Apple exploded rumors that it would murder the Mac Pro today. How? Well, by previewing a new badass version of the high power monster
Source: http://gizmodo.com/what-do-you-think-of-the-new-mac-pro-design-512361961
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June 10, 2013 ? Scientists at Rice University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have advanced on the goal of two-dimensional electronics with a method to control the growth of uniform atomic layers of molybdenum disulfide (MDS).
MDS, a semiconductor, is one of a trilogy of materials needed to make functioning 2-D electronic components. They may someday be the basis for the manufacture of devices so small they would be invisible to the naked eye.
The work appears online this week in Nature Materials.
The Rice labs of lead investigator Jun Lou, Pulickel Ajayan and Boris Yakobson, all professors in the university's Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department, collaborated with Wigner Fellow Wu Zhou and staff scientist Juan-Carlos Idrobo at ORNL in an unusual initiative that incorporated experimental and theoretical work.
The goals were to see if large, high-quality, atomically thin MDS sheets could be grown in a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) furnace and to analyze their characteristics. The hope is that MDS could be joined with graphene, which has no band gap, and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), an insulator, to form field-effect transistors, integrated logic circuits, photodetectors and flexible optoelectronics.
"For truly atomic circuitry, this is important," Lou said. "If we get this material to work, then we will have a set of materials to play with for complete, complicated devices."
Last year, Lou and Ajayan revealed their success at making intricate patterns of intertwining graphene and hBN, among them the image of Rice's owl mascot. But there was still a piece missing for the materials to be full partners in advanced electronic applications. By then, the researchers were already well into their study of MDS as a semiconducting solution.
"Two-dimensional materials have taken off," Ajayan said. "The study of graphene prompted research into a lot of 2-D materials; molybdenum disulfide is just one of them. Essentially, we are trying to span the whole range of band gaps between graphene, which is a semimetal, and the boron nitride insulator."
MDS is distinct from graphene and hBN because it isn't exactly flat. Graphene and hBN are flat, with arrays of hexagons formed by their constituent atoms. But while MDS looks hexagonal when viewed from above, it is actually a stack, with a layer of molybdenum atoms between two layers of sulfur atoms.
Co-author Zheng Liu, a joint research scientist in Lou's and Ajayan's labs, noted the Yakobson group predicted that MDS and carbon atoms would bind. "We're working on it," he said. "We would like to stick graphene and MDS together (with hBN) into what would be a novel, 2-D semiconductor component."
"The question now is how to bring all the 2-D materials together," said co-author Sina Najmaei, a Rice graduate student. "They're very different species and they're being grown in very different environments."
Until recently, growing MDS in a usable form has been difficult. The "Scotch tape" method of pulling layers from a bulk sample has been tried, but the resulting materials were inconsistent, Lou said. Early CVD experiments produced MDS with grains that were too tiny to be of use for their electrical properties.
But in the process, the researchers noticed "islands" of MDS tended to form in the furnace where defects or even pieces of dust appeared on the substrate. "The material is difficult to nucleate, unlike hBN or graphene," Najmaei said. "We started learning that we could control that nucleation by adding artificial edges to the substrate, and now it's growing a lot better between these structures."
"Now we can grow grain sizes as large as 100 microns," Lou said. That's still only about the width of a human hair, but in the nanoscale realm, it's big enough to work with, he said.
Once the Ajayan and Lou teams were able to grow such large MDS arrays, the ORNL team imaged the atomic structures using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy. The atomic array can clearly be seen in the images and, more importantly, so can the defects that alter the material's electronic properties.
"In order to improve the properties of 2-D materials, it's important to first understand how they're put together at a fundamental scale," Idrobo said. "Our microscopy facility at ORNL allows us to see materials in a way they've never been seen before -- down to the level of individual atoms."
Yakobson, a theoretical physicist, and his team specialize in analyzing the interplay of energy at the atomic scale. With ORNL's images in hand, they were not only able to calculate the energies of a much more complex set of defects than are found in graphene or BN but could also match their numbers to the images.
Among the Yakobson team's interesting finds was the existence, reported last year, of conductive subnano "wires" along grain boundaries in MDS. According to their calculations, the effect only occurred when grains met at precise 60-degree angles. The ORNL electron microscopy images make it possible to view these grain boundaries directly.
The Rice researchers see many possible ways to combine the materials, not only in two-dimensional layers but also as three-dimensional stacks. "Natural crystals are made of structures bound by the van der Waals force, but they're all of the same composition," Lou said. "Now we have the opportunity to build 3-D crystals with different compositions."
"These are very different materials, with different electronic properties and band gaps. Putting one on top of the other would give us a new type of material that we call van der Waals solids," Ajayan said. "We could put them together in whatever stacking order we need, which would be an interesting new approach in materials science.
Co-authors of the Nature Materials paper are Rice research associate Xiaolong Zou, graduate students Gang Shi and Sidong Lei, and Wu Zhou at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The Welch Foundation, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Nanoelectronics Research Corporation and the Department of Energy supported the work.
Lou is an associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science. Ajayan is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering and a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering. Yakobson is the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and a professor of chemistry.
Computations were performed on Rice's DAVinCI system and at the Cyberinfrastructure for Computational Research, both funded by NSF.
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SOCHI, Russia (AP) ? Drones hovering overhead, robotic vehicles roaming Olympic venues to search for explosives, high-speed patrol boats sweeping the Black Sea coast ? Russian officials say they will be using cutting-edge technology to make sure the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi will be "the safest Olympics in history."
But intelligence analysts and regional experts say an Islamic insurgency raging across the North Caucasus mountains that tower over the seaside resort of Sochi presents daunting threats. Despite the deployment of tens of thousands of Russian troops, police officers and private guards equipped with high-tech gadgetry, the simmering unrest in the Caucasus could put President Vladimir Putin's pet project at risk.
The Sochi games are the first Olympics in history that are almost on the doorstep of an active insurgency whose members could potentially try to "upstage the games with some kind of attack, which would provide a kind of bad PR for the Russian government," said Matthew Henman, a senior analyst at Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London.
Potential assailants could disrupt the games even with scarce resources, he said, pointing at the recent Boston Marathon explosions, where two shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs killed three people and injured more than 260 in April.
"You don't need an awful lot of expertise to create primitive but largely effective explosive devices," Henman said.
The elder of the two ethnic Chechen brothers from Russia who are accused of staging the Boston bombings spent six months last year in the restive Russian province of Dagestan, which lies about 500 kilometers (300 miles) east of Sochi, about the distance between Boston and Philadelphia. Russian investigators have been trying to determine whether he had contact with local Islamic militants.
Dagestan has become the center of the insurgency that spread across Russia's North Caucasus region after two separatist wars in the 1990s in neighboring Chechnya. Rebels seeking to carve out a caliphate, or Islamic state, in the region have targeted police and other officials in near-daily shootings and bombings.
"The Caucasus poses a threat because the situation there isn't fully controlled," said Alexei Malashenko, a Caucasus expert with the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow office. "It's unclear who could deal a blow, and how and where."
Police, security and medical personnel in Sochi have conducted dozens of drills to train for potential threats. In the most recent exercise at the end of May hundreds of police officers, rescue workers and ambulance crews responded to various emergency scenarios.
"We conduct training to respond to a broad range of terror threats, like explosives at Olympic facilities or an attack by a group of criminals," said Sarkis Pogosian of the Russian Emergencies Ministry's branch in southern Russia. More than 50 such exercises have been conducted in the past 18 months, according to the Interior Ministry.
The drills have highlighted several logistical problems that could make it hard for rescue workers to respond quickly.
Nikolai Vasilyev of Sochi's search and rescue service, who took part in the latest maneuvers, said the exercises have been relatively small-scale and a bigger real-life challenge could prove daunting. He said it would be hard for rescue crews to arrive quickly by road because of Sochi's chronic traffic jams. The few rescue helicopters the service has would be of little help if there were a large number of casualties.
"It would be practically impossible for ambulances and our vehicles to get to an Olympic facility," Vasilyev said. "We can only hope that everything goes forward smoothly."
Vasilyev said authorities need to reserve designated lanes for ambulances and other emergency services, create a network of mobile hospitals near Olympic facilities and remove parking lots cluttering the access to sports venues.
Security always has been tight in Sochi, where Putin has a presidential residence that he uses often and where he frequently hosts visiting foreign leaders.
The government has further beefed up security before the games, which officially begin Feb. 7. It has deployed 25,000 police officers and thousands of other military and security personnel to protect the city, patrol Olympic facilities, screen incoming vehicles and X-ray construction materials for explosives.
The Defense Ministry has sent a special forces brigade of battle-hardened veterans of the Chechen wars and other conflicts to patrol the forested mountains forming Sochi's scenic background.
The government also has spent big on security equipment, providing security forces with drones, robotic vehicles to search for and defuse mines and new high-speed patrol boats.
But Russia's recent history shows that security cordons aren't always effective.
Insurgents in the Caucasus have mounted a number of large-scale terror attacks in Russia. They include a 2002 hostage-taking raid on a Moscow theater in which 129 hostages died ? most from the effects of the narcotic gas that Russian special forces pumped in to incapacitate the attackers.
In 2004, militants from Chechnya took more than 1,000 people hostage at a school in the southern city of Beslan. More than 330 people died in that attack, more than half of them children.
There also have been numerous bombings in Moscow and other cities, including attacks at a Moscow airport and on a high-speed rail line to St. Petersburg. In those attacks, the assailants drove long distances across Russia with weapons and explosives, using ruses or bribes to pass through numerous police checkpoints.
Corruption is deeply ingrained in many aspects of Russian society. But Elena Panfilova, the head of Transparency International Russia, a corruption watchdog, said federal authorities will likely make every possible effort to squelch it within the Sochi security force.
"People in charge of security there are aware of the practice, and they will make sure that the personnel there are disciplined in such a way that they wouldn't even think about it," she said.
Endemic poverty and unemployment in the North Caucasus and brutal tactics used by Russian security forces to quash the rebellion have helped swell the ranks of militants. In Dagestan in particular, the rebellion has turned into a lucrative industry, with many of the gangs associated with ethnic and business clans dividing generous federal subsidies and waging turf battles.
After seeing Dagestan slide into violence for years, Putin in January replaced the provincial leader with a Kremlin stalwart. Earlier this month, SWAT teams from Moscow backed by armored vehicles arrested the mayor of the provincial capital on murder charges and flew him out in a military helicopter to dodge his private army of several hundred bodyguards.
The mayor, Said Amirov, had been seen as the most influential figure in Dagestan and the second-most powerful man in the entire Caucasus behind the Moscow-backed strongman in neighboring Chechnya. In a wheelchair for the past 20 years after one of the 15 assassination attempts against him, Amirov had amassed extensive power and wealth, and had been accused by some of links with the rebels.
Some analysts said Putin took a gamble with Amirov's arrest, which could open the door for even greater instability.
"It's risky, and it may have the opposite effect because thousands stood behind Amirov," said Carnegie's Malashenko.
Denis Sokolov, the head of the Caucasus Center of Project Solutions, an independent Moscow-based think tank, said while Amirov's arrest created risks by sharply upsetting the regional balance of power, he and his supporters might try to hunker down.
"The main tactics of Amirov and his clan would be to try to minimize their losses, not to engage in an open confrontation," Sokolov said. "The regional elites who risked such a confrontation would be doomed to destruction."
Malashenko said while the Kremlin has moved to bring Dagestan's local government back under control, security agencies could also try to make informal deals with rebel leaders to make sure they pose no threat to the Olympics.
Doku Umarov, a widely-known Chechen rebel leader, has claimed responsibility for a number of other recent attacks, including a January 2011 suicide bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport that killed 37 people and injured more than 180. Since then, Russia has seen no major terror attacks outside the Caucasus. Umarov said last year that he told his men to avoid hitting civilian targets because Russians in Moscow have risen up against Putin in a series of mass protests.
Many militant cells in the Caucasus have become increasingly integrated into local politics and business and could have a vested interest in seeing the Sochi Games go off without disruption.
Still, they are not the only terror networks around.
Henman, the Jane's analyst, said other terror groups ? like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, who have trained along the Pakistan-Afghan border? could also plot a strike on Sochi.
Just last week in Moscow's suburbs, Russian security services arrested several suspects with roots in Russia who they said had come from Afghanistan to conduct terror attacks in the capital.
Malashenko said Islamic militants from the Caucasus who have fought alongside Syrian rebels could also come back and try to strike Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
"They are gaining combat experience and getting angry at Russia down there," he said.
The chief of Russia's top KGB successor agency said last week that 200 militants from Russia are fighting alongside Syrian rebels and acknowledged they could be a threat when they return.
Malashenko also warned that organized rebel cells may pose less of a threat than potential "lone wolf" assailants like the ethnic Chechen brothers suspected in the Boston attack.
"Lone attackers like those in Boston are the most dangerous ones," he said.
___
Isachenkov reported from Moscow.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/russia-faces-security-challenges-sochi-olympics-064435242.html
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At its WWDC keynote today, Apple announced an update to Siri that brings a number of new features to Apple's voice-driven personal assistant for iOS. Not only is Siri getting a number of new high-quality male and female voices and support for multiple languages (English, German and French, for example), but it's also getting quite a bit smarter. In this version, Apple has integrated Twitter, Wikipedia and search results from Bing, so it can now, for example, read you back Wikipedia entries for some searches.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/8x-M3LUAYLQ/
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This image made available by The Guardian Newspaper in London shows NSA Wistleblower Edward Snowden. The 29-year-old American who works as a contract employee at the National Security Agency is the source of The Guardian's disclosures about the U.S. government's secret surveillance programs, the British newspaper reported Sunday, June 9, 2013. The leaks have reopened the post-Sept. 11, 2001, debate about privacy concerns versus heightened measure to protect against terrorist attacks, and led the NSA to ask the Justice Department to conduct a criminal investigation. The Guardian said it was publishing the identity of Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, at his own request. (AP Photo/The Guardian, Ewen MacAskill) NO SALES NO ARCHIVE ONE TIME USE ONLY MANDATORY CREDIT
This image made available by The Guardian Newspaper in London shows NSA Wistleblower Edward Snowden. The 29-year-old American who works as a contract employee at the National Security Agency is the source of The Guardian's disclosures about the U.S. government's secret surveillance programs, the British newspaper reported Sunday, June 9, 2013. The leaks have reopened the post-Sept. 11, 2001, debate about privacy concerns versus heightened measure to protect against terrorist attacks, and led the NSA to ask the Justice Department to conduct a criminal investigation. The Guardian said it was publishing the identity of Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, at his own request. (AP Photo/The Guardian, Ewen MacAskill) NO SALES NO ARCHIVE ONE TIME USE ONLY MANDATORY CREDIT
A sign stands outside the National Security Administration (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md., Thursday, June 6, 2013. The Obama administration on Thursday defended the National Security Agency's need to collect telephone records of U.S. citizens, calling such information "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats." (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? A 29-year-old contractor who claims to have worked at the National Security Agency and the CIA was revealed Sunday as the source of disclosures about the U.S. government's secret surveillance programs, risking prosecution by the U.S. government.
The leaks have reopened the post-Sept. 11 debate about privacy concerns versus heightened measure to protect against terrorist attacks, and led the NSA to ask the Justice Department to conduct a criminal investigation into the leaks.
The Guardian, the first paper to disclose the documents, said it was publishing the identity of Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, at his own request.
"My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them," Snowden told the newspaper.
Stories in The Guardian and The Washington Post published over the last week revealed two surveillance programs.
One of them is a phone records monitoring program in which the NSA gathers hundreds of millions of U.S. phone records each day, creating a database through which it can learn whether terror suspects have been in contact with people in the U.S. The Obama administration says the NSA program does not listen to actual conversations.
Separately, an Internet scouring program, code-named PRISM, allows the NSA and FBI to tap directly into nine U.S. Internet companies to gather all Internet usage ? audio, video, photographs, emails and searches. The effort is designed to detect suspicious behavior that begins overseas.
Snowden said claims the programs are secure are not true.
"Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector. Anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of those sensor networks and the authority that that analyst is empowered with," Snowden said, in accompanying video on the Guardian's website. "Not all analysts have the power to target anything. But I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email."
He told the Post that he would "ask for asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy" in an interview from Hong Kong, where he is staying.
"I'm not going to hide," Snowden told the Post. "Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest."
The Post declined to elaborate on its reporting about Snowden.
Spokespeople for the White House, the Director of National Intelligence, NSA and CIA did not have immediate comment on the disclosures, nor would they confirm whether Snowden worked at the U.S. intelligence agencies.
In a statement, Booz Allen confirmed that Snowden "has been an employee of our firm for less than 3 months, assigned to a team in Hawaii." The statement said if the news reports of what he has leaked prove accurate, "this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct," and the company promised to work closely with authorities on the investigation.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has decried the revelation of the intelligence-gathering programs as reckless and said it has done "huge, grave damage." In recent days, he took the rare step of declassifying some details about them to respond to media reports about counterterrorism techniques employed by the government.
Snowden told The Guardian that he lacked a high school diploma and enlisted in the U.S. Army until he was discharged because of an injury, and later worked as a security guard with the NSA.
He later went to work for the CIA as an information technology employee and by 2007 was stationed in Geneva, Switzerland, where he had access to classified documents.
During that time, he considered going public about the nation's secretive programs but told the newspaper he decided against it, because he did not want to put anyone in danger and he hoped Obama's election would curtail some of the clandestine programs.
He said he was disappointed that Obama did not rein in the surveillance programs.
"Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world," he told The Guardian. "I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."
Snowden left the CIA in 2009 to join a private contractor, and spent last four years at the NSA, as a contractor with consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton and, before that, Dell.
The Guardian reported that Snowden was working in an NSA office in Hawaii when he copied the last of the documents he planned to disclose and told supervisors that he needed to be away for a few weeks to receive treatment for epilepsy.
He left for Hong Kong on May 20 and has remained there since, according to the newspaper. Snowden is quoted as saying he chose that city because "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent", and because he believed it was among the spots on the globe that could and would resist the dictates of the U.S. government.
"I feel satisfied that this was all worth it. I have no regrets," Snowden told The Guardian, which said he asked to be identified after several days of interviews.
Snowden could face decades in a U.S. jail for revealing classified information if he is successfully extradited from Hong Kong, said Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer who represents whistleblowers. Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the United States that took force in 1998, according to the U.S. State Department website.
"If it's a straight leak of classified information, the government could subject him to a 10 or 20 year penalty for each count," with each document leaked considered a separate charge, Zaid said.
Snowden told the newspaper he believes the government could try to charge him with treason under the Espionage Act, but Zaid said that would require the government to prove he had intent to betray the United States, whereas he publicly made it clear he did this to spur debate.
The government could also make an argument that the NSA leaks have aided the enemy ? as military prosecutors have claimed against Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, who faces life in prison under military law if convicted for releasing a trove of classified documents through Wikileaks.
"They could say the revelation of the (NSA) programs could instruct people to change tactics," Zaid said. But even under the lesser charges of simply revealing classified information, "you are talking potentially decades in jail, loss of his employment and his security clearance."
Officials said the revelations were dangerous and irresponsible. House intelligence committee member Peter King, R-NY, called for Snowden to be "extradited from Hong Kong immediately...and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," in an interview with The Associated Press Sunday.
"I believe the leaker has done extreme damage to the U.S. and to our intelligence operations," King said, by alerting al-Qaida to U.S. surveillance, and by spooking U.S. service providers who now might fight sharing data in future with the U.S. government, now that the system has been made public.
King added that intelligence and law enforcement professionals he'd spoken to since the news broke were also concerned that Snowden might be taken into custody by Chinese intelligence agents and questioned about CIA and NSA spies and policies.
"To be a whistleblower, there would have to be a pattern of him filing complaints through appropriate channels to his supervisors," said Ambassador John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence, in an interview with the AP Sunday. "For me, it's just an outright case of betrayal of confidences and a violation of his nondisclosure agreement."
President Barack Obama, Clapper and others have said the programs are authorized by Congress and subject to strict supervision of a secret court.
"It's important to recognize that you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," Obama said. "We're going to have to make some choices as a society."
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