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Sugar Cubes Rock
Many of us secretly (or flamboyantly) partake of unhealthy snacks, relying on them to make it througha busy day. But in the not-too-distant future, our afternoon treats will be as precious as oil fields and as essential as an upstate water plant. Sugar is going to rock our world.
Recent studies conducted by Derek Lovley and Swades Chaudhuri at the University of Massachusetts at Ahmherst indicate that a microcosm called Rhodoferax ferrireducens is capable of converting sugars of all kinds into stable, long-term electricity at an impressive rate of 80% efficiency. Not bad for a life form that gets by on an unbalanced diet of waste products and fruit.
This “bacterial battery,” as Lovley and Chaudhuri fondly refer to it, oxidizes sugars through the reduction of iron oxides, and generates electrons capable of attaching directly to the surface of an electrode.
Now that the FDA has bad-mouthed processed foods to the point that the food pyramid might be reshaped, manufacturers of junk food can turn their attention to our even more insatiable appetite for consumer electronics, gadgets, and computers.
Don’t go sticking a Snickers bar into your laptop any time soon, however. Right now the lab is only able to power a 60-watt lightbulb for 17 hours.
WANT MORE?
http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/archive/2003/090703lovely.html
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/9675.shtml
Can a Personal Server Really Save Your Day?
Soon companies will be supplying staff with their own hand-held servers. No longer will anyone be able to use the downed server excuse for a missed deadline or a lost draft.
Intel researchers are developing Personal Servers, a new class of mobile computers that are smaller than PDA-type devices (no keyboard and stylus or teeny display features), optimize extremely low-power consumption (411 mW), and enable you to access you data any hour, anywhere. With a Personal Server in your pocket, all you have to do is walk up to a computer that’s able to recognize your server (with Intel’s handy-dandy Discovery Monitor software installed) and your server shows up on the desktop. Then click onto your server and boom, you’re accessing your server files via Bluetooth. No more dragging around your laptop to give a Powerpoint show. No more embarrassing delays in the conference room while trying to get wired up for an Internet presentation.
The 400-MHz Personal Servers run on Linux and are able to remain in a state of “sleep” (45uA) for days at a time. They also can link up to PDAs and cellular phones to extend their capabilities.
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http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5772921353.html
http://www.intel.com/ebusiness/it/solution/pp022001_sum.htm
Hot Chips Run Cool
How do you make a faster chip? Easy—just take your existing design, shrink it, and add more transistors. Who could argue with that—after all, decades of performance gains at the rate of Moore’s law can’t be wrong.
Don’t tell IBM.
Researchers at Big Blue recently announced progress on an alternative method of performance enhancement—make the electrons move faster, kind of. Hole mobility, the ability for electrical charges to move through device channels, is increased in two recent advances. Strained silicon directly on insulator (SSDI) not only eases manufacturing, but by removing an underlying layer of silicon geranium has also provided high electron mobility. Separately, a hybrid orientation technique (HOT) of using two substrate materials in the same wafer increases hole mobility two-and-a-half times—increasing performance by 40 to 65 percent.
The best part—the two processes are additive. Higher performance, lower power.
WANT MORE?
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20030909_cmos.shtml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/32722.html
Originally published in Queue vol. 1, no. 7—
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