Tech Talk

An article by a former U.S. Air Force Secretary in this month’s Physics Today magazine says that China turned over the blueprints for its own first atomic bomb to China, started to provide Pakistan with nuclear weapons technology as early as 1982, and likely helped Pakistan conduct that country’s first nuclear weapons test at a Chinese test site. The article, by Thomas Reed, whose career started with nuclear weapons work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the early 1950s, is based largely on allegations by Danny Stillman. Stillman, as director of technical intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was given official tours of Chinese nuclear facilities two decades ago. The two of them Reed and Stillman, are authors of a book telling the whole story, Nuclear Express, to be published early next year by Zenith Press.

Continue reading "Startling Claims about China-Pakistan Nuclear Cooperation" »

Research published in the Sept. 5 issue of Science puts two of the biggest problems in climate modeling—the respective roles of clouds and aerosols—in a new perspective. Of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the one that has the biggest overall effects is a natural one, water vapor. Yet the impacts of clouds on temperature are incredibly complicated and still quite poorly understood: depending on their height, density, and other factors, they can either trap radiation or reflect it back into space. Aerosols—tiny particles or drops of liquid, suspended in a gas—also have big effects on climate, and those effects also are complicated and ambiguous; black carbon particles, for example, reflect radiation and dampen warming locally or regionally, and yet also dry out the land they blanket, aggravating droughts.

Continue reading "Why Raindrops Keep Falling . . . Or Do Not" »

In a high-stakes gamble, a combat force of multinational troops has delivered a 200 metric ton turbine to a hydroelectric facility in Afghanistan's Helmand Province. The initiative posed security risks in its delivery phase and will provide many more in its installation and operations phases to come, according to informed sources.

To get the massive turbine from the city of Kandahar to the town of Kajaki in southern Afghanistan, a convoy under British command secretly moved 100 miles over rugged roads through some of the war-torn nation's most hostile territory. A report from the British Army on Wednesday states that the operation involved more than 2000 U.K. soldiers and an additional 2000 Afghan and NATO troops.

The objective of the mission is to help repair a hydroelectric dam at Kajaki that had been damaged by decades of fighting in the region. The Kajaki power station was built in 1975 with funding from USAID, an American civilian aid agency. At its peak, the dam's three turbines had an output capacity of 53 megawatts (MW), delivering electricity to the 1.5 million inhabitants of the remote province, as well as serving as a water resource for irrigation in the agricultural basin. However, years of turmoil saw two of the turbines fail, reducing its capacity to 16 MW.

The British Army account said that its armored troops not only took part in the secret convoy but cleared the path ahead of enemy activity, engaging Taliban fighters close to its route.

Continue reading "Coalition Forces Deliver Hydroelectric Turbine to Southern Afghanistan" »

The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert, author of an acclaimed magazine series and book about climate change, takes a wary look at the two U.S. presidential candidates in the latest issue of OnEarth, a quarterly published by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Though both McCain and Obama have sponsored legislation to curb carbon, “both [also] have supported laws whose goals are directly at odds with cutting emissions,” Kolbert observes. Obama, for example, has favored incentives for corn ethanol, despite evidence that it is about as bad or worse than oil. Last year he sponsored legislation to support conversion of coal to liquids, “about the worst possible move the country could make,” as Kolbert puts it.

Continue reading "Kolbert Casts Cold Eye on Candidates Climate Credentials" »

The Chemical Engineer, a magazine published by Britain’s Institution of Chemical Engineers, is reporting allegations that safety standards are being neglected in the design of a nuclear fuel fabrication facility being built in South Carolina. The $4 billion plant, near Aiken, will produce so-called mixed-oxide fuel, consisting of uranium and plutonium recovered from spent nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons. Dan Tedder, an emeritus professor of chemical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told The Chemical Engineer that basic process design information was incomplete, with serious implications for safety.

Continue reading "Shortcuts at U.S. Nuclear Fuel Facility?" »

A few weeks back, our journalism intern Sally Adee spotted a music video on YouTube that struck her fancy, plus it actually offered some real scientific background on the controversial Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest subatomic particle accelerator. So she posted it to our blog (please see Large Nerd Collider).

(The controversy over the LHC comes from skeptics who claim the operation of the accelerator could result in producing artificial black holes that could eventually swallow the whole planet: see Courts Weigh Doomsday Claims at MSNBC.)

For a publication such as IEEE Spectrum, which sometimes runs the risk of seeming a bit, uh, studious (if that's the right word), it was a breath of fresh air. So we decided to promote it in our weekly Tech Alert newsletter, which goes out to thousands of our readers. Guess what happened next?

Yep, the video, "Large Hadron Rap," went viral. As of today, it's been viewed at YouTube more than 750 000 times. It's so hot that the Associated Press has now noticed. The news service ran an article on the hip-hop video yesterday: This ain't no jive, particle physics rap is a hit.

Continue reading "Nuclear Physics Hip-hop Video Climbs the Charts" »

I spent last week at the Hot Chips conference, which, for you non-cognoscenti, is an all-star conference on high-performance microprocessors. I watched as Intel, NVIDIA, IBM, AMD, and a constellation of other chip designers presented Power-pointy microchip architectures until my brain had disintegrated into a thin gruel. I would like to share some observations, but they will all be borrowed, as my melting neurons were unable to produce their own.

It's not news that everything is about multicore and GPGPUs—that's general-purpose graphics processing units—and the Hot Chips lineup reflected that fact. For those of you unlucky enough to know even less than I do, a GPGPU is a sort of semi-holy grail for system-on-a-chip architectures. GPUs have been used for, well, graphics rendering and processing pretty much since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. But recently with Moore's law sending the semiconductor industry into its screaming death spiral, people have looked for ways out of relying solely on CPUs (central processing units) which are brainy but compensate for their intelligence by being a lot less energy efficient per computation.

If you can get the CPU to be the brains of the operation, so to speak, you can get him directing a bunch of heavy-lifter GPUs, whose strength lies in their amazing ability to crunch numbers that would make your head explode. They can do that because of their ability to deal with floating-point operations.

But the problem is that in order to use these hired thugs for anything other than video processing, you basically have to lie to them and tell them they're working with graphics. You do that with a thin layer of code that converts your instructions into the only language they can understand: red, blue, and green pixels and where to put them. NVIDIA was the first to do so, inventing a language called CUDA. Then the Cell processor came along. Now it's Intel's turn, with the much-vaunted Larrabee architecture, which isn't even a chip yet. But it's still made big waves, because it takes GPU manipulation out of the proprietary NVIDIA pool. Now you don't have to learn to use CUDA. That is the chip engineering equivalent of a swift slap across the face with a white glove: 85 percent of the world's programmers already know how to use Intel's x86 architecture (not to mention C).

A quick rundown of several technologies at the show, and the associated commentary, after the jump.

Continue reading "Confessions of a Hot Chips n00b" »

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, going into operation on Sept. 10 near Geneva, is the subject of a hot new rap song by science writer Kate McAlpine, with over 700,000 views on its main YouTube location and more on alternate sites. Watch it below.

Could be engineer-rap, like Rajeev Bajaj's geek rhythms, profiled in IEEE Spectrum here, is catching on.

Astronomers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), looking at dwarf galaxies orbiting our own Milky Way, have found that most of them display characteristics suggesting they were formed by the effect of dark matter.

A news report in National Geographic informs us that the scientists, using the relative speeds of stars, determined that 18 of the 23 known satellite galaxies have a common central mass of about ten million times that of the sun.

Prior to their findings, the nearby dwarf galaxies were thought to be much less massive at their cores.

The astronomers have theorized that this points to the presence of the mysterious force exhibited by so-called dark matter, which physicists think comprises the bulk of the mass of the universe and enables galaxies to coalesce, even though it can not be directly observed.

Continue reading "Small Galaxies Show Influence of Dark Matter" »

Every Labor Day, Stanford University assembles a remarkable group of journalists from all over the world in order to spend an academic year sampling courses, meeting professors and generally enriching their intellectual outlook at one of America's top universities. The global journalists are gathered through the prestigious Knight fellowship program.
Yesterday, this year's one African journalist, a distinguished Zambian writer and online journalist, Chanda Chisala, arrived. I met Chisala at the airport, partly out of courtesy and partly because on my recent visit to Lusaka, he showed me great hospitality.
Full disclosure: I sometimes teach courses at Stanford, so I predisposed to find value in the university's programs. Chisala, meanwhile, has become a valued friend, and I frankly want him to gain a wider audience during his stay in Palo Alto, California.
Chisala plans to study at Stanford the effect of the Internet on African media. The subject is close to his heart: in his own Zambia, he is the leading actor in bringing serious locally-produced content to the Net. He also thinks deeply about the political consequences of new media forms, and especially the effect on citizen participation in government. He is both an original thinker on African social issues and an important critic of conventional notions of black identity.
In Lusaka, Chisala is best known for his work on Zambia Online. He also is an important developer of software and Internet services in Zambia. He sees no contradiction between using new technologies to communicate and working to create and adapt new technologies to the conditions of his southern African country.
Chisala's journey at Stanford -- and in America -- is only just starting. What he brings back to Africa from my country will be worth a look, I am sure.

In the newspaper last week I read about Apple’s admission that some first-generation iPod Nano’s are overheating due to battery problems. The announcement came in the wake of a Japanese government report that credited overheating in first-generation nanos with causing three fires, two light burn injuries, and twelve damaged cases. In this list it included one iPod nano that scorched a tatami mat back in January and a second unit that burned sheets of paper in this month.

In the mail last week I got an invitation to a party celebrating the fact that Boston Power is shipping its first generation of lithium-ion batteries.

Conclusion: If timing is everything, Boston Power has great timing. This is the startup company I wrote about in the March issue of IEEE Spectrum that began looking for money to fund development of a safer, more reliable, lithium-ion battery just before the big Sony battery recalls of 2006. It probably would have gotten funded eventually without battery flameouts being in the news, but Sony’s problems certainly didn’t hurt.

Now, after keeping a fairly low profile all year, Boston Power is about to send lithium-ion batteries to as-yet-unidentified laptop manufacturs who will quickly be installing them into computers and shipping them out to consumers. And the company also announced product developers can order batteries for evaluation from its website.

Which is why the Nano’s troubles are good news for Boston Power. There’s nothing like a scorched tatami mat or two to make no-meltdown technology just that much more attractive.

Is the "digital divide," one of the most popular technology buzz terms of the decade, dead?
The question was posed to me last night by Eric Osiakwan, an old friend and Internet promoter from Accra, Ghana. Osiakwan is visiting the U.S. to attend a gathering of global geeks convened by Harvard’s Berkman Center next week. As soon as we sat down for beers and pizza in Berkeley's Jupiter cafe, he asked me whether I had seen the confession by Jeffrey Sachs, the economist, in the London Guardian.
I had not, so Eric found the piece on my Ipod. Sure enough, Sachs was admitting that for too long he had underplayed the importance of information technology -- computing, communications and the Internet -- in reducing poverty in Africa.
"The digital divide is beginning to close," Sachs opined.
"Extreme poverty is almost synonymous with extreme isolation, especially rural isolation. But mobile phones and wireless internet end isolation, and will therefore prove to be the most transformative technology of economic development of our time," Sachs added.
"The digital divide is ending not through a burst of civic responsibility, but mainly through market forces," he continued. "Mobile phone technology is so powerful, and costs so little per unit of data transmission, that it has proved possible to sell mobile phone access to the poor."
At this point Osiakwan beamed proudly, but then made an important critical point: On a global scale the digital divide is closing but within African countries the divide remains -- and may even be worsening as in many places the gulf between rich and poor is widening.
Another major issue, Osiakwan told me, is the shifting nature of computing and communications. Five years ago, the experts thought the computer would be the engine of networking, even in very poor parts of Africa. Great and expensive initiatives, often backed by governments and charities, arose with the aim of bringing computers to the African masses.
Computers of course remain important in Africa. But two factors changed the equation. First, used computers began to proliferate in African cities. These machines often cost as little as $150, and they are fully functional desktop machines, effective though usually using a generation-old system. Even laptop computers can be found for $250; again, they are used but in good condition.
These aging computers can no longer be sold in Europe and the U.S., but they are sought after in Africa, and for good reason. They cost 5 to 10 times less than a new machine.
The second factor disloging the computer from center stage is the rapid rise of the mobile phone. Phones are becoming more powerful, so that the prospect is approaching of convergence between Internet and mobility.
As we dive into our pizzas, Osiakwan admits to me that he never anticipated the sudden ascent of mobile phones -- and the relative lack of excitement about computers today in Africa.
"Mobile phones are where the action is," he says, "but the Internet remains the foundation for the new information society arising in Africa. Without the Internt, the phone would only be for talking."
And we all know, talk is cheap.

During the broadcast of the Closing Ceremony last night by NBC, commentator Joshua Cooper Ramos took note of the progress the Chinese athletes have made in recent years and referred to China's nationalized sports program as "an engineering project." Fellow commentator Bob Costas was quick to agree, pointing to the country's focus on developing elite athletes from early childhood while paying scant attention to the physical fitness of those of its children who do not show precocious potential as future Olympians.

Not surprisingly, China won the most gold medals (51) of the Games in Beijing. As with many things developed in a Communist state, those medals were the result of a good deal of planning and long-term follow up. Nationalized sports programs are nothing new in the Olympics. The Soviet Union dominated the Games for years with cradle-to-medal-podium training regimens. But China's athletics "engineering project" still raises questions about the fairness of big, state-controlled programs competing against those of smaller, free-market nations. In other words, were these Games fair for all? Probably not, but the world is not a perfect place.

The bigger question, though, lies implicit in the comments of the NBC commentators: Can a nation engineer premier Olympic athletes, as if they were automobiles or aircraft?

Continue reading "Engineering a Better Olympic Athlete" »

Earthquake risks in the greater New York City area are reassessed in a major study released today by a team of seismologists based at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, N.Y. Though the report reaffirms that large earthquakes are relatively rare in New York, it finds that fault patterns are more complex than previously appreciated. In particular, two fault systems are found to converge very close to the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plant, 24 miles north of the city.

Continue reading "Newly Discovered Seismic Fault Could Threaten Indian Point" »

Even as Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is attracting national attention with his proposal to vastly increase U.S. reliance on wind energy, meeting personally with presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to focus attention on the huge wind potential found in the nation’s Great Plains states, cities at opposite sides of the country are seeking to get in on the action. Earlier this week, New York City ’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an initiative to explore all possible applications of wind in the greater metropolitan area, which he believes could have the city relying on wind for 10 percent of its electricity within a decade.

Continue reading "Coastal Cities Climb on Wind Bandwagon, or Try To" »

The Fiat Siena Tetrafuel can run on gasoline, ethanol, blends of gasoline and ethanol, and also natural gas. Is your next car going to be a multi-fuel? Photo: Fiat Brazil

A recent New York Times story describes the efforts of billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens to promote alternative energy, including wind and natural gas. What caught my attention was the beginning of the story, which says demand for natural gas cars like the Honda Civic GX is running high in certain corners of the United States where that fuel has become an attractive alternative to pricey gasoline.

This is interesting because consumers have long been dismissive of natural gas vehicles. The main problem is a lack of natural gas filling stations (there are only about 1,600 in the U.S.). And then there’s range. Natural gas vehicles have around half the range of comparable gasoline cars. (See other pros and cons here.) These issues have discouraged consumers and automakers alike. The Times reports that Honda plans to produce just 2,000 Civic GX units this year; Ford and GM don’t even have natural gas cars to offer.

What puzzles me is the this-or-that fuel approach. You can either run on gasoline or natural gas. Why aren't automakers offering cars designed to run on both?

Continue reading "Where Are the Multi-Fuel Vehicles?" »

The New York Times reports today from the Intel Developers Forum that Intel is the latest to tantalize us with the promise of wireless power.

Wireless power! No more noodle soup under my desk where brutal Darwinian struggles unfold between the cell phone charger, the laptop charger, the digital camera charger, and the electric carving knife charger*, all jockeying for space on the power strip.

On Thursday, the chip maker plans to demonstrate the use of a magnetic field to broadcast up to 60 watts of power two to three feet. It says it can do that losing only 25 percent of the power in transmission.

Intel calls it WiTricity (wireless electricity) and it's built on the shoulders of MIT giant Marin Soljacic. Mauricio Freitas has cool pictures.

PHOTO CREDIT: MAURICIO FREITAS, GEEKZONE

Combine this development with the new wave of low-power chips, and I have high hopes for an end to the cold war under my desk.

*(No, I don't have an electric carving knife.)

General Motors has announced plans to launch European versions of its much-ballyhooed Volt, the plug-in hybrid it expects to start producing in 2010, according to a report this week in the Financial Times. GM expects to sell it on the Continent as an Opel, and in the United Kingdom as a Vauxhall. The Volt will be a so-called series hybrid, in which the car is always propelled by its electric motor, with a backup internal combustion engine recharging its lithium-ion battery pack when necessary. Toyota’s plug-in electric car, also scheduled for 2010, will be a parallel hybrid, in which the electric motor and internal combustion engine alternatively provide traction, as required. According to the FT, groups led by Korea’s LG Chem and Boston’s A123Systems are competing for the contract to provide the Volt’s batteries.