Tech News Wrap Up For The Week Of February 19, 2007
Medival Muslims Made Stunning Math Breakthrough
Magnificently sophisticated geometric patterns in medieval Islamic architecture indicate their designers achieved a mathematical breakthrough 500 years earlier than Western scholars, scientists said on Thursday.
By the 15th century, decorative tile patterns on these masterpieces of Islamic architecture reached such complexity that a small number boasted what seem to be “quasicrystalline” designs, Harvard University’s Peter Lu and Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt wrote in the journal Science.
Only in the 1970s did British mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose become the first to describe these geometric designs in the West. Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry.
“Oh, it’s absolutely stunning,” Lu said in an interview. “They made tilings that reflect mathematics that were so sophisticated that we didn’t figure it out until the last 20 or 30 years.”
Lu and Steinhardt in particular cite designs on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran, built in 1453.
Islamic tradition has frowned upon pictorial representations in artwork. Mosques and other grand buildings erected by Islamic architects throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere often are wrapped in rich, intricate tile designs setting out elaborate geometric patterns.
The walls of many medieval Islamic structures display sumptuous geometric star-and-polygon patterns. The research indicated that by 1200 an important breakthrough had occurred in Islamic mathematics and design, as illustrated by these geometric designs.
“You can go through and see the evolution of increasing geometric sophistication. So they start out with simple patterns, and they get more complex” over time, Lu added.
Rosetta Space Probe Set to Slingshot Mars
Europe’s pioneering Rosetta space probe will swing around the back of Mars early on Sunday in a critical phase of its 10-year mission to meet a distant comet.
The so-called “swing-by” of the Red Planet is being coordinated by the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, and is the second of four such maneuvers that the probe must make on its ambitious journey.
The mission’s crowning moment will be in late 2014 when it releases a landing vessel in the first attempt at a controlled landing on a comet but first it must gain enough speed to catch it.
“Rosetta is a very long mission,” said Paolo Ferri, head of solar and planetary missions at ESOC. “It is not necessarily the distance but the fact that we want to reach the comet and stay in the vicinity for one or two years.”
“In order to do this we have to achieve the same orbit and the same velocity as the object which is traveling extremely fast,” he said.
The three-metric ton Rosetta comet chaser will orbit Mars just 250 km (155 miles) above the planet’s surface but Ferri said the risks of anything going wrong were minimal.
“You can never exclude this but making an error of 250 km and crashing into the planet is basically impossible,” he said.
Rosetta, launched in March 2004 on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana, will catch up with and monitor the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in one of the most ambitious missions made by the European space project.
GRAVITATIONAL PULL
To gather momentum while conserving as much rocket fuel as possible, controllers are using the gravitational pull of Earth and Mars to catapult the probe closer to its target.
One such “gravity assist” maneuver — commonly known as a swing-by — was performed around Earth two years ago. The Mars maneuver is the second and most complicated of the mission, while two more Earth maneuvers are due in 2007 and 2009.
“I don’t know if this is closest swing-by in history but it is one of the most daring,” Ferri said. The process will take around half a day with the critical maneuvers taking place in the early hours of Sunday morning.
While measurements show the probe is on the right trajectory, Ferri remains concerned about the solar-powered Rosetta passing through the Martian shadow.
For 24 minutes, it will lose the source of power for its major instruments, leaving it reliant on a brace of tiny batteries which were not designed for the task.
In the worst case, the probe may fail to reestablish contact with Earth when it emerges on the other side of the Red Planet.
“This is a big worry because we hate in space flight to do things for the first time,” Ferri said.
UK Doctors May Soon Ditch Clipboards For Tablet PCs
British doctors and nurses could bin the clipboards at the end of patients’ beds and head to their rounds clutching hi-tech tablet PC’s after medical experts gave their backing to the new technology.
The hope is that the A4-sized, lightweight, mobile clinical assistants (MCA) will ease medics’ workloads by giving them access to patient records on the move, make it easier to call up test results and cut down on their paperwork.
San Francisco-based makers Motion Computing and chip giant Intel (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research) also promise the 1,200 pound ($2,340) units will not smash if dropped while the highly sensitive patient data will not be able to be accessed if they fall into the wrong hands.
Accident and emergency specialist Simon Eccles said the new devices had been a hit with the nurses and doctors involved in trials as they were easy to use and saved time.
The Salford NHS foundation trust has ordered a number of the new devices, although the National Health Service is yet to commit to a bulk buy.
The MCA has 30-60 gigabytes of memory, WiFi capability to connect to hospital databases and a digital camera to take photos of wounds. It also has a special pen with which to write notes and a barcode and RFID reader to check drugs and doses against patient wrist bands.
The MCA’s were developed over the last three year after talking to doctors and nurses in Britain, the United States and Singapore.
Mike Bainbridge, a senior clinical architect for the NHS body overseeing the much delayed 6.2 billion pound upgrade of Britain’s public health system said the MCA was a huge step for the problem-fraught project.
“Once we start getting the full clinical record on there and the picture archiving and that sort of stuff the advantages becomes absolutely undeniable.”
He said NHS could get them at a reduced price if it decides to buy in bulk.
Eccles said the new gadgets would earn back their costs by saving the time of highly-paid specialists.
“When you consider that these can save a consultant an hour a day, these will pay for themselves in no time. The first year in fact,” he said.
Apple Inc. and Cisco Agree to Share iPhone Name
Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. and Apple Inc. said on Wednesday they had reached an agreement that allows both to use the “iPhone” name, after Cisco sued the iPod maker for using it for a new multimedia phone.
No further terms of the agreement were disclosed.
In a joint statement, they said both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products throughout the world, and each side will dismiss any pending actions regarding the trademark.
In addition, Cisco and Apple will explore opportunities to work together in the areas of security, and consumer and institutional communications.
Cisco sued Apple for trademark infringement in January after Apple unveiled its long-awaited multimedia phone called the iPhone, a name claimed by the network equipment maker.
Cisco obtained the iPhone trademark in 2000 after acquiring a company called Infogear, which had previously owned the trademark and had sold devices called iPhones for several years.
Linksys, a division of Cisco, had been selling wireless products with the iPhone name since early last year, with new products added to the line in December.
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