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| Five
Patents to Watch |
| NEW
MAGNETIC RECORDING MEDIA PACK MORE DATAONTO
HARD DRIVES |
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US6280813
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August 28,2001
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Media with
Antiferro-
magnetically Coupled
Ferromagnetic Films as
the Recording Layer
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From
giant databases to MP3 music collections,
many aspects of modern computing depend
on the ever increasing capacity of hard
drives. But there's a funda- mental
physical limit to how much information
can be jammed onto these devices: when
the magnetically charged particles that
store the data get too small, they tend
to lose their magnetic properties. Experts
thought disk capacity maxed out at three
gigabits of data per square centimeter.Today
IBM is shipping hard drives that pack
around 5.4 gigabits per square centimeter.
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The
trick? Researchers replaced the single
magnetic layer found in standard hard
drives with two magnetic layers separated
by a superthin layer of the element
ruthenium. Known around IBM as "pixie
dust/'the ruthe- nium couples each particle
in the top layer with one in the bottom,
making it less likely to lose its magnetic
properties even at smaller sizes. IBM
anticipates that by
midyear every drive it ships will contain
pixie dust. Japanese rival Fujitsu has
introduced similar technology, which
it says it developed independently. |
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| FUSING
CARBON NANOTUBES WILL CREATE THE WORLD'S
SMALLEST CIRCUITS |
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US6203864
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March 20,2001
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Method of Forming
a
Heterojunction of a
Carbon Nanotube and a
Different Material
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NEC
researcher Surnio lijima discovered
the microscopic structures known as
carbon nanotubes in 1991; over the past
four years, chemists around the world
have manipulated the minuscule filaments
to fashion crude mechanisms like miniature
transistors. But without a means of
permanently connecting them to the conventional
semiconductor transistors and metal
wires that makeup modern electronics,
practical applications have been progressing
slowly. Now lijima's group has found
a way—the essence of this patent—to.
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create
junctions between the ends of carbon
nanotubes and electronically important
materials like silicon and titanium.
Heating the nanotubes while they're
in contact with another material creates
an atomic connection by chemically bonding
the two materials at their junction,
lijima says that even though the method
is limited to materials like silicon
that will not break down under the extreme
heat needed to form the connections,
circuits incorporating nanotubes could
be around the corner. |
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| ANTENNA
ARCHITECTURE BOOSTS WIRELESS DATA TRANSFER |
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US6317466
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November 13,2001
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Wireless Communica-
tions System Employing
Multi-Element: Antennas
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Anytime,
anywhere Internet access is a promise
cellular companies have yet to fulfill.
Lucent Technologies aims to help keep
it with the antenna array and signal-
processing system behind this patent.The
system com- bines a unique method of
sending and processing data with multiple
antennas at both the cellular transmitter
and the receiver (most likely in a personal
digital assistant or laptop). By using
each antenna at the trans- |
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mit
station to send out different pieces
of each user's data, the scheme can
exploit the same amount of power and
spectrum to send many transmissions
that it does to send one.The result:
data rates that increase linearly with
the number of antennas employed.The
initial implementation, which uses four
antennas at both the base station and
the receiver, should lead to about a
300 percent improvement in data transmission
speeds. |
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| STEM
CELLS HELP IDENTIFY AND FIGHT DISEASE |
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US6200806
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March 13,2001
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Primate Embryonic
Stern Cells
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In
1998, James Thomson successfully isolated
human embryonic stem cells, changing
biomedical research for- ever. Able
to develop into any tissue in the human
body, the cells have been touted as
a possible cure for diseases ranging
from Parkinson's to diabetes—if researchers
can mass-produce and control them. But
the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation,
the intellectual- property arm of the
University ofWisconsin.and Menio Park,
CA-based biotechnology company Geron,
which funded Thomson's research, have
been battling over the |
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rights
to the patent on the cells. The two
settled the law- suit in January, with
Geron receiving exclusive rights to
develop diagnostic and therapeutic applications
of the cells for the heart, pancreas
and nervous system.Thom- son's lab is
working on other therapeutic uses as
well as shorter-term projects to employ
the cells to help speed drug discovery.
In the long term, the cells' most potent
feature may be the window they offer
on what goes wrong in disease, miscarriages
and birth defects—and on how to correct
it. |
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| FRESH
TECHNIQUE MEANS A BETTER WAY TO BUILD
SOFTWARE |
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US6327581
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December 4,2001
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Primate Embryonic
Stern Cells
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Categorizing
documents is a tedious task, but one
that humans find innately simple. Computers,
however, have a much tougher time. Computer
scientists have long looked to machine
learning methods as a way to "teach"
computers new tasks; algorithms called
"support vector machines"
can be trained to produce programs that
sort objects into different categories.
But the algorithms have been too slow
to be practically applied to very large
problems like sorting text files. John
Platt,the leader of Microsoft Research's
Signal Processing group, |
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created
an original way to speed up support
vector machines by a factor of 1,000,
making it ractical for the first time
to tackle such problems. Microsoft developers
are using the technique to make a variety
of applications more intelligent: search
engines that better understand plain-language
user requests, smart "spam"
filters that flawlessly root out junk
e-mail, even a program that looks at
electronic messages to see which ones
might result in scheduling tasks—and
then automatically opens your calendar
to the right spot.. |
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| Source
From: TECHNOLOGY REVIEW May 2002 |
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