Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology

The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.
Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections.

Warning: This YouTube video contains graphic images. It purports to show a woman dying after being shot in an Iran street protest. The Wall Street Journal has not independently verified its contents.

Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.
The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.

Nanopillars that Trap More Light

A material with a novel nanostructure developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley could lead to lower-cost solar cells and light detectors. It absorbs light just as well as commercial thin-film solar cells but uses much less semiconductor material.
The new material consists of an array of nanopillars that are narrow at the top and thicker at the bottom. The narrow tops allow light to penetrate the array without reflecting off. The thicker bottom absorbs light so that it can be converted into electricity. The design absorbs 99 percent of visible light, compared to the 85 percent absorbed by an earlier design in which the nanopillars were the same thickness along their entire length. An ordinary flat film of the material would absorb only 15 percent of the light.
Structures such as nanowires, microwires, and nanopillars are excellent at trapping light, reducing the amount of semiconductor material needed, says Erik Garnett, a research fellow at Stanford University. Nanowires and nanopillars use half to a third as much of the semiconductor material required by thin-film solar cells made of materials such as cadmium telluride, and as little as 1 percent of the material used in crystalline silicon cells, he says. These structures also make it easier to extract charge from the material. Overall, these improvements could make solar cheaper. "Reducing material costs while achieving the same amount of light absorption and hence efficiency is very important for solar cells," says Shanhui Fan, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford.
Many nanostructrued materials have complex designs and require cumbersome fabrication methods to deposit multiple layers, says Ali Javey, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at UC Berkeley who is leading the new work, which is posted in the journal Nano Letters. He says the technique to grow the nanopillars is relatively simple and low-cost.
The researchers make nanopillars two micrometers high, with bases that are 130 nanometers in diameter and tips that are 60 nanometers in diameter. They start by creating a mold for the pores in a 2.5-millimeter-thick aluminum foil. First they anodize the film to create an arrangement of pores that are 60 nanometers wide and one micrometer deep long. They then expose the foil to phosphoric acid to broaden the pores to 130 nanometers--the longer the foil is exposed to the acid, the broader the pores get. Anodizing the film again makes the existing pores one micrometer deeper, and this additional length has the original 60-nanometer diameter. Trace amounts of gold are then deposited in these pores as a catalyst to grow crystals of semiconductor material--in this case germanium, which is good for photo detectors--inside each pore. Finally, some of the aluminum is etched away, leaving behind an array of germanium nanopillars embedded in an aluminum oxide membrane
Javey says that this method of making nanopillars of varying diameters and shapes is simple compared to other approaches, which involve a complicated layer-by-layer assembly of materials, and complex materials that combine wires with metal nanoparticles.

Multistep Diagnostics on Paper

Paper-based diagnostic tests represent an exciting opportunity for improving medical testing in poor countries. They are cheap to produce and don't require complicated instruments to carry out a test or read the result, so they can be implemented in areas with few resources and little infrastructure. But paper diagnostic tests have thus far been limited to fairly simple reactions. Researchers at University of Washington in Seattle have now taken an important step toward enabling more complex chemical reactions on paper.
Paul Yager and collaborators have developed a way to control the timing of delivery of chemicals within a paper-based device, and demonstrated how this can be used to amplify the signal of a test antibody. The amplification step is an important part of routine technique called an enzyme-linked immonsorbent assay (ELISA) that is currently carried out on large, expensive instrumentation. "[ELISA is] the gold standard for sensitivity-- the gold standard for many diagnostics where you're detecting proteins, even small antibodies. It can be used to diagnose multiple diseases," says Barry Lutz, a coauthor on the studies, and Research Assistant Professor at the University of Washington.
Existing clinical tests, involving trained laboratory technicians and large, expensive equipment are out of reach of clinics in remote areas of the developing world. A microfluidic device capable of controlling the movement of tiny amounts of fluid could reduce the amount of costly reagents and enzymes for the tests, and using paper as a material reduces the cost even further.
Pregnancy tests sold in drugstores are a simple example of a paper-based diagnostics. Yager and others are now creating much more complex paper-based tests. Other scientists have had some success developing a paper test of liver function. But most clinical tests are more complex, requiring multiple steps to isolate, label, and multiply a molecule of interest.

Did students commit 'suicide by laptop'?

Whatever happened, no one may ever truly understand.

The facts, as reported by the Daily Mail, suggest that two students from Scotland checked into a hotel around 80 miles from Edinburgh University, where they were both studying.

When staff were concerned that Robert Miller, 20, and James Robertson, 19, were still in their room after check-out time, they reportedly opened their door and discovered them both dead.

Edinburgh University, where both men studied.

(Credit: CC WJMarnoch/Flickr)

Police reportedly examined a laptop in the students' room and, after police said they were not treating the deaths as suspicious, there are reportedly fears in the students' home communities that the dead men may have been influenced by the ideas of Dr. Philip Nitschke, an Australian campaigner for legal euthanasia.

In 1996, Nitschke created the Deliverance Machine, a device that involved a laptop that was connected to a syringe driver. With just one push of a key, the device, outlawed in 1997, delivers a lethal injection.

Edinburgh University is reportedly working with the authorities to try to find more evidence of what might have led to these students' deaths.

These reports will inevitably lead to renewed debate about the Web offering more information, both "bad" or "good," being made immediately available to those who seek it, or even to those who merely happen to come across it by chance.

Should information about assisted suicide, self-harm and other difficult societal aspects be freely available?