News - Cutting Edge

While many in the tech industry have their eyes on the cloud, Ester Dyson has set her sights on the stars.

The longtime tech pundit and investor on Tuesday said she is putting aside most of her day-to-day activities to undergo full-time astronaut training. She'll be a backup to another member of the tech industry, Charles Simonyi, who is set to make a second trip to the International Space Station next spring.

Dyson and Simonyi are indulging their cosmic interests under the auspices of Space Adventures, a company that arranges space flights for private citizens and in which Dyson is an investor. The cost of participating in the backup crew member program is $3 million, according to Space Adventures. (Simonyi reportedly paid about $25 million for his first trip to orbit in April 2007.)

"If, for some reason, he doesn't go (and I can scrounge up some extra cash), I get to go instead!" Dyson wrote on her Flight School blog, where she will chronicle her training, including a less-than-posh stay at Russia's Star City research and training facility. She reckons that her chance of getting into space next spring at about 5 percent.

I'm expecting it to be cold, staying in Star City through a Moscow winter, with a lot of detailed material to learn and exams to pass. Each Soyuz flight has three cosmonauts, and the other two want a colleague they can rely on to do the right thing in an emergency. By all accounts, the food is "stolovaya" (canteen), and the accommodations are spartan.

Dyson says she'll be heading to Russia soon to watch the October 12 launch of Space Adventures' next client to venture into orbit, video game developer Richard Garriott.

The interest in space flight is hardly out of the blue for Dyson, who ran the PC Forum conference for more than two decades. More recently, she launched the Flight School conference for entrepreneurs focused on air and space undertakings. Troubles in that business sector led Dyson to cancel this year's conference; she's aiming to revive it, eventually, she wrote, "but probably not until 2010."

The CERN Computer Center features 8,000 servers, 40,000 Intel processors, and many, many petabytes of data.

(Credit: CERN)

GENEVA--The CERN Computer Center is the number-crunching hub that powers the physics research lab's quest to discover the nature of the universe.

A formidable 8,000 servers housing 40,000 Intel processor cores provide the grunt to help crack the petabytes of data spewed out from CERN's cutting-edge particle accelerators, based here. Editors' note: This story was originally published on Silicon.com as a photo gallery. Click here to see all the images.)

About half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will generate about 15 petabytes of data by colliding protons with protons.

The computer center will provide only about 20 percent of the processing power used to examine the LHC data, with the rest coming from the LHC Computing Grid, a dedicated network of more than 100,000 processors.

Scientists hope the LHC will offer a "glimpse" at the Higgs Boson, a particle thought to give mass to the universe.

The LHC will produce up to 600 million particle collisions per second. To store the huge amount of data the LHC produces, the center houses 8 petabytes of hard disks and 18 petabytes of magnetic tapes. This will increase to 16 petabytes of disc and 30 petabytes of tape by the end of the year.

Even this is insufficient to store the vast amounts of the raw data produced by the LHC, so its four detectors--which each look for different particles and energy signatures--have built-in electronics and smaller computer centers that analyze petabytes of data per second they collect and that throw away the bulk of the information not of interest to the physicists.

The data that's left is sent on to the computer center and its racks of servers.

"A lot of processors are devoted to data processing for physics. We are collecting a tremendous amount of data from the collision points," said Jean Michel Jouanigot, head of network services at CERN.

The computing center holds 1,500 10-gigabit ports for data exchange and 70,000 1-gigabit ports for information flow among CERN sites. These are just some of the switching points.

(Credit: CERN)

The grid is linked to the center through dedicated 10-gigabit-per-second connections. It can handle about 50,000 users at once, sharing out bandwidth and processing power between scientists.

"The grid is a worldwide collaboration through many hundreds of sites and will get information through very powerful networks," Jouanigot said.

CERN serves as an Internet exchange point and is one of the oldest in Europe.

Within the computing center itself, the data exchange is handled by 1,500 10-gigabit ports, while information flow within CERN's various sites is handled by 70,000 1-gigabit ports.

Four robots are on duty to fetch data from CERN's StorageTek vault.

(Credit: CERN)

The center has four robots, each holding about 20,000 tapes, and it's planning to fit in two more.

Using existing tape technology, the room would be filled up within 10 years. However, Jouanigot said, the center is constantly upgrading to tapes with higher data density, adding that each tape now stores about 750GB compared to about 200GB two years ago.

Jouanigot said that the center refreshes its hardware about every three to four years. All the hardware in the computing center uses off-the-shelf components, and the servers run a customized version of Red Hat Linux.

The LHC is fed with protons by a series of particle accelerators that increase the speed and energy of the particles. The particles are then are fed into the LHC's 17-mile ring and accelerated to 99.9 per cent the speed of light.

Each beam that will collide in the LHC consists of up to 100 billion protons, and the center's 39 consoles allow operators to manage the beams' passage around the accelerators and monitor their cooling. The facility's cryogenic cooling system brings the collider's temperature to just above absolute zero to allow the superconducting magnets that drive the beams to work.

But for the time being, that cooling system has been switched off. The LHC is being returned to room temperature to allow repairs to be carried out on a fault. It is expected to start up again in April.

Nick Heath of Silicon.com reported from London.

Washington University engineering student Lee Cordova (left) looks on as his punching bots, posing as the vice presidential candidates, fight it out.

(Credit: Karren Knowlton)

Joe Biden and Sarah Palin weren't the only ones duking it out on Washington University's campus last week. So were two punching robots created by engineering students at the school and appropriately marked for the occasion with photos of the VP candidates affixed to their steel heads.

The bots, which are made of machine parts, did battle on the main courtyard of the St. Louis campus for about six hours Thursday as the candidates prepped for the much-anticipated faceoff inside. Not to be left out, the presidential candidates got a swing, too, with John McCain and Barack Obama's mugs getting swapped in and attached to the heads with magnets for matches of their own.

Students took turns manning the red and blue robots, whose arms operate via pulleys attached to straps. Two cables connect to a control bar, which can be pointed back and forth to make the bot move right and left. A good punch to the opponent's chest causes its spring-loaded head to fall off, which nets the aggressor a point.

Ford's MyKey will come standard in the 2010 Focus coupe. Other models will follow.

(Credit: Ford Motor)

Ford Motor has found a new way for parents to keep teen drivers in check when they lend them the car, the company said Monday.

MyKey, a car key with a chip, can be programmed to curtail the top speed of its user to 80 mph.

The MyKey will come standard with the 2010 Focus coupe and eventually will be available on other Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury models, according to Ford.

In addition to implementing a speed limit, the key can be used to limit the volume of the car stereo system and emit a chime for six seconds every five minutes until the driver puts on a seatbelt.

MyKey can also be programmed to chime once each time the car reaches 45 mph, 55 mph, and 65 mph to alert young drivers about their acceleration.

Another feature, useful to anyone who fails to notice when the fuel light goes on, chimes when the car is 75 miles from empty. (The light on a Ford usually goes on at 50 miles to empty.)

The new gadget is part of Ford's Driving Skills for Life program, which is dedicated to educating drivers not only about safety but also on techniques for reducing fuel consumption.

The Large Hadron Collider will be turned on again at the beginning of April, according to Robert Aymar, CERN's director general.

The LHC, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, was built by the European nuclear-research organization to conduct experiments to test fundamental physics theories and to search for important new science such as the Higgs Boson.

Click image for gallery on the Large Hadron Collider.

(Credit: Maximilien Brice for CERN)

The particle beam machine, located at the border between France and Switzerland, was first powered up on September 10, but the experiment had to be closed down on September 19 after a malfunction caused a leak of liquid helium.

Aymar said that at the moment, the scientists at CERN do not know what caused the leak, as the equipment, which needs to be cooled to operate, still had to heat up to room temperature to be examined.

"We have to perform a test, but we cannot believe a magnet is faulty," Aymar told ZDNet UK on Friday at the official launch at CERN of its grid-computing system, which has actually been running since 2003. "At the moment, we think it is an (electrical) connection. We have thousands of connections, and they can't all be tested...We'll see after the magnet returns to room temperature."

The LHC will come back online at the beginning of April, after a period of maintenance. Aymar said that from November 15 to the beginning of April, all the accelerators are closed down each year for maintenance. The closure period also reduces the winter load on the French power grid, which normally supplies power to the experiment.

"In general, we call (the maintenance period) 'consolidation,' but really we have to do it; otherwise, (the accelerators) would fall apart," Aymar said.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from CERN's headquarters.

TVs galore at Ceatec 2008.

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News)

TOKYO--The Ceatec 2008 circus is packing up the tent, but it won't be long until we see many of these same gadgets again. As the Japanese consumer tech showcase winds down, let's take a look at the major themes of this year's show and look forward to what will make it to the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Although the show was a bit smaller this year, it's still the place to see highly imaginative prototypes, as well as get a glimpse of what will actually be on U.S. stores shelves in the coming year.

The most prevalent theme among the electronics giants: thin TVs. Just like at CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin, and CEDIA Expo this year, they're jostling with each other in a race to see who can make the largest screen on the skinniest panel.

Sony continued to push its current 11-inch OLED TV model, the XEL-1, and showed the prototype 27-inch version. But the company also showed an even thinner prototype, whose display is a mere .3 millimeters thin.

But those are small. In larger TVs, Hitachi showed off a 15-millimeter LCD and a 35-millimeter plasma set (see picture), as did Sharp, which announced its new 23-millimeter thin Aquos XS (for "extra slim") model. Toshiba also lined up to show off a concept Regza that looks and leans like an oversize piece of mirrored glass.

Hitachi's super-thin LCD.

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News)

A slim and trim plasma TV from Hitachi.

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News)

Many companies also showed new types of interfaces, such as gesture-based technology. Panasonic showed its connected-home concept, which included an impressive video wall. Users could theoretically call up an exercise program onto the wall, and a video of an instructor would appear and respond to users' movements. Hitachi showed digital signage technology that used human gestures to play games and create interactive advertisements.

Software industry veteran Charles Simonyi is ready to go back to outer space.

In April 2007, Simonyi spent close to two weeks in orbit, in a very expensive round trip via Russian rocket to spend time aboard the International Space Station. The trip reportedly cost Simonyi $25 million, and apparently he considers the money very well spent: Space Adventures, the company that organized the junket, announced Tuesday that he has signed up for another trip, this one coming up sometime next spring.

Charles Simonyi (seated) on his way to a post-space flight medical exam, April 21, 2007.

(Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Space Adventures had little else to say on the matter for now, save that Simonyi would be training with the Soyuz TMA-14 crew. A press conference is scheduled for Monday.

Simonyi got his first big payday years back through his work on the Excel and Word programs at Microsoft, where he eventually spent two decades. In 2002, he founded the software engineering company Intentional Software.

His interest in outer space isn't limited to his own occasional travels. In January, Simonyi's Fund for Arts and Sciences gave $20 million to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project--twice as much on that occasion as Microsoft co-founder and fellow billionaire Bill Gates. The Chile-based LSST, which is expected to be ready for service in about 2014, will be on the lookout for dark energy and dark matter.

Space flights and rocketry could be the ultimate status symbol among the Silicon Valley crowd. Game designer Richard Garriott, the son of an astronaut, is set to journey to the International Space Station on October 12, according to Space Adventures. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is also a Space Adventures client--over the summer, he plopped down $5 million to book a blastoff.

And over the weekend, entrepreneur Elon Musk was finally able to celebrate after getting a cargo-carrying rocket into orbit. Three previous attempts had failed.

Build an $8 billion machine that forms a 17-mile circle 300 feet underground and that may reveal secrets from the origins of the universe, and you're bound to provoke curiosity.

The machine in question is the Large Hadron Collider, the goal of which is to reproduce the conditions from just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. It'll do so by slamming together subatomic particles at about the speed of light, with scientists poised for a glimpse at the results.

In Sunday night's season premiere of the CBS news program 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft talked to a number of the scientists involved--one reckoned that half of all U.S. particle physicists are there--and ventured underground for a closer look at the one-of-a-kind machinery built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

Below are some clips from the 60 Minutes story:

See inside the Large Hadron Collider: Get the lowdown on the machinery in the underground facility and the kinds of questions it might help answer, such as "What is the origin of mass?"

How the Large Hadron Collider works: Animation shows the scope of the facility and how the subatomic particles will zip along at the speed of light before colliding with each other.

Meet the Americans working on the Large Hadron Collider: Steve Kroft talks to three scientists, one from MIT, one from the University of Chicago, and one from the University of Michigan.

How will we benefit from the Large Hadron Collider? Practical results might be a ways off, but they'll be coming, and they'll be shared equally among all the countries that have participated.

A privately developed rocket is now orbiting the Earth.

Space Exploration Technologies' Falcon 1 launched into orbit at 4:15 p.m. PDT Sunday from Omelek Island, which is in the Kwajalein Atoll, about 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii. Just over nine minutes later, the Falcon 1 reached orbit, the company said.

Falcon 1 lifts off on Sunday.

(Credit: SpaceX)

The successful launch comes after the company, better known as SpaceX, had suffered three unsuccessful attempts over the past two years.

Elon Musk, the company's founder and CEO, called the launch a "great day for SpaceX."

"The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion--middle of the bull's eye--and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake," Musk, who is also co-founder and former head of online payment company PayPal, said in a statement.

Musk said it is the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.

The rocket carries a payload mass simulator developed by SpaceX, which is aiming for private space transportation and deliveries.

Click here for SpaceX's video of the launch.

If there's a place that's more of a sensory overload than Las Vegas, it's Tokyo, which makes it a perfect place to host what many say is the best consumer electronics show in the world: the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies, or Ceatec, for short.

It's that time of year again, after IFA in Berlin and before the madness of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, when Ceatec gets its turn on the world's technology stage.

It's a huge show: just less than 206,000 people showed up to see the 895 companies show off their wares last year. The 2008 confab, which runs from Tuesday to Friday in Chiba, Japan, just outside Tokyo, promises to be even bigger.

While Ceatec offers a glimpse into the future of gadgetry, it's also a parade of practical products. Some tech exhibits can be merely a glance at what a company's R&D department is toying around with in a basement laboratory, with no practical application in sight. However, it's very likely that Asian and European consumers will see them in stores sooner than those in the United States.

From the standpoint of a manufacturer or marketer, this show can be kind of dramatic. It's often the last tryout before products get cut from a company's portfolio. Although many products shown are made especially for the Asian or European markets, it's also a final test in another way.

"The reception these products get at Ceatec will help decide if they will enter the U.S. market," according to Richard Doherty, a consumer electronics market researcher at The Envisioneering Group. Doherty hunts the halls every year at Ceatec looking for the best upcoming technology.

But just like at CES, not everything is designed to become an actual product. Both big and small names in electronics come to Ceatec to display a large portfolio of products so that investors, journalists, potential partners, and retailers can take a look.

While some of the products will already be in development, others are just strategic deterrents, designed to throw competitors offtrack from where a company's real product road map is going.

But Ceatec is probably a better show for consumers and gadget hounds, since much of what will be in a company's booth isn't so far from sitting on a store shelf. For example, according to Doherty, 60 percent of the products shown by electronics giant Samsung at CES this past January will become actual products by year's end.

"At the Japan show, more like 9 out of 10 products will make it to market within the year," he said.

And for the stuff that does make the cut, it will sometimes take two to five years before it appears on this side of the Pacific.