Tech Talk

A solitary piling sticking up out of the sea a few dozen meters from the beach is the epitome of loneliness. Incoming waves sweep around it with just a momentary ruffling of their crests, and the diffraction limit makes it invisible from the sand.

The same phenomenon prevents conventional light microscopes from resolving any object smaller than about half the wavelength of whatever light they use. Like the ocean waves, light waves bend around small objects, neither reflecting nor blocking enough energy to reveal their outlines.

The diffraction limit began to drop in the 1990s, when researchers at the Max Planck institute invented "super-resolution" microscopy with stimulated-emission-depletion fluorescence microscopy. This brought the resolution limit down below the half-wavelength mark, but required that fluorescent labels be bound to the target particles or molecules.

Now Pu Wang, Ji-Xin Cheng, and their Purdue University collaborators, have developed the saturated transient absorption microscope (STAM), a tool for seeing objects tinier than a half wavelength without the need for secondary labels.

The method uses a succession of three laser beams to create a sharply defined spot of illumination just 225 nanometers wide. The spot sweeps across a sample on a slide, creating a transmission image that reveals objects in the 100-nm range more clearly and quickly that ever possible in a far-field image. (Far-field techniques, such as conventional microscopes, let researchers record images at a distance from the sample. Techniques like near-field scanning optical microscopy, NFSOM, and scanning tunneling microscopy, STM, have resolutions of about 20 nm and 0.1 nm, respectively; these, however, rely on very short range quantum mechanical phenomena and require that the detector be positioned within about one wavelength of the sample.) 

"Tech is a young person's game."

"You can't teach old dogs new tricks."

"A child could solve this problem--someone send for a child."

Prejudice against older programmers is wrong, but new research suggests it's also inaccurate. A dandy natural experiment to test the technical chops of the old against the young has been conducted—or discovered—by two computer scientists at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh. Professor Emerson Murphy-Hill and Ph.D. student Patrick Morrison went to Stack Overflow, a Web site where programmers answer questions and get rated by the audience. It turned out that ratings rose with contributors' age, at least into the 40s (beyond that the data were sparse). The range of topics handled also rose with range (though, strangely, after dipping in the period from 15 to 30). Finally, the old were at least as well versed as the young in the newer technologies.

Of course, such a natural experiment can't account for all possible confounding factors. Because the number of programmers has expanded greatly, a disproportionate number are young, and they may thus be a less select bunch. Also, the older programmers were, presuambly, the survivors of downsizings and other cullings of the herd. What's more, they may strain to keep up with new stuff because they fear showing any signs of weakness.  

The raw ability to grasp new things--or fluid intelligence--begins to fall in the 20s, while the mastery of familiar things—or crystallized intelligence—rises for almost as long as a person stays in harness. That's why older people famously substitute craft for cleverness in sports as diverse as boxing and swimming.

The rise and fall of skill has been most precisely traced in chess players. Professionals used to peak in the mid-30s, though today's computer training techniques let mere teenagers rise to the very top. Still, the pattern of decline remains what it was when the pioneer of chess ratings, Arpad Elo, devised the accompanying graph: After a certain age, it's all downhill.

Yet even chess, unlike computer science, is to some extent a physical contest, with its brutal time constraints and exhausting, multi-week tournaments. Programming would seem to place more emphasis on wisdom and less on raw, geek energy. That is, unless your project manager is a 20-year-old wunderkind.

A simple act of cash changing hands could become a lot less private. U.S. researchers have developed a new way of embedding traceable chips within "smart" paper—raising the possibility of banks and governments guarding against counterfeiting and even tracking the usage of paper money.

The new method of embedding radio frequency identification chips (RFID) in paper came from North Dakota State University in Fargo. Researchers used a patent-pending technology—called Laser Enabled Advanced Packaging (LEAP)—to transfer and assemble the traceable RFID chips on paper. Such "smart" paper could lead to new types of banknotes, legal documents, tickets and smart labels.

"I believe our scheme is the first to demonstrate a functional RFID tag embedded in paper," says Val Marinov, an associate professor of industrial & manufacturing engineering at North Dakota State University, in a BBC News interview.

The idea of RFID technology enabling the future of smart money has also encouraged the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan to launch separate projects based on that possibility. Saudi Arabian researchers have also begun their own efforts to embed RFID chips in Saudi Arabian currency.

Any effort to embed RFID chips in paper must overcome such challenges as keeping the RFID chip thin, making the chip durable enough to survive the rough-and-tumble life of cash, and being cheap enough to make the printing of smart money worthwhile. Such flexible but tough qualities could also prove useful in applications beyond smart paper.

A small contingent of Estonian students is counting down the hours at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, where a Vega rocket is set to carry the country’s very first satellite into orbit a little after 2 A.M. GMT on 4 May.

Dubbed ESTCube-1, the satellite will be the first test of a concept for an electric sail made out metal tethers. Unlike an ordinary solar sail, which uses the radiation pressure created when photons collide with a spacecraft to physically push it along, an electric sail would propel a spacecraft by keeping a steady electric potential on long wires, or tethers. These tethers would move the spacecraft by electromagnetic interactions with the solar wind, the steady stream of charged particles emanating from the sun.

Proponents of the idea say such tethers could one day carry spacecraft around the solar system. Closer to home, a tether could be charged up and used to deorbit a satellite at the end of its life, reducing the amount of space junk.   

The scheme depends on making very narrow and very long tethers. The exact specifications depend, of course, on how big a spacecraft you want to move and how fast you want to get it to its destination. But as a guide, proponents of the electric sail say that, over the course of a year, a modestly-sized 1000-kg craft with 100 tethers could accelerate up to a decent clip of 30 km/s. That's about twice the current speed of the New Horizons spacecraft, currently en route to Pluto. 

To pick up enough charge, electric sail tethers will need to be long—perhaps as much as 20 km. But each wire can be just a few dozens micrometers thick, which would keep its overall weight to just a few hundred grams.

The first step is proving this approach can work with a single tether. ESTCube-1 will be the “the first attempted experiment to measure the Coulomb drag experienced by a charged wire or tether in moving plasma,” says Pekka Janhunen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki, who proposed the electric sail.

Still waiting for cheap, portable satellite broadband? Since it spun off from Intellectual Ventures last August, the Redmond, Washington-based startup Kymeta has been working on a line of products aimed at bringing affordable high-speed data service to remote or mobile locations, such as planes, trains, oil rigs and disaster zones. Now, after months in the laboratory, the company has announced its technology is able to work with an actual satellite.

This is no small feat. Kymeta’s satellite terminals rely on a proprietary beam-steering antenna design based on synthetic metamaterials, which can bend electromagnetic waves in ways that natural materials can’t. The antennas are flat and wide; the smallest are about the size and shape of a laptop. They are equipped with an array of metamaterial elements that can be electronically tuned to maintain a satellite connection. (For a more detailed description of the technology’s inner workings, read Katie Palmer’s January 2012 IEEE Spectrum story about it.)

There are other, less exotic ways of linking to a satellite on the go, such as with mechanical gimbals or phased arrays. But such systems are bulky, expensive, and power hungry. Kymeta is aiming for products that are lightweight, low power, and—because they can be manufactured using standard lithography—cheap.

Kymeta seems well on its way to showing this can be done.

Last week, the company claimed its “portable satellite terminal” successfully locked onto a broadcast satellite in the Ka frequency band—a logical first step, because it offers higher bandwidth than other commonly used bands. The antenna maintained the connection for hours while it received high-definition television programming, says Håkan Olsson, Kymeta's senior director of marketing. And apparently, the antenna required only 3 watts of power, siphoned through a USB cable.

Kymeta believes this is the first demonstration anywhere of a metamaterials antenna establishing a connection with a communications satellite. Olsson says the company's next big challenge is to go the other way—upload data from its metamaterials antenna to a Ka-band satellite.

Image: metamaterials antenna prototype, Intellectual Ventures Lab

One of the biggest unknowns in physics is simply this: does antimatter fall up or down?

It's a serious question. If antimatter is repulsed by gravity, that could explain why we see so little of the stuff floating about space. If it's attracted just as matter is, but perhaps just a little more so, that could have implications for theories that attempt to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity. 

Physicists have speculated about the answer for decades, but there's been little data to feed those efforts. Finding the answer has proved to be an experimental difficulty. Antimatter is hard to wrangle: it annihilates as soon as it comes into contact with ordinary matter. Although electromagnetic fields can be used to steer charged antimatter particles quite easily, the forces involved can easily overwhelm any gravitational signal you might hope to see.

The best candidate that has emerged for studying gravity's effects is antihydrogen, an "antiatom" that contains an antiproton and a positron instead of a proton and an electron. Antihydrogen is electrically-neutral, long-lived (assuming you can trap it), and fairly heavy, which is good for gravity experiments. But it's tricky to work with. It must be synthesized from scratch from its antimatter components, and it must be made to move slowly enough for gravity to have a discernable effect before it annihilates.

Despite those challenges, physicists have started making inroads with the stuff. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, a team working on the ALPHA experiment at CERN is reporting the first direct measurement of antimatter’s reaction to gravity. But if you're looking for an answer to the up or down question, you'll have to wait a little longer.

A supersonic flight test for Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo marked a big milestone in the company's efforts to make suborbital space tourism into a reality. The spacecraft tested its rocket in midair for the first time on April 29—a critical step toward the goal of launching commercial operations in 2014.

The 16-second rocket burn propelled SpaceShipTwo to a speed of about 1.2 times the speed of sound and an altitude of 17 000 meters, according to the Wall Street Journal. That first rocket-powered flight aims to pave the way for commercial space tourism flights that would give paying passengers the experience of traveling at a maximum speed of about 4000 kilometers per hour hour (Mach 3) and reaching an altitude of 97 kilometers above the Earth.

Success seems to have given a big boost to both Virgin Galactic and its billionaire founder Sir Richard Branson after years of delays. Virgin Galactic has continually pushed back its timetable for the start of commercial spaceflight operations based out of Spaceport America in New Mexico—the original timetable of 2008 slipped to 2010 and then 2012.

But Branson sounded confident about Virgin Galactic's next steps during an interview with Fox News.

It was the biggest milestone in this program, and it’s taken us eight and a half years to get there. Now we know it can break the sound barrier safely. Now we can start testing at 2 000 miles an hour, 3000 miles an hour, 4000 miles an hour—and then by the end of the year, be ready to do flights into space.

"Flights into space" really means suborbital flights to the edge of space. That's because the space industry typically refers to an altitude of 100 kilometers as the boundary line. But even the brief experience of microgravity near the edge of space could provide new opportunities for doing science on cheaper space tourism flights.

The recent Virgin Galactic test flight involved two pilots sitting at the controls of SpaceShipTwo—designed by aerospace company Scaled Composites—as its mothership WhiteKnightTwo took off from California's Mojave Air and Spaceport with SpaceShipTwo slung under its belly. WhiteKnightTwo eventually released the spacecraft for the rocket-powered test after climbing to an altitude of about 14 000 meters.

That midair test of the hybrid rocket motor came during the spacecraft's 26th flight test. Virgin Galactic  launched glide test flights on 3 April and 12 April as a prelude to the powered flight test.

The latest success may bring higher prices for Virgin Galactic space tourists. Branson told SPACE.com that the US $200 000 seat price for flights would be going up to $250 000 in about a week. And they'll stay that high at least until the first 1000 people had traveled.

Photo: Mark Greenberg/AP Photo

Don't get too excited over headlines claiming that a cheaper rival to Google Glass has emerged. In reality, the putative rival, Japan's Telepathy One, has much more modest and immediate goals—sharing what you see with friends or partners.

Sure, the Telepathy One device looks to be a sleek wraparound headset or visor in the manner of Google Glass, but it lacks any of the latter's augmented reality or other promised features. Instead, Telepathy One's headset's setup—involving a micro camera and a small micro projector to create an image that appears to float in front of the wearer's eye—is designed to allow wearers to stream live video and share images or prerecorded video with anyone using a related smartphone app.

According to published reports, Telepathy One currently relies upon the wearer's mobile phone for wireless Internet access; it communicates via Bluetooth and uses an OS built off Linux; and its creator, Takahito Iguchi, formed his startup of eight people in January 2013.

The $133 million gift announced this week by Qualcomm Founder Irwin Jacobs to Cornell Tech in New York City was certainly good news to the educational institution, but was likely not much of a surprise. That’s because IEEE 2013 Medal of Honor recipient Jacobs, profiled in the May issue of Spectrum, has long supported engineering education. And he’s been particularly generous to the two universities that are building this joint campus on New York’s Roosevelt Island: his alma mater, Cornell, based in Ithaca, N.Y., and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, based in Haifa, Israel. Jacobs has supported a number of fellowships and professorships in Cornell’s Colleges of Engineering and Human Ecology, and, at the Technion, contributed to what is now the Jacobs Graduate School as well as the Jacobs Center for Communications and Information Technologies. So when Cornell and the Technion teamed up to win the right to create a Roosevelt Island campus, well, I'm sure it didn't make the generous Jacobs and his wife Joan, who is also a Cornell alumnus, unhappy. (The only unhappy party was surely Stanford, which withdrew a bid to build a New York City campus.) It was likely that the winners would eventually benefit from the Jacobs's philanthropy.

Jacobs' donation will go to what will be called the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute (JTCII). The Institute will offer a two-year graduate program in which students will earn dual master degrees, one from Cornell and one from Technion, specializing in “Connective Media,” focusing on mobile technology and social media; “Healthier Living,” developing health care technology; or “The Built Environment,” working to improve life in urban environments. It will also offer an incubator program for postdocs trying to commercialize technology.

The contribution brings the private funds raised for the Roosevelt Island campus to $00 million. The school's "beta" entering class of eight students is currently housed in temporary space within Google’s Manhattan headquarters.

Photos: Top, Irwin and Joan Jacobs; bottom, rendering of the planned Cornell Tech Campus, credit: Kilograph

Samsung has begun testing mind-controlled tablets and smartphones as the next step toward freeing people from tapping on keyboards or screens. A lot of early research into mind-control has focused on helping the disabled, and the South Korean company's efforts will similarly likely benefit disabled gadget users sooner than the average electronics consumer.

Early experiments have shown how people can use thoughts alone to launch an app, find and select a contact, choose to play songs from favorite playlists and power a tablet up or down, according to a story in MIT Technology Review. Samsung's Emerging Technology Lab teamed up with Roozbeh Jafari, an electrical engineer at the University of Texas at Dallas, to carry out the research on a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet.

Such achievements sound less impressive when considering that users can only carry out mind-control actions about once every five seconds, and with an accuracy of only 80 to 95 percent. Users must wear a cap covered with electrodes and wires running to each electrode—like an electroencephalograph (EEG), it picks up the patterns in the brain's electrical signals.

The Samsung approach interprets well-known brain activity patterns—ones related to the action of seeing repeating visual patterns—as mind-control commands. Researchers found that users can carry out certain actions on a tablet by mentally focusing on an icon that blinked at certain frequencies.

Similar mind-control technologies relying upon EEG readings have shown up in commercial headsets meant for gaming or high-tech amusements, including the Neurosky Mindset and Emotiv "neuroheadsets." Labs have even experimented with the Emotiv headset for driving cars.

Samsung doesn't expect to put out mobile devices using the technology anytime soon given the imperfect nature of current mind control technology. Kevin Brown, a senior inventor at IBM's emerging technology lab, told BBC News that testers had needed 20 minutes just to send an e-mail with mind control during one IBM experiment. That's a far cry from the 25 words in 83 seconds clocked by a quadriplegic man using a head-tracking system a couple of years ago.

Still, Brown and other researchers expect the current state of mind control technology could end up helping disabled people with conditions that prevent them from effectively using the touch, voice, gesture or eye movement controls commonly found in everyday consumer gadgets.