# By Chris Kohler Email Author
# December 30, 2009 |
# 8:00 pm |
# Categories: Console Games, Portable Gaming
10. Flower (PlayStation 3)
This beautiful, dreamlike game sets itself apart from the darkness and violence of most games. And it actually uses the PlayStation 3’s motion controls (remember those?). Tilt the controller to gather flower petals and bring color back to a dreary landscape and a sinister-looking city. Flower is great fun — and relaxing, too, thanks to the lack of any possibility of failure. Even the closing credits are pretty. – Daniel Feit
Flower probably (OK, definitely) got too much hype prior to its release, but the final product is worth playing. The dynamic music that accompanied your petals’ journey through the wind, plinking out another note each time you revitalized another flower, is one of the game’s unsung features: Lots of games have pretty graphics and music, but few this sort of intertwined Fantasia-style visual symphony. – Chris Kohler
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
* By Richard Martin Email Author
* December 21, 2009 |
* 10:00 am |
* Wired Jan 2010
The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s title — Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world’s energy future.
Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a linebacker’s build and a marine’s crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.
Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.
Today, however, Sorensen spearheads a cadre of outsiders dedicated to sparking a thorium revival. When he’s not at his day job as an aerospace engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama — or wrapping up the master’s in nuclear engineering he is soon to earn from the University of Tennessee — he runs a popular blog called Energy From Thorium. A community of engineers, amateur nuclear power geeks, and researchers has gathered around the site’s forum, ardently discussing the future of thorium. The site even links to PDFs of the Oak Ridge archives, which Sorensen helped get scanned. Energy From Thorium has become a sort of open source project aimed at resurrecting long-lost energy technology using modern techniques.
And the online upstarts aren’t alone. Industry players are looking into thorium, and governments from Dubai to Beijing are funding research. India is betting heavily on the element.
The concept of nuclear power without waste or proliferation has obvious political appeal in the US, as well. The threat of climate change has created an urgent demand for carbon-free electricity, and the 52,000 tons of spent, toxic material that has piled up around the country makes traditional nuclear power less attractive. President Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, have expressed general support for a nuclear renaissance. Utilities are investigating several next-gen alternatives, including scaled-down conventional plants and “pebble bed” reactors, in which the nuclear fuel is inserted into small graphite balls in a way that reduces the risk of meltdown.
Those technologies are still based on uranium, however, and will be beset by the same problems that have dogged the nuclear industry since the 1960s. It is only thorium, Sorensen and his band of revolutionaries argue, that can move the country toward a new era of safe, clean, affordable energy.
Named for the Norse god of thunder, thorium is a lustrous silvery-white metal. It’s only slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm. On the periodic table of elements, it’s found in the bottom row, along with other dense, radioactive substances — including uranium and plutonium — known as actinides.
Actinides are dense because their nuclei contain large numbers of neutrons and protons. But it’s the strange behavior of those nuclei that has long made actinides the stuff of wonder. At intervals that can vary from every millisecond to every hundred thousand years, actinides spin off particles and decay into more stable elements. And if you pack together enough of certain actinide atoms, their nuclei will erupt in a powerful release of energy.
To understand the magic and terror of those two processes working in concert, think of a game of pool played in 3-D. The nucleus of the atom is a group of balls, or particles, racked at the center. Shoot the cue ball — a stray neutron — and the cluster breaks apart, or fissions. Now imagine the same game played with trillions of racked nuclei. Balls propelled by the first collision crash into nearby clusters, which fly apart, their stray neutrons colliding with yet more clusters. Voilè0: a nuclear chain reaction.
Actinides are the only materials that split apart this way, and if the collisions are uncontrolled, you unleash hell: a nuclear explosion. But if you can control the conditions in which these reactions happen — by both controlling the number of stray neutrons and regulating the temperature, as is done in the core of a nuclear reactor — you get useful energy. Racks of these nuclei crash together, creating a hot glowing pile of radioactive material. If you pump water past the material, the water turns to steam, which can spin a turbine to make electricity.
Uranium is currently the actinide of choice for the industry, used (sometimes with a little plutonium) in 100 percent of the world’s commercial reactors. But it’s a problematic fuel. In most reactors, sustaining a chain reaction requires extremely rare uranium-235, which must be purified, or enriched, from far more common U-238. The reactors also leave behind plutonium-239, itself radioactive (and useful to technologically sophisticated organizations bent on making bombs). And conventional uranium-fueled reactors require lots of engineering, including neutron-absorbing control rods to damp the reaction and gargantuan pressurized vessels to move water through the reactor core. If something goes kerflooey, the surrounding countryside gets blanketed with radioactivity (think Chernobyl). Even if things go well, toxic waste is left over.
When he took over as head of Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind.
Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.
In 1965, Weinberg and his team built a working reactor, one that suspended the byproducts of thorium in a molten salt bath, and he spent the rest of his 18-year tenure trying to make thorium the heart of the nation’s atomic power effort. He failed. Uranium reactors had already been established, and Hyman Rickover, de facto head of the US nuclear program, wanted the plutonium from uranium-powered nuclear plants to make bombs. Increasingly shunted aside, Weinberg was finally forced out in 1973.
That proved to be “the most pivotal year in energy history,” according to the US Energy Information Administration. It was the year the Arab states cut off oil supplies to the West, setting in motion the petroleum-fueled conflicts that roil the world to this day. The same year, the US nuclear industry signed contracts to build a record 41 nuke plants, all of which used uranium. And 1973 was the year that thorium R&D faded away — and with it the realistic prospect for a golden nuclear age when electricity would be too cheap to meter and clean, safe nuclear plants would dot the green countryside.
Illustrations: Martin Woodtli
The core of this hypothetical nuclear reactor is a cluster of tubes filled with a fluoride thorium solution. 1// compressor, 2// turbine, 3// 1,000 megawatt generator, 4// heat exchanger, 5// containment vessel, 6// reactor core.
Illustration: Martin Woodtli
When Sorensen and his pals began delving into this history, they discovered not only an alternative fuel but also the design for the alternative reactor. Using that template, the Energy From Thorium team helped produce a design for a new liquid fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR (pronounced “lifter”), which, according to estimates by Sorensen and others, would be some 50 percent more efficient than today’s light-water uranium reactors. If the US reactor fleet could be converted to LFTRs overnight, existing thorium reserves would power the US for a thousand years.
Overseas, the nuclear power establishment is getting the message. In France, which already generates more than 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie has been building models of variations of Weinberg’s design for molten salt reactors to see if they can be made to work efficiently. The real action, though, is in India and China, both of which need to satisfy an immense and growing demand for electricity. The world’s largest source of thorium, India, doesn’t have any commercial thorium reactors yet. But it has announced plans to increase its nuclear power capacity: Nuclear energy now accounts for 9 percent of India’s total energy; the government expects that by 2050 it will be 25 percent, with thorium generating a large part of that. China plans to build dozens of nuclear reactors in the coming decade, and it hosted a major thorium conference last October. The People’s Republic recently ordered mineral refiners to reserve the thorium they produce so it can be used to generate nuclear power.
In the United States, the LFTR concept is gaining momentum, if more slowly. Sorensen and others promote it regularly at energy conferences. Renowned climatologist James Hansen specifically cited thorium as a potential fuel source in an “Open Letter to Obama” after the election. And legislators are acting, too. At least three thorium-related bills are making their way through the Capitol, including the Senate’s Thorium Energy Independence and Security Act, cosponsored by Orrin Hatch of Utah and Harry Reid of Nevada, which would provide $250 million for research at the Department of Energy. “I don’t know of anything more beneficial to the country, as far as environmentally sound power, than nuclear energy powered by thorium,” Hatch says. (Both senators have long opposed nuclear waste dumps in their home states.)
Unfortunately, $250 million won’t solve the problem. The best available estimates for building even one molten salt reactor run much higher than that. And there will need to be lots of startup capital if thorium is to become financially efficient enough to persuade nuclear power executives to scrap an installed base of conventional reactors. “What we have now works pretty well,” says John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, a power company that owns the country’s largest portfolio of nuclear reactors, “and it will for the foreseeable future.”
Critics point out that thorium’s biggest advantage — its high efficiency — actually presents challenges. Since the reaction is sustained for a very long time, the fuel needs special containers that are extremely durable and can stand up to corrosive salts. The combination of certain kinds of corrosion-resistant alloys and graphite could meet these requirements. But such a system has yet to be proven over decades.
And LFTRs face more than engineering problems; they’ve also got serious perception problems. To some nuclear engineers, a LFTR is a little … unsettling. It’s a chaotic system without any of the closely monitored control rods and cooling towers on which the nuclear industry stakes its claim to safety. A conventional reactor, on the other hand, is as tightly engineered as a jet fighter. And more important, Americans have come to regard anything that’s in any way nuclear with profound skepticism.
So, if US utilities are unlikely to embrace a new generation of thorium reactors, a more viable strategy would be to put thorium into existing nuclear plants. In fact, work in that direction is starting to happen — thanks to a US company operating in Russia.
Located outside Moscow, the Kurchatov Institute is known as the Los Alamos of Russia. Much of the work on the Soviet nuclear arsenal took place here. In the late ’80s, as the Soviet economy buckled, Kurchatov scientists found themselves wearing mittens to work in unheated laboratories. Then, in the mid-’90s, a savior appeared: a Virginia company called Thorium Power.
# Uranium-Fueled Light-Water Reactor
# Fuel Uranium fuel rods
# Fuel input per gigawatt output 250 tons raw uranium
# Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
# Coolant Water
# Proliferation potential Medium
# Footprint 200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a low-density population zone
# Seed-and-Blanket Reactor
# Fuel Thorium oxide and uranium oxide rods
# Fuel input per gigawatt output 4.6 tons raw thorium, 177 tons raw uranium
# Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
# Coolant Water
# Proliferation potential None
# Footprint 200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a low-density population zone
# Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
# Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution
# Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium
# Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated)
# Coolant Self-regulating
# Proliferation potential None
# Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone
Founded by another Alvin — American nuclear physicist Alvin Radkowsky — Thorium Power, since renamed Lightbridge, is attempting to commercialize technology that will replace uranium with thorium in conventional reactors. From 1950 to 1972, Radkowsky headed the team that designed reactors to power Navy ships and submarines, and in 1977 Westinghouse opened a reactor he had drawn up — with a uranium thorium core. The reactor ran efficiently for five years until the experiment was ended. Radkowsky formed his company in 1992 with millions of dollars from the Initiative for Proliferation Prevention Program, essentially a federal make-work effort to keep those chilly former Soviet weapons scientists from joining another team.
The reactor design that Lightbridge created is known as seed-and-blanket. Its core consists of a seed of enriched uranium rods surrounded by a blanket of rods made of thorium oxide mixed with uranium oxide. This yields a safer, longer-lived reaction than uranium rods alone. It also produces less waste, and the little bit it does leave behind is unsuitable for use in weapons.
CEO Seth Grae thinks it’s better business to convert existing reactors than it is to build new ones. “We’re just trying to replace leaded fuel with unleaded,” he says. “You don’t have to replace engines or build new gas stations.” Grae is speaking from Abu Dhabi, where he has multimillion-dollar contracts to advise the United Arab Emirates on its plans for nuclear power. In August 2009, Lightbridge signed a deal with the French firm Areva, the world’s largest nuclear power producer, to investigate alternative nuclear fuel assemblies.
Until developing the consulting side of its business, Lightbridge struggled to build a convincing business model. Now, Grae says, the company has enough revenue to commercialize its seed-and-blanket system. It needs approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission — which could be difficult given that the design was originally developed and tested in Russian reactors. Then there’s the nontrivial matter of winning over American nuclear utilities. Seed-and-blanket doesn’t just have to work — it has to deliver a significant economic edge.
For Sorensen, putting thorium into a conventional reactor is a half measure, like putting biofuel in a Hummer. But he acknowledges that the seed-and-blanket design has potential to get the country on its way to a greener, safer nuclear future. “The real enemy is coal,” he says. “I want to fight it with LFTRs — which are like machine guns — instead of with light-water reactors, which are like bayonets. But when the enemy is spilling into the trench, you affix bayonets and go to work.” The thorium battalion is small, but — as nuclear physics demonstrates — tiny forces can yield powerful effects.
Richard Martin (rmartin@newwest.net), editor of VON, wrote about the Large Hadron Collider in issue 12.04.
* December 21, 2009 |
* 10:00 am |
* Wired Jan 2010
The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s title — Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world’s energy future.
Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a linebacker’s build and a marine’s crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.
Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.
Today, however, Sorensen spearheads a cadre of outsiders dedicated to sparking a thorium revival. When he’s not at his day job as an aerospace engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama — or wrapping up the master’s in nuclear engineering he is soon to earn from the University of Tennessee — he runs a popular blog called Energy From Thorium. A community of engineers, amateur nuclear power geeks, and researchers has gathered around the site’s forum, ardently discussing the future of thorium. The site even links to PDFs of the Oak Ridge archives, which Sorensen helped get scanned. Energy From Thorium has become a sort of open source project aimed at resurrecting long-lost energy technology using modern techniques.
And the online upstarts aren’t alone. Industry players are looking into thorium, and governments from Dubai to Beijing are funding research. India is betting heavily on the element.
The concept of nuclear power without waste or proliferation has obvious political appeal in the US, as well. The threat of climate change has created an urgent demand for carbon-free electricity, and the 52,000 tons of spent, toxic material that has piled up around the country makes traditional nuclear power less attractive. President Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, have expressed general support for a nuclear renaissance. Utilities are investigating several next-gen alternatives, including scaled-down conventional plants and “pebble bed” reactors, in which the nuclear fuel is inserted into small graphite balls in a way that reduces the risk of meltdown.
Those technologies are still based on uranium, however, and will be beset by the same problems that have dogged the nuclear industry since the 1960s. It is only thorium, Sorensen and his band of revolutionaries argue, that can move the country toward a new era of safe, clean, affordable energy.
Named for the Norse god of thunder, thorium is a lustrous silvery-white metal. It’s only slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm. On the periodic table of elements, it’s found in the bottom row, along with other dense, radioactive substances — including uranium and plutonium — known as actinides.
Actinides are dense because their nuclei contain large numbers of neutrons and protons. But it’s the strange behavior of those nuclei that has long made actinides the stuff of wonder. At intervals that can vary from every millisecond to every hundred thousand years, actinides spin off particles and decay into more stable elements. And if you pack together enough of certain actinide atoms, their nuclei will erupt in a powerful release of energy.
To understand the magic and terror of those two processes working in concert, think of a game of pool played in 3-D. The nucleus of the atom is a group of balls, or particles, racked at the center. Shoot the cue ball — a stray neutron — and the cluster breaks apart, or fissions. Now imagine the same game played with trillions of racked nuclei. Balls propelled by the first collision crash into nearby clusters, which fly apart, their stray neutrons colliding with yet more clusters. Voilè0: a nuclear chain reaction.
Actinides are the only materials that split apart this way, and if the collisions are uncontrolled, you unleash hell: a nuclear explosion. But if you can control the conditions in which these reactions happen — by both controlling the number of stray neutrons and regulating the temperature, as is done in the core of a nuclear reactor — you get useful energy. Racks of these nuclei crash together, creating a hot glowing pile of radioactive material. If you pump water past the material, the water turns to steam, which can spin a turbine to make electricity.
Uranium is currently the actinide of choice for the industry, used (sometimes with a little plutonium) in 100 percent of the world’s commercial reactors. But it’s a problematic fuel. In most reactors, sustaining a chain reaction requires extremely rare uranium-235, which must be purified, or enriched, from far more common U-238. The reactors also leave behind plutonium-239, itself radioactive (and useful to technologically sophisticated organizations bent on making bombs). And conventional uranium-fueled reactors require lots of engineering, including neutron-absorbing control rods to damp the reaction and gargantuan pressurized vessels to move water through the reactor core. If something goes kerflooey, the surrounding countryside gets blanketed with radioactivity (think Chernobyl). Even if things go well, toxic waste is left over.
When he took over as head of Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind.
Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.
In 1965, Weinberg and his team built a working reactor, one that suspended the byproducts of thorium in a molten salt bath, and he spent the rest of his 18-year tenure trying to make thorium the heart of the nation’s atomic power effort. He failed. Uranium reactors had already been established, and Hyman Rickover, de facto head of the US nuclear program, wanted the plutonium from uranium-powered nuclear plants to make bombs. Increasingly shunted aside, Weinberg was finally forced out in 1973.
That proved to be “the most pivotal year in energy history,” according to the US Energy Information Administration. It was the year the Arab states cut off oil supplies to the West, setting in motion the petroleum-fueled conflicts that roil the world to this day. The same year, the US nuclear industry signed contracts to build a record 41 nuke plants, all of which used uranium. And 1973 was the year that thorium R&D faded away — and with it the realistic prospect for a golden nuclear age when electricity would be too cheap to meter and clean, safe nuclear plants would dot the green countryside.
Illustrations: Martin Woodtli
The core of this hypothetical nuclear reactor is a cluster of tubes filled with a fluoride thorium solution. 1// compressor, 2// turbine, 3// 1,000 megawatt generator, 4// heat exchanger, 5// containment vessel, 6// reactor core.
Illustration: Martin Woodtli
When Sorensen and his pals began delving into this history, they discovered not only an alternative fuel but also the design for the alternative reactor. Using that template, the Energy From Thorium team helped produce a design for a new liquid fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR (pronounced “lifter”), which, according to estimates by Sorensen and others, would be some 50 percent more efficient than today’s light-water uranium reactors. If the US reactor fleet could be converted to LFTRs overnight, existing thorium reserves would power the US for a thousand years.
Overseas, the nuclear power establishment is getting the message. In France, which already generates more than 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie has been building models of variations of Weinberg’s design for molten salt reactors to see if they can be made to work efficiently. The real action, though, is in India and China, both of which need to satisfy an immense and growing demand for electricity. The world’s largest source of thorium, India, doesn’t have any commercial thorium reactors yet. But it has announced plans to increase its nuclear power capacity: Nuclear energy now accounts for 9 percent of India’s total energy; the government expects that by 2050 it will be 25 percent, with thorium generating a large part of that. China plans to build dozens of nuclear reactors in the coming decade, and it hosted a major thorium conference last October. The People’s Republic recently ordered mineral refiners to reserve the thorium they produce so it can be used to generate nuclear power.
In the United States, the LFTR concept is gaining momentum, if more slowly. Sorensen and others promote it regularly at energy conferences. Renowned climatologist James Hansen specifically cited thorium as a potential fuel source in an “Open Letter to Obama” after the election. And legislators are acting, too. At least three thorium-related bills are making their way through the Capitol, including the Senate’s Thorium Energy Independence and Security Act, cosponsored by Orrin Hatch of Utah and Harry Reid of Nevada, which would provide $250 million for research at the Department of Energy. “I don’t know of anything more beneficial to the country, as far as environmentally sound power, than nuclear energy powered by thorium,” Hatch says. (Both senators have long opposed nuclear waste dumps in their home states.)
Unfortunately, $250 million won’t solve the problem. The best available estimates for building even one molten salt reactor run much higher than that. And there will need to be lots of startup capital if thorium is to become financially efficient enough to persuade nuclear power executives to scrap an installed base of conventional reactors. “What we have now works pretty well,” says John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, a power company that owns the country’s largest portfolio of nuclear reactors, “and it will for the foreseeable future.”
Critics point out that thorium’s biggest advantage — its high efficiency — actually presents challenges. Since the reaction is sustained for a very long time, the fuel needs special containers that are extremely durable and can stand up to corrosive salts. The combination of certain kinds of corrosion-resistant alloys and graphite could meet these requirements. But such a system has yet to be proven over decades.
And LFTRs face more than engineering problems; they’ve also got serious perception problems. To some nuclear engineers, a LFTR is a little … unsettling. It’s a chaotic system without any of the closely monitored control rods and cooling towers on which the nuclear industry stakes its claim to safety. A conventional reactor, on the other hand, is as tightly engineered as a jet fighter. And more important, Americans have come to regard anything that’s in any way nuclear with profound skepticism.
So, if US utilities are unlikely to embrace a new generation of thorium reactors, a more viable strategy would be to put thorium into existing nuclear plants. In fact, work in that direction is starting to happen — thanks to a US company operating in Russia.
Located outside Moscow, the Kurchatov Institute is known as the Los Alamos of Russia. Much of the work on the Soviet nuclear arsenal took place here. In the late ’80s, as the Soviet economy buckled, Kurchatov scientists found themselves wearing mittens to work in unheated laboratories. Then, in the mid-’90s, a savior appeared: a Virginia company called Thorium Power.
# Uranium-Fueled Light-Water Reactor
# Fuel Uranium fuel rods
# Fuel input per gigawatt output 250 tons raw uranium
# Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
# Coolant Water
# Proliferation potential Medium
# Footprint 200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a low-density population zone
# Seed-and-Blanket Reactor
# Fuel Thorium oxide and uranium oxide rods
# Fuel input per gigawatt output 4.6 tons raw thorium, 177 tons raw uranium
# Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
# Coolant Water
# Proliferation potential None
# Footprint 200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a low-density population zone
# Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
# Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution
# Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium
# Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated)
# Coolant Self-regulating
# Proliferation potential None
# Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone
Founded by another Alvin — American nuclear physicist Alvin Radkowsky — Thorium Power, since renamed Lightbridge, is attempting to commercialize technology that will replace uranium with thorium in conventional reactors. From 1950 to 1972, Radkowsky headed the team that designed reactors to power Navy ships and submarines, and in 1977 Westinghouse opened a reactor he had drawn up — with a uranium thorium core. The reactor ran efficiently for five years until the experiment was ended. Radkowsky formed his company in 1992 with millions of dollars from the Initiative for Proliferation Prevention Program, essentially a federal make-work effort to keep those chilly former Soviet weapons scientists from joining another team.
The reactor design that Lightbridge created is known as seed-and-blanket. Its core consists of a seed of enriched uranium rods surrounded by a blanket of rods made of thorium oxide mixed with uranium oxide. This yields a safer, longer-lived reaction than uranium rods alone. It also produces less waste, and the little bit it does leave behind is unsuitable for use in weapons.
CEO Seth Grae thinks it’s better business to convert existing reactors than it is to build new ones. “We’re just trying to replace leaded fuel with unleaded,” he says. “You don’t have to replace engines or build new gas stations.” Grae is speaking from Abu Dhabi, where he has multimillion-dollar contracts to advise the United Arab Emirates on its plans for nuclear power. In August 2009, Lightbridge signed a deal with the French firm Areva, the world’s largest nuclear power producer, to investigate alternative nuclear fuel assemblies.
Until developing the consulting side of its business, Lightbridge struggled to build a convincing business model. Now, Grae says, the company has enough revenue to commercialize its seed-and-blanket system. It needs approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission — which could be difficult given that the design was originally developed and tested in Russian reactors. Then there’s the nontrivial matter of winning over American nuclear utilities. Seed-and-blanket doesn’t just have to work — it has to deliver a significant economic edge.
For Sorensen, putting thorium into a conventional reactor is a half measure, like putting biofuel in a Hummer. But he acknowledges that the seed-and-blanket design has potential to get the country on its way to a greener, safer nuclear future. “The real enemy is coal,” he says. “I want to fight it with LFTRs — which are like machine guns — instead of with light-water reactors, which are like bayonets. But when the enemy is spilling into the trench, you affix bayonets and go to work.” The thorium battalion is small, but — as nuclear physics demonstrates — tiny forces can yield powerful effects.
Richard Martin (rmartin@newwest.net), editor of VON, wrote about the Large Hadron Collider in issue 12.04.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
How Algal Biofuels Lost a Decade in the Race to Replace Oil
# By Alexis Madrigal Email Author
# December 29, 2009 |
# 8:00 pm |
# Categories: Biology, Energy
For nearly 20 years, a government laboratory built a living, respiring library of carefully collected organisms in search of something that could grow quickly while producing something precious: oil.
But now that collection has largely been lost.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists found and isolated around 3,000 species algae from construction ditches, seasonal desert ponds and briny mashes across the country in a major bioprospecting effort to find the best organisms to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuel for cars.
Despite meager funding, the Aquatic Species Program (.pdf), initiated under President Jimmy Carter, laid the scientific foundation for making diesel-like fuel from the fat that microscopic algae accumulate in their cells. Fifty-one varieties were carefully characterized as potential high-value strains, but fewer than half of those remain.
“Just when they started to succeed is when the plug got pulled,” said phycologist Jeff Johansen of John Carroll University, who collected algal strains for the program in the 1980s. “We were growing them in ponds and we were going to grow enough to have them made into a diesel fuel.”
The program was part of the huge investment that Jimmy Carter made into alternative energy in the late 1970s. All kinds of research avenues were explored, but when the funding shriveled during later years, knowledge, experts and know-how were lost. The setback highlights the problems created by inconsistent funding for energy research. Now, President Obama has trumpeted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus package, as the largest increase in scientific research funding in history. Scientists roundly applauded the billions of dollars that went into energy research, development and deployment. But what about when the stimulus money runs out in two years?
“One caution is that much of this has been funded with the stimulus package,” said Ernie Moniz at a Google-hosted panel on energy in late November. “So, we’re going to have to see what happens after these next two years, because what we need is not a drop, but a further increase in R&D commensurate with the task at hand.”
And that’s exactly what didn’t happen in the last big energy R&D push.
aquatic-species-program2
From organism to oil
Turning pond scum into oil isn’t easy, but as a hypothetical energy system, it’s elegant. The theory is that algae will produce more burnable fuel on less land than regular crops, perhaps something like a thousand gallons of oil per acre instead of a few dozen from conventional plants. The food-versus-fuel debates that plague biofuels like corn-based ethanol would disappear. Plus, it’s possible the algae could be engineered to make high-energy fuels suitable even for airplanes. It’s these possibilities that sold the Carter administration’s energy officials.
Phycologists, the people who study algae, discovered that under certain circumstances, some algae start cranking out far more oil than normal. Restrict their nutrients, and for some reason they start producing lots of oil. But they also stop growing. If the scientists could keep the algae multiplying and pull the “lipid trigger” anyway, they’d be in fat city. But their understanding of the biology was incomplete, and the task wasn’t easy. It would take some time and effort to know if and when their the process would become cheap enough to compete with crude.
Another challenge was getting the algae to keep growing without injecting a lot of energy into the system. They installed large open ponds near Roswell, New Mexico, and began trying to produce tiny algae at oil tanker scales. It worked, but there were problems. Again, it would take some time and effort to know if and when everything would work together.
The program did not get time or the money to find out. By the time Bill Clinton took office, funding for the program had dwindled to a trickle, and in 1996, the Department of Energy abandoned the program to focus all its biofuel efforts on ethanol. A dark decade fell upon the field of algal biofuel. There wasn’t even money available to take care of the algal collection that had been so painstakingly created.
In an effort to salvage some of the science, a few hundred strains of algae were sent to the University of Hawaii, but the refuge proved less than ideal. When a National Science Foundation grant ran out in 2004, it became difficult to continue the laborious work of maintaining the collection. The organisms sit in rows of test tubes living and reproducing. Every two months, they have to be transferred, “passaged,” to a new nutrient-rich tube. Random genetic mutations can enter a population and lead to permanent genetic changes. The algae can die.
It’s not exactly clear how it happened, but a review released earlier this year found that more than half the genetic legacy (.pdf) of the program had been lost. Only 23 of the 51 strains that were extensively studied during the program remain alive and extant. The losses to the rest of the algal cultures in the collection have been even worse.
“The really bloody shame is that of those 3,000, there are maybe 100 to 150 strains that remain at the University of Hawaii,” said Al Darzins, who heads up the resurgent algal biofuels research program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The way R&D funding has been used in the United States has hurt the efficiency of the research. Programs that started during the late ’70s and early ’80s were stopped in the years of low energy prices that followed. Despite the best efforts of cash-strapped researchers, not everything can be preserved and recovered, frozen cryogenically while awaiting fresh funding.
Algae comes back
While the valuable NREL archive of algae biodiversity languished in a Hawaii basement, the world around it changed. Genetic and genomic research and understanding skyrocketed. Oil demand grew, particularly in massive developing countries like China, India and Indonesia. Oil usage outpaced new oil field finds. Interest in algae-based biofuels exploded. Venture capital and corporate money flowed back into the field. On January 2, 2008, oil hit $100 a barrel for the first time. Despite some ups-and-downs, the price of oil remains substantially higher than it was through much of the 1990s. As a result, more than 50 companies are now at work on some aspect of biofuel production from algae.
In the latest move, Exxon Mobil decided to invest $600 million into a joint venture with Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics for research into next-gen algal fuels.
Over the past few years, Darzins has revived the program at NREL. They’ve been hard at work on the biology of microalgae. Graduate student Lee Elliott of the Colorado School of Mines has collected 500 new species in just the last year and a half. To a certain extent, the problems of maintaining a microorganismal library have been solved. Cryogenic freezing techniques were developed at the University of Texas UTEX Culture Collection of Algae. The NREL team has been able to freeze and then revive 91 percent of their microorganisms.
Despite the lost decade, algal oil makers are optimistic that they are about to ride a steep cost curve down to much, much cheaper biofuel. As they apply new biological knowledge and optimize growing algae, the cost will drop. And as they capture economies of scale, the costs will drop again. In the best-case scenario, when all is said and done, algal biofuel could cost $50 per barrel. But that won’t happen anytime soon, and it could take a decade.
Or maybe it will remain expensive for a long, long time. There are some legitimate reasons to be skeptical of algal biofuel’s potential for large-scale oil production.
So far, nobody has been able to make fuel from algae for a cost anywhere close to cheap, let alone competitive. Some researchers question whether any kind of energy-conversion process based on photosynthesis will ever play a major role in our transportation energy system. One life-cycle analysis found algal biofuels would not have a positive energy balance, in other words, you’d have to put more energy in than you would get out. The prominent startup GreenFuel, which grew out of Harvard and MIT research, went bust earlier this year after blowing through $70 million.
We just don’t know how well algal biofuel production might work. It’s true that the 18 years of research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory yielded a lot of knowledge, but it resulted in nothing resembling a commercial product or process.
“The cultivation of microalgae for production of biofuels generally, and algal oils specifically, is not a near-term commercial prospect,” John Benemann, an algae scientist who worked on the final report of the Aquatic Species Program, wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Larger-scale algal biofuels production still requires considerable, long-term R&D.”
So many questions, so little time
Just $25 million was invested over the life of the Aquatic Species Program, which is just 5.5 percent of the total money the DOE dedicated to biofuels over that time. Adjusted for inflation, the program’s total budget in today’s dollars was less than $100 million. To put this tiny number in oil industry context, Exxon Mobil made $142 million in profit each day of 2008.
“They came up with this idea and in four years, they almost demonstrated the technological feasibility, and then the funding fell out,” said Johansen, the phycologist who collected algae for the program. “The maximum of funding was about $4 million a year. When I left, it was $800,000 a year. Now, there is all this biofuel work going on, and they are all going back to that public domain research. It kind of drives me crazy.”
The neglect of the Aquatic Species Program and subsequent resurgence of algal biofuel interest is one of many examples that show that the lack of coherent, consistent energy policy has left the world’s most oil-dependent nation scrambling in times of crisis.
Johansen even went so far as to say that “if the Reagan and Bush administrations had not ended” the growth of the algal biofuels program, our country would have algal biofuels now.
Even under far less optimistic scenarios, if the Aquatic Species Program had been fully funded from its start until now, there is no question that we’d know a lot more about the potential, and limitations, of algal biofuels.
Instead, we’re left with some lessons learned, a partially missing library of microorganisms, and a lot of questions that investors and entrepreneurs want answered before the next oil price spike.
# December 29, 2009 |
# 8:00 pm |
# Categories: Biology, Energy
For nearly 20 years, a government laboratory built a living, respiring library of carefully collected organisms in search of something that could grow quickly while producing something precious: oil.
But now that collection has largely been lost.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists found and isolated around 3,000 species algae from construction ditches, seasonal desert ponds and briny mashes across the country in a major bioprospecting effort to find the best organisms to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuel for cars.
Despite meager funding, the Aquatic Species Program (.pdf), initiated under President Jimmy Carter, laid the scientific foundation for making diesel-like fuel from the fat that microscopic algae accumulate in their cells. Fifty-one varieties were carefully characterized as potential high-value strains, but fewer than half of those remain.
“Just when they started to succeed is when the plug got pulled,” said phycologist Jeff Johansen of John Carroll University, who collected algal strains for the program in the 1980s. “We were growing them in ponds and we were going to grow enough to have them made into a diesel fuel.”
The program was part of the huge investment that Jimmy Carter made into alternative energy in the late 1970s. All kinds of research avenues were explored, but when the funding shriveled during later years, knowledge, experts and know-how were lost. The setback highlights the problems created by inconsistent funding for energy research. Now, President Obama has trumpeted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus package, as the largest increase in scientific research funding in history. Scientists roundly applauded the billions of dollars that went into energy research, development and deployment. But what about when the stimulus money runs out in two years?
“One caution is that much of this has been funded with the stimulus package,” said Ernie Moniz at a Google-hosted panel on energy in late November. “So, we’re going to have to see what happens after these next two years, because what we need is not a drop, but a further increase in R&D commensurate with the task at hand.”
And that’s exactly what didn’t happen in the last big energy R&D push.
aquatic-species-program2
From organism to oil
Turning pond scum into oil isn’t easy, but as a hypothetical energy system, it’s elegant. The theory is that algae will produce more burnable fuel on less land than regular crops, perhaps something like a thousand gallons of oil per acre instead of a few dozen from conventional plants. The food-versus-fuel debates that plague biofuels like corn-based ethanol would disappear. Plus, it’s possible the algae could be engineered to make high-energy fuels suitable even for airplanes. It’s these possibilities that sold the Carter administration’s energy officials.
Phycologists, the people who study algae, discovered that under certain circumstances, some algae start cranking out far more oil than normal. Restrict their nutrients, and for some reason they start producing lots of oil. But they also stop growing. If the scientists could keep the algae multiplying and pull the “lipid trigger” anyway, they’d be in fat city. But their understanding of the biology was incomplete, and the task wasn’t easy. It would take some time and effort to know if and when their the process would become cheap enough to compete with crude.
Another challenge was getting the algae to keep growing without injecting a lot of energy into the system. They installed large open ponds near Roswell, New Mexico, and began trying to produce tiny algae at oil tanker scales. It worked, but there were problems. Again, it would take some time and effort to know if and when everything would work together.
The program did not get time or the money to find out. By the time Bill Clinton took office, funding for the program had dwindled to a trickle, and in 1996, the Department of Energy abandoned the program to focus all its biofuel efforts on ethanol. A dark decade fell upon the field of algal biofuel. There wasn’t even money available to take care of the algal collection that had been so painstakingly created.
In an effort to salvage some of the science, a few hundred strains of algae were sent to the University of Hawaii, but the refuge proved less than ideal. When a National Science Foundation grant ran out in 2004, it became difficult to continue the laborious work of maintaining the collection. The organisms sit in rows of test tubes living and reproducing. Every two months, they have to be transferred, “passaged,” to a new nutrient-rich tube. Random genetic mutations can enter a population and lead to permanent genetic changes. The algae can die.
It’s not exactly clear how it happened, but a review released earlier this year found that more than half the genetic legacy (.pdf) of the program had been lost. Only 23 of the 51 strains that were extensively studied during the program remain alive and extant. The losses to the rest of the algal cultures in the collection have been even worse.
“The really bloody shame is that of those 3,000, there are maybe 100 to 150 strains that remain at the University of Hawaii,” said Al Darzins, who heads up the resurgent algal biofuels research program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The way R&D funding has been used in the United States has hurt the efficiency of the research. Programs that started during the late ’70s and early ’80s were stopped in the years of low energy prices that followed. Despite the best efforts of cash-strapped researchers, not everything can be preserved and recovered, frozen cryogenically while awaiting fresh funding.
Algae comes back
While the valuable NREL archive of algae biodiversity languished in a Hawaii basement, the world around it changed. Genetic and genomic research and understanding skyrocketed. Oil demand grew, particularly in massive developing countries like China, India and Indonesia. Oil usage outpaced new oil field finds. Interest in algae-based biofuels exploded. Venture capital and corporate money flowed back into the field. On January 2, 2008, oil hit $100 a barrel for the first time. Despite some ups-and-downs, the price of oil remains substantially higher than it was through much of the 1990s. As a result, more than 50 companies are now at work on some aspect of biofuel production from algae.
In the latest move, Exxon Mobil decided to invest $600 million into a joint venture with Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics for research into next-gen algal fuels.
Over the past few years, Darzins has revived the program at NREL. They’ve been hard at work on the biology of microalgae. Graduate student Lee Elliott of the Colorado School of Mines has collected 500 new species in just the last year and a half. To a certain extent, the problems of maintaining a microorganismal library have been solved. Cryogenic freezing techniques were developed at the University of Texas UTEX Culture Collection of Algae. The NREL team has been able to freeze and then revive 91 percent of their microorganisms.
Despite the lost decade, algal oil makers are optimistic that they are about to ride a steep cost curve down to much, much cheaper biofuel. As they apply new biological knowledge and optimize growing algae, the cost will drop. And as they capture economies of scale, the costs will drop again. In the best-case scenario, when all is said and done, algal biofuel could cost $50 per barrel. But that won’t happen anytime soon, and it could take a decade.
Or maybe it will remain expensive for a long, long time. There are some legitimate reasons to be skeptical of algal biofuel’s potential for large-scale oil production.
So far, nobody has been able to make fuel from algae for a cost anywhere close to cheap, let alone competitive. Some researchers question whether any kind of energy-conversion process based on photosynthesis will ever play a major role in our transportation energy system. One life-cycle analysis found algal biofuels would not have a positive energy balance, in other words, you’d have to put more energy in than you would get out. The prominent startup GreenFuel, which grew out of Harvard and MIT research, went bust earlier this year after blowing through $70 million.
We just don’t know how well algal biofuel production might work. It’s true that the 18 years of research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory yielded a lot of knowledge, but it resulted in nothing resembling a commercial product or process.
“The cultivation of microalgae for production of biofuels generally, and algal oils specifically, is not a near-term commercial prospect,” John Benemann, an algae scientist who worked on the final report of the Aquatic Species Program, wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Larger-scale algal biofuels production still requires considerable, long-term R&D.”
So many questions, so little time
Just $25 million was invested over the life of the Aquatic Species Program, which is just 5.5 percent of the total money the DOE dedicated to biofuels over that time. Adjusted for inflation, the program’s total budget in today’s dollars was less than $100 million. To put this tiny number in oil industry context, Exxon Mobil made $142 million in profit each day of 2008.
“They came up with this idea and in four years, they almost demonstrated the technological feasibility, and then the funding fell out,” said Johansen, the phycologist who collected algae for the program. “The maximum of funding was about $4 million a year. When I left, it was $800,000 a year. Now, there is all this biofuel work going on, and they are all going back to that public domain research. It kind of drives me crazy.”
The neglect of the Aquatic Species Program and subsequent resurgence of algal biofuel interest is one of many examples that show that the lack of coherent, consistent energy policy has left the world’s most oil-dependent nation scrambling in times of crisis.
Johansen even went so far as to say that “if the Reagan and Bush administrations had not ended” the growth of the algal biofuels program, our country would have algal biofuels now.
Even under far less optimistic scenarios, if the Aquatic Species Program had been fully funded from its start until now, there is no question that we’d know a lot more about the potential, and limitations, of algal biofuels.
Instead, we’re left with some lessons learned, a partially missing library of microorganisms, and a lot of questions that investors and entrepreneurs want answered before the next oil price spike.
People’s Processor: Embrace China’s Homegrown Computer Chips
* By Christopher Mims Email Author
* December 21, 2009 |
* 10:00 am |
* Wired Jan 2010
Imagine that your nation is entirely dependent on a belligerent and economically unstable foreign country for a precious commodity. Imagine that without that commodity, your entire society would grind to a halt. Got it? OK, now imagine that your nation is China, the belligerent nation is the US, and the commodity is CPUs.
For China to maintain its blistering pace of growth — about 8 percent over the course of the global financial meltdown — the nation’s leaders know they must transition to a postindustrial economy as rapidly as they transitioned to a free-market economy 30 years ago. Computers are key to doing that. The country’s demand for PCs is enormous. The Chinese purchased 39.6 million of them in 2008. And that number is only going to climb — 75 percent of the population still doesn’t have access to the Internet. But the vast majority of PCs sold in China are running central processing units created by the US companies Intel and AMD. This poses a range of problems; perhaps the biggest is that it locks China into paying first-world prices for CPUs. China is also deeply reluctant to build military hardware on top of Western processors. (And if that sounds paranoid, keep in mind that there’s concern in Washington over whether the US military should use American-designed chips that have merely been manufactured overseas.)
Given those issues, it’s not hard to understand why the Chinese government sponsored an ambitious initiative to create a sort of national processor. Work on the Loongson, or Dragon Chip, began in 2001 at the Institute of Computing Technology in Beijing. The goal was to create a chip that would be versatile enough to drive anything from an industrial robot to a supercomputer. One of the first Loongson-powered computers appeared in 2006, an ultracompact desktop PC known as the Fuloong (Lucky Dragon). It was built by the Chinese company Lemote, which soon followed that up with a cheap netbook. And China is now boasting that a third-generation multicore Loongson chip, currently in the prototype stage, will be used to power a petaflop supercomputer.
China’s decision to roll its own processors has gone largely unnoticed in the West. It shouldn’t. The country is incredibly motivated for the project to succeed — it has become a cornerstone of the National High-Tech R&D Program embarked upon in 1986. And we know that the Chinese are very good at leveraging economies of scale. The Loongson chip is going to change more than just computer-ownership rates in the most populous nation on the planet. It’s going to have a profound impact on computers everywhere.
For starters, it could help usher in an era of true post-Windows PCs. Because the Loongson eschews the standard x86 chip architecture, it can’t run the full version of Microsoft Windows without software emulation. To encourage adoption of the processor, the Institute of Computing Technology is adapting everything from Java to OpenOffice for the Loongson chip and releasing it all under a free software license. Lemote positions its netbook as the only computer in the world with nothing but free software, right down to the BIOS burned into the motherboard chip that tells it how to boot up. It’s for this last reason that Richard “GNU/Linux” Stallman, granddaddy of the free software movement, uses a laptop with a Loongson chip.
Loongson could also reshape the global PC business. “Compared to Intel and IBM, we are still in the cradle,” concedes Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson. But he also notes that China’s enormous domestic demand isn’t the only potential market for his CPU. “I think many other poor countries, such as those in Africa, need low-cost solutions,” he says. Cheap Chinese processors could corner emerging markets in the developing world (and be a perk for the nation’s allies and trade partners).
And that’s just the beginning. “These chips have implications for space exploration, intelligence gathering, industrialization, encryption, and international commerce,” says Tom Halfhill, a senior analyst for Microprocessor Report.
Will Loongson-based PCs make inroads with average consumers in the West? You can already order a Lemote netbook online. It isn’t any cheaper or better than other entry-level netbooks, and reviews from geeky hardware enthusiast sites are less than enthusiastic. But these crude first-generation products hark back to another wave of boxy, underpowered consumer goods that were initially regarded as mere curiosities in the West. They were called Toyotas.
Christopher Mims (christopher.mims @gmail.com) wrote about new drilling technologies in issue 17.09.
* December 21, 2009 |
* 10:00 am |
* Wired Jan 2010
Imagine that your nation is entirely dependent on a belligerent and economically unstable foreign country for a precious commodity. Imagine that without that commodity, your entire society would grind to a halt. Got it? OK, now imagine that your nation is China, the belligerent nation is the US, and the commodity is CPUs.
For China to maintain its blistering pace of growth — about 8 percent over the course of the global financial meltdown — the nation’s leaders know they must transition to a postindustrial economy as rapidly as they transitioned to a free-market economy 30 years ago. Computers are key to doing that. The country’s demand for PCs is enormous. The Chinese purchased 39.6 million of them in 2008. And that number is only going to climb — 75 percent of the population still doesn’t have access to the Internet. But the vast majority of PCs sold in China are running central processing units created by the US companies Intel and AMD. This poses a range of problems; perhaps the biggest is that it locks China into paying first-world prices for CPUs. China is also deeply reluctant to build military hardware on top of Western processors. (And if that sounds paranoid, keep in mind that there’s concern in Washington over whether the US military should use American-designed chips that have merely been manufactured overseas.)
Given those issues, it’s not hard to understand why the Chinese government sponsored an ambitious initiative to create a sort of national processor. Work on the Loongson, or Dragon Chip, began in 2001 at the Institute of Computing Technology in Beijing. The goal was to create a chip that would be versatile enough to drive anything from an industrial robot to a supercomputer. One of the first Loongson-powered computers appeared in 2006, an ultracompact desktop PC known as the Fuloong (Lucky Dragon). It was built by the Chinese company Lemote, which soon followed that up with a cheap netbook. And China is now boasting that a third-generation multicore Loongson chip, currently in the prototype stage, will be used to power a petaflop supercomputer.
China’s decision to roll its own processors has gone largely unnoticed in the West. It shouldn’t. The country is incredibly motivated for the project to succeed — it has become a cornerstone of the National High-Tech R&D Program embarked upon in 1986. And we know that the Chinese are very good at leveraging economies of scale. The Loongson chip is going to change more than just computer-ownership rates in the most populous nation on the planet. It’s going to have a profound impact on computers everywhere.
For starters, it could help usher in an era of true post-Windows PCs. Because the Loongson eschews the standard x86 chip architecture, it can’t run the full version of Microsoft Windows without software emulation. To encourage adoption of the processor, the Institute of Computing Technology is adapting everything from Java to OpenOffice for the Loongson chip and releasing it all under a free software license. Lemote positions its netbook as the only computer in the world with nothing but free software, right down to the BIOS burned into the motherboard chip that tells it how to boot up. It’s for this last reason that Richard “GNU/Linux” Stallman, granddaddy of the free software movement, uses a laptop with a Loongson chip.
Loongson could also reshape the global PC business. “Compared to Intel and IBM, we are still in the cradle,” concedes Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson. But he also notes that China’s enormous domestic demand isn’t the only potential market for his CPU. “I think many other poor countries, such as those in Africa, need low-cost solutions,” he says. Cheap Chinese processors could corner emerging markets in the developing world (and be a perk for the nation’s allies and trade partners).
And that’s just the beginning. “These chips have implications for space exploration, intelligence gathering, industrialization, encryption, and international commerce,” says Tom Halfhill, a senior analyst for Microprocessor Report.
Will Loongson-based PCs make inroads with average consumers in the West? You can already order a Lemote netbook online. It isn’t any cheaper or better than other entry-level netbooks, and reviews from geeky hardware enthusiast sites are less than enthusiastic. But these crude first-generation products hark back to another wave of boxy, underpowered consumer goods that were initially regarded as mere curiosities in the West. They were called Toyotas.
Christopher Mims (christopher.mims @gmail.com) wrote about new drilling technologies in issue 17.09.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Data Storage, Data Backup and Storage Virtualization: Oracle's 15 Key Plot Points in Its Struggle with the EC over Buying Sun Microsystems
It's been a long, strange and expensive trip for Oracle in its quest to add Sun Microsystems to its list of company acquisitions. And the final chapter isn't yet written.
This started in early 2009 when word got out that Sun was up for sale. At the time, IBM was first in line as a buyer, and that scenario nearly happened. The transaction was only a few days from fruition in mid-April when some major issues got in the way and the deal fell through. A few days later, on April 20, Oracle surprised a lot of people by announcing that it would acquire Sun for about $7.4 billion, less Sun's cash on hand.
Since April 20, it's been a rocky road for Oracle and for Sun, which is losing a lot of potential sales due to the uncertainty of the situation. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said he believes Sun is losing about $100 million per month, and that's a lot of money for anyone -- even the billionaire Oracle CEO.
The major sticking point is an open-source database that Sun bought for $1 billion two years ago: MySQL. The EC is withholding its blessing on the deal until it is satisfied that MySQL will be allowed to innovate and compete fairly in the IT marketplace. The fact that Oracle's own proprietary database often competes directly against it is seen as a huge conflict of interest; obviously, this has been the crux of the problem. Ellison has said that MySQL does not compete with his company's bread-and-butter databases. This eWEEK slide show covers the 15 most important plot points in this lingering international IT saga, with the final chapter still to be written.
----------------------
Oracle sells the most popular enterprise class databases.
MySQL is the most popular opensource database.
If Oracle owns MySQL what would it do with it?
It doesn't seem to make sense for Oracle to continue to develop MySQL and to continue to support it as an alternative to its own Oracle databases.
If this scenario doesn't make sense, then the opposite scenario seems to make more sense.
It would make more sense for Oracle to help the MySQL user base to migrate to Oracle databases and to eventually abandon MySQL in favor of Oracle databases.
Maybe the best way out would be to approve the sale of Sun to Oracle but to leave MySQL as a separate entity. If such a way is possible. Somebody else should probably maintain and own and develop MySQL.
It seems there is a move toward more consolidation in the IT market. The Oracle Sun deal is just one of the examples of a move to consolidate. The Adobe Macromedia merger saw the abandonment of Macromedia FreeHand in favor of Illustrator. And they were both proprietary products.
It may seem likely that the Oracle acquisition of Sun would turn out the same way with the abandonment of MySQL.
What would be the best scenario? and to whom and why?
----------------------------
MySQL is open source software. Open source software by its nature doesn't really "belong" to anyone. The source code is freely available to anyone who wants it.
Regardless if Oracle owns the MySQL company which supports the MySQL source it just changes the supporters of the opensource project. Oracle cannot make the code proprietary, the MySQL source code remains open regardless of what company supports its continued development.
Even if Oracle has its own proprietary database. The source and support provided to the MySQL open source project remains open. Even prior to the acquisition by Oracle, MySQL, the company, already offers the source code of MySQL the software product in a dual license. It offers it as opensource and offers it using a commercial license so that enterprise customers will not have to make their proprietary code open to others.
This started in early 2009 when word got out that Sun was up for sale. At the time, IBM was first in line as a buyer, and that scenario nearly happened. The transaction was only a few days from fruition in mid-April when some major issues got in the way and the deal fell through. A few days later, on April 20, Oracle surprised a lot of people by announcing that it would acquire Sun for about $7.4 billion, less Sun's cash on hand.
Since April 20, it's been a rocky road for Oracle and for Sun, which is losing a lot of potential sales due to the uncertainty of the situation. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said he believes Sun is losing about $100 million per month, and that's a lot of money for anyone -- even the billionaire Oracle CEO.
The major sticking point is an open-source database that Sun bought for $1 billion two years ago: MySQL. The EC is withholding its blessing on the deal until it is satisfied that MySQL will be allowed to innovate and compete fairly in the IT marketplace. The fact that Oracle's own proprietary database often competes directly against it is seen as a huge conflict of interest; obviously, this has been the crux of the problem. Ellison has said that MySQL does not compete with his company's bread-and-butter databases. This eWEEK slide show covers the 15 most important plot points in this lingering international IT saga, with the final chapter still to be written.
----------------------
Oracle sells the most popular enterprise class databases.
MySQL is the most popular opensource database.
If Oracle owns MySQL what would it do with it?
It doesn't seem to make sense for Oracle to continue to develop MySQL and to continue to support it as an alternative to its own Oracle databases.
If this scenario doesn't make sense, then the opposite scenario seems to make more sense.
It would make more sense for Oracle to help the MySQL user base to migrate to Oracle databases and to eventually abandon MySQL in favor of Oracle databases.
Maybe the best way out would be to approve the sale of Sun to Oracle but to leave MySQL as a separate entity. If such a way is possible. Somebody else should probably maintain and own and develop MySQL.
It seems there is a move toward more consolidation in the IT market. The Oracle Sun deal is just one of the examples of a move to consolidate. The Adobe Macromedia merger saw the abandonment of Macromedia FreeHand in favor of Illustrator. And they were both proprietary products.
It may seem likely that the Oracle acquisition of Sun would turn out the same way with the abandonment of MySQL.
What would be the best scenario? and to whom and why?
----------------------------
MySQL is open source software. Open source software by its nature doesn't really "belong" to anyone. The source code is freely available to anyone who wants it.
Regardless if Oracle owns the MySQL company which supports the MySQL source it just changes the supporters of the opensource project. Oracle cannot make the code proprietary, the MySQL source code remains open regardless of what company supports its continued development.
Even if Oracle has its own proprietary database. The source and support provided to the MySQL open source project remains open. Even prior to the acquisition by Oracle, MySQL, the company, already offers the source code of MySQL the software product in a dual license. It offers it as opensource and offers it using a commercial license so that enterprise customers will not have to make their proprietary code open to others.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Is It Worth Upgrading to SQL Server 2008
By Nigel Maneffa, 2009/12/18 (first published: 2008/10/21)
had downloaded and played a little with the SQL2008 CTPs, and the new features were impressing me, although it appeared that SQL2008 was a development of SQL2005, as SQL2000 was a development of SQL7 despite comments to the contrary. New headline features included backup compression, governors, policy framework, data compression, encryption, change data capture etc. But then I read the recently produced Microsoft documentation on version differences and see that none of them are in Standard edition, not one. They are all Enterprise features. SQL server may be moving more towards a data platform from just a database engine, but the platform appears to be somewhat narrow for non Enterprise users!
The official list of differences can be found here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/d/f/2df66c0c-fff2-4f2e-b739-bf4581cee533/SQLServer%202008CompareEnterpriseStandard.pdf
This posed a question – is it worth upgrading from SQL2005 Standard edition to SQL 2008 Standard edition?
.
.
.
Upgrading from SQL2000 Standard to SQL2005 Standard provided many new features. I remember the discussion at the time, when many thought that SQL2000 was good enough for many applications. I still think that is the case today to be truthful, but have used quite a few of the new SQL2005 features over the last year or two.
However, let’s look at what SQL2008 Standard offers over 2005 Standard.
* There are no processor or RAM improvements, not that they are required any more. Mirroring looks like it might be improved marginally.
* I am really peeved to see that backup compression has not made it to the Standard feature list.
* There are the usual incremental improvements in SSIS and Reporting, again which I do not use.
To cap it all the (to me) business critical merge replication has gained no features, but its growing deprecated item list makes it look more like it’s on the way out than moving ahead. The new sync services look interesting in the longer term, but offer nothing except a likely version 1.0 buglist for those wishing to take the early adopter plunge. With the massive increase in the number of Enterprise features I would have thought it would make great sense to throw in a few of the ‘old’ Enterprise features into the Standard edition – database snapshots would have been nice, or lock pages in memory.
Editor's Note: Standard Edition can now lock pages in memory if you have patched your server.
Forgive me if I feel short changed, but that feature list does not look a great reason to upgrade. Or I have I failed to turn over the magic stone with hidden features?
So I am left looking at programming/development enhancements – date/time fields, HierarchyID, spatial, merge SQL statement etc. Nice but not critical. There are 2 features that have gained relatively little attention but might improve application performance dramatically for the applications I see – optimize for ad hoc workloads, and filtered indexes. It appears on the surface that these features apply to all editions.
So I am left with the question of whether to upgrade, or wait till the next version of SQL server. Or in the longer term investigate ‘cheaper’ alternatives such as MySQL, which will become ever more viable as the performance of hardware hides any performance deficiencies (either perceived or real). Bearing in mind I have ‘free’ upgrade rights within our Microsoft licensing agreement, I would be very worried if someone that can upgrade for free cannot see the benefits of using the new version.
A related topic is that the CTP’s and developer versions of SQL Server are in effect Enterprise versions, with all the features always on. I can understand this (particularly with the CTPs), but surely it must be simple to add a switch to tell developer version which edition you wish to emulate, so it is possible to develop against the edition that will be used in production. This problem was annoying in SQL2005, but the feature is critically required now, with the vast difference in feature set. I see that there is now a management view that tells you which Enterprise features need to be dropped to use a database in Standard edition.
It could be that Microsoft has done their homework well, and are really targeting the ‘Enterprise’ customer, and are less concerned about the Standard version than they were a few years ago as SQL Server moves more upmarket. I think that Microsoft should make sure that everyone gets something from upgrading, not just being forced to do so as the support for the older product eventually runs out. If they don’t provide improvements I can see slippage of SQL Server customers at the lower to middle range products.
Of course, if you run SQL 2000 Standard, upgrading to SQL2008 Standard (or maybe workgroup depending on which features you require) would be a great upgrade. Or am I already getting good value for money and should just be pleased that I am running a very reliable database system, and be happy to pay extra if I need any of the new features.
What do you think?
By Nigel Maneffa, 2009/12/18 (first published: 2008/10/21)
SQLServerCentral.com
had downloaded and played a little with the SQL2008 CTPs, and the new features were impressing me, although it appeared that SQL2008 was a development of SQL2005, as SQL2000 was a development of SQL7 despite comments to the contrary. New headline features included backup compression, governors, policy framework, data compression, encryption, change data capture etc. But then I read the recently produced Microsoft documentation on version differences and see that none of them are in Standard edition, not one. They are all Enterprise features. SQL server may be moving more towards a data platform from just a database engine, but the platform appears to be somewhat narrow for non Enterprise users!
The official list of differences can be found here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/d/f/2df66c0c-fff2-4f2e-b739-bf4581cee533/SQLServer%202008CompareEnterpriseStandard.pdf
This posed a question – is it worth upgrading from SQL2005 Standard edition to SQL 2008 Standard edition?
.
.
.
Upgrading from SQL2000 Standard to SQL2005 Standard provided many new features. I remember the discussion at the time, when many thought that SQL2000 was good enough for many applications. I still think that is the case today to be truthful, but have used quite a few of the new SQL2005 features over the last year or two.
However, let’s look at what SQL2008 Standard offers over 2005 Standard.
* There are no processor or RAM improvements, not that they are required any more. Mirroring looks like it might be improved marginally.
* I am really peeved to see that backup compression has not made it to the Standard feature list.
* There are the usual incremental improvements in SSIS and Reporting, again which I do not use.
To cap it all the (to me) business critical merge replication has gained no features, but its growing deprecated item list makes it look more like it’s on the way out than moving ahead. The new sync services look interesting in the longer term, but offer nothing except a likely version 1.0 buglist for those wishing to take the early adopter plunge. With the massive increase in the number of Enterprise features I would have thought it would make great sense to throw in a few of the ‘old’ Enterprise features into the Standard edition – database snapshots would have been nice, or lock pages in memory.
Editor's Note: Standard Edition can now lock pages in memory if you have patched your server.
Forgive me if I feel short changed, but that feature list does not look a great reason to upgrade. Or I have I failed to turn over the magic stone with hidden features?
So I am left looking at programming/development enhancements – date/time fields, HierarchyID, spatial, merge SQL statement etc. Nice but not critical. There are 2 features that have gained relatively little attention but might improve application performance dramatically for the applications I see – optimize for ad hoc workloads, and filtered indexes. It appears on the surface that these features apply to all editions.
So I am left with the question of whether to upgrade, or wait till the next version of SQL server. Or in the longer term investigate ‘cheaper’ alternatives such as MySQL, which will become ever more viable as the performance of hardware hides any performance deficiencies (either perceived or real). Bearing in mind I have ‘free’ upgrade rights within our Microsoft licensing agreement, I would be very worried if someone that can upgrade for free cannot see the benefits of using the new version.
A related topic is that the CTP’s and developer versions of SQL Server are in effect Enterprise versions, with all the features always on. I can understand this (particularly with the CTPs), but surely it must be simple to add a switch to tell developer version which edition you wish to emulate, so it is possible to develop against the edition that will be used in production. This problem was annoying in SQL2005, but the feature is critically required now, with the vast difference in feature set. I see that there is now a management view that tells you which Enterprise features need to be dropped to use a database in Standard edition.
It could be that Microsoft has done their homework well, and are really targeting the ‘Enterprise’ customer, and are less concerned about the Standard version than they were a few years ago as SQL Server moves more upmarket. I think that Microsoft should make sure that everyone gets something from upgrading, not just being forced to do so as the support for the older product eventually runs out. If they don’t provide improvements I can see slippage of SQL Server customers at the lower to middle range products.
Of course, if you run SQL 2000 Standard, upgrading to SQL2008 Standard (or maybe workgroup depending on which features you require) would be a great upgrade. Or am I already getting good value for money and should just be pleased that I am running a very reliable database system, and be happy to pay extra if I need any of the new features.
What do you think?
By Nigel Maneffa, 2009/12/18 (first published: 2008/10/21)
SQLServerCentral.com
Friday, December 18, 2009
Wisdom in a Cleric’s Garb; Why Not a Lab Coat Too?
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: June 1, 2009
There is a warm fuzzy moment near the end of the movie “Angels & Demons,” starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard.
Mr. Hanks as the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon has just exposed the archvillain who was threatening to blow up the Vatican with antimatter stolen from a particle collider. A Catholic cardinal who has been giving him a hard time all through the movie and has suddenly turned twinkly-eyed says a small prayer thanking God for sending someone to save them.
Mr. Hanks replies that he doesn’t think he was “sent.”
Of course he was, he just doesn’t know it, the priest says gently. Mr. Hanks, taken aback, smiles in his classic sheepish way. Suddenly he is not so sure.
This may seem like a happy ending. Faith and science reconciled or at least holding their fire in the face of mystery. But for me that moment ruined what had otherwise been a pleasant two hours on a rainy afternoon. It crystallized what is wrong with the entire way that popular culture regards science. Scientists and academics are smart, but religious leaders are wise.
These smart alecks who know how to split atoms and splice genes need to be put in their place by older steadier hands.
It was as if the priest had patted Einstein on the head and chuckled, “Never mind, Sonny, some day you’ll understand.”
.
.
.
My first response upon reading the book earlier this year was to wonder if any part of this history could be true. I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that the short answer is no. Mr. Brown is so successful at spinning his fables that a whole industry has grown up around debunking him.
There was indeed an organization called the Illuminati formed in Bavaria in 1776 — too late for Galileo or Bernini — but according to historians it died out a decade or so later. Nevertheless the Illuminati have lived on in the imaginations of conspiracy theorists.
For Mr. Howard, who has been lauded for getting things right in movies like “Apollo 13” and “A Beautiful Mind,” the vagueness between what is real history and what is made up in Dan Brown’s books is part of the fun. “He doesn’t invent things, he creates suppositions,” Mr. Howard said.
The church did burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for various heresies, including espousing the Copernican sun-centric view of the solar system, in 1600, and sentenced Galileo to permanent house arrest as “violently suspect of heresy,” in 1633. But in recent times Catholics have gotten better about science, especially compared with some of their fundamentalist cousins in the United States. The church has been cool with the Big Bang origin of the universe since 1951, and the current pope, Benedict, has signaled his acceptance of evolution, at least as an explanation of how humankind came about, if not why.
In a recent interview, Mr. Howard said that he didn’t think there was any conflict between science and religion. Both are after big mysteries, but whatever science finds, he said, “There’s still going be that question: ‘And before that?’ ”
I don’t really mind that the movie and book have rewritten history, and the movie takes fewer liberties with science than much science fiction.
But I can’t help being bugged by that warm, fuzzy moment at the end, that figurative pat on the head. After all is said and done, it seems to imply, having faith is just a little bit better than being smart.
Maybe I am making too much of this cinematic grain of sand to see the whole history of science and religion in it. But I have a feeling the scene wouldn’t work if the boyish Mr. Hanks were replaced by someone more formidable, say, Frank Langella or Clint Eastwood or Humphrey Bogart.
Part of what gives the movie its kick is the old Henry Jamesian notion of a headstrong American encountering old European tradition. We’re still in awe of all that tradition, even as we insist, like teenagers exclaiming that Dad is an out-of-it old fogey, that it’s a new world.
And they are still patting us on the head.
Why should wisdom and comfort inhabit a clerical collar instead of a lab coat? Perhaps because religion seems to offer consolations that science doesn’t.
The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler once said that what gives great leaders power is the ability to comfort others in the face of death. But the iconic achievement of modern physics is the atomic bomb, death incarnate.
Moreover, since the time of Galileo scientists have bent over backward to restrain their own metaphysical rhetoric for fear of stepping on religious toes. Indeed, many of them were devout believers convinced they were exploring the mind of God. Stephen Jay Gould, the late paleontologist and author, famously referred to science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria.”
The lament, voiced often in the movie and even more in the book, is that science, with its endlessly nibbling doubts, has drained the world of wonder and meaning, depriving humans of, among other things, a moral compass.
The church advertises strength through certitude, but starting from the same collection of fables, commandments and aphorisms — love thy neighbor; thou shalt not kill; blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth — the religions of the world have reached an alarmingly diverse set of conclusions about what behaviors, like gay marriage, are right and wrong.
If science drains the world of certainty, maybe that is invigorating as well as appropriate. The cardinal is free to revel in the assurance of his absolutes, while Tom Hanks and I can be braced by the challenge of being our own cosmologists, creating our own meanings.
Meanwhile, America is not so young and innocent anymore, and science has its own traditions and, yes, wisdoms, stretching back to antiquity.
In science the ends are justified by the means — what questions we ask and how we ask them — and the meaning of the quest is derived not from answers but from the process by which they are found: curiosity, doubt, humility, tolerance.
Those fatherly pats on the head sound comforting, but as an answer to life’s struggles and quests, they lack something.
I miss my dad, but I’m glad I stood my ground and kept flailing at a writing career when he wanted to rescue me and set me up in a family business. Mr. Hanks should hold his ground too.
Published: June 1, 2009
There is a warm fuzzy moment near the end of the movie “Angels & Demons,” starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard.
Mr. Hanks as the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon has just exposed the archvillain who was threatening to blow up the Vatican with antimatter stolen from a particle collider. A Catholic cardinal who has been giving him a hard time all through the movie and has suddenly turned twinkly-eyed says a small prayer thanking God for sending someone to save them.
Mr. Hanks replies that he doesn’t think he was “sent.”
Of course he was, he just doesn’t know it, the priest says gently. Mr. Hanks, taken aback, smiles in his classic sheepish way. Suddenly he is not so sure.
This may seem like a happy ending. Faith and science reconciled or at least holding their fire in the face of mystery. But for me that moment ruined what had otherwise been a pleasant two hours on a rainy afternoon. It crystallized what is wrong with the entire way that popular culture regards science. Scientists and academics are smart, but religious leaders are wise.
These smart alecks who know how to split atoms and splice genes need to be put in their place by older steadier hands.
It was as if the priest had patted Einstein on the head and chuckled, “Never mind, Sonny, some day you’ll understand.”
.
.
.
My first response upon reading the book earlier this year was to wonder if any part of this history could be true. I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that the short answer is no. Mr. Brown is so successful at spinning his fables that a whole industry has grown up around debunking him.
There was indeed an organization called the Illuminati formed in Bavaria in 1776 — too late for Galileo or Bernini — but according to historians it died out a decade or so later. Nevertheless the Illuminati have lived on in the imaginations of conspiracy theorists.
For Mr. Howard, who has been lauded for getting things right in movies like “Apollo 13” and “A Beautiful Mind,” the vagueness between what is real history and what is made up in Dan Brown’s books is part of the fun. “He doesn’t invent things, he creates suppositions,” Mr. Howard said.
The church did burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for various heresies, including espousing the Copernican sun-centric view of the solar system, in 1600, and sentenced Galileo to permanent house arrest as “violently suspect of heresy,” in 1633. But in recent times Catholics have gotten better about science, especially compared with some of their fundamentalist cousins in the United States. The church has been cool with the Big Bang origin of the universe since 1951, and the current pope, Benedict, has signaled his acceptance of evolution, at least as an explanation of how humankind came about, if not why.
In a recent interview, Mr. Howard said that he didn’t think there was any conflict between science and religion. Both are after big mysteries, but whatever science finds, he said, “There’s still going be that question: ‘And before that?’ ”
I don’t really mind that the movie and book have rewritten history, and the movie takes fewer liberties with science than much science fiction.
But I can’t help being bugged by that warm, fuzzy moment at the end, that figurative pat on the head. After all is said and done, it seems to imply, having faith is just a little bit better than being smart.
Maybe I am making too much of this cinematic grain of sand to see the whole history of science and religion in it. But I have a feeling the scene wouldn’t work if the boyish Mr. Hanks were replaced by someone more formidable, say, Frank Langella or Clint Eastwood or Humphrey Bogart.
Part of what gives the movie its kick is the old Henry Jamesian notion of a headstrong American encountering old European tradition. We’re still in awe of all that tradition, even as we insist, like teenagers exclaiming that Dad is an out-of-it old fogey, that it’s a new world.
And they are still patting us on the head.
Why should wisdom and comfort inhabit a clerical collar instead of a lab coat? Perhaps because religion seems to offer consolations that science doesn’t.
The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler once said that what gives great leaders power is the ability to comfort others in the face of death. But the iconic achievement of modern physics is the atomic bomb, death incarnate.
Moreover, since the time of Galileo scientists have bent over backward to restrain their own metaphysical rhetoric for fear of stepping on religious toes. Indeed, many of them were devout believers convinced they were exploring the mind of God. Stephen Jay Gould, the late paleontologist and author, famously referred to science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria.”
The lament, voiced often in the movie and even more in the book, is that science, with its endlessly nibbling doubts, has drained the world of wonder and meaning, depriving humans of, among other things, a moral compass.
The church advertises strength through certitude, but starting from the same collection of fables, commandments and aphorisms — love thy neighbor; thou shalt not kill; blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth — the religions of the world have reached an alarmingly diverse set of conclusions about what behaviors, like gay marriage, are right and wrong.
If science drains the world of certainty, maybe that is invigorating as well as appropriate. The cardinal is free to revel in the assurance of his absolutes, while Tom Hanks and I can be braced by the challenge of being our own cosmologists, creating our own meanings.
Meanwhile, America is not so young and innocent anymore, and science has its own traditions and, yes, wisdoms, stretching back to antiquity.
In science the ends are justified by the means — what questions we ask and how we ask them — and the meaning of the quest is derived not from answers but from the process by which they are found: curiosity, doubt, humility, tolerance.
Those fatherly pats on the head sound comforting, but as an answer to life’s struggles and quests, they lack something.
I miss my dad, but I’m glad I stood my ground and kept flailing at a writing career when he wanted to rescue me and set me up in a family business. Mr. Hanks should hold his ground too.
At a Mine’s Bottom, Hints of Dark Matter
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: December 17, 2009
An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.
The particles showed as two tiny pulses of heat deposited over the course of two years in chunks of germanium and silicon that had been cooled to a temperature near absolute zero. But, the scientists said, there was more than a 20 percent chance that the pulses were caused by fluctuations in the background radioactivity of their cavern, so the results were tantalizing, but not definitive.
Gordon Kane, a physicist from the University of Michigan, called the results “inconclusive, sadly,” adding, “It seems likely it is dark matter detection, but no proof.”
Dr. Kane said results from bigger and thus more sensitive experiments would be available in a couple of months.
.
.
.
The stakes for astronomy and physics could hardly be greater. If the particles are confirmed by tests at other detectors, it would mean that, after more than half a century of speculation, astronomers are zeroing in on the identity of the invisible material that accounts for 25 percent of the universe and determines the architecture of the visible universe.
Confirmation of the particles would also constitute the first evidence for a new feature of nature, called supersymmetry, that physicists have been seeking as avidly as the astronomers have been seeking dark matter. It is central to theoretical efforts like string theory, which unify all of the forces of nature into one mathematical expression.
The report ended weeks of speculation on physics blogs and in laboratory cafeterias around the world. At the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., where dark matter experts who had gathered for a two-week workshop watched the talks on the Web, Dr. Kane, who was present, described the mood at the workshop as “a high level of serious hysteria.”
Dark matter became a serious issue in the 1970s, when Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and her colleagues charted the rotation speeds of galaxies and found that they seemed to be enveloped in halos of dark matter, then called missing mass.
A wide range of astrophysical and cosmological measurements have subsequently converged on an intimidating recipe for the cosmos of 4 percent atoms, 25 percent dark matter and 70 percent a mysterious energy that has been called dark energy and has nothing to do with the news on Thursday.
Published: December 17, 2009
An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.
The particles showed as two tiny pulses of heat deposited over the course of two years in chunks of germanium and silicon that had been cooled to a temperature near absolute zero. But, the scientists said, there was more than a 20 percent chance that the pulses were caused by fluctuations in the background radioactivity of their cavern, so the results were tantalizing, but not definitive.
Gordon Kane, a physicist from the University of Michigan, called the results “inconclusive, sadly,” adding, “It seems likely it is dark matter detection, but no proof.”
Dr. Kane said results from bigger and thus more sensitive experiments would be available in a couple of months.
.
.
.
The stakes for astronomy and physics could hardly be greater. If the particles are confirmed by tests at other detectors, it would mean that, after more than half a century of speculation, astronomers are zeroing in on the identity of the invisible material that accounts for 25 percent of the universe and determines the architecture of the visible universe.
Confirmation of the particles would also constitute the first evidence for a new feature of nature, called supersymmetry, that physicists have been seeking as avidly as the astronomers have been seeking dark matter. It is central to theoretical efforts like string theory, which unify all of the forces of nature into one mathematical expression.
The report ended weeks of speculation on physics blogs and in laboratory cafeterias around the world. At the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., where dark matter experts who had gathered for a two-week workshop watched the talks on the Web, Dr. Kane, who was present, described the mood at the workshop as “a high level of serious hysteria.”
Dark matter became a serious issue in the 1970s, when Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and her colleagues charted the rotation speeds of galaxies and found that they seemed to be enveloped in halos of dark matter, then called missing mass.
A wide range of astrophysical and cosmological measurements have subsequently converged on an intimidating recipe for the cosmos of 4 percent atoms, 25 percent dark matter and 70 percent a mysterious energy that has been called dark energy and has nothing to do with the news on Thursday.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
A Sultry World Is Found Orbiting a Distant Star
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: December 16, 2009
Call it Steam World.
Astronomers said Wednesday that they had discovered a planet composed mostly of water.
You would not want to live there. Besides the heat — 400 degrees Fahrenheit on the ocean surface — the planet is probably cloaked in a dark fog of superheated steam and other gases. But its discovery has encouraged a growing feeling among astronomers that they are on the verge of a breakthrough and getting closer to finding a planet that something could live on.
“This probably is not habitable, but it didn’t miss the habitable zone by that much,” said David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team that discovered the new planet and will reports its findings on Thursday in the journal Nature.
Geoffrey W. Marcy, a planet hunter from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an accompanying article in Nature that the new work provided “the most watertight evidence so far for a planet that is something like our own Earth, outside our solar system.”
Only 2.7 times the size of Earth and 6.6 times as massive, the new planet takes 38 hours to circle a dim red star, GJ 1214, in the constellation Ophiuchus — about 40 light-years from here. It is one of the lightest and smallest so-called extrasolar planets yet found, part of a growing class of planets that are less than 10 times the mass of Earth.
Dr. Charbonneau’s announcement capped a week in which the list of known planets, including these “super-Earths,” grew significantly.
.
.
.
Alan P. Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said of the planet hunters, “Give them a couple more years and they’re going to knock your socks off.”
.
.
.
From the drop in starlight, the astronomers could calculate the diameter of the Ophiuchus planet, known now as GJ 1214b. Then they used a sensitive spectrograph on a 3.6-meter telescope in Chile to measure its gravitational tug on the star, thus deriving the planet’s mass. Using those two numbers, Dr. Charbonneau and his colleagues could calculate the density of the planet, about one-third that of Earth.
“What we probably have here is a water world,” Dr. Charbonneau said.
Dr. Charbonneau said the weight of the new planet’s presumptive atmosphere kept the water liquid rather than just boiling into space. He acknowledged that a different recipe, with more rock and a very puffy atmosphere, would also fit the data. That is unlikely, he and other planet experts say, but the steam-world theory may be soon tested.
The new planet is close enough to be studied directly by telescopes on or near Earth. Indeed, Dr. Charbonneau said his team had already applied for observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope.
“Our own TV signals,” he said, “have already passed this star.”
Published: December 16, 2009
Call it Steam World.
Astronomers said Wednesday that they had discovered a planet composed mostly of water.
You would not want to live there. Besides the heat — 400 degrees Fahrenheit on the ocean surface — the planet is probably cloaked in a dark fog of superheated steam and other gases. But its discovery has encouraged a growing feeling among astronomers that they are on the verge of a breakthrough and getting closer to finding a planet that something could live on.
“This probably is not habitable, but it didn’t miss the habitable zone by that much,” said David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team that discovered the new planet and will reports its findings on Thursday in the journal Nature.
Geoffrey W. Marcy, a planet hunter from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an accompanying article in Nature that the new work provided “the most watertight evidence so far for a planet that is something like our own Earth, outside our solar system.”
Only 2.7 times the size of Earth and 6.6 times as massive, the new planet takes 38 hours to circle a dim red star, GJ 1214, in the constellation Ophiuchus — about 40 light-years from here. It is one of the lightest and smallest so-called extrasolar planets yet found, part of a growing class of planets that are less than 10 times the mass of Earth.
Dr. Charbonneau’s announcement capped a week in which the list of known planets, including these “super-Earths,” grew significantly.
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Alan P. Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said of the planet hunters, “Give them a couple more years and they’re going to knock your socks off.”
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From the drop in starlight, the astronomers could calculate the diameter of the Ophiuchus planet, known now as GJ 1214b. Then they used a sensitive spectrograph on a 3.6-meter telescope in Chile to measure its gravitational tug on the star, thus deriving the planet’s mass. Using those two numbers, Dr. Charbonneau and his colleagues could calculate the density of the planet, about one-third that of Earth.
“What we probably have here is a water world,” Dr. Charbonneau said.
Dr. Charbonneau said the weight of the new planet’s presumptive atmosphere kept the water liquid rather than just boiling into space. He acknowledged that a different recipe, with more rock and a very puffy atmosphere, would also fit the data. That is unlikely, he and other planet experts say, but the steam-world theory may be soon tested.
The new planet is close enough to be studied directly by telescopes on or near Earth. Indeed, Dr. Charbonneau said his team had already applied for observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope.
“Our own TV signals,” he said, “have already passed this star.”
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Yahoo and Microsoft stand united to overthrow Google
by Ayurdhi Dhar - December 12, 2009
Redmond, December 12 -- The Yahoo and Microsoft deal to put their heads together in search engine technology and dethrone their main contender Google is taking shape after many talks and speculations.
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According to the deal, Yahoo will earn through a revenue-sharing agreement, which will depend on the traffic Yahoo is able to generate. Microsoft will also pay Yahoo traffic acquisition costs initially at the rate of 88 percent of the search revenue generated.
Microsoft is also planning to reimburse Yahoo $150 million for the cost of the agreement. This sum is in addition to the $50 million they would be paying Yahoo every year for the first three years. It is a ten-year contract between the two companies.
Morse had also added, "At that point, we start getting reimbursed by Microsoft for the costs of running our paid search and algorithmic search businesses. That is a terrific financial benefit for us that starts right off.
“Part of that total benefit will be these 400 or so engineers that move over. But far greater than that, that savings will be a meaningful impact to us in 2010, as soon as regulatory approval happens."
Advertising together and dethroning Google
Search engine technology is witnessing newer innovations on daily basis. As Google decided to go real-time, and provide Twitter feeds as search results, Yahoo joined the race and declared their own decision to integrate Twitter feeds in search results. Microsoft already has this provision in Bing, but the results for these feeds appear on a separate, and not the main page.
Apart from search engine, the two companies had decided to come together for the purpose of advertisement business too. Here, Yahoo will be the face presented to the world, that is, the exclusive relationship sales force in the world, while Microsoft will work backstage and power Yahoo’s search capabilities.
Redmond, December 12 -- The Yahoo and Microsoft deal to put their heads together in search engine technology and dethrone their main contender Google is taking shape after many talks and speculations.
.
.
.
According to the deal, Yahoo will earn through a revenue-sharing agreement, which will depend on the traffic Yahoo is able to generate. Microsoft will also pay Yahoo traffic acquisition costs initially at the rate of 88 percent of the search revenue generated.
Microsoft is also planning to reimburse Yahoo $150 million for the cost of the agreement. This sum is in addition to the $50 million they would be paying Yahoo every year for the first three years. It is a ten-year contract between the two companies.
Morse had also added, "At that point, we start getting reimbursed by Microsoft for the costs of running our paid search and algorithmic search businesses. That is a terrific financial benefit for us that starts right off.
“Part of that total benefit will be these 400 or so engineers that move over. But far greater than that, that savings will be a meaningful impact to us in 2010, as soon as regulatory approval happens."
Advertising together and dethroning Google
Search engine technology is witnessing newer innovations on daily basis. As Google decided to go real-time, and provide Twitter feeds as search results, Yahoo joined the race and declared their own decision to integrate Twitter feeds in search results. Microsoft already has this provision in Bing, but the results for these feeds appear on a separate, and not the main page.
Apart from search engine, the two companies had decided to come together for the purpose of advertisement business too. Here, Yahoo will be the face presented to the world, that is, the exclusive relationship sales force in the world, while Microsoft will work backstage and power Yahoo’s search capabilities.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Intelligence is prediction
Intelligence is the ability to predict what comes next, even when faced with incomplete knowledge. Intelligence is doing the right thing at the right time - sufficiently right to improve a being's chances of survival.
Artificial Intelligence, therefore, should be software that predicts. Software that can do the right thing - sufficiently right to be valuable for a business or an individual. Artificial Intelligence has reached the stage of sufficiency.
A machine can understand natural language, respond and act such as to be genuinely useful. It doesn't have to possess human-level intelligence. It doesn't have to fool you that it's human, even though, surprisingly often, it can. It just has to do a good job - a better job, that is, than countless imperfect websites, telephone systems and even complete, staffed call centres.
Any modern computer can cope with support or telesales 'scripts' with millions of times the complexity of your average human, and can have any amount of information or knowledge 'at its fingertips'. The missing element, until now, has been understanding.
There are, frankly, too many examples of conversational agents that do not say the right thing often enough. They don't understand, spotting just a few key words in what is said. That's not enough.
Our software predicts what comes next, at every stage in a process. It 'thinks of' the trillions of possible sentences that you might say, and knows exactly which one came closest. So it 'understands' you. It knows every part of what you said, and can act on that understanding. It uses context to resolve ambiguity. Our AI can show sufficient intelligence.
Our AI concentrates currently on natural language processing and on emotional states, yet its universal principles can be applied to any sensory or data inputs.
CleverBot
Artificial Intelligence, therefore, should be software that predicts. Software that can do the right thing - sufficiently right to be valuable for a business or an individual. Artificial Intelligence has reached the stage of sufficiency.
A machine can understand natural language, respond and act such as to be genuinely useful. It doesn't have to possess human-level intelligence. It doesn't have to fool you that it's human, even though, surprisingly often, it can. It just has to do a good job - a better job, that is, than countless imperfect websites, telephone systems and even complete, staffed call centres.
Any modern computer can cope with support or telesales 'scripts' with millions of times the complexity of your average human, and can have any amount of information or knowledge 'at its fingertips'. The missing element, until now, has been understanding.
There are, frankly, too many examples of conversational agents that do not say the right thing often enough. They don't understand, spotting just a few key words in what is said. That's not enough.
Our software predicts what comes next, at every stage in a process. It 'thinks of' the trillions of possible sentences that you might say, and knows exactly which one came closest. So it 'understands' you. It knows every part of what you said, and can act on that understanding. It uses context to resolve ambiguity. Our AI can show sufficient intelligence.
Our AI concentrates currently on natural language processing and on emotional states, yet its universal principles can be applied to any sensory or data inputs.
CleverBot
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