may the force be with you

Peterborough, N.H. - Already being intensely studied as an agent for cleaning up toxic waste, a strain of bacteria has now surprised researchers with its ability to build conducting nanowires.

The long, very thin wires are unprecedented in biological systems, says the microbiologist who discovered the bacteria and the wires' conductivity. They completely change science's understanding of how microbes handle electrons, he said.

Derek Lovley and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass.) reported observing and measuring the conductivity of long wires, 3 to 5 nanometers in diameter, emanating from the Geobacter bacteria.

Exactly what the wires are made of is still under investigation, but the gene that codes for them has been identified, Lovley said. That opens up the possibility of using genetic engineering and systems biology to manufacture wires with predetermined properties.

"The desirable properties will most likely be specified by particular engineering applications," he said. Methods for predicting the structures that would yield the desired properties, he said, "may include those that would be classified under systems biology."

Geobacter is common, appearing in soils and at the bottom of rivers. Since it uses metals, rather than oxygen, for respiration, it has become useful in cleaning up toxic waste, including uranium that has seeped into groundwater.

Lovley discovered the bacteria in the mid-1980s, and the organisms have been thoroughly studied, so finding the thin conducting nanowires emanating from their outer coat was unexpected. But it explains Geobacter's ability to remove metals from soil and water. A key step in its metabolism is the transfer of electrons from its interior to metals in its surroundings. Until now, it was unknown how Geobacter accomplished the task.

The Department of Energy has been the main supporter of Lovley's work over the past two decades. "The microbial world never stops surprising us," said Aristides Patrinos, associate director of the DOE's Office of Biological and Environmental Research. "This discovery illustrates the continuing relevance of the physical sciences to today's biological investigations."

Patrinos said the bacteria may organize to form minipower grids in the soil by linking up via the nanowires. That type of organized behavior might also lead to ultrasmall environmental sensors or novel ways to bioengineer nanocircuits.

The ability of the bacteria to link their nanowires has been observed in Lovley's lab. The hairlike wires emanating from the bacteria had been seen previously, but their conducting function was discovered via atomic-force microscope techniques.

Gemma Ruegera, a microbiologist, worked with physicists Mark Tuominen and Kevin McCarthy to probe the electrical properties of the tiny wires. Their role in electron transfer was confirmed by genetically altering the bacteria so that they no longer produced the wires. The modified bacteria were unable to transfer electrons, the researchers reported.

source:http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3BA2ZWSKMF2MOQSNDBGCKH0CJUMEKJVN?articleID=167101011&printable=true

# posted by dark master : 8/09/2005 09:18:00 AM  0 comments

The company that the product, made available Monday, combines functions such as memory, logic, power management, radio and network processes on a single chip. The chip has been developed using the company's 90-nanometer CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) manufacturing and digital radio-frequency processor technologies, the chipmaker said.

This integration of crucial electronics on a single chip will reduce the power requirements, the needed board area and silicon area of phones. All of that should help drive down costs of entry-level GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) phones with GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) capability, Texas Instruments said. The chip was made available to Nokia at the beginning of the year and is now available to manufacturers in India and other emerging markets.

"It will reduce (the) electronics bill of material for handset vendors by 30 percent," Tom Engibous, chairman of Texas Instruments, said here while addressing members of the Cellular Operators Association of India. With this, he said, there is the possibility of $20 cell phones on the horizon. "Our customers can use this technology to make ultra-low-cost handsets affordable in largely untapped consumer markets such as India, China, South America, Eastern Europe and other emerging markets."

Emerging markets are a target of chipmakers, as well as handset makers. Qualcomm, for example, is also working on chips that combine several functions of CDMA (code division multiple access) cell phones and help handset makers reduce costs.

India is among the fastest-growing cell phone markets in the world. The country expects to add more than 100 million new subscribers in the next two years, from the present base of 58 million. Industry leaders assert that although call charges in India are the cheapest in the world, high regulatory fees and the lack of cheaper entry-level phones are key factors affecting growth.

# posted by dark master : 8/09/2005 09:16:00 AM  0 comments

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM plans to give away key search technologies for corporate data retrieval that use concepts and facts instead of simpler "keyword" searches relied upon by consumer Web companies such as Google Inc. , the world's largest computer company said on Monday.

While simple but powerful keyword searches have revolutionized how Internet users locate and retrieve information, IBM is looking to transform how office workers sift through the piles of data stored inside organizations.

"I don't see any of the major players moving into this area," Arthur Ciccolo, head of search technology at IBM Research, said of how major consumer Internet search companies such as Google, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft have focused on the public Internet instead of private record data retrieval.

IBM plans to openly offer other software developers its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), a technology that can analyze text within documents and other media to understand latent meanings, relationships and facts.

Some 15 companies, including Attensity, ClearForest, Cognos , Endeca, Factiva, Kana , Inquira, iPhrase, Inxight, nStein , QL2, SAS, Schemalogic, Semagix, SPSS Inc. and Temis plan to use UIMA as a framework for search and text analysis of unstructured data, IBM said. Factiva is a joint venture of financial information providers Dow Jones & Co. Inc. and Reuters Group Plc .

IBM is also offering its WebSphere OmniFind software for helping users perform searches on unstructured data in a variety of formats or languages, be they located in databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or video images.

Ciccolo said UIMA will allow many different suppliers of software used in knowledge management, search, business intelligence and text analytics to work with one another.

The corporate data search framework being made available to other software developers is the result of more than four years of development by IBM Research, with contributions from researchers at top U.S. universities, and support from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), IBM said.

Other researchers working on UIMA are military contractors Science Applications International Corp., BBN Technologies and MITRE Corp. and health care provider The Mayo Clinic.

As an example, a combination of software from Attensity, ClearForest, iPhrase, Kana and IBM can be used by consumer goods makers to monitor the Web for initial complaints about a product defect and locate internal corporate data that might help it quickly respond to potential product quality issues.

There has been an explosion in "unstructured" information on the web, taking the form of documents, images, comment and note fields, e-mail and even rich media like video and audio.

However, the technology has not existed to allow software to search out and make sense of these disparate forms of data.

But the push to render meaning out of unstructured information will take many years to solve. To be sure, the issue is as old as messy filing systems and woolly thinking.

A decade ago many database developers, including Informix, a company subsequently acquired by IBM, said their database management systems were close to solving the unstructured data issue. Yet some 85 percent of corporate data still sits in unstructured form outside of databases, analysts estimate.

UIMA technology is expected to be made available through open-source software site SourceForge by the end of 2005. The UIMA framework can currently be downloaded free of charge from IBM AlphaWorks at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uima/.

source:http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=13874891

# posted by dark master : 8/09/2005 09:14:00 AM  0 comments