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Chip Shots pours your Monday cup of coffee |
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May 21, 2007 at 06:15 AM |
Nothing like a steaming hot cup of Chip Shots coffee to start off your Monday.
Here's a few items of interest for the new week.
Look for a few postings this week from the NSTI Nanotech and Cleantech conference here in Santa Clara. I'll be wearing my Senior Contributing Editor hat for Small Times/www.smalltimes.com, but will also be filing my observations of one of the biggest nano shows on Chip Shots. Stay tuned.
I've been a loyal subscriber to---though not always the most consistent reader of---Discover magazine for years. The June issue hit my snailmail slot the other day, and it's a good 'un. A special issue titled "The Invisible Planet: The Science We Don't See" offers a slew of general overview features with titles like "Timeless Wireless," "Your Body Is A Planet," "The Secret Life of Atoms," and "In No Time."
Although I haven't quite consumed the new issue cover to cover yet, here's a nugget garnered from the eyebrow-raisingly titled article, "How Much Does the Internet Weigh?" After coming up with a formula based on the vast amount of traffic percolating over the Net---which the editors ascertained to be 9% email, 75% file sharing, btw---they posit the weight of the Internet to be "just about 0.2 millonths of an ounce." So much for information overload in terms of mass! I wonder how much all the chips that carry the 0's and 1's weigh?
In a more cosmological/astronautical vein, I just got an update from a music buddy of mine, who also happens to be a rocket man. I met him because of his involvement in "the scene" where South Asian and other global rhythms intersect with the digital beats of electronica. But in his recent email missive about State of Bengal, he also mentioned that he'd been working for several months in New Mexico on the DARPA/Boeing/et al. joint project called Orbital Express. If you haven't heard of this effort and you're a fan of space programs, you gotta check it out. Its goal: to provide a "safe and cost-effective approach to autonomously service satellites in orbit."
The programs' key working acronym is ASTRO, which stands for "Autonomous Space Transport and Robotic Operations." A demo satellite rode a rocket into orbit on March 9, then on April 17 performed "the first autonomous transfer of hardware [in this case fuel and a battery] to another spacecraft with a robotic arm," and then on May 10 pulled off the first fully autonomous, free-flying on-orbit rendezvous and capture operation. That's right, we're talking "smart" orbital satellite servicing capabilities, which is pretty cool stuff.
Interested? Check out these videos on the Boeing Website. I hope to find out more about the semiconductor, MEMS, and other micro/nano elements embedded in the Orbital Express vehicle and share them in a future posting of Chip Shots.
Finally, I want to welcome Lubab Sheet to the blogosphere. SEMI's director of emerging tech has a newish blog with the cute 'n' clever handle of LuBlog, where she gets energetic about photovoltaics, fuels cells, and such, climbs into some really small places in the nanotech realm, and gets microwidgety about MEMS.
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