News Bytes of the Week--Smoldering Hawaiian volcano an ongoing geologic hottie

Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano ranks among the world's most active volcanoes and may even top the list.
Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, J. Kauahikaua

Hawaiian volcano letting off steam (not to mention sulfur dioxide and lava)
Kilauea Volcano on Hawaii's largest island piped up with explosive eruptions and toxic sulfur dioxide emissions, the latest sign of unrest in the crater's turbulent history. Now U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists are scrambling to predict the volcano's next move and whether neighboring villagers are in harm's way. Also, the National Park Service has closed indefinitely Crater Rim Drive, which runs through the south caldera area. Kilauea has been the site of 34 eruptions since 1952, and eruptive activity has been continuous along its east rift zone since January 1983. All told, Kilauea ranks among the world's most active volcanoes and may even top the list, scientists say. As of Monday, the volcano was active both at its summit (where the Halema`uma`u vent has been spewing hot ash, steam and gas, elevating sulfur dioxide emission rates and seismic tremor levels) and at the coast (where lava continued to flow into the ocean), according to the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. The volcano is also the site of a national park, although sightseers might want to keep their distance until Kilauea cools off.

The clockwork employee? Biometric punch clock scans body parts
"Punching the clock" will soon take on new meaning as companies adopt biometric devices that check palm- and fingerprints to keep tabs on their employees. Business execs say that biometrics (a group of technologies that scan and store information about body parts unique to each person—including fingers, palms or eyes) help them more precisely log the comings and goings of workers, and that this information can automatically be sent to payroll systems to streamline that process. New York City–based technology consulting firm International Biometric Group, LLC, estimates that biometric device sales last year totaled $635 million, and projects revenues will exceed $1 billion by 2011, according to the Associated Press, which also reports that the Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's franchises as well as Hilton Hotels and the U.S. Marine Corps have purchased biometrics from manufacturer Ingersoll–Rand Security Technologies. In New York City, the Office of Payroll Administration has a $181.1-million contract through 2009 with the Science Applications International Corporation to install a biometric timekeeping system called CityTime, The New York Times reports. City officials say the new system will save taxpayers $60 million annually by modernizing its existing record-keeping system (which required a full-time timekeeper for every 100 to 250 employees). But not everyone's on board. Critics say the technology is intrusive and an invasion of privacy, not to mention a potential purveyor of germs, because so many people will stick their germ-coated fingers or palms in them.

Move over, Edison, historians uncover oldest voice recording—and it's not yours
Until today, most of the free world believed Thomas Alva Edison was the first person to make a sound recording when he developed the phonograph in 1877 and created an audible archive of himself reciting "Mary had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil. But, it turns out that a Frenchman beat him to the chase. The New York Times reports that scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California recently discovered that a piece of paper coated with oil lamp smoke, which dated back to 1860 and for years had been in a Paris archive, actually had a 10-second recording etched into it. When the researchers converted the etchings into sound with optical-imaging technology, they heard a female voice crooning a French folk song. Maryland-based audio historian David Giovannoni tracked down and unveiled the recording—made by French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Giovannoni said today at Stanford University that the inventor was probably trying to render a visual representation of sound by creating a device called a phonautogram. The machine, which could document sound to create a paper record but did not have playback capabilities, consisted of a barrel-like recording horn connected to a stylus (like that on a phonograph or record player). It would take Edison's invention 17 years later to play back recorded sound. (The New York Times, Reuters)

Something to sniff at: You can smell danger
Apparently your nose can do more than guide you toward a fresh pie cooling on a windowsill. It can also be trained to sense danger. Researchers at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago report in Science that 12 volunteers had trouble discerning between two "grassy" scents—until, that is, they were subjected to a mild electric shock after sniffing at one of them. Once jolted, the subjects easily differentiated between the aromas, illustrating, the scientists say, our evolutionary ability to pick up cues important to survival from a flood of sensory information. They note that scans of the volunteers before and after the experiment showed clear alterations in their brains' olfactory centers. (BBC, Chicago Tribune)

Silicon circuits take a stretch
Don't get bent out of shape over new research that shows how to stretch, bend and fold integrated silicon circuits. Materials scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign report in Science that they sandwiched thin ribbons of silicon between taut pieces of rubber-like plastic that were then allowed to snap back to their original size, causing the silicon to crumple [see video below]. Because of the newfound slack in the silicon strips, the plastic circuits could stretch and twist while still carrying electricity, the group says. If researchers can stretch the technology to its logical limit, they might be able to stuff computers into everything from silk shirts to surgical gloves. (Science)

Feds Agree to Toxicity Tests That Cut Animal Testing

ANIMAL'S BEST FRIEND: Government scientists want to make better use of robotic equipment to conduct in vitro testing of human cells and cellular components to identify chemicals with toxic effects and cut back on their use of lab animals.
Courtesy of NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute

Rodents and primates around the world can breathe a little easier. Ditto animal rights activists who have long opposed testing drugs and conducting other experiments on animals. Top officials from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Thursday announced a five-year deal promising to share technology, information and other resources that will improve the toxicity testing of chemical compounds used in food, medicine and other products using robots rather than lab animals.

This joint effort will include experts from the NIH National Toxicology Program (NTP), high-speed, automated screening robots at the NIH Chemical Genomics Center and computational toxicology capabilities available at the EPA Office of Research and Development's National Center for Computational Toxicology (NCCT).

"Today we want to report to you this remarkable collaboration," Elias Zerhouni, director of the NIH, said during a teleconference with reporters held to announce the groundbreaking agreement. He added that the effort—designed to expand the use of in vitro testing of human cells and cellular components to identify chemicals with toxic effects—represents the "birth of a new approach to a crucial problem in public health."

The agencies are hoping to coordinate their resources to better identify toxicity pathways, select chemicals for testing, analyze and interpret data, and promote their findings to scientific and regulatory communities. This is expected to generate data more relevant to humans, expand the number of chemicals tested and reduce the time, money and number of animals involved in current lab studies. The collective budget is yet to be determined, the agencies say.

Animal testing has always been a sore point for scientists and animal-rights advocates, following some high-profile cases of mistreatment of lab animals, such as monkeys discovered in 1981 at the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Md., in deplorable conditions. One of the primary ways to test the toxicology of a compound has been to inject it into a lab animal, see if the animal gets sick, and then conduct an autopsy to observe the damage done to their internal organs. (For more on this, click here. Additional information on animal rights legislation can be found here.)

Scientists present at the news conference agreed that animal testing has yielded some important medical breakthroughs. But Robert Kavlock, director of the NCCT, said that it also is expensive, inefficient and is not always an accurate indicator of how a substance will affect humans.

"The desire here is to see if we could do better," said Francis Collins, director of the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute. He said the federal government is exploring the feasibility of using high-throughput assays to allow scientists to "look at toxicology in a totally new way."

"The news here is the capacity to test many thousands of compounds, something we haven't had until this collaboration," Samuel Wilson, acting director of the NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and NTP, said at the press conference. The new research model would allow scientists to test 100,000 compounds in 1,500 different concentrations in about two days compared with years if the testing was done on animals. This sort of "high-throughput" testing will enable researchers to generate more data relevant to humans, and at the same time reduce the amount of animal experimentation. The cross-species extrapolation from animals to humans is "not always as precise as it should be," Wilson said. "This collaboration is a milestone because it gives us the ability to apply a new generation of approaches to determining toxicities."

The scientists were unable to provide a specific time frame for when the technology might produce significant results or predict how many fewer animals would be used in testing if their effort is a success. They stressed that they plan to move quickly to test the new technology and reduce animal testing as soon and as much as possible.

But they acknowledged that some animal testing will continue at least until the technology proves its mettle in large-scale studies or until Congress passes a substance regulation act similar to the European Union's (E.U.) Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals, or (REACH), which regulates chemicals and their safe use. It is set to take effect in March 2009 and bans such testing.

The officials noted that despite the E.U.'s pending ban, it is unclear whether scientists in Europe have access alternative methods of toxicology testing. Wilson noted that the technology being tested by the EPA and NIH is not yet available in the E.U.

For now, NIH chief Zerhouni said, animal testing will continue in the U.S. in conjunction with the new high-speed, automated screening technology. There are several other approaches under development that would also allow relatively quick, inexpensive testing of a large number of compounds and cells simultaneously. "We plan to use all of these," Christopher Austin, director of the NIH's Chemical Genomics Center, said at the news conference.

As ScientificAmerican.com reported in December, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., the University of California, Berkeley, and Solidus Biosciences, Inc. (a biotech company located at the Rensselaer Incubator Program for start-up businesses) have developed biochips—called MetaChip and DataChip—that mimic what the body does when it ingests a drug. MetaChip is actually a glass slide dotted with 20-nanoliter droplets—each 20 billionths of a liter—of a solution containing human liver enzymes; DataChip is a slide lined with droplets containing cell cultures from the bladder, kidney or liver. Scientists can test the safety of a chemical by putting drops of it onto these slides and measuring the culture's growth or shrinkage over time.

These biochips are used with a high-throughput microarray spotter machine that places the liquid enzyme dots on the slides. The next step involves an optical assay system consisting of a camera connected to a fluorescent light source to take a digital image of the cell culture and highlight living and dead cells. Austin noted, however, that MetaChip and DataChip are not currently capable of handling the volume of testing that the government wants to conduct.

News Bytes of the Week--Can Money Make You Happy?

Money may not buy love, but it can buy happiness…
The catch is: you have to spend it on someone else. Researchers at the University of British Columbia (U.B.C.) and Harvard Business School report in Science that people who lavish gifts on others and give to charity are happier than their peers. As part of the study, U.B.C. psychologists gave volunteers a wad of cash to spend; half of them were told to splurge on themselves and the other half to spend it on others. The givers rated themselves as being happier, on average, than the self-spenders. The findings mesh with those of a Harvard B-school survey of 16 people who were asked to measure their happiness before and after receiving cash bonuses. Those who spent more of their loot on others rated themselves as happier than their co-workers who had failed to spread the wealth. "These findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations, as little as $5," says study author and U.B.C. psychologist Elizabeth Dunn, "may be enough to produce real gains in happiness on a given day." (Boston Globe, The New York Times' Tierney Lab)

Truth be told: U.S. intelligence warned fMRIs not reliable as lie detectors
Can brain imaging really tell you whether a person is lying? The U.S. intelligence community is banking on it, but a Pennsylvania State University researcher isn't so sure. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), routinely used by neurosurgeons to scan for brain tumors and other disorders, has gained popularity in the intelligence community as a tool for identifying potential terrorists and detecting whether they're lying during interrogation. The growing use of fMRI is not surprising given the limited reliability of traditional polygraph tests, Jonathan Marks, associate professor of bioethics, humanities and law at Penn State in University Park, Pa., says in the American Journal of Law and Medicine. Unlike a polygraph, an fMRI uses powerful magnetic fields to detect tiny changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain that are believed to be signatures of cognitive processes. But he questions whether fMRI scans are reliable markers of veracity. He reports that fMRIs are open to broad interpretation and, as such, could provide images that suggest but do not really confirm fibbing, which could prompt more aggressive interrogation tactics of innocent victims.

Picture perfect: A digital camera with thousands of lenses
If you think the pix you snap on your plain old single-lens digital camera are sharp, imagine what they'd look like if shot using a camera bristling with thousands of lenses. A team of Stanford University scientists is developing a prototype digital camera with a multi-aperture image sensor that could, in effect, place up to 12,616 digital cameras (each with its own lens) on a computer chip. Each of these minicameras would be capable of focusing on different areas of a subject, producing a photo in which almost everything, near or far, is in focus, the researchers report in IEEE ISSCC Digest of Technical Papers. In fact, each point would be captured by at least four of the chip's minicams, producing overlapping views, each from a slightly different perspective, just as the left eye sees things differently than the right one does. In addition to being able to create supersharp three-dimensional images, these multi-lens cameras would also be able to track the exact distances of each subject in the photo from the camera. This information could lead to improvements in a number of related technologies, including facial recognition systems used for security purposes, biological imaging and, in 3-D: printing, the creation of objects to inhabit virtual worlds and building modeling. Such an advance would also pave the way for affordable gigapixel cameras with 140 times as many pixels as today's high-end, seven-megapixel cameras.

There's nothing glacial about the global glacier meltdown
The U.S.'s Glacier National Park may find itself in need of a new name if present melting rates continue to accelerate. The World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich in Switzerland has found that the pace of glacial melting has more than doubled since 2004. With much of the world—particularly developing countries—dependent on the water from glaciers, such shrinkage may serve as a "canary a the coal mine," according to Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme, which has funded the work since 1980. The glaciers of Europe have been particularly hard hit, with Norway's Breidalblikkbrea glacier leading the retreat. (AFP, The Guardian)

One of China's biggest exports to U.S.: Pollution
NASA's Terra satellite has tracked the haze from forest fires, car exhaust and industrial pollution in China and other countries of eastern Asia as it makes its way to the U.S. west coast. The scientists estimate that a full 15 percent of smog blanketing Pacific coast cities such as Los Angeles and Vancouver is made in China. In fact, nearly 10 billion pounds (4.5 million metric tons) of pollution wafted over the west coast of North America from 2002 to 2005. The air stream over the Pacific carries its heaviest load during spring before dying down in summer. (NASA)

Sweet: Controlling insulin response may be key to increased life span
Could insulin be the key to longer life? Harvard Medical School researchers report this week in the journal Cell that earthworms (which have genomes similar to humans) they engineered to respond less readily to insulin lived 50 percent longer than normal worms. The researchers determined that insulin (a hormone secreted by the human pancreas that triggers the breakdown of blood sugar) inhibits the function of one of the worm's master genes, SKN-1, which controls a pathway that helps to fight off free radicals (highly reactive chemicals that can damage tissue). When the worm's response to insulin was blunted, SKN-1 kicked into gear, staving off damage and extending its life span. Insulin has also been found to inhibit the forkhead gene family FOXO, which in humans controls the body's response to various types of stress—a factor that has also been linked to accelerated aging (and heightened risk for diseases including cancer). The researchers next plan to study the relationship between insulin and the mammalian version of SKN-1. If confirmed, a drug targeting this gene could some day supplant caloric restriction as an anti-aging regimen. And wouldn't that make us all happier (and fuller)? (The Daily Telegraph)

News Bytes of the Week--Showy send-off for stealth fighter

FAREWELL FLIGHT: An F-117A Nighthawk, it's belly painted in bold red, white and blue stripes, flies overhead during a ceremony at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base this week marking the end of an era as the original stealth fighter is retired to make way for a new generation of cutting-edge aircraft.
USAF

Secret's out: U.S. Air Force stealth flies into the sunset
The F-117A Nighthawk—the original stealth fighter aircraft, which made its first test flight in 1981—may have been developed in secrecy, but the U.S. Air Force gave the radar-defying combat craft a very public send-off this week at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A ceremony held to bid adieu to the aging fighter concluded with a flashy flyby of one of the retiring jets, its giant underbelly painted red, white and blue. The Air Force says that it would rather spend its funding on the next generation of aircraft, including the B-2 Spirit, F-22 Raptor and soon-to-be-fielded F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. These new planes are more adept and less expensive to fly and maintain than the retiring F-117A, according to the Air Force. The old Nighthawks will be placed in storage at an airfield in the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, where the jets flew in total secrecy and only at night until November 1988. The Cold War–era Nighthawks, nearly completely covered with a radar absorbing material, were sent into action in 1989's brief skirmish in Panama and again in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, where they flew nearly 1,300 sorties over Iraq and Kuwait (2 percent of the total combat missions), striking 40 percent of the most highly defended, strategic targets. No teary farewell speeches at this retirement party, though; the once mighty aircraft will shortly have their wings and tails clipped and then be stored in protective hangars. Sorry, conspiracy theorists, there are no plans to stash them in Area 51.
(Air Force)

"Organic" soaps contain cancer-causing chemical
So much for "natural" or "organic" being healthier. Consumers of pricey, so-called organic and natural products may have had the gut feeling they were being duped for some time, but now there's proof. A new study by the Minnesota-based Organic Consumers Association proved that 47 of 100 "natural" or "organic" soaps, shampoos and cleaning products contain 1,4-dioxane—a by-product of chemical soap softeners. The cancer-causing compound can be avoided—by using coconut or other plant oils in lieu of the chemicals—but at a cost. "We need standards," study author David Steinberg told the Los Angeles Times. "Consumers walk into a health food store or natural product supermarket with the expectation that the produce they purchase will be natural or safer than what they could purchase at the drugstore or supermarket." The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates cosmetics, has said that levels such as those detected here do not pose a risk, though manufacturers are urged to reduce them as much as possible. And there is no standard for what constitutes "natural" or "organic" in personal care products.
(Organic Consumers Association; Los Angeles Times)


Will doctors one day be able to test drugs on digital patients?
University College London scientists recently reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society that they used supercomputing power to create "virtual physiological humans" (VPH) to serve as test subjects for the new HIV drug saquinavir (designed to block one of the virus's key proteins). Their goal: to one day be able to create a unique VPH for each HIV patient on which doctors could test different meds to determine their potential effects (on the organs, tissues and cells of real patients) and use the info to tailor the best treatments. Needless to say, such a move would be a dramatic improvement over today's testing methods, which largely involve trial and error because doctors have no way to match the drugs to the profile of the virus as it changes in individual patients. The human body is so complex that the scientists say they had to tap into several supercomputers running off national computer networks comprising both the U.K.'s National Grid Service and the U.S. TeraGrid to summon enough juice for the task. No word on when this testing method might be available for everyday use, though it's unlikely it will be anytime soon.
(Journal of the American Chemical Society)

Wheat fungus threatens billions with starvation
A wheat fungus first identified in Uganda in 1999 has spread to the wheat growing regions of Iran, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The wheat stem rust fungus could infect as much as 80 percent of wheat crops in central Asia and the Indian subcontinent in the near future, as it is carried by wind over vast distances. "The fungus is spreading rapidly and could seriously lower wheat production in countries at direct risk," said Shivaji Pandey, director of the FAO's Plant Production and Protection Division. With bread and other cereal prices already at record highs, the threat of famine is real. Scientists are racing to breed a strain of fungus-resistant wheat but none has yet been discovered despite concerns over the disease's steady spread since it was first discovered. Developing such resistant strains can take years.
(FAO release; Telegraph)

EPA nixes science again, this time on ozone
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this week tightened its standards for acceptable levels of ozone pollution but only from 80 to 75 parts per billion. Ground level ozone, or smog, caused by the exhaust from vehicle tailpipes and other emissions damages the heart and lungs. EPA scientists had recommended that the standard be set at 60 ppb, but President Bush intervened to ensure that the ozone limit was set no lower than 75 ppb despite previous EPA statements on the pollutant's harmful effects. According to a memo obtained by The Washington Post, government lawyers including U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement have warned the White House that the new rules contradict the EPA's past testimony to the Supreme Court and raise other legal issues.
(The Washington Post; EPA; New standard)

Of mice and men: Unsung Microsoft co-founder on quest to map human, mouse brains
Coming to you free online: a navigable genetic map of the human brain. Many people might be surprised to learn that Bill Gates wasn't the only one behind the Microsoft mega-empire. And now his decidedly less prominent co-founder, Paul Allen, is embarking on a new four-year project to create a digital map of gene activity in different parts of the human brain that will be available free of charge to anyone online. Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle plan to a map a composite of the brains of six or seven recently deceased mentally healthy people. Allen envisions the map as a tool designed to help researchers improve their understanding of complex brain disorders, potentially paving the way for new therapies down the road. The institute also announced plans to create an atlas of a developing mouse brain and the mouse spinal cord.
(MSNBC)


Painkillers, diet drug may also affect memory and learning
A new study in Neuron says that a new class of painkillers may dull memory as well as pain. The finding may also have implications for the diet drug rimonabant, sold as Acomplia in Europe, which targets the same brain receptor (TRPV1). Study author Julie Kauer, a Brown University pharmacologist, says that when researchers blocked TRPV1 receptors in rat brain tissue, the connections between neurons weakened, which is a condition associated with memory and learning difficulties. Scientists previously believed that TRPV1 was only implicated in pain, but Kauer says the new research indicates that it may have broader functions; in addition to memory and learning, she speculates that it may also be responsible for psychiatric disruptions (such as suicidal thoughts and depression) that have been linked to Acomplia. The diet drug has not been approved for use in the U.S., and chances are this new information won't help on that score.
(Reuters)

Gross Anatomy Via Your Computer

Gross Anatomy Via Your Computer [Slideshow]

New software peels back the skin for a 3-D adventure of the human body

THE VISIBLE BODY: New software visualizes the human body using sophisticated computer graphics to show how more than 1,700 anatomical structures--including major organs and systems--work together.
Courtesy of Argosy Publishing

Offering more depth (literally) than any anatomy textbook can deliver, the Visible Body is a Web-based 3-D interactive model of the human body available for free to students, educators and health and medical professionals. The software, developed by Newton, Mass.-based Argosy Publishing, visualizes the human body using sophisticated computer graphics to show how more than 1,700 anatomical structures--including major organs and systems--work together.

The images at times isolate different organs or body parts to enhance their clarity, which is useful when studying anatomy or explaining an injury. The software, downloaded using Internet Explorer with Macromedia Flash and Anark Client plug-ins, allows the images to be rotated in a 3-D, 360-degree view. Future versions of the software are expected to include different human models as well as medical pathology and therapy information, so that consumers can get a deeper understanding of their conditions and available treatments.

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DIGESTION IN 3-D: | Slide 1 of 6

Visible Body offers a Web-based 3-D interactive model of the human body, including the digestive tract and most of the accessory organs as well as the relationships between the digestive system and the muscular, nervous and circulatory systems.

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SHAKE ON IT?: | Slide 2 of 6

The relationships of the veins, arteries and nerves of the arm are established in this view. The deep palmar arches of the hand, and the veins of the cubital fossa are clearly shown. The femoral nerve, artery and vein and their significant branches are also shown passing over the pubis bone of the bony pelvis.

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NERVOUS?: | Slide 3 of 6

This posterior view of the nervous system helps to convey the system's complexity. Depicted are both the central nervous system (cerebrum, cerebellum, spinal cord, and all twelve of the cranial nerves) and the peripheral nervous system. This image also includes the major plexuses (brachial, lumbosacral).

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DRACULA'S FAVORITE SPOT: | Slide 4 of 6

This view illustrates the complex relationships of the brachial plexus with the auxiliary artery and vein, as well as the delicate interplay of the nerves and vasculature of the neck and head.

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RELATIONSHIPS OF THE HEART: | Slide 5 of 6

The heart, nestled just under the body of the sternum, has relationships to various other structures, including the internal thoracic (internal mammary) artery and vein, portions of the azygos system, the left bronchial tree, and the vagus nerve with its recurrent laryngeal branch.

Enlarge Image

SHOWING SOME BACKBONE: | Slide 6 of 6

The nervous system radiates outward from the spinal cord the nerves often accompanying arteries and veins. There are 31 pairs of spinal nerves, consisting of cervical, 12 thoracic, 5 lumbar, 5 sacral, and 1 coccygeal.

Microsoft Struts Its Latest Research Innovations at TechFest

New software includes tools to help researchers plumb the ocean's depths, a program that stitches together the night sky, and another that allows collaborative Web searches

WORLDWIDE TELESCOPE is a new PC program that pulls images from ground- and space-based telescopes to provide a seamless digital view of the night sky.
Courtesy of Microsoft

REDMOND, WASH. —Microsoft threw open the doors to its worldwide research laboratories earlier this week at its seventh annual TechFest event, an information technology expo during which the world's largest software maker offers reporters and scientists a peek into its high-tech crystal ball. The more than 35 technology projects on display at the company's campus included its far-out virtual WorldWide Telescope (WWT), software that is helping the U.S. National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative cull data from deep-sea sensors as well as programs designed to make solitary Internet searches a thing of the past.

"On the one hand, we're doing things that feel to me like [the] traditional sort of plumbing-level computer science, programming languages, operating systems, hardware architectures, things of that sort—but we're also stretching out to areas that you might not expect," Microsoft Research senior vice president Rick Rashid said during his TechFest keynote. "I mean, we're working in things like vaccine design and computational biology, quantum computing."

WWT is actually a nifty new PC program that stitches together imagery from the most advanced ground- and space-based telescopes to provide a seamless digital view of the universe in much the same way as Google Sky, which debuted in August. WWT software, which will be available for free some time this spring, is an extension of the TerraServer and SkyServer software developed by Jim Gray, the researcher and manager of Microsoft Research's eScience Group who last year went missing at sea—and was never found despite an all-out search by colleagues that utilized some of the tracking devices that he developed. The new software relies on Visual Experience Engine software developed by Microsoft Research to blend terabytes of images, data and other information from multiple sources over the Internet.

Targeting scientific pursuits closer to home, Microsoft Research developed software designed to help oceanographers at the University of Washington in Seattle, along with other oceanography organizations with their North East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments, or NEPTUNE program. One of its goals is to create an interactive map of the northeastern Pacific Ocean, a feat that requires the coordination of information gathered from underwater sensors distributed along the ocean floor near the Strait of Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. Microsoft is helping the scientists create software built atop Windows Workflow Foundation to, among other things, let researchers search and visualize data as well as catalogue experiments.

Rashid also unveiled Singularity, a prototype operating system designed to help computer scientists and programmers write more dependable software and conduct more "inventive" research in systems, programming languages and tools. "Singularity is sort of a 'concept car' operating system," he said, that will improve the way operating systems and applications interact with one another.

Microsoft also provided a glimpse into future ways of doing research on the Web, demonstrating Search Together, a new plug-in to Internet Explorer that will help students, medical researchers and other prolific Web users collaborate on projects, allowing them to jointly save different searches and avoid redundancy. Another new project, CoSearch, is being designed to let groups of people participate in a Web search on a single computer by using multiple mice or even mobile phones.

Although a lot of the research on display at TechFest will ultimately make its way to the market in one form or another—whether as a product, a feature of a larger software program or the inspiration for a more advanced technology—Rashid pointed out that his organization's philosophy is to explore new areas of computing without trying to predict technology trends. "You do research because you don't know what the future is going to hold, you don't know what's coming around the corner," he said. "Scientists don't really create the future & what we do is we create the raw materials."

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It Came From the Sea—Renewable Energy, That Is

Companies and governments are counting on underwater turbines, submerged "wind" farms, and wave-riding electrical generators to use ocean turbulence to keep the lights on

TIDAL TURBINE: Verdant Power's kinetic hydropower underwater turbines are designed to generate electricity from the water currents of tides, rivers and man-made channels.
Courtesy of Verdant Power

Thirty feet (nine meters) below Manhattan's East River, next to Roosevelt Island, six turbines—each 16 feet (five meters) in diameter, churning at a peak rate of 32 revolutions per minute—stand at attention on the riverbed. The turbines—which belong to New York City-based Verdant Power, Inc., —are built on a swiveling platform that keeps their nose cones facing the tide, whether it's coming in or going out. Resembling an underwater wind farm, these kinetic hydropower systems use gearboxes and speed increasers—which convert the slower rotating rotor into a faster rotating generator—to transform each turbine's mechanical power into electricity.

Verdant's turbines require tides that move at least six feet per second in order to generate enough energy for them to be cost-effective, and the East River is more than obliging. "The East River is a good tidal channel that links the Long Island Sound to the ocean," says Trey Taylor, the company's president and head of market development. "Plus, New York is an expensive place to buy power, so it would be easier here to prove that this could help."

A few dozen feet away from the closest turbine, an onshore control room gets a feed of the energy created by the entire cluster. To prove that this energy could be usable for local businesses, Verdant last year sent a test transmission of electricity to a supermarket and parking garage on Roosevelt Island that were willing to participate in the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy project.

The Earth's oceans, pushed by wind and tugged by the moon and sun, ebb and flow over more than 70 percent of the planet, but only recently has technology emerged to finally harness some of that kinetic energy as usable power for us landlubbers. Underwater turbines, submerged "wind" farms and wave-riding electrical generators are being tested around the world, with new advances in technology promising relief for overworked energy utilities. "We consider wave energy to be more predictable than wind," says Phil Metcalf, CEO of Edinburgh-based Pelamis Wave Power, Ltd., a company taking a different approach than Verdant in developing ocean power–utilizing devices. "You look at the ocean 1,000 miles out, you'll get a good idea of what to expect over the next 24 to 48 hours. We think it's actually going to be easier to dispatch to the grid."

Pelamis's devices are big red tubes, each 426.5 feet (130 meters) long, 13 feet (about four meters) in diameter, weighing around 750 tons (635 metric tons), and with a life expectancy of up to 20 years. They flex as the ocean swells around them. The wave-induced motion of the tubes' joints is resisted by hydraulic rams, which pump high-pressure fluid through hydraulic motors that drive electrical generators to produce electricity. Power from all the joints is fed down a single umbilical cable to a junction on the seabed. Three of the tubes, which work best at a depth of 165 to 230 feet (50 to 70 meters) and roughly 3.7 miles (six kilometers) from the shore, can produce up to 2.25 megawatts.

Pelamis—which until September had been called Ocean Power Delivery—has taken its prototype through about 2,000 hours of testing at the European Marine Energy Center's wave test site near Scotland's Orkney Islands. Three additional machines will form the initial phase of Agucadoura, the world's first commercial wave farm, in April off the coast of Portugal, a project developed by Portuguese utility Enersis, a subsidiary of Babcock and Brown. Pelamis is negotiating with other utilities and governments as well, with future deployments depending on how well the Portuguese project is able to turn waves of water into currents of electricity.

The waters around Scotland are also host to tidal turbine testing by several organizations, including Lunar Energy, Ltd., in East Yorkshire, England, which in March 2007 announced a deal with Germany-based power utility E.On UK, to develop a tidal stream power project of up to eight megawatts off Scotland's west coast.

Meanwhile, Florida researchers may soon be testing both wave- and tide-powered energy technologies that could take advantage of the Gulf Stream, which flows north-northeastward about 15 miles (25 kilometers) off Florida's southern and eastern shores at more than eight billion gallons (30 billion liters) per second. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University's Center of Excellence in Ocean Energy Technology in Dania Beach, Fla., are using a $5-million state research grant awarded in late 2006 to develop air-conditioning technologies that tap into the powerful Gulf Stream and large water temperature differences off Florida's shores. The researchers envision thousands of underwater turbines producing as much energy as 10 nuclear power plants and supplying one third of the state's electricity. The university is working with academic, government and industry partners on the project, including the University of Central Florida in Orlando, the U.S. departments of Navy and Energy, Lockheed Martin, Oceaneering International, Inc., in Hanover, Md., and Verdant Power, which has provided them with a 10-foot (three-meter) diameter rotor system that they used during 2002 East River tests.

Verdant first began testing its three-blade, horizontal-axis turbines from the surface of the East River in 2002. There have been some hitches: Some of the turbines' fiberglass blades broke under the tidal force. (The fiberglass blades will be replaced by the end of April with ones made of a magnesium alloy.)

Still, the site has produced nearly 50,000 kilowatt-hours of energy from December 2006 to May 2007. Verdant's East River testing spot has the potential to support as many as 300 turbines and nearly 10 megawatts of installed capacity. Verdant has been working for the past several years to tweak its tidal turbines so that by the end of 2010 they can deliver up to 1.5 megawatts to the city's electrical grid (800 households use about one megawatt).

The East River is not Verdant's only site. The company is also testing its technology in Canada's St. Lawrence River near Cornwall, Ontario, with the hope of creating a turbine infrastructure capable of producing an output of 15 megawatts. The company is also looking at sites in China and India.

It is unclear just how much it will cost to tap into energy from large bodies of water, since there is no tidal or wave power industry. Verdant's Taylor says his company is at least two years away from being able to quote costs to potential customers. That said, a rough cost estimate for Verdant's marine renewable energy technology is up to $3,600 per kilowatt hour—a higher price tag than wind power, fossil fuels or hydroelectric dams today, he says. However, he also points out that Verdant will be able to lower its costs over time through the mass production of its technology and the reduction of inefficiencies in the licensing and implementation processes.

The next step for Verdant in the U.S. is to apply for a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license that would allow the company to continue its pilot project attempting to prove tidal turbines can be a reliable source of energy for the city's grid. It took four years to secure the necessary permits from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

That bureaucratic delay speaks to the difficulty of navigating the regulatory processes required to get such turbines into the water. Verdant's Taylor says his company has spent about $9 million getting its East River project to its current state, with one third of that cost going toward studies gauging how the turbines might affect vessel navigation, aquatic life and fish migration. Although the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) chipped in $3 million toward the East River project, Taylor says the time and money spent to secure changing, and sometimes redundant, regulatory approval wastes precious time that could be used testing new technologies. "That's got to change," he adds. "The world is burning up, and we're fiddling."

For its part, FERC doesn't see itself as fiddling as much as trying to find the right tune when it comes new hydroelectric technologies. Chairman Joseph Kelliher last year noted, "these technologies present some challenges relating to reliability, environmental and safety implications, and commercial viability."

More projects:

In August 2007 nonprofit research and development firm SRI International and Japanese wave-powered generator maker Hyper Drive Corporation, Ltd., tested a prototype ocean wave–powered generator mounted on a buoy in Florida's Tampa Bay. As the unit bobbed up and down, absorbing energy from the waves, an accordionlike device made of artificial muscle expanded and contracted, creating mechanical energy that was converted into electricity. In the fall SRI will test its more powerful and durable next-generation prototype wave-powered generator.

Finavera Renewables, a Vancouver, British Columbia, renewable-energy technology company, recently signed a contract to deliver power for San Francisco–based Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) by 2012. The deal is North America's first commercial power purchase agreement for a two-megawatt wave-energy project. The PG&E project will be built about 2.5 miles (four kilometers) off the coast of Humboldt County, Calif., for electricity delivery to PG&E's customers throughout the company's northern and central California service territory. Finavera's technology is the AquaBuOY, a floating structure that converts the up-and-down motion of waves into electricity.

The company was also granted a five-year operating license for its one-megawatt Makah Bay Offshore Wave Pilot Project in Washington State by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commissionthe first-ever FERC license issued for a wave, tidal or current energy project in the U.S. Finavera is also looking to develop wave-power projects off the coast of Oregon and South Africa, and is determining the feasibility of a five-megawatt wave energy project off the coast of Ucluelet, British Columbia.

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Roadrunner: A New Age of Super- computing

Roadrunner
Credit: LeRoy N. Sanchez, Records Management/Media Services and Operations

Laboratory officials celebrated Los Alamos's decision to pursue, pending approval by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the final phase of Roadrunner, a high-performance computer (HPC) slated to become the computational cornerstone of Laboratory mission-related work.

"Roadrunner ushers in a new era in high performance computing," said Terry Wallace, principal associate director for science, technology, and engineering (PADSTE). Wallace praised the hard work and dedication of the entire Roadrunner Project Team at the celebration last Thursday.

Roadrunner is designed to achieve a sustained operating speed of 1,000 trillion calculations each second, or a "petaflop/s" in computer jargon-peta signifying the number 10 followed by 15 zeros, and flop/s meaning "floating point operation per second." The fastest current supercomputer is rated at 478 teraflop/s (teraflop/s meaning one trillion floating point operations per second); Roadrunner would be roughly 3 times faster.

The computer will be developed in partnership with IBM and will utilize commercially available hardware, including aspects of commercial gaming and graphics technologies. Because of its off-the-shelf design, the computer costs significantly less than a one-of-a-kind machine. It uses a Linux operating system.

Roadrunner will be the first computer in the world to operate at sustained petaflop/s speeds. Eventhough the Phase 3 Roadrunner Final system will be a very large cluster of nodes associated withgether by a high-speed interconnect, it is a unique hybrid petascale system. Each compute node in this cluster consists of two AMD Opteron- dual-core processors plus four Cell- processors used as computational accelerators. The Cell processors used in Roadrunner are a special IBM-developed variant of the Cell processor used in the Sony PlayStation 3®. The node-attached Cell accelerators are what make Roadrunner different than typical clusters.

The Lab and IBM have been in the development phase of Roadrunner since early 2006. The first phase of the project included delivery of an initial cluster that operates at a speed of 71 teraflop/s. The full-scale Roadrunner machine will operate more than 10 times faster on real applications than the current installed system. Laboratory scientists are using the 71-teraflop/s-version machine for classified weapons applications.

Phase 2 of the Roadrunner project was completed in October. Two external assessments, one by NNSA HQ and one by an independent team of HPC experts, reviewed the machine's potential use for Laboratory applications, the Laboratory's ability to successfully manage the computing system, IBM's ability to deliver the product and whether computer programs could be adapted to the new system. Technical information from the assessments is available here.

Based on the positive outcome of the assessments, the Laboratory has decided to pursue the final phase of the Roadrunner project: development of a full-scale Roadrunner machine, pending NNSA approval.

The powerful clusters of nodes will process information to enable the Laboratory to use Roadrunner for advanced physics simulations and predictive simulations of complex scientific processes. Weapons science applications that can be processed by Roadrunner are applicable to all three of the U.S. Department of Energy weapons laboratories. The machine will also be well equipped to tackle the intricacies of modeling processes, ranging from the biomolecular to the cosmological.

After NNSA approves the Laboratory's decision to acquire a full-scale Roadrunner system, named in honor of New Mexico's official state bird, the machine should arrive at the Laboratory by next fall. The first computing applications are expected to begin running on the machine in January 2009.

The cost of the Roadrunner project is expected to be about $120 million. More than 100 Laboratory employees have been involved in this effort.

"This has been a remarkable partnership effort, exemplifying Los Alamos's and IBM's leadership in high performance computing," Wallace said.

Active computer games no substitute

New generation active computer games stimulate greater energy expenditure than sedentary games, but are no substitute for playing real sports, as per a research studyin this weeks Christmas issue of the BMJ.

Young people are currently recommended to take an hour of moderate to vigorous physical exercise each day, which should use at least three times as much energy as is used at rest. But a number of adolescents have mostly sedentary lifestyles.

Time spent in front of television and computer screens has been associated with physical inactivity and obesity.

The new generation of wireless based computer games is meant to stimulate greater interaction and movement during play, so scientists at Liverpool John Moores University compared the energy expenditure of adolescents when playing sedentary and new generation active computer games.

Six boys and five girls aged 13-15 years were included in the study. All were a healthy weight, competent at sport and regularly played sedentary computer games.

Before the study, each participant practiced playing both the active and inactive games.

On the day of the study, participants played four computer games for 15 minutes each while wearing a monitoring device to record energy expenditure.

The participants first played on the inactive Project Gotham Racing 3 game (XBOX 360). After a five minute rest, they then played competitive bowling, tennis and boxing matches (Nintendo Wii Sports) for 15 minutes each with a five minute rest between sports. Total playing time for each child was 60 minutes.

Energy expenditure was increased by 60 kcal per hour during active compared with sedentary gaming.

However, energy expenditure during active gaming was much lower than authentic bowling, tennis and boxing, and was not intense enough to contribute towards the recommended amount of daily physical activity for children.

When translated to a typical week of computer play for these participants, active rather than passive gaming would increase total energy expenditure by less than 2%.

Google's Knol against Wikipedia?

Google loves the content of Wikipedia. Just do some Google searches and you’ll see the Wikipedia articles among the top results. While Google tries to battle Wikipedia and to create their own encyclopaedia ( under the name Knol), I thought I should share my thoughts with you as a Wikipedia administrator. But Larry Sanger, the head and founder of Citizendium, the expert-encyclopaedia, has beat me to it:

There are a few problems.

First, quality. It looks to me as if Knol is a high-level attempt to do what a number of others have done… Time will tell, but Knol will probably resemble other such websites, and have a huge amount of mediocre content, with a little excellent content mixed in. The concept does not sound like a model that would attract a number of genuine experts. I say that because the notion that anyone may write a "knol" and be compared and ranked by "the crowd" - not by expert peers - is apt to attract relatively little notice from experts who are very careful about where they publish.

Second, lack of buy-in from the free culture crowd. A number of of the sort of people who contribute knowledge to projects like Wikipedia and the Citizendium are likely to be very skeptical of a giant corporation organizing such a project, especially with Google Ads appearing on the articles. It does not appear to be in the spirit of the free culture movement. Still, it is good that Google has decided to make ads optional.

As an encyclopaedia, Knol has no chance against Wikipedia or Citizendium. As an other place for advertisements where people can promote their products, it seems to be a perfect solution. We’ll see…

I highlighted the features: article rating, Google ads and peer reviews.

How about a 40-hour laptop battery?

Unbelievable isn''t it? A laptop battery that can keep your laptop going for 40 hours! Yes, research is underway at Stanford Tech to develop a hi-tech lithium ion battery that can juice up your laptop for 40 hours, keeping those charging woes at bay for a longer period.

Apparently, the new battery uses a discarded technology that has been been revamped by Professor Yi Cui and team - silicon anodes in the form of nanowires for charging. This technology was earlier abandoned as the silicon expands up to 400 times when charged, exploding the battery in the process. Using silicon in the form of nanowires eliminates this danger.

So when can you start rejoicing? In a "few years time" is all the information we have at this moment.

Via Newlaunches.

Mind the (online) gap

Instant messaging, blogs, Facebook, MySpace there are limitless ways your child communicates online with the offline world. And the risks and opportunities are only increasing.

A new Tel Aviv University research study has observed that, despite what parents might believe, there is an enormous gap between what they think their children are doing online and what is really happening.

In her study, Prof. Dafna Lemish from the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University surveyed parents and their children about the childrens activities on the Internet. The data tell us that parents dont know what their kids are doing, says Prof. Lemish.

Her study was unique in that parents and children from the same family were surveyed.


Strange Encounters
In one part of the study, Prof. Lemish surveyed over 500 Jewish and Arab children from a variety of ages and socio-economic backgrounds, asking them if they gave out personal information online. Seventy-three percent said that they do. The parents of the same children believed that only 4 percent of their children did so.

The same children were also asked if they had been exposed to pornography while surfing, or if they had made face-to-face contact with strangers that they had met online. Thirty-six percent from the high school group admitted to meeting with a stranger they had met online. Nearly 40% of these children admitted to speaking with strangers regularly (within the past week).

Fewer than 9 percent of the parents knew that their children had been meeting with strangers, engaging in what could be viewed as very risky behavior. Prof. Lemish suspects that this gap is wider in the U.S., where children from middle-class backgrounds have more opportunity to surf online privately.


Erasing their Tracks
In another part of the study, Prof. Lemish observed that 30 percent of children between the ages of 9 and 18 delete the search history from their browsers in an attempt to protect their privacy from their parents. She suggests that common filtering software may not be effective, since children will access what they are looking for elsewhere at a friends house, an Internet caf, or school. And if the child accesses dangerous material outside of the home, they will be unprepared and uninformed when it happens, she says.

Prof. Lemish believes that one problem is that parents are not as media-literate as they could be. They dont have a handle on using popular online software and chat programs, and tend to have no clue about what is really happening online.

But she cautions, This lack of knowledge on the parents part may be no different than the situation before the advent of the Web. Parents don't know what their children are doing on the Net, in the same manner that they don't know what goes on at class, parties, or clubs.


Avoiding Dangers
Prof. Lemish advises that parents should give their children the tools to be literate Internet users, and to navigate around any potential dangers. Most importantly, parents need to talk to their children. The child needs similar tools that teach them to be weary of dangers in the park, the mall or wherever. The same rules in the real world apply online as well.

For example, under no circumstances, should a child ever give strangers their private information over the Internet, or meet unsupervised with strangers. Children should be encouraged to tell their parents about Internet encounters that make them uncomfortable. Its just common sense and parents need to teach them that. Talking with your children regularly is important.

At the same time, she stresses, parents should not disregard the advantages of the Internet: We tend to forget that it offers our children a source of independence, a way to explore the world, and helps them meet friends whom they could not meet in their real world. As parents, we need to help them explore the positive opportunities the Internet offers them, and to reduce the risks".

Copper connections for high-speed computing

As computers become more complex, the demand increases for more connections between computer chips and external circuitry such as a motherboard or wireless card. And as the integrated circuits become more advanced, maximizing their performance requires better connections that operate at higher frequencies with less loss.

Improving these two types of connections will increase the amount and speed of information that can be sent throughout a computer, as per Paul Kohl, Thomas L. Gossage chair and Regents professor in Georgia Techs School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Kohl presented his work in these areas at the Materials Research Society fall meeting.

The vertical connections between chips and boards are currently formed by melting tin solder between the two pieces and adding glue to hold everything together. Kohls research shows that replacing the solder ball connections with copper pillars creates stronger connections and the ability to create more connections.

Circuitry and computer chips are made with copper lines on them, so we thought we should make the correlation between the two with copper also, said Kohl.

Solder and copper can both tolerate misalignment between two pieces being connected, as per Kohl, but copper is more conductive and creates a stronger bond.

With funding from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), Kohl and graduate student Tyler Osborn have developed a novel fabrication method to create all-copper connections between computer chips and external circuitry.

The scientists first electroplate a bump of copper onto the surface of both pieces, a process that uses electrical current to coat an electrically conductive object with metal. Then, a solid copper correlation between the two bumps is formed by electroless plating, which involves several simultaneous reactions that occur in an aqueous solution without the use of external electrical current.

Since the pillar, which is the same thickness as a dollar bill, is fragile at room temperature, the scientists anneal it, or heat it in an oven for an hour to remove defects and generate a strong solid copper piece. Osborn observed that strong bonds were formed at an annealing temperature of 180 degrees Celsius. He has also been investigating how misalignments between the two copper bumps affect pillar strength.

Ive also studied the optimal shape for the connections so that theyre flexible and mechanically reliable, yet still have good electrical properties so that we can transmit these high frequency signals without noise, said Osborn.

The scientists have been working with Texas Instruments, Intel and Applied Materials to perfect and test their technology. Jim Meindl, director of Georgia Techs Microelectronics Research Center and professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Sue Ann Allen, professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, have also collaborated on the work.

. Graduate student Tyler Osborn and Regents' professor Paul Kohl have developed a novel fabrication method to create all-copper connections between computer chips and external circuitry. Improving these connections will increase. Click here for more information. .

In addition to this new method for making vertical connections between chips and external circuitry, Kohl is also developing an improved signal transmission line with the help of graduate student Todd Spencer.

Several very long communication pathways exist inside a computer that require a very high performance electrical line that can transmit at higher frequencies over long distances, explained Spencer.

This is particularly important in high-performance servers and routers where inter-chip distances can be large and signal strength may be significantly degraded. Kohl and Spencer have developed a new way to link high-speed signals between chips using an organic substrate, with funding from the Interconnect Focus Center, one of the Semiconductor Research Corporation/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Focus Center Research Programs.

Fabrication begins with an epoxy fiberglass substrate with copper lines on one side. The substrate is coated with a polymer and the areas without copper lines are exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light, which disintegrates the polymer where its not wanted. Then, the scientists coat the substrate with another polymer that hardens when exposed to UV light. Layers of titanium and copper are added on top of each copper line. When the layered substrate is heated at 180 degrees Celsius, the first polymer layer decomposes into carbon dioxide and acetone, which diffuse out leaving an air pocket.

The amount of electrical loss relates to the connections sensitivity at higher frequencies, explained Spencer. Just having this air pocket there reduces our signal loss greatly.

The scientists are currently designing a coaxial cable for this chip-to-chip signal link, which should greatly increase the maximum signal frequency the connection can carry.

Companies that make computer chips and package them into a device are very interested in these technologies, said Kohl.

If these connections can be produced at a reasonable cost, they could be very important in the future because youre giving the customer a better product for the same cost, said Kohl.

Attack on computer memory reveals vulnerability

A team of academic, industry and independent scientists has demonstrated a new class of computer attacks that compromise the contents of secure memory systems, especially in laptops.

The attacks overcome a broad set of security measures called disk encryption, which are meant to secure information stored in a computers permanent memory. The scientists cracked several widely used technologies, including Microsofts BitLocker, Apples FileVault and Linuxs dm-crypt, and described the attacks in a paper and video published on the Web Feb. 21.

The team reports that these attacks are likely to be effective at cracking a number of other disk encryption systems because these technologies have architectural features in common.

Weve broken disk encryption products in exactly the case when they seem to be most important these days: laptops that contain sensitive corporate data or personal information about business customers, said Alex Halderman, a Ph.D. candidate in Princetons computer science department. Unlike a number of security problems, this isnt a minor flaw; it is a fundamental limitation in the way these systems were designed.

The attack is especially effective against computers that are turned on but are locked, such as laptops that are in a sleep or hibernation mode. One effective countermeasure is to turn a computer off entirely, though in some cases even this does not provide protection.

Haldermans Princeton collaborators included graduate students Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, Joseph Calandrino, Ariel Feldman and Professor Edward Felten, the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. The team also included Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, William Paul of Wind River Systems and independent computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum.

Felten said the findings demonstrate the risks linked to recent high-profile laptop thefts, including a Veterans Administration computer containing information on 26 million veterans and a University of California, Berkeley laptop that contained information on more than 98,000 graduate students and others. While it is widely believed that disk encryption would protect sensitive information in instances like these, the new research demonstrates that the information could easily be read even when data is encrypted.

Disk encryption is commonly recommended as a magic bullet against the loss of private data on laptops, Felten said. Our results show that disk encryption provides less protection than previously thought. Even encrypted data can be vulnerable if an intruder gets access to the laptop.

The new attacks exploit the fact that information stored in a computers temporary working memory, or RAM, does not disappear immediately when a computer is shut off or when the memory chip is taken from the machine, as is usually thought. Under normal circumstances, the data gradually decays over a period of several seconds to a minute. The process can be slowed considerably using simple techniques to cool the chips to low temperatures.

Disk encryption technologies rely on the use of secret keys -- essentially large random numbers -- to encode and protect information. Computers need these keys to access files stored on their own hard disks or other storage systems. Once an authorized user has typed in a password, computers typically store the keys in the temporary RAM so that protected information can be accessed regularly. The keys are meant to disappear as soon as the RAM chips lose power.

The team wrote programs that gained access to essential encryption information automatically after cutting power to machines and rebooting them. The method worked when the attackers had physical access to the computer and when they accessed it remotely over a computer network. The attack even worked when the encryption key had already started to decay, because the scientists were able to reconstruct it from multiple derivative keys that were also stored in memory.

In one extremely powerful version of the attack, they were able to obtain the correct encryption data even when the memory chip was physically removed from one computer and placed in another machine. After obtaining the encryption key, they could then easily access all information on the original machine.

This method is extremely resistant to countermeasures that defensive programs on the original computer might try to take, Halderman said.

The attacks demonstrate the vulnerability of machines when they are in an active state, including sleep mode or the screen lock mode that laptops enter when their covers are shut. Even though the machines require a password to unlock the screen, the encryption keys are already located in the RAM, which provides an opportunity for attackers with malicious intent.

None of the attacks mandatory specialized equipment. I think we're going to see attackers doing things that people have previously though impractical or impossible, Appelbaum said.

The scientists were able to extend the life of the information in RAM by cooling it using readily available canned air keyboard dusting products. When turned upside down, these canisters spray very cold liquid. Discharging the cold liquid onto a memory chip, the scientists were able to lower the temperature of the memory to -50 degrees Celsius. This slowed the decay rates enough that an attacker who cut power for 10 minutes would still be able to recover 99.9 percent of the information in the RAM correctly.

Hints of problems linked to computers retaining their temporary memory have appeared in the scientific literature, but this is the first systematic examination of the security implications, said Schoen.

The scientists posted the paper describing their findings on the website of Princetons Center for Information Technology Policy. They submitted the paper for publication and it is currently undergoing review.

In the meantime, the scientists have contacted several manufacturers to make them aware of the vulnerability: Microsoft, which includes BitLocker in some versions of Windows Vista; Apple, which created FileVault; and the makers of dm-crypt and TrueCrypt, which are open-source products for Windows and Linux platforms.

Theres not much they can do at this point, Halderman said. In the short term, they can warn their customers about the vulnerability and tell them to shut their computers down completely when traveling.

In the longer term, Halderman said new technologies may need to be designed that do not require the storing of encryption keys in the RAM, given its inherent vulnerability. The scientists plan to continue investigating this and other defenses against this new security threat.