::Moon Shrinking, DANG!

The Moon is shriveling like baboon's testicles in an ice tea glass, NASA scientists said after analyzing new images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Not with those exact words, mind you, but similar enough: It's shrinking because it's cooling down.

The Moon was hot at the beginning of its life. The most accepted theory—proved by simulations and analysis of its surface materials—is that it formed after a massive collision of a Mars-sized object with Earth, around 4.5 billion years ago. The material ejected in the impact accreted to form the Moon. After that, the lunar surface suffered a period of massive bombardment of asteroids and meteors, which combined with the decay of radioactive elements, kept it hot for a long while.

So long, in fact, that it's still probably cooling down today. Before, scientists believed the cooling and shrinking period ended early in its story. Now, new images by NASA's LRO show lobate scarps that are only one billion to one hundred million years old. This is very recent in geological terms, according to Dr. Thomas Watters of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, Washington:

One of the remarkable aspects of the lunar scarps is their apparent young age. Relatively young, globally distributed thrust faults show recent contraction of the whole Moon, likely due to cooling of the lunar interior. [...] We estimate these cliffs formed less than a billion years ago, and they could be as young as a hundred million years.

Lobate scarps—called that way because many of them appear to be lobe-shaped—form as inner parts of the moon collapse, forcing a section of the crust to crack and bulge out over another.

The team formed by scientists at NASA Goddard, Arizona State University and the Smithsonian, believe that these scarps are "among the freshest features on the moon, in part because they cut across small craters." Mapping these thrust faults, they have been able to reconstruct the Moon's tectonic and thermal history during the past billion years.

But how much has it shrunk? Using data taken by the LRO, they believe the distance between the moon's center and its surface shrank about 300 feet in the last one billion years.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, NASA.

::Virus Busting Chips from Intel.

The news of Intel's very expensive McAfee purchase raises one obvious question: why is security software worth over $7 billion to a chip maker? Intel has been short on specifics, but it's becoming clear that virus-killing silicon is coming.

Computer security with hardware roots isn't new for Intel, but it's stuck in last-gen tech that can't stop your system from getting smoked. Feature sets that can help filter out malicious network traffic or let CPUs screen for certain worms have been safeguarding computers you've already thrown away by now. But they're limited. Right now, most of the anti-malware grunt work is being handled by software. Letting applications do the heavy lifting is a resource-heavy affair, which makes chipmakers like Intel nervous when they look forward and see the future of computing floating in the cloud.

The problem with security in the cloud is twofold. To begin with, netbooks and tablets usually just don't have the muscle to balance intensive malware efforts. Do you think your anemic netbook can root out marauding trojans, scanning hundreds of thousands of files, as well as your desktop? But what about just putting the security software in the cloud too? This leads to a second objection: do we really want our sensitive stuff floating out of our devices? Will people feel comfortable having their secrets scanned remotely? Intel doesn't think so—and says it has a solution.

When we interviewed Intel's head tech honcho, CTO Justin Rattner in June, he had much to say about the intersection of cloud computing and secure computing. And the future of beating viruses, according to Intel, lies in the chips that drive our devices, not some program running in the background. "As silicon developers," Rattner explained, "we have a requirement to provide truly secure capability when it's needed." This means malware-fighting hardware is a new mandate. Rattner asserts that their hardware ambitions are to "protect those systems from the various forms of malware and then, in addition, giving them the ability to keep their secrets no matter what happens." Which sounds a little abstract, right? But put it in context: Rattner's plan sounds pretty real as of right now.

While discussing the news of their acquisition today, Intel minced no words about where their pricey new subsidiary will take them. McAfee technology will be put on Intel silicon. Virus scanning, trojan hunting, buffer overflow-blocking—all beat back before it has a chance to touch your software. McAfee's line of applications will continue to sell as is, but Intel simply doesn't believe that the future of computer security can be done with software alone. Malware keeps getting meaner. To block viruses, you need to hit them as soon as possible, which means as deep into the hardware as possible. Think of it as the difference between swatting flies in your kitchen and just keeping your windows closed in the first place.

Intel's processors won't change for now, but when we asked them about the deal's implications for architecture changes down the line, they confirmed that the era of an antivirus-on-a-chip lies ahead—with a mysterious new hardware product slated for 2011. Thanks to Moore's Law, Intel will have more real estate to fill with security mechanisms—courtesy of McAfee's R&D labs. Whether secure silicon takes the form of hardware acceleration for virus-sniffing heuristics, or something else entirely, remains to be seen. But if Intel makes good on its promises (and on the nearly $8 billion it forked over), that folder of photos you regret will stay safe without having to climb to the cloud.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Intel PR.

::Lasers Make Virtual Particles Real.

Next-generation lasers will have the power to create matter by capturing ghostly particles that, according to quantum mechanics, permeate seemingly empty space.

The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics implies that space can never be truly empty. Instead, random fluctuations give birth to a seething cauldron of particles, such as electrons, and their antimatter counterparts, called positrons.

These so-called "virtual particles" normally annihilate one another too quickly for us to notice them. But physicists predicted in the 1930s that a very strong electric field would transform virtual particles into real ones that we can observe. The field pushes them in opposite directions because they have opposite electric charges, separating them so that they cannot destroy one another.

Lasers are ideally suited to this task because their light boasts strong electric fields. In 1997, physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California, used laser light to create a few electron-positron pairs. Now, new calculations suggest next-generation lasers will be able to create such pairs by the millions.Chain reaction

In the SLAC experiment, only one electron-positron pair was created at a time. But with more powerful lasers, a chain reaction becomes probable.

The first pair is accelerated to high speed by the laser, causing them to emit light. This light, combined with that of the laser, spawns still more pairs, say Alexander Fedotov of the National Research Nuclear University in Moscow and colleagues in a study to appear in Physical Review Letters.

"A large number of particles will spill out of the vacuum," says John Kirk of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, who was not involved in the study.

In lasers that can concentrate about 1026 watts into a square centimetre, this runaway reaction should efficiently convert the laser's light into millions of electron-positron pairs, the team calculates.Antimatter factory

That kind of intensity could be reached with a laser to be built by the Extreme Light Infrastructure project in Europe. The first version of the laser could be built by 2015, but it could take a few years after that to complete upgrades necessary to reach 1026 per square centimetre, says study co-author Georg Korn of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.

The ability to generate large numbers of positrons could be useful for particle colliders like the proposed International Linear Collider, which will smash electrons and positrons together, says Kirk McDonald of Princeton University in New Jersey.

But Pisin Chen of National Taiwan University in Taipei says the cost of the very powerful laser might make this method more expensive than the alternative. The standard way to create large numbers of positrons today is to fire a beam of high-energy electrons at a piece of metal to produce electron-positron pairs.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, NewScientist.

::Diamaze Diamond Razor.

At last, a sign that we're advancing from our caveman heritage into a brave new world. Gone are the days of rough-hewn blades, the world of modernity does its cutting with "plasma-sharpened" implements polished off with a layer of synthetic, industrial-grade diamonds. Okay, we're not quite there yet, but we're en route, thanks to a small German outfit named GFD, which has recently debuted a diamond-tipped, tungsten carbide razor blade that promises to retain its sharpness 1,000 times as long as regular steel and to be precise enough to slice a human hair in half. Hell, that latter bit isn't even a promise, it's a fact, which you can verify in the video after the break. GFD is looking for a manufacturing partner to bring this ingenious prototype to market, and given its years of experience applying the technology to industrial uses, we reckon it has enough of a pedigree to stand a decent chance of success.




Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Diamaze.

::NASA's Athlete Mars Rover.

Its been a few years since we last checked in on NASA's All Terrain Hex Limbed Extra Terrestrial Explorer rover -- aka, Athlete. Now a half-scale working prototype standing 15 feet tall, weighing 2.5 tons (about 2,300 kg), and capable of a 1.25 mph (2 kmph) top speed has been set loose for testing by its Jet Propulsion Laboratory creators. Its first task, set to begin next month in Arizona, will be to complete a test circuit of at least 25 miles (about 40 km) in two weeks under its own power. Failing that, we hearWoz is looking for a dance partner. See what we mean in the video of Athlete demonstrating a flare for cargo transport after the break. 







Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, NASA.

::Most Efficient Electric Car.

Pending confirmation by the folks at Guinness, a group of students at DeLaSalle high school in Kansas City will be able to say they've built the world's most efficient electric car, a see-thru, F1-style racer that gets 300mpg equivalent.

OK, they got some help from the folks at Bridgestone America, the world's largest tire company, who contributed resources and supplied the team with high-efficiency Ecopia EP100 tires, though the car was conceived of and developed as a class project.

The ultra light weight plug-in electric was built with the customized chassis of 2000 Lola Indy. During a recent test at Bridgestone's Texas Proving Grounds, the car got the equivalent of 300 miles per gallon fuel economy, an amazing feat the students think qualifies for the world record. Their next project? Building a vehicle that harnesses the elusive power of the atomic wedgie.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Wired UK.

::Ferroelectric Data Storage.

An experimental "ferroelectric" data-recording device crams 4 trillion bits onto every square inch. This all-electrical method leaves magnetic and flash memory devices scrambling to catch up.

The device is the work of Dr. Yasuo Cho and Kenkou Tanaka at Japan's Tohuku University. The device is built from a ferroelectric material, which is a material where the electrical polarization can be changed by applying an external electrical field. A microscopic stylus rides on the surface of the material, making contact with the countless tiny spots on the structure below. To write data, a pulse goes through the stylus and onto one of these spots, changing the spot's polarization and thus allowing for binary data recording.

These electrically charged 0's and 1's can add up to a lot of data because there are so many spots on the material. Cho and Tanaka were able to place each bit just 12.8 nanometers apart, which adds up to about 4 trillion on each square inch of the material. That far exceeds the highest data density levels that even the most advanced magnetic disk drives can currently attain.

Dr. Cho explains what he sees as the future of the device:

"We expect this ferroelectric data storage system to be a candidate to succeed magnetic hard disk drives or flash memory, at least in applications for which extremely high data density and small physical volume is required."

The engineers had to overcome some technical challenges to accomplish this record-breaking data density. When a lot of bits had to be written on consecutive spots on the material, the polarized regions would expand into each other and coalesce into a single, indistinct region. This made the bits themselves indistinct, and harmed the data storage. They worked around this by figuring out how to anticipate such consecutive data-recording and lower the writing voltage so that the polarization was not quite strong enough to bleed over onto the neighboring spots.

Although the fact that this drive is completely electric means it can avoid some of the natural pitfalls of magnetic or thermal-based data drives, the drive isn't quite ready for preorder just yet. Cho and Tanaka say they need to greatly increase the speed of both reading and writing data, and accuracy is still an issue - the bit error rate is low at 1.2%, but not nearly low enough for commercial sale. They also need to find a way to develop the ferroelectric material for a much lower cost than the materials they're using the lab.

And then, of course, there's the ongoing, exponential increase of data storage elsewhere. Cho and Tanaka have quite possibly already tapped the upper limit of what electrical data storage can do, but magnetic storage might still have plenty of room to go. The disk drive maker Seagate, for instance, has said it's technically feasible to one day cram 50 trillion bits per square inch, a data density that would make this ferroelectric achievement look positively quaint by comparison.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, Applied Physics Letters.

::Future Kitchens.

IKEA might be known for soulless furniture basics, but in the year 2040 they're planning on selling mood-adjusting kitchenware, and fridges that project celebrity chefs' cooking tutorials. In short, it doesn't sound all that far-fetched.

The "SKARP" concept as it's been dubbed, was designed after close to 2,000 people were surveyed on what they expect kitchens to look like in 2040. I'm not so sure about their idea that this kitchen will have sixth-generation iPads in every cabinet door, but the 3D food printing is certainly something we know is on its way.

These numbers correlate to the objects in the picture above—

1.) Food is grown on this shelf without soil.
2.) 3D food printer
3.) Fridge, with an interactive 3D screen.
4.) Multi-touch tap.
5.) Self-cleaning surfaces.
6.) This tool displays nutritional info of ingredients
7.) Remote-controlled cooker
8.) Retractable shelves
9.) Height-adjustable cabinets
10.) Energy monitor
11.) Genetically-engineered food.
12.) Roll-out chopping boards and draws.

Really, 2040? Most of this technology is already available, or at the very least, entirely possible. Nonetheless, I'd give up eating cheese for a kitchen that tidy and organized.

Further Reading and Information Courtesy: My Brain, IKEA.