How to fly a paper airplane from Germany to Australia

From: http://dvice.com/

The distance from Germany to Australia is approximately 10,000 miles. This seems like rather a long way for a paper airplane to fly. As it turns out, it's really not so hard, if you just launch a hundred of 'em from 20 miles up.

Samsung, in an effort to prove that its memory cards are durable enough for all of your high altitude paper airplane launching needs, has sponsored the launch of 100 paper airplanes from a helium balloon floating 122,000 feet above Wolfsburg, Germany. Each of the airplanes has a memory card as cargo, and the hope is that wherever the a plane lands, someone will fire up the memory card and then check in with where the plane was found. Plus, hey, free memory card!

The planes were launched on January 17, and so far, there are preliminary reports of landings in Australia, South Africa, India, Russia, Canada and even the U.S.


While the stunt is called "Project Space Planes," we wouldn't be doing our job if we didn't point out that the launch height of about 122,000 feet isn't technically space. The generally accepted boundary between space and not-space is 62 miles (or 327,000 feet), or the altitude where you basically have to be traveling at orbital velocity to keep yourself aloft.

Even if these aren't really space planes, 23 miles up isn't bad for a bunch of little planes made out of paper, and if the reports of the planes making it as far as they did are confirmed, that's a pretty epic journey. Video of the launch below.


Project Space Planes, via New Scientist

64GB iPhones and 128GB iPod Touches on the Way?

• By Charlie Sorrel
• From: http://www.wired.com/
  

Toshiba has just announced the availability of a new embedded NAND flash memory chip, which can hold up to 64GB of data. These are the chips that sit inside the iPhone and iPod Touch.

One reason that the iPod Touch usually has more memory than the iPhone is that, despite its skinny form, there is more room inside. Consequently, the Touch can fit in two chips where the iPhone only has space for one. This new release from Toshiba, then, means that the iPhone could double-up on storage and the iPod Touch could again leap ahead.

Of course, pricing of these chips will have a lot to do with when Apple actually starts to buy them. This, in combination with the now well-established launch schedule of iPhones in the summer and iPods in the Autumn means that we might be waiting a while. On the other hand, if Apple goes ahead with a camera-equipped Touch as expected, we may get a New Year surprise.

One thing we are sure of is that the days of the hard-drive based iPod Classic are now numbered.

Toshiba Launches Highest Density Embedded NAND Flash Memory Modules [Toshiba]

Highest Cpapcity Flash Memory Yet

Memory multiplied: A micrograph of a 64-gigabit flash chip, which can store four bits per memory cell--double the amount traditionally stored. Credit: SanDisk

Even with the electronics industry in the economic doldrums, memory-card maker SanDisk is betting that customers will be willing to pay to put more data in their pocket.

The company has announced a significant advance in flash-memory technology that enables 64 gigabits of data to be stored on a chip the size of a fingernail. The new, more spacious flash chips do this by holding four bits per memory cell, as opposed to the standard one or two bits per cell. SanDisk presented details of the advance at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

"Developing a four-bit-per-cell chip is a massive challenge, and we consider this to be a major breakthrough," says Khandker Quader, senior vice president of memory technology and product development at SanDisk. Quader adds that the work presented at the conference, which focuses on ensuring that data is stored reliably, has implications for generations of flash memory to come.

Flash memory has become a mainstay of the electronics industry. It is used in many gadgets, including cameras, game consoles, cell phones, and the latest laptops. Because data is stored on a flash chip as electrical charge on transistors, flash memory is subject to the famous credo set forth by Gordon Moore of Intel decades ago: that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. In other words, thanks to the shrinking size of transistors, flash memory just keeps getting more capacious.

In recent years, however, engineers have found another way to increase the capacity of flash drives, without waiting for the transistors to shrink. They do this by storing more than one bit of data per transistor, within what are referred to as multilevel cells (MLCs). In a single-level cell, data is stored using two distinct states, defined by different voltage levels. In contrast, a four-bit MLC stores information in 16 states, which translates into four bits of data per cell, or four times the amount of information.

This trick is by no means easy. Ensuring that each memory cell maintains precisely the right voltage, without disturbing that of neighboring cells, is a major challenge, says Quader. Another issue is reducing the time that it takes to write to these cells.

SanDisk tackled these problems with new algorithms that run on a flash-memory chip controller. In order to write and read data to and from cells, engineers employ some of the transistors on a flash chip to control the other transistors used to store data. These algorithms are significant factors in reliably cramming in four bits per cell.

"We've introduced a number of key concepts that allow us to manage the memory side of it," says Quader. "The complexity of this distribution is so much different than what you're doing with two bits per cell."

Usually, a single applied voltage is used to write data to a memory cell, but this approach won't work with four-bit cells because they are so small and close together. Writing to one cell can easily erase a neighboring cell due to electrical coupling effects. Using an approach called three-step programming gets around this problem. A small voltage is applied to one cell, effectively programming only 3 of its 16 states. Next, the neighboring cells are programmed to 15 and 3 levels respectively, using different voltages. Finally, the original cell is programmed a second time. Writing data in this stepwise manner produces electrical characteristics within the cell that ensure reliable storage of bits.

Because the programming scheme takes slightly longer than do traditional approaches, SanDisk developed a feature that senses the voltages stored within cells by effectively remembering the values sensed previously. The end result is a chip that can write data at a rate of 7.8 megabytes per second--close to the speed at which existing chips can be accessed. SanDisk's Quader says that the 64-gigabit chips will be in production before the second half of this year, using 43-nanometer lithography technology.

Mark Bauer, a research fellow at memory company Numonyx and chair of the conference session, says that the real innovation behind SanDisk's work is the controller technology. "You won't see four-bit flash without that controller," he says.

Bauer adds that, while some experts have predicted that flash memory is reaching its storage limits, clever engineering keeps breathing new life into the technology. "Four years ago, people were saying that flash was hitting a roadblock, but the improvements keep coming," he says. "We can't tell what solutions being explored today will solve the problems tomorrow."