Robotic Bug Gets Wings, Sheds Light On Evolution of Flight

Adding wings to a robotic bug improved running performance and stability. However, the boost may not have been good enough for flight. (Credit: Image by Kevin Peterson, UC Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, All rights reserved.)

When engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, outfitted a six-legged robotic bug with wings in an effort to improve its mobility, they unexpectedly shed some light on the evolution of flight.

Even though the wings significantly improved the running performance of the 10-centimeter-long robot -- called DASH, short for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod -- they found that the extra boost would not have generated enough speed to launch the critter from the ground. The wing flapping also enhanced the aerial performance of the robot, consistent with the hypothesis that flight originated in gliding tree-dwellers.

The research team, led by Ron Fearing, professor of electrical engineering and head of the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley, reports its conclusions online on Oct. 18, in the peer-reviewed journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

Using robot models could play a useful role in studying the origins of flight, particularly since fossil evidence is so limited, the researchers noted.

First unveiled by Fearing and graduate student Paul Birkmeyer in 2009, DASH is a lightweight, speedy robot made of inexpensive, off-the-shelf materials, including compliant fiber board with legs driven by a battery-powered motor. Its small size makes it a candidate for deployment in areas too cramped or dangerous for humans to enter, such as collapsed buildings.

A robot gets its wings

But compared with its biological inspiration, the cockroach, DASH had certain limitations as to where it could scamper. Remaining stable while going over obstacles is fairly tricky for small robots, so the researchers affixed DASH with lateral and tail wings borrowed from a store-bought toy to see if that would help.

"Our overall goal is to give our robots the same all-terrain capabilities that other animals have," said Fearing. "In the real world, there will be situations where flying is a better option than crawling, and other places where flying won't work, such as in confined or crowded spaces. We needed a hybrid running-and-flying robot."

The researchers ran tests on four different configurations of the robotic roach, now called DASH+Wings. The test robots included one with a tail only and another that just had the wing's frames, to determine how the wings impacted locomotion.

With its motorized flapping wings, DASH+Wings' running speed nearly doubled, going from from 0.68 meters per second with legs alone to 1.29 meters per second. The robot could also take on steeper hills, going from an incline angle of 5.6 degrees to 16.9 degrees.

"With wings, we saw improvements in performance almost immediately," said study lead author Kevin Peterson, a Ph.D. student in Fearing's lab. "Not only did the wings make the robot faster and better at steeper inclines, it could now keep itself upright when descending. The wingless version of DASH could survive falls from eight stories tall, but it would sometimes land upside down, and where it landed was partly guided by luck."

The flapping wings improved the lift-drag ratio, helping DASH+Wings land on its feet instead of just plummeting uncontrolled. Once it hit the ground, the robot was able to continue on its way. Wind tunnel experiments showed that it is aerodynamically capable of gliding at an angle up to 24.7 degrees.

Tree-dwellers vs. ground-runners

The engineering team's work caught the attention of animal flight expert Robert Dudley, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, who noted that the most dominant theories on flight evolution have been primarily derived from scant fossil records and theoretical modeling.

He referenced previous computer models suggesting that ground-dwellers, given the right conditions, would need only to triple their running speed in order to build up enough thrust for takeoff. The fact that DASH+Wings could maximally muster a doubling of its running speed suggests that wings do not provide enough of a boost to launch an animal from the ground. This finding is consistent with the theory that flight arose from animals that glided downwards from some height.

"The fossil evidence we do have suggests that the precursors to early birds had long feathers on all four limbs, and a long tail similarly endowed with a lot of feathers, which would mechanically be more beneficial for tree-dwelling gliders than for runners on the ground," said Dudley.

Dudley said that the winged version of DASH is not a perfect model for proto-birds -- it has six legs instead of two, and its wings use a sheet of plastic rather than feathers -- and thus cannot provide a slam-dunk answer to the question of how flight evolved.

"What the experiments did do was to demonstrate the feasibility of using robot models to test hypotheses of flight origins," he said. "It's the proof of concept that we can actually learn something useful about biological performance through systematic testing of a physical model."

Among other robotic insects being tested in the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab is a winged, bipedal robot called BOLT (Bipedal Ornithopter for Locomotion Transitioning) that more closely resembles the size and aerodynamics of precursors to flying birds and insects.

"It's still notable that adding wings to DASH resulted in marked improvements in its ability to get around," said Fearing. "It shows that flapping wings may provide some advantages evolutionarily, even if it doesn't enable flight."

The National Science Foundation's Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory helped support this research.

An Unexpected Player in a Cancer Defense System

 Researchers of Karolinska Institutet and the University of Cologne, Germany, have identified a new protein involved in a defense mechanism against cancer. The VCP/p97 complex is best known for its role in protein destruction and is involved in a type of familial dementia and ALS. In a novel study the researchers now describe how this complex also plays an important role in regulating the recruitment of the tumor suppressor protein 53BP1 to damaged DNA -- suggesting an important role for VCP/p97 in our body's defense against cancer.

Damage of DNA is potentially very dangerous and linked to the development of cancer. Since DNA damage is unavoidable, our cells are equipped with a sophisticated defense system that activates repair mechanisms. This process is initiated by binding of sensor proteins to the damaged DNA that in turn bind and activate other proteins responsible for repairing the damage. During the last decade, it has become clear how many of those proteins are recruited to the damaged DNA, but the mechanism by which the tumor suppressor 53BP1 finds its way has been puzzling.

The surprising finding of this study, presented in the scientific journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, is not only the identity of the new player but also how it is doing the job. By following proteins in cells with DNA damage, the researchers found that the VCP/p97 complex is among the proteins that are being recruited to DNA damage. This was unanticipated since VCP/p97 is known to be primarily involved in the destruction of defective proteins. VCP/p97 is doing this by unwinding them so that the waste proteins can be chopped in pieces by dedicated enzymes. This important function also explains its involvement in a type of familial dementia and ALS since this kind of waste proteins typically pile up in these diseases.

It turns out that VCP/p97 is doing something similar at damaged DNA although with a very different outcome. The work shows that VCP/p97 facilitates the binding of 53BP1 by removing a protein that occupies the places where 53BP1 can bind. So instead of unwinding a protein to prepare it for destruction, VCP/p97 pulls a protein out of the way for 53BP1. The researchers also show that worms that have less of this complex are very sensitive to DNA damage supporting an important and evolutionary conserved role of VCP/p97 in DNA damage control. This new mechanism of recruiting a protein by removing another one that gets in the way sheds new light onto how the tumor suppressor 53BP1 finds damaged DNA. An important question that remains is if VCP/p97 plays similar roles in other processes.

Galaxy DNA-Analysis Software Is Now Available 'in the Cloud'

The Galaxy platform helps researchers to analyze vast quantities of DNA-sequence data. (Credit: National Institutes of Health).

Galaxy -- an open-source, web-based platform for data-intensive biomedical and genetic research -- is now available as a "cloud computing" resource.

A team of researchers including Anton Nekrutenko, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University; Kateryna Makova, an associate professor of biology at Penn State; and James Taylor from Emory University, developed the new technology, which will help scientists and biomedical researchers to harness such tools as DNA-sequencing and analysis software, as well as storage capacity for large quantities of scientific data. Details of the development will be published as a letter in the journal Nature Biotechnology. Earlier papers by Nekrutenko and co-authors describing the technology and its uses are published in the journals Genome Research and Genome Biology.

Nekrutenko said that he and his team first developed the Galaxy computing system (http://galaxyproject.org) in 2005 because "biology is in a state of shock. Biochemistry and biology labs generate mountains of data, and then scientists wonder, 'What do we do now? How do we analyze all these data?'" Galaxy, which was developed at Penn State and continues to use the University's servers for its computing power, solves many of the problems that researchers encounter by pulling together a variety of tools that allow for easy retrieval and analysis of large amounts of data, simplifying the process of genomic analysis. As described in one of the team's early papers in the journal Genome Research, Galaxy "combines the power of existing genome-annotation databases with a simple Web portal to enable users to search remote resources, combine data from independent queries, and visualize the results." Galaxy also allows other researchers to be able to review the steps that have been taken, for example, in the analysis of a string of genetic code. "Galaxy offers scientific transparency -- the option of creating a public report of analyses. So, after a paper has been published, scientists in other labs can do studies in order to reproduce the results described," Nekrutenko said.

Now, Nekrutenko's team has taken Galaxy to the next level by developing an "in the cloud" option using, for example, the popular Amazon Web Services cloud. "A cloud is basically a network of powerful computers that can be accessed remotely without the need to worry about heating, cooling, and system administration. Such a system allows users, no matter where they are in the world, to shift the workload of software storage, data storage, and hardware infrastructure to this remote location of networked computers," Nekrutenko explained. "Rather than run Galaxy on one's own computer or use Penn State's servers to access Galaxy, now a researcher can harness the power of the cloud, which allows almost unlimited computing power." As a case study, the authors report on recent research published in Genome Biology in which scientists, with the help of Ian Paul, a professor of pediatrics at Penn State's Hershey Medical Center, analyzed DNA from nine individuals across three families using Galaxy Cloud. Thanks to the enormous computing power of the platform, the researchers were able to identify four heteroplasmic sites -- variations in mitochondria, the part of the genome passed exclusively from mother to child.

"Galaxy Cloud offers many advantages other than the obvious ones, such as computing power for large amounts of data and the ability for a scientist without much computer training to use DNA-analysis tools that might not otherwise be accessible," Nekrutenko said. "For example, researchers need not invest in expensive computer infrastructure to be able to perform data-intensive, sophisticated scientific analyses."

Yet another advantage of Galaxy Cloud is its data-storage capacity. Using the Amazon Web Services cloud, researchers have the option of storing vast amounts of data in a secure location. "There are emerging technologies that will produce 100 times more data than existing 'next-generation' DNA sequencing, which already has reached the point where even more storage becomes an issue, not to mention analysis," Nekrutenko said.

In addition to Nekrutenko, Makova, and Taylor, other authors of the research report include Nate Coraor and Hiroki Goto of the Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics at Penn State and Enis Afgan and Dannon Baker of the Department of Biology and the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Emory University. Galaxy Cloud development was supported, primarily, by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Science Foundation. Additional funding was provided by the Pennsylvania Department of

Health.

Highly Efficient Method for Creating Flexible, Transparent Electrodes Developed

As the market for liquid crystal displays and other electronics continues to drive up the price of indium -- the material used to make the indium tin oxide (ITO) transparent electrodes in these devices -- scientists have been searching for a less costly and more dynamic alternative, particularly for use in future flexible electronics.

Besides its high price, ITO has several drawbacks. It's brittle, making it impractical for use in flexible displays and solar cells, and there is a lack of availability of indium, which is found primarily in Asia. Further, the production of ITO films is relatively inefficient.

Now, researchers at UCLA report in the journal ACS Nano that they have developed a unique method for producing transparent electrodes that uses silver nanowires in combination with other nanomaterials. The new electrodes are flexible and highly conductive and overcome the limitations associated with ITO.

For some time, silver nanowire (AgNW) networks have been seen as promising candidates to replace ITO because they are flexible and each wire is highly conductive. But complicated treatments have often been required to fuse crossed AgNWs to achieve low resistance and good substrate adhesion. To address this, the UCLA researchers demonstrated that by fusing AgNWs with metal-oxide nanoparticles and organic polymers, they could efficiently produce highly transparent conductors.

The team of researchers represents a collaboration between the department of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science; the department of chemistry and biochemistry in the UCLA College of Letters and Science; and the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA.

The team was led by Yang Yang, a professor of materials science and engineering, and Paul Weiss, director of the CNSI and a professor of materials science and engineering and of chemistry and biochemistry.

"In this work, we demonstrate a simple and effective solution method to achieve highly conductive AgNW composite films with excellent optical transparency and mechanical properties," said Yang who also directs the Nano Renewable Energy Center at the CNSI. "This is by far the best solution: a processed, transparent electrode that is compatible with a wide variety of substrate choices."

Scientists can easily spray a surface with the nanowires to make a transparent mat, but the challenge is to make the silver nanowires adhere to the surface more securely without the use of extreme temperatures (200° C) or high pressures, steps that make the nanomaterials less compatible with the sensitive organic materials typically used to make flexible electronics.

To meet this challenge, Rui Zhu, the paper's first author, developed a low-temperature method to make high-performance transparent electrodes from silver nanowires using spray coating of a unique combination of nanomaterials.

First, researchers sprayed a solution of commercially available silver nanowires onto a surface. They then treated the nanowires with a solution of titanium dioxide nanoparticles to create a hybrid film. As the film dries, capillary forces pull the nanowires together, improving the film's conductivity. The scientists then coated the film with a layer of conductive polymer to increase the wires' adhesion to the surface.

The AgNW composite meshes are highly conductive, with excellent optical transparency and mechanical properties. The research team also built solar cells using the new electrodes and found that their performance was comparable to that of solar cells made with indium tin oxide.

The research received support from the Office of Naval Research and the Kavli Foundation.

NASA Launches Sophisticated Rover on Journey to Mars

A rendering of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, known as Curiosity, on the surface of Mars.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The world’s biggest extraterrestrial explorer, NASA’s Curiosity rover, rocketed toward Mars on Saturday on a search for evidence that the planet might once have been home to microscopic life.

It will take eight and a half months for Curiosity to make the 345-million-mile journey to Mars.

The rover, officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory, was hoisted into a cloudy sky on Saturday morning by an Atlas V rocket. More than 13,000 guests crowded the Cape Canaveral space center for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s first mission to Earth’s next-door neighbor in four years, and the first launching of a Martian rover in eight years.

Pan Conrad, a NASA astrobiologist whose instrument seeking carbon compounds is on the rover, had a shirt made for the occasion. The blue blouse was emblazoned with rockets, planets and the words “Next stop Mars!”

The one-ton Curiosity is a mobile, nuclear-powered laboratory holding 10 scientific instruments that will sample Martian soil and rocks, analyzing them on the spot. It also has a drill and a stone-zapping laser machine.

It is “really a rover on steroids,” said Colleen Hartman, assistant associate administrator for science at NASA. “It’s an order of magnitude more capable than anything we have ever launched to any planet in the solar system.”

The primary goal of the $2.5 billion mission is to see whether Mars might once have been hospitable for microbial life — or might even still be conducive to life. No actual life detectors are on board; rather, the instruments will hunt for organic compounds.

With Mars the eventual goal for astronauts, NASA will also use Curiosity to measure radiation on the planet. The rover also has a weather station that will measure temperature, wind and humidity, and a computer application with daily weather updates is planned.

The world has launched more than three dozen missions to Mars, the planet most like Earth in the solar system. Yet fewer than half of those quests have succeeded.

This month, a Russian spacecraft ended up stuck in orbit around Earth, rather than en route to the Martian moon Phobos.

“Mars really is the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system,” Ms. Hartman said. “It’s the death planet, and the United States of America is the only nation in the world that has ever landed and driven robotic explorers on the surface of Mars, and now we’re set to do it again.”

Curiosity’s landing next August will be particularly hair-raising.

In a protective “aeroshell,” the rover will be lowered onto the Martian surface via a jet pack and a tether system similar to the sky cranes used to lower heavy equipment into remote areas on Earth.

Curiosity is too heavy to use air bags, as its much smaller predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity, did in 2004. Besides, the new method should provide for a more accurate landing. Astronauts will need to make similarly precise landings on Mars one day.

Curiosity will spend at least two years roaming around Gale Crater, chosen as the landing site because it is rich in minerals. Scientists have said that if there is any place on Mars that might have been ripe for life, that would be it.

“I like to say it’s extraterrestrial real estate appraisal,” Ms. Conrad said with a laugh last week.

Curiosity’s seven-foot robotic arm has a jackhammer on the end to drill into the rock, and a seven-foot mast is topped with high-definition and laser cameras. No previous Martian rover has been so sophisticated or capable.

The rover, about 10 feet long and 9 feet wide, should be able to go farther and work harder than any previous Mars explorer because of its power source: 10.6 pounds of radioactive plutonium. The nuclear generator was encased in several protective layers in case of a launching accident.

NASA expects the rover to put at least 12 miles on its odometer.

This is NASA’s third space mission to be launched from Cape Canaveral since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet this summer. The Juno probe is en route to Jupiter, and the Grail mission’s twin spacecraft are set to arrive on the Moon on New Year’s Eveand New Year’s Day.

What’s in a Name? Ask Google

KALIA is a stripper name, but Kaleya is not, her parents-to-be concluded.

No offense to the Kalias of the world, but Lecia and Thor Kaslofsky decided this two years ago, after conducting a Google search of names they were considering for their first child.

A search for Kalia pulled up several images of scantily clad women. “I didn’t want there to be a Google identity for her to wrestle with,” said Ms. Kaslofsky, a corporate investigator in San Francisco. So the couple, who wanted an uncommon name, came up with a creative spelling that sounds the same as kah-LEE-ah: Kaleya.

Another Google search didn’t raise any red flags, and thus a name was born. “The Kaleyas online were an illustrator of goth posters and a Spanish metal band,” she said.

In our still-budding digital world, where public and private spheres cross-pollinate in unpredictable ways, perhaps it’s not surprising that soon-to-be parents now routinely turn to Google to vet baby names. A quick search can help ensure that a child is not saddled with the name of a serial killer, pornography star or sex offender.

But what’s new is the level of complexity that Google and other search engines have brought to the name game. Some parents want names that are unique so their child will rise to the top of future search results. Others want names that are uncommon enough to bestow uniqueness, but not so exotic that they would be considered weird on the playground. A rare few want their child’s name to get lost in a virtual crowd.

While there are no reliable statistics on the matter, a small survey on LilSugar, a parenting and pop culture site, found that 64 percent of respondents had Googled their baby’s name before settling on it.

Uniqueness seems to be a primary motive and has spurred an unspoken competition among parents to find the most original names, said Laura Wattenberg, author of “The Baby Name Wizard,” a guide for selecting a name. “Parents thinking of a baby name will type it in and say: ‘Oh, no, it’s taken. There are already three others with that name.’ ”

But too little research can backfire, too. Deborah Goldstein, 43, and her partner, Gabriella Di Maggio, thought they had chosen unique names for their boys: Levi and Asher. To be sure, they checked the Social Security Administration’s list of most popular baby names. Neither was in the top 100.

“I did not want them to have names where there were 15 in their class like I was,” Ms. Goldstein said. “There were a lot of Debbies back then”

But shortly after the couple moved to South Orange, N.J., in 2006, they had a rude awakening. While waiting at an ice cream parlor, they heard a woman shout “Asher!” at a different boy.

“It was two other Jewish lesbian moms with a child of the same name,” Ms. Goldstein said. Google had let her down. “It didn’t tell us it’s a unique name unless you move to a neighborhood outside New York City where other trendy Jews are moving, too.”

More common, it seems, are parents who strive for a middle ground. “You want your kid to be unique enough so there aren’t 80 of them, but not so unique that they seem weird,” said Doug Moe, a comedian in Brooklyn whose show, “Doug Moe Is a Bad Dad,” is playing at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. His 5-year-old daughter, Phoebe, he points out, shares a first and last name with at least two other Phoebe Moes online.

It’s the rare parent, it seems, who wants a common name for a child. New parents, after all, envision future presidents, Super Bowl winners and cancer curers, not Vatican streakers or college beer-bong guzzlers.

But maybe common names are more prudent. A recent study by the online security firm AVG found that 92 percent of children under 2 in the United States have some kind of online presence, whether a tagged photo, sonogram image or Facebook page. Life, it seems, begins not at birth but with online conception. And a child’s name is the link to that permanent record.

“When you name your baby, it’s a time of dreaming,” Ms. Wattenberg said. “No one stops and thinks, ‘What if one day my child does something embarrassing and wants to hide from it?’ ”

Maybe the wisest approach in our searchable new world is to let computers do the naming.

Lindsey Pollak, a writer on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who specializes in career advice, fancied the name Chloe when she was pregnant with her daughter. Her husband, Evan Gotlib, wanted Zoe.

To settle the feud, they downloaded a 99-cent iPhone app called Kick to Pick. After typing in the two names, they held the phone to Ms. Pollak’s stomach, as the phone alternated between the two. When the fetus kicked, the phone froze on one name, like a coin toss. It came up Chloe for each of the four tries.

The next thing Ms. Pollak did, of course, was to Google it. “One of the Web sites said Chloe means little green shoots, and we liked that,” Ms. Pollak said. Chloe it was. They even registered their unborn child’s first and last name as a domain name and signed her up on Tumblr, Twitter and G-mail.

The Kaslofskys wish they had had that foresight. When they Googled Kaleya in 2009, there were only a few relevant results. But since then, the parents of another child named Kaleya have started posting videos of that little girl’s adventures on YouTube, with titles like “Kaleya Makes a Snow Angel” and “Kaleya Runs From a Wave.”

Ms. Kaslofsky is miffed. “Things have changed in the last three years,” she said.

Luckily, she’ll get a second chance: Ms. Kaslofsky is pregnant with her second child, a boy. “We are probably going to name him Lucian, which is related to a family name of Thor’s, and call him Luke.” she said.

Why? “We like the name.”

Turn On the Server. It’s Cold Inside.

TO satisfy our ever-growing need for computing power, many technology companies have moved their work to data centers with tens of thousands of power-gobbling servers. Concentrated in one place, the servers produce enormous heat. The additional power needed for cooling them — up to half of the power used to run them — is the steep environmental price we have paid to move data to the so-called cloud.

Researchers, however, have come up with an intriguing option for that wasted heat: putting it to good use in people’s homes.

Two researchers at the University of Virginia and four at Microsoft Research explored this possibility in a paper presented this year at the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”

They acknowledge that it is more likely that data furnaces, if adopted, would be placed first in basements of office and apartment buildings, not in individual homes. But as a “thought-provoking exercise,” the authors give homes the bulk of their attention.

If a home has a broadband Internet connection, it can serve as a micro data center. One, two or three cabinets filled with servers could be installed where the furnace sits and connected with the existing circulation fan and ductwork. Each cabinet could have slots for, say, 40 motherboards — each one counting as a server. In the coldest climate, about 110 motherboards could keep a home as toasty as a conventional furnace does.

The rest of the year, the servers would still run, but the heat generated would be vented to the outside, as harmless as a clothes dryer’s. The researchers suggest that only if the local temperature reached 95 degrees or above would the machines need to be shut down to avoid overheating. (Of course, adding a new outside vent on the side of the house could give some homeowners pause.)

According to the researchers’ calculations, a conventional data center must invest about $400 a year to run each server, or about $16,000 for a cabinet filled with 40 of them. (This includes the costs of building a bricks-and-mortar center and of cooling the machines.)

Having homes host the machines could reduce the need for a company to build new data centers. And the company’s cost to operate the same cabinet in a home would be less than $3,600 a year — and leave a smaller carbon footprint, too. The company’s data center could thus cover the homeowner’s electricity costs for the servers and still come out way ahead financially.

THE machines would remain under the remote control of the company’s centralized data center, and their workings would remain opaque. Network traffic and data would have to be encrypted. Sensors would warn if the cabinet was opened. If a server failed, its tasks would be automatically reassigned to another — in cloud computing, software is built with the expectation that an individual machine can break at any time.

A data furnace would be best suited for computing tasks that aren’t time-sensitive and can be broken into chunks performed by thousands of machines — say, for scientific research.

The idea awaits one big-name Internet company to give it a try — and to be willing to give prospective users enough financial incentive so they’ll consent to have servers take the place of their furnaces in the basement.

I asked Kamin Whitehouse, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Virginia and a co-author of the research paper, how the computer science world had reacted to the idea. “We’ve gotten a very strong response, more than I usually get after publishing a scientific paper,” he said. “We heard from several people who are already heating their homes with computer systems, which shows that it works. Our contribution is to show that the data furnace also has lower cost and lower energy than a conventional data center.”

Winston Saunders, a physicist who serves as an alternate board member of the Green Grid, a nonprofit industry group that promotes environmentally friendly data centers, read the data furnace paper and is enthusiastic about the concept. Mr. Saunders is director of data center power initiatives at Intel, but spoke on behalf of the Green Grid.

“I’ve got a little house in the middle of the Oregon mountains.” he said. “I have baseboard electric heaters in it right now that cost me a fortune to run. What if I had a ‘baseboard data center’? It would just sit there and produce the same amount of heat with the same amount of electricity. But it would also do computing, such as decoding DNA, analyzing protein structures or finding a cure for cancer.”

I.B.M. Research-Zurich is designing water-cooled servers whose waste heat can be carried in pipes to nearby buildings. Next year, it plans to demonstrate the technology with SuperMUC, a supercomputer under construction in Munich that will be more powerful than 110,000 PCs.

Many cities in Europe already have insulated pipes in place for centralized “district heating.” Heat generated by data centers is beginning to be distributed to neighboring homes and commercial buildings — in Helsinki, for example. But for the rest of us, without such pipes near our homes, the computing would need to be done under our own roof to put the heat to good use.

If tech companies with data centers like the economics of home-based data furnaces, they could offer heating for homeowners at an irresistible price: free.

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Phone Hacking Tied to Terrorists

Four people in the Philippines hacked into the accounts of AT&T business customers in the United States and diverted money to a group that financed terrorist attacks across Asia, according to police officials in the Philippines.

A statement from the Philippines Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, a law enforcement agency, said three men and one woman had been arrested in raids across the capital, Manila, last week.

According to the agency, the men were working with a group called Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda and responsible for the 2002 bombings in Bali, which killed 202 people.

The group has been held responsible for several other terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia, mostly in Indonesia but including the Philippines.

If the new accusation holds up, it would point to a troubling connection between hackers and terrorist cells.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Saturday that it was working with the police in the Philippines on the investigation into the telephone hacking effort, which apparently began as early as 2009.

The suspects remotely gained access to the telephone operating systems of an unspecified number of AT&T clients and used them to call telephone numbers that passed on revenues to the suspects.

AT&T said it reimbursed its customers for the charges. It said in a statement that “its network were neither targeted nor breached by the hackers.”

The company declined to say how many business customers were affected, nor how much it cost AT&T. The Philippines police agency’s statement said the scheme cost $2 million. It is known as a “remote toll fraud” and singles out telephone accounts that are protected by weak passwords.

Two Wall Street Titans, and a Seven-Year Tiff

Carl Icahn says William Ackman is “now the young gunfighter who wants to show he beat the older gunfighter with a big reputation.”

AS Wall Street smackdowns go, this one’s a doozy.

In one corner is Carl C. Icahn, the corporate raider who made C.E.O.’s tremble back in the 1980s and, at 75, is still chasing deals.

In the other is William A. Ackman, 45, one of Mr. Icahn’s figurative heirs and a leading practitioner of the bruising, Icahnesque craft politely known as activist investing.

These ultrarich men battled for seven years in multiple courts, over a relatively paltry $4.5 million. That might be real money to mere mortals, but to these two, it’s barely a rounding error.

So why bother? This battle, it turns out, was more about big egos than big money — and it has left both men spitting expletives. The scrape finally ended this month, with Mr. Ackman victorious. But, before it was over, the affair occupied a Who’s Who of powerful lawyers and ran up millions of dollars in legal fees, all because of an otherwise forgettable deal the pair cut back in 2004.

“The guy is a shakedown artist,” Mr. Ackman sneers. “His word is worthless.”

Mr. Icahn says: “He’s now the young gunfighter who wants to show he beat the older gunfighter with a big reputation. He just likes pounding himself on the chest.”

In the secretive world of hedge funds, most money managers prefer to keep low. Not Mr. Icahn and Mr. Ackman. They are media hounds who court public attention and regularly star at investor conferences. Both buy stakes in companies and agitate for change. Both bemoan what they see as management failures and try to shame companies into replacing their C.E.O.’s, shake up their boards and do whatever it takes to bolster the value of their investments.

In many ways, this is a generational battle, a clash of old Wall Street and new Wall Street. Mr. Icahn may at times seem trapped in the 1980s, right down to his Gecko-esque blue shirts with white collars and cuffs. After 50 years in this game, he still seems to think that most companies would be better off if they would just listen to Carl C. Icahn.

Mr. Ackman is the smart-alecky boy wonder in a crisp modern suit and a Charvet tie. He, too, has become wildly rich, albeit without the old Icahn gruffness. After losing a battle against Target in 2009, he choked up during a speech in which he quoted Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy.

When he first met Mr. Icahn in 2003, Mr. Ackman was virtually unknown outside Wall Street circles. It looked as if he might remain so. His world was falling apart. Gotham Partners, the hedge fund he helped to found when he was in his 20s, had just blown up. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Eliot Spitzer, then attorney general of New York, were investigating him. His investors wanted their money back.

So Mr. Ackman cold-called Mr. Icahn.

He wanted to sell Hallwood Realty, a company whose stock traded at about $60. Mr. Ackman believed Hallwood was worth $140 a share. “By reputation, I knew he was a tough guy and a difficult guy,” Mr. Ackman says. “I wanted to make sure I could collect.”

He continues: “I insisted the agreement be short. I also insisted it have a mathematical example in it, so that there could be no question about the intent of the agreement.”

That’s not quite the way Mr. Icahn remembers it. He says that he was the one who was worried, and that Mr. Ackman was under investigation and desperate to sell. (Both investigations were later dropped.)

“I checked him out,” Mr. Icahn says. “He was in trouble with the S.E.C.; he had investors leaving him. A few of my friends called me up and said; ‘Don’t deal with this guy.’ ”

Mr. Icahn says he saved Mr. Ackman’s bacon, although he puts it more colorfully. The two hammered out a contract. Mr. Icahn said he would pay Mr. Ackman $80 a share and offered a form of insurance. If Mr. Icahn unloaded his shares within three years, the two would split any profit above a 10 percent return.

Mr. Ackman now leads Pershing Square Capital Management. His long court fight with Mr. Icahn involved a relatively small 2004 deal.

Mr. Ackman wanted to bulletproof the deal. He included a provision that if the payout became contentious, the loser would pay all the legal fees. And if any payment was delayed, the contract stipulated, Mr. Icahn would owe Mr. Ackman a hefty amount of interest.

Initially, everything went according to plan. Mr. Ackman even visited Mr. Icahn’s offices to share another investment idea with him: betting against MBIA, a bond insurer that he believed was poised to collapse.

“We were rooting for Carl because we were effectively partners,” Mr. Ackman says. “And then” — expletives follow.

In 2004, Hallwood merged with another company, for $137 a share, netting Mr. Icahn a tidy profit. After waiting a few days, Mr. Ackman called to compliment him and to ask about his share.

As Mr. Ackman tells it, the older man scoffed: “First off, I didn’t sell,” Mr. Icahn told him. Mr. Icahn argued that a merger did not constitute a sale of shares.

“Well, do you still own the shares?” Mr. Ackman asked.

“No,” Mr. Icahn said. “But I didn’t sell.”

And so it went. Mr. Ackman threatened to sue. Mr. Icahn roared that he would countersue.

“Go ahead, sue me. You know what, I’m going to sue you!” Mr. Icahn shouted, according to Mr. Ackman, who says Mr. Icahn told him that he took his advice on MBIA and lost $20 million.

Mr. Icahn says that he never threatened to sue Mr. Ackman and that he held onto his bet against MBIA long enough to make money. Mr. Ackman sued in 2004, contending breach of contract.

As years rolled by, the dispute became a running joke on Wall Street. Mr. Ackman went on to open a new firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, and became an investing celebrity. He took positions in the likes of Sears, McDonald’s and, more recently, J. C. Penney. He made $1.5 billion on a bet on General Growth Properties.

Mr. Ackman’s offices in Midtown Manhattan are white marble and white leather, punctuated with odd pieces like the pilot’s ejector seat from a nuclear bomber from the 1950s. Had Mr. Icahn paid him from the start, he says, he would have shared his winning ideas. Instead, he joined with firms like Vornado Realty Trust, the big real estate company run by Steven Roth. Mr. Roth, he says, has made reams of money from the relationship.

While Mr. Ackman has moved on, Mr. Icahn, in many ways, seems frozen in time. His offices are filled with mahogany and classical paintings and sculptures. He still keeps odd hours, sleeping in and then working late. His voice is still Far Rockaway growl. He uses it to bark at corporate directors, competitors and, periodically, Mr. Ackman.

“Maybe I can be a tough guy, but I’ve been in business since 1960 and made money every year except 2008,” Mr. Icahn says. “I have never ever been in a lawsuit with anybody who trusted me with money or in a lawsuit with any employee.”

Over the last seven years, Mr. Icahn and Mr. Ackman have interacted only a few times. Mostly, it is their lawyers who have suffered the endless rounds of motions, hearings and appeals. (Mr. Ackman hired Andrew J. Levander, the criminal defense lawyer who was recently hired by Jon S. Corzine, the former governor of New Jersey, who presided over the recent collapse of the brokerage firm MF Global.)

Mr. Ackman and Mr. Icahn agree about one interaction. It was a few years ago — they disagree about the exact date — at Il Tinello, a restaurant on West 56th Street that Mr. Icahn likes.

After a lengthy, boozy dinner, Mr. Icahn made an offer: he would put $10 million in one of Mr. Ackman’s favorite charities to settle the dispute once and for all. Mr. Ackman refused, saying the money belonged to Gotham investors. The men left amicably. Mr. Ackman says he paid the bill.

Then, in late 2010, the lawsuit resurfaced as a point of conflict. Mr. Ackman received a call from a friend, David Tisch, the New York investor, wanting to know about his experience with Mr. Icahn. Mr. Tisch told him that Mr. Icahn was looking to invest about $100 million in Mr. Tisch’s new fund, Mr. Ackman says. (Through a spokesperson, Mr. Tisch says he never turned down a formal offer from Mr. Icahn and would welcome any investment in the future. Mr. Icahn says he does not recall anyone by the name of David Tisch.)

So Mr. Ackman says he told his friend what had transpired. Mr. Tisch refused Mr. Icahn’s money.

Mr. Icahn, says Mr. Ackman, called in a huff.

“Bill, you’re blaspheming me,” Mr. Icahn complained, according to Mr. Ackman.

Mr. Icahn says he does not recall any such conversation. He also notes that he is asked almost daily by hedge fund managers to make investments, so that losing out on one opportunity means little to him.

And that was it, until last month, after Mr. Icahn’s final appeal was denied. Mr. Ackman received nearly $9 million from Mr. Icahn, almost double the original amount, thanks to the accrued interest.

On the day of the transfer, Mr. Icahn called the younger man and left a message. Mr. Ackman returned the call. He never heard back.

At least until Nov. 17, when, after an inquiry from The New York Times, Mr. Icahn finally called — and let Mr. Ackman have it once again.

“He started to lecture me,” Mr. Icahn says of Mr. Ackman. “And I said, ‘I’ve been in this business for 50 years, and I’ve done O.K. without your advice.’ ”