It’s a digital world out there, and the key to our survival, in my opinion, is not processing power. It’s data storage. Once all the numbers have been crunched, all the images have been gathered, and all the test results have been compiled, you need to store them somewhere. Somewhere safe, because unlike former means of recording and storing data — e.g. paper, papyrus scrolls, stone tablets — digital data is frighteningly vulnerable. One slip of the finger on a keyboard and it could be gone forever, so most people now keep multiple copies of everything, just to be safe.

What made me think of this was an announcement this week that the University of California’s San Diego Supercomputer Center
(SDSC) just completed a massive upgrade to their tape-based data archival storage system, increasing the total capacity to a whopping 36 petabytes. For those of you without a calculator — or PhD in mathematics — that’s 36 thousand trillion bytes of data! And yes, that does give them bragging rights over every other institute of higher learning in the world. So who cares if they don’t have a football team?

My first computer, an Epson NB3 “portable” PC that weighed close to 6 pounds, came with a 20 MB hard drive, and I remember telling my wife, “I’ll never fill that.” Recently she got so sick of listening to me complain about data storage issues, she went out and bought me a flash drive. Not just any flash drive, mind you; this is the mother of all flash drives! Made by a company called Super Talent Technology the Luxio holds a full 64 GB of data. In my pocket! Not as impressive as San Diego’s setup, perhaps, but it’s a lot bigger than anything my friends have.

Who says size doesn’t matter?

Glenn Rakow is the Development Lead for SpaceWire, a high-speed communications protocol for space-flight electronics originally developed in 1999 by the European Space Agency (ESA). Under Rakow’s leadership, the SpaceWire standard was developed into a network of nodes and routers interconnected through bi-directional, high-speed serial links, making the system more modular, flexible, and reusable.

Basically, SpaceWire is a method for interconnecting spacecraft components. In the future, Rakow sees SpaceWire replacing parallel buses like PCI, and being a good application for serial backplanes.
SpaceWire is currently being used in some places on the Orion crew exploration vehicle for the serial backplane. The communications protocol would also be ideal for robotic missions that don’t require galvanic isolation.

Read the “Who’s Who at NASA” interview with Glenn Rakow here.

A team led by Professor Yosi Shacham-Diamand, vice-dean of Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Engineering, has developed a nano-sized laboratory, complete with a microscopic workbench, to measure water quality in real time. This lab-on-a-chip is a breakthrough in the effort to keep water safe from pollution. “We’ve developed a platform – essentially a micro-sized, quarter-inch square ‘lab’ – employing genetically engineered bacteria that light up when presented with a stressor in water,” says Shacham-Diamand. Equipment on the chip can work to help detect very tiny light levels produced by the bacteria.

The nanolabs can be used to evaluate several biological processes with practical applications, such as microbes in water, stem cells, or breast cancer development. Partnering with other Israeli scientists,
TAU is currently building and commercializing its water-testing mini-labs to measure and monitor how genetically engineered bacteria respond to pollution such as E. Coli in water. Funded by a $3 million grant from the United States Department of Defense Projects Agency (DARPA), the lab-on-a-chip could also become a defense against biological warfare.

Click here for more info.

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are designing and building the next-generation orbiting tracker for NASA that will supply data to more accurately predict the next hurricane, heat wave, or drought.

The 18-inch interferometric receiver being built at UMass Amherst is part of the larger instrument expected to greatly enhance weather forecasting. It works by reflecting 35-GHz microwaves off the Earth’s surface from an orbit 600 miles above to track factors that long-range meteorologists use to predict climate phenomena. Knowing water temperature and current flow can help to provide early warning of an El Nino effect, for example.

The receiver is expected to be launched with other supporting instruments aboard the space agency’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite sometime between 2013 and 2016. It will provide a continually updated map of global water levels, topography and temperature for the oceans and selected inland waters. It is expected to be smaller, lighter, and less power-hungry than the version that flew aboard the space shuttle in 2000.

Click here to learn more.

University of Washington researchers have helped develop a new kind of microscope to visualize cells in three dimensions, an advance that could improve early cancer detection. The technique could also bridge a widening gap between cutting-edge imaging techniques used in research and clinical practices.

Known by the trademarked name Cell-CT, the microscope works similarly to a CT-scan – though on a very small scale, and using visible light instead of X-rays. In the Cell-CT microscope, each cell is embedded in a special gel inside a glass tube that rotates in front of a fixed camera that takes many pictures per rotation. The images are then digitally combined to form a single 3-D image. The gel has similar optical properties to the tube, so that no light reflects off the glass.

Eric Seibel, a University of Washington mechanical engineering associate professor, and his colleagues collaborated with VisionGate Inc., Gig Harbor, WA, to develop the microscope. According to Seibel, the microscope will make it easier to more accurately match an image taken using the fluorescent dyes with an image taken using the traditional stains that form the basis of current cancer diagnoses. “Now that we have a way to compare these stains, we hope this will provide a way to get some of those sophisticated research techniques into clinical use,” Seibel said.

Click here for more info.