A great deal more has happened in the world of technology since the last News of the Ultranet appeared three months ago.
    For a daily science news updates (50 news items per day), please visit the HIQ News site or Today's  Science News
  Viewsonic's 18" SXGA 1,280 X 1,024 LCD Display
    In the last issue of Ubiquity, you instructed Athena, your computer, to connect you to your sister through your 3-D wall screen. Then you called up charts of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, the Standard & Poor's 500, and the Nasdaq Composite, followed by a menu-driven, interactive news report. After supper, your household robot cleared the table, put away the food, and washed the dishes.This time, you head upstairs after supper, where you join a group discussing the latest space-flight developments. A set of three-dimensional images of the participants is arrayed upon your large-screen display. The group is working upon plans for the colonization of Mars. After half an hour of discussion about the optimum selection of payloads to Mars to develop a locally self-sustaining colony, you sign off and opt for computer entertainment. To improve the realism of your experiencee, you don a tactile-feedback suit and head for Nexus, the only Earth-like planet at Tau Ceti. Nexus is a crossroads and a caravanserie for all the neighboring star systems. The artwork is breath-taking, with Nexus' larger moon, Diana, rising over Mount Oberon, and gossamer-winged Zephrons flitting overhead. Other players' avatars are there, in the forms of some of the other races who dwell in this corner of Solar Sector. Tonight's episode involves the investigation of a set of hitherto unexplored caverns on one of Nexus' remote mountains, and the discovery of mysterious cloud-like lifeforms wihin them. After a couple of hours, it's time for bed, and you leave the game, with the other players now trying to decode the symbols they've fouhd on the cave walls.
    So how far off is that?
    Yahoo has just announced that its instant messenger service can now support web cameras. Yahoo's service is set up for 56k modems rather than wideband, so it doesn't support wideband teleconferencing, but within the next few years, that ought to arrive.
    NEC has just announced a 21.3", 3-megapixel, 2,048 X 1,536 LCD display. It won't come cheap, and the future may belong to other kinds of displays.
    Meanwhile, LCD displays are dropping in price. 15" 1,024 X 768 displays may be had for $400, and 18", 1,280 X 1,024 units are $800. Right now, 1,280 X 1,024 resolution seems to be the practical upper limit for reasonably-priced LCD displays. (Silicon Graphics markets a 17", 1,600 X 1024 monitor.) Similar montors can be had on eBay for $300 and $600, respectively. That's still two or three times what a CRT costs, but for commercial applications, the slim form factor and higher image quality may make them worth their cost. Apple has just announced that their future Macintoshes will ship with LCD monitors standard.
    There is a lot of interest in Organic Light Emitting Diode displays (OLED's). However, these are available only with low resolution and short screen life right now, and will first be used in cellphones and PDA's. Electroluminescent (EL) displays have been right around the corner for ten years now, and they're still right around the corner.
    Three-D is gaining more and more momentum, particularly among graphics designers and other commercial users.
    It might be informative to consider the history of displays.
    Forty years ago, in 1961, the only computer-driven display of which I'm aware was the control console on MIT's  Whirlwind "supercomputer". Displays of the 1960's cost about $100,000, and were round, 12", vector-graphics displays capable of displaying only simple line drawings. If much material were displayed upon the screen--more than 30 or 40 full-scrren-width lines, the images would begin to flicker.
    Thirty years ago, in 1971, although vector-graphics displays were still in vogue, Tektronix storage scopes afforded highly-complex, static, green-screen displays. These displays cost about $8,000 1971 dollars, and had a resolution of 1,024 X 1,024.
    Twenty years ago, in 1981, IBM's EGA color displays were the state of the art. They offered 320 X 240 resolution in 16 colors, and they probably cost about $1,000.
    Ten years ago, in 1991, my 14" Macintosh monitor cost $645, and delivered 640 X 480 resolution in 256 colors. High-end 21" graphics monitors with 1,600 X 1,200 resolution were available and expensive, with the monitor costing about $2,000 (although the 19" Hitachi monitor had just been introduced at a cost of $1,100).
    Today, you can buy a 19", 1,600 X 1,200 monitor capable of displaying millions of colors for $200 to $300. Slightly larger monitors are available for approximately $1,000 that will display up to 2,000 X 1,500 pixels. Of course, video processors are, probably, 1,000 times better and cheaper.
    for additional discussion of the latest developments in computer technology and other scientific areas of interest, please click on the links listed below.

  1.Computer Technology
           A lot has happened over the past three months. Among the most significant developments are Intel's announcement that Moore's Law will remain intact through at least 2010. (However, Intel's timetable calls for doubling circuit densities every 22-to-24 months rather than every 18 months, as has been the case with Moore's Law in the past.) Intel has developed circuitry that will permit it to deliverr 10 GHz, 400-million transistor chips with 65-nanometer features in 2005 (only four years from now), Intel develops 0.07-micron transistor for 10-GHz processors by 2005, 20-Ghz, one-billion-transistor chips with 45-nanometer features in 2007, and 35-to-40 GHz, 1.5-to-2-billion transistor chips with 35-nanometer features in 2009, Intel develops 20-nm transistor for 20-GHz processors by 2000, Intel unveils world's smallest transistor.,
    Not to be outdone in the media wars, IBM has achieved a breakthrough in magnetic recording densities that will permit 100 billion bit per square inch recording densities and 400-gigabyte hard drives by 2003, 5/27/2001:.IBM to sprinkle hard drives with pixie dust (mentions further improvements). IBM is also running 210 GHz SiGe transistors.
    A wild card in all this is IBM/Sony/Toshiba's one-teraflops Cell chip, due in 2004-2005, 6/13/2001:IBM, Sony, Toshiba team on processor architecture for broadband. As mentioned in the last issue of Ubiquity, IBM, Sony and Toshiba have announced plans to deliver a one-teraflops (one trillion loating-point-operations-per-second) 6/13/2001: supercomputer on a chip by the tens-of-millions by 2005.
 1.5. Alzheimer's Disease
    Not to be overlooked: What you might do to try to prevent and/or treat Alzheimer's Disease

  2. Robotics
    Robotics continues to record steady progress, with the market for mobile robotic platforms alleged to rise from its current value of $665 million to more than $17 billion in five years. Meanwhile, Sega is preparing to launch toy robots that can walk around and avoid obstacles.
  3. Energy

  4. Biological Sciences

  5. Health

  6. Climate, Environment, and Global Warming

  7. Physics and Astronomy

  8. Space

  9. Technology

10. Other