Please Check Your Vertical Blanking Interval Mail
What if you could get your e-mail for free, pay no telephone charges and free yourself from clogged Internet connections and slow 28.8 modems? Come Oct. 30, you will be able to. That’s when Datatext and Satellite SuperHighways, a company headquartered in Los Angeles, plan to announce a-mail, a new concept developed by its European subsidiary, Hypercast.
A-mail is a broadcast technology carried on frequencies interspersed among those assigned to conventional TV channels--a section of the radio spectrum commonly called the vertical blanking interval. The VBI has been used for 20 years for closed-captioning in the U.S. and teletext elsewhere. It can also be used for transmitting data to PCs. Datatext calls it a-mail because data reach the PC via the TV antenna.
Hypercast already provides a text-based information service called Teletext to such media companies as CNN, Turner Broadcasting and the British firm Carlton Communications.
It plans to use its existing satellite network in Europe, the Middle East, Western Asia and Africa to broadcast a-mail, which will be launched in the United States early next year.
Good as Gold: In their quest for smaller and smaller components, semiconductor makers find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place.
The more circuits crammed together on a chip, the greater the danger of overheating when an electrical current flows through the circuits.
Purdue University researchers seeking a solution to this dilemma believe they have struck gold--literally.
They have created an ultra-thin film made from tiny clusters of gold atoms that allows electrons to hop one at a time from cluster to cluster. When an electric current is passed through a device in this jumping fashion, there is virtually no heat buildup.
This new material, called a linked cluster network, is precipitated from gaseous gold. It is then wrapped in organic molecules, dissolved in a solvent and painted on a silicon wafer. The solvent evaporates and the clusters, which contain only about 500 atoms, form a film on the wafer, which conducts electricity.
Soybeans Benefit Bones: Soy protein, a vegetarian staple, may soon become a food of choice for post-menopausal women worried about bone loss.
A recent study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that a key compound in soy products--isoflavones--could be a substitute for estrogen treatments.
Those treatments are often recommended to prevent osteoporosis, a common disorder of aging women marked by progressive deterioration of bone tissue because of a loss of bone calcium and protein.
The problem is that women at risk for breast cancer are advised to avoid estrogen pills.
Soy isoflavones, the study found, act like weak estrogens when it comes to bone metabolism. Women who ate a low-cholesterol, low-fat diet that included soy protein in baked goods and drinks showed significant improvements in the bone density of their lumbar vertebrae.
Soy proteins, regardless of isoflavone content, also improved blood cholesterol levels. Good cholesterol rose significantly while bad cholesterol dropped.
Kathleen Wiegner can be reached via e-mail at kkwrite@jemez.com
