I find this graph particularly intriguing since it is showing the amazing decrease of cost for DNA sequencing (here it is shown the decrease of cost for a complete human genome) and it compares this with the decrease in cost/increased performances according to the Moore’s law, that has been affecting the chips.

As you can see the decrease in cost has been almost matching the one predicted by Moore for the chips till 2007. From 2008 there is a sharp departure from the Moore’s law with a cost decrease much more rapid. This is due to the adoption of new sequencing techniques (second generation) and we are now on the brink, as reported in another post few days ago, of a third generation leading to a further acceleration of the evolution.

Underneath this faster progress there is electronics and information technology, both supporting the new approaches to sequencing.

Dual Core, MultiCore, Massive Distributed Processing… Just a few words to say that technology has progressed to offer us multiple processors to work on a single task. Multiplying the processors you increase the overall computational power without increasing exponentially the energy required, as it would be the case if you were to speed up a single processor to match the same performances.

Parasail ... a new programming language for parallel processors

The challenge with this approach is to be able to write a code, a program, to take effective advantage of the parallel processing, no small feat at all!

Now a new programming language is available to ease the life of programs: ParaSail, Parallel Specification and Implementation Language.

The language has been designed by Tucker Taft, CTO of Softcheck a software company based in Boston, to overcome the problems programmers run into when dealing with multicore. There is a tradeoff when using these chips: you can stick to conservative programming but then you are not exploiting the parallelisms offered by the multiple cores or you can parallelize everything but risk creating out of sequence operation that leads to errors.

Current Dual Core on the average can increase the processing speed by 20/30% depending on the task at hand, they are not doubling it. ParaSail uses an approach of pico threading, dividing the program (automatically) in as many elemental operations as possible and threading each one on a different core, unless the programmers block parts into sequences. In other words, it assumes that everything can be parallelized unless it is told not to.

The compiler should be released this September and it has already created an interest both in the programmers community and at Intel.

In this decades we will see the number of cores reaching the hundreds. One of the reasons this has not happened so far is because with present programming languages the more cores you have the less efficient their use so it does not make sense to increase their number. If ParaSail meet its promises the situation will change.

What interests me most, however, is the fact that the concept of multicore can be “stretched” to include massively distributed processing. With UBB (UltraBroadBand) and low latency provided by end to end optical connectivity it may start to make sense to micro thread (not pico thread…) computation onto geographically dispersed computers (SETI on steroids…).

Pervasive Computing and Networking, I am convinced of it, will deeply change our view of computation. Ambients will become aware and responsive and this requires distributed computation that is based both on signal exchange and on edge sensing, just the way it happens in our body where cells respond to nervous signals and to the chemical environment surrounding them.

I also see a parallel, and a support in this vision, by the evolution of networks, where the ones provided by the Operators can be assimilated to the nervous systems and the ones being created bottom up at the edges (viral networks, sensors networks, ambient communications) can be assimilated to the local chemical soup conditioning the reaction of the cells.

There is plenty of new research needed in this area that is at the crossing point of bio, electronics, cybernetics, autonomics and semantics.

There have been several announcements in the past few years on bendable screens and suggestions that once market ready they can be used to replace newspapers. Now a prototype has been developed showing how these technologies may change our ideas of smart phones.

The prototype has been developed by the Queen’s University Human Media Lab and will be shown this week at the Computer Human Interaction Conference in Vancouver.

Potentially it can be used also as a tablet although it is so thin and flexible that might be difficult to handle.

The color and resolution is a far cry from what we got used to but it will surely improve over time. It is interesting because it shows what is in store just round the corner and it enforces my vision of a future based on ubiquitous visual interfaces.

Think about it. Nature is building its “products” from a tiny seed that grows over time to become a oak or a pea, a fly or a whale.

We work differently. We start big (even a tiny bolt is bigger than a seed or a spermatozoa) and then we assemble parts to form even bigger objects. Nanotech is working in a much similar way to Nature but with Nanotech we can only build nanothings. We are still missing the capacity to start small and grow.

Some objects, like an airplane, have to be “big enough” to embed all required controls and mechanisms.  We can build an electronic fly, as an example, although some attempts are being made.

Hence, it is with surprise that I just read of the feat accomplished by AeroVironment in developing a humming bird size replica that can fly, hoover, counterbalance the side wind and be precisely directed on a desired path.

The artificial hummingbird

This result stems from a research grant provided by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the one who gave the starting kick to the Internet…) to develop a small bird sized aircraft within a set of tight constraints, like the one just mentioned above.

The artificial hummingbird is slightly bigger than the average hummingbird but smaller than the biggest one. It weights 19 grams and has a wing span of 16 cm.

Just the other day I published a post on the work at the MIT on the creation of a flying screen built up by thousands of tiny flying dots. The kind of control those dots have is minimal, basically the can only hoover in an environment where there is no wind. You would never be able to set up that screen in the open. Too much control is required.

This hummingbird has the control it takes to do that and is even able to carry a camera on board, but, of course, it would too big to be used as a pixel in a flying screen. Still a long way to go to reach that point.

However, it could easily carry a sensor to places where it would be difficult to have one and a fleet (or should I say a flock?) of them can perform amazing task in sensing the environment.

Besides, it is not unconceivable to imagine an ecosystem stemming out of flying sensors providing the possibility to create apps for a real flying platform.

We’ll see.

Today’s cars have an amazing percentage of their cost made up by electronics. You have microchips controlling the injection, the suspensions, the speed, connecting the car with GPS, serving the entertainment system, enabling the locks and so on.

Sensors in tyres communicate wirelessly with Control Centre

More recently sensors have started to be inserted in tyres detectig loss of pressure and chips integrating this information with the automatic balancing of suspension (and of course blinking a light to signal a flat tyre).

All this electronics can go wrong and a bunch of other chips is there to check the correct working of every part. Everything is connected one another via buses criss-crossing the car.

Now, it has been pointed out a further danger: electronics can go awry also because of malicious tampering with its software.

At Rutgers and at the University of South Carolina,   http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/08/cars-hacked-through-wireless-tyre-sensors.ars researchers have detected a weak point in wireless sensors installed in tyres (tyres sensors are compulsory in the USA in all new cars since 2008). The first warning was given earlier this year by researchers at the Washington University who showed that the car control system can be hacked.

Now the research points out several other weak points exist, most notably the wireless communications between the tyres sensors and the ECU (Electronic Control Unit).

Each tyre sensor contains a unique identity and using a 1,500$ set build up of commercial equipment the researchers have been able to intercept the communication and hacked it.

In a car these sensors communicate with the ECU once a minute and it is just a tiny message so the amount of damage that can be done by a malicious hacker is limited to annoyance but the research is important because it is a red light on the danger of building up pervasive systems without taking into accont all the issues that may arise.

Well, I know: with the exception of energy released by the decay of the Earth core (leading to the geothermal energy) all the forms of energy we are harvesting on the Earth are Solar based. However, by far, most of what we use is an energy that was stored millions of years ago and that would take millions of years to be repleted, like gas, oil and carbon. That is why we usually call this non renewable energy sources.

Scientists have been working hard to harvest the energy coming from the Sun every day and bathing the Earth surface in form of light. We have available photovoltaic panels and thermal panels. The former convert light into electrical energy through a quantum effect, the latter use the light to heat a fluid that in turn can be used to power a turbine.

Both approaches work but each is capable of converting only a minor portion of the incoming energy. Now a team of researchers from Stanford have published a paper on Nature to announce the discovery of a way to merge the two approaches onto a single panel, thus significantly increasing the yeald of energy transformation. http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat2814.html

The problem they had to solve is the fact the in the photovoltaic conversion the silicon can operate only at temperatures below 100 C whilst the thermal conversion requires temperatures well above 100 degrees C.

The solution was the creation of a new material capable of producing the photovoltaic effect: rather than using silicon they are using GaN (Gallium Nitride) able to operate at a temperature of 200 degrees C thus leading to a theoretical efficiency close to 50%, a significant leap compared to today’s systems.

The energy conversion process using both photovoltaic and thermal effects

It is not a solution to our hunger of energy but is a step in the right direction. It will require more steps, both in sequence and in parallel to quench our thirst of energy and the “final solution” is not in sight. Also, we should remember that whatever energy level we use we will have to dissipate the thermal product of our energy usage and that is creating problems (like the disappearance of glaciers and the increase in the Oceans level). In the end we will have to continue to strive for a containment in the increase of out usage of energy, an area where Telecommunications may help.

We have been used to ever thinner screens, the thinnest as I am writing is 9 mm. How thinner could they become?

Well, apparently, the limit is … 0!

A new organic semiconductor developed by a research team of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the poly(3-hexylthiophene), or P3HT can be used to create large area electronics, such as screens (and also solar cells).
Electronics created with this material can be painted on any surface using a sort of plotter with an airbrush like technique.

This technology can also be seen as a further twist on the printed electronic technology that is now experimented to print RFID tags and sensors on packages.

AirSpray Electronics

In common with the printed electronics it shares the very low cost (so low in fact that it can be used on disposable objects like packaging) and the possibility to be bended.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=/news/news_single.html?id%3D11996

Researchers at the Arizona State University have found a way to create a diode (the bit equivalent in electronics) using a single molecule. The drive towards smaller and smaller elemental component has been on for the last 40 years. Now miniaturization has reached the nanoscale (40nm is now an industrial process with 20nm on sight in the next decade and possible 4nm by the end of the decade). A single molecule is below the nm size but one has to remember that to get the number of molecules needed at a, say, 20nm scale one has to consider that they are arranged in a volume, non on a line. Hence, to create a component based on a 20nm scale with a 0.2nm molecules you need 100³ molecules, that is 1 million molecules. Note that this calculation needs to be taken with a grain of salt since many of those molecules also serve the purpose to create a substrate, still we are talking, even at that incredibly small size of a huge number of molecules.

It comes as a staggering advance, then, the results of these Arizona researchers, led by N.J.Tao, that have shown how to create a diode using just a single molecule. The feat is accomplished by using asymmetrical molecules that respond differently depending on the interaction applied.

Asymmetrical molecule used as a diode

The technique developed by Tao’s group relies on a property known as AC modulation. “Basically, we apply a little periodically varying mechanical perturbation to the molecule. If there’s a molecule bridged across two electrodes, it responds in one way. If there’s no molecule, we can tell.”

It is interesting to note that this group of researchers operates in the Biodesign Institute, that is the department looking at how Nature works.

The application of these discoveries are still far away (10 years?) but it is nice to know that we have still a way to go ahead of us.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091013110042.htm