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It was the end of 2008, October, right before the holiday shopping season. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey released her highly anticipated Favorite Things list, with the Amazon Kindle topping the gadget category. • This is the moment that the concept of electronic paper, or e-paper, went mainstream. • But this black-and-white, reflective display that always appeared to be on was invented well before the Amazon Kindle made it famous. Its story began a decade earlier, in 1997, at the MIT Media Lab, when it was created by two students, J.D. Albert and Barrett Comiskey, who were inspired by their professor Joseph Jacobson. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bad things happen when demand outstrips supply. We learned that lesson too well at the start of the pandemic, when demand for toilet paper, disinfecting wipes, masks, and ventilators outstripped the available supply. Today, chip shortages continue to disrupt the consumer electronics, automobile, and other sectors. Clearly, balancing the supply and demand of goods is critical for a stable, normal, functional society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE YEAR IS 2028. IT'S 8 P.M. ON A Wednesday night and you're famished. You're staring wistfully at the only remaining item in your refrigerator: a package of sausages with an unappetizing grayish hue. Ugh. Did they always look like that? Are they still safe to eat? In 2018, you'd have to rely on your sense of smell and take a gamble. But in 2028, you might simply wave your smartphone over the package. The smartphone interrogates the package's embedded sensor, which measures the concentration of gases associated with meat decomposition. The smartphone displays the message "Safe to eat within the next 20 hours," and then offers a list of recipes for cooking with sausages. Too hungry to bother with the recipes, you tear open the package, toss the sausages into a frying pan, and discard the package-along with its sensor technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the LCD technology used by manufacturers in the electronic paper (e-paper) display. It states that today's e-paper has readability, low power and liquid crystal display (LCDs) have brilliant colors as well as full video motion. Moreover, the multimode display from Pixel Qi, in San Bruno, California, has taken a brute-force approach, which combines reflective and transmissive liquid crystal technologies.

Newsha Ghaeli reached down an open manhole one morning in April and grabbed a hose dangling in the rushing streams of the sewer below. As she pulled up the hose, she spotted a wad of toilet paper clinging to its end and recoiled in disgust, accidentally splashing a few drops of dirty water on strands of exposed hair sticking out from her face mask. A Cambridge, Mass., sanitation worker offered comfort: "A little caca won't hurt you," he said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

You wake up with a heavy head. Was it the half dozen glasses of champagne last night or are you getting sick? In your bathroom is a little strip of paper that can tell you for sure. You place it on your tongue and after a few seconds, you pull it back to see the bad news: There's a small green dot next to the word "flu." When you fish your doctor's business card out of your wallet, you notice it looks different from the last time you looked at it. The phone number for his office was originally black. Now it's displayed in blinking red letters, a sign that the number was changed recently. The electronics in this scenario are not far off; in fact the basic technological breakthroughs needed to make them work have all been achieved in the past few years. At the moment the costs are still too high for them to be used in things like business cards or package labels, but remarkable advances in materials science and simpler fabrication methods are setting the stage for a whole new breed of cheap, bendable, disposable, and perhaps even recyclable electronics. And some of the most exciting work in this field is happening with paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Provides information on a computer system that digitalizes and transmits hand-written messages from Anoto AB in Lund, Sweden. Background of the company; Features of the system; How the system works.

Deep learning is now being used to translate between languages, predict how proteins fold, analyze medical scans, and play games as complex as Go, to name just a few applications of a technique that is now becoming pervasive. Success in those and other realms has brought this machine-learning technique from obscurity in the early 2000s to dominance today. • Although deep learning's rise to fame is relatively recent, its origins are not. In 1958, back when mainframe computers filled rooms and ran on vacuum tubes, knowledge of the interconnections between neurons in the brain inspired Frank Rosenblatt at Cornell to design the first artificial neural network, which he presciently described as a “pattern-recognizing device.” But Rosenblatt's ambitions outpaced the capabilities of his era—and he knew it. Even his inaugural paper was forced to acknowledge the voracious appetite of neural networks for computational power, bemoaning that “as the number of connections in the network increases…the burden on a conventional digital computer soon becomes excessive.” • Fortunately for such artificial neural networks—later rechristened “deep learning” when they included extra layers of neurons—decades of Moore's Law and other improvements in computer hardware yielded a roughly 10-million-fold increase in the number of computations that a computer could do in a second. So when researchers returned to deep learning in the late 2000s, they wielded tools equal to the challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published an analysis of economic data from many countries and concluded that when debt levels exceed 90 percent of gross national product, a nation's economic growth is threatened. With debt that high, expect growth to become negative, they argued. □ This analysis was done shortly after the 2008 recession, so it had enormous relevance to policymakers, many of whom were promoting high levels of debt spending in the interest of stimulating their nations' economies. At the same time, conservative politicians, such as Olli Rehn, then an EU commissioner, and U.S. congressman Paul Ryan, used Reinhart and Rogoff's findings to argue for fiscal austerity. □ Three years later, Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, discovered an error in the Excel spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff had used to make their calculations. The significance of the blunder was enormous: When the analysis was done properly, Herndon showed, debt levels in excess of 90 percent were associated with average growth of positive 2.2 percent, not the negative 0.1 percent that Reinhart and Rogoff had found. □ Herndon could easily test the Harvard economists' conclusions because the software that they had used to calculate their results—Microsoft Excel—was readily available. But what about much older findings for which the software originally used is hard to come by? □ You might think that the solution—preserving the relevant software for future researchers to use—should be no big deal. After all, software is nothing more than a bunch of files, and those files are easy enough to store on a hard drive or on tape in digital format. For some software at least, the all-important source code could even be duplicated on paper, avoiding the possibility that whatever digital medium it's written to could become obsolete. □ Saving old programs in this way is done routinely, even for decades-old software. You can find online, for example, a full program listing for the Apollo Guidance Computer—code that took astronauts to the moon during the 1960s. It was transcribed from a paper copy and uploaded to GitHub in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic tabletop microscope hasn't changed much in fundamental design in nearly 100 years. At least its design hadn't changed until a Stanford engineer started playing with innovative microscopy ideas in 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the liquid crystal display (LCD) created by Mary Lou Jepsen of Pixel Qi Corp. It states that Pixel Qi display offers black and white reflective mode for power savings and sunlight readability electronic paper (e-paper). Moreover, the prototype screen has outperformed 3Qi display and has beaten E Ink Corp. by its color quality and video playback. It mentions that Jepsen is finding ways to improve the screen like adding touch-sensitive overlays and flexible back planes.

I'll be honest: when the original AxiDraw came out from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in 2016, I thought it was cute but a curiosity. My thought was that if you were going to play around with reintroducing the venerable technology of the pen-and-paper X-Y plotter, why not do something really different, like the iBoardBot remote-controlled erasable miniature whiteboard? And the AxiDraw's US $475 price tag felt steep for a spindly-looking contraption that required the user to manually position each sheet of paper, one at a time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the invention of paper money, counterfeiters have churned out fake bills. Some of their handiwork, created with high-tech inks, papers, and printing presses, is so good that it's very difficult to distinguish from the real thing. National banks combat the counterfeiters with difficult-to-copy watermarks, holograms, and other sophisticated measures. But to give money the ultimate protection, some quantum physicists are turning to the weird quirks that govern nature's fundamental particles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Every child's fantasy has now been lived out by engineer Art Thompson and workers at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson. On 21 March, they hooked up a 13.7-meter-long paper airplane to a helicopter, pulled the airplane to a height of 800 meters, and released it over the desert. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article announces that an electronic paper display, which forms images through expulsion and repulsion of a glob of ink, have been created by researchers in Ohio.

It sounds like a trick question, but it's not: Do white papers need to be either white or paper? Authors are preparing a small but growing number of technical documents today that are intended to be read on a tablet or smartphone screen. And some of these multicolored, multimedia presentations and PowerPoint-style slideshows are having as big an impact as that of any traditionally arranged document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gary Soto was hunkering down on the outskirts of San Juan. Soto, the operations manager of Puerto Rico's state-run utility, faced a daunting task: to keep the grid running and minimize damage from the storm. In the windowless, wood-paneled control center at the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), Soto and a dozen other engineers and supervisors worked at U-shaped desks littered with paper coffee cups, staring at computer monitors that displayed real-time conditions on the grid. One after another, transmission lines were failing, and the team hastily debated their course of action. In this fragile state, the network wouldn?t be able to absorb an oversupply of power, excess voltages, or swings in frequency. They could inject test currents into the downed lines, to see which ones could be restored, or else reduce the level of electricity being put on the grid, to protect the remaining transmission system. Hour after hour, the team's chatter filled the room with rising urgency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN BLOCKCHAINS first appeared nearly a decade ago as the technical backbone of Bitcoin, the world's leading cryptocurrency, they seemed to offer the masses a way to cut out the financial middleman. But now the big banks and other industry players are finding ways to spin the new tool to their advantage. Their blockchains share a vision that is precisely the opposite of the one laid out in the Bitcoin white paper, published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Like Nakamoto himself (or herself), you can own bitcoins without even stating your real name; nobody is in charge; and anybody can check the history of any given transaction. The financial industry's blockchains, however, are closed or, in their jargon, permissioned; to join one you must reveal your identity to a system administrator, who must then approve you. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports that scientists at Infineon Technologies AG in Erlangen, Germany have fabricated organic transistors and circuits on commercially available cotton-fiber paper. Its fibrous surface is rough, whereas a typical semiconductor substrate such as silicon is smooth.

Painful exercises in basic arithmetic are a vivid part of our elementary school memories. A multiplication like 3,752 ? 6,901 carried out with just pencil and paper for assistance may well take up to a minute. Of course, today, with a cellphone always at hand, we can quickly check that the result of our little exercise is 25,892,552. Indeed, the processors in modern cellphones can together carry out more than 100 billion such operations per second. What's more, the chips consume just a few watts of power, making them vastly more efficient than our slow brains, which consume about 20 watts and need significantly more time to achieve the same result. Of course, the brain didn't evolve to perform arithmetic. So it does that rather badly. But it excels at processing a continuous stream of information from our surroundings. And it acts on that information-sometimes far more rapidly than we're aware of. No matter how much energy a conventional computer consumes, it will struggle with feats the brain finds easy, such as understanding language and running up a flight of stairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recycled DVD laser makes a great engraving tool — Today's high-speed DVD drives have less than 40 nanoseconds to heat a bit position on a disk to its phase-change temperature, so anything that stays in the laser's focus longer had better watch out–or prepare to be burned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the possible use of plastic for newspapers in 2020 and mentions the history and commercial application of electrophoresis.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "The Kindlers Are Coming to Get Me" in the August 2009 issue.

The article provides information related to the functionality of robotic actuators, and mention the paper on "Harnessing Cascading Dominoes for Peristaltic Wave Motion" by Yichao Shi, Zhimin Jiang, and Pikul published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Because we believe people catch Ebola through contact with infected animals, ecologists have long sought the animal ?reservoirs? that harbor the virus and pass it along (often without getting sick themselves). With every new outbreak of a zoonotic disease like Ebola, scientists race to identify the reservoirs so that public health officials can determine the method of transmission and perhaps prevent more "spillover events," in which the disease flows from animal reservoirs to people. Such is today's post hoc, reactive model of dealing with outbreaks. In Meliandou, the Ebola detectives interviewed villagers, studied primate populations in nearby forests, and collected bats in nets. In December 2014, they published a paper hypothesizing that little Emile had contracted Ebola from a colony of insect-eating bats that lived in a hollow tree, near where the local children often played. But the tree had caught fire before the team arrived in the village and the bats were gone, so the investigators couldn't say for sure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1960, Science published a paper by Heinz von Foerster predicting that on Friday, 13 November 2026, the “human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia.” Just a few years after this preposterous doomsday alarm, the annual growth of global population peaked at about 2.1 percent and immediately began to decline. By 2020 the growth rate stood at just a bit more than 1 percent, the result of the steadily declining total fertility rate (TFR), the number of children born to a woman during her reproductive period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WALK INTO THE CAMBRIDGE, ONT., OFFICE of health-care equipment company PrescientX and you probably wouldn't suspect you're entering one of the most sanitary places in North America. • In this otherwise-ordinary Toronto-area office suite, you can disinfect your keys, phone, and other portables at the reception area's ultraviolet-sterilization stand. In cooler months, the air you breathe is cleansed of mold and bacteria in UV-sterilized heating units as well as blasted by UV fixtures in the office air ducts to eliminate viruses. In-room UV fixtures pointing at the ceiling disinfect the air, while other UV lights that turn on only when no one's in the room zap pathogens on desks, keyboards, and high-touch surfaces in bathrooms and work spaces. • The office, says PrescientX founder and CEO Barry Hunt, represents a possible future in which pandemics like COVID-19 are more commonplace — but in which germicidal ultraviolet light is one of the most potent weapons we have to face them down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MY ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL LIFE AS AN ENGINEER IS SPENT ON, OR ADJACENT TO, A GLOWING laptop. I use the same computer to code, research, design, and document, and even to waste time. Hour upon hour, every day of the week, every week. So I push to have my creative time be analog: Coming home to do some creative writing, only to sit down at the exact same computer, feels more exhausting than restful—oh joy, more screen time. • But while I find words as easy to read on paper as on a screen, writing does not translate to the analog world so well. After years of typing on a keyboard, writing in a notebook is slow and hand-crampingly painful. With the relatively recent availability of maker-friendly electronic-paper displays of the sort used by devices like the Amazon Kindle, I fantasized about a device that would bring together the best of both worlds, combining a keyboard with the static, daylight-readable surface of an electronic-paper screen. A device that would make me feel the same about writing as I did about picking up a book, with no eyestrain, notifications, or YouTube distractions. And I could do better than the old dedicated word processors of the 1990s—I'd blast past them with 10 gigabytes of SD card storage, triple the display size, and crisper contrast and custom formatting.•However, I quickly found that there were some serious issues I'd have to resolve before banging out a prototype. The first, and most glaring, was the dismal refresh rate of the e-paper screens I was buying— upwards of 2 seconds, if you used the original firmware. If you tried to go faster with custom firmware, you'd get persistent screen burn. It turned out that this was the major reason I hadn't seen my fantasy word processor already on the market—the few similar commercial attempts had received harsh user reviews regarding the lag between pressing a key and seeing a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEFORE SILICON GOT ITS OWN VALLEY, THIS mild-mannered element had to vanquish many other contenders to prove itself the premier semiconductor technology. It did so in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, carbon is poised at a similar crossroads, with carbon-based technologies on the verge of transforming computing and boosting batterystorage capacities. Already, researchers have used these technologies to demonstrate paper-thin batteries, unbreakable touch screens, and terabit-speed wireless communications And on the farther horizon they envision such carbon-enabled wonders as space elevators, filters that can make seawater drinkable, bionic organs, and transplantable neurons. Whatever miracles emerge from Carbon Valley, its carbon-techtitans will surely think fondly upon their field's founding mother, Mildred Dresselhaus. This MIT professor of physics and engineering has, since the early 1960s, been laying the groundwork for networks of nanometerscale carbon sheets, lattices, wires, and switches. Future engineers will turn these things, fabricated from carbon-based materials such as graphene, into the systems that will carry computing into its next era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Computer scientist David Blaauw pulls a small plastic box from his bag. He carefully uses his fingernail to pick up the tiny black speck inside and place it on the hotel caf? table. At 1 cubic millimeter, this is one of a line of the world's smallest computers. I had to be careful not to cough or sneeze, lest it blow away and be swept into the trash. Blaauw and his colleague Dennis Sylvester,both IEEE Fellows and computer science professors at the University of Michigan, were in San Francisco in February to present 10 papers related to these "micromote" computers at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). They've been presenting different variations on the tiny devices for a few years now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the above-named upcoming conference event. May include topics to be covered or calls for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is all about the restoration of vintage IBM 1401 computer for the computer history museum, in Mountain View, Calif. The 1401 processed numbers in decimal rather than binary form and accepted numbers of varying digit spans. Companies leased it for US $6500 a month, equivalent to $45 000 today, a bargain for an all-transistor design with stored programs. Such features had been offered only in huge systems costing about six times as much. The museum got an even better bargain in 2003, when five enthusiasts gave it an old 1401 they'd bought on the German eBay site for a mere $18000, then about $21000. In part, the low price reflects the water damage that occurred during storage in Hamburg, damage the rehabbers took some 10000 man-hours to repair, typically with old parts. The selling price also reflects the old-tech fervor of the seller, a German engineer who'd bought the machine for his own use in 1972, when IBM stopped supporting the model, and couldn't bear to scrap it when its working life was done. And of course, there's the effect of Moore's Law: The 1401 system, all 4 tons of it, has about one-millionth the computing power of your $600 desktop PC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AIR CONDITIONING was devised not for comfort but for industry, specifically to control temperature and humidity in a color printing factory in Brooklyn. The process required feeding paper into the presses a number of times, once for each of the component colors, and the slightest misalignment caused by changes in humidity produced defective copies that had to be thrown away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on issues and topics related to the management of medical information systems in the U.S. Efforts have long been undertaken to create a comprehensive system of electronic medical records. According to its supporters, the use of electronic systems to store and retrieve valuable medical records could save lives and cut health care costs. The endeavor is primarily a private sector effort that has the support of and some funding from the federal government. Once completed, it will replace paper-based files with a digital record containing the complete medical history of a patient.

The article focuses on the database problems of Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) which requires election officials in the U.S. to replace old paper-based voting machines with new electronic equipment. HAVA does not require the state to keep registrants off the rolls if the registration information and data of the voter is different from other data. Also, the study made by the Board of Elections in New York City found that 20 percent of the records failed to match due to typographical errors created by election officials. In March 2006, the Brennan Center for Justice published a study stating that the new HAVA-required databases holds the names of all registrants, however, mismatch problems were found on new voters and those who have changed their name and relocated.

The article discusses career path in academics. Academic tenures in the United States require combination of research, teaching and service in administrative committees. In getting tenure, most young professors get to know about writing research grant proposals, publishing conference papers and journals, teaching multiple courses, advising graduate students and joining school committees and organizations. Richard J. Radke of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York points out that the process can be very stressful and intimidating, but it offers flexibility and has its rewards.

The article features Dublin, Ireland-based Ntera Ltd.'s NanoChromics display (NCD), which is touted as a beneficial alternative to liquid crystal displays (LCD). NCD exhibits razor sharpness, with nearly black images on an almost luminous and paper-white background. Text is easy to read in most lighting conditions, with contrast ratio of 6:1, and a brightness of at least four times that of an LCD. In terms of power consumption, NCD are power-frugal due to two factors: elimination of the need for any kind of separate lighting system through the high contrast ratio, and absence of a requirement to constantly refresh NCD.

This article reports on the failure of the Virtual Case File (VCF) project of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The VCF was supposed to automate the bureau's paper-based work environment, allow agents and intelligence analysts to share vital investigative information, and replace the obsolete Automated Case Support system. Instead, the VCF contractor, Science Applications International Corp. delivered 700, 000 lines of code so bug-ridden and functionally off target that in April 2005, the bureau had to scrap the multimillion dollar project. However, various government and independent reports show that the FBI, lacking in IT management and technical expertise, shares the blame for the project's failure.

The author of this article issued a challenge during the 1990s to his fellow researchers: build a robot using muscles of electrically activated polymers that could arm-wrestle a human. In 2003, researchers from the SRI International told him that their technology could be capable of meeting the challenge. This article looks into the facts surrounding the development of artificial muscles in the electronic and ionic categories. Within the electronic category are passive dielectrics, piezo-electric polymers, graft elastomers, liquid crystals and elctrostrictive paper. Within the ionic category are polymer gels, polymer metal composites, conductive polymers, carbon nanotubes and electrorheological liquids.

Focuses on the controversy with regard to the implementation and enforcement of the United States Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Implications of the act for free inquiry and fair use of copyrighted materials; Challenge posed by a technical paper that circumvent copyright protection measures; Lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Focuses on the decline in industrial researches in electrical engineering in the U.S. as of September 2003. Reasons for the decline in industry papers; State of the research system during the dot-com boom; Examination of papers included in the 2003 IEEE International Communications Conference by the author.

Focuses on the adoption of fuel-efficient technologies in China and India to reduce harm to the economic growth and social fabric of developing countries. Opportunities in improving energy efficiency; Barriers to international progress; Difficulties faced by heavy industrial sector on the changes. INSETS: The caustic soda case;Paper production problems.

The European XFEL, or EuXFEL— currently the largest X-ray free-electron laser in the world-produced its first light in May 2017. The facility, built in a 3.4-kilometer tunnel near Hamburg, Germany, was commissioned in September of last year. And August 2018 brought another milestone—the publication of the first scientific paper based on experiments with the laser, which the authors used to probe the 3D structures of protein microcrystals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behind an unmarked door in Hanover, Germany, a bearded young man with stylish glasses and a pierced lip is loading 350-year-old pieces of paper onto glass plates for digitization by a souped-up scanner. These pieces of paper are part of an immense puzzle. If solved, it could give insights into one of the greatest minds of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wearing face coverings, practicing social distancing, washing hands, and shuttering schools and stores. These are some of the measures that have been implemented to protect people from catching the virus responsible for COVID-19. But just how effective have these interventions been? • Engineers at Carnegie Mellon and Princeton believe they have developed a mathematical modeling approach that could tell us. Their project, called “Modeling and Control of COVID-19 Propagation for Assessing and Optimizing Intervention Policies,” looks at various factors that can impact the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including virus mutations as well as preventive measures such as wearing masks. • H. Vincent Poor, an IEEE Life Fellow, is the principal investigator of the team. Also on the team are IEEE Senior Member Osman Yağan, an associate research professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, and mathematical biologists from Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania who study viral spread. • The model recently received a grant from the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, a new research consortium funding projects that could reduce the effects of pandemics. Related projects on viral spread by Osman and Poor are also being funded by the U.S. Army Research Office and the United States' National Science Foundation. • The template for the new model was adapted from a mathematical theory the researchers developed in 2019 that investigated the process by which viruses and their mutations spread. In their paper, published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they compared how a virus spreads and mutates to how information changes as it's circulated by networks of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 13th century, the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan embarked on a bold experiment. China at the time was divided into different regions, many of which issued their own coins, discouraging trade within the empire. So Kublai Khan decreed that henceforth money would take the form of paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OFTEN LEAD TO wrong conclusions. I well remember receiving a friendly welcome at the residence of a European ambassador in Ottawa and, in the very next sentence, being told that this house was perfect to withstand Canadian winters because it was made of real brick and stone-not like those flimsy North American wooden things, with hollow walls. My hosts then swiftly moved to other matters and, in any case, I did not have the heart to belittle the insulating qualities of their handsome home. • The error is easy to understand, but mass and density are better indicators of sturdiness than of insulating capability. A brick wall obviously looks more substantial and protective than a wall framed with narrow wooden studs and covered on the outside with a sheet of thin plywood and aluminum siding and on the inside with vulnerable gypsum drywall. Angry European men do not make holes in brick walls. • Decades ago, when oil sold for US $2 a barrel, most pre-1960 North American houses usually had nothing more to keep out the cold than the air space between the plywood and drywall. Sometimes the space was filled with wood shavings or shredded paper. Yet, remarkably, even that feeble combination provided a bit more insulation than solid brick. • The insulating value, or thermal resistance, is measured in terms of R-value. It depends not only on the composition, thickness, and density of the insulation but also on the outdoor temperature and moisture. A framed wall from 1960 had roughly the following R values: aluminum siding (0.6), thin plywood (0.5), air space (0.9) and drywall (0.5). It all adds up to only about 2.5. Standard brick (0.8) plastered on both sides offered no more than 1.0. Hence even a flimsy 1960 mass-built North American wall insulated at least twice as well as did Europe's plastered brick. • Once energy prices began to rise and more rational building codes came into effect in North America, it became compulsory to incorporate plastic barriers and fiberglass batts-pillowlike rolls that can be packed between the wooden frames, or studs. Higher overall R-values were easily achieved by using wider studs (two-by-six) or, better yet, by double-studding, which involves building a sandwich from two frames, each one filled with insulation. (In North America, a softwood “two-by-six” is actually 1.5 by 5.5 inches, or 38 by 140 millimeters.) For a well- built North American wall this means adding insulation values of drywall (0.5), polyethylene vapor barrier (0.8), fiberglass batts (20), fiberboard sheathing (1.3), plastic house wrap (Tyvek ThermaWrap at 5) and beveled wood cladding (0.8). Adding the insulating value of interior air film brings the total R-value to about 29. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientists have come up with two clever new ways to harness the programming power of DNA in living bacterial cells. In separate experiments published in Nature in July, researchers reported that they had successfully archived a movie and built a complex biological computer inside living E. coli cells. The experiments expand our ability to exploit DNA's encoding potential. "What these papers represent is just how good we are getting at harnessing that power," says Julius Lucks, a bioengineer at the Center for Synthetic Biology, at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., who was not involved in either report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a meeting in mid-town Manhattan, Kris Myny picks up what looks like an ordinary paper business card and, with little fanfare, holds it to his smartphone. The details of the card appear almost immediately on the screen inside a custom app. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]