Spinning a good tale: Economist

Quantum mechanics may hold the key to a hand-held biology laboratory

BIOTECHNOLOGISTS have long dreamed of creating a “lab on a chip” that would pack the power of a full-scale analytical laboratory into an object as small and as easy to use as the hand-held scanners familiar to fans of science fiction. Such a device might detect biological weapons, run genetic tests or sniff out contaminants. Staff at clinics could use it to screen people for infectious diseases. Police could perform on-the-spot drug tests; paramedics, roadside diagnoses.

Many designs have been proposed for such a device, but none has really taken off. The latest, though, sounds promising. It uses a quantum-mechanical effect called giant magnetoresistance (GMR), which is also the basis of a computer’s hard drive. And prototypes made in laboratories in Europe and America have indeed been able to detect everything from deadly toxins to illegal drugs and markers of disease.

Giant magnetoresistance relies on devices called spin valves. These are made by interleaving thin sheets of magnetic and non-magnetic metals to form a sandwich composed of layers mere nanometres (billionths of a metre) thick. If a nanoscale sandwich is exposed to a magnetic field, the quantum spin of its electrons, and thus its electrical resistance, will change in a way that is easily detectable—which is why they are used in the heads of hard-disk readers.

In 1998, however, it occurred to David Baselt of the United States’ Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, that spin valves might also make excellent biosensors. Biological materials themselves are not usually magnetic, but they are often chemically specific. To Dr Baselt this suggested that tiny magnetic particles might be attached to molecules using either antibodies (which will bond to proteins, sugars and so on) or single-stranded DNA (which will bond to a complementary DNA strand to form the famous double helix). To search for a target molecule, then, all that would be needed would be to sprinkle a sample thought to contain it with magnetic nanoparticles coated with the appropriate antibody or DNA and then run it over a spin valve.

A simple idea. It has, though, taken Dr Baselt and his colleagues, along with researchers in several other organisations, ten years to turn his insight into a practical technology. Now that they have, things are about to go mainstream.

Though the details of the prototypes differ, the principles are similar. Both the spin valves and the paraphernalia of channels needed to feed a sample to them are built onto silicon wafers using the same techniques employed to make microprocessors. The wafer is then cut up into chips.

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How your laptop will just keep getting faster: CNN

(PopSci.com) -- Since the invention of the transistor, silicon semiconductors have been king. But now silicon-based transistors are nearing the limit of their potential. Excess heat and manufacturing hurdles are impeding the development of ever-faster and smaller processors.

Advances in materials and chip design to resist extreme heat and move huge amounts of data, quickly, will be crucial. Experts are exploring three technologies to overcome these challenges: spintronics, graphene and memristors. They are what will someday make ultra-energy-efficient supercomputers small enough to fit anywhere -- even in the palm of your hand.
Rebuilding RAMMemristors will store large amounts of data and could make your computer boot instantly
Accessing data, whether stored in a spinning hard drive or in flash-based memory, is a time-suck and a power hog. The dynamic RAM that rapidly delivers data to the processor is almost maxed out.
"Both technologies for the magnetic hard disk and D-RAM are within a few generations of hitting brick walls," says R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs's Information and Quantum Systems Lab. He believes that circuits called memristors could be the solution. Memristors recently joined the resistor, capacitor and inductor as the fourth fundamental circuit element.
But unlike the others, a memristor has the unusual ability to remember the last resistance it held, even when the power is turned off. When the current starts up again, the resistance of the circuit will be the same as it was before, providing instant-on computers. After the memristor had spent some 30 years as a theory, Williams and his team designed the first one earlier this year. Five years from now, he says, the chips could sit in computers between D-RAM and hard disks to eliminate the boot-up process. Further down the road, memristors, which have higher storage densities than the best flash memory and faster write times than D-RAM, could supplant both technologies in one fell swoop.

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Fraudsters’ bugs transmit credit card details to Pakistan: Daily Times

* UK customer details cloned with help of new sophisticated bugs planted in supermarket card readers
* US counter-intelligence official says bugs transmit information via wireless technology to Lahore
* US National Security Agency is tracking case because of its links to Pakistan

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: Detectives are investigating a sophisticated credit card fraud against customers of some of Britain’s biggest supermarkets that may be linked to extremists in Pakistan, a Sunday Times report said. Fraudsters have targeted more than 40 stores in Britain, including those of Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, in an elaborate scam that police say involves tiny devices inserted into the stores’ ‘chip and PIN (personal identification number)’ credit card readers, according to the report.

Specialists say the technology is the most advanced they have seen and is being used in supermarket chains across Europe. The devices, which are reported to have been made in China, are reading and storing selected customers’ Mastercard and personal identification numbers as the cards are inserted into readers at supermarket checkout tills.

Pakistan: The bugs transmit the information by wireless technology to Lahore, Pakistan, according to a senior American counter-intelligence official. Customers’ cards are then cloned and used to steal money from their credit and current accounts and to pay for items such as airline tickets on the Internet.

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Commies in Washington?: Economistan

FREE MARKETS:Trend of nationalization and government intervention in free markets is eroding consumer confidence.

END OF FREE MARKETS
By Saad Sarwar Muhammad
Monday, September 22, 2008

When Pakistan’s central bank blocked foreign currency accounts to control the flight of capital to foreign banks in the aftermath of nuclear tests that it conducted, it was considered as interventionist and the measures were considered anti-economy and opposed to what free markets were all about. A similar thing happened again early this year when Pakistan’s main stock market shed more than $36 billion dollar of market capital in a very short span, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan put a floor on the points to curtail flight of money. Pakistani rupee also suffered at the hands of the flight of capital and the exchange rate fell from roughly Rs. 60 to a dollar to Rs. 78 to a dollar within a span of a few months. All these measures were criticized around the world because of the interventionist policies of Pakistani institutions who wanted to keep the economy in check.

The collapse of the investment banks like Lehman brothers and Meryl Lynch and firms like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac along with the imminent fall of the US insurance giant AIG put the global markets in a tailspin. UK responded with a ban on short selling of stocks to arrest the fall of FTSE its main index. The US followed suit with the ban on short selling of stocks for a month. Short selling is speculative in nature with investors betting on a company’s stock to fall driving the whole market down. Even profitable investment banks like Morgan Stanley were feeling the pinch because of the short sale. The measures worked and the stock markets around the world recovered within a day with a long and wayward week coming to an end. In the process, the Fed also ended up bailing out the insurance company AIG for a big sum of $85 billion dollars and it is estimated the cost of the Fed’s intervention to the US taxpayer might amount to $700 billion dollars overall driving the domestic debt even higher to upwards of $11 trillion dollars. All these measures, with no clear and definitive answer to whether they will work or would be enough to save the ailing US economy.

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Shake it all about: Economist

How to use your laptop to locate an earthquake

IF YOU drop your laptop computer, a chip built into it will sense the acceleration and protect the delicate moving parts of its hard disk before it hits the ground. A group of researchers led by Jesse Lawrence of Stanford University are putting the same accelerometer chip to an intriguing new use: detecting earthquakes. They plan to create a network of volunteer laptops that can map out future quakes in far greater detail than traditional seismometers manage.

Seismometers are large, expensive beasts, costing $10,000 or more apiece. They are designed to be exquisitely sensitive to the sort of vibrations an earthquake produces, which means they can pick up tremors that began halfway around the world. By contrast, the accelerometer chips in laptops, which have evolved from those used to detect when a car is in a collision and thus trigger the release of the airbags, are rather crude devices. They are, however, ubiquitous. Almost all modern laptops have them and they are even finding their way into mobile phones. The iPhone, for example, uses such a chip to detect its orientation so that it can rotate its display and thus make it easily readable.

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Virtual carnivores: Economist

Struggling to protect privacy behind the great firewall

UNTOLD legions police the internet in China to block information deemed politically threatening. But the world’s biggest online population still has a wild streak. Worries are growing about internet vigilantes who mount “renrou sousuo”, or “human-flesh searches”, to ferret out perceived wrongdoers.

Zhou Zhenglong, a peasant in the north-western province of Shaanxi, began a 30-month jail term on September 27th after internet-users exposed his faking of photographs of a rare Chinese tiger in the wild. Senior Shaanxi officials, eager to attract tourists to the area, had backed the pictures’ authenticity for several months. They were eventually fired amid an internet outcry. Some posters on Chinese bulletin boards and blogs have argued that Mr Zhou was perhaps merely a hapless tool in a hoax perpetrated mainly by bureaucrats.

In the absence of a free press in China, the internet, despite attempts at censorship, can sometimes put the brakes on official abuses of power. But it can also go too far. As the state-run news agency, Xinhua, put it, “You may find yourself up before a kangaroo court of angry netizens and receive a virtual lynching.” “Human-flesh searching” is known less dramatically in English as “crowdsourcing”—using inputs from a large number of people (usually internet users) to solve problems. But often in China the practice involves mobilising people online to hunt down ordinary citizens whose only alleged sin is that of being objectionable.

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China 'spying on Skype messages': BBC

China has been monitoring and censoring messages sent through the internet service Skype, researchers say.

Citizen Lab, a Canadian research group, says it found a database containing thousands of politically sensitive words which had been blocked by China.

The publically available database also displayed personal data on subscribers.

Skype said it had always been open about the filtering of data by Chinese partners, but that it was concerned by breaches in the security of the site.

Citizen Lab researchers, based at the University of Toronto, said they discovered a huge surveillance system which had picked up and stored messages sent through the online telephone and text messaging service.

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