Feb 28, 2010

In order to save energy, consumers need to be able to obtain up-to-date information at any time about the energy consumption of their appliances, and be able to control them while away from home. In Hall 9, Booth B36 at CeBIT, Fraunhofer scientists unveil two applications that help consumers manage their power use.

“Smart meters” – intelligent devices to measure consumption – make it possible to read and control power consumption, even of private households, while away from the property. This is because the increasing use of solar and wind resources will be changing the electricity supply matrix in the very near future. Today’s battery technology is unable to sufficiently buffer the fluctuations in the energy supply. This is why customers should be able to consume power as precisely as possible, once it becomes available. Price incentives represent one possibility for creating this precise alignment of supply and demand: When supply is up, the price drops, and vice versa. An intelligent control system will soon be assisting end-consumers with this by keeping a steady eye on electricity prices.

Professor Frank Bomarius, deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE in Kaiserslautern, and his team are currently developing software that shadows the electricity meter and that ensures energy consumption is adjusted accordingly. “Data on the anticipated price trend over the next few minutes or hours come from the outside – which means from the power supplier – or utility company,” says the computer scientist. These must be adapted to the needs and preferences of the consumer. “Our system makes sure that there is optimal control over household appliances based on these conditions.” This entails more than simply shutting off the air conditioner or laundry machine for the interim, should electricity prices go up. Instead, a much more intelligent approach would be, for instance, using the refrigerator or freezer for energy storage. “If the utility company reports that electricity is getting scarce and will become more expensive in the next two hours, then these appliances can begin to pre-cool their contents right away, so that afterwards, they won’t need any power for an extended period of time.” The same principle applies correspondingly to water and heating systems.

The system can be controlled via PC, where the consumer simply enters his preferences: setting the temperature for cooling or heating, setting a maximum price that he’s willing to pay per kilowatt hour, and setting a limit on maximum consumption. The software uses this input to assess when and which devices in the household are switched on and off. The computer is directly connected to the laundry machine or heater through electrical conduits or wirelessly. And in actual use, the intelligent energy management system will run on the same computer that also controls other household functions: lighting and heating; window shades; locking systems; and arranging help for residents at home who require assistance.

The system is slated for real-life testing in a few residences in Kaiserslautern in 2010.  Of course, it is also suited for use in large residential complexes, public buildings or commercial premises. Typically at such properties, a centralized building system is already installed, and energy management rests on its shoulders. Researchers for the Kaiserslautern project and the local utility company are still negotiating exactly how the system will communicate with the supplier. “We want to keep the interface within a narrow margin,” says Bomarius. “There is no reason why my power supplier should know or influence when I use my heating or cooling, watch television or do the cooking.”

Mobile phone as control center
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin are offering an alternative helpful support: They have created an application that displays the energy consumption of individual appliances within the home. This means that consumers can figure out what device guzzles energy, and get a feeling for which appliances consume how much energy – and that will clearly help them save money. The application is based on the “Hydra” middleware developed by the institute, which was upgraded with a specialized energy protocol. “Using his mobile phone as a display and control mechanism, the resident can control the energy consumption of his appliances,” says Dr. Markus Eisenhauer, who developed the system. “For instance, he can display consumption per room, turn appliances on or off, or dim the lights.” And that’s not all: The cell phone’s camera image can be used as a “magic lens.” Just point the camera to a certain appliance, and, as if waving a magic wand, the appliance’s exact wattage is displayed in real-time.

Feb 28, 2010

This is the year in which 3D cinema and 3D TV will make the breakthrough. At CeBIT in Hannover, Fraunhofer researchers are presenting technologies and standards that are hastening the progress.

Strikers and defenders furiously compete for the ball. Suddenly, the forward drops into the penalty area. Penalty shot. The penalty taker carefully sets the ball just right. Cut to the goal camera. Like a cannon ball, the leather flies over and past the heads of the spectators, who are completely awestruck. Except that these soccer fans are not sitting in the stadium, but rather in front of a 3D television, far away from the hustle and bustle of FIFA World Cup football in South Africa.

2010 will be the year in which cinema and television make the jump into the third dimension. Blockbusters like James Cameron’s Avatar, Pixar’s Ice Age and Dawn of the Dinosaurs have brought in billions box office ticket sales  throughout the globe. And now, the time for 3D movies for television has also come. The industry announced the first 3D televisions will be ready for production by summer. A few games of FIFA World Cup football have already been captured in 3-D. Yet before 3D technology becomes the standard equipment for the movie screen and the telly, a few questions still require some clarification. For instance, how can the recording process and post-processing be optimized, and the costs for them be reduced? Indeed, Cameron’s science fiction extravaganza gobbled down 250 million US-dollars in the making, and required four years of computer work. How can the tools for the post-production of movies be improved? And the sixty-four thousand dollar question: 3D-glasses, or no 3D-glasses?

To address these issues, experts from the film industry, academia and research joined forces in the consortium “PRIME: Production and Projection- Techniques for Immersive Media.” Together they are exploring and developing business models and techniques for cinema, television and gaming. Participating partners include KUK Filmproduktion GmbH, Loewe, Kinoton GmbH, DVS Digital Video Systems AG, Flying Eye, the Film & Television Academy in Potsdam HFF Konrad Wolff, the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Fraunhofer Institutes for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen and for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut HHI in Berlin. The German federal ministry for economics and technology is funding the project.

3D films pose tougher challenges than their two-dimensional counterparts, since two images are always needed in order to create a spatial depiction. For this reason, at least two cameras must be used to record the film, and a 3D screen is needed to display both images. One image for the left eye, and one image for the right. Stereoscopy has evolved into a recording technology for high-resolution home theater. This process demands the utmost precision from the camera crew and post-production, because an individual film has to be produced for each eye. In editing and in post-processing, both streams must be processed together in absolute synchrony. “The most infinitesimal shift or tilt of the camera becomes visible on the screen, and can even make you feel nauseous,” explains Stephan Gick, group manager for digital camera systems at IIS.

For the movie theater, a scene is shot with two synchronized MicroHDTV cameras from IIS. For this, the team around Stephan Gick propelled the technology forward in a way that allows reliable images to be digitally recorded for the right and the left eye. Stereo or side-by-side rigs, a specially-constructed camera structure, simulate the distance of the human eye as realistically as possible. The “Genlock” process is designed to guarantee that the cameras record in synchronous imaging. In this respect, the one camera acts as the “master” – the digital leader. Using the exact same settings, the second camera captures the calibration, color fidelity and geometry.

Especially when it comes to 3D live transmissions, the camera team has to be able to count on these settings. One helpful tool for the recording and transmission of three dimensional data in real-time is STAN, the stereoscopic analyzer that HHI jointly developed with KUK Filmproduktion. This combination of hardware and software records and analyzes stereo images so that they can be processed in real time. During a take, the feedback loop passes on the calculated values directly to the camera, so that errors or incorrect settings can be detected – and corrected – in real time. Researchers at HHI are also working assiduously on one special highlight in the PRIME project – the 3D panorama. The scientists can already present the initial results at a showroom in Berlin.
At the Fraunhofer’s CeBIT Booth in Hall 9, Booth B36, researchers will be presenting technologies and standards for 3D cinema and 3D television. As a special bonus for you, we will be transmitting a part of the Fraunhofer press conference live in 3D, directly at the booth.

The press meeting takes place on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 from 15:30 – 16:30. Discussion panelists include: Prof. Hans-Jörg Bullinger, President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Josef Kluger, managing director of KUK Filmproduktion GmbH, Prof. Claudia Eckert, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT and Jens Fromm, Project Manager for the “The New Identity Card” testing and demonstration center at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS.

Feb 28, 2010

PHILADELPHIA –- Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and IBM Research-Zürich have fabricated an ultra sharp, diamond-like carbon tip possessing such high strength that it is 3,000 times more wear-resistant at the nanoscale than silicon.

The end result is a diamond-like carbon material mass-produced at the nanoscale that doesn’t wear. The new nano-sized tip, researchers say, wears away at the rate of one atom per micrometer of sliding on a substrate of silicon dioxide, much lower than that for a silicon oxide tip which represents the current state-of-the-art. Consisting of carbon, hydrogen, silicon and oxygen molded into the shape of a nano-sized tip and integrated on the end of a silicon microcantilever for use in atomic force microscopy, the material has technological implications for atomic imaging, probe-based data storage and as emerging applications such as nanolithography, nanometrology and nanomanufacturing.

The importance of the discovery lies not just in its size and resistance to wear but also in the hard substrate against which it was shown to perform well when in sliding contact: silicon dioxide. Because silicon –- used in almost all integrated circuit devices –- oxidizes in atmosphere forming a thin layer of its oxide, this system is the most relevant for nanolithography, nanometrology and nanomanufacturing applications.

Probe-based technologies are expected to play a dominant role in many such technologies; however, poor wear performance of many materials when slid against silicon oxide, including silicon oxide itself, has severely limited usefulness to the laboratory.

Researchers built the material from the ground up, rather than coating a nanoscale tip with wear-resistant materials. The collaboration used a molding technique to fabricate monolithic tips on standard silicon microcantilevers. A bulk processing technique that has the potential to scale up for commercial manufacturing is available.

Robert Carpick, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Penn, and his research group had previously shown that carbon-based thin films, including diamond-like carbon, had low friction and wear at the nanoscale; however, it has been difficult to fabricate nanoscale structures made out of diamond-like carbon until now.

Feb 28, 2010

MADISON — Exerting delicate control over a pair of atoms within a mere seven-millionths-of-a-second window of opportunity, physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison created an atomic circuit that may help quantum computing become a reality.

Quantum computing represents a new paradigm in information processing that may complement classical computers. Much of the dizzying rate of increase in traditional computing power has come as transistors shrink and pack more tightly onto chips — a trend that cannot continue indefinitely.

“At some point in time you get to the limit where a single transistor that makes up an electronic circuit is one atom, and then you can no longer predict how the transistor will work with classical methods,” explains UW-Madison physics professor Mark Saffman. “You have to use the physics that describes atoms — quantum mechanics.”

At that point, he says, “you open up completely new possibilities for processing information. There are certain calculational problems… that can be solved exponentially faster on a quantum computer than on any foreseeable classical computer.”

With fellow physics professor Thad Walker, Saffman successfully used neutral atoms to create what is known as a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate, a basic type of circuit that will be an essential element of any quantum computer. As described in the Jan. 8 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, the work is the first demonstration of a quantum gate between two uncharged atoms.

The use of neutral atoms rather than charged ions or other materials distinguishes the achievement from previous work. “The current gold standard in experimental quantum computing has been set by trapped ions… People can run small programs now with up to eight ions in traps,” says Saffman.

Feb 28, 2010

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new technique to study protein dynamics in living cells has been created by a team of University of Illinois scientists, and evidence yielded from the new method indicates that an in vivo environment strongly modulates a protein’s stability and folding rate, according to research accepted for publication in the journal Nature Methods and posted on the journal’s Web site Feb. 28.

Martin Gruebele, the James R. Eiszner Professor of Chemistry at Illinois and corresponding author of the paper, says the method that he and his team of co-researchers engineered marks the first time anyone has been able to follow the real-time folding and unfolding of proteins outside of a test tube.

“This is the first experiment that allows us to observe the dynamics of a protein folding in a live cell,” Gruebele said. “Now we have the capability of looking at how fast biological processes occur as a function of time.”

To study the biomolecular dynamics inside of a single living cell, Gruebele and his team pioneered a hybrid method they’ve dubbed “Fast Relaxation Imaging,” a technique that combines fluorescence microscopy and fast temperature jumps.

“It’s a tool that combines two worlds: chemical dynamics, and the ability to study reactions as they occur; and biological environments, where cell biologists observe how reactions occur in cells,” Gruebele said.

To achieve both a fast upward and downward temperature jump, programmed laser pulses are used to pre-heat, spike, plateau, cool and then finally stabilize the temperature in the cell and its aqueous medium at the final value. An inverted fluorescence microscope is used to observe and record what happens inside the cell, all of which takes place in the span of a few milliseconds.

The cells are usually heated to between 96 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It’s like we give them a little bit of a fever,” Gruebele said.

Gruebele says that although temperature jumps have been used for some time to study the kinetics of chemical reactions in vitro, that method is limited by what he calls “homogenous kinetics,” or an inability to see the dynamics in different areas of the cell.

“We haven’t really been able to study dynamics, to see if a chemical reaction like protein folding varies inside of a living cell,” he said. “With temperature jumps and pressure jumps, you can do those experiments very quickly, but you don’t get any imagery that lets you see if proteins fold faster in one region and slower in another,” Gruebele said.

On the other hand, fluorescence microscopy allows researchers to see inside of cells, but it precludes them from studying cell dynamics and kinetics.

“With fluorescence microscopy, we’re able t

o take images of cells and see inside them, but we can’t observe how anything rapidly changes or adapts with time, so you can’t look at any but the slowest dynamics. This experiment puts those two aspects together,” he said.

Since biomolecular dynamics are predominantly studied in vitro, with the results extrapolated to explain how the same processes would function in a living cell, Gruebel

e says the new technique has yielded some interesting data that could change standard thinking in the field.

“If you perform experiments only in an artificial environment such as a test tube and not in a living cell, you only get one answer,” Gruebele said. “It’s a reproducible environment; therefore, it always gives you the same answer. If you do it in a cell, we find we get very different answers in different parts of the cell.”

Feb 28, 2010

                       This is my Green & Lean HPV, (Human powered vehicle) made from parts available at            home right from used computer chair to a kid's outgrown bicycle. The goal of this project      is to promote Green Living in Malaysia to create the awareness of Global Warmin...
By: Timothy Wooi

Continue Reading »

Feb 28, 2010

Research allows control of a single electron without disturbing other nearby electrons

Researchers from two National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers at Princeton University and the University of California, Santa Barbara made a significant breakthrough in the worldwide pursuit of quantum computing. They engineered a method to control the spin of a single electron within a magnetic field without disturbing other nearby electrons.

The method developed by a team of researchers led by Jason Petta, assistant professor of physics at Princeton University with partial support from his NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award, traps one or two electrons in microscopic corrals created by applying voltages to minuscule electrodes giving them an ability to control spin orientation.

The accomplishment overcomes a major challenge to creating scalable semiconductor-based quantum computers that use the intrinsic spin of individual electrons to store and manipulate information. Previous methods, namely electron spin resonance or ESR, unselectively sprayed microwave radiation on a sample, causing all the electrons in the sample to adopt the same spin orientation. This defeated the goal of having distinct electrons work together to represent data.

In their latest research, Petta and his team control electron spin using a method similar to splitting a beam of light. The path length of one of the resulting two beams is carefully adjusted so that when they recombine, their peaks and troughs either reinforce or cancel out each other. By doing this, researchers can control the constructive or destructive outcome of the resultant beam after recombination. Likewise, by carefully adjusting how the peaks and troughs of two quantum spin waves align, Petta’s team is able to constructively or destructively manage the condition of an electron’s spin and control its orientation.

What’s more, the new method controls the spin of electrons in approximately one-billionth of a second. “This is nearly 100 times faster than conventional electron spin resonance,” said Petta.

The spin of an electron forms a quantum bit, also called a qubit. Qubits are to quantum computing what “bits” are to conventional computing–a basic unit of information representing either a 1 or 0. But in quantum computing, a qubit can represent 1 and 0 at the same time making way for a dramatic increase in computing speed for certain types of computation.

Researchers ultimately would like to have a quantum computer consisting of many densely packed single electron spins. But in order to make this new type of computer a reality, they would need to control the spin orientation of a selected qubit without disturbing the other nearby spin qubits.

The challenge has been achieving the fast single spin rotations that are required to control a spin qubit without allowing the system to suffer “decoherence” or loss of quantum mechanical behavior.

“Think of a spinning top,” said Petta. “Sooner or later it falls down due to friction. Our quantum system in some sense does the same thing. In order for a qubit to be technologically relevant, we need to be able to manipulate its state many times before it loses its quantum coherence.”

Regarding future research, Petta explained that “the next big step for the spin qubit community is to coherently couple two spin qubits, implementing what is called a “two-qubit gate.” Our work demonstrates single qubit control.  In the long run, it is necessary to couple adjacent qubits and have them interact.”

Researchers anticipate that quantum computers would enable a range of new possibilities from greatly improved quantum sensors that could impact mineral exploration to improved medical imaging and perhaps even a revolutionary computational paradigm that could lead to the creation of computing devices capable of efficiently solving problems that can not be solved using conventional computer systems.

Professors Art Gossard and postdoctoral fellow Hong Lu with the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of California at Santa Barbara also assisted with this research.

The researchers reported their findings in the journal Science.

–	Ellen Ferrante, National Science Foundation (703) 292-8070 emferran@nsf.gov
–	Bobbie Mixon, National Science Foundation (703) 292-8485 bmixon@nsf.gov

Investigators
Jason Petta
Art Gossard
Hong Lu
Craig Hawker
Nai Phuan Ong
Richard Register
Glenn Fredrickson

Related Institutions/Organizations
Princeton University
University of California-Santa Barbara

Locations
New Jersey
California

Related Programs
Condensed Matter Physics
Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers

Related Awards
#0819860 Princeton Center for Complex Materials
#0520415 MRSEC: Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at UCSB
#0846341 CAREER: Coupled Quantum Degrees of Freedom in Semiconductor Nanostructures

Total Grants
$20,283,627

Related Websites
Princeton scientist makes a leap in quantum computing: /news/longurl.cfm?id=192

BETTY IS OUR OLD DOG OF THE WEEK! Betty can't understand why she's been waiting in kennels for so long. She's a sweet natured girl with a heart of gold and she's always pleased to see you. She's good with other dogs and still has a playful side. She just needs someone to put the sunshine back in her life.