lightRadio cube mobile technology/zdnet.co.uk

By Dennis Mullin

SCIENCE: Despite the economic and political malaise, high-tech explosion continues. Engineers have invented a device the size of a Rubik’s Cube that will replace all cell-phone relay towers. Sales of E-books jumped in January past hard covers. Drones are monitoring nuclear plants in Japan. Col. Qadhafi is hiding in a tent to elude the pinpoint accuracy of cruise missiles. The U.S.S. Whitney in the Mediterranean is a brand new command-and-control ship, that on its own could have run the invasion of Normandy in WWII. Social internet networks are sparing revolutions all over the world. Those regimes that ignore these advances do so at their own peril.

KINDLES: The e-book boom has reached new heights, but not high enough to boost book sales overall. Helped by millions of Kindles, Nooks and other digital devices given for holiday gifts, e-book sales jumped in January and surpassed purchases of hard covers and mass market paperbacks, according to a new survey.

The Association of American Publishers reported that e-sales more than doubled from $32.4 million in January 2010 to $69.9 million in January 2011. Hard cover sales fell from $55.4 million to $49.1 million, and mass market paperbacks, a format that's declining as baby boomers seek books with larger print, fell from $56.4 million to $39 million. Total sales, which include the education and professional markets, were $805.7 million in January, slightly below the $821.5 million reported last year.

Not all AAP members participate, but the survey includes results from Random House, Inc., Simon & Schuster and other leading publishers. The new numbers "pretty much reflect reality," Simon & Schuster CEO and president Carolyn Reidy said Thursday, although she cautioned that e-sales tend to be especially high in January as new customers test the format.

She told the AP that e-sales likely dropped after January but will settle at a level that's still substantially higher than last year. Reidy said e-books were around 8 to 9 percent of the general trade market at the end of 2010 and she expects them to reach 12 to 15 percent of the market this year.

"When people start out with e-books, they like the convenience and the ease," Reidy said. "They tend to experiment with different kinds of books." Reidy said e-book sales were as high as 50 percent of the total for some works, not just for commercial fiction, but for so-called "midlist" books that depend on reviews and word of mouth. She cited Mira Bartok's well-regarded memoir "The Memory Palace," which came out this year. "You have people reading the reviews and buying the books electronically," she said.

IRAN: The regime there isn't ignoring the technology boom. It has brutally suppressed social network boosted demonstrations even as it forges ahead with the building of a nuclear bomb.  Last week, Teheran said it has sent the country's first space capsule that is able to sustain life into orbit as a test for a future mission that may carry a live animal.

The state IRNA news agency says the capsule was carried by a rocket dubbed Kavoshgar-4 -- or Explorer-4 in Farsi -- some 75 miles (120 kilometers) into orbit.

The launch of the capsule is a part of Iran's ambitious space program. The report provided no other details about the "life capsule." Last year, Iran sent its first domestically made telecommunications satellite into orbit and announced it had successfully launched a rocket carrying a mouse, turtle and worms into space for research purposes. There are concerns Iran's space program could also bolster its ballistic missile program.

HELP FOR JAPAN: American pilotless drones are inspecting  Japan's quake-crippled nuclear plants. The United States is flying  a high-altitude drone over Japan's stricken nuclear power plant to take a closer look, Japan's Kyoto news agency said. "Photographs taken by the plane equipped with infrared sensors could provide a useful clue to what is occurring inside the reactor buildings," the agency said. Operators of the plant again deployed military helicopters on Thursday in a bid to douse overheating reactors, as U.S. officials warned of the rising risk of a catastrophic radiation leak from spent fuel rods.

Meanwhile, the State Department offered Potassium Iodide Pills to personnel serving in Japan. Foggy Bottom is playing it safe with U.S. personnel in Japan offering them potassium iodide pills to protect the thyroid gland against radiation. The Hill newspaper says the department is also warning that distribution of the pills is only a precaution and that they shouldn't be taken unless the U.S. government issues a directive to do so.

“On March 21, 2011, consistent with NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) guidelines that apply to such a situation in the United States, the U.S. government is making available Potassium Iodide (KI) as a precautionary measure for United States government personnel and dependents residing within Nagoya, Tokyo, Yokohama and the prefectures of Akita, Aomori, Chiba, Fukushima, Gunma, Ibaraki, Iwate, Miyagi, Nagano, Niigata, Saitama, Shizouka, Tochigi, Yamagata, and Yamanashi,” the warning reads.

MIND BENDER: Finally in a real mind bender, as mobile data usage skyrockets, wireless companies are spending billions each year to maximize capacity, and consumers end up footing the cost in the form of higher cell phone bills. But a cube that fits in the palm of your hand could help solve that problem.

It's called lightRadio, a Rubik's cube-sized device made by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) that takes all of the components of a cell phone tower and compresses them down into a 2.3-inch block. Unlike today's cell towers and antennas, which are large, inefficient and expensive to maintain, lightRadio is tiny, capacious and power-sipping. As tiny as it is, it has been tasked with solving an enormous problem.

CNN Money says the global wireless industry is spending $210 billion a year to operate their networks, and $50 billion to upgrade them, according to Alcatel-Lucent and PRTM. Networks are dealing with that cost by putting data caps in place with heavy overage charges and by raising prices on their smartphone and tablet plans.

IN YOUR PALM: Despite all that spending and pressure on consumers to curb their data usage, the networks are fighting a losing battle. Mobile data usage is expected to grow 30 times in the next four to five years and 500 times in the next ten years, according to Alcatel-Lucent. With a combination of miniaturization and cloud technology, lightRadio just might be able to help wireless carriers keep pace with their customers.

0:00 /2:36A cell tower that fits in your palm,

When conceiving of lightRadio, Alcatel-Lucent's engineers stripped out all the heavy power equipment that controls modern cell towers, and moved them to centralized stations. That allows the lightRadio cubes to be made small enough to be deployed virtually anywhere and practically inconspicuously: Atop bus station awnings, on the side of buildings or on lamp posts.

Their small size and centralized operation lets wireless companies control the cubes virtually. That makes the antennas up to 30% more efficient than current cell towers. Live data about who is using the cubes can be assessed, and the antennas' directional beams can be shifted to maximize their potential. For instance, radios may be pointed in one direction as people are coming to work in the morning and another direction as they're leaving work at the end of the day.

MULTI-GENERATIONAL: The lightRadio units also contain multi-generational antennas that can relay 2G, 3G and 4G network signals all from the same cube. That cuts down on interference and doubles the number of bits that can be sent through the air. Today's cell towers, by contrast, send power in all different directions, most of which is lost, since it doesn't reach anyone's particular devices.

They're inefficient in other ways as well: Roughly half of the power from cell towers' base stations is lost before it makes its way up to the antennas at the top of the tower. And they have separate antennas for 2G, 3G and 4G networks, causing interference problems.

All of lightRadio's smart technology and power efficiency can help cut carriers' operating costs in half, Alcatel-Lucent believes.

"We need to think differently about this, because no one wants limits," said Tod Sizer, head of wireless research at Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Laboratories. "We hope to solve this problem so that the AT&Ts (T, Fortune 500), Verizons (VZ, Fortune 500) and Sprints (S, Fortune 500) of the world will be able to provide the data capacity that is needed by the customer."

TRIALS: The lightRadio trials will begin in September 2011, and the company expects to be producing them in volume by 2012. Several carriers have expressed interest in the technology, and Sprint Nextel plans to try out the cubes later this year.

"Sprint is talking to Alcatel Lucent about this technology and we will be working with them to test and evaluate it," a Sprint spokeswoman said. "We have been aggressive in smaller factor cell sites to help us support the growth in data traffic."

Sizer said he sees lightRadio as a complimentary technology to existing cell towers. Those big antennas still serve a purpose, providing long distance signals or beams down a highway.

But as wireless companies add infrastructure to keep up with the ever-rising data demands from tablets and smartphones, carriers are finding that they're running into a cost and a space issue: Towers are expensive, and they're running out of room to erect new ones.

RADIUS: Each 1.5-Watt lightRadio cube powers about a two-block radius, so in urban areas, they can be deployed throughout the city and stacked like Lego blocks in stadiums or other areas that need extra capacity. In rural areas, they can be deployed atop existing cell towers in arrays.

"The thing that's incenting us to move quickly is that more and more people are using smartphones, and my customers are being crushed by the enormous amount of data that people want to use," said Sizer. "We have to meet the access demands of the consumer, who wants to access data in any place."