November 17, 2007

Printable carbon nanotube batteries

Batteries that can be printed onto a surface with "nanotube ink" have been demonstrated by US researchers, who say the technique will fit well within the growing field of printed electronics, which still use conventional power sources. Solar cells could also be printed from inkjet printers

Carbon nanotube production is expanding and prices are falling.

To make the battery, a layer of nanotubes is first deposited in the form of "nanotube ink" onto a surface. This layer acts as the charge collector, which removes current from the battery.

Next, a layer of nanotube ink mixed with manganese oxide powder and electrolytes, which carries charge within the cell, is applied on top. This layer acts as the cathode. Finally, a piece of zinc foil – the anode – is applied.

"The batteries are similar to conventional batteries," says Gruner, "with the electrically conducting nanoscale networks replacing conventional metals and electrodes."

He adds that the designs should make it possible to get more power than a conventional design would from the same materials, , "an important factor for portable electronics applications."

The researchers also made supercapacitors using the inking technique and plan to combine these with batteries for applications requiring more power.

Furthermore, since both printed batteries and supercapacitors can be made entirely at room temperature, it should be possible to mass-produce them using established printing methods, Gruner says.

Gruner says his research team is working to increase power output and to demonstrate suitability of the designs for industrial production.

November 16, 2007

New method to manipulate light a million times more efficiently








Nantero's newest NRAM promise is for 2008

Nantero is promising that NRAM could appear in consumer goods in 2008 However, they have previously promised 2005 and 2007.




So I think NRAM will have a radiation hardened and endurance niche.

November 15, 2007

Silicon electronics can be printed by Ink Jet printers

Kovio, sunnyvale startup, jas the world's first all-printed silicon transistor capability. They will have roll to roll printing of computers. This is clearly a process that will get even better as the design rules shrink and as they use faster printing technology like Memjet This technology also has implications for better fabbers, rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing over the next few years.

This could foreshadow some prior to nanofactories style breakthroughs. New near-nanotech could make breakthroughs that can drive cost and applications that cannot be matched by silicon CMOS tech. Ovonic quantum control devices on polymer might have a performance advantage instead of disadvantage versus silicon chips. New nanopatterning systems could get the component sizes down as well.

Super-electronics based on polymer or graphene might be made from far cheaper fabs and far greater flexibility in form factors and cost reductions and even higher volumes.

Better versions or alternatives to this technology might also transform solar photovoltaics.

Its "green" silicon ink for thin-film transistors (TFTs) that achieve the performance of polysilicon transistors, but at a third their price and consuming only 5 percent of the chemicals and 25 percent of the energy of single-crystal silicon. Kovio claimed that radio-frequency identification tags using its silicon ink will drop Kovio's price from 15 cents today to 5 cents by 2008, when Kovio begins volume production of its inkjet-printed RFID tags.

Their thin-film silicon transistors have very high mobilities for a printed device and we can make both p-type and n-type devices for CMOS circuits. Right now their design rules are 20 micron, but they have 10 micron working in the lab, which is where Intel started in 1971. Intel's first microprocessor used just over two thousand transistors: similarly, their first devices for RFID tags will use less than about a thousand transistors when we go into mass production by the end of next year [2008]

Kovio is building its own fab, which uses temperatures too high for plastic substrates (which is why Kovio uses a stainless steel foil substrate), but which does not require the expensive processing equipment and clean-room environment of single-crystal silicon fabs. Silicon ink devices can be fabricated on roll-to-roll printing equipment, which is how Kovio plans to dramatically drop the price of RFID tags and similar applications using all types of flexible electronics.

They can build a printable silicon fab for about $10 million, compared with $1 billion for a traditional silicon fab. They need only about five percent of the materials (one percent of substrate cost and three percent of the cycle time) to create new devices.

By way of comparison, single crystal silicon transistors today can achieve mobilities as high as 600 centimeters squared per volt second (sq cm/Vs), and polysilicon transistors, like those that drive LCD displays, have mobilities of about 100 sq cm/Vs. Unfortunately, there is a big gap between single-crystal silicon and the printable organic transistors that are being demonstrated at dozens of labs worldwide. Organic transistors have dismal electron mobilities of less than 1 sq cm/Vs in contrast with Kovio's silicon ink, which rivals polysilicon with its 80 sq cm/Vs electron mobilities. Most important, silicon ink can produce transistors that are fast enough for RFID and most other electronic interface protocols.

US 9th Appeals Court tosses federal fuel-economy standards

A U.S. appeals court on Thursday threw out the government's new fuel economy standards for many sport-utility vehicles, minivans and pickup trucks in a victory for environmentalists.



Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Thursday that California won't back down from the lawsuit — but will stick to its plan to put tougher standards in place by the 2009 model year despite protests from the auto industry.

Last week, California sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, seeking to force the agency to decide whether California can enact the country's first emissions standards for cars and light trucks.

Nantero NRAM still not commercialized

Nantero NRAM is discussed with the CEO of Nanetero at Hpcwire


NRAM still has significant potential.
NRAM requires only a small number of new manufacturing steps, all of which use existing tools that are present in any production CMOS fab. So NRAM has few hurdles for integration, either as a standalone memory or as an embedded memory. NRAM's scalability, theoretically down to below 5nm, is also unmatched in technologies that are currently under development in production CMOS fabs, as NRAM is.




Copper doped computer memory could be selling in a few years


Making cheaper, stronger and better carbon nanotubes without metal catalysts

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has made a major step forward in reducing the cost of manufacturing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs).

Most manufacturing methods, which use a metal catalyst to form the tubes, have several drawbacks that have impeded development of SWCNTs’ numerous applications. NASA researchers have discovered a simple, safe, and inexpensive method to create SWCNTs without the use of a metal catalyst.

Traditional catalytic arc discharge methods produce an “as prepared” sample with a 30% to 50% SWCNT yield. NASA’s method produces SWCNTs at an average yield of 70%.

Because NASA’s process does not use a metal catalyst, no metal particles need to be removed from the final product. Eliminating the presence of metallic impurities results in the SWCNTs exhibiting higher degradation temperatures (650 °C rather than 500 °C) and eliminates damage to the SWCNTs by the purification process.

Researchers used a helium arc welding process to vaporize an amorphous carbon rod and then form nanotubes by depositing the vapor onto a watercooled carbon cathode. Analysis showed that this process yields bundles, or “ropes,” of single-walled nanotubes at a rate of 2 grams per hour using a single setup.

This process received a Nanotech Briefs Nano 50 award

Hat tip to Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends which also has other links on this topic

Carnival of Space week 29

Reports of Dwave's latest quantum computer demo

Zdnet blogs on the latest quantum computer demo by Dwave Systems

The latest iteration of D-Wave’s chip has 28 qubits (quantum bits), according to Rose. He said they were on track to show a 512 qubit machine next year, and 1024 the year after that. The die has room for a million qubits. But first things first, says Rose. “If we can’t get to 512 qubits by the end of next year, we’re in trouble,” he admitted.

Dwave's press release on the demo and future plans is more optimistic.


At the future of things, Rose takes a tougher stance.

Rose has responded to the criticism saying that major developments have been made in quantum computing systems in the past years. He said that the 28-qubit computer, which will be demonstrated at SC07, will be able to use Dr. Neven's image recognition algorithm to analyze a 300-image database, grouping the objects according to detected similarities. "Our image-matching demonstration, the core of which is too difficult for traditional computers, can automatically extract information from photos-recognizing whether photos contain people, places or things, and then categorize them by visual similarity" – he said.

The actual machine is a bit unweildy at the moment. In fact, it’s about as large as D-Wave’s entire booth, so demos were run remotely via a web service back to the lab. “We’re going to work on making the refrigerator a bit smaller and self-contained,” said Rose, thinking ahead to commercial deployments.

In the picture above you can see a magnified view of the individual qubits on the chip. Each qubit is connected to three of its neighbors. Rose was asked why people were so skeptical of his work. It all comes down to the traditional way of relating discoveries through peer reviewed journals, he explained... He promised. “We’re going to go out to some of the hotbeds of skepticism” in the coming year, he said, with the goal of silencing the nay-sayers. They might even file a paper or two, but it didn’t seem to be a priority.

Apparently the US Patent and Trademark office is convinced, having granted the company dozens of patents on the technology. Dozens more are pending. “We have more [quantum computing] patents than any other company in the world,” said Rose.

Neil Gershenfeld’s Keynote speech from SC07 conference


Computers come in cases -> computers come in rolls, buckets
Compilers optimize programs -> optimizations program compilers
Internetworking -> interdevice interworking
Programs can describe things -> programs can be things


Desktop supercomputers

SiCortex and Scalable Servers Corporation have each packaged something like a server cluster into a single box, to produce what each hopes will be a commercially viable desktop supercomputer.


The new SiCortex SC072 - code-named "Catapult" - fits 72 processors into a deskside unit that starts at less than $15,000. With a total of 72 processors, 48 GB memory, and 3 PCIexpress ports, the Catapult draws less than 200 watts of power and fits in standard PC chassis.

Scalable Servers Corporation has its flexBLADE platform

Capable of a wide range of configurations, the versatile flexBLADE is comprised of a single chassis form factor with up to 5 dual socket blades, configurable as a cluster, SMP, hybrid-combination or small server farm. Supporting the full range Next Generation AMD Opteron processors, the platform can scale from a cool and quiet, low power 1500 watt departmental solution, up to a robustly configured 3000 watt compute powerhouse. The flexBLADE also supports scaling out beyond standard dual socket to quad socket SMP, FAT NODE, configurations with ample memory support (16 DIMM slots per node, or 80 total DIMM Slots per chassis), storage (up to 10-2.5" and 14-3.5" disks), and a PCIe x16 slot per blade which allows multiple graphics heads per platform. Built-in networking includes 10 or 20 Gigabit InfiniBand, 10 Gigabit and 1 Gigabit Ethernet with full system management that allows the flexBLADE platform a wide range of configurations to match performance and cost requirements.

SiCortex also has the SC5832, which has a cluster of 972 nodes, each having six processors, for a total of 5,832 processors. Each processor draws a paltry 600 milliwatts of juice. The chassis can hold up to 8 TB of main memory, and the theoretical peak performance is 5.8 TFlops.

The whole cabinet only draws 18 kilowatts of electricity. Nodes communicate directly over a passive copper backplane. It’s air cooled, and each node runs a fairly standard Linux kernel. It comes pre-installed with a full suite of development software including MPI, TAU, Vampir, TotalView, and more.

November 14, 2007

Interesting theory of everything

A very interesting and relatively simple theory of everything (including gravity) The theory should be testable with new particle colliders.

E8 polytope

All fields of the standard model and gravity are unifed as an E8 principal bundle
connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.

Article from the Telegraph




The E8 theory is being discussed on physics forums.

E8 theory is predictive (that is to say falsifiable) because it has no free parameters to adjust. It will say what it will say---and if that is shown to be wrong, then the theory's wrong. As development proceeds changes might be made to the action and to the way E8 symmetry is broken, but a good many features are already locked in as unalterable predictions. Like the 18 new particles---which might serve to resolve the astrophysical dark---or might serve to trip the theory up!

E8 theory predicts what reactions are allowed for both the new and the already observed standard particles. So even though it is just taking shape the theory is already offering the prospect of something experimentalists can look for. Traditionally this is what hep-th is supposed to do.

Other discussions

and more discussion here

China taking leadership in renewable power deployment

Worldwatch indicates that China will likely achieve—and may even exceed—its target to obtain 15 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020. If China’s commitment to diversifying its energy supply and becoming a global leader in renewables manufacturing persists, renewable energy could provide over 30 percent of the nation’s energy by 2050.

China’s carbon dioxide emissions are on the rise and are expected to exceed total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions shortly, although Chinese per-capita emissions remain about one-sixth those of the United States.


A combination of ambitious targets supported by strong government policies and the manufacturing prowess of the Chinese may enable China to “leapfrog” so-called industrialized nations in renewable technology in the years immediately ahead

The article indicates that nuclear energy could provide about 5% of china's power needs. I think that target will be reached in 2020 (with 50-70 GW of nuclear power). I think China will exceed that percentage with around 100 more nuclear plants from 2020-2030 (up to 10-15% of electricity) and then 200-400 more nuclear plants from 2030-2050 (up to 30-40% of electricity.

32 megajoule rail gun delivered for naval testing


Eight and 9-megajoule rail guns have been fired before, but providing 3 million amps of power per shot has been a limitation. At 32 megajoules, this new system appears to be the most powerful rail gun ever built, and the Office of Naval Research is installing additional capacitors at the Dahlgren facility to support it. The planned 64-megajoule weapon, if it’s ever built, could require even more power—a staggering 6 million amps.

The Navy’s electrically-propelled DDG 100 Destroyer, Chaboki says, is a prime candidate for the final 64-megajoule system. Around 72 megawatts (MW) of the vessel’s power can be used for propulsion. But during combat, the destroyer’s speed could be brought down, freeing up energy for a rail gun. Chaboki calculates that firing the 64-megajoule weapon six times per minute would require 16 MW of power, which would be supplied by either onboard capacitors or pulsed alternators.

Effective rail guns will require a major breakthrough in materials between now and 2020, to keep the guns themselves from being shredded by each high-velocity barrage.

There was a 2003 analysis of using railguns for orbital launches.

For launch to orbit, even long launchers (>1000 m) would need to operate at accelerations >1000 gees to reach the required velocities, so that it would only be possible to launch rugged payloads, such as fuel, water, and material. A railgun system concept is described here and technology development issues are identified. Estimated launch costs could be attractively low (<$600/kg) compared with the Space Shuttle (>$20 000/kg), provided that acceptable launch rates can be achieved.

A european space agency study of rail guns for space launches


Ram accelerators would be cheaper and quicker to develop for gun launching payloads into space.

Superthread carbon nanotubes would be the kind of material needed to help reinforce the rail gun

There is other progress being made on better materials including nanograin metals.

Staffing an expanding nuclear industry





Overcoming the challenges of the workforce issues and knowledge maintenance.

US Nuclear industry staffing levels




Dealing with staffing reductions.




November 13, 2007

Other progress in quantum computing

Other Quantum computer progress discussed at SC07



Big nuclear power plans from China, India and Russia

India's president talking about an energy independence plan.

Currently, power generation capacity in India stands at 130,000 MW, but this is forecasted to increase to 400,000 MW by 2030. To achieve this massive boost in output, a range of different technologies will be required including large scale solar farms, wind farms, nuclear power plants, solid biomass and municipal waste. Power generated from renewable energy sources is hoped to increase from five percent today to twenty five percent by 2030.

China's projected energy plans to 2020 mix looks far different than many project. China would have about 35% power from non-fossil fuel sources in 2020. 270GW Hydro, 40GW nuclear, 123GW from renewables if targets are reached. 42% of power would be from non-coal sources if natural gas usage is increased as projected

Some analysts say China will build 300 [nuclear plants] more by the middle of the century.

Russia has big nuclear plans.

About 15 percent of Russia's electricity comes from nuclear power. Putin wants to increase that to 25 percent or more by 2030. it also hopes to export as many as 60 plants in the next two decades. To facilitate the crash expansion, the Kremlin in the summer of 2007, ordered more than 30 nuclear-related companies to amalgamate into a single state-owned behemoth, which will control every stage of civil atomic engineering from uranium mining to construction and export of power stations to fuel enrichment to decommissioning old reactors.The new nuclear giant, to be called Atomenergoprom (Atomic Energy Industry Complex), is similar to other conglomerates that the Putin government has created and now runs in branches such as aircraft production, arms exports, electricity, and gas.


One teraflop AMD R680 GPGPU due in Q1 2008

More speculation on a US-Iran war

DC-based futurists and analysts pick top 12 areas for innovation by 2025

DC-based research and consulting firm Social Technologies released a series of 12 briefs on their top 12 areas for high impact technology innovation through 2025.

1. Personalized medicine [I agree and have covered personal genomics ]
2. Distributed energy (DE) [Here I think nuclear energy has more potential]
3. Pervasive computing [Fully realizing smart phone and wireless device potential]
4. Nanomaterials [I have written about new carbon nanotube factories and a lot on "active nanosystems", all of the advanced nanotechnology for which my site is named]
5. Biomarkers for health [I have been writing about my proposals for widespread biomarker tracking and part 2 of the biomarker proposal]
6. Biofuels [A bridging technology where electrification of transportation is delayed or less suitable]
7. Advanced manufacturing [rapid prototyping, rapid manufacturing, reel to reel systems, nanofactories]
8. Universal water [I have been covering desalination]
9. Carbon management [Shifting to lower carbon technology like nuclear power and wind power would be better than sequestering]
10. Engineered agriculture [I have been covering aquaculture, genetic engineering for crops, stem cell meat factories, and high rise green houses]
11. Security and tracking [I have tracked advancing imaging technology, surveillance technology, gigapixels, terapixels, sensors, spectrum analysis, lidar, persistent monitoring, RFIDs etc...]
12. Advanced transportation [I have covered electric bikes and scooters, platooning of vehicles, dual mode transportation, electric cars, high efficiency vehicles, advanced truck and diesel systems, transitioning from oil etc...]

Part 2: Widespread use of biomarker tests




There are
51 tests for monitoring glucose for diabetics $100

There is work on lung cancer blood tests.









November 12, 2007

Status of air taxi services














Finex steel process better for environment and lower cost


Finex steel process compared to blast furnace



Energy savings from Finex processes








Finex powerpoint detailing energy efficiency and pollution reduction

A case in technological acceleration: faster communication makes higher resolution telescope



Possible cloning of primate embryos










Two Stem cells advances: one for vascular treatment another for controlled release of cells

South Korean scientists said Monday they used human embryonic stem cells to treat mice suffering from a vascular disease, in an experiment that could lead to cures for strokes and other ailments.

The stem cells were differentiated into blood vessels that were grafted onto the animals afflicted with ischemia. Ischemia is caused by a shortage of blood to a part of the body, stemming from the constriction of blood vessels. Of the 11 mice treated, four developed new vascular cells that fully revived the damaged limb, while four suffered from a relatively mild case of necrosis. Three lost their legs due to the cut-off of blood flow. 10 other mice given alternative treatment failed to recover.


“We have developed a scaffold for stem cell culture that can degrade in the body at a controlled rate,” said lead researcher Ravi Kane, professor of chemical and biological engineering. “With this level of control we can foster the growth of stem cells in the scaffold and direct how, when, and where we want them to be released in the body.”

Kane and his collaborators, which include the author of the paper and former Rensselaer graduate student Randolph Ashton, created the device from a material known as alginate. Alginate is a complex carbohydrate found naturally in brown seaweed. When mixed with calcium, alginate gels into a rigid, three-dimensional mesh.

The device could have wide-ranging potential for use in regenerative medicine, Kane explains. For example, the scaffolds could one day be used in the human body to release stem cells directly into injured tissue. Kane and his colleagues hope that the scaffold could eventually be used for medical therapies such as releasing healthy bone stem cells right at the site of a broken bone, or releasing neural stem cells in the brain where cells have been killed by diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

In order to control the degradation of the alginate scaffold, the researchers encapsulated varying amounts of alginate lyase into microscale beads, called microspheres. The microspheres containing the alginate lyase were then encapsulated into the larger alginate scaffolds along with the stem cells. As the microspheres degraded, the alginate lyase enzyme was released into the larger alginate scaffold and slowly began to eat away at its surface, releasing the healthy stem cells in a controlled fashion.

Dwave System 28 qubit system coverage

Nanowerk covers the Dwave systems demo of a 28 qubit quantum computer system.





EEtimes discusses Dwave's collaboration with Google's expert on its forthcoming search-by-image capability--acquired by Google last year when it bought Neven Vision--D-Wave Systems Inc. (Vancouver, B.C.) will demonstrate how quantum computers can perform Neven-based image-recognition tasks at speeds rivaling those of humans.

We have been collaborating with Hartmut Neven, founder of the image-recognition company, Neven Vision, just after Google acquired it last year," said Rose. "Neven's original algorithms had to make many compromises on how it did things--since ordinary computers can't do things the way the brain does. But we believe that our quantum computer algorithms are not all that different from the way the brain solves image-matching problems, so we were able to simplify Neven's algorithms and get superior results."

For the demonstration, the D-Wave quantum computer analyzes a 300-image data base, cataloging the similarities among photos. The results of that comparison are then displayed on a two-dimensional grid, where similar objects are grouped together.

"We hope to have our commercial architecture ready by mid-2008," said Rose. "It will house enough qbits to begin solving mathematical problems that are intractable today. D-Wave's current prototypes are not amenable to scaling up to hundred of qbits, but with the knowledge we've gained over the last year, we feel that the last remaining technical obstacles to life-size quantum computers have been removed."

Cnet also has coverage

D-Wave has not had its system externally validated, said Rose, because "there is only one meaningful measure of validation for a technology like this: does it outperform the systems people are using today in a metric that they care about? We are getting very close to achieving this objective."

I have extensive coverage of quantum computers

Much of that coverage is about Dwave systems

Possible Disruptive technologies for supercomputers

First introduced at SC06 as the Exotic Technologies Initiative, the Disruptive Technologies activity will return to SC07. Each year, DT will serve as a forum for examining those technologies that may significantly reshape the world of HPC in the next five to fifteen years, but which are not common in today's systems.

A disruptive technology is a technological innovation or product that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or product in the marketplace. This year's SC07 (supercomputer 07) showcase will feature quantum computing, optical interconnects, CMOS photonics, carbon nanotube memory (Nantero NRAM), and software for massively-parallel multicore processors.

IBM Research has developed an Optical Printed Circuit Board technology consisting of chip-like optical transceivers (currently supporting 16+16 optical channels at 12.5Gbps each) and polymer waveguides on circuit cards.
Their technology would be disruptive in that it would replace today’s high cost optical modules based on glass fiber technology with mass manufacturable "optical printed circuit boards." for short backplane and card level links. Although polymer based waveguides have higher losses than glass fiber technology, the ability to use lithographic processes to mass produce this technology coupled with the use of chip like optical components will allow a low cost solution for this ultra-short interconnect application. They are working to develop a supplier ecosystem to mature this technology in the next 5 to 7 years.

I have already been covering the Dwave systems quantum computer and Nantero NRAM.

Luxtera developed a breakthrough nanophotonic technology that enables manipulation of both photons and electrons on a single semiconductor CMOS die and can be produced in high-volume, low-cost mainstream CMOS processes. This breakthrough silicon photonics technology enables connection of fiberoptic cable directly to a silicon die.

ETI has developed a disruptive technology for many-core system software and logic co-verification. A complete system may contain many such chips (e.g. 64-bit 160 cores on a chip and many chips in a system in the case of the IBM Cyclops-64 supercomputer).

Near term longevity and best bets for the longer term

What can be done now for longevity ? And what are the best and under-funded opportunities for the future ?

In terms of longevity now or very near
1. don't eat garbage and exercise
Some sites on longevity enhancing lifestyle that has more chance of longevity

2. There seems to be some promise with calorie restriction (but many people are unable to incorporate it into their lifestyles.). There is an alternate days of semi-fasting approach as well, which could be easier to adopt. There is work on drugs and gene therapy to achieve these effects without lifestyle modification
Calorie restriction linked to mitochondria one of the seven pillars of SENS

So it seems that SENS is an avenue worth pursuing even based on current and near term work and research.

3. Take the tests needed to detect cancer and heart disease early and then make the lifestyle changes or take the necessary medical interventions. Find out your own higher risks based on family history.

4. Look at modifying the environment (air polluition) and public health to reduce chronic disease

However, besides the near term steps for important small gains I also look at the high potential and underfunded opportunities. This is where a little more effort can bring a lot more rewards. So first two on the list are SENS and molecular manufacturing.

I also try to find overlooked ways to use old or near term technology and processes. An example is my proposal for devices to gather a lot more data minable medical data for research and for the development of personalized medicine.

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