Gizmorama

September 1, 2010
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Clearance Sale - Electronics, DVDs, Housewares and more...
http://pd.gophercentral.com/u/3839/c/186/a/474
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Good Morning,

Check out the last article for details on the ongoing rev-
olution of computer chips. See how chips are progressing
into smaller, more capacious entities in this very relevant
article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Email your comments

P.S. You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the new
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Florida coral reefs damaged by cold water

PALM BEACH, Fla. - A rare series of cold-water upwellings
from the deep ocean has severely damaged coral reefs in
Florida already stressed by pollution, scientists say. The
blasts of cold water hit the reefs in July, fatally bleaching
large areas of coral, already under siege from sewage, fer-
tilizers, pesticides and algae, The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post
reported. Much of the damage hit staghorn coral, an endan-
gered species. The impact is not just environmental; there
an economic cost as well because marinas, boat-sellers, bait
shops and fishing and dive charters depend on the health of
the reefs. Thomas Goreau, president of the Global Coral Reef
Alliance in Cambridge, Mass., said 70 percent of a patch of
staghorn coral off Palm Beach, the area's largest, was dead
or dying. "There are records of cold water bleaching kills,
but they all happened in the winter," Goreau said. Upwel-
lings, upward flows of water, are impossible to predict,
Goreau said. "What is really exceptional about this event
is it happened in the hottest time of the year." The upwel-
lings in July subjected the corals to quickly alternating
lethally high and lethally low temperatures, another expert
said. "It would be the equivalent of a human being jumping
into the Bering Sea, where hypothermia would kill the indi-
vidual in minutes to hours," said Rob Ruzicka, a coral
researcher with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Commission. "Exposure to extreme cold water like this would
have acute impacts."


Scientists ponder dolphin mystery

VICTORIA, British Columbia - Canadian scientists say they
are puzzled why dolphins, which normally stay in offshore
waters, are showing up close to shore and in inlets on Van-
couver Island. Dolphins started moving closer to land in
the mid-1980s but the reason is still unknown, researchers
said. It could have been a result of a food shortage or
changing water temperatures. "They just keep increasing,"
Echo Bay, British Columbia, resident Billy Proctor told the
Vancouver Sun. "I guess their population is probably ex-
ploding because there's tons of babies everywhere. I don't
think they're supposed to be here." Proctor said he sees
hundreds of them daily hanging out close to shore. Lance
Barrett-Lennard, a zoologist with the Vancouver Aquarium,
said he sees few dolphins in offshore waters, and that 15
years ago they were plentiful. "I was a bit worried when I
first went up where I usually see dolphins and there weren't
any," he said. "For some reason they seem to be further in-
shore." A recent rash of attacks on dolphins by transient
killer whales may have also been a factor, Barrett-Lennard
said. Dolphins often play with resident killer whales, but
when they see a transient killer whale they'll go the other
way, said John Ford of Canada's Department of Fisheries and
Oceans.


New fossil field found in Canadian Rockies

FIELD, British Columbia - A fossil bed in Canada, one of
paleontology's most revered locations, now has a neighbor
yielding up newly discovered ancient treasures, researchers
say. The new site in the Canadian Rockies is less than 25
miles from the famous Burgess Shale, which has yielded
thousands of fossils dating to 505 million years ago since
its discovery in 1909, ScienceNews.org reported Monday.
Fossils at Burgess appear in several outcrops, all within
less than 40 miles from Field, British Columbia, and all
occurring in shale deposits called the Stephen Formation,
800 to 1,200 feet thick. Now a team from the Royal Ontario
Museum in Toronto has found Burgess-like fossils in the
valley of the Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park,
where a much thinner part of the shale formation that ranges
from 50 to 500 feet thick is exposed. About half of the fos-
sil groups found at Stanley Glacier, such as trilobites, are
found at other Burgess sites in different abundances. But
the creatures unearthed at Stanley also include eight taxa,
or groups, previously unknown to science, the Toronto team
said. "We consider it likely that future exploration and
study will continue to yield new taxa from the 'thin' Stephen
Formation, which is exposed over a broader area regionally
than the 'thick' Stephen Formation," the researchers said in
an article in the journal Geology.


Quest for more computer memory ongoing

NEW YORK - U.S. scientists say new technologies may bypass
barriers to the miniaturization of computer memory, vital to
the consumer electronics revolution. The limits of physics
had loomed as a possible slowdown in the pace of miniaturi-
zation that has allowed the ability to pack ever more power
into ever-smaller devices such as laptops, smart phones and
digital cameras, The New York Times reported. Now two emer-
ging technologies could overcome that barrier, researchers
say. At Rice University, scientists say they have succeeded
in building reliable small digital switches, essential to
computer memory, that could be made at a significantly
smaller scale than is possible using conventional methods.
Based on silicon oxide, one of the basic building blocks of
today's chip industry, the new technology could yield single
chips that store as much as today's highest capacity disk
drives, the Rice researchers say. Hewlett Packard says it
will announce a commercial partnership with a major semi-
conductor company to produce a related technology that also
could advance computer data storage to unheard-of densities
in the next decade. HP and the Rice scientists are both
making what are called memristors, or memory resistors,
switches that retain information without a source of power.
Meanwhile, IBM, Intel and other companies are promoting a
competing technology, phase-change memory, using heat to
transform a glassy material from an amorphous state to a
crystalline one and back. Phase-change memory is being
pushed as a promising technology for so-called flash chips,
which retain information after power is switched off. "There
are a lot of new technologies pawing for attention," Richard
Doherty, president of a consumer electronics market research
company, said. "When you get down to these scales, you're
talking about the ability to store hundreds of movies on a
single chip."

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