Transistor

Overcoming a fundamental barrier in the design of integrated circuits, Intel Corp. said today that it has figured out how to double the amount of information that can be put on a transistor.The giant chipmaker said it will use the breakthrough to create more powerful memory chips for products such as cellular phones, networking equipment and even video arcade games. For instance, a digital answering machine could have twice as much room for messages.Intel said that right now the new technology is good only for flash memory -- chips that retain information even after the products they reside in are turned off. It can't be used for regular computer memory, or for microprocessors such as Pentiums, which are far more complex.

Morris Tischler, a retired science teacher who invented a 1950s transistorized cardiac pacemaker, died of respiratory failure March 9 at his Pikesville home. He was 89. He was born in Newark, N.J., but when his father's real estate business failed in the Depression of the 1930s, he moved with his family to Crisfield, where Mr. Tischler graduated from Crisfield High School. As a youth he dabbled in electronics and built a crystal radio set. "I've seen the various technologies that have come along in my lifetime, from the television to the computer to the new hand-held devices," he told a writer for the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation News in a 2006 article.

1947: First supersonic airplane1947: Bell Labs invents transistor1947: Polaroid camera developed1948: Israel created

A whole new world opened after I bought my first transistor radio. It was all of $6.99 and came from the old Shocket's on Gay Street, a few steps away from the Bel Air Market. It ran on a nine-volt battery, which we always bought on the cheap at Sunny's Surplus. That little plastic radio brought the voice of Alan Field into my room, a broadcast voice that will be on this morning for the final airing of his It's Showtime on WWLG, where he's the Saturday host. Come 9 a.m. Monday, that station will change formats and discontinue the pop music-oldies sound that I've chasing around for the past 46 years.

When you know the answers to these questions, go to http://www.4Kids.org/detectives/What is Paige Brooks trying to cure in the lab?When did the ship Royal Charter run aground? (Go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/rescue/index.html to find out.)What year was the first transistor built?CYBERBEAKERS AND MICROSCOPESIt's time to get busy in the lab! The first step in the experiment is to carefully prepare the secret solution http://www.pfizerfunzone.com/ Once it's bubbling, you're ready to enter one of the doors of the FunZone laboratories.

IT IS SAID that adversity - and around here a 5-inch snowfall is considered adversity - doesn't build character, it merely displays it. I know, for instance, that a snowstorm brings out the German in me. By that I mean that when snow falls, I feel a compelling need to put my domicile in order the way my dad, a German-American, used to put his household in ship-shape. The walks must be cleared. The snow shovels must be standing at attention. The boots and gloves must fit and should be lined up in neat rows in front of the furnace.

311Transistor (Capricorn 314 536 181)Subtlety is not something you expect from a band whose sound is built around guitar crunch and pumped-up dancehall riddim. But even though much of the music on 311's fourth album, "Transistor," is in-your-face aggressive, what makes the album worth hearing is the way the band balances its bluster with soulful interludes and moments of jazzy lyricism. So for every track like the title tune, which stacks meaty, distorted guitar tracks over a giddily kinetic pulse (complete with a mini dub break)

THE VOICES on the radio, huddled around their microphones the other night like some glad survivors gathered around a roaring campfire, sounded like old friends remembering a rambunctious way of life that seems to have slipped away.Alan Christian: "I drove into town in the late '60s and heard two guys on the air yelling and screaming. You gotta remember, it was Vietnam, the anti-war movement. I'm thinking, 'My God, the station's been taken over.' Then I hear one of them say, 'Call that guy a cab.' It was Charley Eckman and Artie Donovan hollering at each other."

THIS IS A column about opera and transistor radios. It is not about the Baltimore Orioles' fight with the New York Yankees for the American League pennant. Plenty of my colleagues are doing a fine job writing about that. And, as one of my editors pointed out, people in this sophisticated metropolis have many more things happening in their lives than monitoring baseball games.Such as going to the opera. I like opera, both in the car, and in the abstract. In the car, I slap some "Tosca" in the tape deck and it makes the crawl around the Beltway almost tolerable.

A whole new world opened after I bought my first transistor radio. It was all of $6.99 and came from the old Shocket's on Gay Street, a few steps away from the Bel Air Market. It ran on a nine-volt battery, which we always bought on the cheap at Sunny's Surplus. That little plastic radio brought the voice of Alan Field into my room, a broadcast voice that will be on this morning for the final airing of his It's Showtime on WWLG, where he's the Saturday host. Come 9 a.m. Monday, that station will change formats and discontinue the pop music-oldies sound that I've chasing around for the past 46 years.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Intel Corp., the world's biggest semiconductor maker, said yesterday that it built a test chip with a new process that creates faster circuits by packing 10 million transistors into an area the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen. Intel has made the first working memory chip that uses so-called 65-nanometer technology to shrink the circuits inside chips, Intel researcher Mark Bohr said in a conference call. The method lets Intel pack twice as many transistors into the same space.

NEW YORK -- The first thing that crossed my mind when the lights went out on the 22nd floor of my Times Square hotel on Thursday afternoon was, "Klaatu warned us." OK, it wasn't the first thing, but it makes for a more interesting lead sentence. Sci-fi film fans will recognize the name Klaatu from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. The alien and his robot, Gort, land their flying saucer in Washington in the middle of the Cold War to warn earthlings that we had better get along or suffer consequences of galactic proportions.

When Vivek Subramanian was a graduate student at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, he didn't have a big food budget. So he paid close attention to the expiration dates on the items in his refrigerator. "You know, even if food had expired, I'd still eat it," he recalled. "Expiration dates are pretty conservative." Now an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Subramanian, 30, found his academic calling by pondering a high-tech way to track food freshness.

IT IS SAID that adversity - and around here a 5-inch snowfall is considered adversity - doesn't build character, it merely displays it. I know, for instance, that a snowstorm brings out the German in me. By that I mean that when snow falls, I feel a compelling need to put my domicile in order the way my dad, a German-American, used to put his household in ship-shape. The walks must be cleared. The snow shovels must be standing at attention. The boots and gloves must fit and should be lined up in neat rows in front of the furnace.

1947: First supersonic airplane1947: Bell Labs invents transistor1947: Polaroid camera developed1948: Israel created

When you know the answers to these questions, go to http://www.4Kids.org/detectives/What is Paige Brooks trying to cure in the lab?When did the ship Royal Charter run aground? (Go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/rescue/index.html to find out.)What year was the first transistor built?CYBERBEAKERS AND MICROSCOPESIt's time to get busy in the lab! The first step in the experiment is to carefully prepare the secret solution http://www.pfizerfunzone.com/ Once it's bubbling, you're ready to enter one of the doors of the FunZone laboratories.

NEW YORK -- The first thing that crossed my mind when the lights went out on the 22nd floor of my Times Square hotel on Thursday afternoon was, "Klaatu warned us." OK, it wasn't the first thing, but it makes for a more interesting lead sentence. Sci-fi film fans will recognize the name Klaatu from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. The alien and his robot, Gort, land their flying saucer in Washington in the middle of the Cold War to warn earthlings that we had better get along or suffer consequences of galactic proportions.

Morris Tischler, a retired science teacher who invented a 1950s transistorized cardiac pacemaker, died of respiratory failure March 9 at his Pikesville home. He was 89. He was born in Newark, N.J., but when his father's real estate business failed in the Depression of the 1930s, he moved with his family to Crisfield, where Mr. Tischler graduated from Crisfield High School. As a youth he dabbled in electronics and built a crystal radio set. "I've seen the various technologies that have come along in my lifetime, from the television to the computer to the new hand-held devices," he told a writer for the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation News in a 2006 article.

THE VOICES on the radio, huddled around their microphones the other night like some glad survivors gathered around a roaring campfire, sounded like old friends remembering a rambunctious way of life that seems to have slipped away.Alan Christian: "I drove into town in the late '60s and heard two guys on the air yelling and screaming. You gotta remember, it was Vietnam, the anti-war movement. I'm thinking, 'My God, the station's been taken over.' Then I hear one of them say, 'Call that guy a cab.' It was Charley Eckman and Artie Donovan hollering at each other."

Overcoming a fundamental barrier in the design of integrated circuits, Intel Corp. said today that it has figured out how to double the amount of information that can be put on a transistor.The giant chipmaker said it will use the breakthrough to create more powerful memory chips for products such as cellular phones, networking equipment and even video arcade games. For instance, a digital answering machine could have twice as much room for messages.Intel said that right now the new technology is good only for flash memory -- chips that retain information even after the products they reside in are turned off. It can't be used for regular computer memory, or for microprocessors such as Pentiums, which are far more complex.