University of Utah physicists successfully controlled an electrical current using the “spin” within electrons – a step toward building an organic “spin transistor”: a plastic semiconductor switch for future ultrafast computers and electronics.

The study also suggests it will be more difficult than thought to make highly efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) using organic materials. The findings hint such LEDs would convert no more than 25 percent of electricity into light rather than heat, contrary to earlier estimates of up to 63 percent.

Organic semiconductor or “plastic” LEDs are much cheaper and easier to fabricate than existing inorganic LEDs now used in traffic signals, some building lighting and as indicator lights on computers, TVs, cell phones, DVD players, modems, game consoles and other electronics.

The study – published online Sunday, Aug. 17 in the journal Nature Materials – was led by Christoph Boehme and John Lupton, assistant and associate professors of physics, respectively, at the University of Utah.

The promising news about spin transistors and sobering news about organic LEDs (OLEDs) both stem from an experiment that merged organic semiconductor electronics and spin electronics, or spintronics, which is part of quantum mechanics – the branch of physics that describes the behavior of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles.

“This is the first time anyone has done really fundamental, hands-on quantum mechanics with an organic LED,” Lupton says. “This is tough stuff.”

Lupton and Boehme conducted the study with postdoctoral researcher Dane McCamey and four University of Utah physics doctoral students: Heather Seipel, Seo-Young Paik, Manfred Walter and Nick Borys.

The Spin on Spintronics

An atom includes a nucleus of protons and neutrons, and a shell of orbiting electrons. In addition to an electrical charge, some nuclei and all electrons have a property known as “spin,” which is like a particle’s intrinsic angular momentum. An electron’s spin often is described as a bar magnet that points up or down.

Computers and other electronics work because negatively charged electrons flow as electrical current. Computerized information is reduced by transistors to a binary code of ones or zeroes represented by the presence or absence of electrons in semiconductors.

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For several decades, archaeologists in Greece have been painstakingly attempting to reconstruct wall paintings that hold valuable clues to the ancient culture of Thera, an island civilization that was buried under volcanic ash more than 3,500 years ago.

This Herculean task — more than a century of further work at the current rate — soon may get much easier, thanks to an automated system developed by a team of Princeton University computer scientists working in collaboration with archaeologists in Greece.

The new technology “has the potential to change the way people do archaeology,” according to David Dobkin, the Phillip Y. Goldman ‘86 Professor in Computer Science and dean of the faculty at Princeton.

Dobkin and fellow researchers report on their work in a paper to be presented Aug. 15 in Los Angeles at the Association of Computing Machinery’s annual SIGGRAPH conference, widely considered the premier meeting in the field of computer graphics.

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Future wars could see opponents attacking each other’s minds, according to a report for the US military.

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DETROIT (Reuters) - In a bid to show the demand for the upcoming all-electric Chevrolet Volt, a proponent of the car has released details of an unofficial waiting list for the vehicle with over 33,000 prospective buyers.

Lyle Dennis, a New York neurologist who has emerged as a prominent enthusiast for the battery-powered car from General Motors Corp, has been assembling a list of prospective Volt buyers for over a year through his Web site GM-Volt.com.

On Tuesday, Dennis released details gleaned from the list showing that 33,411 people had signed up to show their intent to buy a Volt when the rechargeable car is released in 2010.

The list shows the highest number of potential Volt buyers in California, Texas, Florida and Michigan. It also includes potential buyers from 46 countries outside the United States.

The average price buyers were willing to pay for the car was $31,261 — substantially less than the $40,000 GM has said it will cost to build the first-generation of the car equipped with a massive lithium-ion battery pack.

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Scientists have stopped the ageing process in an entire organ for the first time, a study released today says.

Published in today’s online edition of Nature Medicine, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York City also say the older organs function as well as they did when the host animal was younger.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, blocked the ageing process in mice livers by stopping the build-up of harmful proteins inside the organ’s cells.

As people age their cells become less efficient at getting rid of damaged protein resulting in a build-up of toxic material that is especially pronounced in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative disorders.

The researchers say the findings suggest that therapies for boosting protein clearance might help stave off some of the declines in function that accompanies old age.

In experiments, livers in genetically modified mice 22 to 26 months old, the equivalent of octogenarians in human years, cleaned blood as efficiently as those in animals a quarter their age.

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A new low cost platform for swarm robotics research which makes it possible to produce robots for as little as £24 each is being presented at the first European conference on Artificial Life which will be held in Winchester from 5-8 August.The robots will be at a press preview of a special robot demonstration tomorrow Wednesday 6 August at 4.30pm.At a presentation entitled Strategies for maintaining large robot communities on today, Alexis Johnson from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) described how he and his fellow students developed a platform of 25 robots capable of more than two hours of autonomy and with sufficient code capacity and processing power to run complex algorithms. The other students were Stephen English, Jeffrey Gough, Robert Spanton and Joanna Sun.

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War casualties are typically kept behind tightly closed doors, but one company keeps the mangled pieces of its first casualty on display. This is no ordinary soldier, though — it is Packbot from the iRobot Corporation.Robots in the military are no longer the stuff of science fiction. They have left the movie screen and entered the battlefield. Washington University in St. Louis’s Doug Few and Bill Smart are on the cutting edge of this new wave of technology. Few and Smart report that the military goal is to have approximately 30% of the Army comprised of robotic forces by approximately 2020. Of course, they aren’t envisioning robotic soldiers from movies like “Star Wars” and “I, Robot.”

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By 2015, a globally networked Intelligence Enterprise will be essential to meet the demands for greater forethought and improved strategic agility. The existing agency-centric Intelligence Community must evolve into a true Intelligence Enterprise established on a collaborative foundation of shared services, mission-centric operations, and integrated mission management, all enabled by a smooth flow of people, ideas, and activities across the boundaries of the Intelligence Community agency members.” – Mike McConnell(DNI)[1]

The Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and The Council on Foreign Relations has made public a twenty eight page document called ‘Vision 2015’ which outlines a plan to integrate the entire United States intelligence network into a global intelligence community. Unsurprisingly there are many in the 16 intelligence agencies that support this project. At this very moment there is in-fighting between our own intelligence agencies, also currently there are problems between the CIA and Pakistani ISI. So how are they going to resolve these issues that have existed for decades?

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In the column “2007/2008″ published on January 1, 2008 I made a prediction concerning media that is worth revisiting.

At the beginning of the year the entertainment industry was in the middle of the writer’s strike.  I wrote:   “The writers’ strike in the entertainment business is now two months old. Its’ length, the animosity it has engendered and the immediate consequences of it are significant.  It has within it the seeds of structural and permanent change in the entertainment business……While the detailed outcome of the strike is not clear, what is clear is that it will have a permanent structural impact on the entertainment business.  It is a “change event” of some magnitude.”

This has turned out to be an accurate prediction.  All one has to do is take a look at the broadcast networks’ schedules to see the affects of the writer’s strike.  The once proud networks, home to magnificent dramas and classic comedy, now are reduced to filling evening after evening with reality competition shows.  Who wants to marry the farmer?  Who is the best celebrity dancer?  Which grossly overweight contestant will lose the most pounds?  These programs all fit under the umbrella title of ‘reality programming’ yet we know that they aren’t real in the true sense, but are staged, rehearsed, manipulated and highly edited.

Broadcast television through the decades was defined by great writing.  Think Rod Serling, Norman Lear,  Matt Groening and many others.  The networks stood for the highest quality television.  This quality came from great writing. The standard criticism broadcast network executives made about cable networks in the 1980s and 1990s was that the program quality was second rate; it was “cable” and of low quality.  Each of the broadcast networks had some sense of brand identity.  That is no longer the case. The power and influence of the broadcast networks from 1950 - 1995 was huge and unparalleled in American history.  The modern advertising industry was created in partnership with this media colossus.  That is the glorious past, crushed under the growth of cable, the Internet and stubborn holding to outdated business models.  That was the first fundamental decline. This was just verified last week by the huge number of Emmy nominations that cable and basic cable  received, compared to the no longer dominant broadcast networks.

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The tag line of this blog is “A Future Look at Today”.  It is not a political blog, nor is this a political column. I have assiduously kept politics out of this space leaving partisan conversations about campaign issues to others. There is a lot of heat around partisan politics and such heat can prevent clarity. As a futurist I think about the future by looking at the trends, patterns and dynamic forces that exist or are beginning to form.  Readers of this column come here to get a sense of what might happen and why. That is the purpose of this column today.

In my “2007/2008″ column published on January 1, 2008, before the Iowa caucus, my forecast for the 2008 election was:

“.. it looks to this observer that 2008 will be a Democratic landslide year on the order of 1936 and 1964.  Who will be the President in 2009?  The junior senator from Illinois.”

This forecast was and is based upon history, and an analysis of certain forces currently reshaping the world today.  As a number of people who eagerly made bets with me in 2007 can attest, I have been saying that Barack Obama would be the next President of the United States for more than a year.  The reason is that he represents, embodies and is utilizing powerful new forces that are in ascendancy today.

Disintermediation

Disintermediation has been, and will continue to be one of the most powerful forces in the world.  The Internet is the most powerful force of disintermediation since Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable type press. Regular readers know I have written extensively about this force.  The Obama campaign has used the Internet for fund raising with great financial results.  This direct relationship with small donors has effectively disintermediated the need to rely on special interests and bundlers to raise funds.

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A slew of armed, unmanned aircraft were on display at last week’s Farnborough air show — some for the first time.

The debuts included the Schiebel S100 Camcopter, kitted out as a hunter-killer with Thales’ new Lightweight Multirole Missile. As the name suggests, the Camcopter was originally built with other payloads in mind, but it is a useful platform for Thales LMM.

The missile, first revealed in June, has a range of five miles and a warhead capable of taking out air, sea and land targets including light armored vehicles and bunkers. The Camcopter can carry two missiles and has an endurance of six hours.

The Mantis drone, unveiled for the first time at Farnborough, is intended to show BAE can compete with the Predator/Reaper in the armed drone market.

Like the Reaper, it packs a mixture of weapons — the one on display here had four Brimstone anti-tank missiles and four GBU-12 laser-guided bombs.

It is described as an Advanced Technology Concept Demonstrator, rather than a prototype, and is scheduled to fly early next year. Development is likely to be rapid after that — the success of the armed Predator and new Reaper drones is likely to open up a whole new market sector, and General Atomics is unlikely to be able to maintain its monopoly.

Unveiled last month, but making its British debut is BAE’s Fury, a close relative of the company’s HERTI drone. It has a wing span of 41 feet and a cruising speed is around 100 mph.

BAE have already conducted live-fire tests with Thales Lightweight Multirole Missile. HERTI has flown classified missions in Afghanistan, and the requirement for an armed version may be derived from that experience.

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