Nanogenerators produce electricity by squeezing your fingers together, while you dance

Science

Nanogenerators produce electricity by squeezing your fingers together, while you dance

By Sam Sheffer posted Mar 31st 2011 8:23PM

It's been a while since we last heard about nanogeneratos -- you know, those insanely tiny fibers that could potentially be woven into your hoodie to juice up your smartphone. Dr. Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology has reported that he and his team of Einsteins constructed nanogenerators with enough energy to potentially power LCDs, LEDs and laser diodes by moving your various limbs. These micro-powerhouses -- 1 / 500 the width of a single hair strand -- are embedded with piezoelectric zinc oxide atoms and can generate electrical charges when flexed or strained. Wang and his team of researchers shoved a collection of their nanogenerators into a chip 1 / 4 the size of a stamp, stacked five of them on top of one another and can pinch the stack between their fingers to generate the output of two standard AA batteries -- around 1.5 volts. Although it's not much, we're super excited at this point in development -- imagine how convenient to charge your phone in your pocket sans the bulky battery add-ons. And that's only one application of this technology. Yea, we know.

IBM products aim to speed up, automate virtualization

IBM is aiming to make it easier for enterprises to manage their virtualized environments, with new features in the Tivoli Provisioning Manager and other software products.

IBM is rolling out a beta program for new software that it claims can dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to provision new virtual machines. The software can deploy a single VM in seconds, dozens in a few minutes and hundreds or thousands in under an hour, according to an IBM press release.

Dennis Quan, director of the IBM Tivoli China Development Laboratory, was vague about how the software achieves those speeds, saying that it uses a number of techniques including streaming the image.

The software can boost efficiency in organizations where IT people might otherwise spend many minutes or even an hour to get a single VM provisioned, he said.

But the benefits can extend further, he said. One reason companies move to the cloud is because it allows organizations to use only the computing resources they need.

"That idea also assumes that when they're done with those resources they are returned to the cloud so they can be used by others," Quan said. However, sometimes groups are reluctant to give up resources even if they aren't using them because of the time it can take to get those resources back later.

"If you get to the point where you tell users they can get their resources back in seconds to minutes, then the users don't worry about not getting it back quickly if they give it up now," Quan said. The software can also help improve agility for businesses that may want to be able to make changes quickly, he said.

IBM also announced Tuesday that Tivoli Provisioning Manager now supports image federation and deployment across heterogenous infrastructure.

"It's the ability to support different hardware hypervisor platforms from a single management system," Quan said. An enterprise can use VMware, PowerVM and Xen hypervisors and manage them from the same console, he said.

IBM is also announcing that it will launch a beta program "imminently" for new software that extends service management capabilities to hybrid clouds. Users will be able to monitor and provision services that may be hosted internally or on public clouds. Financial services and public sector organizations are among those most interested in keeping important data on internal systems while offloading less mission-critical apps to public clouds, Quan said.

Quan did not share the list of public cloud services that would initially be supported but said that it would be able to tie in many services and would refine the list through the course of the beta program.

The company is also announcing new virtualization support in its Tivoli Storage Manager. The product lets users efficiently manage storage requirements, data recovery and data protection across machines, Quan said. "It gives you better control over your environment and enforces a more uniform policy," he said.

The new features and products may be good news for CFOs, but may not exactly be welcome by IT departments. By automating management and speeding up provisioning times, IT departments require fewer administrators, Quan said.

Intel details new Atom N570 processor

Intel on Tuesday provided further details about its Atom N570 chip and said netbooks with the processor will ship later this month.

The dual-core processor runs at 1.66GHz and includes 1MB of L2 cache. It draws 8.5 watts of power and supports DDR3 memory, Intel said in a blog entry.

Asustek Computer, Samsung and Lenovo will ship netbooks with the Atom N570 processor later this month, Intel said. Some laptops are being shown at the CeBit trade show going on in Hanover, Germany.

Netbooks running on the chip will deliver a battery life similar to that of systems running on single-core Atom processors, Intel said. The battery life of netbooks depends on features, screen size and applications. Some netbooks can deliver between eight and 12 hours of battery life on basic activities such as Web browsing. But applications that demand a lot of processing power, such as high-definition graphics, can drain battery life quickly.

The chip was first announced on Monday with SeaMicro's SM10000-64 low-power server, which includes 256 Atom N570 processors. The chip includes server-friendly features such as 64-bit extensions and multithreading, in which each core is capable of running two threads simultaneously to boost application performance. All desktop, laptop and server chips based on Intel's newer Sandy Bridge microarchitecture and its predecessor, Westmere, are capable of running multiple threads per core.

There is a growing interest in using netbook chips such as Atom in low-power servers. However, netbook shipments are getting clobbered by tablets, which are competing for consumer dollars. Intel is also working on an Atom chip for tablets, which is code-named Oak Trail.