Aasemoon'z Cluster

(Nanowerk News) While the laws of physics weren’t made to be broken, sometimes they need revision. A major current law has been rewritten thanks to the three-port transistor laser, developed by Milton Feng and Nick Holonyak Jr. at the University of Illinois.

CHESS is a tool for disciplined testing of concurrent programs. CHESS requires users to develop concise concurrent tests for that explore one concurrency scenario—or a few scenarios—in their programs. Given such a test, CHESS systematically enumerates all behaviors of the program being tested to find concurrency errors, data races, deadlocks, and livelocks.

Synopsys, Inc., has unveiled the DesignWare Ethernet Quality-of-Service (QoS) Controller IP which implements the new IEEE specifications for audio video bridging (AVB) features. The DesignWare Ethernet IP solution supports the new IEEE 802.1AS and 802.1-Qav version D6.0 specifications. These specifications enable efficient networking of streaming audio video (AV) applications through IEEE 802.1 networks found in consumer electronics, automotive AV and professional sound system products. Synopsys' DesignWare Ethernet QoS Controller, which supports 10/100/1G data transfer speeds, allows designers to develop system-on-chips (SoCs) that deliver time-synchronized, low-latency audio and video over Ethernet networks with exceptional quality-of-service while retaining compatibility with legacy networks.

"An industrial assembly line includes a factory, workers, and a conveyor system," said NYU Chemistry Professor Nadrian Seeman, the study's senior author. "We have emulated each of those features using DNA components." The assembly line relies on three DNA-based components. The first is DNA origami, a composition that uses a few hundred short DNA strands to direct a very long DNA strand to form structures to any desired shape. These shapes are approximately 100 x 100 nanometers in area, and about 2 nm thick (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter). DNA origami serves as the assembly line's framework and also houses its track. The second are three DNA machines, or cassettes, that serve as programmable cargo-donating devices. The cargo species the researchers used are gold nanoparticles, which measure 5 to 10 nanometers in diameter. Changing the cassette's control sequences allows the researchers to enable or prevent the donation of the cargoes to the growing construct. The third is a DNA "walker," which is analogous to the chassis of a car being assembled. It moves along the assembly line's track, stopping at the DNA machines to collect and carry the DNA "cargo." As the walker moves along the pathway prescribed by the origami tile track, it encounters sequentially the three DNA devices. These devices can be switched between an "on" state, allowing its cargo to be transferred to the walker, and an "off" state, in which no transfer occurs. In this way, the DNA product at the end of the assembly line may include cargo picked up from one, two, or three of the DNA machines. "A key feature of the assembly line is the programmability of the cargo-donating DNA machines, which allows the generation of eight different products," explained Seeman.

Microsoft Surface is a prime example of how natural user interfaces can change the way we interact with computers. As designers and developers, one challenge with creating natural user interfaces for multi-touch devices such as Microsoft Surface or Windows 7 is getting around the old ways of thinking and old habits for interface design. Joshua Blake from InfoStrat decided to tackle this problem by creating SurfaceCube. SurfaceCube is a simple 3-D puzzle game for Microsoft Surface which he designed to illustrate as many as the Surface Interaction Guidelines as possible. I had the opportunity to sit down with Joshua and discuss SurfaceCube and the thinking behind some really interesting design decisions that makes it stand out as a natural user interface. We also briefly discuss Joshua’s upcoming book about natural user interfaces and multi-touch development, Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight, due Fall 2010 (since recording this interview, the book titled was updated). As a special offer to Channel 9 readers, you can use the following coupon to order the book through the Manning Early Access Program and read the chapters as Josh writes them. Coupon code channel9y is good for 35% off Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight when ordered through manning.com, and expires on April 24, 2010.

Starting from Visual Studio 2010 F# is full member of .NET Framework languages family. It is functional language with syntax specific to functional languages but I think it is time for us also notice and study functional languages. In this posting I will show you some examples about cool things other people have done using F#.

A Product How-To on building a unified control environment using architectures such as TI’s Stellaris ARM Cortex-M3-based MCUs or Cortex-A8-based Sitara AM35x MPUs.

A transistor that emits light and is made from organic materials could lead to cheaper digital displays and fast-switching light sources on computer chips, according to the researchers who built it. Small displays made from diodes of the same type of materials (organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs) are already in commercial production, but the transistor design could improve on those and lead to applications where OLEDs can’t go. The new organic light-emitting transistor (OLET) is much more efficient than previous designs. It has an external quantum efficiency—a key measure of how much light comes out per charge carrier pumped in—of 5 percent. An OLED based on the same material has a quantum efficiency of only 2 percent. Previous OLET designs had an efficiency of only 0.6 percent.

The World Wide Web Consortium has launched a new specification called "XProc," which provides a standard framework for composing XML processes.  It streamlines the automation, sequencing, and management of complex XML processes, the standards body said.  The "XML Pipeline Language" spec was developed to provide a framework for managing enterprise-level business processes.

Complex computer models can involve thousands of variables. But paradoxically, adding more variables can sometimes make them easier to work with.

The goal of the MultiPlat project is to develop biomimetic proton conductive membranes with nanometer thickness (nanomembranes) through convergence of the number of fields. The primary application of this multipurpose nanotechnological platform is the next generation of fuel cells where it will replace the prevailing evolutionary modifications of the state of the art solutions.

Menta SAS and LIRMM have taped out what they believe is the of worlds first MRAM-based FPGA which has patent-protected circuitry enabling compact integration of MRAM and embedded-FPGA solutions. Researchers at the Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics and Microelectronics (LIRMM), in France, claimed in October that they had developed a FPGA circuit based on non volatile resistive memory cell.

Engineers aim to deliver within a year a broad suite of standards needed to build smart electric grids. They reported on their stepwise progress at the end of Connectivity Week here. Beyond the standards, the industry needs to create new regulations and business models and show consumers the benefits of a smart grid to make the transition to a digital, networked grid happen, said attendees and presenters at the event. The good news is the standards are underway.

An all-optical integrator, or lightwave capacitor, is a fundamental building block equivalent to those used in multi-functional electronic circuits. Associate Professor David Moss, a senior researcher within the Institute for Photonic and Optical Science (IPOS), leads an international team which has developed the optical integrator on a CMOS compatible silicon chip. The device, a photonic chip compatible with electronic technology (CMOS), will be a key enabler of next generation fully-integrated ultrafast optical data processing technologies for many applications including ultra-fast optical information-processing, optical memory, measurement, computing systems, and real-time differential equation computing units.

National Instruments has released a vision module for the PXI platform that provides a high-performance parallel processing architecture for hardware-defined timing, control and image pre-processing. The NI 1483 Camera Link adapter module, in combination with an NI FlexRIO field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board, offers a solution for embedding vision and control algorithms directly on FPGAs which are used to process and analyse an image in real time with little to no CPU intervention. The FPGAs can be used to perform operations by pixel, line and region of interest. They can implement many image processing algorithms that are inherently parallel, including fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), thresholding and filtering.

Remember Hitachi’s little helper robot, EMIEW 2 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Work-mate)?  It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything regarding the project and we feared the worst.  Hitachi has put those fears to rest by holding a news conference to show off its new enhanced voice recognition and driving performance! Known primarily for its unique legs which have wheels for feet, EMIEW 2 can drive at up to 6km/h to keep pace with people.  If it needs to carry something it can kneel down (for added stability) and scoot around, and thanks to its bipedal legs it can step over obstacles that are too high to drive over.  Now it has been given adaptive suspension control technology which increases its stability when driving over bumpy terrain such as elevator doors.  During the press demonstration, EMIEW 2′s springy legs bobbed independently as it drove over cables and uneven flooring.

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) present an efficient and inexpensive alternative when it comes to implementing complete embedded systems along with important peripheral functions. The reconfigurable logic circuitry of an FPGA offers tremendous flexibility. A lesser known feature is that the outputs of a digital FPGA also permit various analogue applications.

Zipping through space at nearly a million miles per day, NASA's New Horizons probe is halfway to Pluto and just woke up for the first time in months to look around. An artist's concept of New Horizons. "Our spacecraft is way out in exotic territory, in the middle of nowhere," says Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at Johns Hopkins University. "And we have a lot to do." It's the perfect opportunity to test New Horizon's instruments before the probe reaches Pluto in 2015. "We don't want to miss a single breathtaking moment during the Pluto encounter," he says. "So we're checking everything out now to make sure we're ship-shape and ready to go." The 9 weeks of testing commenced on May 25th. Mission controllers plan a thorough checkout and recalibration of all seven science instruments onboard. First up is LORRI, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, one of the largest interplanetary telescopes ever flown. "On July 14, 2015, the date of closest approach, we'll be able to distinguish objects on Pluto as small as a football field," says Weaver. "That's about 300 times better resolution than anything we have now."

It's a problem that has long annoyed virtual reality researchers: VR systems can create a good experience when users are observing or manipulating the virtual world (think Michael Douglas in "Disclosure") but walking is another story. Take a stroll in a virtual space and you might end up with your face against a real-world wall. The same problem is becoming apparent in teleoperated robots. Imagine you were teleoperating a humanoid robot by wearing a sensor suit that captures all your body movements. You want to make the robot walk across a room at the remote location -- but the room you're in is much smaller. Hmm. Researches have built a variety of contraptions to deal with the problem. Like a huge hamster ball for people, for example. Or a giant treadmill. The CyberWalk platform is a large-size 2D omni-directional platform that allows unconstrained locomotion, adjusting its speed and direction to keep the user always close to the center. With a side of 5 meters, it's the largest VR platform in the world.