The device was first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show(CES) in January 2012 and has since become a popular addition to Motorola’s Droid family of Android devices.

The 9mm thin Motorola Razr Maxx smartphone is close to 2mm thicker than its Droid Razr sibling but manages to squeeze a huge 3300mAh battery into its chassis, giving owners the ability to play games and surf the web all day, or talk for up to 21 hours straight without having to find a charger.

Samsung’s oversized Galaxy Note smartphone and its Galaxy Nexus ‘Google phone’ were awarded second and third places in the 2012 E-Tech Awards Smartphone & Handset category.

In 2011 Motorola also picked up the E-Tech Award for the best Phone/Smartphone with its Atrix 4G handset, beating LG’s Thrill 4G and HTC’s ThunderBolt which were awarded second and third places respectively.

Judging for this year’s award was conducted by a panel of media and industry analysts. Awards were given to products and services that embodied innovation, functionality, technological importance, implementation and overall “wow” factor.

source from: yahoo

Consider this: If Apple had been added to the Dow in June 2009, the last time there were serious rumors that it would happen, the average would be about 2,500 points higher than it is today and well above its all-time high.

Paul Hickey of Bespoke Investment Group, which crunches numbers about the markets, says the Dow would be at 15,360, about 1,200 points above its record of 14,164, set in October 2007. The Dow closed Wednesday at 12,835.

Not only would investors be perkier, but everyday Americans watching the Dow set one record after another would probably feel wealthier. That might inspire them to spend more money and help the economy grow faster.

But if you think the time is right for an Apple-Dow marriage, don’t check your mailbox for a wedding invitation. Apple, which redefined how people listen to music and reinvented the cellphone, is simply too hot for the Dow.

In 2009, when a bankrupt General Motors and a hobbled Citigroup were booted from the Dow andApple was talked about as one replacement, Apple stock traded at about $144.

On Wednesday, it closed at $569. Because of how the Dow is calculated, Apple would dwarf the other stocks in the average and distort the Dow from its purpose — which is to reflect the broad economy, not represent the hottest stocks.

A big one-day gain by Apple, like a $50 jump after it reported blockbuster earnings last month, would send the Dow higher by hundreds of points. Similarly, a big drop would suggest the market was in more trouble than it really was.

The Dow comprises 30 stocks. It is weighted so that a $1 move by any stock, no matter how cheap or expensive, moves the average the same — about seven and a half points as the Dow is calculated today.

Because it’s much easier for a $100 stock to move $1 than it is for a $20 stock, higher-priced stocks carry more importance. IBM, at about $200, is the most expensive stock and carries nearly 12 percent of the Dow’s weight.

Apple would carry a quarter or more, depending on which stock it replaced. That is why the Dow would be thousands of points higher if it had welcomed Apple in 2009: Each share of Apple has grown by hundreds of dollars since then.

“It wouldn’t be the Dow Jones industrial average,” says Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group. “It would be the Apple Plus Some Other Stuff Index.”

Apple is already the biggest component of the other two major U.S. stock indexes: It makes up nearly 12 percent of the Nasdaq composite and more than 4 percent of the Standard & Poor’s 500.

The Dow was born in 1896 and has changed over the years to reflect the changing economy. Agricultural and coal companies have been replaced by banks and drug companies. Car makers have knocked off railroads.

Of the Dow’s 12 original stocks, only General Electric is still part of the index. So why not add Apple, which has enormous cultural pull and admiration throughout corporate America — plus a market value of half a trillion dollars?

“We don’t run the Dow as we would an investment portfolio,” says John Prestbo, the executive editor of Dow Jones Indexes, which maintains the Dow and other indexes.

Prestbo, along with the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and the research head of the CME Group, which owns a majority stake of Dow Jones Indexes, decide which companies make up the Dow.

They meet occasionally to discuss whether they need to change the index. The CME Group provides benchmark indexes on investments like agricultural products, energy and metals.

The Dow committee might boot a company if it’s no longer an industry leader, or if its industry is too heavily represented. Sometimes companies will ask to be included, which doesn’t necessarily hurt or help their case, Prestbo says.

Three years ago, when GM and Citigroup got the ax, the group snubbed Apple and chose Cisco Systems, which makes computer networking equipment, and Travelers Companies, the insurance provider.

Travelers is up almost 50 percent since it was added to the Dow, but Cisco has moved slightly lower. In the hypothetical example provided by Bespoke, Apple would have replaced Cisco in 2009.

There’s some history behind the idea of having the most valuable company be part of the Dow. Exxon Mobil, which held the title until Apple wrested it in January, is a Dow member. Ten years ago, two Dow components, Microsoft and GE, jockeyed for the honor.

But Prestbo brushes off the what-if questions about Apple. Would the Dow be higher? Sure, he says. “But it also wouldn’t be tracking the market.”

source from: yahoo

Attorney General Dominic Grieve, the government’s chief legal advisor in England and Wales, spoke out following a series of high-profile court cases involving postings made on the micro-blogging site.

“If somebody goes down to the pub with printed sheets of paper and hands it out, that’s no different than if somebody goes and does a tweet,” Grieve told BBC radio.

“The idea that you have immunity because you’re an anonymous tweeter is a big mistake.

“I don’t want to take action but if I think it is necessary to prevent crime, such as racially aggravated harassment, then I won’t hesitate to do it.”

A student who mocked English Premier League footballer Fabrice Muamba on Twitter after he collapsed on the pitch with a heart attack in March was jailed for 56 days after admitting a racially aggravated public order offence.

Some 17 arrests have been made in connection with the alleged naming on Twitter of the woman that Wales footballer Ched Evans was last month convicted of raping.

In March, former New Zealand cricketer Chris Cairns won a libel action against ex-Indian Premier League chairman Lalit Modi in the first libel action heard in England against a post on Twitter.

Judge David Bean dismissed match-fixing allegations levelled against the cricketer, leaving Modi facing a bill of more than £500,000 ($800,000).

Grieve said the government did not need to create new laws as existing ones already make it illegal to “grossly offend” or “cause distress”.

source from: yahoo

Published May 11 in the journalPhysical Review Letters, the findings fill a gap in researchers’ understanding of this atomic structure. This understanding ultimately could help manufacturers fine-tune such properties of metallic glasses as ductility, the ability to change shape under force without breaking, and formability, the ability to form a glass without crystalizing.

Glasses include all solid materials that have a non-crystalline atomic structure: They lack a regular geometric arrangement of atoms over long distances. “The fundamental nature of a glass structure is that the organization of the atoms is disordered-jumbled up like differently sized marbles in a jar, rather than eggs in an egg carton,” says Paul Voyles, a UW-Madison associate professor of materials science and engineering and principal investigator on the research.

Researchers widely believe that atoms in metallic glasses are arranged only as pentagons in an order known as five-fold rotational symmetry. However, in studies of a zirconium-copper-aluminum metallic glass, Voyles’ team found there are clusters of squares and hexagons-in addition to clusters of pentagons, some of which form chains-all located within the space of just a few nanometers. “One or two nanometers is a group of about 50 atoms-and it’s how those 50 atoms are arranged with respect to one another that’s the new and interesting part,” he says.

Measuring the atomic structure of glass at this scale has been extremely difficult. Researchers know that, at a few tenths of a nanometer, atoms in metallic glasses have the same distances between them as they do in crystals. They also know that at long distances-hundreds of nanometers-there’s no order left. “But what happens in between, at this ‘magic’ length of one to three nanometers, is very hard to measure experimentally and is essentially unexplored in experiments and simulations,” says Voyles.

An expert in electron microscopy, Voyles used a powerful, state-of-the-art scanning transmission electron microscope at UW-Madison as his window into this nanometer-scale atomic structure. The microscope can generate an electron probe beam two nanometers in diameter-the ideal size for examining atoms on a length scale of one to three nanometers. “And that, fundamentally, is what makes the experiments work and gives us access to this information that’s otherwise very difficult to obtain,” he says. “We can match our experimental probe in size right to the size of what we want to measure.”

Voyles and his team coupled the experimental data from the microscope with state-of-the-art computational methods to conduct simulations that accurately reflect the experiments. “It’s the combination of those two things that gives us this new insight,” he says. “We can look at the results and abstract general principles about rotational symmetry and nanoscale clustering.”

There were several clues in the properties of some metallic glasses that these competing geometric structures might exist. Those arise from the interrelationships of structure, processing and properties, says Voyles. “If we understand how the structure controls, for example, glass-forming ability or the ability to change shape on bending or pulling, and we understand how different elements participate in these different kinds of structures, that gives us a handle on controlling properties by adjusting the composition or adjusting the rate at which the material was cooled or heated to change the structure in some useful way,” he says.

One of the unique characteristics of glasses is their ability to transition continuously from a solid to a liquid state. While other materials, when heated, are partly melted and partly solid, glasses as a whole become increasingly malleable.

While manufacturers now apply metallic glasses primarily in electrical transformer cores, their special forming capabilities may enable manufacturers to make very small, intricate parts. “Unlike conventional metallic alloys, metallic glasses can be molded like plastic-so they can be pushed or sucked or blown into very complicated shapes without any loss of material or machining,” says Voyles.

Those manufacturing methods hold true even at the micro or nanoscale, so it’s possible to make, for example, forests of nanowires or the world’s smallest geared motor. “Five or 10 years from now, there may be more commercial applications driven by those kinds of things than there are now,” he says.

For Voyles and his team, the next step will be to calculate the properties of the most realistic structural models of metallic glass they have developed to learn how those properties relate to the structure.

source from: sciencedaily

The researchers demonstrated that a single layer of atoms can disrupt or enhance heat flow across an interface. Their results are published this week in Nature Materials.

Improved control of heat exchange is a key element to enhancing the performance of current technologies such as integrated circuits and combustion engines as well as emerging technologies such as thermoelectric devices, which harvest renewable energy from waste heat. However, achieving control is hampered by an incomplete understanding of how heat is conducted through and between materials.

“Heat travels through electrically insulating material via ‘phonons,’ which are collective vibrations of atoms that travel like waves through a material,” said David Cahill, a Willett Professor and the head of materials science and engineering at Illinois and co-author of the paper. “Compared to our knowledge of how electricity and light travel through materials, scientists’ knowledge of heat flow is rather rudimentary.”

One reason such knowledge remains elusive is the difficulty of accurately measuring temperatures, especially at small-length scales and over short time periods — the parameters that many micro and nano devices operate under.

Over the past decade, Cahill’s group has refined a measurement technique using very short laser pulses, lasting only one trillionth of a second, to probe heat flow accurately with nanometer-depth resolution. Cahill teamed up with Paul Braun, the Racheff Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the U. of I. and a leader in nanoscale materials synthesis, to apply the technique to understanding how atomic-scale features affect heat transport.

“These experiments used a ‘molecular sandwich’ that allowed us to manipulate and study the effect that chemistry at the interface has on heat flow, at an atomic scale,” Braun said.

The researchers assembled their molecular sandwich by first depositing a single layer of molecules on a quartz surface. Next, through a technique known as transfer-printing, they placed a very thin gold film on top of these molecules. Then they applied a heat pulse to the gold layer and measured how it traveled through the sandwich to the quartz at the bottom.

By adjusting just the composition of the molecules in contact with the gold layer, the group observed a change in heat transfer depending on how strongly the molecule bonded to the gold. They demonstrated that stronger bonding produced a twofold increase in heat flow.

“This variation in heat flow could be much greater in other systems,” said Mark Losego, who led this research effort as a postdoctoral scholar at Illinois and is now a research professor at North Carolina State University. “If the vibrational modes for the two solids were more similar, we could expect changes of up to a factor of 10 or more.”

The researchers also used their ability to systematically adjust the interfacial chemistry to dial-in a heat flow value between the two extremes, verifying the ability to use this knowledge to design materials systems with desired thermal transport properties.

“We’ve basically shown that changing even a single layer of atoms at the interface between two materials significantly impacts heat flow across that interface,” said Losego.

Scientifically, this work opens up new avenues of research. The Illinois group is already working toward a deeper fundamental understanding of heat transfer by refining measurement methods for quantifying interfacial bonding stiffness, as well as investigating temperature dependence, which will reveal a better fundamental picture of how the changes in interface chemistry are disrupting or enhancing the flow of heat across the interface.

“For many years, the physical models for heat flow between two materials have ignored the atomic-level features of an interface,” Cahill said. “Now these theories need to be refined. The experimental methods developed here will help quantify the extent to which interfacial structural features contribute to heat flow and will be used to validate these new theories.”

source from: sciencedaily

In addition, they are light and flexible like plastics, which opens up the possibility of meeting one of the most important challenges of 21st century electronics: miniaturizing components down to the nanometric scale. This work is published on 22 April 2012 on Nature Chemistry‘s website. The next step is to demonstrate that these fibers can be industrially integrated within electronic devices such as flexible screens, solar cells, etc.

In previous work published in 2010 (5), Giuseppone and his colleagues succeeded for the first time in obtaining nanowires. To achieve this feat, they chemically modified “triarylamines,” synthetic molecules that have been used for decades by industry in Xerox® photocopying processes. Much to their surprise, they observed that in light and in solution, their new molecules stacked up spontaneously in a regular manner to form miniature fibers. These wires, a few hundred nanometers long (1 nm = 10-9 m, i.e. a billionth of a meter), are made up of what is known as the “supramolecular” assembly of several thousand molecules.

In collaboration with Doudin’s team, the researchers then studied the electrical properties of these nanofibers in detail. This time, they placed their molecules in contact with an electronic microcircuit comprising gold electrodes spaced 100 nm apart. They then applied an electric field between these electrodes.

Their first important finding was that, when triggered by a flash of light, the fibers self-assemble solely between the electrodes. The second surprising result was that these structures, which are as light and flexible as plastics, turn out to be capable of transporting extraordinary current densities, above 2.10^6 Amperes per square centimeter (A.cm-2), approaching those of copper wire. In addition, they have very low interface resistance with metals (6) : 10,000 times below that of the best organic polymers.

The researchers now hope to demonstrate that their fibers can be used industrially in miniaturized electronic devices such as flexible screens, solar cells, transistors, printed nanocircuits, etc.

source from: sciencedaily

The maximum reward for exposing a vulnerability that would let an intruder’s code get up to mischief in a Google datacenter was ramped up from the $3,133.70 payout set when the bounty program launched in November of 2010.

“When we get more bug reports, we get more bug fixes,” Google security team manager Adam Mein told AFP. “That is good for our users; that is good for us.”

Google has paid out approximately $460,000 since it established the Vulnerability Reward Program.

Of the 11,000 software flaws reported to Google, more than 780 qualified for rewards ranging from $300 to the maximum, a figure selected because the digits translate into a technical term in a hacker programming language.

The bounty was raised to inspire software savants to hunt for difficult-to-find, and potentially perilous, bugs hidden deep in programs, according to Mein.

“We want them to know the reward is there for them if they find the most severe bugs,” Mein said.

Bugs found in more sensitive services such as Google smartphone “Wallet” software tends to merit more generous rewards.

People vying for bounties have tended to be computer security professionals; engineering students honing their skills, and website operators, according to Google.

source from: yahoo

Many modern data storage devices, like hard disk drives, rely on the ability to manipulate the properties of tiny individual magnetic sections, but their overall design is limited by the way these magnetic ‘domains’ interact when they are close together.

Now, researchers from Imperial College London have demonstrated that a honeycomb pattern of nano-sized magnets, in a material known as spin ice, introduces competition between neighbouring magnets, and reduces the problems caused by these interactions by two-thirds. They have shown that large arrays of these nano-magnets can be used to store computable information. The arrays can then be read by measuring their electrical resistance.

The scientists have so far been able to ‘read’ and ‘write’ patterns in the magnetic fields, and a key challenge now is to develop a way to utilise these patterns to perform calculations, and to do so at room temperature. At the moment, they are working with the magnets at temperatures below minus 223°C.

Research author Dr Will Branford and his team have been investigating how to manipulate the magnetic state of nano-structured spin ices using a magnetic field and how to read their state by measuring their electrical resistance. They found that at low temperatures (below minus 223^oC) the magnetic bits act in a collective manner and arrange themselves into patterns. This changes their resistance to an electrical current so that if one is passed through the material, this produces a characteristic measurement that the scientists can identify.

The scientists have so far been able to ‘read’ and ‘write’ patterns at room temperature. However, at the moment the collective behaviour is only seen at temperatures below minus 223oC. A key challenge now is to develop a way to utilise these patterns to perform calculations, and to do so at room temperature.

Current technology uses one magnetic domain to store a single bit of information. The new finding suggests that a cluster of many domains could be used to solve a complex computational problem in a single calculation. Computation of this type is known as a neural network, and is more similar to how our brains work than to the way in which traditional computers process information.

Dr Branford, who is an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, said: “Electronics manufacturers are trying all the time to squeeze more data into the same devices, or the same data into a tinier space for handheld devices like smart phones and mobile computers. However, the innate interaction between magnets has so far limited what they can do. In some new types of memory, manufacturers try to avoid the limitations of magnetism by avoiding using magnets altogether, using things like ferroelectric (flash) memory, memristors or antiferromagnets instead. However, these solutions are slow, expensive or hard to read out. Our philosophy is to harness the magnetic interactions, making them work in our favour.”

Although this new research represents a key step forward, the researchers say there are many hurdles to overcome before scientists will be able to create prototype devices based on this technique such as developing an algorithm to control the computation. The nature of this algorithm will determine whether the room temperature state can be used or if the low temperature collective behaviour is required. However, they are optimistic that if these challenges can be tackled successfully, new technology using magnetic honeycombs might be available in ten to fifteen years.

In experiments, Dr Branford applied an electrical current across a continuous honeycomb mesh, made from cobalt magnetic bars each 1 micrometer long and 100 nanometres wide, and covering an area 100 square micrometers (as pictured). A single unit of the honeycomb mesh is like three bar magnets meeting in the centre of a triangle. There is no way to arrange them without having either two north poles or two south poles touching and repelling each other, this is called a ‘frustrated’ magnetic system. In a single triangular unit there are six ways to arrange the magnets such that they have exactly the same level of frustration, and as you increase the number of triangular units in the honeycomb, the number of possible arrangements of magnets increases exponentially, increasing the complexity of possible patterns.

Previous studies have shown that external magnetic fields can cause the magnetic domain of each bar to change state. This in turn affects the interaction between that bar and its two neighbouring bars in the honeycomb, and it is this pattern of magnetic states that Dr Branford says could be computer data.

Dr Branford said: “The strong interaction between neighbouring magnets allows us to subtly affect how the patterns form across the honeycomb. This is something we can take advantage of to compute complex problems because many different outcomes are possible, and we can differentiate between them electronically. Our next big challenge is to make an array of nano-magnets that can be ‘programmed’ without using external magnetic fields.”

source from: sciencedaily

Resembling chicken wire on a nano scale, graphene — single sheets of graphite — is only one atom thick, making it the world’s thinnest material. Two million graphene sheets stacked up would not be as thick as a credit card.

The tricky part physicists have yet to figure out how to control the flow of electrons through the material, a necessary prerequisite for putting it to work in any type of electronic circuit. Graphene behaves very different than silicon, the material currently used in semiconductors.

Last year, a research team led by UA physicists cleared the first hurdle by identifying boron nitride, a structurally identical but non-conducting material, as a suitable mounting surface for single-atom sheets of graphene. The team also showed that in addition to providing mechanical support, boron nitride improves the electronic properties of graphene by smoothening out fluctuations in the electronic charges.

Now the team found that boron nitride also influences how the electrons travel through the graphene. Published in Nature Physics, the results open up new ways of controlling the electron flow through graphene.

“If you want to make a transistor for example, you need to be able to stop the flow of electrons,” said Brian LeRoy, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona’s department of physics. “But in graphene, the electrons just keep going. It’s difficult to stop them.”

LeRoy said relativistic quantum mechanical effects that come into play at atomic scales cause electrons to behave in ways that go against our everyday experiences of how objects should behave.

Take tennis balls, for example.

“Normally, when you throw a tennis ball against a wall, it bounces back,” LeRoy said. “Now think of the electrons as tennis balls. With quantum mechanical effects, there is a chance the ball would go through and end up on the other side. In graphene, the ball goes through 100 percent of the time.”

This strange behavior makes it difficult to control where electrons are going in graphene. However, as LeRoy’s group has now discovered, mounting graphene on boron nitride prevents some of the electrons from passing to the other side, a first step toward a more controlled electron flow.

The group achieved this feat by placing graphene sheets onto boron nitride at certain angles, resulting in the hexagonal structures in both materials to overlap in such a way that secondary, larger hexagonal patterns are created. The researchers call this structure a superlattice.

If the angle is just right, they found, a point is reached where almost no electrons go through.

“You could say we created holes in the wall,” LeRoy said, “and as soon as the wall has holes in it, we find that some of the tennis balls no longer go through. It’s the opposite of what you would expect. That shows you how weird this is. It’s all due to those relativistic quantum effects.”

The discovery puts the technology a bit closer to someday being able to actually control the flow of electrons through the graphene, the authors of the paper said.

“The effect depends on the size of the hexagonal pattern resulting from the overlapping sheets,” explained Matthew Yankowitz, a first-year graduate student in LeRoy’s lab and the study’s lead author.

The pattern, he explained, creates a periodic modulation of the potential — picture a ball rolling across an egg carton.

“It’s a purely electronic effect brought about by the structure of the two materials and how they sit on top of each other,” Yankowitz said. “It’s similar to the Moiré pattern you see when someone wears a striped shirt on TV.”

As of now, the researchers are not yet able to control how the graphene and boron nitride end up oriented relative to each other when they combine the two materials. Therefore, they make many samples and check the structure of each one under an electron microscope.

“With our scanning tunneling microscope, we can get an image of each superlattice and measure its size,” Yankowitz said. “We take a picture and see what the pattern looks like. If the hexagonal pattern is too small, the samples are no good and we throw them out.”

Yankowitz said about 10 to 20 percent of samples showed the desired effect.

If it becomes possible to someday automate this process, graphene-based microelectronics might be well on their way to propel us from the silicon age to the graphene age.

source from: sciencedaily

The US president’s home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is part of a Google Art Project that lets online visitors step into museums, galleries and other famous spaces and look around as though they were there.

“The White House isn’t simply a home to first families or a meeting space for world leaders, it’s also known as ‘The People’s House,’ a place that should be open to everyone,”Michelle Obama said in a video message.

“Thousands of people have walked these halls and gazed at the artwork. They’ve examined the portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy,” she said.

“They’ve imagined the history that’s unfolded here. And now you can do all of that without leaving your home.”

Google used Street View cameras in rooms to capture images in 360 degrees to provide a sense of being able to gaze around full circle, zooming in on pieces of art or other features.

President Barack Obama and the First Lady have been known to unexpectedly drop in on groups touring the White House, which has logged about 2.5 million visitors during the past three years.

The online opening of the White House came with word of the expansion of the Google Art Project, launched early last year, to include more than two dozen new partners.

The website at GoogleArtProject.com was not live when the addition of the White House was announced.

source from: yahoo