New Material Will Allow Unlimited Data Storage Lasting A Million Years?

University of Southampton - July 9, 2013

“We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan,” says Jingyu.

credit: University of Southampton

Using nanostructured glass, scientists at the University of Southampton have, for the first time, experimentally demonstrated the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional digital data by femtosecond laser writing. The storage allows unprecedented parameters including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000°C and practically unlimited lifetime.

Coined as the ‘Superman’ memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz, which is able to store vast quantities of data for over a million years. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.


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Software Will Predict the Future

MIT Technology Review - By Tom Simonite on February 1, 2013

Researchers have created software that predicts when and where disease outbreaks might occur based on two decades of New York Times articles and other online data. The research comes from Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

The system could someday help aid organizations and others be more proactive in tackling disease outbreaks or other problems, says Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist and codirector at Microsoft Research. “I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what’s to come,” he says. “Eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for people.” Horvitz did the research in collaboration with Kira Radinsky, a PhD researcher at the Technion-Israel Institute.

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What You Lookin' At?

MIT Technology Review - By Tom Simonite on January 10, 2013

One of the most intuitive demonstrations involved selecting an on-screen object by looking at the target, and tapping the spacebar. It allowed for speedier selection than with a mouse cursor and double clicking. A maps application provided another example; the user focused his gaze on a spot, and scrolling the mouse zoomed the map in on that location.

Products that could make it common to control a computer, TV, or something else using eye gaze, gesture, voice, and even facial expression were launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The technology promises to make computers and other devices easier to use, let devices do new things, and perhaps boost the prospects of companies reliant on PC sales. Industry figures suggest that interest in laptop and desktop computers is waning as consumers’ heads are turned by smartphones and tablets.


Intel led the charge, using its press briefing Monday to announce a new webcam-like device and supporting software intended to bring gesture, voice control, and facial expression recognition to PCs.

“This will be available as a low-cost peripheral this year,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president for Intel’s PC client group. “Rest assured that Intel’s working to integrate this with all-in-ones and Ultrabooks, too.”

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"Software is Eating the World"

NYT - 1.10.13 by Quentin Hardy

In one view, if you are not creating an industry-eating software business, you’re out of luck. “You’re either on the side of the lever where you’re getting leveraged away,” he says, “or you’re providing the software in which you’re going to be insanely rich.”

Ben Horowitz may have the skeleton key to the decimation – sorry, transformation – of our economic and political lives. What he doesn’t have is a good sense of what we will look like when we get to the other side.

As he says in this video interview, “Do we think enough about the implications and how it’s going to change society? Probably not as much as we should.”


Mr. Horowitz is an unusually thoughtful person, but thinking about social implications is not his job. As co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s newest, largest and most high-profile venture capital firms, he and co-founder Marc Andreesseen base many of their investments off a thesis they call “Software is Eating the World.”

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Head-mounted iPhone Coming?

Is Apple working on a response to Google Glasses?

Mail Online - July 6, 2012 by Rob Waugh

Apple could be working on a wearable, head-mounted version of its his iPhone.

Patents uncovered this week show that the technology giant has been investigating a head-mounted display with transparent glass.

Google showed off early versions of its own 'computer glasses' - Project Glass - earlier this week. Companies such as Epson have already rushed to make their own versions.

Apple's patents, filed in 2006, suggest that the company has been interested in the technology for a considerable time.

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The coming programmable universe

New York Times - December 5, 2011 by Larry Smarr

Over the next 10 years, the physical world will become ever more overlaid with devices for sending and receiving information.

Already billions of processors are embedded in our smartphones, cars, appliances and buildings and the environment. These sensors can send out streams of data about their surroundings, and more and more it is anonymously transmitted to remote data centers — the “clouds” of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple.

From these vast clouds, the companies can power apps that are “spatially aware.” For instance, Google Maps now draws on data in the cloud to sample the location and movement of cellphones in cars, producing a real-time picture of traffic congestion.

Smart electric grids are measuring our homes’ use of power; active people are tracking their heart rates; and hundreds of millions of us are uploading geo-tagged data to Flickr, Yelp, Facebook and Google Plus. As we look 10 years ahead, the fastest supercomputer (the “exascale” machine) will be composed of one billion processors, and the clouds will most likely grow to this scale as well, creating a distributed planetary computer of enormous power.

Such computational power, co-located with the gigantic storage that holds the data from all the incoming data streams, will enable faster-than-real-time simulations of many aspects of our physical world. As Mike Liebhold and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future have discussed, computing will have evolved from merely sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. In this evolution, the world gradually becomes programmable.

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Want processors 1000 times faster? Use this glue.

Mashable - 9/9/11 by Charlie White


If you want to make processors 1,000 times faster, you’re going to need some serious technology, right? That would be the conventional wisdom. But 3M and IBM have unlocked a secret low-tech shortcut.

The companies found a much simpler way to hit that elusive goal — not by creating some spectacular new circuitry or using exotic quantum mechanics, but with the invention of a new variety of a mundane substance: glue.

This is not just any glue. It’s an adhesive that dissipates heat so efficiently that layer upon layer of chips can be stacked on top of each other into silicon “towers” up to 100 layers high, glued together with this special adhesive that keeps things cool. The result? Faster chips for computers, laptops, smartphones and anything else that uses microprocessors.

With IBM supplying its microprocessor and silicon expertise and 3M contributing its super-cool adhesive, the two companies aim to stack together processors, memory chips and networks into monster “skyscrapers” of silicon they say will be 1,000 times faster than today’s fastest processor.

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An online PhD is of interest to some people who want to pursue deeper knowledge of this.


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New Brain-Like Chips from IBM!

computing.co.uk - 8/18/11 by Stuart Sumner

IBM has unveiled a new experimental computer chip that it says mimics the human brain in that it perceives, acts and even thinks.

It terms the machines built with these chips "cognitive computers", claiming that they are able to learn through experience, find patterns, generate ideas and understand the outcomes.

In building this new generation of chip, IBM combined principles of nanoscience, neuroscience and supercomputing.

It has been awarded $21m (£12.7m) of new funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the next phase of the project, which it terms "Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics" (SyNAPSE).

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Battling Financial Market Algorithms

PopSci - May 13, 2011 by Clay Dillow

Trading Places More computers than people. Rafael Matsunaga via Wikimedia

Theft of trading ideas has long been a proud tradition on trading floors across the world. There was a time when smart traders would hang out in the same restaurants, bars, and flophouses as their institutional counterparts trying to catch a hint about tomorrow’s dealings or to manipulate another trader with some skullduggery--and then try to take advantage of the trade. These days it’s common knowledge that computers do a lot of our financial dealing, but a somewhat frightening article in the London Review of Books describes how the algorithms have now taken up the trader’s practice of trying to fool each other.

Most trading algorithms execute simple tasks. Say a large institution wants to purchase a large chunk of stock in a company: the program will seek out shares and buy them in many, many small quantities so as not to send the price soaring with a massive order--and to stop other traders from seeing what they’re up to and getting in on the deal. Called VWAPs, they’re fairly benign.

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Who knows what you want before you ask? Your phone will, soon.

PCMag.com - 9.15.10 by Matthew Murray

SAN FRANCISCO—In his keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum here this morning, Intel vice president and chief technology officer Justin Rattner focused on "context-aware computing," in which devices anticipate your needs and desires and help fulfill them—before you even ask.

The goal, he said, of bringing this to currently popular devices is to "change the relationship so we think of these devices not as devices but as companions, things that are indispensable in our daily lives." He described future devices that will constantly learn about you and your preferences based on how you use the device.

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Computers are vanishing

New York Times - 9.4.10 by John Markoff

An image of a circuit with 17 memristors captured by an atomic force microscope.

THE personal computer is vanishing.

Computers once filled entire rooms, then sat in the closet, moved to our desks, and now nestle in our pockets. Soon, the computer may become invisible to us, hiding away in everyday objects.

A Silicon Valley announcement last week hinted at the way computing technology will transform the world in the coming decade. Hewlett-Packard scientists said they had begun commercializing a Lilliputian switch that is a simpler — and potentially smaller — alternative to the transistor that has been the Valley’s basic building block for the last half-century.

That means the number of 1’s and 0’s that can be stored on each microchip could continue to increase at an accelerating rate. As a consequence, each new generation of chip would continue to give designers of electronics the equivalent of a brand new canvas to paint on.

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Moore's law will live on

Moore's Law, the phenomenon that has allowed computers to double in speed every 2 years (more precisely that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto an integrated circuit will at least double every 2 years) seems to be a kind of touchstone for whether you are a techno optimist or pessimist.

The nattering nabobs of negativism continue to predict its demise. "It won't last forever," they say. Perhaps not, but according to this article by Alan Boyle of Cosmic Log, it will probably live on for a nice little while thanks to the memristor...

"Will memristors save Moore's Law? The answer appears to be yes … that is, if you redefine Moore's Law, which has fueled the growth of the computer industry for four decades. Research groups say that memristors, a new type of memory device that's on the verge of going commercial, will dramatically enhance the storage capacity and usability of computers."

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Where computer interfaces are heading - Mobile, Screenless, Invisible

Technology Review - 8.17.10

One futurist's vision of the coming interface singularity contrasts with the reality of today's prototypes.

Reto Meier, an "Android Developer Advocate for Google" recently laid out a fairly science-fiction account of where computer (or at least mobile) interfaces are headed.

In the spirit of the best futurism, all of his predictions - from Augmented Reality eye glasses to advanced batteries - have parallels in the real world. What follows is a walk-through of the future, expressed in terms of the not quite ready for prime time discoveries coming out of labs today.

You Can Never Have Enough Monitors

Working on the average laptop is like working on a desk that's as big as a sheet of paper. That's why all our "files" are half an inch high. The key to productivity and immersion is more, bigger screens - hence the proliferation of external monitors, secondary reading devices and even mobile phones with improbably large screens.

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Extreme-scale computing - approaching one quintillion calculations per second

NetworkWorld - 6.23.10 by Michael Cooney

Not known for taking the demure route, researchers at DARPA this week announced a program aimed at building computers that exceed current peta-scale computers to achieve the mind-altering speed of one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.

Dubbed extreme scale computing, such machines are needed DARPA says to "meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, system dependability and security." 

10 hot energy projects that could electrify the world

DARPA says its Omnipresent High Performance Computing (OHPC) systems will involve all manner of new research and development.  Specifically the outfit is looking for:

    * Hardware, software and algorithms for reducing and managing power requirements for high performance computing systems, including the memory and storage hierarchy

    * Hardware, software and language design that enables highly programmable systems, which reduces the need for users to be aware of system complexity, including heterogeneous cores, the memory hierarchy

    * Improved hardware and software for bolster system dependability, managing the component failure rate, and security compromises including approaches for shared information and responsibility among the OS, runtime system, and applications

    * Scalable I/O systems, which may include alternatives to file systems

    * Self aware system software, including operating system, runtime system, I/O system, system management/administration, resource management and means of exposing resources, and external environments

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Man/Machine Transistor Devised

Discovery News - 6.2.10 by Eric Bland

By embedding a nano-sized transistor inside a cell-like membrane, scientists link humans and machines more intimately than ever.

An artist’s representation of a new transistor that's contained within a cell-like membrane. In the core of the device is a silicon nanowire (grey), covered with a lipid bilayer (blue). Man and machine can now be linked more intimately than ever, according to a new article in the journal ACS Nano Letters. Scientists have embedded a nano-sized transistor inside a cell-like membrane and powered it using the cell's own fuel. Scott Dougherty, LLNL.

The research could lead to new types of man-machine interactions where embedded devices could relay information about the inner workings of disease-related proteins inside the cell membrane, and eventually lead to new ways to read, and even influence, brain or nerve cells.

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DNA Logic - Computers in your bloodstream

New Scientist - 6.2.10 (by Kate McAlpine)

DNA-based logic gates that could carry out calculations inside the body have been constructed for the first time. The work brings the prospect of injectable biocomputers programmed to target diseases as they arise.

"The biocomputer would sense biomarkers and immediately react by releasing counter-agents for the disease," says Itamar Willner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, who led the work.

The new logic gates are formed from short strands of DNA and their complementary strands, which in conjunction with some simple molecular machinery mimic their electronic equivalent. Two strands act as the input: each represents a 1 when present or a 0 when absent. The response to their presence or absence represents the output, which can also be a 1 or 0.

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Living Earth Simulator - Are you living in one of these?

Technology Review - 4.30.10

The 'Living Earth Simulator' will mine economic, environmental and health data to create a model of the entire planet in real time.

When it comes to global crises, we're not short of complex systems that look close to the edge: the climate, the food supply, energy security, the banking system and so on. Add to this the threat of war in many parts of the world and the possibility of global pandemics and it's a wonder that anybody gets out of bed in the morning.

Science has certainly played an important role in understanding aspects of these systems but could it do more?

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Your 2020 Life - Predictions for your life in 10 years

The article excerpt below is part of a larger series on what your life will be like in 2020.

Forbes - 4.8.10 (by Mark Rolston)

Your Computer In 2020 - Traditional computers are disappearing; human beings themselves are becoming information augmented.

What's the most fascinating shift that computing is creating in our lives? You might think it's just "smaller, better, faster," but there is an even more dramatic story about how computing is changing who we are as people and a society.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, the idea of managing two distinct lives has become common for many of us. We have always had the first life--our physical existence, the one we can't escape until we die. But today many of us have also adapted a second life. We have long had the opportunity to invent ourselves through media, historically through writing. We could invent a new self. Yet our first lives remained dominant for most of us.

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Flexible displays only a few years away

PhysOrg.com - 3.25.10 (by John Messina)

Current flexible displays use a batch cookie cutter process for manufacturing. A new production method called Self-Aligned Imprint Lithography (SAIL) will streamline production and reduce cost.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Flexible Display Center, at Arizona State University, hopes to have flexible displays ready for test trials in approximately three years. The possibilities of using flexible displays are endless and one day will be used in many portable devices such as e-readers, cell phones, and tablets.

The people at hardware.info recently saw one of HP’s flexible screens rolled up and placed into a poster tube. HP’s CTO, Phil McKinney states that the flexible display is not designed to be rolled up. The display would only survive being rolled up about six times before it would start to malfunction. The screens are printed on flexible plastic sheets of Mylar material and could be easily rolled during the manufacturing process.

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They won't fly, but future cars will compute like mad

CNet - 3.18.10 (by Daniel Terdiman)

A Ford screenshot showing the current state of the art when it comes to in-car technology. Over the next five years, though, hardware and software are likely to be integrated, making a wide variety of cloud- and sensor-based applications possible. But safety must still come first. (Credit: Ford).

I have seen the future of computing technology in cars, and it's not coming any time soon.

It is coming, though, and when it arrives, it may very well change the way we deal with information while we're driving. But because the auto industry moves at a truly snail's pace when it comes to innovation, it's likely to be at least five years before this vision comes to pass.

My view into this future came from a conversation I had at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival with T.J. Giuli, a vehicle software systems engineer in Ford's Infotronics Research and Advanced Engineering division.

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