Researchers at the Karlsruhe University have managed to beat the speed record they owned by transmitting last year 10 Tbps on a fibre using a single laser beam. Now they have transmitted 26 Tbps!

Interestingly, they say that this new achievement is just showing that we have not received the physical limits of transmission speed (or rather capacity, since the speed never changes, being the speed of the electromagnetic field).

It is always nice to see how far research can “push the envelope” even though this kind of speed are not viable today for commercial exploitation. However, in a commercial fibre we have already reached multi Tbps capacity by inserting several laser beams into the fibre with DWDMA (Dense Wavelength Division Multiple Access). By increasing the capacity of each single beam we can multiply the overall capacity by adding more lasers. However, at a certain point, at least today, we need to convert the optical signal into an electric one (and the other way around) and here is where we have the bottleneck. The cost of increasing the speed of electronics (in the electro-optical conversion) skyrockets with present technology once you push beyond 40 Gbps.

In the future, however, we will see both an increase of speed in the optical-electrical conversion and the optical networks will be able to extend much further, possibly right into the computer chip where some researchers have started to use optical bus for communication in the chip and are experimenting with optical processing.

It looks like the thresholds of what is impossible keep moving as we get closer.

Wellbeing fostered through apps on your cell phone

There is a growing batch of Apps that let people share their health data, get advise from others suffering from the same or similar ailment, create their medical history for doctors to peruse when the need comes.

Take a look at the analyses provided in a recent article on the Technology Review published by MIT.

Many more Apps are expected as the UCLA/UCSF Open mHealth project will release APIs for transmitting and accessing a variety of personal health related data.

These data can be input manually through the App on the cell phone or can be retrieved automatically by some sensors you are wearing, may be embedded in your dresses or in your watch, and then transmitted to the Open Data Base at the University through your cell phone.

What is new is that whilst today most apps are sending health related data to specific data base connected just to that particular app, in the Open mHealth the data are sent to a common repository that provides the functions to support the privacy of the information and the ones to let the owner of the information to decide what she wants to share and with whom.

Researchers in the medical field expect to be able to leverage on these data and be able to derive precious information, basically transforming the whole population into an open lab for continuous feedback. Any medicine will thus generate continuous feedback from its users thus allowing the detection of any problem and the fine tuning of prescription.

This is so much in line with the ideas that we have for the Trento EIT/ICT Lab that has just been approved and that will use the territory and the people as a big open lab.

Well, it is not exactly like that but headlines have to be catchy, don’t they?

Brain Implant Chip (rats only!)

Researchers at the Wake Forest University have developed a custom chip that can improve memory in rats. Although it is nothing like an extra storage for the brain it is indeed an interesting development since it points out that we are really starting to have a clearer view on how the brain works and we are starting to interact with its processes.

The researchers monitored the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for converting short term memory into long term one, of several rats and learned the mechanisms used by their brain to remember certain action, in the specific the pushing of one of two levers.

The implanted chip is able to pick up signals from the short term memory and through an algorithm stimulate the hippocampus so that such memories are stored in the long term area. There is not, at least so far, an understanding of the “language” used to store information in the short and long term memory but, as the researchers are pointing out, it does not matter since the chip acts like a translator from Chinese to Russian without understanding what it is translating.

Although this experiment demonstrates the progress we have been able to make both in the understanding of the brain and in the creation of algorithms that can mimic the brain internal communications we are extremely far for a clinical application. We can today monitor a single neuron but we know that a single memory, like the flavor of the ice cream I ate yesterday, involves millions of neurons (that are also involved in hundreds of thousands of other memories).

Hence, it will be quite some time before we can plug in some extra Gigs in our brain. Some scientists are arguing that it will never be possible to have a machine thinking like a human because human thinking is different from what can be created in silicon at a fundamental level. This goes back to the critique of Artificial Intelligence, a theme that was hot in the past and that is now being rediscussed.

However, never say never….

We are now living in the PetaScale era, since the most powerful computer on Earth (a Chinese machine!) reaches the processing capacity of several PFLOPS (million of billion of floating point instructions per second).

As a matter of fact the amount of date produced every year has already got into the ExaScale (close to 200 EB).

Now Intel at the Supercomputers Conference has announced a roadmap leading computers in the ExaScale Era by 2018.

By 2020, according to Intel, the most powerful computer will have reach the 4 EFLOPS, something that will be need for the ever more precise climate change prediction upon which we are basing our economic policy in the energy field.

Take a look at what was presented at the conference for a peek into the future of processing, a future where, as far as this decade is concerned, the Moore’s law will hold.

Interestingly, one of the major stumbling block in this progress is the energy required to power these new monsters. If we were to use the technology used today by the fastest supercomputer and power it up to reach the EFLOP barrier we would need 1,6 GW of power, enough to serve  city with 2 million people.

Intel is working with some European Research Centres to find ways to decrease the amount of power required.

The second law of thermodynamics is telling us that whatever we do the entropy increases and a good part of it is generation of heat. Of course you can use heat (and it is done over and over) to generate more useful forms of energy, like electricity, but still at the end you will end up in increased entropy and heat.

No changes are in sight (apparently as long as the Universe will keep expanding…). But ways to convert part of the heat into more usable forms of energy can be found.

And this is what happened at the University of Minnesota, College of Science and Engineering. Researchers have discovered a new alloy that when heated becomes a magnet. And we know how to use a magnet to generate electricity!

So just imagine. Your laptop is creating heat as you are using it and part of this heat can be reconverted in electricity to (partly) recharge the battery…

Just remember, it is not perpetual motion…just a way to use energy more efficiently.

Sure you had. And, besides, we have come to take for granted that we need to choose what needs to be in focus and what we accept to be out of focus.

This is part of the rules of the game when we use a camera, both film and digital.

But now a start up, Lytro, has found a way to let us take the whole image as it is in front of us and then decide afterward what we want to see in focus.

You can even change the point of view and create, after the shot, 3D images.

It should be available later this year at a price that according to Lytro, will be more than 1$ and less than 10,000$. That is quite a range…so let’s wait before calling it our next gadget!

Reading Roberto’s posts (on the incredible amount data around us) reminded me a paper (Predicting the future with social media) about how social media can be utilized to forecast future outcomes. While the study focused on the adaproblem of predicting box office revenues of movies by using the chatter from Twitter.com, the method can be extended to a large set of topics, ranging from the future rating of products and services of consumer interest to election outcomes. Tapping and elaborating information from social media can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.

The brain rewarding system

This reminded me also another paper (Remembering the past to imagine the future: the prospective brain) arguing that, according to a growing number of recent neuroscience studies, imagining the future depends on much of the same neural machinery that is needed for remembering the past: the so called prospective brain. It is a crucial function of the brain; it uses stored information to imagine, simulate and predict possible future events. We know that for a living organism, preparing for the future is a vital task important for adaptation and survival: the anticipatory capacity is crucial for deciding between alternative courses of actions. For instance, one simple prediction made by the prospective brain is the probable time and magnitude of future rewarding events (a positive value that a living organism refers to an object, an act or an internal state. Physiological studies has recently complemented these arguments by identifying dopaminergic neurons whose fluctuating output signals changes or errors in the predictions of future salient and rewarding events. This is amazing. Once we understand deeper how rewards are processed by the brain, we may then even discover how reward information is used to produce behaviour that is directed towards rewarding goals.

The ultimate appears to be gaining a comprehensive understanding of the prospective neural machinery that deal with all aspects of reward that are relevant for explaining living organism goal-directed behaviour and adapatation. This will produce a wealth of important knowledge not only for making more accurate predictions of future events but also for designing self-adaptable future networks .

Do you remember the e-cat, the controversial and potentially disruptive technology on new form of clean and cheap source of energy?

Well, today the Greek company called Defkalion has announced commercial plans and technical specifications of their products (called Hyperion) that, at moment, produces only heat and not electricity that can be generated with the application of existing third party technology.

The architecture of the kW Hyperion products is based on the simplified design in the figure: area A is the E-Cat, area B is a hydrogen canister under pressure, areas C consists of the electronics that monitor and control the safety conditions of the operation as well as the security of the product against any unauthorized use.

With regards to electricity generation, consumers will be able to receive a total solution based on mutually confirmed interoperability with third party technologies such as steam turbines and micro-steam turbines, Rankin new generation CHP, as well as intelligent heat management systems.

Their current product line ranges from kW units (5 – 30kW) to MW units (1.15 – 3.45 MW).

Hyperion products have different configurations:

• Series A: Single tube single module CHP: By this configuration, 5-10Kw heat power will be released to operate micro-CHP/micro turbine configurations
• Series B: Multi tube single module CHP: By this configuration, multiples of 5 or 10Kw heat power (max 30kW) can be integrated in the same box , when product has to operate (heat) bigger CHP/micro-CHP or steam turbine configurations
• Series C: Single tube single module heat only: By this configuration, 5-10Kw heat power will be released to operate small steam or hot water demands such as agricultural applications (green houses)
• Series D: Multi tube single module heat only: By this configuration, multiples of 5Kw heat power can be integrated in the same box , when product has to produce substantial amounts of heat for energy demanding applications
• Series E: Single or multi tube modules in parallel: To face the energy demands of big industrial installations at the range of MWs. Such products consists of arrays of A, B, or D series rack-mounted
• Series F: Single or multi tube modules in series: To accelerate power in different configurations

All products are connected to Defkalion main computers through on-line GSM for monitoring.

The company declares that there are no radioactive materials used or produced, there is no emitted radioactivity nor any other hazardous gases or other materials – both during production but also usage.

The deadline of the inauguration of the first E-Cat Plant is coming and soon Defkalin is starting to sell products in Greece, then in Balkans and worldwide.

While the world is ignoring this epochal revolution, Defkalion, despite the silence of media, is starting to sell the product based on the intelligence and work of italian scientists.  Of course there will be a lot to do to improve these products and to begin to produce electricity but now it’ s important to start and to demonstrate that the e-cat really works.

The revolution of new era for cheap energy seems already started.

So, stay tuned… soon I’ll post updates.

It is now two years since Intel has announced its futuristic ideas on creating objects out of … catoms. These are very tiny computers that can interact one another and their surface is smooth and shaped like a marble.

The idea is that the surface of these tiny marbles can be electrostatically charged so that two marbles can stick together or repel one another. Localize the charge on the sphere surface and you can create basically any object.

Carnegie Mellon University has taken up the challenge and it is progressing to a goal that probably can be reached within this decade in certain sectors but will likely require twenty more years (my take) to have a real impact. They got a name for this science: claytronics, basically mixing together the clay (as in the Genesis, Adam was made of clay…) and the electronics. And “catoms”  of course stands for claytronics atoms.

To me this research represents a way to approach nanotech products without having to go through the nanotech complex assembly. You have nanotech in the production of the “catoms” but this is something we already know how to do, since it is basically about developing chips. The extra feature here is the embedding sphere and its capability to have localized charges activated. This is not a trivial issue and ties in with the energy consumption. You do not want your new toy to melt away because the millions of catons it is made of lose the grip on one another.

Clearly there is still a long way to go before having something that is marketable and usable but still it makes me think about the opportunities. First of all you are not going to have an object embedding a computer, you have millions, may be billions of them with a collective processing power that is just beyond imagination.

They will act as a real ecosystem, since you will need at any instant to have them all in equilibrium, but at the same time this equilibrium can change over time (upon command) so that your catoms based phone that perfectly fit your pocket will get thinner and wider in your hand and even larger on your desk providing you with more screen real estate. And what about fusing together two objects if you are lacking a few million catoms? Or for that matter chipping a few millions away from your pocket to get an instant pair of glasses with embedded translation capabilities.

Yes I know, we are on the edges of science fiction, but we are standing on that edge from the science part, not from the fiction! And, besides, you can get the inside news on catoms direclty from Wikipedia.

Two things are certain: our life is becoming an endless stream of data generation and we are in a symbioses with our cell phone.

What can you do by merging these two things? Apparently the only limit to their exploitation is our imagination. More an more cell phone based apps are appearing to leverage this tuple.

What can your cell phone tell about your health?

A start up stemming out from the Media Lab, DailyData, is now offering an app that will run on your cell phone in background and collect data from your calls (when, where, how long) generating a pattern. The claim is that over a period of months the app can start to understand the average pattern and from then on it can start detecting variations.

Some of this variations may be connected to your health status. Specifically, it has been studied the change of calling pattern in relation to depression bouts, an ailment afflicting many people in today’s world.

I wouldn’t be surprised, actually I am expecting it, to see an app monitoring our voice as we speak in the phone and being able to detect subtle changes that in turns can point to some medical conditions requiring prompt scrutiny.

Our cell phone, on one side, and our digital shadow, on the other, will become the best black box device to understand what’s going on within us helping to manage our health in a proactive way.