IBM and EE Times predict

The end of one year and the start of another always brings out a series of gurus and soothsayers foretelling the future. Many are quite rightly forgotten by mid February, but the guys at IBM and EE Times probably deserve a hearing more than most. IBM have revealed five innovations that they expect to change our lives within five years. Briefly they encompass: Capturing and recycling energy from anything that moves; using biometrics security to safeguard access to information; linking human brain activities to control and activate electronic systems; the end of the digital divide and smarter, personalised priority e-mail. EE Times have produced their list of 20 hot technologies for 2012, it includes MEMS, plastic electronics, graphene, EUV lithography and 3D ICs.

Time for a (completely) new calendar?

We put a new calendar on the kitchen wall in the Grange household every January 1st. This year it has pictures of old railway advertising posters on it. A group at the Johns Hopkins University want to change things a bit more radically. The current Gregorian calendar has been in place since 1582, when Pope Gregory altered a calendar that was instituted in 46 BC by Julius Caesar. The JHU team wish to create a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one which came before, and remains that way from one year to the next in perpetuity. Under the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, if Christmas fell on a Sunday in 2012 it will also fall on a Sunday in 2013, 2014 and beyond. Under the new calendar, September has 31 days, as does June, March and December, the remaining months have 30 days. The advocates suggest that the benefits of such a calendar are many, including the stability which allows the permanent, rational planning of annual activities, from school to work holidays along with simplified financial calculations such as mortgage interest calculations. And they also encourage the abolition of world time zones and the adoption of “Universal Time” in order to synchronize dates and times worldwide, streamlining international business.

ET gone home?

One petition to the US government recently boldly asserted that more than 50 percent of the American people believe there is an extraterrestrial presence and more than 80 percent believe the government is not telling the truth about this phenomenon. Sadly for the conspiracy theorists the White House has officially responded in the negative. According to the White House Office dealing with Science & Technology policy: "The US government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye". But they do note that doesn't mean the subject of life outside our planet isn't being discussed or explored. In fact, there are a number of projects working toward the goal of understanding if life can or does exist off Earth. Are they implying that Star Trek is untrue?

Engineering royally acknowledged

The Royal Academy of Engineering has announced the creation of The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. A new global award which celebrates truly outstanding advances in engineering that have created significant benefit to humanity. The £1 million Prize will be awarded in the name of Her Majesty The Queen to an individual or a team of up to three people, of any nationality, directly responsible for advancing the positive application of engineering knowledge. The Prize will be international and will be awarded biennially, the first being presented in Spring 2013. Nominations will be sought in early 2012 from appropriate organisations worldwide, including engineering and science academies, universities, research organisations and companies. In looking for the winners, the judging panel will be seeking outstanding engineering-led advances that have produced tangible and widespread public benefit.

Lightweights at Caltech

A team of researchers from UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology have developed the world's lightest material - with a density of 0.9 mg/cc - about 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. The new material, which is 99.99% air, is formed of hollow nickel/phosphorus tubes arranged into a micro-lattice cellular architecture. Developed for the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the novel material could be used for battery electrodes and acoustic, vibration or shock energy absorption.

And then there was ...

A group of physicists working at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have succeeded in proving that visible photons can be produced from the virtual particles that have been thought to exist in a quantum vacuum. The experiment is based on one of the most counterintuitive, yet, one of the most important principles in quantum mechanics: that vacuum is by no means empty nothingness; it teems with virtual particles flitting in and out of existence. Using the vibrational speeds associated with a superconducting quantum interference device to enact the dynamical Casmir effect the team was able to convert the virtual photons into real ones. Almost magical.

Speedy Intel

The SC11, supercomputer conference, in Seattle saw Intel show off an accelerator chip on a test machine capable of speeds of one teraflop, equal to one trillion calculations per second. The chip packs 50 individual processors into one unit. Not quite faster than light or neutrino speeds but still fairly quick.

Icarus flies to the rescue?

It was looking a bit bleak for Mr Einstein. The OPERA group at Gran Sasso laboratory had reviewed and refined their September observations and reported that the CERN neutrinos were still travelling faster than the speed of light. However a further experiment, also at Gran Sasso, called ICARUS captured some of the neutrinos and measured their energy rather than journey time. According to theory, any neutrinos that were at superluminal velocity would have to be emitting radiation and thus losing energy. The ICARUS group found no evidence of radiation as the neutrinos arrived with the same energy as they left. The inference thus being that they cannot have been travelling faster that light.

Gioachino Rossini wrote Italian comic operas, however I don't recall one about flying Greeks. But as has often been said about Brünnhilde's final aria from Götterdämmerung, it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings. There is more to come.

Top Innovators

Thomson Reuters has announced the world's 100 most innovative organisations. The ranking methodology they used to identify innovative organisations is based on four principle criteria: Patent approval success rate, global reach of patent portfolio, patent influence in literature citations and overall patent volume. The US continues to lead this list and Asia and Europe are placed second and third, respectively. There are no completely UK organisations on the list. China is not yet ranked because of its practices regarding protecting IP and commercialising products globally. Whilst the US dominates in the semiconductor and electronics areas, Asia in the computer hardware sector and Europe in machinery manufacture it is interesting to note the position of France. It leads the world in scientific research and is the European nation with the most companies represented in the list.

Three in a row

We are pleased to announce the third K-Alpha XPS system sale in the UK this year, to a well-known industrial group with significant experience in XPS. The K-Alpha proved the match of all our competition, commented Richard Thomson, RTA Instruments Director. We ticked all the boxes with an exceptional solution for high quality, high-throughput, low-cost sample analysis. Intuitive workflows allow multiple operators to quickly master high quality XPS data acquisition, interpretation and reporting. In the UK we now have coverage of all XPS user categories: first time industrial users; first time academic users; experienced industrial users and experienced academic users.

"May you live in interesting times"

"May you live in interesting times" is an often used phrase and alluded by many to be some ancient Chinese curse. Regrettably, facts frequently get in the way of a good story. The phrase actually appears to be of early 20th century western origin with Robert Kennedy bringing it to prominence in a speech in South Africa in 1966. Whatever the exact origination, it seems fair to say that we are living in challenging and interesting times. Current fiscal matters coupled with the interlocking nature of the global economies has already, and could further, adversely impact many of us. I have neither the ability, nor desire, to attempt to solve the world recession and the plight of the Euro currency in this newsletter. However, in searching for solutions and avoiding repeating past mistakes, I do advocate that more use is made of scientific thinking. The banking fraternity could do well to consider Occam's Razor (simple explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than complex ones). If you cannot explain sub-prime derivative products to your grandmother, think again. Isaac Newton knew a bit about money, he was created Master of the Mint in 1699. His first law of motion should be explained to EU leaders; things only change if you take some positive action otherwise they just carry on.

Perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel. Lucas Papademos, Greece's new Prime Minister, is an MIT alumnus with a bachelor’s degree in physics, a master’s degree in electrical engineering as well as a doctorate in economics. Just don't let the latter drag you down Lucas.