Cutting Edge

The Department of Energy on Monday named the first winners of a program aimed at generating breakthroughs in clean-energy technologies.

The program, called Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), began taking applications earlier this year for research ideas that reduce imports of foreign fuel, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency. Funding for the agency is part of the Obama administration's goal to improve the economic competitiveness of the U.S. by investing in energy technology.

The DOE is awarding $151 million in 37 grants to both academics and green-tech companies, most of which are start-ups. The ideas are meant to be high-risk and high-reward, with a number not expected to meet their goals.

Authority to create the agency, roughly modeled on the DARPA defense program that spawned the space race, happened in 2007 but it wasn't funded until earlier this year. ARPA-E now has authority to fund as much as $400 million in research. A second tranche of grant awardees is scheduled to be announced later this fall.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The naming of ARPA-E grants is being closed watched in the green-tech start-up community and among researchers. There were 3,600 concept papers submitted, followed by 300 full applications and ultimately 37 awardees.

One awardee is an effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make an all-liquid battery, which would make storage of storage of solar and wind power more cost effective.

Another is funding for a bioreactor developed by the University of Minnesota that proposes using two microorganisms to make a vehicle fuel. One bacteria would convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into a sugar, and another would convert the sugar into a fuel.

Two other efforts include developing enzymes that would more effectively capture carbon dioxide from power plants and a low-cost material for making LED lighting. The full list of awardees is at the ARPA-E site (click for PDF).

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is scheduled to speak at Google Monday morning in Google to make an announcement, after which Google CEO Eric Schmidt will speak with Chu. Through its philanthropic arm Google.org, Google has invested in a number of renewable energy companies. It has also developed Web-based energy monitoring software for consumers.

So you're a programmer deciding where to invest your energy. What's a better idea: the latest Apple device, where hot new games can mean big bucks and millions of users, or a calculator introduced 10 years ago?

ticalc.org news editor Michael Vincent

(Credit: Michael Vincent)

Most go for iPhones and iPods. But another community thrives in its own way. These are the folks who spend hours trying to elevate their Texas Instruments calculators to a level far surpassing their modest roots.

Among their achievements: adding new features, creating new operating systems, connecting the calculator to keyboards and other hardware, playing a video excerpt from "The Matrix," and even running Nintendo Game Boy video games. Not bad for calculators such as the $100 TI-83 Plus, introduced in 1999 with a Z80 processor running at 6MHz, 24KB of memory, 160KB of flash memory, and a 96x64 pixel display.

Why all this work for projects that realistically are not going to reshape the future of computing? Much of the motivation parallels mountaineer George Mallory's rationale for climbing Mount Everest: "Because it's there."

TI's graphing calculators are programmable, affordable, and widely used in schools--a lot more approachable than a Himalayan peak. That doesn't mean they're easy. The calculators must be programmed in assembly language--a slightly more human-readable version of the very basic machine code the calculators execute, but hardly something more easily read and debugged such as C or Java.

Twitter may not be making money but at least it's providing a forum for some innovative artistic collaboration.

Take, for instance, science fiction writer and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman. He's going to create an audio book based on tweets provided by Twitter users.

You might remember the game of "Exquisite Corpse" where a group of people create a poem or story together by writing down sentences in succession that no one else can see until everyone has contributed. Read as a whole, the mish-mash can be entertaining, at least to slightly inebriated English literature students bored on a Friday night.

Well, Gaiman is going to start the project off with a first line to be tweeted at midnight EDT Monday at http://twitter.com/BBCAA. Others can tweet their contributions to "#bbcawdio."

"When roughly 1,000 tweets are logged, we'll edit the contributions and compile a script, then head into the studio to record and produce the audiobook. The final audiobook will be downloadable free on our Web site and also available as a digital download at iTunes and other audiobook retailers," the BBC Audiobooks America Blog says.

Given that Gaiman has 1.2 million followers, I suspect it shouldn't take long to get 1,000 contributions.

It's not clear where this idea came from, but Gaiman has a history of using the Internet in interesting ways. He came up with the idea of raising money for causes by auctioning off the names of characters in upcoming books on eBay, and organized such an auction with other writers in 2005.

(Thanks to Galleycat.)

Neil Gaiman is using Twitter to solicit contributions for an audio book project.

(Credit: Twitter)

At first glance, James Dyson's latest invention looks like a powerful HD antenna or perhaps a small portal into another world. But in fact, the device, which carries the vaunting title of Dyson Air Multiplier, is something much more common: a fan.

What, a fan with no blades? Yes, that's exactly what you're looking at, and what makes the Air Multiplier so hard for people to classify at first. This fan uses some innovative airflow engineering to pull air up through an energy-efficient brushless motorbase and multiply it 15 times, expelling it through an airfoil-shaped ramp at a rate of 118 gallons a second, according to the press release.

Dyson, the company, says its fluid dynamics engineers spent four years "running hundreds of simulations to precisely measure and optimize the machine's aperture and airfoil-shaped ramp" and air fluctuations were mapped with something called a Laser Doppler Annometry.

(Credit: University of Missouri)

Scientists at the University of Missouri are developing a small nuclear battery that they say can hold a million times more charge than standard batteries.

The radioisotope battery, being developed by Jae Kwon of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and other researchers, is the size and thickness of a penny.

That makes it smaller than nuclear batteries used in space and military applications. Kwon says it might shrink to less than the thickness of a human hair if the right materials are used.

The battery is designed to drive micro/nanoelectromechanical systems (M/NEMS). Such devices include labs on a chip, and biological and chemical sensors.

The nuclear battery produces power from charged particles released by radioactive decay. It also uses a liquid semiconductor material, rather than a solid one, to minimize damage to the battery.

Kwon said the technology is safe. "Nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pacemakers, space satellites and underwater systems," he noted.

The team has applied for a provisional patent on the battery.

Eolas Technologies, a company that ground through a years-long patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft, now has sued a large swath of corporate powers for infringement of that same patent and another related patent concerning interactive programs on Web sites.

The list of defendants includes many high-profile companies inside and outside the tech world: Adobe Systems, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Staples, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube.

Eolas' suit is not to be taken lightly. Although the earlier Microsoft case took many years to resolve, and Eolas by no means won a complete victory, the patent involved did overall withstand heavy legal challenges despite many on the Web rallying to Microsoft's aid. Microsoft and Eolas won't describe terms of their 2007 settlement of the patent case, but Eolas did say it expected to pay its shareholders a 2007 dividend afterward.

"What distinguishes this case from most patent suits is that so many established companies named as defendants are infringing a patent that has been ruled valid by the Patent Office on three occasions," said Mike McKool, head of the national law firm McKool Smith and Eolas' lead attorney.

This diagram shows one example of the newly granted Eolas patent 7,599,985 in use.

(Credit: Eolas)

The U.S. District Court suit, filed in the eastern district of Texas, seeks preliminary and permanent injunctions prohibiting the plaintiffs from using the patented technology; payment for damages from infringement, including treble damages because the alleged infringement was willful; attorney's fees; and a jury trial.

Eolas conducts research and development but also has a separate licensing department. "Eolas seeks to return value to its shareholders by commercializing these technologies through strategic alliances, licensing and spin-offs," the company says of itself.

The earlier Microsoft case involved U.S. patent 5,838,906, "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document," which involved browsers launching a helper application such as Adobe Flash.

In the new case, that patent is joined by a newer one granted Tuesday, No., 7,599,985, with a very similar title: "Distributed hypermedia method and system for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document."

"The '985 Patent is a continuation of the '906 patent, and allows Web sites to add fully-interactive embedded applications to their online offerings through the use of plug-in and Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web development techniques," Eolas said in a statement about the lawsuit.

Ajax caught on midway through the decade as a way to endow Web pages with interactive features based in part on the JavaScript programming language. Ajax is used in many Web sites including Google Maps and Yahoo Mail.

The '985 patent, originally filed Aug. 9, 2002, involves a program embedded in a Web page--or "hypermedia document," as the patent language calls it more generally. Here's an excerpt from the patent abstract's description of the technology:

A system allowing user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia to access and execute an embedded programming object. The program object is embedded into a hypermedia document much like data objects.

The user may select the program object from the screen. Once selected the program executes on the user's (client's) computer or may execute on a remote server or additional remote computers in a distributed processing arrangement.

After launching the program object, the user is able to interact with the object as the invention provides for ongoing interprocess communication between the application object (program) and the browser program.

And later, in a bit more detail:

The present invention allows a user at a client computer connected to a network to locate, retrieve, and manipulate objects in an interactive way. The invention not only allows the user to use a hypermedia format to locate and retrieve program objects, but also allows the user to interact with an application program located at a remote computer.

Interprocess communication between the hypermedia browser and the embedded application program is ongoing after the program object has been launched. The use is able to use a vast amount of computing power beyond that which is contained in the user's client computer.

Apple, Google, Yahoo, Texas Instruments, and Office Depot each declined to comment on the suit. Staples, Playboy, Sun, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Adobe, and Perot Systems didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Elizabeth Driscoll, vice president of public relations for Go Daddy, said in a statement, "We have not seen the lawsuit and, therefore, cannot comment on it. However, we are unaware of the basis for any such claims and we will defend the case vigorously."

Updated 1:26 p.m., 2:09 p.m., 2:35 p.m., and 4:08 p.m. PDT with comment from companies.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for "two revolutionary optical technologies."

Charles K. Kao, who discovered how to transmit light through fiber optics, and the team of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who designed the first digital-imaging sensor, split the Nobel Prize, announced by the Nobel Foundation on Tuesday.

Born in Shanghai, Charles K. Kao made a discovery in 1966 that would lead to today's fiber optics. A man ahead of this time, Kao calculated how it would be possible to transmit light over 100 kilometers (62 miles), compared to only 20 meters (65 feet) for the fiber cables available in the '60s. He discovered that by removing impurities and creating a more pure type of glass, the fiber could be made more efficient and absorb less of the light over great distances.

Kao's research stimulated other scientists to join the effort, leading to the first ultrapure fiber cable created in 1970.

Another breakthrough in technology was the invention of the first successful digital-imaging sensor, used today in everything from consumer cameras to surgical devices.

Working at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1969, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith built the first CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). Using the photoelectric effect theorized by Albert Einstein, the sensor transforms light into electric signals. The team's major hurdle was determining how to gather and read out those signals into a large number of pixels in a short burst of time.

The first consumer camera with a CCD was designed in 1981, leading to a revolution in digital photography.

Willard S. Boyle, left, and George E. Smith of Bell Labs invented charged-coupled devices (CCDs). In this 1974 photo, they are demonstrating an experimental TV camera that contains a CCD substitute for the vacuum tube of a conventional TV camera.

(Credit: Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs)

"When combined with the laser and the transistor, the invention of an efficient, low-loss optical fiber has made nearly instantaneous communication possible across the entire globe," said H. Frederick Dylla, director of the American Institute of Physics. "This mode of communication is essential for high-speed internet and forms the optical backbone of 21st century commerce. The CCD sensor has revolutionized technical, professional, and consumer photography in the last few decades. Taken together these inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half century."

Kao will take home one half of the award prize of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million) with the team of Boyle and Smith splitting the other half. Awarded by the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Nobel prizes are given each year for achievements in science, literature, and economics.

Have you ever worried that knuckle cracking will give you arthritis or wondered why pregnant women don't tip over? Me too.

Research into those topics--as well as studies finding that diamonds could be created from tequila and giant panda feces are good for composting--received Ig Nobel Prizes in a ceremony on Thursday night at Harvard University.

The prizes, awarded to scientific achievements that "cannot and should not be reproduced," are presented in the week before the real Nobel prizes are announced and are sponsored by the science humor magazine "Annals of Improbable Research."

A Thousand Oaks, Calif., doctor won the Ig Nobel medicine prize for his firsthand research into arthritis in fingers. As a child and in adulthood, Donald Unger's mother, several aunts, and mother-in-law warned him that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis in his fingers. To test that theory, he cracked the knuckles of his left hand, but not the right hand, every day for more than 60 years.

His conclusion? The cracking has no effect. (A chiropractor in San Francisco previously agreed with that notion in a very unscientific survey conducted by me.)

In Switzerland, the half-liter refillable beer bottle is commonly used as a weapon in bar fights and can crack a skull, researchers said.

(Credit: Stephan Bolliger/Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine)

"There was no arthritis in either hand, and no apparent differences between the two hands," Unger wrote in a letter to the editor in Arthritis and Rheumatism, Vol. 41, No. 5, in 1998, after he had completed only 50 years of his study.

"This result calls into question whether other parental beliefs, e.g., the importance of eating spinach, are also flawed," he wrote. "Further investigation is likely warranted."

The Ig Nobel Prize for peace went to a group at the University of Bern in Switzerland for its bar room brawl-related research. The doctors, several of whom are forensic pathologists, had been asked to testify in court cases whether a skull can be broken by smashing a beer bottle on someone's head--and whether that is more easily accomplished with a full bottle or an empty one.

"Full and empty bottles suffice in breaking the skull. However, the likelihood of such fractures is greater in blows with an empty bottle. Empty beer bottles are therefore more dangerous," Dr. Stephan Bolliger wrote in an e-mail response to questions on Friday.

Asked whether certain beer brands might be more dangerous than others, Bolliger said, "The brand of the bottle is irrelevant, as the major breweries in Switzerland all use the same, recyclable half-liter bottles."

The research paper concludes that because half-liter beer bottles present "formidable weapons" in a fight, "prohibition of these bottles is therefore justified in situations which involve risk of human conflicts."

Meanwhile, other Ig Nobel-honored research suggests that farmers can benefit from improved human-bovine relations. Researchers at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom won the veterinary-medicine prize for their work showing that "Bessie" is likely to produce more milk than "No. 5863329."

"On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case," the researchers wrote in an abstract for their paper, "Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production."

In Japan, researchers turned to a beloved animal for help in home waste reduction. A team at the Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara won the biology prize for "demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90 percent in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas."

The physics prize went to researchers from the University of Cincinnati, the University of Texas, and Harvard for "analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over" in their paper "Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins."

And in a modern-day alchemy experiment, researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico received the chemistry prize for turning tequila into diamonds. Well, maybe not exactly diamonds, but diamond films that could be an economical component in electrical insulators.

The public-health prize was awarded to inventors who received a patent for a brassiere that can be converted into a pair of gas masks.

There were also awards for findings that came of less research. The economics prize was awarded to officials from four Icelandic banks "for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa--and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy."

The mathematics prize went to the governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank for "giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers--from very small to very big--by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from 1 cent to 100 trillion dollars."

And finally, the prize for literature was given to Ireland's police service for writing more than 50 traffic tickets to "the most frequent driving offender in the country--Prawo Jazdy--whose name in Polish means "Driver's License."

Marten Mickos, surrounded by inflatable MySQL dolphin mascots.

(Credit: Benchmark Capital)

Marten Mickos, the one-time chief executive of MySQL who left about a year after Sun Microsystems acquired the open-source database company, has joined Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur in residence.

"Why I like @benchmark: They consistently ask 'What's best for the entrepreneur?' and they think big," Mickos said Tuesday on Twitter.

The admiration is mutual. "Marten Mickos builds global disruptive businesses. As CEO of MySQL AB for seven years, Mickos grew that company from a garage start-up to the second largest open-source company in the world," Benchmark said on its Web site.

Mickos joined MySQL in 2001, stayed through Sun's 2008 acquisition, and left earlier this year. Mickos also is on the board of cloud computing start-up RightScale and Thunderbird e-mail software backer Mozilla Messaging.