Motorola’s Z9 is a slider phone with a mahogany exterior, which is a nice color to differentiate the Z9 from the rest. The external controls continue to be standard with a volume rocker and music shortcut on the left spine, and a camera shutter and a microUSB port on the right spine. The front packs a gorgeous 2.4-inch display with 262k color support, a crispness that’s required to view today’s digital content, including videos, photos and text. We had a blast navigating through the menu just because the display was so vibrant and exciting to use. Of course similar to a lot of smartphones, you can adjust the brightness and backlighting time to conserve battery, and trust us, with the display this bright, you are almost certainly going to have to work on reducing the brightness.

Going back to the navigation menu, do note that Motorola hasn’t updated its menu at all. It’s the same old way of browsing through your phone. We’re not pleased; half of the fun of getting a new phone is to take advantage of new features, and the Z9 is lackluster in that category.

Underneath the display is your OK button with four corresponding keys for navigation. Additionally, there are two soft keys, Talk/End-Power keys, a Clear-Back key and a Web browser shortcut key to further occupy the rest of the device.

Once you slide open the phone, you are welcomed to its keypad with alphanumeric keys. All keys offer tactile feedback that are difficult to feel. The keys underneath the display, especially, didn’t offer the best tactile feedback that we have experienced. Motorola needs to work on getting the most basic necessities of the phone right.

On the back, you will find the integration camera with its lens and flash. It’s a 2.0-megapixel camera with support for four resolutions (1,600×200, 1,280×960, 640×480, 320×240), three quality settings and 8x digital zoom. Other options, such as lighting (five), color tones (six), and exposure metering are all present. You can also record video in three resolutions (320×240, 176×144 and 128×96) with three quality settings. You can record for up to 30 seconds for MMS clips, or for an unlimited amount of time depending on onboard storage. The phone is equipped with 45MB of onboard storage + a microSD expandable slot for additional memory. There’s a memory meter to alert of you of total available memory, a delightful option.

The Z9 lacks a mirror, so taking self-portraits would be an interesting task at best. The camera quality was decent. It took crisp pictures, but there was some blurriness in them due to dull lighting. Even in the brightest of times, the photo quality didn’t quite get the colors right. While sharp, there were some issues with color contrast in our testing. We would qualify the overall quality to be good with reservations, or decent.

Motorola’s Z9 feels good when you are holding it, as it’s a sturdy, solid unit.

In addition to the onboard camera, it packs an alarm clock, a calendar, text and multimedia messaging and a host of other default, expected features. Most notable is AT&T’s Navigator GPS application, AT&T’s Video Share service, AT&T Music (thanks to 3G support), and a music player with support for MP3, AAC and WMA formats; playlists, shuffle and repeat modes; it also packs a host of mobile multimedia (music, video and weather) services to round out its features set. We liked the feature set in general. Although it’s limited in its potential, Motorola did its best to include as many applications as the phone would hold.

On the performance side, in one word: “Excellent!” The Z9 is an amazing phone with its excellent audio quality. We had no problem understanding callers, or vice versa, thanks to Motorola’s CrystalTalk and auto background noise canceling technology. The phone automatically adjusted our volume depending on extraneous noise, which is something we are greatly fond of with Motorola handsets.

The speakerphone was good, but not quite there with standard output. The volume output was poor, and we really had to focus on what callers were saying to understand them. That defeats the point of turning on the speakerphone option.

Signal strength for 3G was superior and so were audio and video streaming. Though video quality was okay, it was expected. Our videos didn’t pause for buffer or any other technical issues. We loved interacting with our digital control through Z9 and its speedy connection. For some odd reason, however, loading time for music and video files was all over the graph. Some files took longer to load, while others were fairly rapid.

Volume output for audio on the phone was surprising good, especially with a headset.

The Z9 is rated for four hours of talk time and 13 days of standby time. We confirmed these numbers in our lab, and they were inline with the company’s estimates. Four hours is a little iffy for our taste considering it’s a multimedia phone with a handful of battery heavy options.

All in all, the Z9 is a very good phone with solid exterior and a host of features. It’s not the phone for consumers who are looking for mobile innovation, but if you just want a cell phone without a learning curve, but with a bit trendy design, the Z9 is a superb option.

[Gundeep Hora]

This article has been republished with the kind permission of our friends at CoolTechZone. For more news about the gadgets that make the world go ’round, go give ‘em a look or Subscribe to CoolTechZone’s RSS Feed!

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Among the most important and complex molecules in the human body, sugars control not just metabolism but also how cells communicate with one another. Graduating senior Jeffery Martin has put his basic knowledge of sugars to exceptional use by creating a lab-on-a-chip device that builds complex, highly specialized sugar molecules, mimicking one of the most important cellular structures in the human body — the Golgi Apparatus.

“Almost completely independently he has been able to come closer than researchers with decades more experience to creating an artificial Golgi,” said Robert Linhardt, the Ann and John H. Broadbent Jr. ‘59 Senior Constellation Professor of Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer and Martin’s adviser. “He saw a problem in the drug discovery process and almost instantly devised a way to solve it.”

Cells build sugars in a cellular organelle known as the Golgi Apparatus. Under a microscope, the Golgi looks similar to a stack of pancakes. The strange-looking organelle finishes the process of protein synthesis by decorating the proteins with highly specialized arrangements of sugars. The final sugar-coated molecule is then sent out into the cell to aid in cell communication and to help determine the cell’s function in the body.

Martin’s artificial Golgi functions in a surprisingly similar way to the natural Golgi, but he gives the ancient organelle a very high-tech makeover. His chip looks similar to a miniature checker board where sugars, enzymes, and other basic cell materials are suspended in water and can be transported and mixed by applying electric currents to the destination squares on the checker board. Through this process sugars can be built in an automated fashion where they are exposed to a variety of enzymes found in the natural Golgi. The resulting sugars can then be tested on living cells either on the chip or in the lab to determine their effects. With the chip’s ability to process many combinations of sugars and enzymes, it could help researchers quickly uncover new sugar-based drugs, according to Martin.

Scientists have known for years that certain sugars can serve as extremely beneficial therapeutics for humans. One well-known example is heparin, which is among the most widely used drugs in the world. Heparin is formed naturally in the Golgi organelle in cells of the human body as well as in other animals like pigs. Heparin acts as an anticoagulant preventing blood clots, which makes it a good therapeutic for heart, stroke, and dialysis patients.

The main source of heparin is currently the intestines of foreign livestock and, as recent news reports highlight, the risk of contamination from such sources is high. So researchers are working around the clock to develop a safer, man-made alternative to the drug that will prevent outside contamination. A synthetic alternative would build the sugar from scratch, helping eliminate the possibility of contamination he explained.

“I am very grateful to have the privilege of working with Dr. Linhardt who has discovered the recipe to make fully synthetic heparin,” Martin said. “Because we know the recipe, I am going to use it as a model to test the device. If our artificial Golgi can build fully functional heparin, we can then use the artificial organelle to produce many different sugar variants by altering the combination of enzymes used to synthesize them. Another great thing about these devices is that they are of microscale size, so that if needed we could fill an entire room with them to increase throughput for drug discovery.”

There are millions of possible sugar combinations that can be formed and scientists currently only know the function of very few of them like heparin. “Since it is known that these types of sugars play a part in many important biological processes such as cell growth, cell differentiation, blood coagulation, and viral defense mechanisms, we feel that that this artificial Golgi will help our team to develop a next generation of sugar-based drugs, known as glycotheraputics,” Martin said. “We are going to start making new combinations and we simply don’t know what we are going to find. We could find a sugar whose signal blocks the spread of cancer cells or initiates the differentiation of stem cells. We just don’t know.”

Martin, a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar and native of the small town of Boylston, Mass., is graduating from Rensselaer on May 17, 2008 with a nearly perfect GPA. He plans to continue on at Rensselaer as a graduate student, working with Linhardt to test and further develop his artificial Golgi.

[Gabrielle DeMarco @ Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute]

What’s more, car owners are predicted to cut back on driving in order to save money. Together, these changes in consumer behaviour could make an important dent in the US contribution to global warming, reducing annual carbon dioxide emissions by tens of millions of tonnes per year. The impact will be dramatic, says Chris Knittel, an economist at the University of California, Davis, who was involved in one of the studies.

The changes are being driven by record fuel prices in the US, where, at the end of April, the average price of gasoline stood at $3.65 per gallon, 20 percent more than in January and treble the price of a decade ago. Until recently, these increases did not seem to be having a consistent effect on the car market and fuel use. Though sales of SUVs in the US have been falling over the past few years, this decline has come on the back of years of rapid growth, and overall gasoline consumption has been increasing every year since 1991.

That could be about to change. Knittel and colleagues looked at data on 1.4 million car purchases over the past 10 years, comparing sales patterns with gas prices. They found that sales of the least fuel-efficient cars, such as SUVs and pick-up trucks, fell by 13 percent for every $1 per gallon increase in the price of gasoline. The biggest SUVs suffered the most, with sales dropping by over 25 percent for every dollar by which the gas price rose. And for every $1 hike in gas prices there was a corresponding 17 percent sales boost for the most efficient vehicles, such as compact cars and hybrids. Knittel estimates that over about a decade, such changes in buying habits could cut the amount of gasoline used by US drivers by around 7 percent for every $1 increase in its price.

Knittel’s findings, presented last month at the University of California Energy Institute in Berkeley, are in broad agreement with those of economist Kenneth Small of the University of California, Irvine. Small looked at data on US fuel consumption and prices over the past 40 years, and projected last year that the recent doubling in fuel prices would quickly lead to a 4 percent drop in the total mileage covered on the roads. In the longer term, as drivers continue to react to rising prices, he projects the size of the reduction will grow to around 20 percent (The Energy Journal, vol 28, p 25).

This would lead to a substantial reduction in carbon emissions. Small says that a $1 per gallon rise in gasoline prices, roughly that seen over the past two years, will result in motorists using 14 percent less fuel in the long term. That would avoid the release of some tens of millions of tonnes of CO2 per year, equivalent to roughly 2 percent of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions for 2006. That is a hugely significant drop, close to the level of cuts that some nations are required to make under the Kyoto protocol.

Small’s prediction comes with major caveats, however. Gasoline prices are not expected to return to the lows of a decade ago, but could fall by 10 or 20 percent in coming years. And any US economic recovery will boost fuel consumption, partly through raising incomes, which would dilute the pressure on motorists to drive less. So while expensive fuel will rein in consumption, Small and other economists question whether this will be enough to cause an overall fall in emissions from cars.

It is also possible that politics will intervene before any of these effects has a chance to kick in. Presidential hopefuls John McCain and Hillary Clinton have reacted to consumer protests over soaring fuel prices by declaring that they would suspend federal gasoline taxes. “It’s a fantastically stupid idea,” says Roberton Williams, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin.

“But people don’t like high gas taxes, so it’s popular.”

[Claire Bowles @ New Scientist]

The dime-sized laser, to be described Thursday, May 8, at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, emits 10 billion pulses per second, each lasting about 40 femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second), with an average power of 650 milliwatts. For comparison, the new laser produces pulses 10 times more often than a standard NIST frequency comb while producing much shorter pulses than other lasers operating at comparable speeds. The new laser is also 100 to 1000 times more powerful than typical high-speed lasers, producing clearer signals in experiments. The laser was built by Albrecht Bartels at the Center for Applied Photonics of the University of Konstanz.

Among its applications, the new laser can be used in searches for planets orbiting distant stars. Astronomers look for slight variations in the colors of starlight over time as clues to the presence of a planet orbiting the star. The variations are due to the small wobbles induced in the star’s motion as the orbiting planet tugs it back and forth, producing minute shifts in the apparent color (frequency) of the starlight. Currently, astronomers’ instruments are calibrated with frequency standards that are limited in spectral coverage and stability. Frequency combs could be more accurate calibration tools, helping to pinpoint even smaller variations in starlight caused by tiny Earthlike planets. Such small planets would cause color shifts equivalent to a star wobble of just a few centimeters per second. Current instruments can detect, at best, a wobble of about 1 meter per second.

Standard frequency combs have “teeth” that are too finely spaced for astronomical instruments to read. The faster laser is one approach to solving this problem. In a separate paper, the NIST group and astronomer Steve Osterman at the University of Colorado at Boulder describe how, by bouncing the light between sets of mirrors a particular distance apart, they can eliminate periodic blocks of teeth to create a gap-toothed comb. This leaves only every 10th or 20th tooth, making an ideal ruler for astronomy.

Both approaches have advantages for astronomical planet finding and related applications. The dime-sized laser is very simple in construction and produces powerful and extremely well-defined comb teeth. On the other hand, the filtering approach can cover a broader range of wavelengths. Four or five filtering cavities in parallel would provide a high-precision comb of about 25,000 evenly spaced teeth that spans the visible to near-infrared wavelengths (400 to 1100 nanometers), NIST physicist Scott Diddams says.

Osterman says he is pursuing the possibility of testing such a frequency comb at a ground-based telescope or launching a comb on a satellite or other space mission. Other possible applications of the new laser include remote sensing of gases for medical or atmospheric studies, and on-the-fly precision control of high-speed optical communications to provide greater versatility in data and time transmissions. The application of frequency combs to planet searches is of international interest and involves a number of major institutions such as the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

[Laura Ost @ National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)]

Berkeley Lab has signed a collaboration agreement with Tensilica, Inc. to explore the use of Tensilica’s Xtensa processor cores as the basic building blocks in a massively parallel system design. Tensilica’s Xtensa processor is about 400 times more efficient in floating point operations per watt than the conventional server processor chip shown here.

In a paper published in the May issue of the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Michael Wehner and Lenny Oliker of Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division, and John Shalf of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) lay out the benefit of a new class of supercomputers for modeling climate conditions and understanding climate change. Using the embedded microprocessor technology used in cell phones, iPods, toaster ovens and most other modern day electronic conveniences, they propose designing a cost-effective machine for running these models and improving climate predictions.

In April, Berkeley Lab signed a collaboration agreement with Tensilica, Inc. to explore such new design concepts for energy-efficient high-performance scientific computer systems. The joint effort is focused on novel processor and systems architectures using large numbers of small processor cores, connected together with optimized links, and tuned to the requirements of highly-parallel applications such as climate modeling.

Understanding how human activity is changing global climate is one of the great scientific challenges of our time. Scientists have tackled this issue by developing climate models that use the historical data of factors that shape the earth’s climate, such as rainfall, hurricanes, sea surface temperatures and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One of the greatest challenges in creating these models, however, is to develop accurate cloud simulations.

Although cloud systems have been included in climate models in the past, they lack the details that could improve the accuracy of climate predictions. Wehner, Oliker and Shalf set out to establish a practical estimate for building a supercomputer capable of creating climate models at 1-kilometer (km) scale. A cloud system model at the 1-km scale would provide rich details that are not available from existing models.

To develop a 1-km cloud model, scientists would need a supercomputer that is 1,000 times more powerful than what is available today, the researchers say. But building a supercomputer powerful enough to tackle this problem is a huge challenge.

Historically, supercomputer makers build larger and more powerful systems by increasing the number of conventional microprocessors — usually the same kinds of microprocessors used to build personal computers. Although feasible for building computers large enough to solve many scientific problems, using this approach to build a system capable of modeling clouds at a 1-km scale would cost about $1 billion. The system also would require 200 megawatts of electricity to operate, enough energy to power a small city of 100,000 residents.

In their paper, Towards Ultra-High Resolution models of Climate and Weather, the researchers present a radical alternative that would cost less to build and require less electricity to operate. They conclude that a supercomputer using about 20 million embedded microprocessors would deliver the results and cost $75 million to construct. This “climate computer” would consume less than 4 megawatts of power and achieve a peak performance of 200 petaflops.

“Without such a paradigm shift, power will ultimately limit the scale and performance of future supercomputing systems, and therefore fail to meet the demanding computational needs of important scientific challenges like the climate modeling,” Shalf said.

The researchers arrive at their findings by extrapolating performance data from the Community Atmospheric Model (CAM). CAM, developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, is a series of global atmosphere models commonly used by weather and climate researchers.

The “climate computer” is not merely a concept. Wehner, Oliker and Shalf, along with researchers from UC Berkeley, are working with scientists from Colorado State University to build a prototype system in order to run a new global atmospheric model developed at Colorado State.

“What we have demonstrated is that in the exascale computing regime, it makes more sense to target machine design for specific applications,” Wehner said. “It will be impractical from a cost and power perspective to build general-purpose machines like today’s supercomputers.”

Under the agreement with Tensilica, the team will use Tensilica’s Xtensa LX extensible processor cores as the basic building blocks in a massively parallel system design. Each processor will dissipate a few hundred milliwatts of power, yet deliver billions of floating point operations per second and be programmable using standard programming languages and tools. This equates to an order-of-magnitude improvement in floating point operations per watt, compared to conventional desktop and server processor chips. The small size and low power of these processors allows tight integration at the chip, board and rack level and scaling to millions of processors within a power budget of a few megawatts.

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit our Website at www.lbl.gov.

[Ucilia Wang @ DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory]