Boom times ahead for mobile web

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Net-browsing smartphones are becoming more popular

The world of mobile internet devices is set to explode in the next four years says chip maker Intel.

Research carried out for the company suggests portable net-enabled devices will grow to 1.2 billion by 2012 as the need to be connected increases.

Intel's predictions were unveiled as it launched a series of chips designed for portable web-browsing gadgets.

"The demand is there and the need is there and our technology can meet those needs," said Intel's Gadi Singer.

Big future

Alongside an explosion in mobile web-using devices, Intel estimated that 100 million households will also be watching IPTV by 2011.

"The fact that people want to be on the internet all the time means they will be looking for the ability they have today say at their desk and to have that anytime and anywhere," said Mr Singer, head of Intel's mobility group.

"That creates the demand for new devices and more sophisticated devices with the computing power and connectivity presenting a major opportunity."

The figures came as Intel revealed eight "system on a chip" designs aimed at the portable web-browsing market.

Cramming four separate chips into package cuts the size of the processing and wireless units by 45% and power demands by 34%, said Mr Singer.

Mr Singer said he expected to see its new chips in car entertainments systems, smart phones, notebooks and industrial robots.

BY-BBC NEWS

Prisons to ban adult-rated games

Adult prisoners in England and Wales are to be banned by the Prison Service from playing computer games rated 18.

Good behaviour will allow offenders to play other games, and those at risk of suicide will be also given access.

However, eligible inmates would have to buy consoles themselves as the new rules ban prisons from buying games or consoles with immediate effect.

Last year the government spent more than £10,000 on 80 PlayStations and 15 Xboxes for young offender institutions.

All prisons have been told to remove 18-rated games - not suitable for people aged under 18 - by 30 September.

BY-BBC NEWS

Media Molecule hits little big time

By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News

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Sony has very high hopes for LittleBigPlanet

Game developer Media Molecule have gone from promising start-up to one of the pillars of the PlayStation empire in two years - and all before ever releasing a game.

Its first blockbuster title, LittleBigPlanet, has become the poster child of the PlayStation 3, and Sony is pinning its hopes on the game becoming a breakthrough hit for the console when it is released in October - attracting hard core gamers and more casual players.

The expectations for the game are huge, something of which Media Molecule's co-founder Alex Evans is all too aware.

He has had to develop a one of the biggest games of 2008, while at the same time building a game studio from scratch.

"I code by night and manage by day," he explained to BBC News.

Despite the seeming inexperience of the team, the founding members are veterans of Peter Molyneux's Lionhead studio, with more than 25 years of games industry experience.

The team first found fame when founding members Mark Healey and Alex Evans developed Rag Doll Kung Fu in their own time while at Lionhead.

LittleBigPlanet lets PS3 owners make their own games from scratch

The game, with its emphasis on simplicity and character, became a calling card which got them through the door to meet with Sony, which immediately threw its backing behind the project.

Sony is certainly taking Media Molecule and the game itself very seriously. Alex Evans was invited on to the stage at E3 in Los Angeles with Sony Computer Entertainment America boss Jack Tretton to use the game as a backdrop for a media presentation.

It certainly signalled Sony's ambitions for the game, which is being developed by 27 people in Guildford.

HP's plan to fix ailing planet

by Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Scientists at HP have been working in nanotech for the last 13 years

Hewlett Packard is up to two years away from starting to build a "central nervous system for the earth", known as CeNSE.

The man leading this ambitious project is Dr Stan Williams who runs HP's Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory.

"The motivation for this work is realising and understanding the planet is sick and the disease is us," he told BBC News.

"As information technology people, we are not going to be the ones who proscribe and administer the cure but we should be the people who provide the information required to do proper diagnosis and treatment."

Unprecedented

And just as a doctor would use a barrage of tests to find out what ails a patient, so Dr Williams believes he and HP can do the same in finding out what is going wrong with our environment and offering solutions to problems before they turn into disasters.

Dr Williams suggested that, instead of wielding a stethoscope, HP would use trillions of sensors to monitor the health of the Earth and use the information to head off natural calamities such as large scale flooding or wildfires.

Wildfires in California burned 1,528 square miles across the state this year

The ubiquitous sensors would mimic human senses such as touch, smell, hearing, sight and taste.

"We are working with physics here so we can go beyond those normal human systems and we can sense them at an extraordinary level which is literally unprecedented," said Dr Williams, an HP senior fellow and a pioneer in nanotechnology.

These sensors will be so sensitive they can detect and measure anything and everything from viruses to bacteria, from the chemical composition of molecules to sounds and moisture levels.

BY-BBC NEWS

Saving whales from deadly ship collisions

By Marsha Walton
CNN

(CNN) -- Drive past a car accident, everybody slows down to look. Tell a toddler, "Don't touch that," and of course he or she does.

A U.S. Coast Guard ship assists in a 2005 attempt to disentangle a right whale from fishing gear.

Well, North Atlantic right whales are the same way.

Marine scientists say several right whales are struck and killed each year by commercial ships passing through their feeding grounds.

But when researchers blasted warning noises from ships to scare the whales away, the lumbering giants instead swam to the surface to see what was going on -- a response that put them in greater danger. Scientists found the animals are either so used to loud sounds, or so curious about them, that the noises apparently do the opposite of warning them.

"It's like living beside a train track. After a while you stop hearing the trains go by," said Angelia Vanderlaan, a doctoral candidate in oceanography at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Since the whales were not budging, Vanderlaan and other marine mammal experts designed a plan to encourage cargo ships to take a short detour around them during certain months of the year.

Right whales, which can grow to 70 tons, were hunted to the brink of extinction until killing them was outlawed in 1935. Whaling crews dubbed them the "right" whales to kill because they moved slowly and stayed close to the surface. Today, ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the biggest threats to the animal.

Study: Girls equal to boys in math skills

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Sixteen years after Barbie dolls declared, "Math class is tough!" girls are proving that, at math, they are just as tough as boys.

Girls have caught up on test scores, which researchers attribute to more taking higher math classes like calculus.

In the largest study of its kind, girls measured up to boys in math in every grade, from second through 11th. The research was released Thursday in the journal Science.

Parents and teachers persist in thinking boys are simply better at math, said Janet Hyde, the University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who led the study. And girls, who grew up believing it, wound up avoiding harder math classes.

"It keeps girls and women out of a lot of careers, particularly high-prestige, lucrative careers in science and technology," Hyde said.

That's changing, albeit slowly. Women are now earning 48 percent of undergraduate college degrees in math; they still lag far behind in physics and engineering.

But in primary and secondary school, girls have caught up, with researchers attributing that advance to increasing numbers of girls taking advanced math classes such as calculus.

Hyde and her colleagues looked at annual math tests required by the No Child Left Behind education law in 2002. Ten states provided enough statistical information to review test scores by gender, allowing researchers to compare the performance of more than 7 million children.

The researchers found no difference in the scores of boys versus girls -- not even in high school, where previous studies have suggested girls lagged slightly behind in math.

Utilities: Grid can handle influx of electric cars

SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- Which draws more juice from the electric grid, a big-screen plasma television or recharging a plug-in hybrid car?

The nation's electric grid can handle a mass conversion to plug-in hybrid cars like this one, utility executives say.

The answer is the car. But the electricity draw by plasma televisions is easing the minds of utility company executives across the nation as they plan for what is likely to be a conversion of much of the country's vehicle fleet from gasoline to electricity in the coming years.

Rechargeable cars, industry officials say, consume about four times the electricity as plasma TVs.

But the industry already has dealt with increased electric demand from the millions of plasma TVs sold in recent years. Officials say that experience will help them deal with the vehicle fleet changeover.

So as long as the changeover from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles is somewhat gradual, they should be able to handle it in the same way, Mark Duvall, program manager for electric transportation, power delivery and distribution for the Electric Power Research Institute, said Tuesday.

"We've already added to the grid the equivalent of several years' production of plug-in hybrids," Duvall said at a conference on electric vehicles in San Jose. "The utilities, they stuck with it. They said, 'All right, that's what's happening. This is where the loads are going, and we're going to do this."'

Automakers, such as General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. , are planning to bring rechargeable vehicles to the market as early as 2010. But speakers at the Plug-In 2008 conference say it will take much longer for them to arrive in mass numbers, due in part to a current lack of large-battery manufacturing capacity.