2012-03-02

mbt moja

The double Zhang clips iron slice in hand, mbt online the Xiao burning eyes slowly shut up, the soul knows and fluently begins arm, exploring of light car familiar road into black iron slice in.

Because the Xiao blazes respiratory steady, in the room, again be calm down.

Is a long time again of silent, some moment, the Xiao of bed Ta is burning, the double eye fiercely opens, right Zhang inching song book, become the form of claw form, the spirit of that weak thin Dou inside the body, control fluently attract by to know, quickly once wore a few particular grains and acupuncture points of center of palm of hand, the vacuum force finally sprayed thin but.

"Bang …"

Palm point, a green vase on the table, suddenly fluttered several bottoms, finally bang however drop ground, ring in a clear and crisp voice in, become everywhere fragment.

"Is alas, although the Dou skill is a Xuan rank, can the spirit of Dou, too weak, it is much power to basically could not develop."Hope the breakage resulted in by oneself, the Xiao blazed Pie Pie mouth, the helpless light tone is from the language way:"Shine on this effect to see, wanting to build can pull a person’s vacuum force, perhaps at least need the spirit of seven Dous then can accomplish."

"Calculated, went to the low class Dou that saw to have no without extra trouble of the household Dou skill hall skill, this absorbs Zhang, the in a short time was a nothing important to greatly use, now now that can self-discipline Dou of annoyed, always can not return elephant before so very silly self-discipline …" sighed an one breath, Xiao burning climb-down bed, vision Pie for a while hand in the black ring that didn’t respond, then before going from the door, push door but.

Tiny Mi next eyes, while just a little adapting to after having a little intensely hot sunlight, the Xiao blazes this just careful of the path that is anti- to close, leisurely and carefreely follow crushed stones in the door, slowly and longly toward back yard to go.

The crushed stones path both sides plant to grow jade-green willow, the green of spring onion Yu, let people spirit for of a flap.

Once turned a road, a burst of young girl Xi laughter, but spread out from another path.

Be bothered quiet atmosphere, Xiao the burning eyebrows is tiny wrinkly, the vision followed voice to once move and hoped those Jiaos to smile to walk of young girl.

In escorting of a few beautiful young girlses, a facial appearance is some charmingly feminine young girls, just smile slightly in the purse one’s lips, the charmingly feminine romantic feeling peep out on the small face, let it body side of a few green puckery young girl some feel from vulgar.

This young girl woulds be on that day at test square to greatly show off of Xiao Mei.

The vision cool Piao leads this ever heel at oneself nearby cousin’s cousin was a continuously mbt kimondo and beautiful young girl, the Xiao blazed a childish small face up, once the flash across put on Ji Feng and lightly shook to shake head and nowise reluctant to part with of took back vision.

Walk to the journey end, Xiao Mei that has alluring laughter rather sudden weak come down, she saw the left side the youth of distance not …

The setting sun spreads to fall from the horizon and shines on in that arm Zhen to wear back of the head, small face cool youth body up, divide outside charming.

Is a pair of some hang up soul Duo soul of Mous son, stare at that more and more near youth, the lo wears its small face up that put on could not say is taunt or smile of shallow radian, the spirits of Xiao Mei, the sudden is faintly a bit difficult to express …

Three years ago, that youth, the corner of mouth, would is to usually hang ,this radian that puts on to make some fans of people inebriate.

The youth hoping to slowly go to come over, all of Xiao Mei several people is descend step, the Xi smiles of the voice was also gradually weak many.

The Xiao Mei is a few beautiful and slender young girls at the side of bodies, Zheng’s wearing big eyes to hope this to once be thought is the youth of household honor, the facial expression on the small face, unspeakable feel sorry for still other.

At first, the of Xiao Mei’s at heart was some to band together, in the heart bottom, in fact she also thought to let with this ever she Qing Mu not already of youth Chang chat, however, the reality is to tell her, the margin of two human lives, now is more and more big, again put idea on a disabled person, obviously is some not Zhi.

Curved curved leaf’s eyebrow is lightly wrinkly wrinkly, soon after unfold to open, the Xiao Mei is in mind to have some helpless dark ways:"Beat hello and never so say, he is also regarded as his own cousin."

Don’t understand the mind in the heart of Xiao Mei, Xiao the burning double of arms Zhen wear back of the head, the idea Tai idlely went to come over.

Hope near burning in the very short distance Xiao, the desire just showed a smiling face on the Xiao Mei good-looking small face, can the youth’s action, but let that smiling face Jiang that puts on to return all of the not yet finisheds to present at small face up, have a liking for to seem to be a bit funny.

The double arm Zhen wears back of the head, the Xiao is burning side if is unmanned, the path refusing to be distracted kept to nearby once walk from a few young girls, didn’t express to the slightest reluctant to part with.

The tiny Zhang Zhu’s rosy small mouth hopes the youth’s figure, the Xiao Mei is a bit startled, with her facial mbt tariki appearance, when have ever been subjected to this kind of treatment?The at heart just a little gushes a difficult to express abashed Nu and cannot help but of shouted 1:"The Xiao blazes a cousin."

The step is tiny, the Xiao was burning don’t turn round, light tone, as if unfamiliar dialogue of the human life:"Occupy?"

Mild but not well acquainted with tone, let the Xiao Mei is one Zhi, shout of shook to shake head:"Have no …"

The Xiao burning eyebrow point lightly picked to pick, again lazy must realize, shook to shake head, continued to go before moving forward.

Hope that disappearance’s figure in path end, Xiao Mei some duos of fens Fen Duo small feet, soon after is also followed the same road to walk up.

Become together curved, the Xiao burning title hoped before fixing attention on that spacious room, the signboard of room on, drawing to have a Dou skill the hall is three fascinating flourishes in dancing blood-red big words.

Listen to a Dou skill to spread in the hall come of threaten a voice, the Xiao blazes some accidents, here in normal times generally all rare person come, today how thus noisy?

Song shrug shoulders, the Xiao is burning just at will turned to turn a mind, then threw it to 1 time, moved forward into a Dou skill hall.

On entering a Dou skill hall, repeatedly youth the acclaim of the young girl drinks a colourful voice and would was to billowingly spread to come over.

In the Dou skill hall, is divided into thing two parts, the east cent is to deposit household Dou skill of, but the west divide, but is a training with not small scale field, at this time, many person’s heads are escorting training field on, full of beansly hope to have a competition in the field of two people.

"See Xiao rather the cousin make moves of the spirit density of Dou, perhaps have already had eight Dous of annoy?"

"Hey Hey, two months ago, Xiao rather cousin already the Jin go into the spirit of eight Dous."

"Although he has the spirit of eight Dous, can smoke cousin Er but is nine Dous of annoy, see, Xiao rather the cousin want to win, also true nothing important may."

"Smoke cousin Er to encourage!"

Listen to spread in the crowd of astonished drink a mbt sport 2 voice, the Xiao blazes a step this just live, the vision swept to see 1 turn in the training field, the Rao finally has stopping of fascination at that beautiful young girl body that wears thin purple dress skirt up.

"This Ni son today how has carefree feeling to have a competition with others?"The at heart whispered a , the Xiao is burning to stop in the big hall eastern side under step, with once took out a flank a black spooler on the shelf, then slowly spread, spooler after spreading, appeared a few yellow big words on the back.

Class in Huang Jie:Crushed stones Zhang!

Is leisurely and carefree of depend on the bookcase, Xiao blazes to simultaneously read the method of self-discipline of this crushed stones Zhang, vision also occasionally Piao to the training field of war situation vehemence up.

Spacious big hall, as if be cut up into two worlds, the west clamors continuously, but the east is quiet Ping-ho.

The opponent that smokes son is also a youth, however his age should be about 78, the shape is very handsome, with that day see of add row Ao to differ only a few.

The youth is rather named Xiao, is the grandson of big elder in the Xiao house, the self-discipline natural endowments is also quite good, the year is only 17, then have already fixed into the spirit of eight Dous, in the household, also only smoking son can press his a head of.

The Xiao blazes to this own impression with little cousin, occasionally meets, is also not well acquainted with dozen voice hello then and respectively leave, probably because that some out of harmony atmosphere among its grandpa and oneself father, the Xiao is burning to always feel, this cousin, seem to be to oneself combine not that satisfied, and again probably because several years ago, what oneself expresses was decadent of past, so, this cousin, at three the middle of the years, didn’t also make a special trip to once seek oneself troublesome …

Lightly smiled to smile, the Xiao was burning to jilt to open the recollection in the brain, continue to study to begin medium crushed stones of Zhang.1 ⑹αр .⑴⑹k .The C N tidies up

Training field on, smoke son as if a thin purple butterfly is general, staying away of grace but nimble , mbt tariki walnut ,the Xiao Be rather fast to storm shot, on the fine elegant small face, always keep thou well not wave of mild.

A near body attack had some boringly and unloaded to open Xiao rather, smoke son vision at will of become a turn of in the big hall, a short moment after, the suddenly fierce lives.

Hope a big hall east that leans against the youth whom the bookcase is devoted to and smoke a cool small face of son up, peep out one elegant and soft shallow smile slightly idea of putting on.

At young girl this such as flashy elegant smiling face in, the neighborhood rounds the youth of view, all is not from get silly past.

"Smoke cousin Er, caution!" At smoke son just a little diverted of, suddenly spread the youth’s hasty voice in the crowd.

Feel the after death fierce set of strength spirit for coming, smoke a son show the eyebrow lightly pick, but the vision is to sweep once again toward under the bookcase of youth.

Meanwhile, the Xiao is suddenly burning to also is to raise a head, hoped to encounter a sneak attack in the field of smoke son, eyebrows a wrinkly, helplessly shook to shake head, reveal in the vision underlying worry.

The lo wears Xiao to blaze a forehead of that puts on Chen strange with worry, smoked son to sarcastically blink big eyes of blinking the beauty, then body form suddenly to left very small horizontal step an one step, this one step, but is a bit uncanny of Xiao rather of the attack unbiasedly avoided to open …

On the feet while moving of, smoke son the young and delicate small hand is as the jade and gush a light gold long grass, as if wear to spend Duo a leaf general, through Xiao rather double the blockader of the Zhang, finally very light fall at Xiao rather chest on.

The toe lightly orders in the granite floor and smoked son to soft and charmingly turn a circle and turned to go to anti- push of strength dint, lightly hoped that to urgently back ten to tread more, the last feet acrossed the Xiao that trains a field rather.

The lo wears a Zhang to defeat Xiao to rather smoke son, training field the surroundings is tiny tiny a quiet, soon after and fiercely rang out to praise highly of drink a colourful voice.

"Ha ha, smoke cousin Er the Kui isn’t light household middle age one generation one person, is really more and more strong."Be smoked son to bowl off to come off stage, Xiao rather but remain warm smiling face of full face, walk to come forward, smile a soft track.

Settling to certainly hope in front that beauty is like the young girl of green lotus, Xiao rather the love in the eye Tong, almost hard cover up.

Although rank cousin, however Xiao rather is to know, household in, mostly the persons all didn’t own close relative blood relationship, while the Xiao smoke son, is also the blood relationship relation with no the slightest with him.

BE don’t feel Xiao rather that intensely hot vision, smokes son courtesy but again not well mbt kifundo acquainted with tiny shake head, light tone way:"Rather Xiao cousin Qian let."Finish saying, don’t need Xiao to rather continue the set would be to toward a big hall almost the east that is devoted to smile to sing at the youth in the spooler of go.

As the focus in the big hall, smoke the action of son be realized by the owner naturally, a pair of doubles visions, follow to smoke the route of son before go, finally stayed around a bookcase under of youth body up.

Is that very hot vision to the full training field, the youth is feel like don’t smell, remain deeply drunk own world in.


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Monster Powerbeats Monster Beats Dr Dre

Pour y Beats By Dre Pas Cher aller, de ne pas me rendre compte, l’instructeur et commandant de la compagnie là-bas, afin de les informer sur l’aller. Monster Beats Dr Dre La voix de Tina Boa est un peu agité. Un virage standard à gauche, est allé à la commandant de la compagnie avant le commandant Monster Beats Dr Dre de la compagnie, camarade, les recrues avec trois rangées.

Placez Monster Beats Dr Dre au repos. Oui. Roi un salut, et est retourné à l’équipe. L’équipe d’évaluation, prendre le temps très Monster Beats Dr Dre heureux. Vous êtes de bons soldats. D’excellents soldats. Vous donnez une entreprise un visage long. Je vous remercie, maintenant Monster Beats Dr Dre revenir en arrière et bien rangé.

Casque Beats Studio Commandant de la compagnie fit un geste de la main, sous l’ordre. Petit-déjeuner retour à même, Monster Beats Dr Dre a reçu un avis dans la matinée pour se reposer. Par la suite, à savoir, quand ils mangent le petit déjeuner, le siège de donner Monster Beats Dr Dre même le téléphone, ils évaluent la fermeture à glissière Beats Solo Hd a pris sur les six dernières années, la société a pris dans les sujets Monster Beats Dr Dre à fermeture à glissière sur le terrain.

http://www.monsterbeatspascherbydre.com


Monster Powerbeats Monster Beats Dr Dre

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Monster Beat By Dre ils sont donnés

L’entrevue Pas Cher Beats By Dre avec les économistes japonais sur la Chine ont les meilleures intentions du, Beats Pro dans l’espoir que l’économie chinoise pour éviter une tragédie de style japonais. Bien sûr, il s’agit en fait pour le bien des intérêts du Japon, Beats Pro après tout, une fois l’échec économique de la Beats Pro Chine sera sans aucun doute coup à la déjà faible économie japonaise.

Dans l’interview Monster Beat By Dre, ils sont donnés à attendons avec impatience le livre, Beats Pro et même un peu d’inspiration et l’espoir de la Chine la prise de décision supérieure. Beats Pro Si le livre est en mesure de remplir ce rôle, je suis bien sûr aussi un grand honneur. Beats Pro Le premier chapitre de la sécurité à long végétarien: la Chine prend l’ancienne route du Japon?

En 1994 Casque Beats By Dre, Ann carême longtemps servi en tant que directeur de la Banque du Japon. Beats Pro En 1998, Ann carême long a quitté son travail pour près de 40 ans, Beats Pro la Banque du Japon, à la Beats Pro Banque de crédit à long terme du Japon a été président et la seule responsabilité de sauver cette banque au bord de la fermeture en raison de la crise financière Beats By Dre Diamant asiatique.


Monster Beat By Dre ils sont donnés

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Record-speed wireless data bridge demonstrated: Takes high-speed communications the 'last mile'

These unprecedented speeds, up to 20 billion bits of data per second, were achieved by using higher frequencies than those typically used in mobile communications -- the wireless bridge operates at 200 gigahertz (GHz) (two orders of magnitude greater than cell phone frequencies).

The team will present their research at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC), taking place March 4-8 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

"An inexpensive, flexible, and easy-to-implement solution to the 'last mile' problem is the use of wireless technology," explains Swen Koenig, a researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology's (KIT) Institute of Photonics and Quantum Electronics, who will present the findings at OFC/NFOEC. "Instead of investing in the cost of digging trenches in the ground and deploying ducts for the fibers, data is transmitted via the air -- over a high-speed wireless link."

In this type of setup, the optical fiber infrastructure is used up to its ending point and then connected to a wireless gateway. This gateway converts the optical data to electrical millimeter-wave signals that feed an antenna. The transmitting antenna "illuminates" a corresponding receiving antenna. At the receiving point, the electrical signal is directed toward its final destination, either using another wireless channel in a relay technique via copper wire or a coaxial (TV) cable or with an optical fiber. Wireless links also serve as a bridging element in fiber optic networks, if obstacles and difficult-to-access terrain such as lakes, valleys, or construction sites are in its pathway.

"The challenge in integrating a wireless link into a fiber optic environment is to ensure that the wireless link supports data rates comparable to those of the optical link -- ideally about 100 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) -- and that it's transparent to the data," notes Igmar Kallfass, a researcher and the project's leader at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF, as well as a professor at KIT. "Besides optoelectronic conversion, no further processing must be involved before the signals reach the antenna. This also holds for the receiving part in a reversed sequence."

Multi-gigabit wireless transmission demands multi-GHz bandwidths, which are only available at much larger frequencies than mobile communications normally use. Millimeter-wave frequencies -- radio frequencies in the range of 30-300 GHz -- fulfill this need. By comparison, laser light, as used in optical communications, provides bandwidths of many terahertz (THz).

Indeed, free-space optical point-to-point links that use laser light for data communication between two optical gateways are already commercially available. However, free space optical links don't work or only work with limited quality and stability under adverse atmospheric conditions such as fog, rain, and dust. In contrast, a wireless link at millimeter-wave frequencies remains operational under such conditions.

"For our experiment, we use state-of-the-art electronic up- and down-converter modules developed at the Fraunhofer IAF. Previously, wireless data transmission at frequencies greater than 200 GHz with electronic up- and down-converters was virtually unexplored," Kallfass says.

After the first fiber span, the optical signal is received in the first wireless gateway and converted to an electrical signal. The electronic up-converter module is then used to encode the electrical signal onto a radio frequency carrier of 220 GHz. This modulated carrier then feeds the antenna that radiates the data. The antenna of a second wireless gateway receives the signal.

"In our first indoor experiment, the wireless transmission distance was limited to 50 centimeters, which we've now increased to 20 meters," notes Kallfass. "The second wireless gateway performs the inverse operation of the first gateway by an electronic down-converter module. Eventually, the electrical signal is again encoded onto laser light and transmitted over the second fiber span."

This experiment was carried out within the framework of the MILLILINK project led by the Fraunhofer IAF and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education. Other partners include: KIT, Siemens Corporate Research and Technologies, Kathrein, and Radiometer Physics. The consortium is supported by Deutsche Telekom and Telent.

Koenig's presentation at OFC/NFOEC, titled "High-speed wireless bridge at 220 GHz connecting two fiber-optic links each spanning up to 20 km," will take place March 5 in the Los Angeles Convention Center.

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Future smart phones will project images on the wall

Small-size laser projectors 1-2 centimetres in length can be integrated into many kinds of electronic appliances, such as digital or video cameras, gaming devices and mobile phones. Integrated micro projectors could, in practice, project images the size of an A3 sheet of paper on a wall.

The challenge is to develop a small, energy-efficient and luminous three-colour (RGB) light source, whose manufacturing costs can be kept low, for use in the projectors. Solutions for these challenges are sought in a project combining Finnish know-how, whose parties are VTT, EpiCrystals Inc. and the Aalto University.

"The project has successfully combined multi-technological know-how from VTT and its partners in the project, from manufacturing materials and the accurate focusing of laser chips all the way to production line design. The project was launched last autumn, and we are now entering the stage where we can move from brainstorming and design to building prototypes. It is our goal to prove by next summer that large quantities of the new laser light sources can be manufactured quickly and economically ," says Principal Scientist Timo Aalto from VTT.

EpiCrystals Inc. aims straight for the global market with its product, and it is the company's goal to be the technology and market leader in laser light sources for micro projectors by 2015.

"We are developing an entirely new technology that is currently not in use anywhere else in the world. At the moment, there are stand-alone projectors on the market that can be connected to electronic appliances and early stage integrated projectors, but their quality and price are not competitive enough. Large electronics manufacturers are extremely interested in integrated projectors, and market research shows that demand for these micro projectors will increase strongly in the coming years. Soon, around two billion mobile phones per year will be sold in the world, and if even a couple of per cent of those contain a projector, we are talking about tens of millions of copies, and the hundred million mark is not far either," says Vice President of Business Development Tomi Jouhti of EpiCrystals Oy.

EpiCrystals' laser modules will be mass-produced in Asia, but the research and development will remain in Finland also in the future. The VTT, EpiCrystals and Aalto University project has received funding from the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation Tekes, among others.

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Qualcomm not worried about mobile graphics competition

BARCELONA--Qualcomm is not worried about falling behind its competition when it comes to mobile graphics, according to a senior executive at the firm.

Speaking at MWC, Qualcomm’s president of internet services and innovation center, Rob Chandhok, claimed Qualcomm shipped more GPUs “than anyone else in the world,” and said that though the chips may currently lack DX11 support, they had “the correct architecture for mobile.”

“Dx11 is something we’re working on, for the first time,” said Chandhok, explaining that it was highly complex compared to previous iterations of the technology, owing to various bits of silicon needing to be added in.

Chandhok denied claims that Qualcomm may have fallen behind its competition in terms of graphics, however, saying that the firm had the best and brightest graphical engineers who were working on bringing the Adreno platform up to speed.

“We made a significant investment in taking on the AMD graphics,” he said, alluding to the $65 million Qualcomm paid to acquire AMD’s mobile graphics unit back in 2009.

“We don’t see any need to use Imagination Technologies, like our competitors do,” he added, when asked whether adopting the same graphics partner as Intel and Texas Instruments would accelerate matters somewhat.

Imagination Technologies has often said it would consider it a coup to land Qualcomm as a GPU customer, and several analysts have recommended Qualcomm use the independent graphics maker lest it lose out to competitors like Nvidia, which brings its PC level graphics to the smartphone and tablet arena.



Qualcomm not worried about mobile graphics competition

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The Development of Purses

You can find different types of bags in the world, one of these are usually handbags. The word "purse" is derived from the particular Latina word "bursa.Inch Through huge hand bags to stylish clutches, different types tend to be combined simply by well-liked purse brands, including Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci among others. There is certainly, actually, numerous duplicate purses now available from reasonable prices.

In the course of simple times, purses and handbags are restricted to smaller dimensions bags given that ladies don't have cellphones, many of keys and also cosmetics kits to transport that point. As an alternative, they were used to carry smaller sized purses built to have only a few money along with a handkerchief. Handbags have been then evolved in order to purses referred to as "reticules," which widely used through wealthy families during the overdue 17 millennium.

When compared to the earlier type of purses, reticules had been sufficient to accommodate several things for example palm fans, scents, deal with powders or shakes and also safari spectacles. Then inside nineteen twenties, beaded and also mesh bags was a well-known option, and continue to be described as a preferred vintage purse until these days. These days, such handbags can be found in different styles, styles, dimensions and also supplies to select from. Through the years, handbags have evolved from a tiny energy company right into a style and classy women accent.

The Different Styles Of Handbags

Aftermarket clutches

Aftermarket clutches doesn't just possess a quantity of things, in addition they produce a excellent trend declaration. A great choice associated with clutch bag may go along with ladies upon diverse activities, such as beverage parties and also formal gatherings. There are many gorgeous selections of clutch system totes nowadays, there are also locate clutches that may be customized together with gleaming deposits.

Funds Hand bags

These purses and handbags are very beneficial which are meant to carry change and little papers, such as expenses and bills that frequently very easily dropped. Cash bags are actually available in individualized material as well.

Leather-based Purses

Leather handbags are perhaps one of the most favorite handbags of women these days. Ladies of various age groups might love some great benefits of leather purses. Not merely since they're as elegant as beaded as well as frozen totes, but they be a favorite selection because of the durability of a natural leather substance. Leather-based bags can create a best reward regarding career ladies and also college students as well.

When purchasing purses and handbags on your own or even as a reward for an individual, be sure to buy appropriately. Although there are different variety of totes to choose from, but not just about all fits for you personally. Consequently, it is a must to decide on a handbag that fit to your physical stature plus your attire. As would be to choose one that accentuate most of your attire.

Envisage to shop online. If you want to see a much more larger choice of handbags, browse the Web. There are plenty of web shops that have everything you need to notice whenever choosing any handbag. Bankruptcy attorney las vegas what you never picture present. Additionally, many of these online handbags may be personalized according to your choice, including monogrammed night time totes; embroidered handbag hand bags; stitched journey totes as well as and so on.

Jnet is an author for a number of way of life issues as well as topics. If you're looking for personalized totes, go to the internet site [http://www.fakelouisvuittonhandbags.com] and look their particular substantial selection. Obtain also beach hand bags for your fellow workers as well as buddies on the internet!
The Development of Purses

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Magnificent London Product labels

London is a referred to as a deluxe fashion funds. Browse the large designer stores or the much more close stores. Have pleasure in the world renowned purchasing london. This particular metropolis has got the talented. Stylish trend and also luxurious Cheap london hotels go hand in hand with super elegant cafes and finish treats. Birmingham offers all you could want to shower oneself inside luxury.

Brompton Cross is known all over the world because the A pretty tiara Triangle. El born area upon Fulham street happens when to become for girls who lunch. Stocked with the glamorous models for the latest designers. It's home to Chanel, Joseph as well as Betty Jackson.

Selfridges sure you can purchase fridges but the also have a huge variety of pleased towels. Selfridges retailer house windows certainly are a large attract with regard to eye-port consumers. Their own window models use a history of becoming each striking as well as artful.

Gucci is recognized for luxurious. Gucci offers bags and also sneakers that perhaps the most trend ignorant noticed as well as recognize. The actual make pads and also a lot of hairspray might not have made it from the 80's however Gucci did and is also nevertheless cherished worldwide.

Manolo Blahnik along with presently there reddish underside are extremely obvious along with Debbie Jessica Parker's hire Carrie Bradshaw continually yearning more of this kind of custom sneakers, They will grew to become much more mainstream. Madonna once asserted a pair of Manolo Blahnik footwear were better than sex.

Harvey Nichols provides what exactly is warm in vogue these days. Females put on, men's use, components, attractiveness as well as food products are a handful of the things which Harvey Nichols offers within the many esteemed brands within the world of fashion. The fifth ground, has the benefit of a cup or even a couple of champers for their exhausted consumers.

Louis Vuitton and Escada both call Sloane Road residence. Sloane road gets the footwear that each style diva hopes for for eye-catching heels. Louis Vuitton delivers red-colored carpeting all set shoes and purses for the elite.

High end buying can't get any better next Greater london. Style ahead individuals have been making the actual models in the Birmingham boutiques for years. Health spas and London hotels on this glorious metropolis suits a particular crowd. Royals as well as superstars as well love the luxurious provided these any time spend time in London. Oxford rectangular provides brand new meaning to the phrases go shopping till you decrease.
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Tuttle replaces Sayiner as CEO at Silicon Labs

Tyson Tuttle will take the helm at analog and mixed-signal specialist Silicon Labs, the company announced Thursday (March 1), replacing Necip Sayiner as president and CEO effective April 18.

Tuttle, 44, joined Silicon Labs (Austin, Texas) in 1997, leading the company’s marketing efforts for its first RF products. He went on to oversee development of Silicon Lab’s video IC and radio development and marketing strategy. Tuttle later led the company’s broadcast business, which represents about a third of Silicon Lab's current business, until 2010, when he moved up to become chief technology officer.

Tuttle, who earned a masters' degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, was named COO last year, managing Silicon Labs' business units and R&D activities, the company said.

Touting the company’s design team and growth potential, Tuttle said in a statement: "I will be focused on leveraging this solid framework to further optimize the business and realize the high rate of growth I believe we’re capable of over the next decade.”

Sayiner, who joined Silicon Labs in 2005, will step down as CEO the day before the company’s annual shareholder meeting. Under his leadership, the company’s revenues doubled.

Silicon Labs gave no reason for the change in leadership.

The company has emphasized that it is positioned to compete with larger rivals like Texas Instruments to compete in the emerging “Internet of things” market.


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Tuttle replaces Sayiner as CEO at Silicon Labs

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Light-emitting nanocrystal diodes go ultraviolet

LEDs based on solution-processed inorganic nanocrystals have promise for use in environmental and biomedical diagnostics, because they are cheap to produce, robust, and chemically stable. But development has been hampered by the difficulty of achieving ultraviolet emission. In their paper, Los Alamos National Laboratory's Sergio Brovelli in collaboration with the research team lead by Alberto Paleari at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy describe a fabrication process that overcomes this problem and opens the way for integration in a variety of applications.

The world needs light-emitting devices that can be applied in biomedical diagnostics and medicine, Brovelli said, either as active lab-on-chip diagnostic platforms or as light sources that can be implanted into the body to trigger some photochemical reactions. Such devices could, for example, selectively activate light-sensitive drugs for better medical treatment or probe for the presence of fluorescent markers in medical diagnostics. These materials would need to be fabricated cheaply, on a large scale, and integrated into existing technology.

The paper describes a new glass-based material, able to emit light in the ultraviolet spectrum, and be integrated onto silicon chips that are the principal components of current electronic technologies.

The new devices are inorganic and combine the chemical inertness and mechanical stability of glass with the property of electric conductivity and electroluminescence (i.e. the ability of a material to emit light in response to the passage of an electric current). As a result, they can be used in harsh environments, such as for immersion into physiologic solutions, or by implantation directly into the body. This was made possible by designing a new synthesis strategy that allows fabrication of all inorganic LEDs via a wet-chemistry approach, i.e. a series of simple chemical reactions in a beaker. Importantly, this approach is scalable to industrial quantities with a very low start-up cost. Finally, they emit in the ultraviolet region thanks to careful design of the nanocrystals embedded in the glass.

In traditional light-emitting diodes, light emission occurs at the sharp interface between two semiconductors. The oxide-in-oxide design used here is different, as it allows production of a material that behaves as an ensemble of semiconductor junctions distributed in the glass. This new concept is based on a collection of the most advanced strategies in nanocrystal science, combining the advantages of nanometric materials consisting of more than one component. In this case the active part of the device consists of tin dioxide nanocrystals covered with a shell of tin monoxide embedded in standard glass: by tuning the shell thickness is it possible to control the electrical response of the whole material.

The paper was produced with the financial support of Cariplo Foundation, Italy, under Project 20060656, the Russian Federation under grant 11.G34.31.0027, the Silvio Tronchetti Provera Foundation, and Los Alamos National Laboratory's Directed Research and Development Program.

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Alternative fuels expert plans coast-to-coast U.S. trip on 10 gallons of gas or less

Ricketts, a 35-year agriscience professor at MTSU, plans to put his research to the test in both 2012 and 2013.

Ricketts' first quest to travel the approximately 2,532-mile distance from Savannah and Tybee Island, Ga., to Long Beach, California, will begin this Saturday, March 3.

Using two alternative-fuel vehicles in the first 916 miles of the journey from Savannah to Fort Smith, Ark., Ricketts' fuel sources will be the sun (solar) and hydrogen from water in a 2005 Toyota Prius and 1994 Toyota Tercel.

After leaving two vehicles in Fort Smith, Ricketts says the remaining approximately 1,616 miles to Long Beach will be with a plug-in hybrid 2007 Prius using E95 (95 percent ethanol and 5 percent gas) and electric (two, 10 kilowatt-hour battery packs) that should go "100 miles per gallon for about 200 miles until the batteries run down and then purely on ethanol only the rest of the way."

"My goal is to drive across the country on less than 10 gallons of gas," Ricketts says.

Next year, Ricketts plans to make the coast-to-coast trip on sun and water.

Along an almost totally Interstate route (I-16, I-75, I-24 and then 1-40 to California), Ricketts says he expects to drive the cars at between 58 to 65 mph.

He will be joined on this year's quest by a student team of technicians who will be just beginning their spring break and other experts, including former student Terry Young, a hydrogen expert, of Woodbury, Tenn., and Mike Sims of Jackson, Mich. The students include Travis Owens of Woodbury, Tenn., Tim Reed of Lewisburg, Tenn., and Brett Harris of Manchester, Tenn.

On Nov. 1, 2010, Ricketts drove the Tercel, nicknamed "Forces of Nature," approximately 500 miles from Bristol, Va., to West Memphis, Ark., fueled by the sun and hydrogen from water.

Ricketts is a faculty member in the MTSU School of Agribusiness and Agriscience, which is one of 10 programs in the College of Basic and Applied Sciences.

Brentwood, Tenn.-based Tractor Supply Co. has been a 20-plys year sponsor of Ricketts' alternative fuel research. This year, he received a $15,000 grant from Farm Credit Services of Mid-America and additional financial support for the Office of the Provost. Other primary sponsors include MTSU's Office of Research and the College of Basic and Applied Sciences.

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Fancy footwork and non-stick leg coating helps spiders not stick to their own webs

They also observed that spiders carefully move their legs in ways that minimize adhesive forces as they push against their sticky silk lines hundreds to thousands of times during the construction of each orb.

The web-weaving behavior of two tropical species, Nephila clavipes and Gasteracantha cancriformis, was recorded with a video camera equipped with close-up lenses. Another video camera coupled with a dissecting microscope helped to determine that individual droplets of sticky glue slide along the leg's bristly hair, and to estimate the forces of adhesion to the web. By washing spider legs with hexane and water, they showed that spiders' legs adhered more tenaciously when the non-stick coating was removed.

Their results are published online in the journal, Naturwissenschaften.

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Bacteria tend leafcutter ants' gardens

New research shows the bacteria help decompose the leaves and play a major role in turning the leaves into nutrients that may be important for both ants and fungi. The findings were published March 1 by The ISME Journal, a publication of the International Society for Microbial Ecology.

"This research provides some of the first tangible details about the fascinating symbiotic relationship between leafcutter ants, fungi and bacteria," said Kristin Burnum, a bioanalytical chemist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Burnum is a co-author on the paper and led the study's protein analysis. "Understanding how bacteria turn plant matter into a source of energy in ant fungal gardens could also help improve biofuel production."

The gardens in question are initially sowed by the ants, which bring leaf pieces into their underground nests. From the leaves grow the fungus Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, traditionally thought of as the ants' food. The relationship between leafcutter ants and fungi has been known since 1874, but it wasn't until the late 1990s that scientists started to also identify bacteria in the underground gardens.

Since then, a lively debate has gone on about the bacteria's role. Because pure samples of the garden fungi grown in laboratories don't easily degrade cellulose, a molecule that gives plants structural stability, many scientists have argued the bacteria help decompose the leaves. Other researchers have proposed bacteria -- like the microscopic bugs in our guts -- help ants obtain nutrients from the leaves.

Lead author Frank Aylward of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Burnum and their co-authors set out to help resolve the debate by doing a comprehensive survey of the various bacteria species that live in the gardens and examining the suite of proteins those bacteria produce. They traveled to a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute site near Gamboa, Panama, and gathered samples of fungal gardens tended by two ant species, Atta colombica and Atta cephalotes.

Aylward and several others on the research team are part of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, one of three Bioenergy Research Centers established by DOE's Office of Science in 2007 to accelerate research toward the development of cost-effective advanced biofuels from nonfood plant fiber. The University of Wisconsin-Madison leads the Great Lakes center.

To produce results that more accurately reflect the large diversity of real-world gardens, the team collected large samples with bits of leaves, ants, fungi and bacteria intermixed instead of just gathering samples of the bacteria they intended to study. This allowed them to better examine the entire community of bacteria that live in the gardens and prevented them from missing some bacterial species. The team then studied the bacterial community's genes and proteins -- an approach known as metagenomics and metaproteomics.

The researchers sequenced their genetic samples at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's DOE Joint Genome Institute. With the help of an extensive library of bacterial genes developed by co-author Cameron Currie, team members at University of Wisconsin-Madison identified thousands of bacterial genetic sequences from the two ant gardens. More than two-thirds of the bacterial species found were from just a few groups. More than half of those identified belong to the family Enterobacteriaceae, whose members are known to ferment sugars and include the intestinal microbes that help animals digest food.

From the bacteria, Burnum and her PNNL colleagues in Richland examined proteins, the workhorses of the cell that perform the tasks needed to keep organisms alive and well. They used mass spectrometers at EMSL, the Department of Energy's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at PNNL, to identify proteins in an A. colombica nest.

They found proteins that were involved a surprising number of different metabolic pathways, including:

  • Breaking down complex sugars that make plants tough and durable, but difficult to digest.
  • Transporting sugars, allowing broken-down sugars to be used for energy.
  • Making amino acids, the buildings blocks of proteins.
  • Making vitamin B5, which is needed to both break down proteins, carbohydrates and fats and to make energy from nutrients.

When compared to all other bacteria in Currie's large library of bacterial genes, very few -- just 0.2 to 0.6 percent -- of the garden bacteria were involved in breaking down cellulose. Instead, most of the garden bacteria were involved in breaking down simpler sugars, indicating that perhaps fungi initially breaks down cellulose and the bacteria then turn the partially digested sugars that result into a variety of nutrients that could promote the fungi's growth or even nourish the ants themselves.

"Our results show that calling these 'fungal gardens' is pretty misleading; 'fungus-bacterial communities' would be far more accurate," Burnum said. "Bacteria are not only integral residents of these communities, but they perform essential tasks that keep the communities -- and the ants that help cultivate them -- living."

Next, the team plans to analyze the fungi, lipids and various metabolic products found in the gardens.

This study's findings and future results could advance the work of scientists who are looking at fungal enzymes to make biofuel out of plants. The enzymes, or biological catalysts, of fungi are exceptionally talented at breaking down cellulose in plants, making them a good model for large-scale biofuel production.

"It's apparent that neither fungi nor bacteria work in isolation when it comes to leafcutter ant gardens," Burnum said. "It's possible that the same goes for biomass conversion; perhaps both fungi and bacteria are needed to efficiently turn plants into biofuel."

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Leatherback turtle migration study identifies Pacific danger zones for endangered species

"The study shows that leatherbacks can be found throughout the Pacific Ocean and identifies high-use areas that are of particular importance to their survival," said lead author Dr. Helen Bailey of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "This information on their movements is essential for identifying hot spots and assessing where limiting fishing at particular times of year may be effective for protecting leatherbacks."

Leatherbacks are the widest-ranging marine turtle species and are known to migrate across entire ocean basins. Female leatherbacks lay their eggs on tropical nesting beaches, but then migrate to foraging areas to feed on jellyfish. These long-distance migrations are likely to increase the risk that these animals may be caught in fishing gear, undermining conservation efforts to protect turtles on their nesting beaches. Interaction with fisheries is believed to be a major cause of death, which is of particular concern in the eastern Pacific Ocean, where the number of leatherback turtles has dropped by more than 90% since 1980.

"Leatherback turtles are long-lived animals that take a long time to reach maturity, so when they are killed in fishing gear it has a huge impact on the population," said study coordinator Dr. James Spotila of Drexel University. "Their numbers are declining so rapidly it is critical that measures are taken quickly to ensure these animals don't go extinct."

Leatherback turtles can travel enormous distances between their nesting and feeding sites. In the Pacific Ocean there are two populations of leatherback turtles that nest in the eastern and western Pacific. The study used state-of-the art satellite tracking, the largest satellite telemetry data set ever assembled for leatherbacks, to track 135 turtles. Leatherbacks in the eastern Pacific were tagged at the nesting sites in Costa Rica and Mexico. The western Pacific population was tagged at two nesting sites in Indonesia and at foraging grounds off the coast of California. The tracks were combined with oceanographic satellite data provided by NOAA, NASA, and a number of international partner space agencies to provide important insights into their long distance migrations.

The study found that the western Pacific population nesting in Indonesia traveled to many different feeding sites in the South China Sea, Indonesian seas, southeastern Australia, and the U.S. West Coast, mainly in highly productive coastal areas. This wide dispersal allows for a greater likelihood to find food. It also means that the turtles are more vulnerable to being caught unintentionally by fishing gear in coastal and offshore areas.

The eastern Pacific population had a very different migration pattern, traveling from their nesting sites in Mexico and Costa Rica to the southeast Pacific. These turtles migrated south and tended to feed in offshore upwelling areas where their food, almost exclusively jellyfish, may be concentrated. The more limited feeding areas of the east Pacific turtles makes them more vulnerable to any changes that occur to the distribution or abundance of jellyfish in this area. Deaths caused by human activities, such as being caught in fishing gear, also pose a greater risk of causing this population to go extinct because they have a smaller range than the western Pacific leatherbacks.

Experts from around the world joined together to work on this landmark study of leatherback turtle migration. The collaboration included Helen Bailey of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science; James Spotila of Drexel University; George Shillinger and Barbara Block from Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University; Stephen Morreale of Cornell University; Frank Paladino of Indiana-Perdue University; Scott Eckert of the Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network; Rotney Piedra of Parque Nacional Marino Las Baulas; Creusa Hitipeuw of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature-Indonesia; Ricardo Tapilatu of The State University of Papau; and Peter Dutton, Scott Benson, Steven Bograd, Tomoharu Eguchi and David Foley of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The study, "Identification of distinct movement patterns in Pacific leatherback turtle populations influenced by ocean conditions," appears in the March issue of Ecological Applications.

The study was supported by funding the from Lenfest Ocean Program, the Leatherback Trust, the Tagging of Pacific Predators program of the Census of Marine Life, and the NOAA-Fisheries Service.

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Depression: An evolutionary byproduct of immune system?

Some previous proposals for the role of depression in evolution have focused on how it affects behavior in a social context. A pair of psychiatrists addresses this puzzle in a different way, tying together depression and resistance to infection. They propose that genetic variations that promote depression arose during evolution because they helped our ancestors fight infection.

An outline of their proposal appears online in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

The co-authors are Andrew Miller, MD, William P. Timmie professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory and director of psychiatric oncology at Winship Cancer Institute, and Charles Raison, MD, previously at Emory and now at the University of Arizona.

For several years, researchers have seen links between depression and inflammation, or over-activation of the immune system. People with depression tend to have higher levels of inflammation, even if they're not fighting an infection.

"Most of the genetic variations that have been linked to depression turn out to affect the function of the immune system," Miller says. "This led us to rethink why depression seems to stay embedded in the genome."

"The basic idea is that depression and the genes that promote it were very adaptive for helping people -- especially young children -- not die of infection in the ancestral environment, even if those same behaviors are not helpful in our relationships with other people," Raison says.

Infection was the major cause of death in humans' early history, so surviving infection was a key determinant in whether someone was able to pass on his or her genes. The authors propose that evolution and genetics have bound together depressive symptoms and physiological responses that were selected on the basis of reducing mortality from infection. Fever, fatigue/inactivity, social avoidance and anorexia can all be seen as adaptive behaviors in light of the need to contain infection, they write.

The theory provides a new explanation for why stress is a risk factor for depression. The link between stress and depression can be seen as the byproduct of a process that preactivates the immune system in anticipation of a wound, they write.

Similarly, a disruption of sleep patterns can be seen in both mood disorders and when the immune system is activated. This may come from our ancestors' need to stay on alert to fend off predators after injury, Miller says.

Miller and Raison's theory could also guide future research on depression. In particular, the presence of biomarkers for inflammation may be able to predict whether someone will respond to various treatments for depression.

Miller and Raison are involved in ongoing research on whether certain medications, which are normally used to treat auto-immune diseases, can be effective with treatment-resistant depression.

Further Information: http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00463580#miller%20infliximab%20depression

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Manufacturing by design: New skills needed to compete


OXON HILL Md. – Reviving U.S. manufacturing has emerged as such a hot election-year issue that an entire afternoon of an energy technology conference was devoted to the barriers to domestic manufacturing and obstacles to retraining the U.S. manufacturing workforce.

Those new workers will require design skills that are integral to modern manufacturing along with “soft skills” like critical thinking, leadership and collaborative abilities, experts agreed during an Energy Department conference this week across the Potomac River from Washington.

Corporate executives, educators, current and former bureaucrats and an ex-congressman all weighed in on the erosion of the American manufacturing base and how to return it to global competitiveness. Most argued that labor costs and energy usage aren’t the key barriers; what is needed is a revival of flexible, design-driven manufacturing and a new, modular approach to training the next generation of machinists, engineers and technical managers.

Throughout the preceding two centuries, the U.S. led the world in deploying disruptive technologies ranging from railroads and the telegraph to an electrical grid and communications networks. No more, argued market researcher Stefan Heck of McKinsey & Co. “Where we are lacking is the guts to deploy new technologies.”

Heck’s use of the word “guts” refers not only to the infrastructure needed to roll out new technologies by the willingness to take risks in order to reap the benefits of new energy and other innovations. He argued that much of the semiconductor industry has left the U.S. not because of labor costs - which account for only about 2 percent of the chip production costs - but because most U.S. chip makers “haven’t been willing to make the investment” in the capital equipment needed to operate advanced chips plants.

Heck, who worked closely with global chip companies before shifting his focus to cleantech, was among a range of experts addressing manufacturing and workforce issues during an Energy Department summit sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. Leo Christodoulou, program manager for DoE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office, noted that manufacturing currently accounts for 11 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, employs about 12 U.S. million workers and about 60 percent of U.S. scientists and engineers work in manufacturing-related fields.


Factory floor skills must be augmented by design expertise.

Manufacturing by design: New skills needed to compete

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In space and on Earth, why build it, when a robot can build it for you?

That's just one thing researchers in Hod Lipson's Creative Machines Lab envision with their latest robot prototype. It can autonomously traverse and manipulate a 3-D truss structure, using specially designed gears and joints to assemble and disassemble the structure as it climbs. Lipson is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and of computing and information science at Cornell University.

The robot's design is detailed in a paper accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation, to appear soon online and in print. Its co-authors include former visiting scientist Franz Nigl, former visiting Ph.D. student Shuguang Li, and undergraduate Jeremy Blum.

"What gets me most excited is this idea of safety," said Blum, a student researcher working on the project. Having a robot able to climb and reconfigure building structures, even just to deliver materials, would be a step toward making construction zones safer for humans, he said.

The researchers also point to space-exploration applications. Instead of sending astronauts out on a dangerous spacewalk at the International Space Station, a robot could be deployed to repair a damaged truss.

The robot is equipped with an onboard power system, as well as reflectivity sensors so it can identify where it is on the structure. This allows it to maneuver accurately without explicit commands, Blum added.

Lipson said he envisions transforming the built environment with the help of these kinds of technologies. Instead of making buildings out of concrete or other non-recyclable materials, components designed specifically for robots could be used to build or reconfigure structures more efficiently -- for example, after an earthquake, or if an outdated building needed to be torn down in favor of something better.

"Right now, we are very bad at recycling construction materials," Lipson said. "We are exploring a smarter way to allow the assembly, disassembly and reconfiguration of structures."

The project is part of a National Science Foundation Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation grant jointly awarded to Lipson at Cornell, Daniela Rus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mark Yim of the University of Pennsylvania, and Eric Klavins of the University of Washington.

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Opinion: Did Intel just break my glasses?


What's going on?

I feel like the nerdy schoolkid who has just had one of the lenses in his spectacles broken. I can still see but everthing is a bit blurred and fractured.

First it was the dropping of the chip market's book-to-bill ratio for the global chip industry. OK that was some time ago in January 1997. But it still represented the passing of useful market indicator that shows whether the market was going up, down or was on the turn.

But more recently has been the withdrawal of foundries Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. and United Microelectronics Corp. from the SICAS project (Semiconductor International Capacity Statistics) to measure semiconductor wafer production capacity. And now it is the similar withdrawal of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp. from the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization.

The latest we have heard is that the Semiconductor Industry Association has pulled the plug on the whole SICAS report.

Both the SICAS and WSTS programs rely on being able to capture and aggregate data from multiple companies to give the larger market picture. In the case of WSTS the raw numbers are then multiplied up to give a global figure based on a factor that is cross-correlated with other market research data.

Some people think that the semiconductor industry is maturing and becoming more like the automotive industry – a market dominated by a few large players and showing single-digit annual percentage growth. Others think there is plenty of life in a youthful chip business that has just been going through some growing pains recently.

One thing's for sure is that the chip business continues to change.


Next: Mess with WSTS at our peril
Opinion: Did Intel just break my glasses?

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What makes a robot fish attractive? Robot fish moves to the head of the school

Through a series of experiments, researchers from Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) aimed to increase understanding of collective animal behavior, including learning how robots might someday steer fish away from environmental disasters. Nature is a growing source of inspiration for engineers, and the researchers were intrigued to find that their biomimetic robotic fish could not only infiltrate and be accepted by the swimmers, but actually assume a leadership role.

In a paper published online in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Stefano Marras, at the time a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering at NYU-Poly and currently a researcher at Italy's Institute for the Marine and Coastal Environment-National Research Council, and Maurizio Porfiri, NYU-Poly associate professor of mechanical engineering, found conditions that induced golden shiners to follow in the wake of the biomimetic robot fish, taking advantage of the energy savings generated by the robot.

The researchers designed their bio-inspired robotic fish to mimic the tail propulsion of a swimming fish, and conducted experiments at varying tail beat frequencies and flow speeds. In nature, fish positioned at the front of a school beat their tails with greater frequency, creating a wake in which their followers gather. The followers display a notably slower frequency of tail movement, leading researchers to believe that the followers are enjoying a hydrodynamic advantage from the leaders' efforts.

In an attempt to create a robotic leader, Marras and Porfiri placed their robot in a water tunnel with a golden shiner school. First, they allowed the robot to remain still, and unsurprisingly, the "dummy" fish attracted little attention. When the robot simulated the familiar tail movement of a leader fish, however, members of the school assumed the behavior patterns they exhibit in the wild, slowing their tails and following the robotic leader.

"These experiments may open up new channels for us to explore the possibilities for robotic interactions with live animals -- an area that is largely untapped," explained Porfiri. "By looking to nature to guide our design, and creating robots that tap into animals' natural cues, we may be able to influence collective animal behavior to aid environmental conservation and disaster recovery efforts."

The researchers posit that robotic leaders could help lead fish and other wildlife that behave collectively -- including birds -- away from toxic situations such as oil or chemical spills or human-made dangers such as dams. Other experimenters have found success in prompting wildlife to move using non-living attractants, but the researchers believe this is the first time that anyone has used biomimetics to such effect.

Marras and Porfiri conducted their experiments with support from the National Science Foundation.

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2012-03-01

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Rebuilding America: Design moves front and center in manufacturing debate


OXON Hill, Md. – Reviving U.S. manufacturing has emerged as such a hot election-year issue that an entire afternoon of an energy technology conference was devoted to the barriers to domestic manufacturing and obstacles to retraining the U.S. manufacturing workforce.

Those new workers will require design skills that are integral to modern manufacturing along with “soft skills” like critical thinking, leadership and collaborative abilities, experts agreed during an Energy Department conference this week across the Potomac River from Washington.

Corporate executives, educators, current and former bureaucrats and an ex-congressman all weighed in on the erosion of the American manufacturing base and how to return it to global competitiveness. Most argued that labor costs and energy usage aren’t the key barriers; what is needed is a revival of flexible, design-driven manufacturing and a new, modular approach to training the next generation of machinists, engineers and technical managers.

Throughout the preceding two centuries, the U.S. led the world in deploying disruptive technologies ranging from railroads and the telegraph to an electrical grid and communications networks. No more, argued market researcher Stefan Heck of McKinsey & Co. “Where we are lacking is the guts to deploy new technologies.”

Heck’s use of the word “guts” refers not only to the infrastructure needed to roll out new technologies by the willingness to take risks in order to reap the benefits of new energy and other innovations. He argued that much of the semiconductor industry has left the U.S. not because of labor costs - which account for only about 2 percent of the chip production costs - but because most U.S. chip makers “haven’t been willing to make the investment” in the capital equipment needed to operate advanced chips plants.

Heck, who worked closely with global chip companies before shifting his focus to cleantech, was among a range of experts addressing manufacturing and workforce issues during an Energy Department summit sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. Leo Christodoulou, program manager for DoE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office, noted that manufacturing currently accounts for 11 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, employs about 12 U.S. million workers and about 60 percent of U.S. scientists and engineers work in manufacturing-related fields.

The Energy Department office is looking for ways to promote manufacturing clusters that leverage the local and regional characteristics of U.S. manufacturing (durable goods in the Midwest, high-tech in the Southwest). Further, Christodoulou’s office is attempting to identify the “keystone, foundational technologies” that the U.S. can exploit to revive manufacturing. Two, he noted, are a superior communications infrastructure and first-rate universities.

Identifying and developing new materials and manufacturing methods are among the next steps in forming regional and state clusters focused on value-added manufacturing, he added. Together, these advances could help transform American manufacturing into an agile, design-driven sector capable of thriving in a global technology competition that places the greatest emphasis on being the first to deliver innovative new products.

With labor-intensive manufacturing unlikely to return to the U.S., McKinsey’s Heck argued: “What we have to shift to is the kind of manufacturing that involves technology, involves automation, involves engineering skill sets, involves more complicated kinds of tasks…things that actually require design, require looking at 3-D CAD drawings, require particular skills to make sure the quality is high.” He offered as examples jet and rocket engines, products that are not only strategically important but require precise tolerances, very exact machining and control of temperature cycles during design and manufacturing.

Christine Furstoss of General Electric’s Global Research Center called for integrating more small and medium-sized manufacturers into industry supply chains since a manufacturing revival “will require a new kind of ecosystem.” A greater focus in new approaches like “additive manufacturing” using thin-film deposition, for example, will help in scaling up a new manufacturing ecosystem, Furstoss said.

“Today, we’re very sequential” in how products are manufactured,” she added. “We need to change that paradigm to make it a non-sequential process.”

Other corporate executives here like Boeing Research and Technology’s Matthew Ganz acknowledged that the aircraft maker has been “hindered” by separating its design and manufacturing operations. Boeing is now in the process of reuniting design and manufacturing while promoting younger engineers with strong design skills. “We grab them by the arm and pull them up the [organizational] chart,” Ganz stressed.

‘Stackable credentials’


The other part of the manufacturing equation is educating a new generation of skilled workers capable of driving a design-oriented manufacturing sector. An “all-hands-on-deck” approach that links companies, trade unions and community colleges is seen as one of the best approaches to reinvigorating the sector, corporate executives and educators agreed.

Community colleges “have been excellent partners and a critical cog” in training the next generation of manufacturing workers, said Carrie Houtman, public policy manager at Dow Chemical Co. Dow CEO Andrew Liveris along with MIT President Susan Hockfield head an Advanced Manufacturing Partnership unveiled by the White House last June.

A new approach to training manufacturing workers called “stackable credentials” is being pioneered by California’s community college system. Van Ton-Quinlivan, the system’s vice chancellor for workforce development, described the approach as earning course certificates that can be “stacked” in order meet manufacturer’s requirements for new employees. Each stack represents an individual skill.

For example, Ton-Quinlivan explained, an engineering student hoping to work in the energy technology market could gain both pre- and post-sales certificates, allowing the newly minted engineer to implement an energy program that a company has just sold. The modular education and training program is designed to provide students with the skills employers want now, while allowing students to “stack” other courses that would lead to undergraduate or graduate degrees.

The California official also put the onus on manufacturers to play a more active role in training future workers. She said community colleges are motivated to deliver the skills companies need, but companies must be more specific about what required and desired skills they are seeking in new employees.

Responding to widespread complaints here about regulatory red tape and the lack of tax incentives needed to promote manufacturing, the former chairman of the House Science Committee said the revival of U.S. manufacturing ultimately comes down to training more skilled workers. “You can have all the tax and regulatory reform you want,” Bart Gordon told an audience of technology company executives, “but you still have to have a skilled workforce” to compete in global markets.
Rebuilding America: Design moves front and center in manufacturing debate

TAG:Energy Department Design Skills Design Manufacturing ARPA E Training Education Skills

When continents collide: A new twist to a 50 million-year-old tale

India and Eurasia continue to converge today, though at an ever-slowing pace. University of Michigan geomorphologist and geophysicist Marin Clark wanted to know when this motion will end and why. She conducted a study that led to surprising findings that could add a new wrinkle to the well-established theory of plate tectonics -- the dominant, unifying theory of geology.

"The exciting thing here is that it's not easy to make progress in a field (plate tectonics) that's 50 years old and is the major tenet that we operate under," said Clark, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

"The Himalaya and Tibet are the highest mountains today on Earth, and we think they're probably the highest mountains in the last 500 million years," she said. "And my paper is about how this is going to end and what's slowing down the Indian plate."

Clark's paper is scheduled for online publication Feb. 29 in the journal Nature.

In it, she suggests that the strength of the underlying mantle, not the height of the mountains, is the critical factor that will determine when the Himalayan-Tibetan mountain-building episode ends. Earth's mantle is the thick shell of rock that separates the crust above from the core below.

According to the theory of plate tectonics, the outer part of Earth is broken into several large plates, like pieces of cracked shell on a boiled egg. The continents ride on the plates, which move relative to one another and occasionally collide. The tectonic plates move about as fast as your fingernails grow, and intense geological activity -- volcanoes, earthquakes and mountain-building, for example -- occurs at the plate boundaries.

The rate at which the Indian sub-continent creeps toward Eurasia is slowing exponentially, according to Clark, who reviewed published positions of northern India over the last 67 million years to evaluate convergence rates. The convergence will halt -- putting an end to one of the longest periods of mountain-building in recent geological history -- in about 20 million years, she estimates.

And what will cause it to stop?

Until now, conventional wisdom among geologists has been that the slowing of convergence at mountainous plate boundaries was related to changes in the height of the mountains. As the mountains grew taller, they exerted an increasing amount of force on the plate boundary, which slowed the convergence.

But in her Nature paper, Clark posits that a different model, one based on the strength of the uppermost mantle directly beneath the mountains, best explains the observed post-collisional motions of the Indian plate.

By "strength" Clark means the uppermost mantle's ability to withstand deformation, a property called viscous resistance. Clark suggests that the relatively strong mantle directly beneath Tibet and the Himalayas acts as a brake that slows -- and will eventually halt -- the convergence of the two continents.

"My paper is arguing that it's not the height of the mountains, it's the strength of the mantle that's controlling this slowing," Clark said. "This is something that hasn't been considered before and basically grew out of field observations in northern Tibet."

But viscous resistance doesn't tell the whole story. Other factors may also contribute to the slowing of the Indian plate, Clark said.

"For me, critical field observations showed that the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau hasn't moved since the collision 50 million years ago," she said. "Therefore, the Tibetan Plateau is getting smaller in width. It's like squeezing a box and making it narrower while squeezing it up."

The rate at which the box is being squeezed is the average rate of mountain-building, and it provides important clues about the factors controlling plate motion. Clark analyzed how the convergence is slowing as compared to the shrinking of the plateau.

"If the height of the mountains were important in slowing India's convergence, then the rate of mountain-building should also slow down as the Himalaya and Tibet grew to high elevation," Clark said. "But when I analyzed how the mountain-building rate changed over the past 50 million years, I was surprised to find that it didn't change at all.

"From this I conclude that the strength of the uppermost mantle is keeping this mountain- building constant. But as the box is shrinking, the plate motion must slow down to keep the shrinking rate the same," she said.

Support for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation's Continental Dynamics Program.

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Open your eyes and smell the roses: Activating the visual cortex improves our sense of smell

"It's known that there are separate specialized brain areas for the different senses such as vision, smell, touch and so forth but, when you experience the world around you, you get a coherent picture based on information from all the senses. We wanted to find out how this works in the brain," says Dr. Christopher Pack, lead investigator at The Neuro. "In particular we wanted to test the idea that activation of brain regions primarily dedicated to one sense might influence processing in other senses. What we found was that electrically stimulating the visual cortex improves performance on a task that requires participants to identify the odd odor out of a group of three." This result is interesting because it shows, for the first time, that on a basic level the brain structures involved in different senses are really quite interconnected in everyone -- more so than previously understood.

"This 'cross-wiring' of senses has been described in people with synesthesia, a condition in which stimulation of one sense leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sense, causing people to see the colour of numbers, or smell words, or hear odours for example, says Dr. Johan Lundstrom at Monell Chemical Senses Center. "Now this study shows that cross-wiring of the senses exists in all of us, so we could all be considered synesthetic to a degree."

To examine the possibility that activating the visual cortex influences the sense of smell, people were tested on smell tasks before and after application of TMS, a non-invasive method of stimulating targeted brain areas. TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, was directed towards the visual cortex using a protocol that had been previously shown by researchers at The Neuro to improve visual perception. TMS is already widely used in the treatment of certain disease symptoms, and because TMS alters brain activity in a targeted area, it provides a powerful test of the hypothesis that visual cortex activation changes olfactory perception.

The results demonstrate that visual cortex activity is incorporated into the processing of smells, proving for the first time a cross-wiring of the visual and olfactory systems in the brain. Interestingly, the team did not find evidence for similar cross-wiring between olfactory and auditory systems. This suggests that vision may play a special role in binding together information from the different senses, a possibility that the researchers are currently exploring. In addition to Drs. Pack and Lundstrom, the research was carried out by Jahan Jadauji, a Master's student, and Jelena Djordjevic, a clinical neuropsychologist and neuroscientist, both at The Neuro. This collaboration between researchers and clinicians was made possible by The Neuro's integrated research institute and hospital.

This study was funded by a Centre of Excellence in Commercialization and Research grant, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Swedish Research Council, and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, as well as support from Mrs. Anna Engel.

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Report: Taiwan seeks merger with restructured Elpida

SAN FRANCISCO—Taiwan's government said it would continue to push for Taiwanese DRAM makers to consolidate with Japan's Elpida Memory Inc. if the firm is restructured after filing for bankruptcy, according to an Associated Press report.

The report quoted sources at Taiwan's Economics Ministry saying that Micron Technology Inc. is expected to be a key part in any possible consolidation plan involving Elpida. Micron has reportedly been in talks for several months with Elpida, which filed for bankruptcy protection Monday.



Report: Taiwan seeks merger with restructured Elpida

TAG:Elpida Micron Taiwan DRAM

Commentary:Why it’s wrong for Intel and AMD to abandon WSTS


NEW YORK – The news that Intel is pulling out of the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) – after AMD took the same powder last year – should set off alarms for everyone in the industry.

Clearly, this action tends to cast doubt on the validity of all future data published by WSTS. That sort of uncertainty has a huge ripple effect. It will impact chip companies doing planning and forecasting, market research analysts who depend on WSTS numbers — interpret them and predict market trends, and broad-spectrum media outlets like EE Times.

But beyond these obvious implications, Intel deserves censure for its wrongheaded, short-sighted and arrogant desertion of WSTS – for two reasons: “disclosure” and “bargaining power.”

In my opinion, any industry, whether it’s automobiles, semiconductor or veeblefetzers, will begin — once it stops collecting data within the industry — to lose a significant measure of its economic and political power in the greater world. Without a credible trade association backed up credible industry data, the industry has no legitimate representation beyond its own membership, this compromising its bargaining power.

OK. You may say that this is just about WSTS; it’s not like Intel is leaving Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). True. And yet, the WSTS activities do go hand in hand with SIA’s mission. In fact, we are also hearing some disturbing stories about a few companies beginning to leave SIA. (But that’s for another story)

Rank-and-file members of an industry that does not publish and distribute credible data that demonstrate its size, sales and social significance — the semiconductor industry, for example — place themselves at the mercy of the largest, loudest and most powerful companies within the industry. This usually means that only the interests of the largest, loudest and most powerful companies end up being served.

Disclosure of data among members is the basic, first step in building an industry association. Once shared, these vital statistics allow members to see where the industry is going. They help members take the necessary actions. That often forestalls problems and assures a higher level of mutual prosperity.

Without trusted data, every company is left to its own devices, to fend for itself. Of course, if your company is already the largest and the richest, you probably don’t care about that.

I can’t help recall the time of trade disputes – in the 1980’s and early 1990’s – specifically the Japan-U.S. semiconductor negotiations.

As EE Times’ Washington correspondent George Leopold called it, this was “the defining moment” for Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) in the United States. Without all the monthly book-to-bill ratios and other stats put together by WSTS, the SIA had virtually no ammunition for the U.S. government’s negotiations with Japan.

No credible industry data and no credible industry representation equal no bargaining power.

The enemy for the U.S. semiconductor then was Japan. As Leopold said then, a trade association always needs a good enemy to thrive, and right now no “good enemy” is evident. But who’s to say that the U.S. industry will never see another enemy in the future?

Of course, in an age of “globalization,” and in an era when almost everyone is either “fab-lite” or no longer interested in “manufacturing,” the industry association seems increasingly to be a thing of the past.

Really?

I beg to differ. We are standing at a crossroads for U.S.-based companies and American policymakers, where the way lies open to restore a measure of our historic manufacturing growth. Possibly, the chip industry isn’t interested in joining such a revival. Perhaps, as I’ve heard suggested, it’s already too late for the semiconductor industry to come back.

In the face of such pessimism, however, I offer this assurance. With the first sight, on the horizon of any viable new nano-technologies, the chip industry — aided by the U.S. government and academia — is going to seize the opportunity. When that golden goose hatches, this industry will need, more than ever, a good effective trade association — rather than one big, rich, winner-take-all company — to negotiate the resulting deals and spread the wealth.
Commentary:Why it’s wrong for Intel and AMD to abandon WSTS

TAG:Intel AMD SIA WSTS

Oldest fossilized forest: Entire fossil forest dating back 385 million years unearthed

The research team has now unearthed and investigated an entire fossil forest dating back 385 million years.

The Gilboa fossil forest, in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, is generally referred to as 'the oldest fossil forest'. Yet by scientific standards it has remained mythical.

Fossils of hundreds of large tree stumps (the 'Gilboa tree') preserved in the rocks were discovered in the 1920s during excavation of a quarry to extract rock to build the nearby Gilboa Dam. Only sketchy information was recorded about the geological context of the fossil stumps, the soil the trees were growing in, and the spacing of trees bases. Following completion of the dam the quarry was backfilled. Until now, the only way the Gilboa fossil forest could be investigated was from museum specimens and from small exposures of other levels in nearby streams.

In May 2010, the quarry was partially emptied as part of a dam maintenance project. Researchers were monitoring the site with contractors, Thaille Construction Company and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Professor Bill Stein, Binghamton University and Frank Mannolini, the New York State Museum spotted that the original quarry floor had been exposed, and that the roots and positions of the trunk bases had been preserved.

Dr Chris Berry, Cardiff School of Earth and Ocean Sciences explains: "For the first time we were able to arrange for about 1,300 square meters to be cleaned off for investigation. A map of the position of all the plant fossils preserved on that surface was made."

The researcher's findings are published in the journal Nature (1st March). They describe bases of the 'Gilboa trees' as spectacular bowl-shaped depressions up to nearly two meters in diameter, surrounded by thousands of roots. These are known to be the bases of trees up to about 10 meters in height, that looked something like a palm tree or a tree fern. One of the biggest surprises was that the researchers found many woody horizontally-lying stems, up to about 15cm thick, which they have demonstrated to be the ground-running trunks of another type of plant [aneurophytalean progymnosperm], only previously known from its upright branches. They also found one large example of a tree-shaped club moss, the type of tree that commonly forms coal seams in younger rocks across Europe and North America.

Dr Berry said: "All this demonstrates that the 'oldest forest' at Gilboa was a lot more ecologically complex than we had suspected, and probably contained a lot more carbon locked up as wood than we previously knew about. This will enable more refined speculation about the way in which the evolution of forests changed this Earth.

"Personally, tha chance to walk on the ancient forest floor, and to imagine the plants that I have been studying as fossils for more than 20 years standing alive in the positions marked by their bases, was a career highlight. Seven years ago colleagues Linda and Frank found us a fossil of a complete Gilboa tree. That was amazing. But this time we've got the whole forest!"

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Astronomers Rediscover Life on Earth -- By looking at the Moon

"We used a trick called earthshine observation to look at the Earth as if it were an exoplanet," says Michael Sterzik (ESO), lead author of the paper. "The Sun shines on the Earth and this light is reflected back to the surface of the Moon. The lunar surface acts as a giant mirror and reflects the Earth's light back to us -- and this is what we have observed with the VLT."

The astronomers analyse the faint earthshine light to look for indicators, such as certain combinations of gases in Earth's atmosphere [2], that are the telltale signs of organic life. This method establishes Earth as a benchmark for the future search for life on planets beyond our Solar System.

The fingerprints of life, or biosignatures, are hard to find with conventional methods, but the team has pioneered a new approach that is more sensitive. Rather than just looking at how bright the reflected light is in different colours, they also look at the polarisation of the light [3], an approach called spectropolarimetry. By applying this technique to earthshine observed with the VLT, the biosignatures in the reflected light from Earth show up very strongly.

Co-author of the study Stefano Bagnulo (Armagh Observatory, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom) explains the advantages: "The light from a distant exoplanet is overwhelmed by the glare of the host star, so it's very difficult to analyse -- a bit like trying to study a grain of dust beside a powerful light bulb. But the light reflected by a planet is polarised, while the light from the host star is not. So polarimetric techniques help us to pick out the faint reflected light of an exoplanet from the dazzling starlight."

The team studied both the colour and the degree of polarisation of light from Earth after reflection from the Moon, as if the light was coming from an exoplanet. They managed to deduce that Earth's atmosphere is partly cloudy, that part of its surface is covered by oceans and -- crucially -- that there is vegetation present. They could even detect changes in the cloud cover and amount of vegetation at different times as different parts of Earth reflected light towards the Moon.

"Finding life outside the Solar System depends on two things: whether this life exists in the first place, and having the technical capability to detect it," adds co-author Enric Palle (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain). "This work is an important step towards reaching that capability."

"Spectropolarimetry may ultimately tell us if simple plant life -- based on photosynthetic processes -- has emerged elsewhere in the Universe," concludes Sterzik. "But we are certainly not looking for little green men or evidence of intelligent life."

The next generation of telescopes, such as the E-ELT (the European Extremely Large Telescope), may well be able to bring us the extraordinary news that Earth is not alone as a bearer of life in the vastness of space.

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