A serious technical discussion between Henry Benitez (left) and Mike Windler at the dB Society Picnic at Lambert's Downtown Barbeque (since 1873) during the 2009 IEEE-EMC Symposium in Austin, Texas. > See the photos

AIR Post Production Chooses Tektronix

Tektronix, Inc. of Beaverton, Oregon, a worldwide provider of test, measurement and monitoring instrumentation, reports that AIR Post Production has added a WVR7020 waveform rasterizer to its suite of post-production tools. The company, which provides post-production services to the broadcast, film and DVD industries, will use the new WVR7020 unit to carry out QC monitoring of video and audio broadcast.

The transition to HD technologies means broadcasters are increasingly turning to advanced audio options such as Dolby E to provide viewers with the best possible audio-visual experience. With the largest full service HD post-production facility in East London, AIR Post Production needed to find a waveform monitor and vectorscope with Dolby E monitoring and meta data analysis capabilities, which could also provide error logging functionality for QC checking of broadcast masters. AIR Post Production selected the WVR7020 waveform rasterizer for its comprehensive video and Dolby audio monitoring capability.

Invisible Doorways or Portals a Step Closer to Reality

Using a technique known as transformation optics, researchers have revealed a way to alter the pathway of light waves that could eventually allow them to create portals that are invisible to the human eye.

Pushing the laws of refraction and reflection to the limit, a team from Hong Kong University and Fudan University in Shanghai describe the concept of a "a gateway that can block electromagnetic waves but that allows the passage of other entities".

The gateway uses transformation optics and a superscatterer made from photonic crystals to create an optical illusion,' forcing light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation into complicated directions to hide the portal.

Previous attempts at an electromagnetic gateway were hindered by their narrow bandwidth, only capturing a small range of visible light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation.

The breakthrough, described in the New Journal of Physics, also has the added advantage of being able to be switched on and off remotely.

Dr Huanyang Chen, from the physics department at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said that " people standing outside the gateway would see something like a mirror."

Magnetic Nanopoles Observed for the First Time

In the material world magnetic particles are usually observed as dipoles, north and south combined. However, several theories, including one that physicist Paul Dirac proposed in 1931, predicted the existence of monopoles: hypothetical particles that carry a single magnetic pole, either north or south. Scientists in Germany studying crystals cooled to near absolute zero now believe they have obtained the first concrete evidence of their existence, attesting that monopoles exist as emergent state of matter.

William R. Cuming 1921-2009

Dr. William R. "Bill" Cuming, founder and chairman of Cuming Corp., passed away May 28. He was 88 years old. A busy executive with a tireless work ethic, Cuming was still behind the desk at his Cuming Corp. office until his last few months, when his health began to fail.

In 1948, Cuming joined Cherry L. Emerson, a friend and fellow engineer, in forming Emerson & Cuming. They merged their knowledge of radar and plastics to create a family of new materials for the burgeoning electronics industry. The product line grew quickly to include dielectric materials, microwave absorbers, engineering adhesives, and high performance surface coatings, and rapidly gained wide acceptance.

In the late 1960s, Emerson & Cuming became involved in the fledgling offshore oil and gas industry with their new endeavor, syntactic foam, a low-density high-strength composite material based on newly-developed glass microspheres. In 1968 E&C made the first drilling riser buoyancy modules and became the world leader in deep-sea buoyancy systems. In 1985, along with Frank Sinatra,

Bill received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Stevens Institute, and in 2000 won its Entrepreneur Award.

He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Ruth DeVenne Cuming, and his son, John W. Cuming.

FerriShield Celebrates Milestone

FerriShield recently celebrated its 25th year in business and its second anniversary as a distinguished Leader Tech product offering. "The addition of FerriShield Ferrites to the company's extensive line of board and enclosure shielding products has been an overwhelming success," says Tim Black, director of sales and marketing.

In its founding years, Ferrishield pioneered the concept of "clamp-on" ferrites to help eliminate unwanted RF interference in terminated cables. Leader Tech stays true to the FerriShield philosophy of maintaining the world's largest in-stock selection of bisected and solid core ferrites.

The FerriShield product line has enhanced Leader Tech's ability to provide customers with integrated EMI shielding solutions for the vast majority of RF interference problems.

Mobile Phone Towers Threaten Honey Bees

The electromagnetic waves emitted by mobile phone towers and cellphones can pose a threat to honey bees, a study published in India has concluded.

An experiment conducted in the southern state of Kerala found that a sudden fall in the bee population was caused by towers installed across the state by cell phone companies to increase their network.

The electromagnetic waves emitted by the towers crippled the "navigational skills" of the worker bees that go out to collect nectar from flowers to sustain bee colonies, says Dr. Sainuddin Pattazhy, who conducted the study, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

He found that when a cell phone was kept near a beehive, the worker bees were unable to return, leaving the hives with only the queens and eggs and resulting in the collapse of the colony within 10 days.

Over 100,000 people in Kerala are engaged in apiculture and the dwindling worker bee population poses a threat to their livelihood. The bees also play a vital role in pollinating flowers to sustain vegetation.

Scientists Develop Polarizers on the Nanoscale

According to Nanowerk News, scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany describe, for the first time, three-dimensional metamaterials that could really be applied in spectroscopic measurement instruments.

The work, reported by the renowned journal Science as a highlight on its website prior to the publication of the printed version, is based on a combination of various technologies. To produce these novel components, the team headed by Prof. Martin Wegener from the Center for Functional Nanostructures and Prof. Volker Saile from the Institute of Microstructure Technology uses a laser to write the structure into a photoresist. Then, the structure is dissolved leaving a porous mold.

In a second step, gold is deposited into the cavities of this mold until they are filled. Finally, the original polymer mold is etched off.

This property is based on the fact that metamaterials do not only directly influence the electric, but also the magnetic component of an electro-magnetic wave. "Depending on the size of the helixes, such structures do this for various wavelengths and over a comparably wide range of wave-lengths," explains Justyna Gansel from the working group headed by Wegener. Her results nullify the previously observed drawback that the special properties of metamaterials were limited to a narrow frequency spectrum.

India's EMC Testing Center

India's first automotive EMC testing center was inaugurated in August by Union Minister for heavy industries and public enterprises, reports Vilasrao Deshmukh at the Vehicle Research and Development Establishment (VRDE) at Ahmednagar.

Until now, vehicles produced in the country underwent EMC tests abroad at a cost of around Rs 50 lakh. With the new facility in Ahmednagar, the tests can now be carried out locally at a fraction of the cost -- for Rs 3 lakh.

"The EMC Tech Centre will cater to the long-felt needs of the Indian automotive industry and the defense sector," Deshmukh said. "The proportion of electronics incorporated in vehicles has increased dramatically in recent times and the trend is rising at a faster pace. In such a scenario, this kind of a testing center was a must."

Deshmukh pointed out that the establishment of the center would also reduce foreign currency outflow.

Active Radar Cloaking

Active cloaking differs from cloaking technologies that rely on special materials to bend electromagnetic waves around an object or absorb the waves.

"The problem with metamaterials is that their behavior depends strongly on the frequency you are trying to cloak," said Graeme Milton, a mathematician at the University of Utah. "So it is difficult to obtain broadband cloaking."

By contrast, active cloaking could generate electromagnetic waves that adapt to match the frequency and amplitude of incoming waves. That creates the phenomenon known as destructive interference, where waves cancel each other out, much the same way as cancellation headsets work on sound waves. The same technique could cloke submarines from sonar.

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