Japan's Optware Corp announced a roadmap toward commercialization of of its Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD). Six companies are forming an HVD Alliance to promote the technology. Optware claims the new technology will allow them to store up to 3.9 TeraBytes (about 4000 GB) of data on a single disk. In comparison, the modern DVDs hold about 4.7GB, and the upcoming (single layer) Blu-Ray optical format can hold up to 25 GB.

HVD vs. DVD (courtesy: Physorg.com) As in CDs and DVDs, HVD uses a laser to store information on 12-centimeter discs. However, instead of storing data on 2D layers, beams of light interfere with each other, creating 3D patterns within the disc. The company says it will submit three storage media (200GB storage, 30GB credit-card-sized, and 100GB read-only) in the coming years. Their primary consumers might be the health industry/hospitals, whose requirements are set to grow to 363 Peta-Bytes (1 PB = 1024 GB) by 2007.
The transfer data is at over 1 gigabit per second, or 40 times faster than a DVD. The holographic technique also allows for a quieter storage device, with less moving parts, and less affected by RFI (Radio Frequency Interference). In a sense, this technology is of a quantum jump in storage, which allows us to move from 1D (tapes), 2D (current magnetic/optical storage) to 3D.

Physics of Holography (Courtesy: IBM Almaden Research Center) In holographic storage, the interference pattern between a data beam (laser beam encoded with data) and a coherent (monochromatic) beam is stored on a photosensitive medium (photographic plate, crystal cube, etc.). When just the coherent beam is focussed towards the cube, the emitted light is a laser beam encoded with the data.

Not much is known about the underlying processes by which a language is born. Almost all humans can communicate either by speech/sound, writing, or sign/mime. A typical language is composed of words/signs, and a grammar that binds them into a meaningful construct. However, the origins of language are lost, and we do not have much insight into how (or if) a new language would be created by a group of people who were never introduced to languages before.

ABSL signer telling a story (Courtesy: ScienceDaily.com) Linguists are gaining new insights into this process by studying a sign language (ABSL, or Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) created by group of deaf people in a small village in Israel's Negev desert. This community has developed their own distinct grammatical structure. This structure favors a particular word order: Subject-Object-Verb, as in "Man Book Give", unlike in English, where it is Subject-Verb-Object (Man Give Book). This structure is also different from languages spoken in the neighborhood of the village (Arabic or Hebrew). Researchers (Mark Aronoff: Stony Brook University, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler: University of Haifa and Carol Padden: University of California, San Diego) found that ABSL has a complex grammar, that goes beyond questions about 'now' and 'here' (e.g. come here, go there), but can also deal with questions about 'how' and 'when'. Such complex structures, can tell us a lot about what it means to build a language from scratch, without any prior knowledge of any other language.
The Al-Sayyid village (population: 3500) was founded about 200 years ago, by a group of people with congenital deafness. Inter-marriage in the village has resulted in the birth of 150 deaf people in the last three generations. The deaf people are fully integrated with the non-deaf people in the village, and they all can communicate via this sign language. The language propagates from generation to generation like any other language, thus providing researchers unique insights into the birth and development of a new language.
For the present study, the researchers focused on the second generation of ABSL signers. Further work will document the evolution of the language in the third generation.

Scientists all over the world (Image Courtesy: Discover.com) are trying to unravel the mysteries of life, and where it came from. One particularly interesting branch of this endeavor is to create life, from scratch, in a laboratory setup. Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School is one of such scientists. He and his team demonstrate that creation of such a life (a cell) might be astonishingly simple.
Szostak started with chemicals/compounds that might have been available on primitive Earth. For example, certain nucleic/fatty/amino acids are created when a reducing atmosphere (atmosphere lacking oxygen), containing a lot of methane, water, ammonia and carbon-dioxide is subjected to ultraviolet light (ancient earth had no ozone layer), and electric discharge. Fatty acids have the tendency to form bubbles (our cell membranes are composed of phospholipids, which are fatty acids). Invariably, some of these bubbles trap nucleic acids. These bubbbles also have the interesting property that these allow small molecules to enter/exit, but trap larger molecules. When the nucleic acids interact with each other inside the bubble, they make large chains (like our RNA/DNA), which are trapped by the bubble. Suddenly, we have a mini reaction chamber! The bubbles collide with each other, and larger bubbles spontaneously assimilate the smaller ones, just like small water droplets on a surface coalesce into larger droplets.
Now, we have a small evolutionary mechanism in play. Larger bubbles compete amongst each other for resources (nucleic acids), and the most successful ones win out. Some of these large bubbles might evolve a mechanism to split into smaller bubbles, just like a cell division in our body. Over time (millions of years), might it not be possible to have nucleic chains (like certain RNA molecules, that can reproduce without the help of other molecules) that can copy itself? This, plus some mutations, and voila, we have a Survival of the fittest struggle in motion, which might (just might!) eventually lead to single celled organisms, and eventually, us.
If only there were a way to peek back in time!

Monkeys, like their hairless, tailless counterparts, are attracted to ahem, nudity. Robert Deaner of Duke University Medical Center and his team studied male macaques looking at pictures of other macaques on the computer screen. Specifically, they examined the amount of reward (some juice) the monkeys are willing to accept in order to look at the pictures. They found that the monkeys will look at certain pictures (females of higher rank, swollen female behind, etc.) for significantly small rewards, than say, when looking at images of low ranking males :-).

Red-faced male macaque (Courtesy: St. Andrews University) More seriously, the study might have implications for the wiring for the human brain as well. Since monkeys and humans are quite alike, this might explain why many human males behave in a similar manner (note: J. Lo). Also, it will be interesting to see if the researchers (or some other group) can extend this work to cover apes, especially chimps (where males are dominant), and bonobos (where females are more powerful) and see if this holds true for them as well.
This work will appear in the March issue of Current Biology. Hmm, and what about the female behavior when watching males? Corri Waitt of the University of Stirling, in association with the St. Andrews University, found that female macaques prefer males with symmetric, rosy faces. Nothing prurient about that!

An interesting piece of research recently appeared at arXiv, and was mirrored by PhysicsWeb today. It concerns the behavior of fluid droplets falling on smooth surfaces at different atmospheric pressures and molecular weights. The research was done by L. Xu et al at the University of Chicago. Normally, when a droplet falls on a surface, primary and secondary splashes result, and the amplitudes of the splashes depend on the viscosity of the fluid. This research finds that the splash phenomenon is also dependent on the pressure and molecular weight of the gas the droplet falls through.
Decreasing pressure from top to bottom (courtesy: PhysicsWeb)It seems that the observed splashing can be totally suppressed, by reducing the pressure of the surrounding gas. In the limit, when the experiment is done at near vaccum (or below a threshold pressure), there is no splash! The threshold pressure is observed to be a function of the impact velocity, and scales with the viscosity of the fluid, and the molecular weight of the gas. Conjecture: The gas compresses the falling droplet, thereby increasing the chance of a splash. This is apparent in the above (high-speed-recorded) image, where the first row (droplet at 1 atm. pressure) is slightly deformed at the moment-of-impact, due to the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. The team used three liquids (methanol, ethanol, 2-propanol) and four gases (helium, air, krypton, sulphur fluoride).

Questions
1. What happens during low-velocity/terminal velocity impacts, or zero-g?
2. Does the temperature of the gas affect the behavior?
3. How does the surface-air-fluid sandwiching at the moment-of-impact affect the splash (due to the lateral shock)?

The result at low pressures is quite counter-intuitive. Common sense suggests that a fluid droplet at vacuum should make a bigger splash! Now we know: when a tree falls down in a forest and no one is around, it makes no noise :-).

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