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Saturday, July 27, 2013
SAMSUNG OVERTAKE APPLE AS WORLD's MOST PROFITABLE MOBILE PHONE MAKER


Apple has lost its status as the world's most profitable maker of mobile phones, with strong demand for Samsung's Galaxy handsets pushing the South Korean multinational into the financial lead for the first time.
The California company made an estimated $3.2bn (£2.1bn) profit from iPhone sales in the second quarter of the year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, a marked drop from $4.6bn a year ago and less than Samsung's estimated $5.2bn haul from both its basic models and smartphones in the same period.
While the high-priced iPhone was the engine that propelled Apple to become the world's most valuable company, its customers are no longer bent on owning the latest model.
Healthy demand for the three-year-old iPhone 4, which is cheaper than the latest iPhone 5, has reduced the average selling price of its blockbuster device.
As smartphone ownership trickles down the income brackets in both western and emerging markets, Apple's margins have taken a hit. The company's latest financial results showed that the average selling price of an iPhone has fallen to $581, down from $613 in the first quarter.
The same trend has squeezed Samsung's handset profits, which are down from an estimated $5.6bn in the second quarter of 2012, but the strong performance of its flagship Galaxy S4 has, at least for now, put an end to Apple's four-year reign as the world's most profitable phone-maker.
"With strong volumes, high wholesale prices and tight cost controls, Samsung has finally succeeded in becoming the handset industry's largest and most profitable vendor," said Neil Mawston at Strategy Analytics.
"Apple is now under intense pressure to launch more iPhone models at cheaper price-points or with larger screens to fend off the surging competition and recapture lost profits in the second half of 2013."
Rather than producing new budget phones, Apple has relied on sales of its older models to reach more cost-conscious shoppers. But a change of strategy is rumoured: the chief executive, Tim Cook, is said to be considering a brand-new budget iPhone as part of a revamp of the company's product range planned for this autumn.
Across all brands around the world, the average price of a smartphone has plunged to $375 from $450 since the beginning of 2012, the research firm IDC estimates. With mobile phone networks cutting subsidies on handsets in the depressed economies of southern Europe, cheaper models by companies including LG and Sony are proving popular.
In China's fast-expanding smartphone market, homegrown brands including ZTE and Huawei are selling well.
The trend has helped Samsung widen its lead over Apple in the overall volume of handsets sold.
Apple's global smartphone market share has fallen from 17% to 14%, its lowest level for three years, while Samsung's edged up to 33%, Strategy Analytics' research shows. Samsung sold 76m smartphones in the quarter to June, more than twice Apple's 31m iPhones, and up from 49m in the same period a year ago. LG, ZTE and Huawei have all roughly doubled their worldwide shipments by unit
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Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Extremely bright supernovae explained


It is not yet clear what gives rise to supernovae with a peak brightness many times the average, so-called superluminous supernovae (SLSNe), but since they are observable from further away than normal supernovae, a better understanding of these events might also make them a valuable additional ‘standard candle’ for distance measurements in the Universe. Using survey data from the ROTSE-IIIb telescope at the McDonald Observatory (Texas, US) that covered 500 square degrees of sky, a small team of international researchers – including CAASTRO member Dr Fang Yuan (ANU) – has now calculated the volumetric rate of SLSNe.
Having identified five suitable events, the first step in their calculations was to produce light curve templates and estimate pseudo-absolute magnitude distributions for both hydrogen-poor SLSN Type I and hydrogen-rich SLSN Type II. Monte Carlo simulations were then used to determine the efficiency of different surveys on the telescope in ‘shortlisting’ candidates in a given volume of sky. For the pooled SLSN-like data and at a redshift of 0.2 (local volume), the team calculated a volumetric rate of 199 events Gpc-3 yr-1 h3 which, due to the small sample size, is subject to large statistical (199 +137 / -86) and systematic (199 +65 / -41) errors.
Their results approximately match the local rate of sub-energetic, long-duration gamma-ray bursts but are exceeded by the estimated rate of core collapse supernovae by a factor of 400 to 1300. These new calculations now offer an opportunity to determine the origin of SLSNe by comparing them with the formation rate of stars in the critical mass range at similar redshifts. And since peak magnitudes of SLSN Type I were found to be tightly clustered (M = -21.7 ±0.4), these events might be a promising ‘standard candle’ once sufficient sample sizes have been reached.
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Fast Optical Fibre

A Monash PhD student has presented the next step in creating superfast internet through the optimisation of optical fibre at a prestigious conference in Kyoto.
Md. Monir Morshed of the Optical Communications Group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering presented his findings in a post-deadline session at the 18th OptoElectronics and Communications Conference/ Photonics in Switching (OECC) earlier this month.
Post-deadline sessions are reserved for late-breaking innovations and are usually dominated by industrial research laboratories.
Mr Morshed said he was thrilled to present at the largest optical communications conference in the Asia Pacific.

"Attending the conference was a wonderful opportunity to hear from the leading researchers in the field. The paper was a great achievement for our group," Mr Morshed said.
Mr Morshed's research aims to increase the data capacity of optical fibre, in terms of both speed and distance by mitigating a feature known as nonlinearity. Impressively, he demonstrated data speeds of more than one terabit per second over more than 800 kilometres. This is more than 10 times the capacity of current systems and could lay the groundwork for superfast inter-city networks.
"Internet users increasingly demand more and more bandwidth. We are working out how to optimise existing infrastructure to create next generation optical systems," Mr Morshed said.
Leader of the Optical Communications Group and Australian Laureate Fellow, Professor Arthur Lowery, praised Mr Morshed's research.
“Monir has made tremendous progress in his PhD, with theoretical and experimental innovations that are globally competitive. I am extremely proud of my group and its achievements in tackling the nonlinear capacity limit in optical fibres,” Professor Lowery said.
The presentation is the latest success for the Optical Communications Group, following post-deadline papers at last year’s OECC and the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) in 2013.
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Saturday, July 20, 2013
Students to Spark Zero-Gravity Fires on Weightless Airplane


HOUSTON — Gravity, get ready to meet your match. A team of students is counting down to light zero-gravity fires high in the sky today (July 18) aboard a jet plane designed specifically for weightless flights.

After months of preparation, eight engineering students from the University of California, San Diego are set to fly with NASA's Microgravity University today to test how biofuels burn in weightless conditions.

"I think the team is really looking forward to actually flying," Sam Avery, team leader for the UCSD Microgravity Team, told SPACE.com here Wednesday (July 17). 
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A new antibiotic may be on its way


Researchers have produced a potential new antibiotic which could help in the battle against bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
The potential new antibiotic targets a bacterial enzyme critical to metabolic processes.
The compound is a protein inhibitor which binds to the enzyme (called biotin protein ligase), stopping its action and interrupting the life cycle of the bacteria.
"Existing antibiotics target the bacterial cell membranes but this potential new antibiotic operates in a completely different way," says Professor Andrew Abell, project leader and Acting Head of the University's School of Chemistry and Physics.
Professor Abell says the compound, although at a very early stage of development - it has not yet been tested on an animal model - has the potential to become the first of a new class of antibiotics.
"Bacteria quickly build resistance against the known classes of antibiotics and this is causing a significant global health problem," he says. 
"Preliminary results show that this new class of compound may be effective against a wide range of bacterial diseases, including tuberculosis which has developed a strain resistant to all known antibiotics."
Developing the new protein inhibitor involved a novel approach called 'in situ click chemistry'. A selection of small molecules, or 'precursor fragments', are presented to the bacteria in a way so that the target protein enzyme itself builds the inhibiting compound and also binds with it.
"In a sense the bacteria unwittingly chooses a compound that will stop its growth and assembles it - like building a weapon and using it against itself," says Professor Abell. "We've gone a step further to specifically engineer the enzyme so that it builds the best and most potent weapon."
"Our results are promising. We've made the compounds; we know they bind and inhibit this enzyme and we've shown they stop the growth of a range of bacteria in the laboratory. The next critical step will be investigating their efficacy in an animal model."
"Thanks to this new approach what might have taken a year or more with a range of sequential experiments, we can now do in one single experiment," Professor Abell says.
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