August 2010

Scientists at Rice University and Hewlett-Packard are reporting this week that they can overcome a fundamental barrier to the continued rapid miniaturization of computer memory that has been the basis for the consumer electronics revolution.

In recent years the limits of physics and finance faced by chip makers had loomed so large that experts feared a slowdown in the pace of miniaturization that would act like a brake on the ability to pack ever more power into ever smaller devices like laptops, smartphones and digital cameras. But the new announcements, along with competing technologies being pursued by companies like IBM and Intel, offer hope that the brake will not be applied any time soon.

In one of the two new developments, Rice researchers are reporting in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society, that they have succeeded in building reliable small digital switches -- an essential part of computer memory -- that could shrink to a significantly smaller scale than is possible using conventional methods. More important, the advance is based on silicon oxide, one of the basic building blocks of today's chip industry, thus easing a move toward commercialization. The scientists said that PrivaTran, a Texas startup company, has made experimental chips using the technique that can store and retrieve information.

Separately, H.P. is to announce on Tuesday that it will enter into a commercial partnership with a major semiconductor company to produce a related technology that also has the potential of pushing computer data storage to astronomical densities in the next decade. H.P. and the Rice scientists are making what are called memristors, or memory resistors, switches that retain information without a source of power.

For a decade, West Africa's main connection to the Internet has been a single fiber-optic cable in the Atlantic, a tenuous and expensive link for one of the poorest areas of the planet. But this summer, a second cable snaked along the West African coastline, ending at Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos. It has more than five times the capacity of the old one and is set to bring competition to a market where wholesale Internet access costs nearly 500 times as much as it does in the U.S. It's the first of a new wave of investment that the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union says will vastly raise the bandwidth available in West Africa by mid-2012.

A volley of primaries put the mid-term elections in the media foreground last week. At the same time, two sobering assessments -- one of post-Katrina New Orleans and the other of the nation's economy -- followed close behind in a week where no story clearly dominated the news. And the controversy surrounding the New York Islamic center and a massive egg recall were also among the top stories.

Primary elections in five states -- with at least one surprise outcome -- made politics and the mid-term elections the No. 1 story for the week of August 23-29, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. At 14% of the newshole, it was the second time in three weeks that the mid-terms were the top story in PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index, which analyzes the media agenda of the mainstream press. Much of the debate centered on the advantages of insider versus outsider candidates, but by the week's end, pundits were left with a challenge to the conventional wisdom. Last week was also the five-year anniversary of the arrival of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, and many media outlets sent personnel to New Orleans to assess the progress of the region's recovery. The story was No. 2 for the week, accounting for 11% of the newshole studied. The third-biggest story of the week was the state of the U.S. economy.

Research In Motion Ltd.'s concession in giving Indian authorities access to BlackBerry e-mail and instant-messenger correspondence means it's likely to do the same for other governments, analysts said.

The agreement sets a precedent that will make it difficult for RIM to refuse countries seeking similar conditions, said Romal Shetty, executive director of the telecommunications division at KPMG's Indian unit. RIM spokesman Satchit Gayakwad declined to comment on the government accord or discuss any details of the proposal. RIM's proposal, disclosed by the Indian government yesterday, means the company may be willing to compromise on the privacy of corporate customers to placate regulators.