WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS
Earthdate October 2001


INSIDE SCOOP


FED FUNNIES


OFFICIAL NEWS
by Hazed


What was in October 2001's Official News:

THE MONTH IN BRIEF
AN EXTRA HOUR'S SLEEP
ICEDRAKE STAYS THE DISTANCE
PRODUCT RECALL: MARTIAN RADS
SPACE BOOZE
GAS CHIPS BECOME A REALITY
REAL LIFE NEWS: THE ROBOTIC GARDENER

THE MONTH IN BRIEF

The October 14, 2001 Federation Chronicle was late due to an accident involving a keyboard and a glass of soda. Halfway through working on the news, all was going well, I had plenty of time. But then the soda got accidentally poured over the keyboard. (Well, of course it happened accidentally... I wouldn't deliberately pour cola over electrical products!) After I mopped everything up, the keyboard seemed to work OK for about twenty minutes, and then something short-circuited and it acted as if one of the keys was stuck down. No amount of stuffing tissues between the keys would fix it, and I had previously lent my spare keyboard to a friend, so a tedious drive through the Sunday traffic was undertaken, to purchase a new keyboard from the nearest computer store. By the time I got the new keyboard hooked up and rebooted the computer, I'd missed the deadline!

Alsatian reviewed Rocketmunkee's planet Ailanthus, and was so impressed he awarded the PO a Walrus of Merit.

AN EXTRA HOUR'S SLEEP

If you're wondering why your Federation Chronicle is an hour late this morning, it's not - you're an hour early! Clocks went back by one hour last night in both the US and the UK.

Twice a year, you realise just how many clocks, watches, timepieces and gadgets that contain timing devices there are in the average house, as you scurry around changing them backwards (or forwards in the Spring).

At least in the fall you get an extra hour's slumber, or an extra hour's partying, depending on your dispostion (or possibly stamina).


Sunday Morning Postscript

Having written the above a few days ago, and then spent a large part of Saturday nagging Bella to make sure the Fed reset happened at the right time, I then completely forgot about the time change. I woke up this morning blithely ignorant of the fact that I could have stayed in bed an extra hour. Proof, if it was needed, that even demi-goddesses make mistakes!

ICEDRAKE STAYS THE DISTANCE

Back in May I told you that Icedrake (or Greg, the player behind the planet-eating dragon) was in training to run a marathon, to raise money for the Whitman-Walker Clinic, the leading clinic in the Washington DC area for providing assistance to those with AIDS and the HIV virus. I am now delighted to tell you that he did it! On Saturday October 20, Greg ran in the Baltimore Marathon, and successfully completed the long, gruelling run in a time of just over seven hours. What a tremendous achievement! You can still sponsor Greg's run even though he's completed it - sponsorship will remain open until the end of November. You can also look at pictures and read his articles about the training process, and the final run itself, all at http://www.marathongreg.com.

Give that dragon a massive round of applause!

PS - He's doing it again in 2002, so go sponsor him to give him the encouragement he needs.

PRODUCT RECALL: MARTIAN RADS

Radiation King (Mars) Inc, the premier manufacturers of radioactive products in the Solar System, has issued a product recall notice on radioactives sold on the Martian trading exchange between stardates 212100 and 212108. The recall concerns batches bearing the product code 45A7-930XX and marketed under the brand name Bad Rads.

A Radiation King spokesdroid stated that the shielding on the radioactive products has been found to be defective and under certain conditions could allow radiation to leak into the cargo hold, thus contaminating other goods being carried in the ship.

The Amalgamated Union of Dockers and Allied Cargo Handlers has expressed concern that stevedores unloading goods may well be affected by the contamination, and although Radiation King are playing down the risks, planet owners are advised to carry out frequent radiation checks, and to ensure their decontamination facilities are in order.

Any suspect rads should be returned to the company's warehouse on Mars for a full refund.

SPACE BOOZE

News reports late this week had a hot new story - alcohol has been located in space. This will come as no surprise whatsoever to the denizens of Fed DataSpace, whose bars have made sure there's a plentiful supply of booze all over the Galaxy. Why, even those who cannot be bothered to customize their stock mini planets are not deprived of places to buy alcohol - the Snow Queen's bar on the ice planet serves hot toddies to keep out the cold, and the Candy Bar on the candy mini offers drinks with candy stirrers.

In fact, with the prevalence of bars in the Galaxy, and the fondness of Fedders for buying each other rounds, it's a wonder any work ever gets done in Fed DataSpace!

Anyway, back in the boring old real world, scientists at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesvile, Virginia, have announced that they've found evidence of vinyl alcohol in a cloud of dust and gas near the centre of the Milky Way. This is significant because it sheds light on how molecules bond with each other and become distributed through the galaxy, and it may provide a better understanding of the chemical processes that lead to the formation of living organisms. The scientists say there must be a fairly dense presence of the stuff in the gas cloud.

Vinyl alcohol is similar to ethyl alcohol, which is what you and I drink in the form of our favorite tipple. It's rare in concentrated form, but is involved in many chemical reactions, particularly those that create complex organic molecules on Earth.

GAS CHIPS BECOME A REALITY

Some of the trading commodities that you haul in Federation DataSpace are real items - Meat, Woods, Gold and so on. Some are completely made-up - such as LanzariK and Katydidics.

Then there are those commodities which don't exist, but which might do in the future, or which scientists speculate about - like Anti-matter and Monopoles (magnets with only one pole). Well, one of those commodities has just moved to take a much firmer place in the "real" category - GAs-chips, the tech commodity.

Gallium arsenide (GaAs as it's known outside of Fed) is a semiconductor. Electrons zip along it through the places they need to go, much more swiftly than in silicon, and find it much harder to pass the places they shouldn't. As a result, transistors made from Gallium arsenide have a much higher maximum speed than silicon - up to thirty or forty times higher. So, as you would expect, chips made from the stuff are highly desirable, and are used in specialist logic circuits for Crays and other such supercomputers. But the chips are hideously expensive. Gallium is much rarer than silicon and costs a great deal more, while arsenic is not the easiest of substances to handle safely. Combined into GaAs, they make a very brittle, glassy grey metal that shatters if you so much as look at it. You can't make big wafers with it, so the economics of mass production don't work.

So scientists have been trying to combine it with silicon, to make slightly more robust chips, for the last thirty years, but with precious little success. The two substances just wouldn't bond together. Until last month, that is. Motorola finally forced them to operate together, simply by putting a third layer in between them, that both substances will bond with. I say simply, but obviously it's a tricky operation otherwise it wouldn't have taken thirty years to crack. Motorola's taken out over 200 patents on this process and will charge people who want to use the process a large amount of money.

The technology provides the ability to make most of the circuit in boring old silicon, with all its benefits, then to add just enough GaAs to make the parts that need to go like greased lightning. And this will benefit you and me - cheaper very high bandwidth fibre networks, denser DVDs, gigabit wireless and a whole lot more exciting stuff could take advantage of GAs-chips.

So you could say that Fed predicted the future by having GAs-chips as a valuable trading commodity.

REAL LIFE NEWS: THE ROBOTIC GARDENER

Two fascinating stories about the application of technology to horticulture.

I love the idea of the SlugBot which is being developed by engineers at the University of West England. The robot roams the garden, hunting down and destroying slugs at the rate of more than 100 per hour. But here's the neat bit: it then uses their decomposing bodies as fuel, generating enough electricity to keep the bot running without ever needing to recharge its batteries. I wonder if the same technology could be applied to automobiles - could road kill act as a supplementary fuel source?

On a slightly less gory note, engineers at the University of Greenwich want to develop a machine for thigmomorphogenesis. Huh? That very long word is the term for stroking the tips of plants to produce short, stocky specimens. Yes, apparently, expert gardeners don't just talk to their plants or play them music, they also stroke them. So the boffins are developing an automated plant-stroking machine, nicknamed Dr Green. Whatever next - a machine to stroke the cat for you?


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