The world's first battery fuelled by air - with 10 times the storage capacity of conventional cells - has been unveiled.

Scientists say the revolutionary 'STAIR' (St Andrews Air) battery could now pave the way for a new generation of electric cars, laptops and mobile phones.

 The cells are charged in a traditional way but as power is used or 'discharged' an open mesh section of battery draws in oxygen from the surrounding air.

This oxygen reacts with a porous carbon component inside the battery, which creates more energy and helps to continually 'charge' the cell as it is being discharged.

By replacing the traditional chemical constituent, lithium cobalt oxide, with porous carbon and oxygen drawn from the air, the cell is much lighter than current batteries.

And as the cycle of air helps re-charge the battery as it is used, it has a greater storage capacity than other similar-sized cells and can emit power up to 10 times longer...

To read more please visit:

www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5353809/Worlds-first-battery-fuelled-by-air.html

Adobe Audition is the latest in sound editing.  The newest interface matches the rest of the Adobe Video Collection package (along with Premiere Pro, Encore DVD, and After Effects) to a T.  While most full service Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) run almost exclusively on Mac’s, Audition only works on Windows, which may make shortcuts a little difficult to get used to.  But the program is absolutely complete for use of tracking, editing, mixing and mastering on a professional level even as far as the pitch shifting/time-stretching Radius, made by iZotope, the same algorithm used by industry trademarks like Cakewalk and Digidesign. 

The new design of the frequency editor makes it much easier to pin-point selections and change them around to your setting.  With this you can even take selections, put them into Photoshop, and change them that way.  One of the best updates with the new version is the increased latency when recording.  This seemed to be one of the biggest drawbacks of the older version and Adobe definitely corrected it.  The Guitar Suite-effects sound awesome, mimicking analog guitar sounds to affect any track with wah, distortion and compressor.  This really is a wonderful DAW where the limits of what you can do truly end with your imagination. 

This is the second in a series of blog posts leading up to my presentation on Clustering at CFUnited on June 20, 2008 at 2:00PM.  Clustering has been available to us in two apparently different forms.  Hardware Clustering and Software Clustering.  I say apparently different as some digging reveals interesting items, particularly as they relate to the current Software Clustering offered with ColdFusion – JRun.

Before looking more deeply into those issues, I wanted to lay out some basic differences between Hardware and Software Clustering.  In my view a Hardware Clustering system exists when there is a dedicated piece of hardware whose only job is to handle Clustering (Fail-Over and/or Load-Balancing).  One detail of note here, the Hardware Clustering device needs Clustering Software to operate. 

Software Clustering typically means that the Clustering Software is installed on an existing server, not a dedicated Hardware device.  One noted example of Software Clustering is Windows Network Load Balancing (aka NLB).  This is a bit of a misnomer, as this is a Clustering mechanism which includes Load-Balancing as well as Fail-Over.   Another example of Software clustering is the Clustering offered in ColdFusion-JRun which is actually based on J2EE standards.

If we dig a little deeper into the current J2EE clustering used in ColdFusion and JRun; since CF moved to Java with the MX version forward.   We see what I would class as a subset of full Software Clustering.  The reason I believe this is that J2EE clustering as applied the CF-JRun is a sub-set of Software Clustering is that it is purely peer-to-peer with no overall service watching all Cluster members.  Typically we would not only have multiple ColdFusion severs-instances but also multiple web servers or we would not have full redundancy.  Fail-Over over is not covered at the CF-JRun level if a Web server fails.  There has to be a higher level system to do this such as Windows NLB or a Hardware Clustering device.  As an historical point;  prior to MX, ColdFusion-JRun had a much more fully featured Software Clustering system called “ClusterCATS”, this did embrace to concept of a central monitoring-management service and Web server Fail-Over.  This was always tricky though if ColdFusion was deployed in the “distributed-mode” where the Web server and ColdFusion were on different physical devices. 

The last consideration in this piece, is when would we use Hardware or Software Clustering or both.  Typically Hardware Clustering scenarios are much more robust than Software Clustering, as that is their only job in life.  Having said that; Windows NLB claims support for up to 32 servers.  Going back to the Allaire-ColdFusion clustering, ClusterCATS, our testing showed that 8 servers was a good point to consider Hardware Clustering. 

Lastly, the overall term here is “Clustering” and within Clustering we have Fail-Over and Load-Balancing so the often used term “Load Balancing Device” should actually be “Clustering Device”.

Tim O'Reilly blog post on Chinese fast growth and pollution in his Chinese Foo Camp review made me think of the book "Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update" which I just got. If you haven't seen it it is an analysis and computer models of where our current world is going with all the growth and pollution and the effectiveness (or not in most cases) of actions we might take to prevent an economic, human and ecological crisis in the next 30 years. It is sobering to play with the variables and assumptions in the models and still end up crashing the planet. For example doubling the amount of oil and other natural resources actually makes things worse in the long term due to even greater pollution. They conclude that we are currently in a global 'overshoot,' or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet and that there will be a corresponding crash within next 50 years.

I remember reading the original book edition in 1972 and there are some stories on what we have done right (eg CFC and ozone layer) and others that are not so good (global warming).

The models are available if you want to play with them at Chelseagreen or from Amazon. The models are written in a programming language called Stella that I hadn't come across before.