New York: A hardy, heat-resistant, graphite-based memory device holds the potential of making massive amounts of storage available for computers, handheld media players, cell phones and cameras.
Rice University researchers, who are currently developing the device, said the solid-state device takes advantage of the conducting properties of graphene and would have many advantages over today's state-of-the-art flash memory and other new technologies.
Graphene memory would increase the amount of storage in a two-dimensional array by a factor of five, said James Tour, who led the research team.
This is so because individual bits could be made smaller than 10 nanometres, compared to the 45-nanometre circuitry in today's flash memory chips.
Findings of the new research have been published online in the journal Nature Materials.
Being essentially a mechanical device, such chips will consume virtually no power while keeping data intact -- much the same way today's e-book readers keep the image of a page visible even when the power is off.
What distinguishes graphene from other next-generation memories is the on-off power ratio -- the amount of power a circuit holds when it's on, as opposed to off.
"It's huge - a million-to-one," said Tour. "Phase change memory, the other thing the industry is considering, runs at 10-to-1. That means the 'off' state holds, say, one-tenth the amount of electrical current than the 'on' state."
Current tends to leak from an "off" that's holding a charge. "That means in a 10-by-10 grid, 10 'offs' would leak enough to look like they were 'on.' With our method, it would take a million 'offs' in a line to look like 'on'," he said. "So this is big. It allows us to make a much larger array."
While generating little heat itself, graphene memory seems impervious to a wide temperature range, having been tested from minus 75 to more than 200 degrees Celsius with no discernable effect, Tour said.
That allows graphene memory to work in close proximity to hot processors. Better still, tests show it to be impervious to radiation, making it suitable for extreme environments.
Tour said the new switches are faster than his lab's current testing systems can measure. And they're robust. "We've tested it in the lab 20,000 times with no degradation," said Tour. "It's lifetime is going to be huge, much better than flash memory."
Best of all, the raw material is far from exotic. Graphene is a form of carbon. In a clump it's called graphite, which you spread on paper every time you use a pencil.
Washington: Google has unveiled a new tool which allows users to customise search results and announced it is ending its virtual world experiment, Lively. Google, in a posting on its official blog said a new feature known as SearchWiki allows users to personalise search results by editing them according to their own preferences.
SearchWiki lets users who have a Google Account rearrange their search results, re-ranking websites by moving them up or down in the results page. Useless search results can be deleted and others can be added.
"With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site," Google said. "You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong."
The Mountain View, California-company said the modifications will be shown the next time users log on and will not affect searches done by others.
A video explaining the new feature is online at: googleblog.blogspot.com/
SearchWiki marks the first time that Google, which dominates Internet search with more than 70 per cent of all US searches in October according to Hitwise, has allowed users to modify search results. Google also announced in another blog posting that it was killing off Lively (lively.com), a virtual world website similar to Second Life, at the end of December.
Spam drops worldwide
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San Francisco: The volume of spam on the Internet plunged by about two thirds this week after two US internet service providers cut the Internet connections of a company that was using its servers to disseminate billions of unwanted email messages, Internet security firms said Friday.
Symantec said the number of spam messages had fallen by some 120 billion per day, to around 60 billion. However it warned that many of the spam spewers would probably find new routes to distribute their messages and that the respite was likely only temporary.
Nevertheless the success was greeted as a sign of the validity of the new anti-spam approach that traced the messages back to a Silicon Valley company called McColo, which rents out servers to clients. After researchers identified the company they also contacted its two major internet access providers, Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing, which promptly cut its internet connection.
The report identifying McColo was published anonymously by the ad-hoc team of researchers who said that among other things, McColo reportedly enabled its customers to control vast networks of hijacked computers to send spam and take payments for fake anti-virus software. McColo at one time hosted up to 40 Web sites with child pornography, the report said.
"We got the report, and it looked pretty damning," said Benny Ng, director of infrastructure at Hurricane Electric, of Fremont, California. "They were a client of ours, and we turned them of
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