Representatives of Intel announced the opening of a laboratory where Intel researchers and university staff will collaborate on open research projects to accelerate the convergence of computing and communications. Intel Research Cambridge laboratory will focus on developing networking, systems and software technologies to enable new types of distributed systems.

Intel Research Cambridge will provide facilities for 20 to 25 Intel scientists and an equal number of university faculty, graduate students, and visiting researchers. The lab will be directed by Dr. Derek 'Mac' McAuley, an affiliated lecturer at Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and founding member of the Microsoft and Marconi research labs in Cambridge. Intel Research Cambridge is initially focusing on the challenges of delivering the capabilities of new communications and networking technologies to applications developers. This will include fundamental networking research, from mathematical modeling of network traffic to emerging technologies such as optical switching. The Cambridge lab joins three other Intel labs at universities in Seattle, Berkley and Pittsburgh to make up the Intel Research Network.

Elsewhere in Europe, Intel Labs Barcelona located at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya is focused on proprietary R&D in the area of microprocessors. Additionally, Intel's Labs in Russia are working to build a world-class Intel R&D operation with both technology research and product development capabilities. Spread between Moscow, Sarov and Nizhny Novgorod, Intel R&D has an operation of more than 200 employees and contractors all working as a linked entity.

Representatives of Boeing announced that the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) program has successfully completed all ground and flight objectives for the first phase of demonstrations and is ready to begin the second phase of flight demonstrations, focused on more advanced, multi-vehicle operations.

The completed demonstrations are an important step toward a planned experimental capability of the UCAV system by the U.S. Air Force by 2008.

As a joint effort of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Air Force and the Boeing Phantom Works, the UCAV program consists of two X-45A air vehicles, a mission control system and various supportability elements. Its objective is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a UCAV system to effectively and affordably perform suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) and strike missions.

In the first phase of demonstrations, known as Block 1, 48 discrete laboratory, simulation and flight demonstrations were conducted, primarily focused on initial systems checkout, including a total of 16 flights for the two air vehicles. The final demonstration flight occurred on Feb. 28, which verified safe operation of the weapons bay door at 35,000 ft. and speeds up to 0.75 Mach, the maximum planned altitude and speed for the X-45A demonstrator vehicles.

Key Block 1 demonstrations included:
" Assembly and disassembly of the UCAV wings for transport
" Autonomous taxiing
" Concept of operations simulations that included demonstration of the UCAV's mission control in SEAD missions
" Distributed control, during which control was passed between mission control people and others in a ground vehicle
" Response to a loss of communication, during which the aircraft was able to return and land safely
" Successful 4-D navigation, which allowed the UCAV system to accurately control time as well as position - a critical capability in multi-vehicle operations.

With these Block 1 demonstrations complete, the UCAV program will now proceed to Block 2 flight demonstrations. These demonstrations will include multi-vehicle coordinated operations, beyond-line-of-sight communications capability/mission management and the employment of inert ordnance. This phase of demonstrations will also demonstrate the ability of multiple operators to simultaneously manage multiple UCAVs in a simulated tactical scenario.

The UCAV demonstration program is scheduled to proceed through Block 2, 3 and 4 phases over the next two years and culminate in a "graduation exercise" consisting of both X-45A vehicles performing a coordinated SEAD mission using inert munitions.

The X-45A air vehicles have a stealthy, tailless, 27-foot long airframe with a 34-foot wingspan. They weigh 8,000 pounds (empty) and can carry a 3,000-pound payload. The open architecture mission control station has robust and secure satellite-relay and line-of-sight communications links for distributed control.

The X-45A system is demonstrating the technical feasibility of the UCAV concept. The program is now designing a more operationally representative and robust demonstrator aircraft that will demonstrate the military utility and operational value of the UCAV system to effectively and affordably prosecute 21st century SEAD and strike missions within the emerging global command and control architecture.

The X-45A UCAV system is being developed by the Boeing Phantom Works, which is the advanced R&D unit and catalyst of innovation for the enterprise. By working with the company's business units, it provides advanced solutions and innovative, breakthrough technologies that reduce cycle time and cost while improving the quality and performance of aerospace products and services.

Chains of molecules known as conducting polymers are versatile materials that can work like electronic circuits. Potential uses include flat panel displays, solar panels, sensing devices and transistors, to name just a few. Their invention won three scientists the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

But to make useful devices from conducting polymers requires a degree of chemical wizardry that often proves elusive. University of Illinois at Chicago chemistry professor Luke Hanley has found a new and effective way around the problem.

Hanley, along with UIC doctoral candidates Sanja Tepavcevic and Yongsoo Choi, has developed a method for growing conducting polymers that he calls Surface Polymerization by Ion-Assisted Deposition, or SPIAD for short. The method is described in the current issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society. His research was funded through a National Science Foundation grant.

Hanley has done work on ion-surface interactions for over a decade and has published a series of papers on taking individual ions and landing them on a surface.

Working with thiophene, Hanley and his group tried to land individual ions onto a surface, hoping they'd link up to form a type of conducting polymer known as polythiophene. The ions "formed something," Hanley said, "but it wasn't an interesting polythiophene. So we brought in both an ion beam and neutral beam at the surface."

Using a commercially available instrument that provides a source of ions, Hanley modified the device to work with organic material, such as thiophene. "We can put organic molecules into it and get out the types of ions that we want," he said. "We can actually grow large areas of films fairly quickly by this method. We're not quite at manufacturing scale yet, but we've demonstrated that we know how to get to that point."

Hanley has high expectations for his conducting polymers and thinks the SPIAD method may open the door to many new and useful materials.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have created the highest resolution optical image ever, revealing structures as small as carbon nanotubes just a few billionths of an inch across. The new method should open the door to previously inaccessible chemical and structural information in samples as small as the proteins embedded in a cell's membrane. The research appears in the recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

Since light is so rife with information, Novotny and his colleague, visiting professor Achim Hartschuh, can determine what a piece of material is made of as well as its structure. Is the string of carbon rolled into a tube or just a string of atoms? Is a protein made of expected molecules and properly folded to be an effective medicine? And what could be the most rewarding result of the research-detecting properties of such small structures that were unknown before. Novotny and his team are also eager to learn if certain structures exhibit unknown characteristics, such as when carbon nanotubes, for instance, cross or interconnect.

The ultimate vision for the Raman microscopy project, however, is to refine the process to a point where it might revolutionize biology.

Garnering the cornucopia of information light provides from the proteins on a membrane would mean scientists could understand exactly how a cell's membrane works, opening the door to designer medicines that could kill harmful cells, repair damaged cells, or even identify never-before-seen strains of disease.

The Rochester team's technique, called near-field Raman microscopy, illuminates the nano-sized structures with light, allowing researchers to glean far more information than any other technique. Other ultra-high resolution imaging techniques, such as atomic force microscopes, only detect the presence of objects, they don't "see" them. Though researchers have longed wished to use light at such magnification, the laws of physics make this extremely difficult. Light travels in waves, and if an object like a nanotube or a protein is much smaller than that wavelength, it's like trying to pick up a poppy seed with a fork-the poppy seed falls between the tines. Some efforts have been made to force light to shorter wavelengths and through tiny apertures, but these methods have their own built-in limitations, including damage to the aperture itself.

Novotny and Hartschuh sharpen a gold wire to a point just a few billionths of an inch across. A laser then shines against the side of the gold tip, inciting electrons inside it to oscillate. These oscillations create a tiny bubble of electromagnetic energy at the tip, which interacts with the vibrations of the atoms in the sample. This interaction, called Raman scattering, releases packets of light from the sample at specific frequencies that can be detected and used to identify the chemical composition of the material.

In about two years, Novotny and Hartschuh think they will be able to refine the system, already with a resolution of 20 nanometers (billionths of a meter), so that they can image proteins, which are only 5 to 20 nanometers wide. To do that they will try to get the point of the gold tip sharper still, or even experiment with different shaped points. Then the trick will be keeping the tip "alive," meaning using it without incurring the least damaging bump or scrape-a difficult task when hovering only a few nanometers above the scanned sample. If all goes well, the research team may try to push the technology even further to derive first-ever optical images of smaller molecules.

The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

The world's No 2 PC maker Dell Computer aims to bolster its position in China this year with a goal of outpacing overall growth in the market by a factor of three, its top Asia executive said last week.

Since entering China five years ago, Dell has built out its local network and is now the nation's No 3 seller with about 5 per cent of the market, according to preliminary unit shipment figures for 2002 from data tracking firm IDC.

The IDC preliminary data showed overall PC shipments to China numbered around 11 million last year versus about nine million in 2001.

With China's PC market expected to grow about 17 per cent this year, Dell's bullish forecast meant the company believed it could grow by some 50 per cent, boosting its market share to about 7.7 per cent, said Sieh Tien-yu, an analyst at Merrill Lynch.

Dell gained the No 3 spot in China last year after finishing fourth in 2001 behind IBM, according to IDC.

If it achieves its growth target for 2003, the company would still finish behind China's No 2 PC seller Founder, which controls about 9 per cent of the market; and well behind Legend Group, the leader with 27 per cent.

In a nod to the China's growing importance to its global strategy, Dell eventually aimed to make its PC plant in the south China city of Xiamen its primary production facility for all of north Asia, including Japan, Korea and Taiwan according to the representatives.

Computers sold in the region currently come from China, as well as the United States and Dell's other Asian production facility in Malaysia.

Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) Chairman Admiral Hal Gehman has asked NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe to appoint three new members to the CAIB. The appointments were immediately approved.

The new members are: Nobel Prize laureate in Physics Douglas Osheroff; former NASA astronaut and physicist Dr. Sally Ride; and George Washington University Space Policy Institute Director Dr. John Logsdon.

Dr. Douglas D. Osheroff was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics. He shares the prize with two colleagues from Cornell University for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. Osheroff received his BS from California Tech and Ph.D. from Cornell. He is the G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. He was a member of the technical staff at the Department of Solid State and Low Temperature Research at Bell Laboratories in the 1970s.

As a graduate student at Cornell before that, Osheroff and his thesis advisors, David M. Lee and Robert C. Richardson, discovered the first of three superfluid phases of liquid helium-3, at a temperature only about two-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Osheroff is a leader in the study of superfluidity and of the properties of thin superconducting films. He served as Chairman of the Cornell Physics Department from 1993 until August 1996. The Nobel Prize caps a long list of awards Osheroff has received. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he has won the Simon Memorial Prize, the Oliver Buckley Prize, and was named a MacArthur Fellow. Osheroff also won a Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dr. Sally Ride is a former NASA Astronaut and the first American woman in space. She is a Professor of Space Science at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD).

Ride received her BS in Physics, BA in English, MS and Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University. Her first spaceflight was aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. Her second was also aboard the Challenger in 1984. During those flights she deployed communications satellites, operated the robot arm and conducted experiments in materials, pharmaceuticals, and Earth remote sensing. Training for her third spaceflight was interrupted by the Space Shuttle Challenger mishap. Ride served as a member of the Presidential Commission investigating the accident and chaired its subcommittee on Operations. She then served as NASA's first director of Strategic Planning. Ride spent two years at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. In 1989 she became the Director of the University of California's California Space Institute, and joined the UCSD faculty. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, member of the National Research Council's Space Studies Board and has served on the Boards of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. Ride has written four science books for children: To Space and Back; Voyager; The Third Planet, and The Mystery of Mars.

Dr. John Logsdon is Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, where he is also Professor of Political Science and International Affairs.

He received his BS in Physics from Xavier University and Ph.D. in Political Science from New York University. Dr. Logsdon's research interests focus on the policy and historical aspects of U.S. and international space activities. He has written numerous articles and reports about space policy and history. He recently completed the basic article on "space exploration" for the new edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Logsdon is a member of the NASA Advisory Council and the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee of the Department of Transportation. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and Vice Chair of its Commission on Space Policy, Law and Economics. Logsdon recently served on the Committee on Human Space Exploration of Space Studies Board, National Research Council. He served on the Vice President's Space Policy Advisory Board and NASA's Space and Earth Sciences Advisory Committee. He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He was the first holder of the Chair in Space History of the National Air and Space Museum.

Admiral Gehman also requested NASA astronaut Michael J. Bloomfield (Lt. Col., U.S. Air Force) be appointed as an Astronaut Advisor to the board. Administrator O'Keefe agreed and Bloomfield will begin his new assignment at the direction of Admiral Gehman.
Bloomfield was selected for the astronaut corps in 1994 and is currently qualified as a pilot. He is a veteran of three Space Shuttle flights. Bloomfield is a former chief of safety in NASA's Astronaut Office, and he currently serves as chief astronaut instructor. Bloomfield will assume the responsibilities currently performed by former astronaut Bryan O'Connor, who will return to NASA Headquarters in his role as NASA Associate Administrator for Safety and Mission Assurance in Washington.