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This dust is beyond magical: It's smartBy J. SCOTT ORR
STAR-LEDGER STAFF Researchers around the world are working to make all that dust in the wind a bit
smarter. So-called "smart dust," minuscule particles full of sensing, computing and communication goodness, has
been a dream of scientists since the term was first coined by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, almost 10
years ago. Today, breakthroughs in nanotechnology have researchers envisioning all kinds of potential uses for the tiny powerhouses:
surveillance, tracking items and people, detecting dangerous chemicals in air and water, diagnosing and treating diseases
and a vast range of other applications. "Work on these tiny sensors and smart electronic devices with computer processing
capability and the capability to communicate is all starting to come together," said Michael Sailor, a leading nanotechnology
researcher at the University of California, San Diego. Driving smart dust's migration from science fiction to science fact is the
confluence of the original smart dust idea, which envisioned particles that could be measured in millimeters, and nanotechnology,
which deals in far smaller sizes down to the molecular level. Adding to the buzz in recent weeks is the development at the University of California,
Irvine, of a key radio component that is thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. Christopher Rutherglen, an engineering graduate student
at UC Irvine, worked with professor Peter Burke in developing a working nano-scale radio component, the demodulator, that
translates radio waves into sound. They are now working on shrinking the amplifier down to size, another step toward a functioning nano-radio. "It's definitely
conceivable that it could be used as a component of smart dust, though smart dust needs to have a lot more components to it,"
Rutherglen said. A nano-sized power supply, he said, could be the biggest challenge, though breakthroughs are coming at a breathtaking
pace. "There's a surprise around every corner and you don't know what will happen next, nor do I. We're
taking it one step at a time, but it is moving quickly," Rutherglen said. "There's a lot of money being thrown
at this." While there is a lot of speculation about the applications for a radio so small that it can't be seen, there
is little doubt that the Pentagon is interested, since it provided the funding for Rutherglen's research and similar work
at other U.S. institutions. Smart dust differs from other nanotechnologies in that it requires two key components: It must be able to detect
sound, light, movement or other environmental conditions, and it must be able to communicate that information. For example, 100,000
smart dust particles could be spread about a subway system to create a network to monitor for chemical or biological threats,
loud noises, flashes of light or other signs of potential danger. Or they could be spread across a battlefield from an aircraft to track troop movements,
detect weapons deployments, intercept communications or otherwise gather valuable wartime data. Marlene Bourne, who heads Bourne Research in Scottsdale,
Ariz., also sees a bright future in dust, but, since her company deals with existing applications, she also acknowledges the
significant challenges that lie ahead. Existing technology has mastered the "smart," it's the "dust"
part of the equation that remains elusive today. "The cool part of it is that the sensors, the little onboard sensor components,
those are dust-sized," Bourne said. "The problem is once they are packaged with processors and batteries and so
forth, the dust ends up being the size of a deck of cards," she added. Still, these deck-of-card-sized sensors are rather
extraordinary in themselves. One current application: they are scattered around vineyards to give winemakers real-time reports on things like
temperature, humidity and soil conditions. Just last week, scientists at France's Université de Lyon showed off
marble-sized devices that could be tossed into the ocean to report back on water currents and temperatures. Their findings are
to be published in a coming American Physical Society journal, according to Science Daily. "These things are already in use, they are getting
smaller and smaller. They're not really dust just yet, but they are certainly heading in that direction," Bourne
said. As with any new technology, there are concerns over how smart dust might be abused. Should authorities, for example, be allowed to scatter
the stuff over a crowd of protesters to track their movements? "More and more of these issues are going to come into play that deal with
privacy," Sailor said. "Fast forward to the point that this stuff is ubiquitous and you have these things everywhere: You can paint
Orwellian pictures," he said. "Any technology has the capability of being misused, but the reason we work in this area is . . . really to
save lives or to improve the quality of life, not to invade people's privacy," he said. _____________________________________________________________________________________________
A scientific dust-up?
Advances in nanotechnology have scientists excited about the possibilities
of using “smart dust” for a variety of applications. However, all of these are still hypothetical uses that will
take more work to put into action. Here are a few things that researchers hope smart dust will be good for and a few of the
complications they face:
POTENTIAL
USES
- Detecting toxins or pollutants:
If smart dust particles were scattered in a confined space, such as a subway station, they could be able to determine if there
were dangerous elements in the air.
- Tracking
and surveillance: If smart dust were scattered over a battlefield, it could track where troops went and supply other
useful wartime data.
- Identifying cancer:
If smart dust were to enter the human body, it could attach to cancerous cells, leading doctors to all the sites of cancer
earlier than if they had to look for tumors.
HURDLES TO JUMP
- Power supply: One of the biggest challenges scientists face is power. In order to communicate the
information it might gather, the smart dust would have to have some sort of power supply, and at the moment, nothing exists
on a nano-scale.
- Communication: There
is also the problem of the smart dust being able to communicate the information it might gather. Although scientists have
made progress on a nano-radio, it only receives radio waves, but cannot transmit them.
- Targets: Another potential problem is that the smart dust is designed to detect a specific target,
meaning that if anthrax were in the air, the dust would not recognize it if the dust were programmed to detect sarin gas.
The next big thing: 3D images due in your living roomBy J. SCOTT
ORR Forget hi-def TV. That technology is as old as
the internet. The next generation of digital entertainment could bring entertainers into your living room as full-sized 3D holograms,
bring cell phone voicemails to life with tiny images of callers or bring you face-to-face with Super Mario himself. It's an exciting
time for physicists and other researchers who have spent decades trying to expand the applications of holography, the creation
and manipulation of 3D images made by bouncing laser light around. Last month, a team of researchers at the University of Arizona unveiled a critical
breakthrough toward the elusive goal of holographic video, developing a technology that allows holograms to be rewritable
for the first time. This could allow 3D images to be changed many times per second, just like the frames in a movie. Nasser Peyghambarian,
chairman of photonics and lasers at Arizona University, said the rewritable holographic technology his team developed is the
first step toward video applications for holograms. "It is not yet suitable for 3D movies, but I believe we will be able to get
to that capability," he said, adding that holographic video would require the image to be rewritten 50 times per second
or so, while the current technology allows rewrites at a pace of only about one per minute. "The medium we are using is capable of being
rewritten every 100 microseconds, far faster than is necessary for video, but there are many other challenges including the
technique for rewriting that fast. It is possible to do it, but we certainly can't do it yet. I would suspect it will
take several more years to get to that point," Peyghambarian said. Tung H. Jeong, an author and retired physics professor
at Lake Forest College outside Chicago, has studied holography since the technology emerged in the 1960s. "When we start
talking about erasable and rewritable holograms, we are moving toward the possibility of holographic TV . . . It has now been
shown that physically, it's possible," he said. Although holograms are common in credit cards, where they long have been used as
a security feature, the recent advances allow for a variety of new applications, from large-scale holographic portraiture
to virtual input devices for computers. The "Beam One" interface from Connecticut-based HoloTouch Inc., for example,
can project a working image of a keyboard in space. Among other things, the virtual keyboard can allow doctors to enter data
into a computer during surgery without risking touching nonsterile surfaces. InPhase, a Colorado-based spinoff of Lucent, is nearing
release of a holographic data storage technology that stores data three dimensionally in multiple layers instead of single
layers like CDs and DVDs. Its discs can hold 300 gigabytes of data vs. 25 to 50 gigabytes for a Blu-ray high definition DVD.
That,
the company says, is enough storage to save "50 hours of high definition video on a single disc, 50,000 songs on a postage
stamp, or 500,000 X-rays on a credit card." Infosys Technologies Limited, based in India, was granted U.S. patents in June
for technology that would allow holographic video, games and images to be beamed among cell phones. The technology would squeeze
the huge amounts of data needed to make holograms through existing communications networks by sending unprocessed data to
be turned into holograms once they are received. Frank DeFreitas, who runs the website holoworld.com, said recent breakthroughs
are being embraced by holographers around the world. "There are all sorts of things we can do now and some extraordinary new applications
on the horizon. It's an exciting time in the holographic world," he said.
Will we one day find technology in our family tree?By J. SCOTT ORR There is no doubt recent years have brought advances in technology that have been revolutionary, but are they also
evolutionary? Whether technology will have an impact on the
evolution of the human species is a controversial question, but there already are signs that we are using our brains differently
today than people did just a generation ago. Quick, how many
telephone numbers have you committed to memory? Probably not as many as you did before you started storing contacts in your
cell phone. Do you use your brain, or a calculator, to answer math problems? Why memorize facts when all the world's information
is as close as the nearest internet connection? Today's
technological advances are, of course, a mere blip on the human evolutionary timeline, but there are certainly precedents
for technology playing a role in previous episodes of human evolution, like breakthroughs in the creation and use of hunting
tools or the development of agriculture tens of thousands of years ago. William Halal, a professor of science, technology
and innovation at George Washington University and author of the forthcoming book "Technology's Promise," said
he sees the coming decades as a time of major change for technology and the human condition. By 2020, Halal predicts, artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies will advance to the point where
they take over many of the mundane tasks humans now perform both physically and mentally. That, he said, is good because it
will free up the world's human resources to deal with more pressing global concerns. "All of the routine things we currently preoccupy ourselves with are going to disappear and people are going
to do what? We will move up another notch in the level of evolution," he said. "Humans are going to move on to higher-order functions that are going to be needed to address these enormous
challenges that will face the world," he said, citing global issues such as international conflict, energy depletion,
climate change, environmental degradation, weapons of mass destruction and so forth. "This will be a very promising period in the history of man," Halal said. Patrick Tucker, director of communications for the World Future Society and senior editor of the Futurist magazine,
said new technologies that enable humans to avoid mundane mental and physical tasks could lead to generations of people who
are less physically able. There already is evidence humans
are doing less physically. Not long ago, for example, if you were seeking the answer to a complicated question you had to
go to the library, or grab a book from a shelf, physically open it and look for the answer. Now, you just type your query
into Google. Soon, you'll ask your computer the question verbally, eliminating even the use of your fingers to access
information. "We are the first humans to outsource jobs
to technology, to automate that which is labor intensive or mentally tedious. In the 21st century, this may result in people
that are by and large less capable than we are today. Whether or not we seize all of those opportunities depends on how we
mature in the coming decades," he said. So if today's
humans are devoting fewer resources to things like rote memorization of phone numbers or mathematical calculations, where
is all that brain power going? Maybe it's going to develop more technology, says Peter Rojas, writer and creator of the
tech review site Engadget, who is devoting his energies to music publishing as CEO of rcrdlbl.com. "I think it is a big advantage that people who have grown up in the digital era have an innate sense of what
information is worth internalizing and what is not. Not that it is not valuable to know things, but being able to access and
discover and find information is in some ways more important," Rojas said. "There are a lot of other important things we use our brains for that aren't memorization, like learning
to think abstractly and creatively to develop new stuff," he said. But those who look at things in an evolutionary context say modern technological changes are not likely to affect
significantly the human species because while technology might change human behavior — the way we think or other aspects
of our humanity — it also can supply solutions that prevent our genes from dealing with our problems. John Hawks, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, explained
evolution is all about natural selection and genes, and humans have evolved because superior genes led to the procreation
and survival of those with the most robust genetic makeup. Today,
things like diminished eyesight because of overexposure to computer screens for example, can easily be corrected with glasses
or surgery and therefore won't affect the human gene pool. "Sitting
in front of a computer all day, you are using your eyes differently than if you're hunting all day in the wild, but there
is not a genetic susceptibility there. Our population is not going to evolve because of these things," he said. "There are all kinds of technologies to deal with things like diseases, obesity,
addiction. There are technologies that are there to address changes in humans that may be brought on by the use of technology.
Our genes in some sense don't have to respond," Hawks said. THE EVOLVING THUMB Still, Stanley Ambrose, a professor
of anthropology at the University of Illinois, at least allows for the possibility that technology could be having an impact
on human evolution. But like all evolutionary ideas, the question will not be answered over mere generations, but over thousands
and thousands of years. Take for example the human thumb, which
throughout history has been used in opposition to fingers for grasping things. Today, the thumb has taken on new prominence
among digits as it is used more and more as a communication tool for text messaging on cell phones and other hand-helds. "There may be some genetically based extra neural connection that could allow
me to text message faster. Faster text messaging could get me a better job and allow me to have more kids to inherit my thumb
gene. That would be evolving," Ambrose said. He added,
however, if there were a text-messaging gene, it might already have been present in humans, but stayed dormant until a use
for it came about. "People could have been evolving a
better text-messaging thumb gene for 100,000 years, but it didn't do any good until BlackBerrys came around. It could
be a capacity that some had that suddenly became advantageous," he said. Taking Halal's theory of more brains, less physicality to its extreme, is it possible too many advances in technology
could lead to a race of transhumans, morphed into physically challenged brainiacs? Could the human race one day become mere
brains, like "The Providers" featured in an early "Star Trek" episode, or more like super-smart, but physically
able beings like Mr. Spock? These are choices tomorrow's
humans will have to make for themselves, says Tucker of the World Future Society. "No one, I think, would make the decision, looking forward to future technologies, where I am nothing more than
a brain in a jar, capable of unimaginable feats of intellectual dexterity but bound to float in the ether for eternity,"
he said.
Some of today's internet won't be gone tomorrowArchivists are
preserving web pages before they vanish into the virtual etherBy J. SCOTT ORR The internet is the world's living, ever-evolving database, certainly the largest depository of information ever
assembled. But as it is assembled and reassembled, changing by the second, researchers are concerned that too often backing
up is hard to do. To some, nothing is older than a minutes-old web page (to update the old saw about a day old newspaper), but for
others there is value in the websites of yester-minute and archivists have been wrestling with means of preserving today's
internet for tomorrow's scholars and researchers. Without a working archive, these experts fear, future-generation web surfers might
never know who Client 9 was or what topics were generating the most interest on Digg.com this week. By virtue of its shear enormity and its warp-speed
evolution, the task of archiving the internet in its entirety is clearly impossible, like trying to catalog every grain of
sand on the world's beaches. But as it is easy to take a photograph of a beach, it also is possible to grab snapshots
of the internet, or specific portions of it, to preserve for future generations. And that's exactly what researchers at the Internet
Archive, the Library of Congress, the National Archives and libraries worldwide are working on. There have been some remarkable strides already, starting
with the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, where its creator hopes to build a sort of
second coming of the Library of Alexandria, the long-ago destroyed institution that housed much of the ancient world's
recorded knowledge. The project has archived some 85 billion web pages on computers that measure data in unfathomably large quantities
called petabytes. "The average life span of a website is about 100 days, so you have to be proactive about getting and saving
them," said Brewster Kahle, who founded the nonprofit Internet Archive and began sculpting his vision of a working internet
library in 1996. "We knew that this was coming. You could tell that there was going to be an online digital world and we wanted
to make sure there was a library built," said Kahle, who is as dedicated to his gargantuan task as he is unassuming in
discussing it. So, on a regular basis, the Internet Archive releases a robot program called the Heritrix, which conducts web crawls
bounding about the internet collecting web sites by the millions. Each crawl collects about 4 billion sites, which are saved in the Wayback Machine.
Anyone can access the collection at archive.org, type in a site name and view archived past versions of it. Initially funded
by Kahle, the project has since received money from dozens of individuals and institutions — including the Mellon Foundation
— and works worldwide with government agencies and libraries. The robot crawlers collect only open public sites
and those who don't want their sites archived can add a bit of code to block the bot. The Internet Archive is happy to remove sites on request,
though Kahle says webmasters are more likely to request that their sites be added. Kahle, a geeky middle-aged internet pioneer who sold
start-up companies to Amazon and AOL, said the Internet Archive has no endgame and its web crawlers will continue indefinitely
collecting petabytes of data as the internet continues to dilate. A LOT OF DATA It
can be difficult to wrap your brain around the enormity of a petabyte, which is about 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. "Science Grid
This Week," a publication of the Fermilab, sums it up like this: If a byte is a single character on a keyboard and you
typed one character per second, it would take more than 30 million years to create a petabyte-length document. Another example:
Say you had a fleet of personal computers and each one had a 50 gigabyte hard drive. You would need 20,000 of those PCs to
hold a petabyte of data. So when the Internet Archive says it has 2 petabytes worth of data stored, that's one supersized
library. Still, it's just a fraction of the information stored on millions of internet servers around the world. And what
doesn't get archived can end up disappearing forever into the digital ether. Gregory S. Hunter, a professor at the Palmer School
of Library and Information Science at Long Island University and one of the nation's leading experts on electronic archiving,
agreed that some web sites are precious commodities that must be preserved. Unlike Kahle's all-inclusive approach, most other
archives are consumed with the often vexing task of determining what data is worth saving and what belongs in the digital
dung heap. Do we really want to preserve every teenager's MySpace page? Well, Hunter says, we may want to save some of them
so future researchers can understand the phenomenon of social networking. "It's very important that we preserve some
web sites as evidence of what has been created, or what was happening at a given point in the past. Newspaper web sites are
a good example. "It's a cultural question. We want to preserve things that reflect society in all its beauty and
ugliness for future generations," Hunter said. Hunter is the principal archivist for a project to build the federal government's
Electronic Records Archive, which would preserve or "appropriately dispose" of any government electronic record.
The
ERA, a project of the National Archives, passed a milestone in December with the successful test of its software system developed
by Lockheed Martin. Now comes the hard part. "As archivists we think that by making appropriate judgments we can help sort out the wheat from the chaff.
If we save every bit of information, what good would it do us? If we keep nothing, that would do us no good either. Archivists
are trying to find that middle point," Hunter said. ONE LIBRARY COLLECTION Abbie Grotke, digital media projects coordinator on the web capture team at the Library of Congress, said the national
library, home to some 30 million books and countless other items, also has been archiving select collections of web sites.
It has archived thousands of web pages related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, everything from ABC News to Z Magazine. "We do more
focused crawls. We pick topics or themes to archive: the national elections, House and Senate web sites, the Supreme Court,
we're doing an Iraq war crawl," said Grotke, who added that unlike the Internet Archive the Library of Congress has
curators who vet web sites and get permission from site owners before making them publicly available. So far, the collection
totals a mere 80 terabytes (a terabyte is one-thousandth of a petabyte), but Grotke said it is growing daily as are digital
collections at libraries around the world. Major libraries from Australia to Scandinavia and the Internet Archive have come
together to form the International Internet Preservation Consortium to develop standards and protocols for archiving online
content. "We're all grappling with the question of what to save and how to save it. We can't preserve everything,
but we all realize that there is a lot of content out there that is worth saving" she said.
Digital age can be tough on thumbsHand therapists fear health risks By J. SCOTT ORR WASHINGTON -- Dan Katz is a 36-year-old lawyer, congressional aide and father. He also is a member of a growing
global community known as "the thumb generation." At his desk in the
Hart Senate Office building, at his home in suburban Washington, at the mall with his wife and 11-month-old child, Katz is
all thumbs as he tap-tap-taps away at his BlackBerry handheld e-mail
device. "I've gotten pretty good at it," Katz said of his superior thumb typing skills. "When I get my thumbs flying, I can get
a message out in less than a minute, easily," said the chief counsel to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.). But as the popularity
of text messaging - on BlackBerries, cellular phones and other handheld devices - explodes across the United States, some
fear for the health of America's thumbs. All that thumbing at
tiny handheld keyboards, ex perts on ergonomics and hand therapists say, can have painful consequences for a digit that was
hardly designed for such tasks. The thumb, which through human history has been the essen
tial counterpart to fingers for grasping items, has taken on new prominence, working solo as a communications enabler for
millions, perhaps billions, of text messagers around the world. "The thumb is not
a particularly dexterous digit," said Alan Hedge, a professor of ergonomics at Cornell University. "It's really
designed to use in opposition to the fingers. It is not designed for use in getting information into a system. People who
use their thumbs a great deal for these kinds of tasks surely risk
developing painful conditions." Texting is in its infancy in the United States, where the thumb's principal communication task is still signaling approval or disap proval by pointing up or down. But in Japan, where
the craze started, millions of members of the oyayubi-zoku, or thumb
tribe, are among the world's leading "textperts." Nowhere has thumb use been
taken to greater lengths, according to "On the Mobile," a study conducted for cell phone giant Motorola. The report
found that Japanese texters have begun using their thumbs for other
tasks normally assigned to fingers, like pointing and ringing door bells. While the Japanese are still world leaders in text
messaging, Americans by the millions are join ing the craze, which has been described as anything from a fascina tion to an
addiction. In the United States, the number of text messages grew from 1.2 billion in the first quarter of 2003 to around 2.9
billion for the third quarter of 2004, according to the Boston-based market research organization the Yankee Group. According to a Yankee
Group survey, the universe of American texters is young and growing. The survey found that 63 percent of cell phone users
over 18 have text mes saging capabilities, while only 24 percent use them. For those 13 to 18, the study found, 79 percent
have text service and 51 percent use it. There is little empirical data on the health risks associated with thumb typing around the world, though health experts in Britain and Asia say they have
seen a steady increase in complaints of sore thumb among text messag
ing enthusiasts. Last year, the Chiropractors Association of Australia, another text messaging hotbed, sponsored a "National
Day of Safe Text" during which participants wore bandages on their typing thumb and prac ticed "text- ercises" aimed at heading off injuries and
ailments. "We've seen it with the game players for years," said Marvin Dainoff, director of the Center for Ergonomic
Research at Miami University of Ohio, referring to a kind of tendinits that has become known as "Nintendo thumb" "It's not an efficient way to send information. The thumb is good for grasping, not good for repetitive movement. It's taken on a life
of its own and their will be consequences for people," he said. The most likely cause of thumb pain for texters is a condition called DeQuervain's tenosynovitis, an inflammation of the two ten dons that
control the thumb's movement. It is caused primarily by overuse.
Stacey
Doyon, a certified hand therapist in Portland, Maine, and incoming vice president of the American Society of Hand Therapists,
said too much texting can re sult in an aching pain at the base of the thumb
either on the outside leading to the wrist, or on the inside leading to the palm. "There are three components to overuse: frequency,
duration and intensity. With text messaging, you're looking at how often you repeat the same motion and over what period
of time. If you're doing it for hours at a time, obviously that can lead to problems," she said. Doyon said the rule
of thumb for avoiding problems is simple: Give your thumb a break. Don't spend hours at a time text messag ing and, if you must stay
constantly in touch, give other digits a turn. The good news: In most cases conditions like tendinitis go away with rest. Severe
cases might re quire a cortisone shot. Which brings us back to Katz and his text messaging for his job on Capitol Hill,
where BlackBerry communications is popular. Katz said his text messages, which can number in the dozens daily, have not yet
led to any ail ments though he said his thumbs do tire sometimes.
"They'll
probably discover some new ailment associated with these things in a year or two and I'll have it," he said.
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