For the myopic eyeball toucher, this is brilliant: an electronic contact lens case with a simple LED display that tells you how long it's been since you started wearing your current set of contacts. You can even customize the schedule from between 14 and 30 days, allowing you to throw out your contacts according to your optometrist's defined schedule, long before they get to the oogy petri dish protozoa stage. They go for about $34.

­If you thought the Apple iPhone was amazing, then feast your eyes -- and fingers -- on this phone from Samsung. Dubbed the Anycall Haptic, the phone features a large touch-screen display just like the iPhone. But it does Apple's revolutionary gadget one better, at least for now: It enables users to feel clicks, vibrations and other tactile input. In all, it provides the user with 22 kinds of touch sensations.
Those sensations explain the use of the term haptic in the name. Haptic is from the Greek "haptesthai," meaning to touch. As an adjective, it means relating to or based on the sense of touch. As a noun, usually used in a plural form (haptics), it means the science and physiology of the sense of touch. Scientists have studied haptics for decades, and they know quite a bit about the biology of touch. They know, for example, what kind of receptors are in the skin and how nerves shuttle information back and forth between the central nervous system and the point of contact.

Unfortunately, computer scientists have had great difficulty transferring this basic understanding of touch into their virtual reality systems. Visual and auditory cues are easy to replicate in computer-generated models, but tactile cues are more prob­lematic. It is almost impossible to enable a user to feel something happening in the computer's mind thro­ugh a typical interface. Sure, keyboards allow users to type in words, and joysticks and steering wheels can vibrate. But how can a user touch what's inside the virtual world? How, for example, can a video game player feel the hard, cold steel of his or her character's weapon? How can an astronaut, training in a computer simulator, feel the weight and rough texture of a virtual moon rock?

Since the 1980s, computer scientists have been trying to answer these questions. Their field is a specialized subset of haptics known as computer haptics. Over the next few pages, we'll cover how haptic technology works by:

·   relating computer haptics to related fields of haptics research

·   characterizing the types of haptic feedback required for realistic virtual touching

·   examining haptics systems either in development or currently available on the market

·   exploring current and potential applications

Of course, the promising future of haptics owes much to its history. In the next section, we'll examine this history to understand that computer haptics falls on a continuum of haptics research.

The Haptics Continuum

As a field of study, haptics has closely paralleled the rise and evolution of automation. Before the industrial revolution, scientists focused on how living things experienced touch. Biologists learned that even simple organisms, such as jellyfish and worms, possessed sophisticated touch responses. In the early part of the 20th century, psychologists and medical researchers actively studied how humans experience touch. Appropriately so, this branch of science became known as human haptics, and it revealed that the human hand, the primary structure associated with the sense of touch, was extraordinarily complex.

With 27 bones and 40 muscles, including muscles located in the forearm, the hand offers tremendous dexterity. Scientists quantify this dexterity using a concept known as degrees of freedom. A degree of freedom is movement afforded by a single joint. Because the human hand contains 22 joints, it allows movement with 22 degrees of freedom. The skin covering the hand is also rich with receptors and nerves, components of the nervous system that communicate touch sensations to the brain and spinal cord.

Then came the development of machines and robots. These mechanical devices also had to touch and feel their environment, so researchers began to study how this sensation could be transferred to machines. The era of machine haptics had begun. The earliest machines that allowed haptic interaction with remote objects were simple lever-and-cable-actuated tongs placed at the end of a pole. By moving, orienting and squeezing a pistol grip, a worker could remotely control tongs, which could be used to grab, move and manipulate an object.

In the 1940s, these relatively crude remote manipulation systems were improved to serve the nuclear and hazardous material industries. Through a machine interface, workers could manipulate toxic and dangerous substances without risking exposure. Eventually, scientists developed designs that replaced mechanical connections with motors and electronic signals. This made it possible to communicate even subtle hand actions to a remote manipulator more efficiently than ever before.

The next big advance arrived in the form of the electronic computer. At first, computers were used to control machines in a real environment (think of the computer that controls a factory robot in an auto assembly plant). But by the 1980s, computers could generate virtual environments -- 3-D worlds into which users could be cast. In these early virtual environments, users could receive stimuli through sight and sound only. Haptic interaction with simulated objects would remain limited for many years.

Then, in 1993, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) constructed a device that delivered haptic stimulation, finally making it possible to touch and feel a computer-generated object. The scientists working on the project began to describe their area of research as computer haptics to differentiate it from machine and human haptics. Today, computer haptics is defined as the systems required -- both hardware and software -- to render the touch and feel of virtual objects. It is a rapidly growing field that is yielding a number of promising haptic technologies.

Before we look at some of these technologies in greater detail, let's look at the types of touch sensations a haptic system must provide to be successful.

Types of Haptic Feedback

When we use our hands to explore the world around us, we receive two types of feedback -- kinesthetic and tactile. To understand the difference between the two, consider a hand that reaches for, picks up and explores a baseball. As the hand reaches for the ball and adjusts its shape to grasp, a unique set of data points describing joint angle, muscle length and tension is generated. This information is collected by a specialized group of receptors embedded in muscles, tendons and joints.

Known as proprioceptors, these receptors carry signals to the brain, where they are processed by the somatosensory region of the cerebral cortex. The muscle spindle is one type of proprioceptor that provides information about changes in muscle length. The Golgi tendon organ is another type of proprioceptor that provides information about changes in muscle tension. The brain processes this kinesthetic information to provide a sense of the baseball's gross size and shape, as well as its position relative to the hand, arm and body.

When the fingers touch the ball, contact is made between the finger pads and the ball surface. Each finger pad is a complex sensory structure containing receptors both in the skin and in the underlying tissue. There are many types of these receptors, one for each type of stimulus: light touch, heavy touch, pressure, vibration and pain. The data coming collectively from these receptors helps the brain understand subtle tactile details about the ball. As the fingers explore, they sense the smoother texture of the leather, the raised coarseness of the laces and the hardness of the ball as force is applied. Even the thermal properties of the ball are sensed through tactile receptors.

Force feedback is a term often used to describe tactile and/or kinesthetic feedback. As our baseball example illustrates, force feedback is vastly complex. Yet, if a person is to feel a virtual object with any fidelity, force feedback is exactly the kind of information the person must receive. Computer scientists began working on devices -- haptic interface devices -- that would allow users to feel virtual objects via force feedback. Early attempts were not successful. But as we'll see in the next section, a new generation of haptic interface devices is delivering an unsurpassed level of performance, fidelity and ease of use.

Haptic Systems

There are several approaches to creating haptic systems. Although they may look drastically different, they all have two important things in common -- software to determine the forces that result when a user's virtual identity interacts with an object and a device through which those forces can be applied to the user. The actual process used by the software to perform its calculations is called haptic rendering. A common rendering method uses polyhedral models to represent objects in the virtual world. These 3-D models can accurately portray a variety of shapes and can calculate touch data by evaluating how force lines interact with the various faces of the object. Such 3-D objects can be made to feel solid and can have surface texture.

The job of conveying haptic images to the user falls to the interface device. In many respects, the interface device is analogous to a mouse, except a mouse is a passive device that cannot communicate any synthesized haptic data to the user. Let's look at a few specific haptic systems to understand how these devices work.

·   The PHANTOM® interface from SensAble Technologies was one of the first haptic systems to be sold commercially. Its success lies in its simplicity. Instead of trying to display information from many different points, this haptic device simulates touching at a single point of contact. It achieves this through a stylus which is connected to a lamp-like arm. Three small motors give force feedback to the user by exerting pressure on the stylus. So, a user can feel the elasticity of a virtual balloon or the solidity of a brick wall. He or she can also feel texture, temperature and weight.

The stylus can be customized so that it closely resembles just about any object. For example, it can be fitted with a syringe attachment to simulate what it feels like to pierce skin and muscle when giving a shot.

·   The CyberGrasp system, another commercially available haptic interface from Immersion Corporation, takes a different approach. This device fits over the user's entire hand like an exoskeleton and adds resistive force feedback to each finger. Five actuators produce the forces, which are transmitted along tendons that connect the fingertips to the exoskeleton. With the CyberGrasp system, users are able to feel the size and shape of virtual objects that only exist in a computer-generated world. To make sure a user's fingers don't penetrate or crush a virtual solid object, the actuators can be individually programmed to match the object's physical properties.

·   Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are experimenting with a haptic interface that does not rely on actuated linkage or cable devices. Instead, their interface uses a powerful electromagnet to levitate a handle that looks a bit like a joystick. The user manipulates the levitated tool handle to interact with computed environments. As she moves and rotates the handle, she can feel the motion, shape, resistance and surface texture of simulated objects. This is one of the big advantages of a levitation-based technology: It reduces friction and other interference so the user experiences less distraction and remains immersed in the virtual environment. It also allows constrained motion in six degrees of freedom (compared to the entry-level Phantom interface, which only allows for three active degrees of freedom).

The one disadvantage of the magnetic levitation haptic interface is its footprint. An entire cabinet is required to house the maglev device, power supplies, amplifiers and control processors. The user handle protrudes from a bowl embedded in the cabinet top.

As you can imagine, systems like we've described here can be quite expensive. That means the applications of the technology are still limited to certain industries and specialized types of training. On the next page, we'll explore some of the applications of haptic technology.

Applications of Haptic Technology

It's not difficult to think of ways to apply haptics. Video game makers have been early adopters of passive haptics, which takes advantage of vibrating joysticks, controllers and steering wheels to reinforce on-screen activity. But future video games will enable players to feel and manipulate virtual solids, fluids, tools and avatars. The Novint Falcon haptics controller is already making this promise a reality. The 3-D force feedback controller allows you to tell the difference between a pistol report and a shotgun blast, or to feel the resistance of a longbow's string as you pull back an arrow.

Graphical user interfaces, like those that define Windows and Mac operating environments, will also benefit greatly from haptic interactions. Imagine being able to feel graphic buttons and receive force feedback as you depress a button. Some touchscreen manufacturers are already experimenting with this technology. Nokia phone designers have perfected a tactile touchscreen that makes on-screen buttons behave as if they were real buttons. When a user presses the button, he or she feels movement in and movement out. He also hears an audible click. Nokia engineers accomplished this by placing two small piezoelectric sensor pads under the screen and designing the screen so it could move slightly when pressed. Everything -- movement and sound -- is synchronized perfectly to simulate real button manipulation.

Although several companies are joining Novint and Nokia in the push to incorporate haptic interfaces into mainstream products, cost is still an obstacle. The most sophisticated touch technology is found in industrial, military and medical applications. Training with haptics is becoming more and more common. For example, medical students can now perfect delicate surgical techniques on the computer, feeling what it's like to suture blood vessels in an anastomosis or inject BOTOX into the muscle tissue of a virtual face. Aircraft mechanics can work with complex parts and service procedures, touching everything that they see on the computer screen. And soldiers can prepare for battle in a variety of ways, from learning how to defuse a ­bomb to operating a helicopter, tank or fighter jet in virtual combat scenarios.

Haptic technology is also widely used in teleoperation, or telerobotics. In a telerobotic system, a human operator controls the movements of a robot that is located some distance away. Some teleoperated robots are limited to very simple tasks, such as aiming a camera and sending back visual images. In a more sophisticated form of teleoperation known as telepresence, the human operator has a sense of being located in the robot's environment. Haptics now makes it possible to include touch cues in addition to audio and visual cues in telepresence models. It won't be long before astronomers and planet scientists actually hold and manipulate a Martian rock through an advanced haptics-enabled telerobot -- a high-touch version of the Mars Exploration Rover.

­On the next page, we'll take a look at how haptic technology has gained in its importance and is becoming essential in some applications.

The Importance of Haptic Technology

In video games, the addition of haptic capabilities is nice to have. It increases the reality of the game and, as a result, the user's satisfaction. But in training and other applications, haptic interfaces are vital. That's because the sense of touch conveys rich and detailed information about an object. When it's combined with other senses, especially sight, touch dramatically increases the amount of information that is sent to the brain for processing. The increase in information reduces user error, as well as the time it takes to complete a task. It also reduces the energy consumption and the magnitudes of contact forces used in a teleoperation situation.

Clearly, Samsung is hoping to capitalize on some of these benefits with the introduction of the Anycall Haptic phone. Nokia will push the envelope even farther when it introduces phones with tactile touchscreens. Yes, such phones will be cool to look at. And, yes, they will be cool to touch. But they will also be easier to use, with the touch-based features leading to fewer input errors and an overall more satisfying experience.

William Harris

The German government wants to build up to 30 offshore windfarms in a bid to meet its renewable energy targets, Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said in an interview published Sunday.

Tiefensee told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that the windfarms would be built in the Baltic and North seas and said some 2,000 windmills should soon be producing 11,000 megawatts of electricity.

The government is aiming to obtain "25,000 megawatts of energy from windfarms by 2030", Tiefensee said.

"The rise in the oil price has made this all the more pressing and the interest from investors shows that it is economically viable," he added.

The first windfarm will go up off Borkum island in the North Sea later this year, according Welt am Sonntag.

Earlier this year, the French energy giant Areva announced that it would sell windmills to the German renewable energy company Prokon Nord to enable it to build a windfarm near Borkum.

Germany's Bundestag or lower house of parliament passed a law last month aimed at increasing the amount of power generated by renewable energy sources like wind or solar power to 30 percent from the current 14 percent by 2020.

Wind energy currently makes up seven percent of the nation's energy consumption.

The new law was part of a long-awaited package aimed at fighting climate change agreed by Chancellor Angela Merkel's left-right coalition government.

The government has agreed to honour a decision to close the country's 17 nuclear power plants by 2020 but remains divided over the issue.

Merkel insists that a nuclear phase-out would hinder efforts to slash Germany's dependency on greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels.

But Tiefensee, a member of Merkel's Social Democrat coalition partners, said that investing in windfarms was better than keeping the nuclear plants running.

"We believe in renewable energy and not in nuclear energy." >>>>

The body that oversees the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty offered its unique know-how Wednesday to countries that ring the Pacific Ocean to warn them of killer tsunamis.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) said that, by providing fast and reliable seismic and hydroacoustic data, it could help Pacific Rim nations "issue timely and reliable tsunami alerts".

"Agreements for tsunami warning purposes will shortly be concluded between the preparatory commission for the CTBTO and several organizations in Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, the United States, Thailand and Malaysia," it said in a statement.

Data is already being provided to tsunami warning organisations in Australia, Japan, Malaysia and the United States, in the wake of the December 26, 2004 tsunami that killed nearly 220,000 people in southeast Asia.

Since that disaster, the international community has spent about 60 million dollars to set up a tsunami early warning system. Most of the funding went to Indonesia, which was hardest hit.

The preparatory commission of the CTBTO was established in 1996 to lay the groundwork for implementation of the nuclear test ban treaty once it enters into force.

Some 114 nations now are parties to the treaty, which however cannot take effect before it is embraced unanimously by a select group of 44 nations that includes China and the United States, which have so far failed to ratify it.

To enforce the treaty, a worldwide network of well over 300 monitoring stations -- above ground, below ground and beneath the sea -- is envisioned, providing data that could also help respond to tsunami threats. >>>>

Placing solar panels in space above both night and clouds was first considered 40 years ago. But the estimated cost was, in a word, astronomical.

The idea, however, has seen a resurgence, thanks to rising oil prices and advances in solar technology. A report from U.S. Defense Department found that space-based solar is technically feasible and economically viable.

To help prove the point, the Air Force Academy recently announced plans for a small demonstration satellite that would beam down a meager, but still significant, 0.1 watts of solar power.

"Our vision is to build the world's first-ever space-based solar power system to light a single bulb on Earth and in so doing light the path for business to follow," said Col. Michael "Coyote" Smith of the Air Force.

The type of transmission beam is still not decided, but the project may benefit from separate research in Japan that has been studying the two most likely technologies: microwaves and lasers.

In the full light of space

The sun puts out more than 10 trillion times the energy currently being consumed by the whole world.

"We would only need to tap into a small fraction of that to get all our energy now and in many years to come," said Mark Hopkins, senior vice president of the National Space Society, which recently formed an alliance with other non-profits to promote space-based solar.

The advantage of going to space is that sunlight is constant up there and three to 13 times stronger than the average down here on Earth, Smith said.

The first suggestion of a solar power satellite was in 1968, but early estimates put the price tag around $1 trillion, largely because astronauts would have had to construct the facility back then.

Now robots can do the job, installing improved-efficiency solar cells in a modular fashion, for 100 times cheaper than before.

"If you decide to go now with today's technology, you're talking about the same cost as ground-based solar," Hopkins said, which is around 30 cents per kilowatt-hour.

That's still too high, according to Hopkins, but he thinks costs will continue to come down, especially if development dollars start coming in. The Pentagon-sponsored report offered a roadmap for how to build a 10-megawatt test satellite over the next 10 years for $10 billion.

But where that money will come from is hard to say. According to Hopkins, NASA sees this as an energy application and the Department of Energy sees this as a space enterprise.

"There are bureaucratic problems finding a home for this project," he said.

Japan plans ahead

The Japanese space agency, JAXA, has been providing steady support over the past decade for their Space Solar Power System (SSPS). The goal is to launch a geostationary satellite by 2030 that could supply 500,000 homes on Earth with a gigawatt of power.

Currently, JAXA researchers are looking at both microwaves and lasers as possible options for beaming the energy down.

"The technology for microwave transmission is more advanced, since it is based on current communication satellites," said Susumu Sasaki, a manager at JAXA's Advanced Mission Research Group.

But to transmit huge amounts of power in a focused beam, the transmitting antenna in space needs to be roughly 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) wide. A receiving antenna of similar size or bigger must be built on Earth.

The alternative would be a laser. Japanese scientists have been working on metal alloy plates that can absorb sunlight and directly convert it into an infrared laser beam.

The advantage is that the transmitting and receiving devices can be about 10 times smaller than for microwaves, Sasaki said. Lasers also do not carry the risk of interfering with communication networks that use microwaves.

However, lasers cannot go through clouds like microwaves can, so about half of the beam energy is lost if lasers are used.

Another problem is that a laser-beaming satellite sounds like a weapon, even though Hopkins thinks there would be ways to ensure that it never gets used in such a way.

In contrast, microwave transmission is too low of intensity to be considered dangerous. A person could safely walk across where the targeted beam hits the Earth, according to Hopkins.

"You would feel it as some extra warmth, like on a sunny day," he said.

Sooner than later

Smith said that both microwaves or lasers were being considered for the Air Force project, which was announced earlier this month at the International Space Development Conference.

"Although our architecture is far from decided, we have adopted the mantra keep it cheap and simple and deliver it soon," he said.

They plan to stay under $10 million with a 400-pound (181-kilogram) satellite in low Earth orbit. It may be able to piggyback on another mission and use inflatable solar arrays. Smith hopes it will launch in 2010.

"We want to get this rolling," he said.

·                     Top 10 Disruptive Technologies

·                     How Less Zoom Zoom Could Power the Future

·                     Solar Power From Space: A Better Strategy for America and the World?

Michael Schirber

Gamma rays are blamed for making Bruce Banner the Incredible Hulk. But what are gamma rays and what can they really do?

Gamma rays are the highest energy form of light. The rainbow of visible light that we are most familiar with is just part of a far broader spectrum of light, the electromagnetic spectrum. Past the red end of the rainbow, where wavelengths get longer, are infrared rays, microwaves and radio waves, while beyond violet lie the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet rays, X-rays and, finally, gamma rays.

A gamma ray packs at least 10,000 times more energy than a visible light ray. Unlike the Incredible Hulk, gamma rays are not green - lying as they do beyond the visible spectrum, gamma rays have no color at all that we can describe.

Death rays

Exactly how Bruce Banner survives his transformation is unclear.

Just as high doses of X-rays are typically lethal, so too would an explosion of gamma rays kill the average person.

Gamma rays can knock electrons around like a bowling ball would bowling pins. These charged particles can then disrupt any chemical bond they come across, wreaking havoc on the delicate chemical machinery of the cell and generating molecular fragments that can act as toxins.

To put it gently, a gamma bomb in the real world would not turn Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk. Rather, it would likely quickly turn him into a corpse dead from radiation sickness, if not incinerating him instantly.

Still, gamma rays can have medical applications - a medical device known as the gamma knife can kill tumors by aiming gamma rays at a patient's brain.

When Bruce Banner becomes the Incredible Hulk, his body swells with muscles seemingly from out of nowhere. Intriguingly, gamma rays can be so powerful that they can actually create matter. This is because, as Einstein's formula E = mc2 explains, energy can get converted to matter, and vice versa. Extraordinarily high-energy gamma rays, such as ones that black holes can generate, can yield pairs of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, known as positrons. (Whether the Incredible Hulk uses gamma rays to violate the law of conservation of matter and grow is another question.)

Gamma rays in space

Gamma rays are created under some of the most violent events in the universe, such as the death of stars. The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), set to launch June 11, will be the first gamma-ray observatory to survey the entire sky every day with unprecedented sensitivity, and the hope is that it will open a dramatic new window onto the cosmos. (GLAST will receive a new name once in orbit, chosen from some 12,000 suggestions given by the general public around the world, and the name "Hulk" did come up.)

In particular, GLAST could shed light on mysterious gamma ray bursts, which can unleash as much energy as our sun during its entire 10 billion year lifetime in anywhere from milliseconds to a minute or more. Just as the Incredible Hulk "is the strongest one there is," as he says himself, so too are gamma ray bursts the most powerful explosions known.

Indeed, just as the Incredible Hulk is strong enough to destroy the entire planet, so too can a gamma ray burst kill life on this world. A "death star" was recently discovered that might one day explode with a gamma ray burst directed straight at us - although it might readily miss.

·                     Movie Review: 'Incredible Hulk'

·                     Liv Tyler on Being Beauty to the Hulk's Beast

·                     All About Light

Charles Q. Choi

Perhaps ET is just a solar system away, and perhaps all we need is one more telescope to find him. That's the hope, at least, of some scientists who say a new radio observatory being built in Europe may hold a chance of finding alien life beyond our planet.

The Low Frequency Array, or LOFAR, is a network of up to 25,000 small antennae being built in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, France and the United Kingdom. The distributed radio arrays will collectively scan the universe in the low radio frequency of light when they are completed in 2009.

"LOFAR can extend the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to an entirely unexplored part of the low-frequency radio spectrum, an area that is heavily used for civil and military communications here on Earth," said Michael Garrett, general director of ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and professor of radio techniques in astronomy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. "In addition, LOFAR can survey large areas of the sky simultaneously — an important advantage if SETI signals are rare or transient in nature."

So far, the world's most famous alien-hunting telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, has been unsuccessful in locating extraterrestrials. The giant dish, which has been listening for radio waves since 1963, may even have to shut down in a few years if it can't recover the funding lost since the National Science Foundation decided to reduce its budget. LOFAR will scan a lower-frequency range of the electromagnetic spectrum than Arecibo — the very range in which we Earthlings broadcast television and radio signals. Some scientists hope that LOFAR offers the chance to tune in to an alien version of "I Love Lucy."

But others are skeptical of this suggestion.

LOFAR will probably not be sensitive enough to detect ET's TV, unless the aliens are broadcasting with much more powerful television transmitters than we have, said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in California. He calculated that an alien version of LOFAR would have to be at a distance of less than one light-year away from Earth to detect our television signals, which is closer than the closest star.

Furthermore, broadcasting TV out into space is already becoming passe on Earth, where most of us get our signal through a cable in the wall, not rabbit ears on top of the set. Soon, we may forego over-the-air broadcasting altogether.

"Presumably, ET has done all that, and to think that ET television will still be broadcast into space the way we do, I think is being a bit na�ve," Shostak told SPACE.com. "The chances that they're at the same level as us are very, very small."

Still, to those who spend their time hunting and hoping for ET to finally phone home, any new tool that might aid the quest is welcome, such as SETI@home, which allows people to donate their personal computers' down time to the search.

"SETI searches are still only scratching the surface; we need to use as many different telescopes, techniques and strategies as possible, in order to maximize our chances of success," said Dan Werthimer, SETI@home project scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

·                                 VIDEO: Figuring Out the Odds of ET Existing

·                                 All About SETI

·                                 Listening For ET's Television

Clara Moskowitz

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission says he is satisfied the $3.8 billion merger of the nation's only two satellite radio companies is in the public's interest, but that's no guarantee the deal will win final approval.

Two of the other four commissioners are ardent foes of allowing big media companies to get bigger and a third has been sympathetic to the broadcast industry, which opposes the satellite radio deal.

Some powerful members of Congress also have spoken out against the merger. Put it all together, and approval of the deal is anything but a slam dunk.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin said Sunday he will recommend that Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.'s buyout of rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. be approved by the five-member commission.

The companies offered concessions, including turning 24 channels over to noncommercial and minority programming and a three-year price freeze on service.

Commissioners can vote as soon as they receive Martin's order recommending the deal, which was expected late Monday.

The other four commissioners have kept their views on the deal largely to themselves. Unlike in other major decisions, Martin has no indication how they may vote. A three-vote majority is needed for approval.

The two Democrats on the commission — Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein — have strongly opposed efforts to loosen rules on media ownership. But they may agree to the deal if they believe concessions offered by Sirius and XM are significant enough.

"As I've said from the beginning, this merger is a steep climb for me. That hasn't changed," Copps said Monday in a statement. Copps said he will review Martin's proposal with an open mind.

Republican commissioner Robert McDowell has portrayed himself as a supporter of free markets and limited government intervention, suggesting he will vote in favor of the deal.

The two Democrats "lean pretty heavily against" the deal, said Blair Levin, a former FCC chief of staff and now an analyst with the investment firm of Stifel Nicolaus. He agreed McDowell probably will support it.

The third Republican, Deborah Taylor Tate, generally has voted with the chairman in the past, but she has shown a streak of independence lately. In public remarks, she has shown sympathy for broadcasters and has been courted heavily by them recently. She is also politically vulnerable, given that she still awaits confirmation by the Senate for another term.

But the Justice Department's approval of the merger in March bodes well for the companies, Levin said. He said he was unaware of any merger approved by the Justice Department but then rejected by the FCC.

The XM-Sirius deal will affect millions of subscribers who pay to hear music, news, sports and talk programming, largely free from advertising, in homes and vehicles. Under the proposal, XM shareholders will receive 4.6 shares of Sirius stock for every share of XM they own. XM shareholders, based on Monday's closing price of Sirius shares, would receive about $3.85 billion.

The FCC's analysis of the XM-Sirius deal has lasted twice as long as the agency prefers in merger reviews, largely because it has faced a special hurdle: To ensure competition, the FCC prohibited the merger of the only two license holders when it created the industry in 1997.

That spurred the companies to offer significant conditions in an attempt to convince regulators the deal would be in the public interest.

Among some of the other promises, the companies have agreed to an "open radio" standard, meant to create competition among manufacturers of satellite radios. In addition, the companies have pledged to offer radios that are capable of receiving both services within one year.

The combined company would also include a so-called "a la carte" offering that would be available within three months of the close of the buyout.

Washington-based XM reported 9.3 million subscribers through the first three months of the year while New York City-based Sirius reported 8.6 million subscribers.

JOHN DUNBAR

Roadrunner supercomputer is first to break petaflop barrier

A new supercomputer in the U.S. has broken a barrier that many thought wouldn’t be broken for years to come. A new supercomputer-- dubbed Roadrunner-- has broken the petaflop barrier.

Roadrunner was designed by engineers and scientists at IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Ultimately, Roadrunner will be placed into a classified environment where it will be used to simulate what effects aging has on the stockpile of nuclear weapons the U.S. has in its arsenal. The problem it will work on is modeling how aging nuclear weapons behave the first fraction of a second during an explosion. Before beginning its nuclear weapons research, Roadrunner will be used to model the effects of global warming.

The Roadrunner supercomputer costs $133 million and is built using chips from both consumer electronics and more common server processors.

Roadrunner has 12,960 chips that are an improved version of the Cell chip used in the PS3. These Cell processors act as a turbocharger for certain portions of the calculations the Roadrunner processes. The computer also uses a smaller, unspecified number of AMD Opteron processors.

A computer researcher from the University of Tennessee, Jack Dongarra told the New York Times, “This [breaking the petaflop barrier] is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing.”

Horst Simon from the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory said, “Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade. Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cell phones and embedded electronics.”

Technology first appearing in the consumer electronics market and then making its way into supercomputing is a stark contrast to a process that commonly works in the exact opposite manner.

In total, Roadrunner has 116,640 processing cores and the real challenge for programmers is figuring out how to keep all of those processing cores in use simultaneously to get the best performance. Roadrunner requires about 3 megawatts of power, or about enough electricity to run a large shopping center.

To put the processing power in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino of the National Nuclear Security Administration said that if all 6 billion people on Earth entered calculations on a calculator for 24 hours a day, seven days per week it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day.

How Roadrunner is cooled is unknown, IBM has recently moved to liquid cooling for its supercomputers, but Roadrunner appears to be air cooled. >>>>

Security scanners which can see through passengers' clothing and reveal details of their body underneath are being installed in 10 US airports, the US Transportation Security Administration said Tuesday.

A random selection of travellers getting ready to board airplanes in Washington, New York's Kennedy, Los Angeles and other key hubs will be shut in the glass booths while a three-dimensional image is made of their body beneath their clothes.

The booths close around the passenger and emit "millimeter waves" that go through cloth to identify metal, plastics, ceramics, chemical materials and explosives, according to the TSA.

While it allows the security screeners -- looking at the images in a separate room -- to clearly see the passenger's sexual organs as well as other details of their bodies, the passenger's face is blurred, TSA said in a statement on its website.

The scan only takes seconds and is to replace the physical pat-downs of people that is currently widespread in airports.

TSA began introducing the body scanners in airports in April, first in the Phoenix, Arizona terminal.

The installation is picking up this month, with machines in place or planned for airports in Washington (Reagan National and Baltimore-Washington International), Dallas, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Miami and Detroit.

But the new machines have provoked worries among passengers and rights activists.

"People have no idea how graphic the images are," Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, told AFP.

The ACLU said in a statement that passengers expecting privacy underneath their clothing "should not be required to display highly personal details of their bodies such as evidence of mastectomies, colostomy appliances, penile implants, catheter tubes and the size of their breasts or genitals as a pre-requisite to boarding a plane."

Besides masking their faces, the TSA says on its website, the images made "will not be printed stored or transmitted."

"Once the transportation security officer has viewed the image and resolved anomalies, the image is erased from the screen permanently. The officer is unable to print, export, store or transmit the image."

Lara Uselding, a TSA spokeswoman, added that passengers are not obliged to accept the new machines.

"The passengers can choose between the body imaging and the pat-down," she told AFP.

TSA foresees 30 of the machines installed across the country by the end of 2008. In Europe, Amsterdam's Schipol airport is already using the scanners. >>>>