THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Laser Study Sheds Light on Data Storage
One of our modern day puzzles is how to store more information in less space. One attempt to solve this puzzle is called holographic data storage, which uses lasers to store information as “pages” of electronic patterns within special optical materials. Because a million or more data bits are placed on each page and thousands of pages can be stored in material no larger than a small coin, holographic systems offer the potential for compact devices holding many trillions of bytes of information.
Work on this storage technology has been going on since the 1960s--before the invention of the laser--when Glen Sincerbox, a scientist in the optical storage technology department at IBM Corp.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, helped develop the first working holographic data storage system for the U.S. Air Force using photographic film. Last year, a team led by Lambertus Hesselink, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, announced the development of the first digital holographic display system for storage and retrieval.
Now Hesselink and Sincerbox will be the principal technical investigators for a recently announced joint university/industry/government consortium that plans to develop a holographic data storage system that has the potential to store 12 times the information of today’s largest magnetic hard disk drives, and maintain data input and output rates more than 10 times faster than is possible today. The $32-million program is being supported equally by the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and by the 12 participants, among them GTE Corp., Eastman Kodak Co., Rockwell and IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
The initial goals of the project are to develop several key components for the system, including a spatial light modulator for data input; sensor arrays for data output, and a high-power red-light semiconductor laser. ARPA’s aim is to see if this technology could provide modern soldiers and command centers with rapid access to large amounts of information and visual images. The corporate participants anticipate significant applications in aviation, computing, image processing and telecommunication.
*
Flower Power: Any good gardener knows that planting chrysanthemums is one way to protect crops from voracious pests. Doing nature one better, AgriDyne Technologies of Salt Lake City has successfully synthesized a natural insecticide produced from a special variety of chrysanthemums, hand picked and grown best in Kenya and other east African nations.
Chrysanthemums produce a family of compounds called pyrethrins that kill insects on contact. But unlike many synthetic insecticides, pyrethrins have low toxicity for mammals, degrade quickly and produce no harmful residues. AgriDyne uses a complex genetic engineering process for artificially producing pyrethrins.
The process involves implanting a flower gene into yeast cells. The yeast produces quantities of chrysanthemyl alcohol, the critical component needed for synthesizing pyrethrins. The insecticide still has to undergo field and toxicity testing but if these are successful, AgriDyne believes a produce could be on the market in two to three years.
*
Aneurysm Procedure: Every year, about 30,000 Americans experience ruptured blood vessels in the brain, which result in strokes and often death. These ruptures are due to brain aneurysms, sacs that form on a blood vessel in the brain and cause it to become thin, weak and susceptible to rupture.
A common surgical procedure for treating an aneurysm involves inserting a metal clip at the location of the sac in the affected blood vessel. But very large aneurysms are difficult to clip successfully and about 15% of the aneurysms occur in the back of the brain where blood vessels are difficult to reach.
Using a new non-surgical technique recently approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a group of physicians at UC San Francisco are filling an aneurysm with tiny metal coils. A plastic catheter is threaded into the blood vessel adjacent to the aneurysm site. Using the catheter, the physicians insert a soft platin coil as thin as a thread coil to fill the aneurysm sac and strengthen the blood vessel.
