1. I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you.

 

2. No man or woman is worth your tears, and the one who is, won't make you cry.

 

3. Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to, doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.

 

4. A true friend is someone who reaches for your hand and touches your heart.

 

5. The worst way to miss someone is to be sitting right beside them knowing you can't have them. 

6. Never frown, even when you are sad, because you never know who is falling in love with your smile.

 

7. To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world. 

 

8. Don't waste your time on a man/woman, who isn't willing to waste their time on you. 

 

9. Maybe God wants us to meet a few wrong people before meeting the right one, so that when we finally meet the person, we will know how to be grateful.

 

10. Don't cry because it is over, smile because it happened.

11. There's always going to be people that hurt you so what you have to do is keep on trusting and just be more careful about who you trust next time around.

 

12. Make yourself a better person and know who you are before you try and know someone else and expect them to know you.

 

13. Don't try so hard, the best things come when you least expect them to.

REMEMBER: WHATEVER HAPPENS, HAPPENS FOR A REASON.

Gunners' ongoing to Paris, however, is not all about superman Henry. It has been a team effort and every player can bask in the success.  

 

One of the classic player, Dennis Bergkamp will be retiring this year, However, aesthetically and technically, Bergkamp will live forever in the memory.

 

Touch, passing of incredible vision, sublime finishing, out of this world skills - he has everything.

The Dutchman has brought a different dimension to Arsenal's game, weighing in with plenty of goals and creating innumerable chances for his fellow strikers.

 

Bergkamp,, can trace his heritage in Dutch football back to Johan Cruyff, yet he is a one-off, a classic number 10 but demonstrably unique.

Descriptions of Bergkamp vary. He has long been called an artist, but Arsene Wenger prefers to brand him a scientist; look at the cool analysis of the situation, the perfect calculation of the angle and weight of the precise pass to bisect a defence. If he paints a picture, in other words, it is for a purpose, though he has illuminated the game in the process.

 

Think of his hat-trick against Leicester in 1997, his winner for Holland against Argentina the following year or the improbable goal against Newcastle in 2002, the product of an inventive turn to deceive Nikos Dabizas.

A proposed engine design approaches the efficiency of gas-electric hybrids, but could be far cheaper.

For years, Wi-Fi telephones and walkie-talkie-like communicators have been available for hospitals and offices. Now, manufacturers and mobile carriers are preparing to link standard cellular networks to the mishmash of Wi-Fi hotspots, a move that will expand coverage and perhaps make cheaper mobile minutes a reality.

The technology, called Unlicensed Mobile Access, or UMA, will help those who have high-speed Wi-Fi routers overcome any poor coverage in their houses or apartments. It's also a way for mobile carriers to expand their footprint without spending lots of money on new infrastructure.

UMA could enable users of souped-up handsets to wirelessly download content at broadband speeds at home and take that on the road when they leave.

''Everything from multimedia to audio, video -- when you look at the capabilities of phones now, the options expand pretty quickly,'' Nokia spokesman Eric Estroff said.

At the conference in Las Vegas last week, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. unveiled its t709 phone capable of seamlessly accessing Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Nokia's 6136 and Motorola Inc.'s A910 were introduced in February at a conference in Spain.

ABI Research expects the market for Wi-Fi enabled mobile handsets to reach 100 million units annually by 2009.

Carriers in Europe have expressed interest. France Telecom SA has said it will be Nokia's first European customer for its UMA phones, while Nordic operator TeliaSonera AB said in February it is moving ahead with trials for business customers.

But U.S. carriers were tightlipped about when they might roll out the service and at what price, despite Nokia and Samsung representatives saying they would start selling functioning handsets in the country this year.

T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, was widely expected to be among the first by tapping its 7,400 Wi-Fi hotspots at hotels, airports and Starbucks coffee shops nationwide.

Its logo also adorned Samsung's new model on display here, but a T-Mobile USA spokesman said the company had no comment.

Cingular Wireless LLC, jointly owned by landline giants AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp., said it was looking at the technology and already supports a personal digital assistant that receives data on Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

 

Global Mobile Alert has developed a warning system that helps drivers gab without crashing.

 

 it's a system that uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) chips lodged inside many cell phones to track a vehicle's coordinates. Whenever a driver who's talking on a phone closes to within 100 meters of a stoplight, the system interrupts his or her conversation with a loud chirp -- providing a not-so-gentle reminder to slow down. Thompson (now living in Los Angeles) has demonstrated a prototype to city engineers and set up a company, Global Mobile Alert, to market the idea to cellular carriers, who could offer the warning system as part of a growing array of data services available to mobile subscribers.

 

The only requirement for using Thompson's system, however, is a GPS-capable cell phone. The phone compares signals from GPS satellites to determine the vehicle's location, direction, and speed, and transmits that information over the cellular data network to a computer server built by Global Mobile Alert. The server contains a database with the exact latitude and longitude of all stoplights and other traffic hazards in the driver's area. If the server calculates that the cell-phone user's vehicle is nearing one of those positions, it sends a chirp resembling the cuckoo-clock sound played by some pedestrian-crossing systems for the benefit of the visually impaired.

 

 

Flash can facilitate these operations because it stores data very differently than traditional hard drives. Right now, computers use a disk that stores individual bits, 1s and 0s, as a magnetic orientation in regions of the disk. The disk spins at 4,200 revolutions per minutes (in laptops), and the bits are read and written by a read-write head that resembles the arm of an old-fashioned LP player.

Because the disk spins, it can take up to 10 milliseconds to read a bit of data. Also, the motion drains energy from a battery and leaves the disk vulnerable to sudden movements that can damage a portion of the drive.

Flash avoids these problems because it is made of tiny transistors on a silicon chip. There are no moving parts, only moving electrons. Flash storage comes in two basic categories, NAND and NOR, where both names refer to the type of logic gates that allow the transport of bits. As Barnetson explains, data can be written faster to NAND than to NOR chips, and NAND chips also take up less space on a silicon wafer, and so are less expensive to produce.

 

This "hybrid drive" will produce a number of noticeable benefits, says Barnetson. For one, information can be written to the flash drive, and then, about every 10 minutes, dumped from flash memory to the hard disk. This means the hard disk spins only periodically, reducing the amount of power consumed by 90 percent, according to Barnetson. And since a hard disk chews up about 10 percent of a computer's power, this could translate into 30 more minutes on a laptop's battery charge.

Moreover, because flash is "nonvolatile," meaning it stores data even when the power is off, the flash memory in a computer can act as a backup, keeping files intact. Storage without power will also enable these hybrid machines to start up almost instantly. Barnetson notes that as a user is waiting for the hard drive to get up and running, the flash drive can be streaming information out of the cache (see "Starting Your Computer in a Flash").

 

In a typical computer, the startup software and operating system are stored on the hard drive; when the computer is turned on, the hard drive starts spinning and the instructions are transferred into the computer's random-access memory (RAM), where the central processing unit can access them. That hard drive, with its mechanized, moving parts, has long been a roadblock to faster start times. If Flash memory chips had enough capacity to store an entire operating system (or the parts essential to startup), the need to wait for the hard drive to cycle through its startup tasks would be eliminated.

 

Barnetson believes that, while the cost of flash memory is currently too high to offer a 40-gigabyte laptop within the next few years, prices are decreasing by 35-40 percent per year. Devices such as tablet PCs that don't need as much storage may be the first to arrive with all flash memory hard drives.

Furthermore, David Patterson, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, suggests that laptops may not need all the storage space that users are currently accustomed to. If more data is stored in networks and accessed via the Internet, Patterson suggests, a 10-gigabyte laptop might suffice. In this case, the laptop's memory could be reserved for programs that are rewritten less often, keeping the flash memory fresh.

But Patterson also doubts that Flash will entirely replace magnetic hard drives anytime soon. He notes that flash memory wears out after about 100,000 rewrites. This means it's good for an iPod, where songs are updated every couple of days or so, but bad for software that has to write constantly to a computer's hard drive.

Samsung has created a program that lessens the wear-and-tear on flash chips by evenly distributing data rewrites, so that one particular cell of the chip is not bombarded with information in rewriting, according to Barnetson. Even so, Patterson says, a cleverly written virus could wipe out an entire flash drive by taking advantage of this weakness.

And flash memory can't do everything alone. Intel's Teixeira notes that another issue is to increase bandwidth -- the speed at which information is transferred from devices or streamed over networks. Join up flash memory with pumped-up bandwidth, Teixeira says, and "we're heading toward a ubiquitous computing world where anything has intelligence."

A crossbar latch, also called a molecular crossbar latch, is a nanoscale device with properties similar to those of a conventional silicon transistor, but physically much smaller, having a diameter of approximately 2 nanometers (nm, where 1 nm = 10^-9 m). The crossbar latch is expected to find applicability in nanoscale computing. It may someday supplant the transistors currently found in computer chips. Because the crossbar latch is much smaller than any functional transistor, engineers hope that it will facilitate the construction of computers with much greater processing speed and power than exist today.

The device consists of three nanowires (extremely small wires) that cross at certain angles and that are separated by thin layers of stearic acid, a substance found in common soaps and lubricants. Pulses of current in one of the wires influence pulses of current in the other wires, making it possible to store data, perform logic operations, and amplify signals.

The technology was invented by Phillip J. Kuekes of Menlo Park, California, and he received a patent in July, 2003. Rights have been assigned to Hewlett-Packard (HP).

What it looks like
A single crossbar latch consists of a three wires: a "latch" wire and two control, or clock, wires. The latch wire lies under the other two. The wires are connected by molecules, which transfer electrical impulses from one wire to the next. (In the latches used to perform calculations, it is a layer of a common acid made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.)

In layman's terms, a series of electrical impulses will close the molecular switch between the latch wire and the first clock wire. The impulses will then open the switch between the latch wire and other clock wire. In digital terms, a computer interprets this action as a "0". Conversely, opening the first switch and closing the second becomes a "1."

Earlier, Kuekes had produced crossbar latches that could perform basic calculations, but they couldn't store partial results for later usage. The new crossbar latches, however, detailed in an article in the Journal of Applied Physics, can: They conceivably perform transistorlike functions.

A key attribute of the switches is that the junction between the wires can be as small as 2 nanometers. The equivalent junction in current transistors inside 90-nanometer chips is about 60 nanometers, meaning that far more crossbar latches can be put into the same space that now holds transistors. Traditional transistors, in fact, will never be able to hit these limits, Kuekes said.

 

Shrinking the electrical junctions in a chip also generally increases performance, but the switches in the experimental crossbar latches only flip at about a tenth of a second.

Just as important, chips made on crossbar latches could be cheap to manufacture. The wires are put into place through nano-imprint lithography. In this technique, a customized mold is placed into a film later; the imprints left by the mold become the templates for the wires.

The molecular switches, meanwhile, do not have to be placed individually at the juncture of the wires. Only wires at the junctions will carry a current.

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Nokia is testing a new antenna that could send a narrow beam to a cell phone, improving next-generation cellular service.

In the United States, however, the spectrum allocated by the government for first-generation, analog cellular networks was enough to support only 56 channels per cell --the 57th caller in any given cell was out of luck. So frequencies had to be divided up further.

In Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) digital networks each burst of information on a particular frequency is split into three time slots, each a few milliseconds long. These slots are assigned to three different phones, each of which can piece together the data from its time slot into a continuous conversation. The result is that three phones at a time can use the same frequency, tripling the capacity of each cell, to roughly 168 channels. TDMA is the basic technique behind protocols such as the Global System for Mobile Communications, or GSM, used by major companies such as China Mobile, T-Mobile, the Cingular division of the new AT&T, and Personal Communications Services, or PCS, used by Sprint.

An alternative technique is to abandon channels altogether and instead spread multiple conversations in small pieces across the entire cellular spectrum. In this method, known as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), all phones in a particular cell listen to the same range of frequencies and receive the same raw data, but each piece of data is prefaced by a digital code unique to one customer's phone. Only that phone can pick out and reassemble the pieces that constitute the user's conversation. CDMA is the preferred wireless protocol of Verizon Wireless in the United States, Orange in Europe, and NTT DoCoMo in Japan.

The third-generation (or "3G") version of CDMA is called Wideband CDMA, referring to its greater capacity to carry data such as music and live moving images. In ideal circumstances, WCDMA networks can send data at near-DSL speeds: 384 kilobits per second to moving users and 2 megabits per second to stationary users, compared with about 50 kilobits per second for second-generation networks. This standard has already been adopted by NTT DoCoMo and other carriers, and Nokia has invested heavily in the protocol, building the necessary phones, base-station equipment, computer systems, and software.

As Nokia gears up now to handle anticipated congestion on WCDMA networks, its researchers have come full circle: they've returned to the idea of dividing cellular signals spatially. Just as first-generation cellular technology divided space into cells, beamforming divides cells into slices, each served by a different beam. (Beamforming technology can be applied to any type of digital cellular network, not just CDMA-based ones.)

While beamforming itself isn't a novel idea, it's never been successfully applied to cellular telephony. "It's basically old military technology," says Kauppinen. "Some radars have been functioning with this principle for a very long time. But only in the last few years have we had an understanding of how beamforming would actually function in cellular networks."

 

BEIJING (AP) -- Promoters of China's controversial wireless encryption system on Tuesday accused backers of a rival American system of ''dirty tricks'' after the world industrial standards group rejected the Chinese system for global use.

China will keep promoting its WAPI standard and will use it domestically despite the decision by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

China is promoting WAPI in an effort to reduce reliance on foreign technology and give its companies a competitive edge.

ISO members rejected WAPI in favor of the American standard known as 802.11i, the Geneva-based group said Monday.

A statement issued by ChinaBWIPS -- the official China Broadband Wireless IP standard Group -- accused backers of the American system of ''a lot of dirty tricks including deception, misinformation, confusion and reckless charging to lobby against WAPI,'' according to Xinhua.

It didn't give details of what supporters of the American system were accused of doing.

ISO groups together the national bodies throughout the world that set standards for telecoms, electronics and other industries.

China dropped an effort last year to make WAPI its mandatory national standard after complaints by Washington that it would hamper access to the Chinese market for foreign companies.

China's high-tech companies could benefit if its system won acceptance as a world standard, because they would have a head start in using it and could license their technology abroad.

But only eight of 25 ISO members voted in favor of China's proposal, far short of the 75 percent approval needed in order for a draft amendment to be carried, the organization said.

Still, the Chinese government ''insisted that it will firmly support the technology called WAPI and failure in the international standard application will not affect its domestic use,'' Xinhua said.

Last week, China announced the creation of a 22-member group of companies to promote WAPI. Members include Lenovo Group, the world's No. 3 PC maker, and Huawei Technologies, a leading maker of switching equipment used for telecoms and the Internet.

The Chinese government has promoted WAPI as being more secure than 802.11i, developed by a group led by U.S.-based Intel Corp., the world's biggest computer chip maker.

But the U.S.-based electronics industry newspaper EE Times, citing ISO documents, said those who voted against WAPI expressed concern that its development was closed to outsiders and that China has released too little information about it.

China is the world's biggest mobile phone market, with more than 400 million customers, and the second-largest Internet market after the United States, with more than 100 million people on line.

 

http://www.wapi.com/

安徽省  马鞍山市湖东路四小 304  毛以翔

By creating maps of the body’s complex molecular inter­actions, Trey Ideker is providing new ways to find drugs.

 

Biomedical research these days seems to be all about the "omes": genomes, proteomes, metabolomes. Beyond all these lies the mother of all omes -- or maybe just the ome du jour: the interactome. Every cell hosts a vast array of interactions among genes, RNA, metabolites, and proteins. The impossibly complex map of all these interactions is, in the language of systems biology, the interactome.

Trey Ideker, a molecular biotechnologist by way of electrical engineering, has recently begun comparing what he calls the "circuitry" of the interactomes of different species. "It's really an incremental step in terms of the concepts, but it's a major leap forward in that we can gather and analyze completely new types of information to characterize biological systems," says Ideker, who runs the Laboratory for Integrative Network Biology at the University of California, San Diego. "I think it's going to be cool to map out the circuitry of all these cells."

Beyond the cool factor, Ideker and other leaders in the nascent field of interactomics hope that their work may help uncover new drugs, improve existing drugs by providing a better understanding of how they work, and even lead to computerized models of toxicity that could replace studies now conducted on animals. "Disease and drugs are about pathways," Ideker says.

Ideker made a big splash in the field in 2001 while still a graduate student with Leroy Hood at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. In a paper for Science, Ideker, Hood, and coworkers described in startling detail how yeast cells use sugar. They presented a wiring-like diagram illustrating everything from the suite of genes involved, to the protein-protein interactions, to how perturbing the system altered different biochemical pathways. "His contribution was really special," says geneticist Marc Vidal of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who introduced the concept that interactomes can be conserved between species. "He came up with one of the first good visualization tools."

Last November, Ideker's team turned heads by reporting in Nature that it had aggregated in one database all the available protein-protein interactomes of yeast, the fruit fly, the nematode worm, and the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Though there's nothing particularly novel about comparing proteins across species, Ideker's lab is one of the few that has begun hunting for similarities and differences between the protein-protein interactions of widely different creatures. It turns out that the interactomes of yeast, fly, and worm include interactions called protein complexes that have some similarities between them. This conservation across species indicates that the interactions may serve some vital purpose. But Plasmodium, oddly, shares no protein complexes with worm or fly and only three with yeast. "For a while, we struggled to figure out what was going wrong with our analysis," says Ideker. After rechecking their data, Ideker and his team concluded that Plasmodium probably just had a somewhat different interactome.

Hydrogen has been getting plenty of hype as a potential replacement transportation fuel, for cutting carbon dioxide emissions and reducing dependence on fossil fuels. But methanol would be far better than the more reactive and volatile hydrogen, argues George Olah, a chemist and Nobel laureate, in a new book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy.

Olah notes that methanol, a clean-burning liquid, would require only minor modifications to existing engines and fuel-delivery infrastructure (see "The Methanol Economy"). And manufacturing it could even make use of carbon dioxide, a source of global warming. Methanol's benefits have long been understood -- now recent advances in methanol synthesis and methanol fuel cells could make this fuel even more attractive.

Currently, about 90 percent of the worldwide production of methanol (CH₃OH) is derived from methane (CH₄), the main component of natural gas. Today's methods of making methanol have two stages: converting methane into syngas, a mixture of primarily carbon monoxide and hydrogen, and then into methanol. Although these steps have become more efficient over time, the elimination of the syngas step could save money, since it currently accounts for up to 70 percent of the cost of making methanol.

In an effort to eliminate this cost, Olah and his colleagues have explored ways of converting methane directly into methanol. "You take methane and stick in just one oxygen atom," says Olah, director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California (USC). "Easily said, but not so easily done." The problem is that methane is chemically inert, and combines readily with oxygen only at high temperatures. A catalyst helps, but commonly used catalysts themselves work only at 300 degrees Celsius or higher. At these temperatures, most of the methanol produced is oxidized to carbon dioxide and water. Indeed, methanol yields from such reactions can be as low as 2 percent.

Recently discovered lower-temperature catalysts offer better yields, says Roy Periana, associate professor of chemistry at USC. Using a platinum-based catalyst dissolved in concentrated sulfuric acid at 200 degrees Celsius, Periana has achieved a methanol yield of more than 70 percent. He's now looking for less expensive catalysts, and has found some promising ones.

Olah and his colleague Surya Prakash, professor of chemistry at the university, have developed an alternative method for converting methane to methanol, using a halogen such as bromine. In the presence of special catalysts and at less than 250 degrees Celsius, methane reacts with bromine to form methyl bromide (CH₃Br) and hydrogen bromide (HBr). Methyl bromide then reacts with water to form methanol. The bromine from the hydrogen bromide can be recovered by reaction with air, and reused.

Making methanol from natural gas -- which still involves fossil fuels and increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- is just the first step, says Olah. Chemists have long known that methanol can be made by combining carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Such a process requires considerable energy, for example, to harvest the hydrogen from water, but this energy could come from carbon-free sources such as nuclear or wind power. The carbon dioxide could be captured from flue gases, and eventually directly from the atmosphere, he says.

 

In such a system, the carbon dioxide released by burning methanol would be cancelled out by the carbon dioxide captured to make it. So the process would be carbon neutral, and the methanol produced would be a convenient liquid fuel that could replace petroleum-based fuels. If the carbon dioxide comes from air and the hydrogen from water, this method of making methanol would be like fast photosynthesis: "We don't have to wait for plant life to slowly convert excess carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons," Olah says. "We can substitute for Mother Nature."

Olah emphasizes that the methanol produced in this way would not be a new energy source, but simply a convenient way of storing energy. Its advantage over hydrogen would be the ability to use existing engines and infrastructure with only minor modifications.

In many ways, with its low emissions and an octane rating of 100, methanol is already a better fuel for internal combustion engines than gasoline. A methanol engine can run at a higher compression ratio, and is easier to cool. But methanol has some drawbacks: it has lower vapor pressure than gasoline, which makes engines sluggish on cold starts, and it burns with an invisible flame, which could be a safety hazard, since it would be hard for emergency workers to detect in an accident, for example. To mitigate these problems, methanol today is usually blended with 15 percent gasoline to make a fuel mix known as "M85."

Methanol is an even better automotive fuel when used in combination with fuel-cell technology, says Paul Erickson, assistant professor in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Davis. Fuel cells, which convert chemical energy directly into electricity, are more efficient than engines that burn fuel. The hydrogen fuel cell, in particular, has been widely proposed as a clean and efficient alternative to gasoline-powered internal combustion engines. Erickson's laboratory has a functioning hydrogen fuel-cell bus with an onboard reactor that "reforms" methanol to produce hydrogen for its fuel cells. "We completely avoid having to store hydrogen," Erickson says.

Onboard "reforming," however, consumes space and energy. In 1993, Prakash, Olah, and a team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, jointly invented a fuel cell that runs directly on a mixture of methanol and water. The cell's positive and negative electrodes are separated by a membrane designed to allow only protons from the methanol to migrate from one electrode to the other. Early versions of this membrane, however, allowed some methanol to get across and react with oxygen at the second electrode, which reduced the voltage of the cell and wasted energy in the form of heat.

In 2001, Prakash and his colleagues developed a new membrane that is both cheaper and more resistant to crossover. With this refinement, the direct methanol fuel cell gives an efficiency of 35 percent, about twice that of an internal combustion engine, but well short of its theoretical efficiency of 97 percent.

The direct methanol fuel cell is currently too expensive to be used in passenger cars. Its high cost comes mainly from the platinum and ruthenium used as catalysts. Prakash and others are developing a variety of approaches to reduce the amount of catalyst needed: making the catalyst more active, increasing its surface area, and using nanoscale methods. When this technology matures, Erickson believes it might replace the hydrogen fuel cell. "An inexpensive, high-power direct methanol fuel cell is the Holy Grail," he says.

A new process using jet fuel made from coal could reduce oil dependence, and improve fuel performance in advanced aircraft.

 

These days, most electronic circuitry comes in the form of rigid chips, but devices thin and flexible enough to be rolled up like a newspaper are fast approaching. Already, "smart" credit cards carry bendable microchips, and companies such as Fujitsu, Lucent Technologies, and E Ink are developing "electronic paper" -- thin, paperlike displays.

But most truly flexible circuits are made of organic semiconductors sprayed or stamped onto plastic sheets. Although useful for roll-up displays, organic semiconductors are just too slow for more intense computing tasks. For those jobs, you still need silicon or another high-speed inorganic semiconductor. So John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found a way to stretch silicon.

 

If bendable is good, stretchable is even better, says Rogers, especially for high-performance conformable circuits of the sort needed for so-called smart clothes or body armor. "You don't comfortably wear a sheet of plastic," he says. The potential applications of circuitry made from Roger's stretchable silicon are vast. It could be used in surgeons' gloves to create sensors that would read chemical levels in the blood and alert a surgeon to a problem, without impairing the sense of touch. It could allow a prosthetic limb to use pressure or temperature cues to change its shape.

What makes Rogers's work particularly impressive is that he works with single-crystal silicon, the same type of silicon found in microprocessors. Like any other single crystal, single-crystal silicon doesn't naturally stretch. Indeed, in order for it even to bend, it must be prepared as an ultrathin layer only a few hundred nanometers thick on a bendable surface. Rogers exploits the flexibility of thin silicon, but instead of attaching it to plastic, he affixes it in narrow strips to a stretched-out, rubber-like polymer. When the stretched polymer snaps back, the silicon strips buckle but do not break, forming "waves" that are ready to stretch out again.

Rogers's team has fabricated diodes and transistors -- the basic building blocks of electronic devices -- on the thin ribbons of silicon before bonding them to the polymer; the wavy devices work just as well as conventional rigid versions, Rogers says. In theory, that means complete circuits of the sort found in computers and other electronics would also work properly when rippled.

Rogers isn't the first researcher to build stretchable electronics. A couple of years ago, Princeton University's Sigurd Wagner and colleagues began making stretchable circuits after inventing elastic-metal interconnects. Using the stretchable metal, Wagner's group connected together rigid "islands" of silicon transistors. Although the silicon itself couldn't stretch, the entire circuit could. But, Wagner notes, his technique isn't suited to making electrically demanding circuits such as those in a Pentium chip. "The big thing that John has done is use standard, high-performance silicon," says Wagner.

Going from simple diodes to the integrated circuits needed to make sensors and other useful microchips could take at least five years, says Rogers. In the meantime, his group is working to make silicon even more flexible. When the silicon is affixed to the rubbery surface in rows, it can stretch only in one direction. By changing the strips' geometry, Rogers hopes to make devices pliable enough to be folded up like a T-shirt. That kind of resilience could make silicon's future in electronics stretch out a whole lot further.

OTHER PLAYERS
Stretchable Silicon

Stephanie Lacour -- Neuro-electronic prosthesis to repair damage to the nervous system
University of Cambridge, England

Takao Someya -- Large-area electronics based on organic transistors
University of Tokyo

Sigurd Wagner -- Electronic skin based on thin-film silicon
Princeton University 

Is China only playing nice with the United States now in order to buy time and consolidate its power so that it has the capacity to hurt it later? You'd be surprised how many Americans think this -- or maybe you wouldn't!

Who knows about China for sure? Unlike hindsight, paranoia isn't always perfect, and neither are pundits. This column, for a decade now, has advocated the maximum degree of engagement with China. But punditry about Beijing's true intentions is about as dicey as predicting the fertility of mating pandas.

Optimists can look to the soothing presentations of Chinese high priests such as Qian Qichen. Qian recently dropped by Los Angeles to promote China's views on foreign policy, as well as his book "Ten Episodes in China's Diplomacy." He is a highly influential former vice premier, who during the 1990s was virtually the vicar of articulation with regard to Chinese foreign relations.

His most recent articulation of Chinese foreign policy, in Los Angeles, spurned any mention of "communism" or "socialism." According to the silver-haired Qian, his country will threaten no one, take no prisoners (because there'll be no war), and somehow make everyone wealthier as it gets wealthier (OK, but watch your wallet, I say!).

The overall idea under conveyance to the hotel-ballroom audience was that China and America need to emphasize the steady process of cool and reasoned diplomacy, exploiting the benefits of overlapping national interests, while minimizing and managing the disruptive, if not conflict-creating, impacts of differences in interests or perspectives.

But is such a pastoral vision a realistic and sustainable formula for the Sino-U.S. relationship? Many Americans will doubt it, for it seems too good to be true.

But the alternative is too depressing to bear: It's an old-man's grumpy vision of a bilateral relationship that puts China in the bad-guy role formerly held by the late Soviet Union (the "evil empire") and triumphantly hands America the good-guy role of the world's savior.

Are the dynamics of world politics today so primitive that a new cold war is the only way forward?

Sympathy for such a grim view -- for turning back the clock, for taking sides, and for dividing the region into pro- or anti-red -- is hard to find in Asia. Recently, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ran just that idea up the Australian flagpole in trilateral talks that included otherwise amenable Japan, but she found that the Aussies were notably unenthusiastic -- an emotion that doesn't come easily to them when Americans ask for help.

So too, India has almost zero interest in serving as a China counterweight, much less joining the anti-red team. It's too weighed down by its own innumerable domestic problems (not to mention Kashmir and nuclear-armed Pakistan) to bother antagonizing anyone whose national interests might overlap with its own.

Qian's vision of pastoral persistence is a much better sell than Rice's intimations of a new bipolar world. This is also the view in another excellent and timely book: "Power Shift: China and Asia's New Dynamics." Its author, David Shambaugh of George Washington University, is one of America's most level-headed China experts. He is perhaps most famous for emphasizing that if we wish to make the Chinese into our enemy, they will become one.

Like it or not, he notes, the new power balance in Asia has been shifting from Tokyo toward Beijing -- and away from Washington. This shift is not complete and it needn't become total or alarming. America still has a huge and vital role to play in Asia unless it misplays its cards, creates an enemy out of China and in the process alienates much of the rest of Asia.

The key for Americans is to begin the process of serious and sustained public debate over what is an optimal Chinese-American relationship. Rather than seeking to enlist Asians in a China-hedging coalition, our national government needs to enlist the American people in a huge and historic national effort to understand how to maximize the harmony and minimize the friction.

Public diplomacy -- for the all-important China question -- best begins at home, not abroad. We have to convince ourselves of what our vision is before we can convince anyone else of what their vision ought to be.