Solar-Powered Future

EFFORTS TO DRIVE DOWN COSTS REMAIN PARAMOUNT, WHILE OVERCAPACITY MAY DOOM SOME SOLAR CELL MAKERS.


September,09 swept in with good news for Solyndra Inc. The maker of cylindrical solar photovoltaic panels was announced as the recipient of a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy to finance construction of the first phase of its second solar panel manufacturing facility.

This loan guarantee is the first issued under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Vice President Joe Biden, who announced the loan finalization, identified it as "part of the unprecedented investment this administration is making in renewable energy."

Solar projects seem to make news almost daily. Just ahead of the Solyndra announcement, for example, e Solar in August unveiled its 5-megawatt Sierra Sun Tower solar power plant, and Solient Energy opened a pilot production facility capable of producing 1 megawatt of solar panels annually, the company said.

In the USA more than 62,000 new solar thermal and solar electric installations were completed in 2008, up 16% over the previous year, according to the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. On a global scale, capacity is expected to boom in 2009. Research firm Display Search has forecast solar cell producing capacity growing by 56% in 2009.

That capacity growth has a potential downside. DisplaySearch forecasts a 17% drop in PV module demand in 2009, with a recovery beginning in 2010. For now that means Charles Annis says "the PV industry is currently experiencing an enormous over-supply that is causing rapid price erosion and potentially setting the stage for the failure of multiple cell manufacturers".
At the heart of solar energy research is the drive to reduce manufacturing costs. Researchers at the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley report they have demonstrated a way to fabricate efficient solar cells from low-cost, flexible materials. The design grows optically active semiconductors in arrays of nano-scale pillars. The nano-pillar array offers a greater surface to collect light than two-dimensional solar cells.

Meanwhile, solar company Sky Fuels has teamed with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to develop the Sky Trough Parabolic Trough Solar Concentrating Collector. Designed for utility-sized power generation, this innovation allows Sky Trough to reduce installed costs by 35%, according to the NREL. And at Kansas State University, professor Ryszard Jankowiak has received a grant to study photosynthetic complexes from a type of bacteria. The research could one day aid in the development of devices that more efficiently convert solar energy into electricity.



Quantum 'trampoline' to test gravity
WAY TO TEST THE STRENGTH OF GRAVITY WITH HIGH ACCURACY

To test theories such as general relativity, the strength of gravity is measured precisely using ensembles of supercold atoms falling in a vacuum chamber. These ensembles are called "Bose-Einstein condensates".

BECs act in a quantum-mechanical wave-like fashion and interfere with each other. The interference pattern depends on the paths the atoms take, so gravity's effect on how fast they fall can be calculated by analysing the pattern with an interferometer. The longer the fall, the more precise the measurement – but the harder it is to keep the ensemble intact.

"The longer your interferometer, the more precise is your measurement," says Thomas Bourdel of the Charles Fabry Institute of Optics in Palaiseau, France. "But you are limited by the size of your apparatus."

Now Philippe Bouyer of the Institute of Optics in Palaiseau, France, along with Bourdel and colleagues have increased the fall time with a "quantum trampoline".

In a microscopic chamber, they fired a specially designed laser pulse at the falling BECs. The pulse affected the BECs in the same way that a crystal lattice can affect light: since the atoms exhibit wave-like behaviour, they can be diffracted in a similar way to light in a crystal.

By tuning the laser, the team were able to split up the wave, causing some of its components to bounce upwards. When the parts fell back down, the laser was pulsed so they split again, and so on. Eventually the parts recombined in an interference pattern.

The device is less precise than existing atom interferometers, but the team plan to improve precision markedly by, for instance, using lighter atoms. Lighter atoms like helium and lithium will levitate for longer after each bounce than heavier atoms. This has the same effect as creating a longer interferometer with heavier atoms.



SOLAR SAILING
DESPITE EARLIER FAILURES, THE PLANETARY SOCIETY IS GEARING UP TO TEST ANOTHER SOLAR SAIL IN SPACE IN A YEAR

Earlier this week, the Planetary Society, a space advocacy group in Pasadena, California, received an anonymous donation to build and launch a small solar-sail driven spacecraft.

The Society hopes to launch the sail in about a year as part of a three-stage plan to demonstrate the viability of solar sail propulsion, which has never been tested in orbit. The group says it is the only practical technology that might be used for interstellar travel, since the light generates a small but constant pressure that should accelerate a sail to high speeds over time.

New Scientist caught up with Louis Friedman, the organization's executive director, to find out more about the promise and challenge of solar sailing.

A solar sail is a device that collects sunlight and transfers the energy of the sunlight to the momentum of the spacecraft. It uses pure light, reflecting off the sail, so you want a large area to collect a lot of photons and you want it highly reflective so you get a high efficiency of them bouncing off. We use aluminised mylar.

Solar Sail:

Solar sails (also called light sails or photon sails) are a form of spacecraft propulsion using the radiation pressure of light from a star or laser to push enormous ultra-thin mirrors to high speeds.
According to the Einstein relation, E = pc, photons have momentum, and hence light reflecting from a surface exerts a small amount of radiation pressure. In 1924, the Russian space engineer Friedrich Zander proposed that, since light provides a small amount of thrust, this effect could be used as a form of space propulsion requiring no fuel. Gathered across a large area, this thrust can provide significant acceleration. Over time, this acceleration can build considerable speed.

Changing course can be accomplished in two ways. First, the sail can allow gravity from a nearby mass, such as a star or planet, to alter its direction. Second, the sail can tilt away from the light source. This changes the direction of acceleration because any force applied to a sail's plane pushes at an angle perpendicular to its surface. Smaller auxiliary vanes can be used to gently pull the main sail into its new position.
The Idea:

The pressure of sunlight was noted by the early pioneers who discovered light. Felix Tisserand and others noted how light pressure affected comet [tails] back in the 19th century. The use of light to propel a spacecraft, that idea was invented by Fridrich Tsander and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky back in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. But it wasn't until the 1970s that anyone thought about practically doing it. Solar pressure force has been measured on spacecraft many times and it's been used in manoeuvres, but never as the single force to propel your way around in space.



VIRTUAL GRAPHICS CONTACT LENS
A CONTACT LENS FITTED WITH AN LED AND THE CIRCUITRY TO HARVEST POWER FROM RADIO WAVES IS THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS A NEW KIND OF HEAD-UP DISPLAY

A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.

Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. "Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away," says Parviz.

His research involves embedding nanoscale and microscale electronic devices in substrates like paper or plastic. He also wears contact lenses. "It was a matter of putting the two together," he says.

Fitting a contact lens with circuitry is challenging. The polymer cannot withstand the temperatures or chemicals used in large-scale microfabrication, Parviz explains. So, some components – the power-harvesting circuitry and the micro light-emitting diode – had to be made separately, encased in a biocompatible material and then placed into crevices carved into the lens.

One obvious problem is powering such a device. The circuitry requires 330 microwatts but doesn't need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna picks up power beamed from a nearby radio source. The team has tested the lens by fitting it to a rabbit.

Parviz says that future versions will be able to harvest power from a user's cell phone, perhaps as it beams information to the lens. They will also have more pixels and an array of microlenses to focus the image so that it appears suspended in front of the wearer's eyes.

Despite the limited space available, each component can be integrated into the lens without obscuring the wearer's view, the researchers claim. As to what kinds of images can be viewed on this screen, the possibilities seem endless. Examples include subtitles when conversing with a foreign-language speaker, directions in unfamiliar territory and captioned photographs. The lens could also serve as a head-up display for pilots or gamers.

Mark Billinghurst, director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory, in Christchurch, New Zealand, is impressed with the work. "A contact lens that allows virtual graphics to be seamlessly overlaid on the real world could provide a compelling augmented reality experience," he says. This prototype is an important first step in that direction, though it may be years before the lens becomes commercially available, he adds.

The University of Washington team will present their prototype at the Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCas 2009) conference at Beijing later this month.



CAMERA CAN FOLLOW FIRING NEURONS
Slow motion just got a whole lot slower, with a camera sensor able to film action at 1 million frames per second.

The black and white device is quick enough to capture impulses hurtling through firing nerve cells, and its resolution is good enough to film the microsecond-long pulse-like nerve signals that speed through networks of neurons at up to 180 kilometres per hour.

Capturing frames that last one-millionth of a second requires great sensitivity to light, as well as precise timing. The device uses an array of single-photon detectors, or SPADs, each hooked up to a tiny stopwatch. The stopwatch records when the SPAD is hit by an incoming photon, with an accuracy of around 100 picoseconds.

Wider view:

Each SPAD and its timer together act as a single-pixel camera, a setup that has been used for several years, says Edoardo Charbon at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Charbon is the coordinator of the pan-European Megaframe project, which is the first to make a silicon chip that combines many such devices into a image sensor. The chip works like the one in a digital camera and so can snap whole objects, not just tiny spots like individual SPADs. The current chip contains an array of 1024 SPADs and stopwatches: "No one has operated so many on a single chip before," says Charbon.


Short exposure:

Each Megaframe image is captured in just a few nanoseconds, and the device itself can capture one image per microsecond, or 1 million frames every second. "If every pixel was hit by a photon every microsecond, then you could measure 1024 million photons per second – that's one gigameasurement every second," says Charbon. In reality, however, not enough photons collide with SPADs to give such resolution.

The sensor could be fitted with a conventional camera lens, for example in mobile gadgets, says Charbon. But for now the team has attached it to a microscope to capture the firing of neurons. They use a technique called fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy. It exploits the fact that, when illuminated, some molecules absorb photons before discharging the energy shortly afterwards in a second photon of another colour.

The Megaframe sensor detects those emitted photons and measures how long they take to appear after the initial photon is absorbed. This can reveal the properties of the emitting molecule. "The distribution varies in a predictable way depending on the local environment – for instance, the calcium concentration," Charbon says.

Because the ion channels in neurons fire when there is a build-up of calcium around them, the technique offers a way to monitor neuron activity. And because the chip can handle up to 1024 photons at the same time, it can record a moving image of the neuron to show exactly how a nerve signal travels through it.

Speed of thought:

Using the Megaframe chip to capture a million images a second, it will be possible to "film" the impulses moving around a small network of neurons, says Charbon.

Carl Petersen at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne used a previous generation of the chip, containing fewer SPADs, to "film" similar processes. "This new chip will be extremely useful," he says.

Neuroscientist Alessandro Esposito at the University of Cambridge is excited about the new perspectives Megaframe could provide.

He says the new chip can map events so fast-moving that currently they can only be recorded by electrical measurements which give no spatial information. "The Megaframe impact on lifetime sensing will be momentous," he says. It could, for instance, lead to a better understanding of the molecular basis of cancer.



LETS SEE THROUGH WALLS: Transparent wall
AUGMENTED REALITY SYSTEM LETS YOU SEE THROUGH WALLS

If only drivers could see through walls, blind corners and other dangerous road junctions would be much safer. Now an augmented reality system has been built that could just make that come true.

The prototype uses two cameras: one that captures the driver's view and a second that sees the scene behind a view-blocking wall. A computer takes the feed from the second camera and layers it on top of the images from the first so that the wall appears to be transparent.

This makes it simple to glance "through" a wall to see what's going on behind it. But the techniques needed to combine them were challenging to develop, says Yaser Sheikh of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Altered images:

The view of the hidden scene needs to be skewed so that it looks as if it were being viewed from the position of the person using the system. The system does this by spotting landmarks seen by both cameras: the one seeing the hidden view and the one with the same view as the user.

Sheikh and his colleagues also had to develop software that transforms moving objects in the images to avoid distortion.

Ultimately, the team want to build the system into a car. An onboard video processor would tune into a wireless feed from a roadside camera with a view of the hidden scene, such as a stretch of road behind a blind corner, and project the image of the hidden scene onto the windscreen rather than a monitor.

The project is funded by Denso, a car parts manufacturer based in Kariya, Japan.

Future view:

"It's an interesting peek into the future," says Bruce Thomas of the University of South Australia in Adelaide. He points out that many cities already have networks of CCTV cameras that could provide footage of hidden scenes.

Such a network could be supplemented by images from cameras mounted on many cars, says Shiekh. The Carnegie team is working on software that integrates feeds in footage from such sources into the system.

But Thomas adds that several formidable hurdles will have to be cleared before the technology can be used on public highways. Fast, powerful data processing and communication would be required to make the system work usefully in a moving car in real time.



BREATH FRESH AIR, TRANSFORMS STEM CELLS
BREATH OF FRESH AIR AND TRANSFORMS YOUR STEM CELLS

Mimicking the environment experienced by cells in the windpipe is enough to transform stem cells into a range of different lung cells. Such "physical" techniques could be used to create specialized tissues when growth factors alone aren't enough.

Lindsey Van Haute of the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium and colleagues spread human embryonic stem cells onto a porous membrane. The cells were fed from beneath by nutrients and from above by a fluid that encouraged them to multiply. Removing two chemicals from the growth fluid kick started differentiation.

Four days later, the team removed the fluid covering the cells, leaving them open to the air while still being sustained and supported from below, as they would be in the trachea. After 24 days the cells had developed surface proteins that identified them as specific types of lung cell, including alveolar cells, which allow the exchange of gases, and cilia, which expel bacteria and dirt.

Physical influence:

"Our study proves differentiation into lung cells is influenced by physical forces," says Van Haute. Previously, stem cells have been made to differentiate into lung cells using a cocktail of different growth factors, but Haute says using physical forces might be simpler.

"Physical forces are certainly a factor in getting the lung lining to be fully functional," says Anne Bishop at Imperial College London, who has made alveolar cells from mouse stem cells using growth factors alone. "But I find it difficult to believe that raw stem cells would differentiate through to these uncommon types of cells solely in response to physical forces."

Haute's team plans to use the cells they created to study lung diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. Such cells might one day be used to treat people with damaged lung tissue, but only if the cells can be made from a person's own tissue. This could be done by converting the cells first into induced pluripotent stem cells.

Digital Revolution Short Film Competition - the shortlist announced

The Digital Revolution short film competition has closed for entries and we have spent some fantastic hours watching and short-listing the entries to present to the judges next week to deliberate and find two winners.

We have to extend a huge thank you to all those creative and skilled individuals who put forward their films for the competition. We provided the rushes, but you have all provided a tremendous amount of effort and imagination to create a superb collection of films to genuinely enjoy viewing.

The shortlist of people whose film entries are going forward to the final judging stage are as follows:

Dimitra Nikitaki - Young People and Social Media
Alexander Urazov - Digital Revolution Trailer
Richard Adamson - Press Play To Start
Tom Dixon - Trailer for Digital Revolution
Naomi Desautels - The Internet: How It Is Planning To Overthrow The World And Kill Us All
Tamsin Comrie - Internet as Religion
Alex Hudd - The Digital Revolution
Matthew Keats - Future Web
Paul Wright - 01010010011001010111011001101111011011000111010101110100011010010110111101101110
Paul Carpenter - Digital Revolution Trailer
Steve Dean - Trapped in a Web
Tero Hiltunen - Craving Communication
Edward Sludden - Digital De-evolution
Mayowa Ojo - BBC The Web Promo

The shortlist will be taken to a judging panel consisting of BBC Factual Executive Producers Nick Mirsky and Dominic Crossley-Holland, and BBC Factual Multiplatform Executive Producer Julian Phillips, who will assess each film based on the judging criteria.

Winners will be contacted on 12 or 13 January 2010. If a selected entrant cannot be contacted after reasonable attempts have been made to do so, the BBC reserves the right to offer the prize to the next best entry.

Update

Our competition winners have now been contacted. If you were shortlisted and haven't heard from us, unfortunately you are not one of the winners. However, thanks for entering the competition, and do watch this space - all the shortlisted films and trailers will be published on the blog in due course.


Digital Revolution series title decided at last: The Virtual Revolution


Thanks for all your suggestions for a name for 'Digital Revolution'. It's taken a bit longer than we'd hoped, but as we've outlined here, we now have our series title: 'The Virtual Revolution'.

Let us know what you think!


Cassetteboy and Barry Pilling mash-up the message for the BBC Digital Revolution Short Film Competition


Masters of the video mash-up, Cassetteboy and Barry Pilling, have joined the Digital Revolution team to make mirth and entertainment with the Digital Revolution downloadable content, and hopefully provide some inspiration of ways in which you can use our content for the Digital Revolution Short Film Competition.

Please note that these short films were commissioned by us to provide inspiration - they aren't entered into the competition.

First up, Cassetteboy, whose fast-cutting mash-up videos are (in)famous around the web, applies his signature techniques to the Digital Revolution rushes to offer a unique collection of mashed statements about the web:
Next, Barry Pilling uses his stop-motion approach to create a brilliant interpretation of the Digital Revolution content - telling the multiplatform story in a literally multiplatform

You just knew they'd never be able to resist using Stephen Fry saying "LOL".

So hopefully this has whetted your appetites for the rushes and fanned the flames of your your creative fires to get involved with our short film competition.

Digital Revolution has been releasing rushes sequences from the ongoing production for you to watch, embed, download and re-use for your own video, and we thought it would be fun to run a competition for you to make a short film about the series themes or a trailer for the series as a whole. We've made our own little mash-up to explain this further:


In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.


Your short film or trailer could win a promo spot on the BBC Homepage and be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. The winners will also be invited to attend a documentary masterclass at the BBC and meet with a BBC Multiplatform Commissioning Executive. Just make something that educates, informs and entertains. You can find more of the details of the competition on the Digital Revolution Competition page.

After today (7 December 2009) we won't be uploading any further video rushes sequences until after the competition closes - 3 January 2010. So what you find on the rushes page is everything we will be putting up for use in the competition.

In fact, since we've been uploading more and more rushes sequences over the last couple of weeks, you have more rushes to play with than Cassetteboy or Barry Pilling had. So what are you waiting for? Get mashing!

Net scams profit from desperate jobseekers

The methods to defraud people online have been evolving since e-mail became the 21st Century's preferred method of communication.

Unsolicited e-mails announcing a lottery win or phishing correspondence asking for banking details have become common.

But as net users become savvy, scams are also becoming more sophisticated, for instance by seeking to exploit unemployed people during the economic downturn.

Unsolicited e-mails offering the chance of high-paid employment in fields such as financial services aim to gather people's personal information which could lead to identity theft.

However, once someone replies to these e-mails, the likelihood of gainful employment is very slim indeed.

'Too good to be true'

Caroline Coats, from scam advice website Cyberfraud.org.uk said the main fraudulent scheme at the moment is mystery shopper positions.

"The idea is it tells you about quite a lucrative job that you could be doing, maybe earning in excess of £100 a day, but you have to pay a sign up fee," she said.

"It doesn't sound quite too good to be true and that is what gets people to pay £34 to sign up".

When the net user has signed up, the fraudsters pocket their cash and disappear into the digital ether.

There are many variations of this employment scam, and similar ones have existed since the times when physical mail was the main method used by fraudsters.

Recruitment scams

Financial fraud can have particularly devastating consequences for its victims - one example is the money mule scam which turns unwitting users into money launderers for criminal gangs.

The process begins when a user applies for a job via a legitimate-looking recruitment website which is actually fake.

Andy Auld, head of intelligence for the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), said there had been a recent rise in such online banking crime.

"It's one thing to gain access to an account but it's very difficult to actually transfer funds to the country of origin of the attack," he explained.

Scams once attempted with letters have now moved to the internet


"Fraudsters need people in the UK to receive criminal transfers into bank accounts under their control, and this is where mule recruitment operations come in," he added.

He said the fake job adverts on websites are professionally crafted and usually for admin and services positions such as financial controllers.

"People get duped into applying for jobs that appear genuine and involve the forwarding of funds on behalf of e-commerce operations.

"It doesn't matter if you don't realise you are committing an offence," said Mr Auld.

"In certain aggravating circumstances you will actually face criminal prosecution and potential imprisonment for acting as a mule."

Identity theft

He added that bank account details, date of birth and e-mail addresses are valuable pieces of information to fraudsters - unwittingly sending these to criminals is tantamount to being recruited as a money launderer.

Ms Coats set up her advice website after falling victim to a money mule scam which resulted in her losing £14,500 and being arrested.

All charges were dropped when it became clear she was victim rather than perpetrator of the scam.

However, with the loss of funds there is also an ongoing risk of identity theft.

"Somebody in the world could have a passport in your name, opened a bank account in your name, and they can also register an address," Ms Coats said.

Video game success may be in the mind, study finds

If you find video games a struggle, it could be to do with the size of certain parts of your brain, a study suggests.

US researchers found they could predict how well an amateur player might perform on a game by measuring the volume of key sections of the brain.

Writing in the journal Cerebral Cortex, they suggest their findings could have wider implications for understanding the differences in learning rates.

There is broad acceptance of a link between brain size and intelligence.

However it remains a complicated picture. Within the animal kingdom some smaller brains appear superior to many larger ones: the monkey's compared with the horse, for instance, or the human and the elephant.

But there are certain parts of the brain which can be disproportionately larger, and this may explain some differences in cognitive ability - between individuals as well as species.

A multi-disciplinary team from the University of Illinois, the University of Pittsburgh and Massachusetts Institute of Technology recruited 39 adults - 10 men, 29 women - who had spent less than three hours each week playing video games in the previous two years.

They then had to play one of two versions of a specially developed game. One required them to focus exclusively on achieving a single goal, the other involved shifting priorities.

Playing power

MRI scans showed participants with a larger nucleus accumbens, which is part of the brain's reward centre, outperformed others in the first few hours, perhaps due to the "sense of achievement and the emotional reward" accompanying achievement in the earliest stages of learning, the team speculated.

But those players who ultimately performed best on the game in which priorities changed had larger sections deep in the centre of the brain, known as the caudate and putamen.

"This makes sense, because these areas have been linked to learning procedures and new skills, as well as adapting to changing environments. These people could do a number of things at once. Think of it like driving a car, as well as looking at the road, you're tampering with your GPS, and talking to your passengers," says Prof Arthur Kramer of the University of Illinois.

"The great thing about using a video game rather than methodical cognitive tests is that it brings us a step closer to the real world and the challenges people face."

In total, the team calculated that nearly a quarter of the difference in performance could be predicted by measuring the volume of the brain.

Keep trying

The findings should not however be used to support a determinist view of the world in which everyone simply had to accept the brain they were born with, nor as paving the way for a brave new world in which people's brains were regularly measured to predict their ability, Prof Kramer said.

"It has been shown that some parts of the brain are fairly plastic - they can change and develop. The more we learn about these structures and function the more we can understand the circuits that promote memory and learning. That can have educational benefits but also implications for an ageing population where dementia is an issue."

Timothy Bates, a professor of psychology at the University of Edinburgh, said the study's findings fitted with increasingly prevailing views about brain size and cognitive ability.

"But that's no excuse for saying I'm not going to bother doing my homework. The person born with the large brain can easily be outstripped by someone with a smaller brain. No matter what your brain size is, it's what you do with it that counts. Just remember the hare and the tortoise."

Digital world has feet on ground

We need atoms as well as bits, says Bill Thompson
I once got told off by the manager of the BBC's Heritage Collections for publishing a photograph of Alistair Cooke's typewriter in its display case on the second floor lobby of Bush House, home of the World Service.

It seemed that photography on BBC premises was not approved of, so I removed the image from Flickr.

I didn't want the people in charge of such things to stop exhibiting interesting artefacts because they were scared we might take photographs of them.


Fortunately things seem to have got a lot more relaxed since 2006, as the stream of BBC-related photos and videos on the world's many social networks demonstrates.

Cooke's typewriter fascinated me because it seemed to bring me close to the journalist himself, whose work I had long admired. It's long gone from the lobby, but I was reminded of it earlier this month when I saw another important typewriter, one owned and used by T S Eliot during his years working at Faber & Faber.

Few authors still use typewriters, and I have to admit to wallowing in nostalgia when I came across this particular item of literary memorabilia on display as part of In a Bloomsbury Square, the British Library's celebration of Faber's 80th anniversary.

Today books are largely written on the keyboards of laptop or desktop computers, and the typewriter belongs to a vanished age - despite the valiant efforts of my 18-year-old daughter who still writes essays on hers.

I was made vividly aware of how much things have changed last week during a visit to Melbourne, where I am speaking at a conference on the role of libraries in the networked world.

The Library's head of learning, Andrew Hiskens, gave me a tour around the collection at the State Library of Victoria, and it was a treat - here a volume from the Medici library, there a hand-written edition of Boethius in a script that looked like a modern font, while next to the illuminated manuscripts sits one of Caxton's earliest printed volumes.

Then we came across a display case containing the iBook G4 laptop on which Peter Carey wrote 'The True History of the Kelly Gang', sitting beside a marked up manuscript and editions of the book it was used to write.

More than words

On first glance, the laptop and the typewriter are just two different ways of putting words in order, but there is a fundamental difference: the laptop remembers.

The typewriter has no memory of the poems and letters written on it, while the laptop can be persuaded to recall the book it was used to create, and it may be the only place from which early drafts and abandoned versions can be conjured back into existence.
On first glance the laptop and the typewriter are just two different ways of putting words in order, but there is a fundamental difference: the laptop remembers.
Bill Thompson



Eliot's typewriter and Carey's laptop exist on the two sides of a gulf as wide as that between the hand-written copy of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and the early example of Caxton's printing that share space in the Victorian library; the gulf between the pre-computer world and the world we know today.

It is a world we are still building, and although we can make out some of its boundaries the final shape is far from certain. But it is not a "digital" world, and I think it's time we corrected the misapprehension that it might be.

We are not abandoning the physical or planning to give up our organic bodies and sublime into a mysterious form of conscious energy like the advanced species in Iain M Banks' Culture novels. We remain resolutely physical, and we remain reliant on old-fashioned analogue systems like eyes, ears and brains.

Digital content remains dependent on the physical world too, since data has to be stored somewhere, and some machine built of atoms is needed to process it. The digital world is really a hybrid world, one where analogue and digital co-exist, where the physical and the virtual come together in a mutually dependent relationship.

Those of us living in developed countries already inhabit a world in which most of the information we deal with, most of the time, is either created, manipulated or distributed as bits and relies on networks and computers for its existence or availability.

The change to this way of doing things is, as the long-time commentator on network culture Glyn Moody puts it, not just a once in a generation shift - it is a once in a civilisation shift. So it is no wonder that we feel dislocated by what is happening or that we are uncertain about the future. The last time our species tried to change things on this scale we invented agriculture.



Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet. He is currently working with the BBC on its archive project.

Google co-founders to sell shares

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are selling 10 million of their shares, raising $5.5bn (£3.4bn) at today's prices.

The stock sale means they will no longer have majority control. Their 59% voting rights will be reduced to 48% when the sale is completed.

Shares will be sold over a period of five years to avoid hurting the stock price as much as possible.

"They are both as committed as ever to Google," a spokeswoman said.

"They are integrally involved in our day-to-day management and product strategy. The majority of their net worth remains with Google" she added.

The fact that the pair are ceding majority control is seen as more symbolic than practical. Mr Brin and Mr Page run Google together with the chief executive Eric Schmidt, who has 10% voting power.

PlayStation 3 'hacked' by iPhone cracker

A US hacker who gained notoriety for unlocking Apple's iPhone as a teenager has told BBC News that he has now hacked Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3).

George Hotz said the hack, which could allow people to run pirated games or homemade software, took him five weeks.

He said he was still refining the technique but intended to post full details online soon.

The PS3 is the only games console that has not been hacked, despite being on the market for three years.

"It's supposed to be unhackable - but nothing is unhackable," Mr Hotz told BBC News.

"I can now do whatever I want with the system. It's like I've got an awesome new power - I'm just not sure how to wield it."

Sony said it was "investigating the report" and would "clarify the situation" when it had more information.

'Open curiosity'

Mr Hotz said that he had begun the hack last summer when he had spent three weeks analysing the hardware.

After a long break, he spent a further two weeks cracking the console, which he described as a "very secure system".

He said that he was not yet ready to reveal the full details of the hack but said that it was "5% hardware and 95% software".
The hack could allow gamers to play pirated games


"You can use hardware to inject an insecurity and then you can build on that," he said.

He admitted that he had not managed to hack the whole system, including the protected memory, but had worked out ways to trick the console into doing what he wanted.

Mr Hotz said that he was continuing to work on the hack and, once finished, would publish details online in a similar way to his previous iPhone exploits.

In particular, he said, he would publish details of the console's "root key", a master code that once known would make it easier for others to decipher and hack other security features on the console.

He said his motivation was "curiosity" and "opening up the platform".

"To tell you the truth, I've never really played a PS3," he said. "I have one game, but I've never really played it."

Opening the system could allow people to install other operating systems on their console and play homemade games, he said.

In addition, he said, the hack would allow people to play older PS2 games on their consoles.

Recent versions of the PS3 do not have the ability to play PS2 games after Sony controversially removed a piece of hardware.

He admitted that it could also allow people to run pirated games.

"I'm not going to personally have anything to do with that," he told BBC News.

Gaming firms do not take the issue of game piracy and console modification lightly. Recently, Microsoft disconnected thousands of gamers from its online gaming service Xbox Live for modifying their consoles to play pirated games.

Mr Hotz said that the nature of his PS3 hack means that Sony may have difficulty patching the exploit.

"We are investigating the report and will clarify the situation once we have more information," said a Sony spokesman.

Mr Hotz rose to fame in 2007 at the age of 17 when he unlocked the iPhone, which could only be used on the AT&T network in the US at launch.

The hack allowed the popular handset to be used on any network.

He has since released various other hacks, allowing people to unlock later versions of the popular handset

What is Technology?

Technology is the process by which humans modify nature to meet their needs and wants. Most people, however, think of technology in terms of its artifacts: computers and software, aircraft, pesticides, water-treatment plants, birth-control pills, and microwave ovens, to name a few. But technology is more than these tangible products.

Technology includes all of the infrastructure necessary for the design, manufacture, operation, and repair of technological artifacts, from corporate headquarters and engineering schools to manufacturing plants and maintenance facilities. The knowledge and processes used to create and to operate technological artifacts -- engineering know-how, manufacturing expertise, and various technical skills -- are equally important part of technology.

Technology is a product of engineering and science, the study of the natural world. Science has two parts: (1) a body of knowledge that has been accumulated over time and (2) a process-scientific inquiry-that generates knowledge about the natural world. Engineering, too, consists of a body of knowledge-in this case knowledge of the design and creation of human-made products-and a process for solving problems. Science aims to understand the "why" and "how" of nature, engineering seeks to shape the natural world to meet human needs and wants. Engineering, therefore, could be called "design under constraint," with science-the laws of nature-being one of a number of limiting factors engineers must take into account. Other constraints include cost, reliability, safety, environmental impact, ease of use, available human and material resources, manufacturability, government regulations, laws, and even politics. In short, technology necessarily involves science and engineering.

The Nature of Technology
Technology and Science
Technology and Innovation

The Nature of Technology

The nature of technology has changed dramatically in the past hundred years. Indeed, the very idea of technology as we now conceive it is relatively new.

For most of human history, technology was mainly the province of craftsmen who passed their know-how down from generation to generation, gradually improving designs, and adding new techniques and materials. By the beginning of the twentieth century, technology had become a large-scale enterprise that depended on large stores of knowledge and know-how, too much for any one person to master. Large organizations were now required for the development, manufacture, and operation of new technologies. Complex networks of interdependent technologies were developed, such as the suite of technologies for the automobile. These include gas and oil refineries, filling stations and repair shops, tire manufacturers, automobile assembly plants, the highway system, and many more. The government began to play a larger role in shaping technology through technological policies and regulations.

The meaning of the word "technology" evolved to reflect these changes. In the nineteenth century, technology referred simply to the practical arts used to create physical products, everything from wagon wheels and cotton cloth to telephones and steam engines. In the twentieth century, the meaning of the word was expanded to include everything involved in satisfying human material needs and wants, from factories and the organizations that operate them to scientific knowledge, engineering know-how, and technological products themselves.

As the nature of technology changed, its meaning became more vague, leaving room for misconceptions that sometimes led to questionable conclusions.

Technology and Science

Science and technology are tightly coupled. A scientific understanding of the natural world is the basis for much of technological development today. The design of computer chips, for instance, depends on a detailed understanding of the electrical properties of silicon and other materials. The design of a drug to fight a specific disease is made possible by knowledge of how proteins and other biological molecules are structured and how they interact.

Conversely, technology is the basis for a good part of scientific research. The climate models meteorologists use to study global warming require supercomputers to run the simulations. And like most of us, scientists in all fields depend on the telephone, the Internet, and jet travel.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the achievements of technology from those of science. When the Apollo 11 spacecraft put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, many people called it a victory of science. When a new type of material, such as lightweight, superstrong composites, emerges on the market, newspapers often report it as a scientific advance. Genetic engineering of crops to resist insects is also usually attributed wholly to science. And although science is integral to all of these advances, they are also examples of technology, the application of unique skills, knowledge, and techniques, which is quite different from science.

Technology and Innovation

Technology is also closely associated with innovation, the transformation of ideas into new and useful products or processes. Innovation requires not only creative people and organizations, but also the availability of technology and science and engineering talent. Technology and innovation are synergistic. The development of gene-sequencing machines, for example, has made the decoding of the human genome possible, and that knowledge is fueling a revolution in diagnostic, therapeutic, and other biomedical innovations.