World's longest lab experiment still going 85 years later

 (Credit: Video screenshot by Bonnie Cha/CNET)


In 1927, Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Australia set out to teach his students a lesson, and that lesson is still going on today and has at least another 100 years to go.
The physics professor wanted to demonstrate to his pupils that solid material could have viscous properties, so he used tar pitch, a derivative of coal once used to waterproof boats, in an experiment to prove his point.
At room temperature, pitch appears to be solid and can even shatter if hit with a hammer, but despite its look and feel, pitch can also flow at room temperature--just really, really slowly.
To conduct the Pitch Drop Experiment, Parnell melted some pitch into a glass funnel with a sealed stem and allowed it to settle for three years. In 1930, the funnel was unsealed, clearing the way for the pitch to flow freely, but it sure did take its sweet time.
Eight years went by before the first drop of pitch hit the beaker below, and it was another nine years before the second drop hit. Parnell passed away in September 1948, but a third drop was recorded in 1954, before the Pitch Drop Experiment was stored away in a cupboard.


John Mainstone took over the project after a colleague discovered the "weird" object in a cupboard.
(Credit: University of Queensland)
The experiment may never have seen the light of day again had it not been for John Mainstone.
Mainstone, who joined the University of Queensland physics department in 1961, took over the project after a colleague discovered the "weird" object in the cupboard. With some coaxing, Mainstone also got the university in 1975 to publicly display the experiment in a cabinet in the foyer of the department building.
Now, the Pitch Drop Experiment has its own live Webcam. The eighth and most recent drop was recorded on November 28, 2000, but wouldn't you know it? The camera malfunctioned when it fell. To date, no one has actually witnessed a drop fall.
The experiment isn't kept under special environmental conditions, so the rate of flow fluctuates with seasonal temperatures. However, Mainstone expects that the ninth drop will occur sometime in 2013 and adds that it could be at least another 100 years before all the pitch flows out of the funnel.
It's pretty safe to say Parnell got his point across, albeit slowly, and his perseverance didn't go unrecognized. In 2005, Parnell and Mainstone were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize, an America parody of the Nobel Prize, for physics. The Pitch Drop Experiment also holds the world record for being the longest running lab experiment in the Guinness Book of Records.

Via PopSci

Securing in-vehicle infotainment domain

As cars increasingly turn into networked IT entities, the security threats are also rising. The most visible gateway for hacking attempts to cars is the infotainment domain. Thus, next generation infotainment system architectures must address these issues from the ground up. The article discusses architectural approaches which guarantee the necessary level of security.
One of the first computer systems within an automobile was the 1978 Cadillac Seville's trip computer, run by a Motorola 6802 microprocessor with 128B of RAM and two kilobytes of ROM. The printed source code could not have occupied more than a handful of pages.
In contrast, even the lowest end automobile today contains at least a dozen microprocessors; the highest end cars incorporate in excess of 100 microprocessors. Examples of computers embedded within a modern automobile are shown in figure 1.


With infotainment systems running sophisticated operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and various distributions of Linux, the total embedded software content can easily exceed 100 million lines of code.
Complexity is driven by the inexorable demand for better capabilities, the digitisation of manual and mechanical functions, and the interconnection of our world. While this growth in electronic content has been beneficial to society, that growth is also a key source of our reliability, security, cost, and time-to-market woes. Next-generation infotainment system architecture must help developers manage this complexity.
Automotive electronics consolidation
Another important automotive trend is ECU consolidation. As the automobile continues its transformation into an electronic system of systems, electronic component counts and associated wiring content within the car have skyrocketed. This electronics growth poses a significant production cost, physical footprint, and time to market challenge for automotive manufacturers. The response is to reverse the growth trend and instead merge disparate functions into a fewer number of electronic components.



Processor consolidation is closely aligned with the trend towards mixed criticality systems in which safety, security, or real-time critical components must coexist with less critical components. For example, consolidating the infotainment head-unit with the real-time, safety-critical rear-view camera and/or driver information cluster components results in a mixed-criticality system (figure 2).

Santa’s Been Good to Embedded Developers

Lots of Presents for Good Engineering Boys and Girls

 This year has been a good one for embedded hardware engineers. There have been a ton of new chips, for starters. I mean, a ton—a huge selection, a plethora, a USDA butt-load of new chips. We are dealing with an embarrassment of riches, my friends.
That’s a good sign, because it means the chip companies are feeling secure enough to crank out new products for our delectation. It also means we get a lot of new choices. So many, in fact, that we’ll probably never be able to adequately evaluate them all. Oh, well. That’s what advertisements and PowerPoint slides are for. Woo me, Mr. Chip Salesman.
Among the goodies in Santa’s pack this month are some new proximity-sensing chips from Atmel. “What’s proximity sensing,” you ask? Well, it’s like touch-sensing but cooler. If you really want the full Minority Report experience, you have to give up touch-sensitive screens and go for proximity sensing.
Atmel’s new QT2120 chips allow you to simply wave your hands in front of your user interface and it’ll detect your presence. Pretty cool huh? The technology isn’t quite advanced enough to tell exactly what you’re pointing at (at least, not with very fine resolution), so it’s probably best used as a “wake-up” sensor. For example, you could use it to tell when the user is about to pick up the device, and wake up the screen, processor, and other hardware. The gee-whiz factor of having a gizmo that automatically wakes up when you reach for it has got to be worth a few bucks, right? It will also save battery power because you can power-down your device whenever it’s not being used.
By placing three or more proximity sensors close together, you can tell which direction the user is gesturing. So you could, for example, build a touch-free “slider bar” that could tell whether you’re gesturing up or down, left or right, clockwise or counterclockwise. The possibilities are endless.
Over at Texas Instruments, they’ve pulled the wrapping paper off a collection of new Sitara AM335x processor chips. These are ARM Cortex-A8 devices that run at around 500 MHz, give or take 50%. Some chips even have Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR graphics controller, as well as a touch-screen interface, 1Gbit Ethernet, USB, crypto, and more. With prices starting at just $5, these chips are ridiculously cheap. (Of course, that’s high-volume pricing, but Santa always buys in volume, right?) You can even get a BeagleBone development system for just $89.
Even though you want Santa to make it through the chimney, you may still want a firewall around your embedded devices. Firewalls for embedded systems? You betcha, says Icon Labs. Malicious port sniffers don’t care whether they’re probing PCs or embedded devices; they’re just testing IP addresses looking for open ports or weak security. And since so many embedded devices are now always-on and Internet-connected, they’re just as vulnerable as anything else.
Icon Labs’ “Floodgate” software is specifically designed for embedded developers, and it runs on a variety of embedded operating systems. You get the source code and, with the license fee, a year of support and upgrades. Floodgate protects against a variety of Internet-borne maladies, including SYN floods (hence its name), security breaches, and brute-force attacks. It’s not an antivirus, which is both good news and bad news. A lot of developers mistakenly equate “network attack” with “virus,” and think they’re home free because their system isn’t running Windows, Linux, or MacOS. But there are probably as many embedded devices with IP addresses as there are “real computers,” so network security is something every embedded developers needs to add to his wish list.
Of course, to power all your new devices you’ll need some sort of AC adapter or battery supply. And today’s microprocessors usually require multiple voltages (at very tight tolerances), so that job gets tricky. Say hello to Enpirion, a company that makes “power SoC” chips for just that purpose. These are like itty bitty versions of the power “bricks” you often seen in larger systems or servers. Power SoCs achieve their small size (no bigger than a typical 14-pin IC) by using high-frequency inductors for switching. Small size is useful in its own right, but it also means you can place the power supply very close to the load, reducing inductive coupling and improving transient performance. Enpirion’s Power SoCs also give off very little heat, so you can squeeze ’em into tightly packed systems.
Next year, if you didn’t get all the gifts you wanted, you can still ask Santa to bring you a shiny new Wi-Gig interface. Never heard of Wi-Gig? You will, and all the kids will be wanting one before long. Wi-Gig is the just-completed standard for high-speed Wi-Fi over 60-GHz spectrum. With up to 7 Gbit/sec peak bandwidth, Wi-Gig isn’t just a faster replacement for wires, it’s a wireless replacement for buses.
Wilocity, one of the companies beavering away on Wi-Gig silicon, expects the new standard to replace PCI, HDMI, and similar buses, in effect creating wireless systems. Instead of just having a cordless keyboard and mouse, you can have cordless disk drives, processors, and display adapters. System enclosures effectively give way to an “exploded diagram” type of system architecture, with high-speed subsystems located across the room from each other.
One of the many hurdles the Wi-Gig group had to overcome was the natural directionality of the 60-GHz broadcast spectrum. You see, normal Wi-Fi’s 2.4- and 5-GHz frequencies are naturally omnidirectional; they spray data in all directions. That’s normally what you want, but the downside is that they contaminate the airspace in all directions. Wi-Gig, on the other hand, is strongly directional. That’s dandy for keeping signals from interfering with one another, but it also means you’ve got to aim the transmitter directly at the receiver. Wi-Gig cleverly solves this problem by specifying a number of micro-transmitters grouped into a phased array. An automatic “search and locate” protocol allows Wi-Gig devices to discover each other and set up a narrow transmit/receive beam. If either unit moves, the phased array will follow it around, sort of the way cell phone towers hand off calls from moving phones. All very space age, and all very complicated. Look for the first Wi-Gig products late next year… just in time for your 2012 wish list.