The researchers have been studying bio-based polymers for more than a decade. While they showed some promise,
there were a couple of key problems-wood's rough surface, and how it responds to moisture and heat."
"The result is based a bio chip, which is not only flexible enough to use in consumer electronics but an order of magnitude more environmentally-friendly."
"The chips are so safe you can put them in the forest and fungus will degrade it.
They become as safe as fertilizer, "said Ma. He added:""Mass-producing current semiconductor chips is so cheap,
and it may take time for the industry to adapt to our design. But flexible electronics are the future,
and we think we're going to be well ahead of the curve
#This DNA sequencer fits in the palm of your hand A team of British and Canadian researchers has managed to successfully sequence the full genome of a living organism using a machine the size of a smartphone called the Minion.
The miniaturisation breakthrough could allow for more personalised medical diagnosis and better research in the field. The Minion was developed by Oxford Nanopore technologies
and is currently undergoing tests to evaluate the technology. Its tiny size and relatively low cost could allow scientists to perform much more advanced analysis away from a lab."The amazing thing about this device is that it is many times smaller than a normal sequencer-you just attach it to a laptop using a USB cable"
explained Jarden Simpson, a lead author on the study.""It's amazing,"added Luiz Ozaki from the Center from the Study of Biological Complexity,
who plans to use the handheld device to study mosquitoes that transmit malaria and other diseases in the Amazon."
"It's something I can put in my pocket, take into the rainforest and get a genetic sequence right there."
"The drawbacks identified so far revolve around accuracy-the data it produces is currently less accurate than the data produced by a larger machine,
meaning that strong bioinformatics tools are needed to correct errors. That was the focus of Simpson's paper:"
"We were able to mathematically model nanopore sequencing and develop ways to reconstruct complete genomes off this tiny sequencer,
"he said. Once proven, it's hoped that the device could be used to sequence tumour genomes,
giving the option of more personalised diagnosis and treatment to cancer patients.""It's not ready for prime time yet,
but it is producing a lot of data, "said Gregory Buck, also from the Center from the Study of Biological Complexity."
"We want to see it work, and we're optimistic that it's going to work
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