Seeing beef in a new light

The use of LEDs to save electricity is well known, but work within the US meat industry has thrown up extra advantages. The use of LEDs in refrigeration display cabinets has been shown to extend the shelf life of some beef products. The propensity of customers to discriminate against natural oxidation related meat coloration changes is a key factor in defining the shelf life of fresh meat. Scoring LED lighting against the normal fluorescent in the areas of preferred colour, taste and operating costs showed several advantages in using LEDs.

Eastern expansion

Continued confidence and growth in the far east semiconductor sector has been emphasised this month with AXT announcing further expansion of its compound semiconductor substrate manufacturing facilities in China. On a larger scale, it is reported that Samsung is increasing its 2012 investments to $41 Billion. The money will be used for everything from building factories to R&D, as well as mergers & acquisitions and hiring new staff. Samsung expects to take on around 26,000 new staff in 2012, taking its global total to about 376,000. The company has not specified the R&D development areas but analysts widely expect it to raise investment in mobile chips for phones, tablets and digital cameras and to accelerate the production of next-generation OLED (organic light emitting diode) flat-screen displays.

12 = 1 (or 0)

IBM scientists have used a scanning tunnelling microscope to make a magnetic storage device from only twelve atoms. By using antiferromagnetism to limit external magnetic fields, the IBM group have been able to encode a bit of data in just 12 iron atoms. They then placed eight of the 12-atom bits side by side creating a byte of data made of 96 atoms. Because no magnetic field strayed from each cluster of 12 atoms, the bits could be placed very close, creating a byte 100 times as dense as those typically used in today's hard drives. Apparently using less than twelve atoms is a problem. Smaller numbers of atoms are too unstable to act as bits, without neighbours to interact with and stabilise them, the atoms behaved like quantum objects that existed in multiple spin states at once.

An enterprising $10m

First seen in 1966, Dr McCoy's tricorder was a regular Star Trek gadget used to diagnose illnesses by scanning a body. A prize is now on offer for such a device. The Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE is a $10 million global competition to stimulate innovation and integration of precision diagnostic technologies, making reliable health diagnoses available directly to people in their homes. The winning device will be a tool capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases. Metrics for health could include such elements as blood pressure, respiratory rate and temperature. Ultimately, this tool will collect large volumes of data from ongoing measurement of health states through a combination of wireless sensors, imaging technologies and portable, non-invasive laboratory replacements. I might be suspicious if the prize is won by Vulcan Healthcare Developments Inc.

IUPAP Prize

The International Union of Pure & Applied Physics (IUPAP) is seeking nominations for its 2012 Young Scientist Prize in Physics of Semiconductors. The IUPAP C8 Young Scientist Prize recognizes exceptional achievement in the study of semiconductor physics by scientists at a relatively junior stage of their career. Two prizes will be awarded in 2012. The recipient must be no more than eight years post PhD (excluding career interruptions) and is expected to have displayed significant achievement and exceptional promise for future achievement in an area of semiconductor physics. Further details are available via this link.

RTA celebrates 10 years of trading!

In January 2002 we issued our first invoice, number 2002/01. We started trading as Richard Thomson Associates and our early customers engaged us for sales market consultancy, sales service provision and customer satisfaction surveys - areas of our strong expertise.

Huawei completes acquisition of CIP Technologies

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced the acquisition of the Centre for Integrated Photonics Ltd (CIP), a world-leading photonics research laboratory, from the East of England Development Agency (EEDA).

CIP will significantly deepen the optical research and development (R&D) capabilities of Huawei and demonstrates the company’s ongoing commitment to R&D in the UK. The CIP R&D team, which is located in Ipswich, will be retained by Huawei and will form the core of the new Huawei UK R&D centre, part of Huawei’s global R&D network.

CIP has a reputation as a world-class incubator in fibre optic transmission and carries out world-leading cutting edge research work in this hi tech area. Huawei will continue to invest in fibre optic R&D to ensure that CIP remains an innovator in this important technology sector.

Sensorable garments?

A group of researchers in the US, Italy, and France have made transistors made from cotton fibres. The cellulose that makes up cotton is naturally insulating, so to make a fibre conductive, the team coated each strand with gold nanoparticles. Polymers such as pentacene and PEDOT are used to provide the dielectric and semiconducting properties. The team considers that the most realistic application areas reside with sensors. For example, fire-fighter's uniforms might be able to detect dangerous chemicals, while security personnel could be alerted to airborne signatures of explosives or drugs.

Building blocks of matter

It is good to know that the best brains of Europe are on the case at CERN. Fundamental physics and high speed neutrinos are one thing but a scale model of the LHC ATLAS detector made out of LEGO has to take precedent. The real ATLAS project is 44 metres long and 22 metres wide and weighs 7,000 tonnes. Mehlhase’s model at approximately 1:50 scale is approximately 1 metre long by a half metre wide. The real ATLAS has millions of parts, the model has 9,500 pieces, mostly LEGO blocks. I know that it is not easy looking for elusive particles such as the Higgs Boson but is the ATLAS experiment that boring?

iTV for 2012?

The rumours keep coming. There has been speculation for several years that Apple would move into selling televisions, but the slow sales of its Apple TV boxes suggested that the company didn't see this as a priority. Steve Jobs, Apple's late chief executive, told his biographer that he had "cracked" the problem of building a television. Not surprisingly when this comment appeared in his biography published shortly after his death, rumours of an Apple TV intensified. Last week, Taiwan sources reported that Apple was going down the route of the iTV with 32 inch and 37 inch screens from Sharp and chips from Samsung. Previous reports have suggested that Apple's TV set would have voice control using Siri, the voice controlled personal assistant used in the iPhone 4S. The industry is very keen to ascertain what Apple could have as a surprise package. What could they do with the humble TV to make the iTV a must-have product alongside its MP3 players, smartphones and tablets?

Low cost tablets

The digital divide between India and the West will be eliminated quicker than five years, if a recent report in the Times of India is anything to go by. Sales bookings for the Aakash tablet soared to 1.4 million units just two weeks after it was put on sale for Rs 2500 ($45). To cater for the demand, the UK-based vendor Datawind will establish three new factories, in Cochin, Noida and Hyderabad, in the first half of 2012 to assemble the tablet, giving a total output of 70,000 units per day by April. The Aakash is an computer tablet jointly developed by Datawind and the Indian Institute of Technology Rajasthan. The 7-inch touch screen tablet features 256 MB RAM, uses an ARM processor with the Android 2.2 operating system, has two USB ports and delivers HD-quality video.