Chinese students stealing tech secrets from UK varsities

British industrial designer Sir James Dyson has alleged that Chinese students at the country's universities are stealing scientific and technological secrets and passing them on to their country.

"They (Chinese students) go back home taking that science and technology knowledge with them and then they start competing with us. This is mad, it is madness,'' Dyson, best know for inventing the bagless vacuum cleaner, told the UK's Sunday Times newspaper.

British universities minister David Willetts said he will carefully study the evidence that Dyson has got.

Universities UK chief executive Nicola Dandridge said, "We are very aware this is going on and we are taking it very seriously." Electronic engineering and computer sciences are suspected to be among the two sectors where technology is being stolen. Dyson said many Chinese students continue to do so even after leaving UK. "Bugs are left in PCs so that data continues to be transmitted after the students return home."

via timesofindia

NASA disavows its scientist's claim of alien life

The gaps and stringy fibers in these space rocks sure look like bacteria, and a NASA researcher has caused a stir with claims that they're fossils of alien life. But as NASA found 15 years ago, looks can be deceiving.

Top scientists in different disciplines immediately found pitfalls in a newly published examination of three meteorites that went viral on the Internet over the weekend. NASA and its top scientists disavowed the work by noon Monday.

Biologists said just because it looks as though the holes were made by bacteria doesn't make them fossils of extraterrestrial microbes. The meteorites could be riddled with Earthly contamination. And both astronomers and biologists complained that the study was not truly reviewed by peers.

There are questions about the credentials of the study's author, Richard Hoover. And the work appeared in an online journal that raises eyebrows because even its editor acknowledges it may have to shut down in June and that one reason for publishing the controversial claim was to help find a buyer.

"There's a lot of stuff there, but not a lot of science," said Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, who publicly dissected the paper over the weekend. "I looked at it and shuddered."

The Associated Press talked to a dozen scientists, and none of them agreed with the findings. There was none of the excitement that surrounded a similar claim that NASA announced with fanfare in 1996 — but was forced to back away from later — that a meteorite from Mars found in Antarctica showed evidence of alien life.

"There has been no one in the scientific community, certainly no one in the meteorite analysis community, that has supported these conclusions," NASA Astrobiology Institute Director Carl Pilcher said Monday of the latest work.

Hoover, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., claims he found fossils that look like remnants of bacteria in a handful of meteorites. His research, published online Friday in the Journal of Cosmology, concludes these must have come from outer space. It is based on three specimens of a rare type of meteorite — thought to come from comets — found in France in 1806 and 1864 and Tanzania in 1938.

Hoover's pictures look like microscopic versions of flattened tubes and tangled strings.

Hoover didn't return phone calls or e-mails from the AP.

Rudy Schild, a Harvard astronomer and editor-in-chief of the journal, said the study was reviewed by scientists, but he wouldn't identify them. Schild said the idea was to garner attention and generate debate, which happened after it was first reported over the weekend by FoxNews.com.

"We thought the purpose of the exercise here is having it released and having it discussed," Schild told the AP. He acknowledged the journal's imminent demise was "a factor in play, but there are other factors as well" in the decision to publish Hoover's research.

The year-and-a-half-old journal champions a disputed theory that life started elsewhere in the universe and was seeded on Earth by asteroids and comets.

Schild said criticisms of Hoover's paper "are legitimate" but that he agrees with Hoover's conclusion.

Other scientists say Hoover, who has worked for NASA in solar physics but now bills himself as an astrobiologist, doesn't have the proper expertise. "Anyone can call himself an astrobiologist. That doesn't make it so," said Pilcher, the astrobiology institute director.

And while Hoover's paper in the journal lists him as a "Ph.D.," NASA's solar physics website does not mention a doctorate. A colleague of Hoover's said he acknowledges that he doesn't have the advanced degree. Schild said someone at the journal — he doesn't know who — may have inadvertently listed Hoover with the doctorate title.

Top planetary scientists, including those who study meteorites, are at a conference in Houston this week and this was the talk — albeit mostly in a can-you-believe-this-stuff way, said Harry "Hap" McSween, one of world's foremost experts in meteorites.

"I don't think anybody accepts this idea," McSween said. "Nobody thinks they are extraterrestrial."

McSween has studied one of the meteorites cited — the one that fell to France in 1864. He said it was in "atrocious" condition at a Paris Museum with noticeable contamination. There was a vein in the rock that hadn't been there in old photographs, a sign of creeping moisture. That makes sense because even NASA moon rocks, hermitically stored, have been contaminated with Earthly microbes, he said.

McSween and other scientists said they had hoped the public would ignore reports about the study, but they didn't. It was on the top of Yahoo News much of Monday.

"It looks like it's kind of viral," McSween said. "It's extraterrestrial life, that's why."

via sify

Scientists solve mystery of disappearing Sunspots

In a major breakthrough, a team of scientists led by Dibyendu Nandi of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata, has used a computer model of solar activity to explain how the Sun lost its spots and solar storms for a long period. Sunspots are dark spots on the Sun with strong magnetic activity. The results of the study on the characteristics of the Sun is slated for international release on Thursday in the "Nature" journal and has been praised by NASA as a breakthrough in generating advanced knowledge of sustained good weather in space.

Nasa has scheduled a conference on Thursday involving several international scientists to discuss the results.

Speaking to TOI from Kolkata, Nandi explained the significance of these predictions lie in the fact that these can be used by airline operators while scheduling air traffic, especially over polar routes and also by space agencies in planning missions.

"Did you know that there is weather in space just like weather on Earth? And that dark spots on the Sun's surface called sunspots can affect weather in space and can disrupt flights over the Earth's polar region," Nandi said.

"The shorter, polar routes are preferred by airline operators because less fuel is consumed and predictions of good weather can be used to direct heavier traffic through these remote regions," he said.

source : timesofindia

2-inch Cube that could replace unsightly Cell Towers

They tower over the landscape, sometimes disguised in a way that does not fool anyone.

Big trees that look so fake, they are derided as "Frankenpines." Flagpoles that soar higher than any flag would warrant. Or unadorned towers that offer absolutely no pretense as to their purpose.

But a day could soon come when those sky-high, unsightly cell phone towers that litter the countryside may be replaced with something no bigger than a Rubik’s cube.

Called the lightRadio cube, the new device developed by Bell Labs in Murray Hill is generating major buzz by cell phone carriers around the world.

"The lightRadio could radically transform the model for wireless networks and could actually change the way the wireless industry operates," predicted Dan Hays, a telecommunications consultant with PRTM in Washington, D.C.

Cell phone antennas now must be large and high because they rely on sending signals down and outward like an umbrella. But officials at Alcatel-Lucent, where Bell Labs is located, said the lightCube directs cell phone signals more directly using far less power, while handling as much as 30 percent more capacity than current cell phone towers.

The device was created in Alcatel-Lucent’s wireless research division. As consumers clamor for stronger data and voice capabilities on their smartphones, telecommunications companies struggle to keep up with demand, said division head Tod Sizer.

Sizer challenged his team to come up with a solution. To push them further, he calculated the device could be as small as 2.3 inches. A hobbyist woodworker, Sizer went into his shop at his home in Little Silver, built a wooden model, and showed it to the group, which is scattered globally.

In March, they told him it would be impossible.

But in May, an inventor in Stuttgart showed his boss what he’d come up with: three 2-inch, stacked circuit boards for the antenna, radio, and network connection, replacing the conventional antenna system that connects every cell phone call.

"I said, ‘Do you realize what you did?,’" Sizer recalled, his voice rising with excitement. The team has since tested the prototype and proved the concept worked. To work effectively, the technology would force carriers to switch how they build wireless networks, but the lightRadio means rural areas and developing countries could get internet access. The device only requires a network connection and a power source.
"The flexibility this brings is really going to be quite fun," Sizer said.

The device shrinks the antenna and radio devices at the top of a cell phone tower, relocating the network communications power systems — which sit at its base — to central data centers. As a result, the antenna casing can be smaller — about 2.3 inches, down from conventional antennas that are typically the size of an ironing board.

Hays said the device could be a game changer. "Historically, the wireless industry has really revolved around towers with large areas of coverage," he said. "There’s now an opportunity to rethink how wireless networks are structured." The device will include wirings for all carriers and cell phone technologies, including 2G, 3G and the emerging 4G or LTE system. Officials said it should also be able to handle as much as 30 percent more capacity than a typical antenna, but that figure varies based on where it is deployed, the number of users and the other types of devices, traffic, and speeds that are on the network, said Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman Wendy Zajack.

LightRadio garnered the biggest buzz at last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where it was launched, where cell phone companies were in Alcatel-Lucent’s booth, examining the lightRadio cube, taking pictures and asking questions.

"Beyond a couple of new smartphones and tablets that were announced, lightRadio was actually one of the most exciting new ideas that came forward," Hays said.

Already, dozens of mobile carriers across the world have approached Alcatel-Lucent asking for demonstrations and trials, according to Ken Wirth, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s 4G/LTE wireless networks business. Five carriers in the United States, Europe and China are enrolled for trials by the end of this year and the company hope to roll the devices out commercially within 18 months.

Tom Sawanobori, vice president of technology planning at Verizon Wireless, said his company was looking at the technology.

The cubes can be positioned nearly anywhere, from the sides of buildings to light poles, or arranged in grids for more strength. If a certain area has more use during a particular time of the day — say, weekday rush hour on the Garden State Parkway compared to the surrounding suburbs on weekends — the signals can change direction at the touch of a button.

The towers do have one benefit, though. Municipalities and state authorities gain revenue when the carriers install towers on their property. But it’s a Catch-22: nearby residents push back as more towers go up, while still demanding better connectivity, technology analyst Jeff Kagan said.

"We as a people have got a problem: we want more connectivity, but that means more towers, and we don’t want more towers," he said. "If (lightRadio) works as well as it sounds like it’s going to work, it sounds like the solution that we need."

via nj