It is nice to read a newspaper on a light and large tablet, but what if you can roll it up too? What if you can fold your cellphone like a piece of paper, or you had devices with screens that do not break when dropped? You cannot do these things now because the displays and electronics are rigid structures. Flexible electronics and displays are being developed all over the world, and you can see them incorporated into devices beginning from this year. Take, for instance, the camera developed by John Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois and Urbana Champaign. This tiny device, as big as a small coin, has sensors that curve like the retina of the eye. In fact, the device is called eyeball camera. Because the sensors are curved, and because the curvature can change synchronously with the curvature of the lens, it has excellent zoom capabilities. Unlike multi-lens systems with similar capabilities, the eyeball camera has a single fluid-filled lens. Rogers' work is published this week in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rogers is one of the pioneers in flexible electronics. He currently serves as the director of Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center on nanomanufacturing, funded by the US National Science Foundation. His technique is to use silicon itself, rather than organic materials, in his devices. Rogers makes tiny pieces of silicon connected by coiled wires, and is deposited on plastic sheets using standard manufacturing techniques. When the materials stretch, the wires stretch too. Performance of the device does not deteriorate even when the material is stretched 75 per cent. Considering the business potential of the research, Rogers has set up a company called MC10, and it has concluded an agreement with sportswear manufacturer Reebok to incorporate electronics into its shoes. An electronic-implanted shoe can monitor a runner's performance, among other things. It is the start of a new age of wearable electronics.Bacterial InventionWhen you have a serious problem, and none of your solutions is working, it pays to take a look at how nature would have solved the problem. This is why engineers are turning to biology to solve some of their most intractable problems. Some students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong recently turned to the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. Coli) when faced with the problem of large data storage. The bacteria obliged, paving the way for a technology to store data at extra-high densities. Scientists and engineers have been looking for a while at ways of using bacteria for data storage. A bacterium is tiny, and its components are tinier — so tiny that, theoretically, one gram of bacteria can store information worth 900 terra-bytes (that's space enough to store about a million movies!). The information can also last for thousands of years (the best of today's storage media can manage at best 100 years). In practice, it is not so straightforward as it sounds. One has to find a way of writing the information, another way of keeping it safe from intruders and retrieving this information when necessary. Now scientists are developing methods for these.In 2007, researchers at Japan's Keio University developed a method to store 100 bits of data within an artificial DNA. They used the method to code the equation E = MC2 within a bacteria found in the soil. Now the Chinese team has made a major advance: a method to compress, split and distribute data evenly between bacterial cells. They have a method to encode the data as well as one to locate it. They also use an altered form of the original bacterium that cannot exist outside the synthetic medium. The work is in early stages, and could take years before being applied.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 07-02-2011)
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We will live almost double the years we do now. The humans of the future will regenerate their body parts. Medicines will assume an even more vital role in improving the quality of future generations2020There will be artificial versions of all key body parts. Brain accidents and Alzheimer's disease will be fully cured by brain implants. Making body spare parts will become an industry. Stem cell pharmacies will be common place Contact lenses will beam words and images into the eye. Computerised nerve stimulation and exo-skeletal robotics will help those with spinal injuries2030A vaccine will eradicate AidsActive skin technology will help blast e-capsules into skin surface that go deep enough to make links to nerve endings, helping cure Parkinson'sVirtual love making will be a reality. Couples will be able to link peripheral nervous systems via active skin for enhanced love making2040Microscopic machines will help repair damaged cells and organs. It will be possible to back up memories and personality traitsThe predictions are compiled from the writings of futurists Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The ThirdWave; Ian Pearson, a futurologist with Futurizon who is credited to have an "85 per cent accuracy at the 10 yearhorizon"; Patrick Dixon, business consultant and head of trends forecasting company Global Change; RayKurzweil, author and inventor with interests in optical character recognition and speech recognition; and ThomasFrey, executive director and senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute; among others(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 12-12-2011)
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Artificial intelligence (AI) involves making intelligent machines — making computers that can do things that humans consider intelligent and even more. Computers will act like human brains, or better them, and will respond to situations and events in ways that are error-free and faster2015 Robots will begin to do jobs such as farming2020Robot rights will emerge as an issue in many countries. There will be debates on the civil rights and legal protection of robotsMind-reading robots that can be controlled by human thought will appear2030Robots will start replacing the bulk of administration employees in large corporations. Artificial intelligence will take over most labour-intensive jobs A card the size of a micro SD card will have the storage capacity of 20,000 human brains2040Robots will be used to sit in crime hotspots, freeing up the police force for other dutiesExabyte (1 billion GB) storage will be available, boosting space-thirsty AI and similar technologiesThe predictions are compiled from the writings of futurists Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The ThirdWave; Ian Pearson, a futurologist with Futurizon who is credited to have an "85 per cent accuracy at the 10 yearhorizon"; Patrick Dixon, business consultant and head of trends forecasting company Global Change; RayKurzweil, author and inventor with interests in optical character recognition and speech recognition; and ThomasFrey, executive director and senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute; among others(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 12-12-2011)
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Commuting in the future will be efficient, eco-friendly and easy to use2015 Hybrid cars will account for 30 per cent of the new car market 2020Sea travel will involve the use of hydrogen-powered yachts and ships. The ships of the future will look vastly different. Giant cruise ‘mother ships' will be able to launch fleets of smaller vessels.2030Intelligent cars will auto-drive. Exclusive automated highway networks will allow such cars to self-pilot across cities and even continents. The networks will interact with the onboard computer, sensors and actuator systems in the car.Space tourism will be common. (There are plans to build multi-purpose, commercial space stations that will include hotels, research facilities and venues for zero-gravity sports)Automated flying drones will transport humans. Developing a well-functioning delivery drone network will pave the way for confidence in it. Unmanned aerial vehicles will be safer than those prone to human error (such as 2D vision)2040Production of cars run by water will startFirst manned trip to MarsThe predictions are compiled from the writings of futurists Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The ThirdWave; Ian Pearson, a futurologist with Futurizon who is credited to have an "85 per cent accuracy at the 10 yearhorizon"; Patrick Dixon, business consultant and head of trends forecasting company Global Change; RayKurzweil, author and inventor with interests in optical character recognition and speech recognition; and ThomasFrey, executive director and senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute; among others(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 12-12-2011)
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Whoever told you that microprocessors no longer needed to go faster and faster? Needless to say, chips in today's gadgets are adequate for most of our computing needs. Over the years, with the advent of the netbook and now the tablet, we need more battery life rather than faster processing. Yet, there are so many things that computers cannot do well enough as processors are not good enough. Intel and AMD seem bent on addressing these problems.For example, try streaming a high-definition (HD) video while working on something else (probably in the background) on your computer. This may be difficult in India due to bandwidth constraints, but your processor won't be able to handle it even if you had fat pipes running to your home. Or try using a HD camcorder with your hands and zoom while recording; your hands won't keep still enough for you to record a flawless HD video. Or, better still, try converting — quickly — an HD video format into one that can be played on a mobile device. In many such situations, current processors are not good enough.Last week, just before the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel launched a new processor architecture that will solve some of these problems immediately, and some others slowly over a period. The Sandy Bridge architecture is Intel's answer to the online video age. It is a generation ahead of the previous architecture, Nehalem, that is used in its current frontline processors like i3, i5 and i7. From now onwards, these processors, whose names will not change, will start using the Sandy Bridge architecture.There are several improvements in the Sandy Bridge over its predecessor, but the most important one is the integration of the graphics processor to the main processor. Nehalem architecture had a separate chip outside the CPU, called north bridge, which consisted of the graphics unit, the memory controller, etc. In Sandy Bridge, north bridge is inside the main CPU. It would speed up video processing straightaway, to such an extent that you could multitask video watching with other work easily. It also offers better gaming experience through improved 3D image processing.Sandy Bridge chips are otherwise energy efficient, will run cool and have next-generation turboboost technology. And Intel has added an interesting feature in these chips for the first time. Called Intel Insider, this feature is aimed at stopping video copying from inside the PC and authenticates content automatically, without using additional software. This would obviously annoy many consumers, but encourage Hollywood studios and other television networks to sell their creations online. It would let viewers buy video content once and stream it to other devices. It would encourage movie companies to make available movies online simultaneously with DVD releases. In fact, it is even possible to let viewers download the video in advance, but let them watch only at the time of release.Improved video processing would help the progress of HD video. You could process video at higher and higher frame rates. Face detection would be easier. Real time algorithms could compensate for blurring by combining images. Faster processing can create very exciting possibilities for video. You could see some of them this year.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 24-01-2011)
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About a month ago, researchers at Belgian firm Imec presented a new kind of micro-processor at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) at San Jose in California. Although it was a primitive product by modern standards, it generated some excitement in electronics engineers. The reason: it was made of plastic instead of silicon.For several decades, the world of electronics was driven by continuous improvements in silicon chips. These improvements will continue for some time, but silicon is simply not good enough for many applications because it is expensive and rigid. There is a minimum cost, about $1-2, below which you cannot produce a silicon chip. And you cannot bend silicon to fit the geometry of many products. Plastic electronics can solve both problems, thus opening up worlds we have only imagined so far.The Imec processor was the first to be made of plastic. The institution had been working on the device for a while, and had frequently announced milestones earlier. The current one, announced at ISSCC, consists of 4,000 plastic transistors pieced together and put on top of a flexible plastic foil. Together, the transistors take up an area of 4 sq. cm. It can handle only simple programs: those that run at 8 bits. The processor runs at about 6 hertz.The computer industry passed this phase decades ago. The first PC chip that Intel launched in 1972 had 3,500 transistors, was eight bit and could run at half a million hertz (500 khz). Even your phone processor runs at 1 ghz now and PC chips can process data at a maximum of 128 bits at a time. So the plastic chip is a snail, but even snails have their uses in many ways. The processor is part of an ongoing revolution in organic electronics. Although organic compounds that could carry current were discovered in the 19th century, the overwhelming success of silicon slowed down the development of organic electronics. It was only in the 1990s that scientists began to develop techniques for making plastic electronics substrates. The first set of commercial products will hit markets soon.The Imec processor is some way from commercial development. Plastic processors cannot be built with the precision of silicon processors: silicon has a perfect crystalline arrangement whereas organic molecules form a jumble. Yet, you can develop algorithms that could eliminate this imprecision to an acceptable level. The Imec team gives two examples: a processor that could give you warning of gas leaks or another one that could tell you the amount of calories you consumed from a packet of cookies.Organic processors would be used in situations where they need to be cheap or flexible. Organic electronics, however, has a much wider scope than computing. Plastic RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags are now coming into the market. Organic electronics is the basis for the emerging technology that uses electrochromism, a property of materials that change colour and opacity when a charge is applied (this is leading the development of smart glass for buildings and automobiles).Plastic Logic, one of the most high-profile startups in organic electronics, is developing a plastic e-reader. Its first generation product, called Que, was shelved a year ago due to change in market conditions, as a series of e-readers were launched. Coming up is its second generation plastic e-reader. In the near future, plastic paper could let you roll up your e-readers the way you do a newspaper. That will be quite a revolution.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 18-04-2011)
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The first step in treating cancer is to catch the disease early. Unfortunately, it is also the most difficult step. The standard method is to take a tissue sample and put it under a microscope, but this method works only if we have a suspect in the first place and needs skilled pathologists. You could also take the patient's blood and screen it for many known markers, but they may give false alarms and so are not definitive tests. Now, there is hope for cancer patients: many new-generation tests based on nanotechnology are about to make their way into the market. Here are two examples. Scientists from the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have developed a handheld device that can detect gastric cancers in one hour with 96 per cent accuracy. This is not unlike the tissue sampling method, but the difference is the increased accuracy due to automation involved. At the University of California in Los Angeles, scientists are using nanotechnology to identify and collect circulating tumour cells that play a major role in the metastasis — spreading of the disease in the body — of cancer. Both results were published early this week. The Harvard group developed a microchip that contains a solution with magnetic nanoparticles. These nanoparticles are designed to bind to 11 proteins commonly found in gastric cancers. The microchip is connected to a smartphone that has the software to analyse results of the binding quickly. The more the kind of proteins that bind, the higher the accuracy of the system, but just four bound proteins are enough to give an accuracy of 96 per cent. This is better than human examination of the tissue as it eliminates human errors. In the future, cancer diagnostics will be based on identifying proteins in the tissue or blood, but the technology is still in the development stage. It is important to automate these methods to enable ease of use and to eliminate human error. The device also needs to be portable because proteins start degrading after one hour of the removal of the tissue from the body. The Harvard method is a good idea in this sense because the test can be done by the patient's bedside. The technology is useful in detecting proteins involved in other diseases as well, and the scientists are already developing it for TB and ovarian cancer. Circulating tumour cells (CTC) have been known for at least 100 years, but they pose more questions than answers. For example, we do not know at what stage of cancer they start circulating in the blood. But we do know that they are involved in some way in the spread of cancer to other parts of the body. They are also considered to be good indicators of the progress of treatment. But identifying CTCs is a major problem because they are so few in number. There is only one approved commercially available method, manufactured by Veridex, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. This technology uses antibodies to gather CTCs. Nanotechnology-based tests are a generation ahead of the current approved test. Scientists from the University of California used a micro-chip with a nanotechnology-based ‘Velcro' that can identify and gather CTCs. However, this team is only one of the many in the world developing such technology. Two other teams are in Louisiana State University and MGH. Nanotech-based cancer diagnostics is becoming a hot area attracting the attention of investors. The MGH team recently got $30 million from Johnson & Johnson. Watch out for more. (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 21-03-2011)
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When you start talking about Microsoft, it is often tempting to compare the IT giant with its closest rivals. In the 1990s, most comparisons were with its old foe Apple. There were countless arguments then about the benefits and drawbacks of Windows versus the Mac OS. Then, for a brief while, comparisons were between Linux and Windows, a line of argument that has not died down completely or probably never will. Now, in the cloud age, Microsoft products are compared with that of Google. Specifically, its Office products are weighed against Google Apps for Business, although the two sets of productivity software are very different in some ways. Now, there is a reason to continue these comparisons.A few days ago, Microsoft released the beta version of Office 365, its cloud-based offering for the Office Suite. Before we look at this more closely, it is worth looking at what it is not. It is quite different from the Google Apps for Business. It is not a pure Web version of Office 2010 either. Yet, it is a response to Google Apps for Business and the increasing tendency to use cloud-based versions of software. Microsoft offers these services in its own unique way, which could be exhilarating or frustrating, depending on your techno-political affiliation. If you leave these affiliations behind, Office 365 is like any other cloud-inspired software product: some good features, some not so good ones, and many others you are not sure about.Office 365 is a product aimed at small businesses and is the next version of Microsoft's business productivity online services (BPOS). It consists of Office Web Applications and online versions of SharePoint, Exchange and Lync. Like with Google Apps for Business, Office 365 also has a market place that helps users find partners and other applications. Office Web Apps is the online version of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. SharePoint Online is a set of collaboration tools. Exchange Online is a hosted service of email, calendar and contacts. Lync Online is an instant messaging and communications service. So, Office 365 has an extremely broad set of features. It has unified communications, business intelligence, content management, collaboration tools, enterprise search and other features. It also offers the option of purchasing Office as a subscription.Microsoft, thus, has three sets of offerings related to the Office Suite. One is the outright purchase of a version of Office in the conventional way. The second option, particularly for a consumer, is to use Windows Live. It has a large set of products including limited word processing, mail and Outlook Connecter for free, but with some ads. The third is Office 365, where you get the full Office Suite and other products for a subscription. It is here that Office 365 differs from the Google Apps for Business, which has no downloadable productivity suite. If you are on Google Apps but offline, there isn't anything that you can do. But with Office 365, you can continue to use the Office products as long as you have paid the subscription fee. But Office 365 makes commercial sense only for a company with at least 25 employees.Office 365 integrates your PC with mobile platforms such as a Windows 7 phone or iPhone. It works with Mac as well. For $6 per user, you also get 25 GB of storage free. A subscription also obviates the need for frequent upgrades. The launch of Office 365 is, thus, a significant move for Microsoft. We have to wait and see how Google and others react.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 02-05-2011)
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