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Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
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How new technologies are modifying our way of life
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A 1.4-gigapixel camera to detect asteroids
MIT engineers have developed silicon chips that will be at the heart of a telescope installed on Haleakala mountain, Maui, Hawaii, which will begin operation next month. The system, called Pan-STARRS (for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System), is being developed at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. 'The primary mission of Pan-STARRS is to detect Earth-approaching asteroids and comets that could be dangerous to the planet.' Apparently, it will be able to give us early warnings about dangerous asteroids and comets. The lead researcher says that they 'get an image that is 38,000 by 38,000 pixels in size, or about 200 times larger than you get in a high-end consumer digital camera.' In fact, this telescope will be able to detect 'stars 10 million times fainter than those visible to the naked eye' and other moving objects near the Earth. But read more...
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Towards a World Wide Grid?
In recent months, the concept of 'cloud computing' was all the buzz. European researchers think about another name, the World Wide Grid, which could run on top of the Internet. In an article to appear soon, ICT Results will report about the g-Eclipse project. As the scientists said, 'the g-Eclipse project aims to build an integrated workbench framework to access the power of existing Grid infrastructures. The framework will be built on top of the reliable eco-system of the Eclipse community to enable a sustainable development.' The project started in July 2006 and was successfully completed in June 2008 for a total cost of €2.5 million including a EU contribution of €1.96 million. You can submit today jobs to this grid, but read more...
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Firefly satellite will study thunderstorms
The Firefly mission is the second project under the new U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CubeSat program. The goal of this program is to provide a low cost access to space research. Firefly will be launched in 2010 or 2011 and will try to 'solve the mystery of the most powerful natural particle accelerator in Earth's atmosphere: TGFs, or terrestrial gamma-ray flashes,' according to this NSF news release. As I wrote recently, satellites can cost several hundreds of millions of dollars. But the Firefly represents a new kind of satellite. It is small -- the size of a football (4" by 4" by 12") and the cost to develop, launch, and operate it for three years during its science mission is expected to be less than $1 million. Read more...
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Fast and cheap blood tests
According to this article from Technology Review, U.S. researchers have developed an integrated blood barcode chip which can identify what's in your blood in less than 10 minutes. Instead of going to a lab, having a shot, and waiting for results for a day or two, this new chip will allow physicians to practice sophisticated exams in their offices by using a single drop of your blood. And these tests will be very cheap compared to existing procedures. If this chip becomes widely available, you might one day enter your physician's office and learn a few minutes after that you have a cancer. Of course, such blood chips are a good thing, but they also are frightening. Read more...
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1,000-device personal networks in 2017?
According to ICT Results in 'The Network of Everything,' wireless experts estimate that our personal networks will include about a thousand devices in 2017, including dozens of sensors checking our health and our home. This is why European researchers have launched in 2006 a networking project called 'MAGNET Beyond.' The name is an acronym for 'My personal adaptive Global NET and beyond.' The article suggests that the researchers have in fact built the Smart Personal Network, which integrates the concepts of Personal Networks (PNs) and Personal Area Networks (PANs). Read more to discover the results already achieved...
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