Tech Talk

Today's the kind of day when you can see the future. Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first treatment that can restore (limited) eyesight to (some) blind people. Despite the caveats, it's an exciting milestone.

The treatment involves electrodes implanted in the eyes of people whose retinas are damaged. The FDA approved the implants for people with severe cases of retinitis pigmentosa, a relatively small patient population. But the company that makes the implants, Second Sight Medical Products, says they can benefit a much broader group of people with vision problems, including many elderly people who suffer from macular degeneration. 

IEEE Spectrum covered the technology in "Birth of the Bionic Eye." Click through to that article for all the technical details of how the retinal implant system works, and what the experience of wearing one was like for one test subject, Barbara Campbell (pictured at right).

That article was part of our "Top Tech 2012" special report based on Second Sight's optimistic predictions that it would win FDA approval for the implants in the year 2012. So the company is a couple of months behind schedule in the United States, but its implants have been on the market in Europe since 2011. 

Second Sight isn't the only company working on retinal prostheses. We've also described a competing technology from the German company Retina Implant AG, whose system was undergoing clinical trials last year.

Photos: Second Sight, David Yellin 

With the flip of a single red switch, the operators of the Large Hadron Collider cleared the last near-light-speed protons from the particle accelerator early this morning. Such "dumps," which divert the LHC's particle beams from their circulating ring and into two 10-ton graphite blocks, are routine. They can occur multiple times a day to protect the collider from beams that become unstable. But today's dump is expected to be the last one for two years, as physicists and engineers work to repair and upgrade the facility, with the aim of nearly doubling its power.

The coming campaign, dubbed "Long Shutdown 1," will span all 27 kilometers of the LHC's accelerator ring. The chief aim will be to fix some 10 170 high-current connections between superconducting magnets. A single faulty connection between two magnets was responsible for the explosion in September 2008 that destroyed part of the accelerator and set the LHC's schedule back more than a year.

In the aftermath of that accident, a careful investigation of the quality of other connections around the accelerator revealed additional faulty connections. Some of the most egregious ones were fixed, but LHC managers couldn't exclude the possibility that there were other large ones lurking in parts of the accelerator that were not warmed up for careful inspection after the accident. These were deemed not a danger, so long as the LHC did not operate at too high of an energy. As a result, the collider has been run at 3.5 TeV per beam (more recently 4 TeV), instead of the 7 TeV it was designed for.

CERN's Lucio Rossi, who headed up the production of the superconducting magnets, explained in a 2010 article from the CERN Courier that the magnet team estimated that 10-15 percent of the joints in the facility will need to be resoldered in order to make the collider safe to run as designed. Technicians will also add on an extra, copper shunt to each of the 10 000-odd interconnections. That will allow an extra pathway for electric current should a superconducting connection suddenly quench, or become normally conducting (this greatly raises the material's electrical resistance and can lead to overheating, which is what happened in 2008). 

In addition to new joints, the LHC will also be getting new electronics shielding, new computers, and upgrades to the four large detector experiments stationed around the ring. "It's absolutely not time off," Dave Charlton, deputy spokesperson for the LHC's ATLAS experiment, told Nature.

Physicists will also continue to analyze the data collected over the three years that the LHC was in operation. There's still a lot of work to be done in pinning down the properties of the newly discovered, Higgs-like particle that was announced in July. And when I spoke with Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the CMS experiment, last year, he told me that the CMS team had been stockpiling data in anticipation for the shutdown. They hope to comb through it for evidence of still more new physics.

(Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

A lot of planning and testing goes into creating a new web site and we want our readers to be part of it. That’s why we’ve launched the beta version of our new site, which won't be fully completed until May. Keep in mind that it's a true beta version—if you see things that look broken, it's probably because we're still fixing bugs and adding features. If you spot a bug, or have a complaint or feature request, let us know by using the UserVoice widget in the lower left corner. You can also vote on the suggestions of other readers. We'll be using this feedback to help guide our remaining development priorities

On the beta site, one of the first things you’ll notice is that it sizes to fit your screen, whether you’re viewing it on a TV, desktop monitor, laptop or tablet. If you don’t see something that grabs you on the first page of our homepage or topic pages, you can load more stories, as many as you want. We’ve given you various ways to explore our treasure trove of technology news and analysis like a rich navigation menu that lets you explore engineering topics, special reports, multimedia, our award winning magazine and sponsored content including our popular webinars and whitepapers. You’ll notice that our search results page provides better sorting and filtering controls to help you find exactly what you’re looking for the first time around.

Our content pages have been revamped to be easier to read, with bigger, more legible fonts and a wider content well. Our videos and podcasts are presented in a big, bold format and our blogs have been spiffed up with new landing pages and logos. We’ve switched to a new commenting system powered by Disqus that we think is going to facilitate even more lively discussions.

We also have a number of other features in the works. We’re going to let you sort the modules on our homepage by recency and what other readers find most interesting right now. In addition, we’ll be adding some filters to let you drill down to exactly what you want to see on our homepage and topics pages. We’re going to tighten up the header to reveal more content above the fold and we’re going to redo the bottom of our content pages so they are more readable and easier to navigate. The first column to the right of the content well will all be content related to the item you’re reading so a deeper dive is just one click away. We’ll also be adding our entire print magazine archive going back to 2000.

While we still have lots of work to do, we'd like to get your feedback on what we've got so far. So, take the new site for a spin, and let us know what you think. On the lower right corner of every page, you'll also find a toggle that allows you to switch back and forth between the current site and beta version on any page.

The North Korean provenance of yesterday's nuclear explosion leaps out at even the most casual visitor to the Web site of NORSAR, the Norwegian Seismic Array, north of Oslo.

“Look at the three lines showing the test blasts of 2006, 2009 and 2013,” says Steven J. Gibbons, senior research geophysicist at the organization. “The ripples on the seismograms look identical, except for the difference in amplitude. That’s because the seismic waves have travelled through exactly the same rock, the same rock boundaries.”

It's a correlative method, like fingerprinting, but it works only if you have an earlier, positively identified blast from the same site to serve as a template, notes Gibbons, an IEEE member.  “People are trying to develop models that might one day be able to detect such an explosion without a prior example, but I personally think that’s a long way off,” he says.

After noting a nuke's characteristic squiggle in a seismic readout, researchers around the world can compare notes to pinpoint the origin. “By measuring miniscule differences in travel times between the different stations, you can say that the test in 2009 was approximately 2 kilometers west of the one in 2006 and that the one today was less than one kilometer away.”

Detector arrays in quiet areas, like the central Sahara or the Australian outback, are particularly useful for separating a nuclear explosion’s fingerprint from background noise coming from road traffic, ocean waves, and numberless movements in the depths of the earth.  Once the identification is certain, the amplitude of various data samples over time can help you estimate the size of an explosion.

“If you increase the yield by a factor of 10, you increase the amplitude on the seismograph by a factor of log 10,” Gibbons explains. “We think North Korea’s yields have increased tenfold--from 1 kiloton in 2006 to 5 kilotons in 2009 and to 10, in 2013.”

For all the advantages of a far-flung network of detectors, there is still good reason to get as close to the action as possible. “A seismic wave will decay with distance,” Gibbons explains. “I follow very closely what happens in North Korea, and we process data from Russia’s detector, which is about 350 km from the North Korean border, and from South Korea’s, which is about 250 kilometers from it. We can thus detect mining blasts in North Korea, and I can say, yes, that is what it is, and it came from here or from there.”

In the movie Dr. Strangelove, Soviet ambassador de Sadesky warns that renegade U.S. Air Force general Ripper has put the whole world in peril. The reason, the ambassador explains, is because his countrymen have deployed a doomsday device—50 nuclear bombs spiked with “Cobalt-Thorium G.” These bombs were rigged to go off if the Soviet Union were to suffer a nuclear strike, thus serving as the ultimate deterrent. Unfortunately, the Soviets failed to announce the existence of this system, and as the Dr. Strangelove character scolds de Sadesky, “The whole point of the doomsday machine . . . is lost if you keep it a secret!”

North Korea’s underground test of a nuclear bomb yesterday wasn’t any secret. It wouldn’t serve that nation’s aims if it were. But it is nevertheless interesting to explore how such nuclear tests are detected from afar and whether North Korea could hide such activity if it wanted to.

Four distinct technical systems have been established to detect clandestine nuclear explosions: incorporating seismic, hydro-acoustic, infrasound, and radionuclide sensors. These systems were put in place to support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1996 and which 159 nations have so far ratified (not yet including the United States).

UPDATE 13 FEB, 2013: 

It appears that the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous failed to disrupt U.S. President Obama's State of the Union Speech. From my vantage point, a couch in suburban New Jersey, the webcast was undisturbed.

This commenter on the Anonrelations.net web site summed things up well:

A web site that claims to represent the Anonymous said the group is aggrieved by the re-introduction of the controversial CISPA cybersecurity legislation as well as reports that President Obama will issue an executive order concerning cybersecurity today. The web site says the "Internet is a sovereign territory, and does not fall under the jurisdiction of any nation state... Our determination is that President Obama is acting in direct contravention of this principle."

As we pointed out yesterday, the State of the Union webcast was a pretty risky target for Anonymous. If it had succeeded it would have incited the ire of the FBI. In failing, Anonymous appears to be a spent force.

-Samuel K. Moore

It seems that Washington D.C. isn't the only place where preparations are being made for the annual Presidential address to the U.S. Congress, scheduled for tonight at 9 pm Eastern Time. A web site that claims to represent the hacker political activist group Anonymous—reputed to have been behind several high-profile leaks and cyberattacks, has declared that it will attempt to block the live Internet feed of the State of Union address.

According to the web site, Anonymous is aggrieved by the re-introduction of the controversial CISPA cybersecurity legislation as well as reports that President Obama will issue an executive order concerning cybersecurity tomorrow. The web site says "the Internet is a sovereign territory, and does not fall under the jurisdiction of any nation state... Our determination is that President Obama is acting in direct contravention of this principle." Only the live broadcast is being targeted: "So as not to infringe upon the President’s free speech, subsequent broadcasts will be allowed to pass unhindered."

Blocking the live video would be a feat in itself. Doing so after giving an advance warning would certainly demonstrate a significant cyberwarfare strike capability—a demonstration which would, ironically enough, probably provide political cover for far reaching online security measures. Will Anonymous really make the attempt? Could they actually pull it off? We'll find out in a few hours.

Risk Factor's own Robert N. Charette thinks the move is risky whether Anonymous succeeds or fails. If it succeeds it'll provoked the ire of the FBI and underscore the President's need for the executive order. If it fails it could show that Anonymous is a spent force.

Almost as soon as the first organism developed the ability to change its position, answering the question “Where am I?” became a matter of life and death. Over a billion years of evolution, animals have developed multiple redundant systems for navigating among the landscape’s carrots and sticks, following cues of light, polarization, odor, taste, sound, pressure, electrical charge, magnetic charge, and almost any other parameter that changes over space. Despite the universality of animal navigation, some of the most effective long-range systems remain half-veiled mysteries.

Two groups of researchers have recently delved into historical datasets to illuminate the tools used by two prodigies of long-range navigation, Pacific salmon and homing pigeons.

Pacific salmon choose a route

Recent research revealed a candidate magnetoreceptor that is found distributed (albeit thinly) throughout the key sensory tissues of one salmonid fish, the trout—in the olfactory bulb, inner ear, lateral line, and cornea.

Nathan Putman and David Noakes—part of a team from Oregon State University and the Universities of North Carolina, Washington, and California—analyzed a 56-year set of fisheries data tracking the return of the Fraser River sockeye salmon to their home river. The Fraser River flows out of British Columbia into the Strait of Georgia behind Vancouver Island.  The homing fish must detour around the 290-mile-long island, entering either from the north, via the Queen Charlotte Strait, or from the south, via the Juan de Fuca Strait. The researchers call the percentage of fish opting for the northern route the “diversion rate.”  It varies widely, from 85 percent in some years down to 2 percent in others; most of the time, naturally, the diversion rate falls somewhere in between.

The fisheries scientists tabulated data on which route the salmon took, year-by-year, and correlated it with two environmental variables: transient drift in the Earth’s magnetic field and water temperature (salmon are cold-water creatures and will generally pick the chillier of two evils). The geomagnetic field fluctuates predictably. The researchers used the established Geomagnetic Reference Field model (GRF-11) to calculate the field strength at the mouth of the Fraser River in the year the salmon left the river, and the field strengths at the river mouth and each strait entrance when they returned two years later.

U.K. Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, announced a £25 million investment to expand the country’s national standards institute. The investment, Willetts said, will be used to build a new Advanced Metrology Laboratory, “a state of the art laboratory for cutting edge measurement research. The creation of advanced facilities at the National Standards Laboratory in Teddington will allow scientists there to undertake leading edge research in key nano and quantum metrology programmes.”

The measure is intended to boost Britain’s national competitiveness in manufacturing, process control, communications, and transportation, and to move the country into the forefront of development in key technologies, including high-accuracy optical clocks and frequency measurement, graphene-based electronics, quantum detection, surface and nanoanalysis, and advanced materials.

The new facility at NPL will mean 20 new laboratories with workspace for about 40 metrologists, with stringent temperature and humidity controls and isolation to reduce interference from acoustic, electrical, and magnetic sources.

The investment builds on an earlier announcement that NPL would strike partnerships with academic and applied-science organizations to develop new technologies and create a new NPL postgraduate research institute.

The Advanced Metrology Laboratory expansion was part of a £600 million (roughly US $900 million) technology-development package that includes £189 million for big data and energy efficient computing, £35 million for center of excellence in robotics and autonomous systems, and £30 million to for R&D on grid scale energy storage technologies. 

Image: UK National Physical Laboratory

The world has embraced the cloud. What’s not to like? Startups can grow rapidly without investing in racks of computers, companies can back up data easily, consumers can travel light and still have access to their huge photo libraries and other personal files.

Back in October, however, real clouds clashed with metaphorical clouds when Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath took down some key data centers in New York and New Jersey; a serious problem for businesses who had their main servers in New York and their backup servers in nearby New Jersey. Commercial cloud service providers, for the most part, did pretty well; perhaps because some of the largest data centers, like Amazon’s northern Virginia server farm, were not in the disaster zone. But Sandy certainly reminded cloud service providers that redundant files have to be separated by more than a couple of racks, or even a couple of miles.

Startup Symform thinks it can provide better disaster resilience than even data centers hundreds of miles apart. And, says Bassam Tabbara, Symform cofounder and Chief Technical Officer, it can do that in a way that’s extremely cheap—and in some cases free—to its customers.

Tabbara describes Symform’s approach as a “decentralized, distributed, virtual, and crowd-sourced” cloud. Living in the San Francisco Bay area, I can visualize that kind of cloud, however, we don’t call it a cloud here, we call it fog. (I thought I had invented the term Fog Computing, but a quick search proved me wrong.)

Here’s how it works. Most of Symform’s customers act as hosts as well as customers, that is, they allocate some amount of their on-site storage for use by Symform. Pricing depends on just how much storage they make available; if they allow twice as much data to be stored as they are uploading into the Symform fog, then their fog storage is free. (Otherwise, pricing is 15 cents per gigabyte per month.) This approach is similar to the SETI@home effort in which volunteers donate idle computer cycles to analyze radio data as part of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; Symform asks customers to provide idle storage.

Amazon announced this week that come May its customers will be able to buy Kindle Fire apps and some other goodies with a new virtual currency called Amazon Coins. And to jumpstart the program, they will give away millions of dollars worth of coins.

The giveaway is a great way to get started, but it points to a problem with using the word "currency" to describe what Amazon has created. Calling Amazon Coins a virtual currency suggests that it will be a widely accepted, independent store of value that you can easily convert to another currency. But from the few details Amazon has given, there's no reason to think this will be anything other than yet another in-house system of credits. If Amazon Coins are currency then so is the card I use to get on the subway in New York, because it works the same way—you load money onto an account. But once its there, the subway system is the only place you can use it. At least you can use the cards throughout the subway system (and eventually, maybe as part of a system that includes Metro North trains and PATH). When Amazon dumps "tens of millions of dollars worth of Coins" on their customers, will these coins be redeemable throughout all of the Amazon marketplace? No. They will only buy Kindle Fire apps, games, and in-app items.

And we've seen this a million times before. Microsoft Points. Nintendo points. Even the gang from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia tried beefing up business at their bar by printing Paddy's Dollars. It's the kind of scheme where it works the best for the company when it works the least for the customer, trapping people in with inflexible policies that force them to buy more credits than they immediately use.

It seems that Amazon is at least trying to avoid some of the most offensive mistakes of its predecessors. For example, one of the biggest complaints with Microsoft Points is that they are not matched exactly to the U.S. dollar. Instead, one dollar equals 80 points and in order to use them you have to do some wacky conversion in your head. People really didn't like this and many thought it was designed to obfuscate the actual price of things. Amazon has chosen a one to one ratio where each coin will equal a penny.