NU Ideashare: Fwd: Next Big Future

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Fwd: Next Big Future - 10 new articles

More articles shared from "Next Big Future" (Some of them were published before)
Reading this is a good way of keeping pace with latest techno news.

From: FeedBlitz <feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 3:34 PM
Subject: Next Big Future - 10 new articl

Click here to read this mailing online.

Here are the latest updates

"Next Big Future" - 10 new articles

A Big Shift from Coal to Natural Gas Because of Cheap Natural Gas

The share of U.S. electricity that comes from coal is forecast to fall below 40 percent for the year — the lowest level since the government began collecting this data in 1949. Four years ago, it was 50 percent. By the end of this decade, it is likely to be near 30 percent.

Utilities are aggressively ditching coal in favor of natural gas, which has become cheaper as supplies grow. Natural gas has other advantages over coal: It produces far fewer emissions of toxic chemicals and gases that contribute to climate change, key attributes as tougher environmental rules go into effect.

Natural gas will be used to produce 29 percent of the country's electricity this year, up from 20 percent in 2008.

The shift is because shale gas has increased supplies and made natural gas cheap. It is not because of concerns over health effects. Coal is more harmful for health.

Read more »

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

Air Pollution by Location and Incremental Effect from Coal Plants

This is an update of air pollution from coal plants in the United States.

Map of coal power by state. Note: about of third of the air pollution can go thousands of miles from the plant. There is more impact on air quality and health of those near the plants. Air pollution has been improved in the USA since the 1950s and 1960s. There is still a negative effect. 24,000 coal impacted deaths and a total of 60,000 air pollution impacted deaths out of 2.5 million deaths from any cause. Cigarette smoking and obesity have larger negative effects, which is seen in West Virginia's health statistics. The bad air pollution states are ending up at or near the bottom of state health rankings.

The incremental particulate matter from 11 coal plants in Michigan

They have mapped the health effects from particulates from all coal plants based on the measurement of incremental pollution by location. They have the increased levels of health impacts in those same locations.

PM2.5 is 10-12% from coal power plants. So it is not the whole problem but eliminating that pollution source would improve health and save lives.

Analysis of PM10 by metro statistical area.

Source watch has a list of the states with the most coal power plants

Rank State # of Plants Total Capacity 2005 Power Prod.   1    Texas          20   21,238 MW      148,759 GWh   2    Ohio           35   23,823 MW      137,457 GWh   3    Indiana        31   21,551 MW      123,985 GWh   4    Pennsylvania   40   20,475 MW      122,093 GWh   5    Illinois       32   17,565 MW       92,772 GWh   6    Kentucky       21   16,510 MW       92,613 GWh   7    West Virginia  19   15,372 MW       91,601 GWh   8    Georgia        16   14,594 MW       87,624 GWh   9    North Carolina 25   13,279 MW       78,854 GWh   10   Missouri       24   11,810 MW       77,714 GWh   11   Michigan       33   12,891 MW       71,871 GWh   12   Alabama        11   12,684 MW       70,144 GWh   13   Florida        15   11,382 MW       66,378 GWh   14   Tennessee      13   10,290 MW       59,264 GWh   15   Wyoming        10   6,168 MW        43,421 GWh   16   Wisconsin      28   7,116 MW        41,675 GWh

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

A 'Dirt Cheap' Magnetic Field Sensor from 'Plastic Paint'

University of Utah physicists developed an inexpensive, highly accurate magnetic field sensor for scientific and possibly consumer uses based on a "spintronic" organic thin-film semiconductor that basically is "plastic paint."

The new kind of magnetic-resonance magnetometer also resists heat and degradation, works at room temperature and never needs to be calibrated, physicists Christoph Boehme, Will Baker and colleagues report online in the Tuesday, June 12 edition of the journal Nature Communications.

The magnetic-sensing thin film is an organic semiconductor polymer named MEH-PPV. Boehme says it really is nothing more than an orange-colored "electrically conducting, magnetic field-sensing plastic paint that is dirt cheap. We measure magnetic fields highly accurately with a drop of plastic paint, which costs just as little as drop of regular paint."

The orange spot is only about 5-by-5 millimeters (about one-fifth inch on a side), and the part that actually detects magnetic fields is only 1-by-1 millimeters. This organic semiconductor paint is deposited on a thin glass substrate which then is mounted onto a circuit board with that measures about 20-by-30 millimeters (about 0.8 by 1.2 inches).

An inexpensive and highly accurate "spintronic" magnetic field sensor developed at the University of Utah is shown here. The entire device, on a printed circuit board, measures about 0.8 inches by 1.2 inches. But the part that actually detects magnetic fields is the reddish-orange thin-film semiconductor – essentially "plastic paint" – near the center-right of the device. Photo Credit: Christoph Boehme, University of Uta

Nature Communications - Robust absolute magnetometry with organic thin-film devices

Read more »

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

Quantum computers could help search engines keep up with the Internet's growth

Eurekalert - USC scientists demonstrate that quantum computing could speed up the way web page ranks are calculated on the ever-expanding Internet.

Most people don't think twice about how Internet search engines work. You type in a word or phrase, hit enter, and poof – a list of web pages pops up, organized by relevance.

Behind the scenes, a lot of math goes into figuring out exactly what qualifies as most relevant web page for your search. Google, for example, uses a page ranking algorithm that is rumored to be the largest numerical calculation carried out anywhere in the world. With the web constantly expanding, researchers at USC have proposed – and demonstrated the feasibility – of using quantum computers to speed up that process.

"This work is about trying to speed up the way we search on the web," said Daniel Lidar, corresponding author of a paper on the research that appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters on June 4.

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

1 nanometer diameter wires could yield next gen quantum computers

New Electronics UK - Nanowires can now be made with a diameter of just 1 nanometer (nm), though researchers tend to work with nanowires that are between 30 and 60nm wide. At these dimensions, materials can acquire properties very different to those they exhibit at larger scales. That is partly because at such tiny scales, quantum confinement effects alter the behaviour of fundamental particles like electrons within the material. Such effects can change how materials conduct electricity and heat, or interact with light.

"There are a host of niche applications within the electronics sector, such as solar cells and sensors, where nanowires could have a significant impact in the medium term and rapid advances are being made. You could say nanowires have taken on some of the attention that a few years ago was being spent on nanotubes."

A key question about nanowires concerns how best to manufacture them: building them from the bottom up, or from the top down? A top down approach involves taking the material that will form the nanowire and reducing it until you reach nanoscale dimensions. As its name suggests, the bottom up approach is an assembly process where the nanowire is 'grown', by adding particles gradually.

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

Sandia aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope is 50 to 100 times faster and 50 times better resolution

Sandia's new aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope (AC-STEM), the $3.2 million FEI Titan G2 8200, is 50 to 100 times better than what came before, both in resolution and the time it takes to analyze a sample.

The AC-STEM delivers electron beams accelerated at voltages from 80 kV to 200 kV, allowing researchers to study properties of structures at the nanoscale — crucial for materials scientists working on everything from microelectronics to nuclear weapons.

The instrument's unique combination of X-ray detectors and very high resolution offers magnification Kotula compares to a telescope powerful enough to show two peas side by side on the moon. High-clarity slides of microstructures analyzed with the AC-STEM and fuzzy images taken by Sandia's older analytical microscope highlight the new capabilities. An analysis that took seven minutes on the AC-STEM took two hours on the older instrument, he said.

The image on the left was captured in seven minutes at 0.5nm/pixel with Sandia's new AC-STEM; the image on the right was captured in 120 minutes at 2nm/pixel with the old microscope. The analytical power of the AC-STEM is at least 70 times better than the older analytical microscope at Sandia. These high-resolution chemical images are confirming predictions from the 1970s regarding the atomic-scale characteristics of electrical contact materials. (Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories)

Read more »

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

Singapore sets up US$11.7 million Graphene Product Fabrication Facility

Channelnewsasia - The National University of Singapore's Graphene Research Centre announced on Tuesday the opening of a S$15 million micro- and nano-fabrication facility to produce graphene products.

The facility is the first of its kind in Asia and will be fully operational by October.

The facility would use graphene to develop new technologies for flexible and transparent electronics and new devices that do not yet exist in the market, using the latest scientific equipment.

Another area which scientists are looking at are stem cells. Researchers say that stem cells infused with graphene could produce artificial bones and even liver cells.

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

Atomistic Simulations Show Cement Nanotubes Can Exist

Advanced Materials Journal - Using atomistic simulations, this work indicates that cement nanotubes can exist. The chemically compatible nanotubes are constructed from the two main minerals in ordinary Portland cement pastes, namely calcium hydroxide and a calcium silicate hydrate called tobermorite. These results show that such nanotubes are stable and have outstanding mechanical properties, unique characteristics that make them ideally suitable for nanoscale reinforcements of cements.

Nanowerk has coverage

The problem with carbon nanotubes is that they are water insoluble. In order to make them compatible with water chemistry, they must be functionalized in advance. Inorganic oxide nanotubes would be a natural means of reinforcements of cement pastes, in view of their chemically compatibility with the cement-water system. The team focused on cement-based nanotubes fabricated from calcium silicate hydrate gel and calcium hydroxide precipitates. They succeeded in demonstrating the feasibility of these cement nanotubes in view of their stability at room temperature, with strain energies in agreement with values previously obtained for other nanotubes compounds.

Portlandite nanotubes have tensile strength of 8.4 GPa, which is about 10% of the Young's modulus. 8 GPa greatly exceed the tensile strengths of cement pastes and are at least an order of magnitude higher than those of typical reinforcing materials such as structural steels ( which is about 0.5 GPa).

They are now determining that the cement nanotubes survival in different water solutions.

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

$39 Raspberry Pi has better hardware and Emulates the Software of old IBM Mainframe and DEC VAX Cluster

Design Spark - a Raspberry Pi ($39) can be used to emulate a mainframe which would have filled a large computer room, and to run the same software which it would have run. Of course, the only reason you would do this is for fun, learning or perhaps as part of computer conservation efforts, e.g. in providing continued access to old computer software and/or data. A modern mainframe would massively outperform a Raspberry Pi and offer many benefits beyond simple processing power.

Having configured a mainframe on a Raspberry Pi, it was time to try out a Raspberry Pi on a mainframe! The image below shows the Pi sat on top (centre) of the CPU from an IBM 4381.

• Email to a friend • Article Search •

208 million annual shipments of Phone/Tablet Hybrids by 2015

ABI Research - More than 208 million phablets, a hybrid device that is larger than a smartphone but smaller than a tablet, like the Samsung Galaxy Note, will be shipped globally in 2015. The category includes smartphones and tablet devices in the 4.6 to 5.5 inch screen size range.

We recently covered the Samsung Galaxy S3 (4.8 inch screen) and the expected Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (5.5 inch screen)

Despite the slow start for phablet smartphones in 2011, the market is at the dawn of the phablet era. HTC, LG, and Huawei will each introduce phablet smartphones in 2012, joining the ranks of Samsung's Galaxy Note and Nexus.

The 5.3 inch Galaxy Note beside an iPhone 4S

By ABI Research's definitions, many recent Android smartphones would fall into the 'phablet' category, such as the LG Optimus Vu, HTC One X, the HTC One XL on ATT, the HTC EVO 4G LTE on Sprint, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and the Samung Galaxy S III.

Gigaom - With rich media consumption on the rise on mobile devices — particularly as we get faster 4G networks and more Wi-Fi networks to supplement them — a larger display is desirable. The same can be said for Web browsing, which is one of the most popular activities on a mobile: Why scroll and zoom when a larger display minimizes such efforts?

Provided these handsets are still pocketable, consumers will adopt them because they combine the portability of a smartphone with the more immersive experience found in a tablet. That's not to say 10-inch slate sales will fall; these fit a totally different use case for most, as they are less portable and are better suited for casual computing or consumption in a given location. A recent Viacom study, for example, found that 74 percent of tablet use is in the home.