Denser and denser

Holographic breakthrough crams in 0.5TB per square inch

InPhase claims industry record
Robert Jaques, vnunet.com

InPhase Technologies claims to have broken the record for the highest data density of any commercial storage technology after successfully recording 515Gb of data per square inch.

Holographic storage can dramatically boost capacity as it takes advantage of volumetric efficiencies rather than recording only on the surface of the material.

Densities in holography are achieved by different factors to magnetic storage. Density depends on the number of pixels/bits in a page of data, the number of pages stored in a particular volumetric location, the dynamic range of the recording material, the thickness of the material, and the wavelength of the recording laser.

In this demonstration there were over 1.3 million bits per data page, and 320 data pages spaced 0.067 degrees apart were stored in the same volume of material.

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Ping Fu defines DSSP

DSSP is a category whose time has come

When the space shuttle Discovery landed in August 2005 following its 12-day mission, the world shared a collective sense of relief, especially considering the safety concerns before and during the flight.

Interest in the mission was especially high in Research Triangle Park, N.C., where engineers from Geomagic were on call 24x7 to help ensure the safety of Discovery astronauts. The company's digital shape sampling and processing (DSSP) technology gave NASA the ability for the first time to detect, assess, repair and validate a repair in the unpredictable environment of space.

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NYT: For Robots, Fuel Cells That Double as Muscles

By KENNETH CHANG
An android walks into a bar...

Ray H. Baughman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Texas at Dallas, has not built an android. He has not built a brain or an eye or a robotic equivalent of some other complex body part. Instead, he has built something that will also be crucial for future androids: artificial muscles.

Today's crude humanoid robots already use gears, pulleys and pistons to mimic the actions of muscles. But they are electrically powered, requiring that they be plugged in and tethered by an extension cord or powered by batteries, which drain quickly.

Dr. Baughman's advance, reported in the current issue of the journal Science, is that his new muscle fibers double as fuel cells. Just like real muscles, they power themselves instead of relying on external electrical power. Chemical energy also delivers a greater bang.

"The most advanced battery can only store only about one-thirtieth of the energy that is stored chemically in fuels such as methanol," Dr. Baughman said.

He and his colleagues have made two types of artificial muscles. One is a nickel-titanium alloy coated with platinum, which causes the fuel — currently methanol, but hydrogen or alcohol could work, too — to react with oxygen, producing heat. The metal shrinks; the muscle flexes. The artificial muscle can apply 100 times as much force as real muscle.

Dr. Baughman said the technology was simple enough that it could find commercial applications in as few as three years.

The second artificial muscle, currently less powerful, is made of a sheet of nanotubes, tiny but superstrong cylindrical molecules of carbon. The reaction of fuel and oxygen releases electrical charges that repel each other and cause the nanotube sheet to expand.

To put such artificial muscles into robots will require solving other problems, like how to control the amount of fuel going to the muscles. "The analogy of a circulatory system is really what's needed," Dr. Baughman said.

But for the future, he said, it is not entirely far-fetched for an android to walk into a bar.

 

Will Wright's "Spore"

Will Wright, the inventor of SimCity and related games, is, in my view, the greatest systems thinking educator the world has ever seen. His games are played by millions of people. Through the dynamics of simulation and the motivation of gaming fun, they quickly transition through metalevels of complexity and develop requisite variety in problem-solving that will serve them throughout life.

Watch this 35–minute film of Will’s presentation at a gaming conference and you’ll see why I think this is the convergence of CAD, simulation, UI, and transformative education.

By the way...

This is just one of my blogs…check out this one, too. And this one. Oh, yeah – this one, too. And just one more.

Finally! A good illustration

Have you ever wondered just how your computer works?

Well... It's finally explained here in one, easy-to-understand,
illustration!

http://www.newportharbor.us/computerworks.htm