Workers in the field of evolutionary biology are using microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) scanning to create precise images of the inner ear of echolocating and non-echolocating bats ”in hopes of understanding some of the differences among them.” Evolutionary biology is the ultimate ‘whodunnit’ game for deciding where a particular character like echolocation came from and why it appeared when it did. In the case of bats, the study of flight didn’t necessarily include echolocation. The 3D imaging used for this study enabled scientists to determine that a tiny common mammalian bone called the stylohyal bone physically connects the larynx to the ear (tympanic) bone. January 24 in Nature.

Detailed 3-D images of individual bats representing 26 species were possible because of the micro capabilities of this technology which is close to those commonly used in hospitals but with much higher resolution. Because of it workers were able to avoid dissecting or damaging the specimens studied. As with most anatomical inferences, the stylohyal bone seems to connect only in echolocating bats, though there are no clear answers as to why that is so. There is also no clear evidence that all echolocating bats are represented in the sample. Yet, Brock Fenton, a biology professor at Western Ontario, and senior study author claims, that if you find a fossil with such a bone connecting to the tympanic bone, you have an echolocator. “researchers suggested that [the connection] might help both in perceiving the outgoing signal and in dampening the vibrations to prevent the bat from deafening itself with the sound it produces, which can be more than 100 times louder than the reflected echoes. By having a physical connection, Fenton says, it would allow the bats to have a "completely crisp and close-to-the-source representation of the original signal," which is crucial for comparison with incoming signals. “

Here’s some basic common definition of the terms: “Echolocation

Bat echolocation is a perceptual system where ultrasonic sounds are emitted specifically to produce echoes. By comparing the outgoing pulse with the returning echoes the brain and auditory nervous system can produce detailed images of the bat’s surroundings. This allows bats to detect, localize and even classify their prey in complete darkness. At 130 decibels in intensity, bat calls are some of the most intense airborne animal sounds.[17]

To clearly distinguish returning information, bats must be able to separate their calls from the echoes they receive. Microbats use two distinct approaches.

1.Low Duty Cycle Echolocation: Bats can separate their calls and returning echos in time. Bats that use this approach time their short calls to finish before echoes return. This is also important because these bats contract their middle ear muscles when emitting a call to avoid deafening themselves. The time interval between call and echo allows them to relax these muscles so they can clearly hear the returning echo.[18]

2. High Duty Cycle Echolocation: Bats emit a continuous call and separate pulse and echo in frequency. The ears of these bats are sharply tuned to a specific frequency range. They emit calls outside of this range to avoid self-deafening. They then receive echoes back at the finely tuned frequency range by taking advantage of the Doppler shift of their motion in flight. These bats must deal with changes in the Doppler shift due to changes in their flight speed. They have adapted to change their pulse emission frequency in relation to their flight speed so echoes still return in the optimal hearing range.[19]

Yet while echolocation would have allowed bats to quickly radiate and fill the nocturnal skies left empty by birds, there is no clear evidence that echolocation evolved prior to or simultaneously with flight. One can only imagine the skies filled 24/7 and every conceivable strategy attempted to exploit a burgeoning mammalian clade. If you watch migrating birds today in some of the more populated areas, they seem as a blizzard, and you wonder how might they all seem to do this without practice? Or you wonder is the idea that evolution proceeds in an improving of the species, as obtuse as we were told it was.

A biochemical analysis by Jones and Teeling of the genomes revealed back in 2006 that:

“Recent molecular phylogenies have changed our perspective on the evolution of echolocation in bats. These phylogenies suggest that certain bats with sophisticated echolocation (e.g. horseshoe bats) share a common ancestry with non-echolocating bats (e.g. Old World fruit bats). One interpretation of these trees presumes that laryngeal echolocation (calls produced in the larynx) probably evolved in the ancestor of all extant bats. Echolocation might have subsequently been lost in Old World fruit bats, only to evolve secondarily (by tongue clicking) in this family. Remarkable acoustic features such as Doppler shift compensation, whispering echolocation and nasal emission of sound each show multiple convergent origins in bats. The extensive adaptive radiation in echolocation call design is shaped largely by ecology, showing how perceptual challenges imposed by the environment can often override phylogenetic constraints.”

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It has always seemed more plausible that sophisticated systems such as predation and navigation via sound, and to the extent this must work flawlessly, that there must have been an abundance of traits that contained this, and possibly other capabilities coupled together and perhaps no longer apparent or fitness enhancing. Surely we know that traits were lost for the most ephemeral conditions imaginable. Others were re-invented in new ways that science may never come close to guessing correctly. But it is amazing to see how the biological sciences are apparent in our all our studies of complex systems.

Scientists have leaped over a major hurdle in efforts to begin commercial production of a form of carbon that could rival silicon in its potential for revolutionizing electronics devices ranging from supercomputers to cell phones. Called graphene, the material consists of a layer of graphite 50,000 times thinner than a human hair with unique electronic properties. Their study appears in ACS’ Nano Letters.

This graphic represents an atom-thin sheet of graphene, a form of carbon that could replace silicon in future electronic devices. Scientists have developed a simple manufacturing method that could allow its mass production. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Continue reading at Science Daily ->

After I posted a blog on software energy efficiency recently, I realized from some of the comments from readers that most people did not get it. When I talk about software energy efficiency, most people think I am talking about using software to make other things greener. Yes, software can be used to automate and to scale in making other things greener. But I am talking about a particular piece of software being greener.

Here are a few examples to make my point.

Take a sorting program. We can implement such a program with half a dozen algorithms. This is Data Structure/Algorithm 101: the resultant program behaves differently depending on the algorithm used. Some programs take more time than others. Some consume more CPU time and memory than others. Obviously, the version of the sorting program that consumes the least CPU time and memory is the greenest. We can make this discussion more interesting by adding other factors like data structures, the implementation language, and so on.

We can implement such a program using arrays or linked lists. When we use arrays, we can allocate a large area for the arrays or the smallest area to accommodate the input space. We also can select a language for implementation, such as C, C++, scripts, or web languages. There may be more factors involved. I hope this trivial example illustrates my point of making software more energy efficient.

Another example is SMTP server software. SMTP is the de facto standard and is available on Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac, and other platforms for sending email. SMTP is big. It is designed to be implemented as a monolithic chunk, executable rather than modularized. Running such a big executable requires a lot of swapping because not all of it is stored in memory. If it is modularized, each module may fit in memory, reducing swapping. So if software is well designed with modularization in mind, its performance will increase with less computing resources. Everyone knows SMTP needs a rewrite, but it is widely used, and it will take a long time to have a thoroughly quality-assured new version of it.

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The third example is parallel programming. Scientific application programs tend to be broken into pieces that can be computed in parallel. They save more computing resources that way. In the days of single-core CPUs, this did not make any sense. With the advent of multicore CPUs, we can exploit this computer architecture.

So, again, my point is that each piece of software, without considering its relationship with other things, can be made greener, requiring less computing resources (CPU time and memory) and power. And of course, greener software can also make other things, including other software, greener. I hope I made my point clearer. What do you think?

Scientists have created a flat surface patterned after the body hair of spiders that refuses to get wet.

The surface also has the added benefit of being self-cleaning, since water does a pretty good job of picking up and carrying off dirt as it is being repelled.

This makes the material ideal for some food packaging, windows, or solar cells that must stay clean to gather sunlight, scientists say. Boat designers might someday coat hulls with it, making boats faster and more efficient.

Continue reading at Live Science ->

A car that runs on coffee is unveiled today - but it certainly won’t take the grind out of commuting.

And at between 25 and 50 times the cost of running a car on petrol, the invention won’t please any motor industry bean-counters either.

Nicknamed the Car-puccino, it has been created using a converted 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco bought for £400 and chosen for its resemblance to the time-travelling DeLorean in the movie Back To The Future.

Continue reading at Daily Mail ->

Green IT means two different things. One is to make IT itself greener, and the other is to make other things greener. Let’s focus on the former. As everyone knows, IT consists of hardware-such as servers, storage equipment, and network gear-and software. Up until now, energy efficiency has been focused on hardware but not on software.

I tried to cover this issue in the Green Software Unconference last August. See here and here.

In those posts, I listed several factors to consider in making software energy efficient:

• Parallel programming—hard to program, nondeterministic (such as race condition)
• Design/architecture—modularized structure vs. big monolithic chunk (e.g., SMTP server)
• Interpretive vs. compiled—web languages vs. C, C++, and Java
• Performance vs. ease of use—heavy on the ease of use, and the heavy lifting left to hardware
• Optimization—of compilers and other utilities
• Selection of algorithms

Although my session drew some audience, interest in software energy efficiency was limited. Why is this the case? First and foremost, most software engineers want to make their programs function correctly according to the specification. And then the programs will be optimized to run faster. Although optimized software tends to consume fewer computing resources and is likely to be greener, there is no guarantee that it is energy efficient.

What is energy efficiency for software? A more energy efficient server hardware box would produce the same results (like MIPS, million instructions per second) with less wattage. In other words, with the same amount of wattage, it produces more. MIPS is a standard metric for any server hardware box. If we use the same idea, then an energy efficient software piece would produce more results with the same wattage. In other words, an energy efficient software piece requires less wattage to produce the same results. The problem here is how we define the results. Software has no universal metric like MIPS for hardware.

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Two pieces of software could be compared for their energy efficiency if:

• They are run on the same hardware platform (same CPU, memory, and so forth).
• They produce exactly the same results.

There may be other conditions, but I cannot think of any at this point. This subject has been on my mind. Recently, I attended FountainBlue’s Clean Energy Entrepreneurs Forum on the topic “Leveraging Software for Clean Green Solutions” March 1 (5:30–7:30 p.m. at Applied Materials in Santa Clara.)

The focus of this meeting was on how to make other things greener with software. Software energy efficiency was too early to discuss because it is far more important to make other things greener at this stage. I will keep this topic in mind and try to make a point from time to time.

Solar panels nowadays are flat, but folding them in origami-like ways could help dramatically boost the amount of power they could generate, scientists say.

Research into solar or photovoltaic panels thus far have kept them flat largely to prevent them from casting any shadows that might diminish the amount of light they could harvest. Two-dimensional panels are also far easier to install on rooftops and are well suited to standard large-scale fabrication techniques.

Computer simulations of 3-D solar panels. The one on the left consists of 64 flat, triangular, double-sided panels; the one on the right is a simplified version. Credit: Jeffrey Grossman et al.

Still, three-dimensional solar panels could in principle absorb more light and generate more power than a flat panel of the same area footprint, which could prove useful in circumstances where the available space is limited. The idea is that any light that might normally reflect unused off a solar panel surface could then get trapped on another panel.

Continue reading at LiveScience ->

As seen in Smart Grid, ICT technologies will have new market, CleanTech. The US ICT vendors have a lot of business opportunities in the Japanese market.

The Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) is a Japanese government organization for promoting mutual trade and investment between Japan and the rest of the world. In San Francisco recently it held a symposium on cleantech in Japan and the U.S. Because JETRO’s mission is to promote Japan as the country to do business with and to invest in, all the presentations portrayed:

These are two of the highlights:

• Japan Unisys (no longer affiliated with Unisys Corp. but retaining the name), a subsidiary of Mitsui and Co., works in three areas: home appliances, electric vehicle (EV), and eco-house. Their view is from EV to smart house and finally the smart community, as in the following:

• Unlike Japan Unisys, which is Japanese market–centric, Panasonic’s presence in the U.S. is pretty big—$8B in sales with 10,000 employees and 10 locations. They have been doing business in the U.S. for 50 years. Panasonic has a series of products that could be greener, but like Japan Unisys, they have an eco-house idea. In addition, Panasonic acquired Sanyo, which has the biggest share in batteries. The merger creates a large corporation—Panasonic’s 300,000 employees plus Sanyo’s 86,000 employees, with Panasonic’s $78B in sales plus Sanyo’s $9B.

Panasonic’s eco-house

A consultant emphasized the investment in the cleantech area by the Japanese government, as in the following:

He also showed who’s who in the cleantech area in the following:

• The director of KQED did a special piece on Japan’s cleantech. He said that Japan owns 40% of all cleantech patents, while the U.S. owns 12% of them. He also pointed out that fuel cells are big in Japan. Although it costs $30,000 to install one, the government subsidy brings it down to $15,000. His special piece can be seen here.
• A reporter from Nikkei said that cleantech information on Japan can be seen in his magazine here.

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Overall, it was a good conference, reaffirming that Japan is pushing to green home appliances and homes and promoting EVs.

All-optical switching could allow dramatic speed increases in telecommunications by eliminating the need to convert photonic signals to electronic signals — and back — for switching. All-optical processing could also facilitate photonic computers with similar speed advances.

Details of these materials — and the design approach behind them — were reported February 18th in Science Express, the rapid online publication of the journal Science. Conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

“This work provides proof that at least from a molecular point of view, we can identify and produce materials that have the right properties for all-optical processing,” said Seth Marder, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and co-author of the paper. “This opens the door for looking at this issue in an entirely different way.”

Continue reading at ScienceDaily ->

-From ScienceDaily-

Magnets that can readily switch their polarity are widely used in the computer industry for data storage, but they present an engineering challenge: A magnet’s polarity must be easily switched when writing data to memory, but be difficult to switch when storing or reading it.

These conflicting requirements are typically met by heating and softening the magnet for saving data, then cooling and hardening the magnet for storage and reading.

(Credit: University of Chicago)

Continue…

-From ScienceMatters @ Berkeley-

“Statistics is everywhere,” says David Brillinger. A Berkeley professor of statistics, Brillinger’s rich and varied career proves that concept in spades. Over the years, he has helped scientists grapple with topics ranging from neuroscience to marine biology, space debris to seismology, choosing the projects that pique his interest and expand the boundaries of his discipline.

“I don’t know why everyone isn’t a statistician. We are the freest of the people out there,” Brillinger says.

Brillinger is adept at identifying which statistical approaches are effective to address real-world problems. He recalls listening to UCLA neuroscientist Jose Segundo describing how nerve cells in the brain interact with one other. “You have three neurons and they’re firing and you wonder, is the firing of this one influencing the other two? Or is it this one and then that one? I could see that some theoretical methods in graphical structure I’d developed abstracted it,” Brillinger says. The two teamed up on a number of papers about brain synapses and neural firing.

Continue…

-From MSNBC News-

A tiny solar-powered sensor, smaller than Abe Lincoln’s head on a penny, can supply almost perpetual energy, its creators say.

The device contains solar cells, a battery and a processor, all in a package that measures 2.5 by 3.5 by 1 millimeters.

Daeyeon Kim

It could enable new biomedical implants as well as new devices to monitor buildings, bridges and homes. “It could vastly improve the efficiency and cost of current environmental sensor networks designed to detect movement or track air and water quality,” the developers said in a statement.

Continue…

Some time ago, container based data centers got good attention because of its time to market, availability of high power density and focused cooling. As recent as last December, Tier-1 indicated that there is little traction by this technology. Lately, a lot of buzz on this subject are in the media and from people I meet, including a 20 feet container recently announced from HP, VMware and ones mentioned in here.

There are several vendors providing container based DCs, including:

• HP
• IBM
• Verrari
• Sun/Oracle
• SGI

The benefits of container based DCs include:

• Short time to market
• Availability of dense server (and therefore, power) concentration
• Savings of packing materials, such as boxes, extra power cords and so on

Some vendor put up to 22 racks of 42U (924 1U) servers. If you put blade servers instead, you could pack several thousands of servers per container with effective cooling. Because it is already set up as a mini DC, time to market is very short and you do not need to unpack each server box to get rid of empty boxes and extra power and networking cords.

As I mentioned, with some exceptions like Microsoft and Google, the market traction for this technology has been slow because many people consider this technology being only for large data center operators. I have informally solicited for opinions from several data center experts. There was almost 50-to-50 split between positive and negative opinions. The people with negative opinions claim this type of solutions only work for large DC operators and they are not large in number. Initially, I was in the same opinion. But after talking to two experts with positive opinions, I am beginning to change my stance, although I am not totally convinced yet.

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The positive opinion is summarized as follows:

• Because of the capital crunch and time to market, more and more enterprises are moving towards co-location
• Co-location/Whole Sale DC operators are becoming bigger by acquisition and other means to exploit economies of scale
• Cloud computing will accelerate the above two trends
• Containers are not property but equipment and thus, are not subject to property tax. They can be placed anywhere, including rooftops and parking lots, eliminating the need for large space to accommodate large IT loads.

The largest negative factor on the container based DCs is the granularity. Only large operators can use the container based DCs is limited in number. As the proliferation of cloud computing continues, more and more enterprises will move their roll your own DCs to DC operators’ sites for time to market and cost. This trend will make DC operators bigger and consequently; let economies of scale work well. For small players, a container-full of servers are too big to deal with but for large operators, the container may become a reasonable building block. Based on some conversation with a DC expert, fortune 500-1,000 companies are beginning to move to cloud computing type computing and this is actually happening.

Finally, not all the container based DCs are made in the same manner. Some are good and others are not that great. All of these data and information make me research further on the container based data centers. More to come…