Tech Talk

The exoplanet zoo just got a truly spectacular addition. Astronomers have found evidence for an Earth-mass planet in our own backyard, about 4.4 light years away in the Alpha Centauri system, the star system nearest to our own. 

The planet, which is at least 1.1 times the mass of the Earth, orbits Alpha Centauri B (α Cen B), one of two sun-like stars in the three-star system. With a year lasting just 3.2 days, the planet speeds around α Cen B in a scorching orbit, one that's far too close to be considered habitable. "If there are any inhabitants there, they're made of asbestos," SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak quipped in an interview with NPR. 

Still, the discovery has astronomers excited because low-mass planets often seem to come in groups. It may be that there is an Earth-like planet just waiting to be found in α Cen B's 'habitable zone', with temperatures in just the right range to support the presence of liquid water and life as we know it. 

That doesn't mean such a planet will be easy to find. This discovery was already pushing the limits of existing instruments. Xavier Dumusque, a Ph.D. student affiliated with the Geneva Observatory, and colleagues found the planet by scouring starlight coming from α Cen B using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument, an ultra-precise spectrograph mounted on a 3.6-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. HARPS is designed to pick up tiny shifts in spectral lines that arise when planets tug on their host stars and cause them to move back and forth along the line of sight with Earth. 

Finding the stellar wobbles created by the planet around α Cen B required detailed modeling of stellar activity. Although α Cen B is a relatively calm star, it still has weather that can mask the presence of planets. In the end, the team uncovered a signal that, according to an article accompanying the team's paper, is just one third as strong as α Cen B's stellar activity. The signal is puny compared to previous finds, corresponding to stellar motion of just 50 centimeters per second, or about as fast as a baby crawls, according to a press release put out by the European Southern Observatory. That's about 1% the speed generated by the tug of 51 Peg b, a planet about half the mass of Jupiter that was discovered in 1995 (it was the first to be found orbiting an ordinary star). 

"The Geneva team has done something very difficult," says Debra Fischer, an astronomy professor at Yale University. "There is not a more exciting result for an individual star, even with the long line of spectacular results from the last 2 decades." Fischer has been conducting a search for planets around α Cen B using a new detector on the 1.5-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile and says her team is well poised to follow-up on the HARPS measurements.

Finding habitable planets around α Cen B could be trickier. At a press conference on Tuesday, Dumusque said that, at its current sensitivity, HARPS could turn up a planet in the habitable zone of α Cen B with a mass as low as four times the mass of Earth. Finding a true Earth twin, an Earth-mass planet on an Earth-like orbit, would require measuring stellar motions of just 9 centimeters per second, says Nature News.

There is some hope that we'll get there. Astronomers are testing out new laser-based calibration systems that could help boost the sensitivity of HARPS and other such instruments by a factor of 10 (although astronomers will still have to contend with stellar activity). And there are other ways to detect planets. If the alignment is right, we could potentially see α Cen B planets as they pass in front of the star in the course of their orbit, temporarily blocking out a fraction of the light that reaches Earth. 

Either way, maybe it's time to start contemplating a mission to Alpha Centauri to see what there is to find. We'll probably want something a bit speedier than our interstellar pioneer, Voyager 1. If the spacecraft were headed in that direction, it would take more than 70,000 years to reach the system.

(Image: G. Hüdepohl/ESO)

A new type of ocean power generator could harvest the steady, reliable energy of deep ocean currents, and a group of companies are working together to place the first 1-megawatt system on the seafloor. The companies are currently raising money for the demonstration project and say they're investigating R&D funding from the U.S. Navy and the Department of Energy. 

The grid connections and system software are being designed by Eaton Corporation, a power management company with experience in linking renewable energy sources like wind and solar farms to the grid. The 1-MW turbine will come from Triton, a Florida-based company that primarily builds deep-ocean subs. Eaton representatives say the 1-MW demonstration project could easily be built up to a utility-scale current farm by adding more turbines. 

Deep ocean currents are generated by differences in the ocean's salinity and temperature around the continents. They run at a constant speed of about 3 to 5 knots (5.5 to 9 kilometers per hour), according to Eaton's Department of Defense account development manager Jim Spaulding. "You’d be amazed at how steady-state these deep ocean currents are," Spaulding told me. "That’s the appeal: It’s very, very consistent." 

The consortium hasn't picked out a spot yet for its demo, but Spaulding mentioned the waters off the coast of Florida as one attractive option. There, strong currents can be found within a couple of miles from shore and at relatively easy-to-reach depths of 30 to 150 meters, he said. Eventually, Eaton plans to build systems at depths of 300 to 500 meters. 

While the ocean energy industry is in its infancy, there's been a lot of excitement in recent years over new turbine technologies and demonstration projects. In the United States, the first tidal station began providing power to the Maine grid in September, and a wave power project is intended for Oregon's waters (although the installation of the wave power turbine was recently postponed until spring 2013). Outside the United States, companies like Pelamis Wave Power and OpenHydro are pursuing commercial-scale wave and tidal power stations, respectively.

Image: Triton Energy Systems, LLC

Today the UK government announced that it won't allow hacker Gary McKinnon to be extradited to the United States, where he was supposed to stand trial for invading thousands of U.S. government computers.

McKinnon was diagnosed in recent years with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, and his supporters have argued that his condition partly explains his criminal behavior. 

The UK home secretary, Theresa May, revoked the extradition order on human rights grounds, saying that McKinnon's Asperger's and depression would make him a risk to himself if he ended up in a U.S. jail. "After careful consideration of all of the relevant material, I have concluded that Mr. McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr. McKinnon's human rights," she told MPs.

In a 2011 cover story for IEEE Spectrum, David Kushner told the whole bizarre tale of McKinnon's crimes and diagnosis. McKinnon has publicly admitted that he hacked into thousands of computers belonging to NASA and the Department of Defense in 2001 and 2002. The U.S. government claims that McKinnon did more than $700 000 worth of damage and says he put national security at risk. The government's charges against him carried a sentence of up to 70 years. 

But in a weird twist, McKinnon's hacks were motivated by his obsession with aliens. From Kushner's article:

McKinnon claimed that UFOs were the reason for his hack. Convinced that the government was hiding alien antigravity devices and advanced energy technologies, he planned to find and release the information for the benefit of humanity. He said his intrusion was detected just as he was downloading a photo from NASA's Johnson Space Center of what he believed to be a UFO. 

McKinnon was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome during the long years that he's been fighting the extradition order. He has become a cause celebre for the autism community, with some supporters arguing that his obsessive quest to discover alien secrets and his social naivete, which may have caused him to ignore the potential consequences of his actions, are essentially symptoms of Asperger's. 

McKinnon could still stand trial in Britain. May said the director of public prosecutions will make the decision on that. 

Image: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

A123, one of the most innovative lithium-ion battery makers around, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, after having its hopes of being bought out by a Chinese concern raised, then dashed.

“Being firstest with the mostest”—a 19th century cavalry officer's succinct definition of strategy—isn’t always enough to ensure success in the biz-tech world, where the initiators of new ideas often do worse than the me-too crowd. Such is the case for A123, of Waltham, Mass., which just sold most of its assets to Johnson controls, of Milwaukee, Wisc., for US $125 million. That sum will come with additional financing to enable A123 to continue operations while the sale goes forward.

IEEE Spectrum first wrote about A123’s innovative cathodes back in 2007, when the details of that technology —based on iron phosphate—were still under wraps. We’ve covered the company and its travails ever since.

Our interest has been purely technical, but A123 has now risen to prominence in the political world, thanks to the $129 million in federal loan guarantees it obtained as part of the Obama Administration’s support for green-energy projects. A123 has used about half of that money; whether any will be paid back during the reorganization isn’t clear.

The issue could come up in tonight's televised debate between President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, who has criticized such subsidies as “crony capitalism.”

Everyone sings the praises of A123's batteries. It’s just that no big car company doubled down on them. Its only automotive client was little Fisker, which took longer than expected to bring its electric car to market—and afterwards a lot of those cars were recalled.

The melting of northern ice continues to open long-pursued arctic sea routes to practical navigation, according to a new Arctic Institute Center for Circumpolar Security Studies (CCSS) report. By the middle of November 2012, when ice closes the Northern Sea Route (along Eurasia’s north shore from the Bering Strait to Murmansk), shipping volume will have soared more than 75% above 2011 tonnage—to about 1.5 million tons, up from 850,000 tons.  

Image: The Arctic Institute

Click on image for a larger view.

Since the Arctic Ocean ice cap seems to be retreating towards Greenland and Canada’s Nunavut Territory, the Northern Sea Route is the first of the three principal arctic sea lanes to become navigable. The map, left, shows the retreat of the ice from 1970 through 2100. (The others are the fabled Northwest Passage, which threads among Canada’s boreal islands, and the Transpolar Sea Route, straight across the top of the world from the Bering Strait passing northwest of Svalbard and on to  Iceland. See map below.)

CCSS analysts Malte Humpert and Andreas Raspotnik note that some northern connections between European and Asian ports can be as much as 40 percent shorter than courses carrying ships through the Suez Canal. This saves fuel and salaries on each trip, of course. It also allows ship-owners to make more trips per year or, alternatively, make super-slow trips—attractive because dropping a ship’s speed by 40% can double its fuel efficiency, cutting both costs and emissions. (Though Humpert and Raspotnik don’t mention it, the northern route also avoids the pirate-haunted waters at the mouth of the Red Sea.)

As the authors point out, “Global shipping operations depend on three key factors: predictability, punctuality, and economy-of-scale,” all still problematic along Arctic routes. But the ice cap's steady retreat suggests that these important supports will evolve.

Image: The Arctic Institute

Click on image for a larger view.

For another, less optimistic assessment global warming’s impact—on the endemic ranges of some infectious diseases as temperatures and sea-levels rise—tune in Tuesday, 16 October, for the free webcast, “Oceans, Climate and Human Health: the Cholera Paradigm” with former National Science Foundation director Rita R. Colwell. (I'll be moderating.) This is the first of a monthly series, “Blue Marvel—Ocean Mysteries,” presented by the Ocean Research Collaboration Network in conjunction with the National Science Foundation and the Group on Earth Observations. Register at www.oceanmysteries.net.

The competition for cooler servers is heating up. This week, Austin-Tx.-based start-up Calxeda announced it received another US $55 million in funding, which could help propel its chips into a server market that's struggling to keep down power consumption. But the company faces steep competition.

Founded in 2008, Calxeda made waves last year when Hewlett-Packard announced it was working with the company to develop a new line of low-power HP servers. Calxeda’s server chip is based on 32-bit designs from ARM, which licenses IP to nearly every smartphone chipmaker. The company reckons servers built with its chips will consume much less power and space than those built with today’s 100-Watt behemoths. 

This latest cash infusion, which includes investments from Austin Ventures and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, is an added vote of confidence for Calxeda and a sign that the company might just be on to something.

When I spoke with Karl Freund, Calxeda’s VP of Marketing earlier this year, he said low-power chips will help offer more choice in a server industry dominated by high-speed options: “What you’ll see is the industry will go from a one-size-fits-all model to tailored solutions, much in the same way you see in the cell phone business.”

Freund said Calxeda isn’t aiming for the entire server market. Instead the company is looking at a growing segment of server applications, like processing web search results, that can be broken down into bite-sized computational chunks. Those sorts of workloads can be “scaled out,” meeting increased demand by simply adding more processors.

But Calxeda isn’t the only company with this idea. It's not even the only company whose chips Hewlett-Packard is using for this idea. HP is moving forward with similar “microservers” made with low-power Intel Atom chips. Then there is Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker AppliedMicro, which is pursuing 64-bit server chips, also based on ARM designs. Even Samsung seems to be getting into the game with its own ARM-based CPUs. It will take a while to see how these bids all shake out, but the next couple of years are shaping up to be pretty interesting.

(Image: Calxeda)

An abundance of cheap, renewable energy, particularly hydropower and geothermal, has drawn aluminum smelters to Iceland. It's become an industry that already consumes five times as much electricity as the country’s residents, and more aluminum plants are on the drawing board—raising concerns about how much the country’s economy is relying on one industry.

Meanwhile, there is another fast-growing, power-hungry industry in the world: cloud computing and storage. “The cloud” seems so light and fluffy, but building a cloud involves huge clunky buildings full of servers. Just one of these server farms, according to an April report by Greenpeace, can consume the energy equivalent of 180 000 homes. The companies that run them do their best to be efficient, because high energy costs hurt profits—and also, in some cases at least, because of a corporate commitment to the environment. The April Greenpeace report praised Yahoo and Google for “prioritizing access to renewable energy in their cloud expansion” but criticized Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft for rapidly expanding their clouds “without adequate regard to source of electricity,” relying “heavily on dirty energy.”

Which brings us back to Iceland. Even with all that aluminum smelting, Iceland has a renewable energy surplus. And, since the recent addition of two new, high-speed, transatlantic fiber optic cables to the country’s single older fiber cable (and one more going into service soon) it’s got bandwidth to spare as well.

It turns out Iceland also has entrepreneurs with big ideas ready to take advantage of this power and bandwidth, such as GreenQloud, which says it's ready to offer commercial cloud services. At the DemoFall conference last week in Santa Clara, Calif., cofounder Eirikur Hrafnsson described how he started working on the idea that became GreenQloud in 2008, after seeing a Gartner report indicating that the IT industry is responsible for as much greenhouse gas generation as the aviation industry—some 2 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. A McKinsey report around the same time predicted that this number would double by 2020.

Hrafnsson says his company wants to take on Amazon, currently the go-to company for businesses and government entities that want to offload their computing to the cloud. Will big organizations really trust their data to a little startup in Iceland? Hrafnsson is betting that a trifecta of attributes—greener, cheaper, and what he says is a better software platform—will inspire  potential customers to give GreenQloud a chance.

Photo: Gulfoss, Iceland. Source: Wikimedia Commons

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David J. Wineland of the United States and Serge Haroche of France will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics  “for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems”.

Affiliated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Wineland’s work allows for “optical” clocks that reach a precision of 10^-17 seconds, a hundred times better than the caesium clocks that set the official time in the United States. Optical clocks use a self-referential technique—one ion is used as a clock, another is used to read the clock without altering its fragile quantum state. Their precision allows for measurement of the effects of relativity—like time dilation and gravitational shifts—even across distances as small as tens of meters. So far optical clocks have run in Wineland’s lab for “many hours and days,” he said in an interview on the Nobel Prize’s web site.

Wineland’s group has also demonstrated computing operations based on two quantum bits. Unlike conventional computers, where the basic unit of information, a bit, can take the binary values of either 1 or 0, a quantum bit can be 1, 0, or both 1 and 0 at once. Computation scales up dramatically, because n quantum bits can represent 2ⁿ states at the same time, theoretically allowing for unimaginable computational power. “Most of us feel that even though that is a long, you know, long way off before we can realize such a computer,” Wineland said, “many of us feel it will eventually happen.”

Both Nobel Laureates’ work probes the quantum properties of particles in isolation. In particular they explored a quantum phenomenon called superposition, where a particle can be in two states at once. The phenomenon was made famous by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s thought experiment. A cat—for some reason usually shown as black—is isolated in a sealed box that also contains a vial of poison. The poison is released when the decay of a radioactive atom in the box is detected. Because radioactive decay is a quantum mechanical process, there is a level of uncertainty in when the atom decays. The system is in a state of superposition—the atom has both decayed and not decayed, so the cat is both alive and dead. Opening the box “collapses” the state and possibly kills the cat.

Schrodinger didn’t think that it would be possible to study this collapse of a quantum state in detail. In 1952, he wrote, “We never deal with just one electron or atom, or (small) molecule,” except in thought experiments.

But the work done by the Laureates did just that, describing the “progressive collapse” of the wave function of a single particle. Haroche and others have even created “cat states”.

Wineland and Haroche’s techniques are neatly complementary: While Wineland traps electrically charged atoms using laser light, Haroche measures trapped photons by sending atoms through a trap.

Haroche, who noticed the 46 Sweden code when the Nobel call came this morning, said in an interview on the Nobel Prize website that the ability to work with single atoms and photons means that quantum properties that are “veiled” due to statistical effects, come out in the open. “If you were to ask me what was the application,” he said, “I would tell you I don't know. And I would just tell you that I think there will be some applications.”

This story was corrected on 10 October.

In August 1479, a Franco-Portuguese fleet attacked a Genoese merchant convoy just off Cape St. Vincent, the southwest tip of the Iberian Peninsula. Three Genoese ships went down, leaving one wounded, almost-twenty-five-year-old sailor-adventurer adrift clutching an oar. He swam ashore at Lagos, Portugal, to find himself in the pilot house of the Age of Navigation.

And so the Genoan castaway Christopher Columbus started to soak up the high technology of his time, learning math, celestial navigation, shipbuilding, Latin…and map-making, the great enabling technology of the epoch. In short order, Columbus and his brother, Bartholomew, started (probably) a chart-making business in Lisbon, an enterprise that put him in touch with information and ideas from all of Europe. It was an information age, and the information was generating huge discoveries and massive fortunes—like those produced by the high tech and biotechnology booms of our own time.

So today we’re dipping back into Samuel Eliot Morison’s wonderful Admiral of the Ocean Sea (with the combinatorial publication date of 1942) for a look at how measurement—or, more particularly, mismeasurement—fueled the explorer’s conviction that he could reach the Indies by sailing west across the Atlantic. His certainty, rooted in some of his age’s best measurements, technologies, and calculations, was undermined by the entrepreneur’s hallmark character trait: When faced with several possible values for a key variable, Columbus would invariably choose the most optimistic.

We thus owe the great 1492 Enterprise of the Indies to three serious measurement errors.

Washington Irving’s overly imaginative A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus notwithstanding, it was widely known by the 15^th Century that the Earth is spherical. The question was, how big is the sphere? In 200 BCE, after all, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to within one percent of its actual girth. He figured that one degree of latitude was equal to 59.5 nautical miles.

In making his own calculation, however, Columbus preferred the values given by the medieval Persian geographer, Abu al Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani (a.k.a. Alfraganus): one degree (at the equator) is equal to 56.67 miles. That was Columbus’s first error, which he compounded with a second: he assumed that the Persian was using the 4 856-foot Roman mile; in fact, Alfraganus meant the 7 091-foot Arabic mile. (This is, of course, the sort of confusion of units that sent the Mars Climate Orbiter into its terminal swan dive in September 1999.)

Taken together, the two miscalculations effectively reduced the planetary waistline to 16,305 nautical miles, down from the actual 21,600 or so, an error of 25 percent.

And then there was the third error. “Not content with whittling down the degree by 25 percent,” Morison writes, “Columbus stretched out Asia eastward until Japan almost kissed the Azores.” Through a complicated chain of reasoning that mixed Ptolemy, Marinus of Tyre, and Marco Polo with some “corrections” of his own, Columbus calculated that he would find Japan at 85º west longitude (rather than 140° east)—moving it more than 8,000 miles closer to Cape St. Vincent.

All in all, he figured, the Indies were just 68 degrees west of the Canary Islands. Calculated travel distance: 3080 nautical miles. Actual distance from Tenerife to Jakarta: 7313 nautical miles. Margin of error: 58 percent.

“Of course,” Morison noted, Columbus's “calculation is not logical, but Columbus’s mind was not logical. He knew he could make it, and the figures had to fit.” Morison, an admiral himself, is full of admiration for Columbus’s skill as a practical navigator, capable of pinpoint landfalls on his returns to the New World. As a metrologist and theoretician, however, he failed to double-check his work.

Image: Douglas McCormick

According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were 5.4 million automobile crashes on U.S. roads in 2010, killing 33 000 people and injuring more than 2.2 million. In a paper recently published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, two researchers at Virginia Tech’s Center for Injury Biomechanics delve into just how much of an effect systems that warn a driver about an impending front collision—then slam on the brakes if the driver doesn’t act quickly enough—might have on these crash statistics.

Automakers are starting to introduce vehicles equipped with electronic safety systems whose purpose is to keep cars from crashing. The researchers, Clay Gabler, a professor of biomedical engineering, and Ph.D. student Kristofer Kusano, studied a suite of systems that rely on radar to tell the car when it is coming dangerously close to another vehicle’s rear bumper. Some of these systems deliver an audible warning when the distance between the car and the one ahead of it gets too narrow.

Others offer braking assistance if the driver responds to the warning by applying the brakes. Still another type attempts to bring the car to a halt with a huge braking force if the driver has not hit the brake pedal 0.45 seconds before the sensors predict that there will be contact.

Gabler and Kusano combed through 5000 investigator reports of crashes. In computer simulations that recreated the scenarios of 1400 rear-end collisions (for which investigators from the U.S. Department of Transportation had gathered information such as photographs and diagrams of the crash scenes, police, driver, and occupant statements, and vehicle damage assessments), the Virginia Tech researchers were able to demonstrate the extent to which the electronics would have helped. They concluded that in most cases, the electronic safety systems would slow cars down enough to cut the number of serious injuries in half. Better still, they say, 7.7 percent of rear-end collisions would be avoided altogether.

“Even if the driver is distracted and does nothing, a system of this type would brake forcefully enough during that final half second before impact to slow a car traveling at [72 kilometers per hour] by about [10 to 12 km/h],” says Clay Gabler, who is also assistant director of the Center for Injury Biomechanics. “That might not seem like a lot,” he says, “but the aim is to reduce the energy of a collision. And since kinetic energy is related to the square of velocity, this change in speed reduces the likelihood of serious injury by about 35 percent. That’s huge.”