Category Archives: Technology

Technology

Outside Rio, agricultural scientists work to improve production – and protect the landscape

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RIO DE JANEIRO – The world has focused plenty of energy on the Amazon in recent decades, and legitimately so given the sheer scale of the physical transformation under way there. Less attention has been paid to the “cerrado”,  but Brazil’s ongoing agricultural expansion could have equally dire impacts on biodiversity in this tropical savannah, which picks up where the dense rainforest tapers off (see map at right).

Humberto Bizzo, a chemist with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), is one of many scientists and environmentalists who are now turning their attention to the cerrado, partly out of a fear that the recent success in slowing deforestation the Amazon is merely displacing pressure for freshly cleared land into the surrounding landscape. Bizzo conducted his first field expedition in April to survey plants that produce essential oils that could be turned into valuable products in the cosmetics and beauty industry, potentially giving landowners another reason to protect the savannah.

“Biodiversity is actually higher in the cerrado than it is in the Amazon,” Bizzo says, but companies like the Brazilian Natura that are developing this kind of market focus on the Amazon because of its obvious marketing appeal. “That’s why we are turning our attention to this area.”

Totalling some US$200,000 over three years, the project is one of countless initiatives, large and small, competing for the spotlight at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. As international negotiators continued to squabble over text on Saturday, Bizzo and his colleagues at Embrapa’s Food Technology centre, located 20 kilometres to the west of the negotiations, paused to talk about their work with a group of visitors. Continue reading →

New EU lab promises improved nuclear safeguards

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A new laboratory for analysis of nuclear micro-particles, inaugurated last Friday at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Karlsruhe, Germany, will boost international nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation activities.

A state-of-the-art Large Geometry Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (LG-SIMS) instrument is the latest addition to the worldwide network of laboratories for detection and analysis of nuclear material in samples taken by the International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA). The €3.5-million (US$4.4-million) high-precision kit, housed in a specially built zero-vibration lab in the JRC’s Institute for Transuranium Elements (ITU), is designed to improve by an order of magnitude the analytical capability of standard SIMS facilities. Continue reading →

Uncovered spyware may have been at work for years

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Some of sKyWIper's encryption-related code

A massive computer virus dubbed Flame or sKyWIper may have been targeting computers in the Middle East, and Iran in particular, for the past five years, according to a report by a research team involved in analysing the sophisticated computer code.

The report, released on 28 May by the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security in Budapest, Hungary, which was part of a team analysing the malware, bases its estimate on file names that were first spotted in Europe in 2007.

Analysts say that the virus is designed to steal information by turning infected computers into spying machines, capturing screen shots, turning on microphones and otherwise probing them for other information that can be transferred to servers under the malware’s control.

“It covers all major possibilities to gather intelligence, including keyboard, screen, microphone, storage devices, network, wifi, Bluetooth, USB and system processes,” the Hungarian researchers wrote.

Although Flame is being compared to Stuxnet, the infamous malware that is credited with damaging Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in 2010, it does not appear to target industrial security processes. Rather, it is a highly complex version of spyware. Kaspersky Lab, the antivirus company that first revealed the existence of the Flame malware, describes it as “a huge package of modules comprising almost 20 megabytes in size when fully deployed”.

“This is on a completely different level,” Roel Schouwenberg, a Kaspersky researcher, told the Associated Press on Tuesday. “It can be used to spy on everything that a user is doing.”

Indeed, what makes Flame similar to Stuxnet is its size and complexity, which has led researchers and computer-security firms to suggest that it is the work of a government-backed team, rather than a criminal network or hacking group. “[T]his code was not likely to have been written by a single individual but by an organized, well-funded group of people working to a clear set of directives,” Symantec, another leading computer security firm, wrote on its blog.

Another similarity with the Stuxnet virus is that Flame appears to be most prevalent in the Middle East, and in Iran in particular. The malware may also have been involved in an April cyberattack against the Iranian Oil Ministry, according to Symantec.

Iran’s Computer Emergency Response Team, the Maher Center, which provided an alert of the malware on Monday, claimed that it had already developed ways to detect Flame and to remove it. Although a report by Iran’s Fars New Agency links the attack to Israel, there is no specific evidence pointing to who developed or deployed Flame.

Although Flame is being described as spyware at present, researchers acknowledge that there may be elements of the malware attack that are not yet fully known or understood.

But one thing that researchers seem to agree on is the significance of the new attack. “Overall,” the Kaspersky Lab notes on its blog, “we can say Flame is one of the most complex threats ever discovered.”

China to boost clean energy as global CO2 climbs to all-time high

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Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning of fossil fuel reached a record high of 31.6 billion metric tonnes in 2011, according to preliminary estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Coal-fired power plant.{credit}Photo by vxla via Flickr under Creative Commons.{/credit}

Emissions were around one billion tonnes higher than in 2010, the agency says. Coal accounted for 45% of emissions in 2011, followed by oil (35%) and natural gas (20%).

Experts reckon that global CO2 emissions would need to peak at 32.6 gigatonnes by no later than 2017 to give the world a 50% chance of limiting the rise in global average temperature to 2 °C. This no longer seems very likely.

“The new data provide further evidence that the door to a 2 °C trajectory is about to close,” IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said on announcing the figures.

China’s emissions rose by 720 million tonnes, or 9.3%, owing mainly to higher coal consumption. In 2010, China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter of CO2.

However, China’s carbon intensity — the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of gross domestic product — has decreased by 15% since 2005. And the Chinese government plans to keep up massive investment in energy efficiency and renewable energies.

Yesterday the Chinese ministry of finance announced it would spend CN¥170 billion (US$27 billion) this year on energy conservation and emission reductions.

“What China has done over such a short period of time to improve energy efficiency and deploy clean energy is already paying major dividends to the global environment,” Birol said.

Emissions decreased last year in the United States (1.7%) and in the European Union (1.9%).

Since 2006, the United States has cut its emissions by a total 430 million tonnes (7.7%) — the largest reduction in all countries and regions — thanks mainly to the switch from coal to natural gas in power generation, according to IEA analysts.

In Japan, emissions increased in 2011 by 28 million tonnes (2.4%) as a result mainly of increased fossil-fuels use after the Fukushima nuclear accident. India’s emissions rose by 140 million tonnes (8.7%), moving it ahead of Russia to become the world’s fourth-largest emitter.

Space X launches Falcon 9

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This morning, the first commercial space launch to the International Space Station (ISS) lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It was launched by SpaceX, and will carry the company’s Dragon capsule, containing some 460 kilos of supplies, to the space station crew.

The Falcon 9 rocket runs on a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene. It is essentially a larger version of the company’s Falcon 1 rocket, which first reached orbit in 2008.

The launch is a huge success for SpaceX, which hopes to eventually play a major role in supporting the ISS. It is also a vindication for NASA, which has invested millions in commercial companies in recent years.

This is just the start of the mission, however. Over the next few days, the Dragon capsule will perform a number of maneuvering tests. It will then move near enough to the ISS to be snagged by the station’s robotic arm and guided in for docking. The supplies will be unloaded, and the capsule will be filled with a variety of cargo for transport back to earth, including several experiments that have languished on the station.

After 18 days at the space station, the capsule will undock and return to earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. Only when the capsule is bobbing in the waves will the Dragon’s flight be considered a complete success.

 Image: NASA TV

US materials initiative gains momentum

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A gathering of industrial and academic leaders has unveiled a flurry of new projects under the umbrella of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), a US government effort to boost progress in advanced materials research.

Of the 15 projects announced today, some provide funding for materials research, including US$17.3 million towards basic materials research from the Department of Defense and a new grant programme from the National Science Foundation (NSF) called Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer Our Future. The NSF plans to announce awards later this summer. Other projects involve commitments by individual companies and universities to collaborate and share data and broader projects drawing on a number of national labs and agencies. They include:

  • a joint effort by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Champaign, Illinois-based software company Wolfram Research to simulate structures made from some 7 million organic molecules, with open public access to the results;
  • a consortium led by Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin that will accelerate the development of carbon nanostructures;
  • the establishment of a Joint Materials Genome Institute sponsored by the Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge US national laboratories; and
  • a programme to predict the properties of nanomaterials under another multi-agency programme, the National Nanotechnology Initiative.

Cyrus Wadia, assistant director for clean energy and materials research and development at the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, which organized the workshop, says that the projects reflect an encouraging convergence of interests around the MGI. “Behind the scenes, there is a robust inter-agency process,” Wadia told Nature in an e-mail. “This work is creating a strong foundation for both current programs as well as future programs and commitments.”

A handful of other institutions have already shown support for the MGI. Earlier this year, the Department of Energy committed $12 million for materials research and $14.2 million towards improving fuel efficiency through methods such as “lightweighting” or developing new materials to make cars physically lighter.

The Obama administration has proposed a roughly $90-million budget for MGI-related activity in 2013, but Wadia stresses that this does not express the full leverage across existing science-agency budgets.

Harvard, MIT launch online education venture

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Beginning this fall, several classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University will be available for free online, thanks to a joint non-profit venture announced today by the two Cambridge, Massachusetts-based universities. Harvard and MIT will each kick in US$30 million to launch the non-profit, called edX, which has developed an open-source platform for online education.

“Modern technology such as the Internet, cloud computing, machine learning and so on are coming together to make it possible for us to offer online education on a massive scale around the world,” said Anant Agarwal (pictured), an electrical-engineering professor at MIT who will head up the new initiative.

The courses will be in a range of disciplines, from the humanities to the social and natural sciences, and will include video lectures, quizzes and automated grading, online labs, student-discussion forums and certificates for students who complete and pass the courses.

Officials from the two schools, which will jointly own and run edX, say that they hope that other universities will join them in offering their courses on the same platform.

“What we’re seeing here is a tipping point” in online university education, says Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. EdX is part of a fast-growing trend of universities, such as Stanford University in California and the University of Texas, that are joining up to develop online courses. DeMillo says that he has been surprised at how quickly universities have made quality courses available online over the past five years.

At a press conference today, packed with MIT computer-science students snacking on free pastries, Harvard president Drew Faust and MIT president Susan Hockfield took pains to emphasize that online courses wouldn’t take away from conventional on-campus education, but would enhance it. One the goals of edX is to further research on education, by, for example, developing new online tools that can be used by on-campus students. Such tools could enable personalized learning and online collaboration between students.

MIT is already collecting data on how students learn online, through its prototype online course, 6.002x, or “Circuits and Electronics”, which began in March and had a whopping 120,000 students from around the world register.

Agarwal teaches the course and said that developing it wasn’t much more work than creating a new classroom course, although he’s put in extra hours to work out the kinks in the prototype course and admits to being overwhelmed by e-mails from his thousands of students.

EdX officials were vague today about how the non-profit would sustain itself financially. The philosophy of edX is to offer courses for free, said Agarwal, but officials are still figuring how to generate revenue. Options include charging for certificates, or offering premium courses for a fee. DeMillo says that there are enough plausible revenue streams that coming up with a business model for online education shouldn’t be too difficult.

Photo credit: M. Scott Brauer

US moves towards export-control reform

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Posted on behalf of Sharon Weinberger. 

After years of waiting, university space-science researchers hoping for promised reforms to US export controls got a bit of good news: a report by the defence and state departments recommends that many space systems be moved to the commerce department.

The report, released on 18 April, also says that the US Congress should ease control on some commercial satellites while also increasing restrictions on exports to China and Iran. Another recommendation would allow the president the discretion to determine which satellites should be classified as munitions.

A White House fact sheet describes the findings as “part of the Administration’s broader review of US space policy and of the nation’s export control system.”

Although Congress will have to approve any legislative changes, the report is considered a crucial step towards reversing rules that many in industry and academia believe have placed a stranglehold on US satellite research and manufacturing for more than a decade.

“First of all, I think it’s a good day,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, a professor of space science and aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who has followed the export issues closely. “It’s a step in the right direction.”

Congress  shifted authority over dual-use satellites from the commerce department to the state department in 1998. Tighter rules were put in place, in part to address concerns over the transfer of strategically important technologies to China after the failed launch of Intelsat 708, a US-built satellite, atop a Chinese Long March rocket (pictured) in 1996.

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PayPal co-founder’s Breakout Labs issues first grants

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Companies pursuing new ways to store organs, image the brain and capture positrons are among the first six firms that will be funded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs programme.

Thiel conceived of Breakout Labs to try to remedy what he sees as a failure of imagination in modern scientific and technological innovation: “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters,” reads the website of the Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm of which Thiel is the managing partner, in a reference to the microblogging service Twitter.

Breakout Labs, run by the Thiel Foundation based in San Francisco, California, was announced in November and awards grants of up to US$350,000 each to companies that “dream big and want to build a tomorrow in which we all want to live,” Thiel said in a press release. The programme aims “to fill the funding gap that exists for innovative research outside the confines of an academic institution, large corporation, or government.”

Companies funded in this first round of grants span the gamut of scientific experience. Immusoft, a Seattle, Washington-based company that engineers immune cells, was spun out of Nobel laureate David Baltimore’s lab at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Inspirotec, based in Chicago, is an air-analysis company that was co-founded by Julian Gordon, a developer of the Western-blot technique that is widely used in protein analysis.

But 3Scan, a San Francisco-based company developing a microscope to image the brain in three dimensions much more quickly than conventional techniques, is led by Todd Huffman, who left his doctoral neuroscience studies to commercialize the microscope after its inventor, Bruce McCormick, died in 2007.

Arigos Biomedical is developing ways to cool organs so they might one day be stored and banked for transplants. Longevity Biotech is making drugs using an “artificial protein technology” platform spun out of a lab run by Samuel Gellmann at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And Positron Dynamics aims “to enhance the production and collection of positrons” that could one day be used in medical imaging or in space travel.

Continue reading →

Nuclear summit highlights research reactor risk

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Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge.

Today marks the beginning of the 2012 nuclear security summit in South Korea. Ahead of the meeting, US President Barack Obama delivered a speech at Hankuk University in Seoul, in which he reiterated his hope for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Obama has been particularly worried about the ‘loose-nuke’ scenario, in which a terrorist procures some nuclear material and fashions it into a crude weapon. One source would be research reactors, many of which were built during the height of the cold war and run on highly enriched uranium-235 (HEU) — the same material used in basic nuclear weapons.

In 2010, I accompanied a group of American advisers as they spirited uranium out of the Polish Institute of Atomic Energy in Otwock-Świerk, 30 kilometres southeast of Warsaw. It was a big undertaking, and you can watch a shaky bit of video from my trip below.

The US National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversaw the operation, continues to work at converting research reactors and removing nuclear material. Today the agency announced the successful conversion of Mexico’s lone research reactor to the less dangerous low-enriched fuel.

It’s a positive step, but to really get the research-reactor problem under control, the US needs to work on Russia, which has dozens of HEU-fuelled research reactors (see diagram). After years of negotiation, Russia has agreed to do “feasibility studies” on the possibility of converting a handful of its reactors, according to Matthew Bunn, a non-proliferation expert at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But Russia, Bunn says, could do much more. The former superpower “has not yet committed even to do a study of which ones are still needed, and which could be converted or shut down.” Bunn has a new report out this month with a lot more detail on the research-reactor problem.

Russia is the biggest concern, but the West also has its fair share of research reactors running on HEU. One important use is the creation of medical isotopes for cancer treatments. Techniques involving low-enriched uranium are in development, and this morning Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the United States pledged to end the use of HEU processes by 2015.

You can read a lot more about the research-reactor problem in this feature about the ongoing US effort to secure HEU reactor fuel.

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Image source: NNSA