Cisco inspired by The Big Bang Theory

While Star Trek fans bang on about how their favourite show inspired mobile tech, Cisco has been taking its inspiration from situation comedy.
The Big Bang Theory had an episode where one of the characters built a "shelbot" so that he did not have to go to work. The robot works fine until it meets Steve Wozniak in a restaurant and cannot get his autograph.
Now it turns out that Cisco has teamed up with robotics firm iRobot to create their own enterprise version of the 'Shelbot'.
Dubbed Ava 500, it uses iRobot's autonomous navigation with Cisco's TelePresence system. It means that a remote worker sitting in front of a video collaboration system can meet with colleagues in an office setting and take part in a facility tour.
It is not clear if it can open the doors itself.
According to TechWorld, the technology involved is not that great a leap. Ava 500 is essentially a Cisco TelePresence EX60 personal video endpoint mounted on top of an iRobot mobile robotics platform, which can self-navigate busy environments like offices, manufacturing floors and laboratories without bumping into people or objects.
It is controlled using an iPad interface. The remote user can select his or her destination by tapping a location on a map or by choosing a room or employee name.
An available robot is then activated to virtually "take" the user to make the trip from the charging station to selected location. It can be done in "private" mode where the screen appears blank – or in "public" mode where the user's face is displayed.
Snorre Kjesbu, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group, told Techworld that, while browser-based telepresence clients can allow people to be more mobile, Ava 500 allows them to roam from a distance.
It also means that people will no longer have to get out of their desk to see colleagues. If someone could work out a way for staff to go to the loo without having to leave their desk, they may never have to leave it. 

New memory stores light

Popular science magazine Nature is talking about a new prototype storage system that is faster than light and uses less power.
Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a materials scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Junling Wang, a specialist in oxide materials at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have emerged from their smoke filled labs with a storage device which combines speed, endurance and low power consumption by uniting electronic storage with a read-out based on the physics that powers solar panels.
The machine is based around bismuth ferrite which uses binary digits, or bits, as one of two polarisation states, and can switch between these states when a voltage is applied.
This Ferroelectric RAM has been around for a while but not found widespread use. One problem is that the electrical signal used to read out a bit erases it, so the data must be rewritten every time.
What Ramesh and Wang have done is use another property of bismuth ferrite to read these memory arrays in a nondestructive way.
Earlier research in 2009 demonstrated that bismuth ferrite has a photovoltaic response to visible light. So if you hit it with light a voltage is created Shining light on the material doesn't change its polarization, and so does not erase the data stored in it.
Ramesh and Wang grew films of bismuth ferrite on top of a metal oxide, then etched it into four strips, created electrodes and uses these to polarize the cells, then shone light onto the whole array and found that it produced two types of voltage readings — one negative and one positive.
It took 10 nanoseconds to write to and read the cells, and recording the data requires about three volts. This is 10,000 times faster than flash which needs 15 volts to record. 

Read more: http://news.techeye.net/science/new-memory-stores-light#ixzz2X2TryspQ

Scientists working on smart contact lenses

Although Google Glass has yet to hit retail and flop, scientists are already working on next generation wearable devices and they include smart contact lenses.
One of the main problems facing Google Glass is its sheer bulk. The device is still pretty big, yet despite its size it doesn’t offer a lot of battery life. Scientists in Korea and Switzerland believe smart contact lenses, built using a new generation of nanomaterials, are the way to go.
A team led by Jang-Ung Park at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology managed to mount a light emitting diode on an off the shelf contact lens. The team came up with a special material of their own to make it possible - a stretchy mix of graphene and silver nanowires, reports Technology Review.
They tested their contraption on rabbits. The fluffy test subjects didn’t seem to mind, and did not rub their eyes.
Meanwhile a Swiss team at Sensimed is working on a smart lens for 24-hour monitoring of eye pressure in glaucoma patients. Like the bunnies, they don’t seem to mind, either. University of Washington professor and Google Glass project founder Babak Parviz has also dabbled in contact-lens displays, but they were built using rigid, non-transparent materials.

Read more: http://news.techeye.net/science/scientists-working-on-smart-contact-lenses#ixzz2X2TbnOm6

Researchers create wooden battery

Scientists have taken a leaf from the book of nature and developed a thin, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly battery that uses wood.
According to Design and Trend, the components in the battery, tested by scientists at the University of Maryland, are a thousand times thinner than paper.
Researchers Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and others emerged from their smoke filled labs having made a battery built around a sliver of wood coated with tin.
They think it is much better than batteries that use stiff, non-flexible substrates. Current batteries are too brittle to withstand the swelling and shrinking that happens as electrons are stored in and used up from the battery.
Hu said that idea came from looking at trees. Wood fibers that make up a tree once held mineral-rich water, and so are ideal for storing liquid electrolytes, making them not only the base but an active part of the battery.
They used wood as the base of an experimental sodium-ion battery, choosing sodium over lithium.
Sodium does not store energy as efficiently as lithium, so would not be as much use in mobile phones - instead, its low cost and common materials would make it ideal to store huge amounts of energy at once such as solar energy at a power plant.
The team noticed that after charging and discharging the battery hundreds of times, the wood ended up wrinkled but intact. Computer models showed that that the wrinkles effectively relax the stress in the battery during charging and recharging, so that the battery can survive many cycles, putting it among the longest lasting of all sodium-ion nanobatteries.
Wood fibers are soft enough to serve as a mechanical buffer, and so can accommodate changes in tin, which the researchers say is key to their long-lasting sodium-ion batteries. 

Read more: http://news.techeye.net/science/researchers-create-wooden-battery#ixzz2X2TAARqn

Oddest Couple Share 250 Million Year Old Burrow

Scientists from South Africa, Australia and France have discovered a world first association while scanning a 250 million year old fossilised burrow from the Karoo Basin of South Africa.

The burrow revealed two unrelated vertebrate animals nestled together and fossilised after being trapped by a flash flood event. Facing harsh climatic conditions subsequent to the Permo-Triassic (P-T) mass extinction, the amphibian Broomistega and the mammal forerunner Thrinaxodon cohabited in a burrow.
Scanning shows that the amphibian, which was suffering from broken ribs, crawled into a sleeping mammal's shelter for protection. This research suggests that short periods of dormancy, called aestivation, in addition to burrowing behaviour, may have been a crucial adaptation that allowed mammal ancestors to survive the P-T extinction.
The international team of scientists was led by Dr Vincent Fernandez from Wits University, South Africa and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. The other authors from Wits University include Prof. Bruce Rubidge (Director of the newly formed Palaeosciences Centre of Excellence at Wits), Dr Fernando Abdala and Dr Kristian Carlson. Other authors include Dr Della Collins Cook (Indiana University); Dr Adam Yates (Museum of Central Australia) and Dr. Paul Tafforeau (ESRF).
After many impressive results obtained on fossils, synchrotron imaging has led to revived interest in the studies of the numerous fossilised burrows discovered in the Karoo Basin of South Africa and dated to 250 million years ago. The first attempt to investigate one of these burrow-casts surprisingly revealed a world-first association of two unrelated animals.
The fossil was recovered from sedimentary rock strata in the Karoo Basin. It dates from 250 million years ago, at the beginning of the Triassic Period. At that time, the ecosystem was recovering from the Permo-Triassic mass extinction that wiped out most of life on Earth. In the Pangea Supercontinent context, what is now South Africa was an enclave in the southern half called Gondwana. It was the scene of pronounced climatic warming and increased seasonality marked by monsoonal rainfall. To survive this harsh environment, many animals, including mammal-like reptiles (mammal forerunners), developed a digging behaviour, attested by the numerous fossilised burrow casts discovered in the Karoo Basin. These casts have long been thought to enclose fossilised remains, triggering interest from palaeontologists. Early this year, an international group of scientists started to research the contents of these burrows using X-ray synchrotron computed microtomography.
Two burrow casts were selected from the collection at Wits to be scanned using the state-of-the-art facility at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). Using the unique properties of the X-ray beam which enables non-destructive probing, the scan of the first burrow started to reveal the skull of a mammal-like reptile called Thrinaxodon, an animal previously reported in another burrow.
As the scan progressed, the three-dimensional reconstruction displayed results beyond expectations: the mammal-like reptile was accompanied by an amphibian Broomistega, belonging to the extinct group of Temnospondyl.
"While discovering the results we were amazed by the quality of the images," says lead author Fernandez, "but the real excitement came when we discovered a second set of teeth completely different from that of the mammal-like reptile. It was really something else."
Besides the pristine preservation of the two skeletons, the team focused on the reasons explaining such an unusual co-habitation. Fernandez explains: "Burrow-sharing by different species exists in the modern world, but it corresponds to a specific pattern. For example, a small visitor is not going to disturb the host. A large visitor can be accepted by the host if it provides some help, like predator vigilance. But neither of these patterns corresponds to what we have discovered in this fossilised burrow."
The scientists gathered all the information to try to reconstitute the events that led to this incredible fossil aggregation, testing scenarios one after another. "It's a fascinating scientific question: what caused the association of these two organisms in the burrow? One of the more obvious possibilities is a predator-prey interaction, but we inspected both skeletons looking for tooth marks or other evidence implying predation, ultimately finding no support for one having attempted to feed on the other," says Carlson.

Artist impression of Broomistega seeking shelter in Thrinaxodon's burrow.

His colleague, Cook, adds that the consecutive broken ribs resulted from a single, massive trauma. The amphibian clearly survived the injury for some time because the fractures were healing, but it was surely quite handicapped. According to Fernandez this Broomistega is the first complete skeleton of this rare species that has been discovered. "It tells us that this individual was a juvenile and mostly aquatic at that time of its life," he says.
The scientists eventually concluded that the amphibian crawled into the burrow in response to its poor physical condition but was not evicted by the mammal-like reptile.
Numerous Thrinaxodon specimens have been found in South Africa, many of them fossilised in a curled-up position. Abdala says: "I have always been fascinated by the preservation of Thrinaxodon fossils in a curled-up position that show even tiny bones of the skeleton preserved. It's as if they were peacefully resting in shelters at the time of death."
The shelters prevented disturbance of the skeletal remains from scavengers and weathering. "We also think it might reflect a state of torpor called aestivation in response to aridity and absence of food resources," Abdala says.
Piecing all the clues together, the team finally elucidated the enigmatic association, concluding that "the mammal-like reptile, Thrinaxodon, was most probably aestivating in its burrow, a key adaptation response together with a burrowing behaviour which enabled our distant ancestors to survive the most dramatic mass extinction event. This state of torpor explains why the amphibian was not chased out of the burrow," says Rubidge.
Both animals were finally entrapped in the burrow by a sudden flood and preserved together in the sediments for 250 million years.
Tafforeau says: "Thanks to the unique possibilities for high quality imaging of fossils developed during the last decade at the ESRF, these unique specimens remain untouched, protected by their mineral matrix. Who knows what kind of information we'll be able to obtain from them in the future and which would have been completely lost if the specimen had been prepared out of its burrow cast?"

Google files facial password patent to increase Android security

London: Google has filed a patent suggesting users pull a series of faces, like sticking out their tongue or wrinkling their nose, in place of a password to unlock their Android phones or tablets.

Google says requiring specific gestures could prevent the existing Face Unlock facility being fooled by photos, reports BBC News.

The document - which was filed in June 2012 but has only just been published - suggests the software could track a "facial landmark" to confirm a user not only looks like the device's owner but also carries out the right action.

It says examples of the requests that might be made include, a frown, a tongue protrusion, an open-mouth smile, a forehead wrinkle and an eyebrow movement.

It says the check would work by comparing two images taken from a captured video stream of the user's face to see if the difference between them showed the gesture had been made. The filing also notes several ways the software might check that the device was being shown a real person's face rather than doctored photographs.

These include studying other frames from the captured video stream to check that the person had made a sequence of movements to achieve the commanded gesture, and confirming all of the frames actually showed the person's face.

In addition it says the software could monitor if there were changes in the angle of the person's face to ensure the device was not being shown a still image with a fake gesture animated on top. Such efforts might help address criticism that its current face detection software is insecure.

Google, Facebook deny compromising personal data

New Delhi: Amidst an uproar in the US over the issue of government secretly tracking information on foreigners from Internet firms, Google and Facebook have categorically denied their participation in such a project.

Both the US-based technology giants said that their organisations were not aware about the existence of such a programme -- code-named PRISM -- until it hit national and international headlines.

In a post on his profile on Facebook yesterday, its founder Mark Zuckerberg said: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers.

"We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday."

Similarly, Google Co-founder and CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond in a post on the search giant's official blog said: "First, we have not joined any program that would give the US government or any other government direct access to our servers.

"Indeed, the US government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."

The top Google honchos added that the issue was about press reports alleging that Internet companies have joined a secret US government program called PRISM to give the National Security Agency direct access to Google's servers.

On government requests for data, Zuckerberg said: "When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law.

Likewise, Page and Drummond in their blog post said Google provides data to governments only as per the law.

"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don?t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users? data are false, period," the post said.

It further added: "Until this week's reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users' call records.

"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users? Internet activity on such a scale is completely false."

"Finally, this episode confirms what we have long believed there needs to be a more transparent approach. Google has worked hard, within the confines of the current laws, to be open about the data requests we receive," they said.