In a second part of the experiment, the researchers tested the ability of the laser to selectively remove hydrogen from the surface of the silicon when other types of atoms were present, in an effort to broaden the implication of their findings. When they included deuterium atoms (a heavy form of hydrogen) on the silicon, the laser stripped away only the hydrogen, leaving the deuterium behind. (Since the deuterium atoms are heavier, they don't vibrate at the same frequency as hydrogen and are therefore invisible to the 4.8 micrometer wavelength light, Tolk explains.)

One of the next steps for the researchers, says Leonard Feldman, physics professor at Vanderbilt and a researcher on the team, is to test their bond-breaking technique on the type of silicon that has a crystal structure most commonly used in the semiconductor industry. (In the experiment, the researchers used silicon with a crystal structure that had been studied thoroughly in terms of silicon-hydrogen bond formation and breaking.) Also, he says, in order to get a broader understanding of the physical processes involved in breaking hydrogen bonds, the researchers will test materials other than silicon, such as diamond, which "tends to behave like silicon" in terms of hydrogen bonding, Tolk says.

Kotov is working with Pappas to develop retinal implants using nanomaterials. "Single-wall carbon nanotubes can be thin and compatible with the mechanics [muscle contractions] of the eye," says Kotov. Macular degeneration, a condition in which the light-sensing cells in the center of the retina break down, is the most common cause of vision loss in people over 65. To treat the disease, Kotov and Pappas hope to replace the light-sensing nerves with a combination of nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes that can sense light, convert it into an electrical signal, and send a message to the nerves that communicate between the eye and the brain. (These nerves remain intact in patients with macular degeneration.) Kotov says his nanoparticles "can even give color resolution."

But Kotov cautions that research should proceed very slowly to ensure the safety of any nanotube-based prosthetics. Researchers say that while carbon nanotubes appear to be inert and biologically harmless, their effects on the body have not yet been established experimentally (see "Tiny Toxins?").

Thomas Webster, associate professor of materials science and biomedical engineering at Brown University, is conducting some of the first experiments implanting carbon nanotubes in live animals. Webster and researchers at Yonsei University in Seoul injected a solution of carbon nanotubes and stem cells into stroke-damaged areas of rats' brains. "Without carbon nanotubes, the problem is that stem cells don't stay in the hurt area -- they migrate into healthy tissue," says Webster. In his experiments, the nanotubes helped the stem cells stay put, and their rough surfaces and conductivity coaxed the cells to develop into neurons. He says it's too early to find out "what happens to the materials after they do the job," though, or whether the nanotubes will have toxic effects in the long term.

SenseWeb is composed of three basic parts: sensors (or data-collecting units), Microsoft's database indexing scheme that sorts through the information, and the online map that lets users interact with the data. The sensors used in the project can vary in form and function, and can include thermometers, light sensors, cameras, and restaurant computers. SenseWeb puts baseline sensor information, such as location and function, into a database that's searchable by location and type of sensor information.

Then, if someone wants to check traffic conditions along a stretch of highway, for instance, the database will direct queries to cameras ("Web cams") located along the route -- and an image of traffic shows up on the map.

In order for people with sensors -- from researchers at universities to a private citizen with a Web cam -- to participate in SenseWeb, Nath says, they would have to be able to upload data to the Internet and provide information to the Microsoft group about their sensor, such as latitude, longitude, and the type of data it provides (for example, gas prices, temperature, or video).

One challenge for the SenseWeb project will be making the different types of information pulled into its database consistent enough to analyze and sort, says Samuel Madden, professor of computer science at MIT. For instance, there would need to be standard units for temperatures. "As soon as you start integrating all this data, you can imagine that weird things will happen," he says. "It's really a challenge to build tools that work with generic data and to come up with a way that anyone can publish their information."

Another, more fundamental hurdle for the SenseWeb project, Nath says, is getting people to register their sensors and sign on to the free program. Gas stations or restaurants may not even know about the project, or may not have an efficient way to pass along their data.

Therefore, in coming months, the Microsoft group will extend SenseWeb to universities that have already deployed sensors for other projects. In addition, the team is talking to a company that has sensors on parking spots, which, if integrated into Live Local, could help people find available parking more easily, he says.

For now, though, SenseWeb and Live Local are separate projects, according to Nath. The Live Local team "really loves this technology," he says, but right now "what's missing is the actual data."

Researchers in Microsoft's Interactive Visual Media Group have unveiled a software application that creates a panoramic, four-gigapixel image out of hundreds of smaller pictures, a technology that could be integrated into Windows Live Local to provide more visually accurate and interactive navigation for online maps.

The panorama shot, demonstrated at the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Road Show in Mountain View, CA, this week, was composed of about 750 smaller digital images, captured by an off-the-shelf digital camera mounted atop a building in Seattle. Then the composite pictures were stitched together almost seamlessly by automated software developed by Microsoft researchers.

This big picture illustrated technology that's part of ongoing work by the software giant to expand its online mapping platform, Windows Live Local, currently in its beta (or testing) phase. Live Local already provides traditional street maps and top-down views culled from satellites images for almost all of the United States, as well as actual photos of a handful of cities that allow viewers to look at buildings from an angled perspective -- what Microsoft refers to as "Bird's Eye" images.

The company plans to take the image-processing techniques demonstrated in these panoramas and apply them to the Bird's Eye images, which are taken from planes flying at low altitudes over cities. This would allow future versions of Live Local to offer images stitched together for easier navigation, says Matt Uyttendaele, a Microsoft researcher who worked on the panorama project. Currently, Live Local offers only the angled view for a small part of the city at a time; in order to look beyond that view, another picture must be loaded into the browser.

Within the past year, competition for the best online mapping application has increased between Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo (see "Mapmaking at Microsoft"). Many experts believe that the Bird's Eye images distinguish Microsoft maps from others by providing a more natural view of a city. Now panoramic views, such as those taken by the Microsoft researchers, could be even more useful for mapping purposes because multiple cameras placed on multiple buildings could provide more views of site, says Rick Bobbit, founder of GeoSpatial Experts, a Thorton, CO-based company. By placing cameras all around a city atop buildings, "you could get a whole bunch of different angles, and that would be useful," he says.

That's in stark contrast to Google's online mapping tool, for instance, which offers street maps, top-down satellite images, and a view that combines the two. But satellite images mostly provide information about the tops of buildings and their geometries, while Microsoft's angled view offers pictures of storefronts or geographic nuances that a satellite can miss. The close-up, angled view can be more useful for actually navigating in an unfamiliar area, Bobbit says.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Google Inc. has seeped into many aspects of online life across the globe, but the Internet search engine has failed so far to make any notable inroads in one of the world's most-wired countries: South Korea.

Users here are some of the most Internet-savvy in the world, with millions of people running their own blogs and taking advantage of omnipresent broadband hookups and Wi-Fi hotspots.

South Koreans would seem like natural Google users, but the leading search engine is merely a bit player.

Google referred only about 17 percent of unique visitors to other sites in March, according to the Web analytics company WebSideStory. Another research company, KoreanClick, found that Google's Korean site referred only about 10.8 percent of unique visitors in February.

The search-engine field here is ruled by local NHN Corp.'s Naver Web site, whose links accounted for nearly 58.4 percent of search referrals, according to WebSideStory. KoreanClick's tally of Naver's share was even higher -- nearly 80 percent. Daum Communications was second with more than 48 percent, and U.S.-based Yahoo's Korean-language site No. 3 at 32 percent.

Why hasn't Google, which last week surprised investors with a 60 percent surge in first-quarter profit, done better in this technological hotbed? After all, its worldwide referral rate was more than 63 percent in March, according to WebSideStory. And while announcing its results, Google cited growth in international markets as a big factor.

Experts say Google's struggles here stem from unique factors in the Korean market, as well as Google's reliance on its software rather than human expertise to get search results.

The Korean slice of the Web is relatively small compared to the English-language chunks of cyberspace. Koreans often come up short when trying to find information in their native tongue.

To remedy the situation, Naver -- which is more like a Yahoo-esque portal than a mere search engine -- came up with what it calls Knowledge iN, where users post questions that are answered by other users -- creating a database that now totals more than 41.1 million entries. A search on the site brings up typical Web results along with the Knowledge iN database and news and blog sites.

''I don't know whether they expected it before or not, but it was actually a very good match for Korean culture,'' Wayne Lee, an analyst at Woori Securities, said of Naver's service. ''Korean netizens like to interact with other people, they want to answer questions, they want to reply.''

The most popular questions clicked on Naver's site focus on love, dieting or eradicating computer viruses. The queries that have garnered the most answers range from how dinosaurs are named to getting rid of pimples, and even musings on why telephone poles are spaced 50 meters (165 feet) apart.

Google relies on its computers to troll the Web and see which sites are linked most often by other sites, creating a ranking system based on how often a page is referenced. Compared to Naver's people-created database, Google doesn't ''have a system to combat that,'' said Danny Sullivan, editor of industry newsletter Search Engine Watch.

Exalead, a Paris-based company, is experimenting with a new search model. It believes that by combining the approach of "enterprise" search and Google-like page-ranking search, individuals will be able to surf the ever-expanding Web more thoroughly and efficiently.

Enterprise search, which scours the intranets of institutions, has been the previous focus of Exalead's products. It differs from Google's page-ranking Web search approach: Google's tack is to give a higher rank to Web pages with more incoming links, explains Dan Gruhl, research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. This approach has created a "dark" Web, however, in which a large amount of data goes unread. Companies don't have the luxury of having all of their documents ranked, Gruhl says, and therefore page ranking algorithms "work pretty poorly" in the enterprise search environment.

In contrast, enterprise search software finds relevant items by processing an entire document or file "as a concept," Gruhl says. It's able to extract the meaning of a document, instead of just scanning it for key words. This allows the engine to search for terms in documents that weren't even entered by the user. For instance, if an employee at a pharmaceutical company searches for "aspirin," the search software would extend the search to "pain killers" and "COX inhibitors" as well.

This is the crux of Exalead's blending of a Web-based and an enterprise search approach, with the entire set of search features needed to find a specific file applied at the user-search level.

Using Exalead, an individual has a variety of options: searching by phonetic spelling, by six different languages, by specific document type (.pdf or .doc are two examples), and by date, continent, or country.

While many of these features are similar to Google's "Advanced Search option," Exalead also offers a "related terms section," in case the initial search terms don't bring up the intended results. This enables what François Bourdoncle, the company's CEO, calls "serendipitous search," in which a person can find something even when he or she doesn't ask the right question.

These related terms help distinguish Exalead from Google's advanced search, by allowing users to start at one search query and progressively narrow it down. For instance, a search on "greenhouse effect" could yield the related term "greenhouse gases." From there, a user can further narrow the search to geography, or types of document, for example. Then, one could return to the initial search and narrow down again, using a different related term.

Still, searching the Web effectively, even with this hybrid approach, is not technologically easy, Bourdoncle says, and it has taken his team of engineers -- many of whom came from Alta Vista, the Internet's first viable search engine -- about eight years to put in place.

Networks applying their S-band system will be able to use satellites to provide universal coverage over nine channels, Baujard says. Meanwhile, in cities, ground-based transmitters would provide on-demand access to a virtually unlimited range of TV channels and movies.

Baujard says that the AII funding will enable Alcatel and its partners to accelerate the process of developing the system from handset to satellite. He predicts that by 2008 consumers will be watching S-band-ready handhelds on the first trial networks in Europe, and he looks to China, India, and Brazil for future growth. (Frequency issues will delay entry in the United States, though, where cordless phones and some other applications already use the S-band.)

No one disputes Alcatel's suggestion that its mobile TV technology could be worth €10 billion in revenues in 2010. But many are skeptical of AII's more aggressive infotech project. Led by French home electronics manufacturer Thomson, with €90 million in funding from AII, this project, called Quaero, is Chirac's answer to the U.S. dominance of the Internet in general and Google in particular.

Quaero's promise is to develop sophisticated search, translation, and voice-recognition tools, the latter for crawling through and making available the Web's growing podcasts and video clips. The problem, according to critics, such as IT consultant Mons, is that the wrong player is at the top. Rather than Thomson, they say, the AII funding should have gone to a more agile and smarter player: Paris-based Exalead (see "The Enterprise Approach to Search").

France's much neglected search engine innovator Exalead has struggled to find financing since its founding in 2000. Virtually unknown in the United States, its search engine offers extensive options for narrowing a search and viewing the results, including thumbnails of each page. Instead of leading the Quaero program, however, Exalead will participate as one of five startups and even more research labs in Thomson's consortium.

It's a good sign that France's leaders are asking why Europe has yet to produce an infotech success story like Google, says Mons -- but their top-down solution shows they have a ways to go. "There is no innovation," says Mons, "in innovation management in Europe."

Bernard Buisson, coauthor of a recent book on the process of developing new ideas into products, Objectif Innovation, agrees. "Instead of enabling the creation of new companies," he says, "the [French] state is going to waste several billion euros in large projects that won't deliver."