Samsung may begin producing flexible AMOLED displays this quarter

According to The Verge, Korean news site DDaily says Samsung is set to begin manufacturing its long-rumored "Youm" displays -- a new type of ultra-thin AMOLED panel which is bendable, stretchable, rollable and possibly even foldable. This jibes with rumors we heard in 2011 that Samsung may have been planning to mass produce these very interesting displays in Q2 2012. 

Before anyone gets too excited though, Samsung is curiously expected to ship these flexible displays affixed to a rigid sheet of "protective" glass, initially. Clearly, this dampens some of the excitement surrounding the rumor. However, DDaily's sources claim Samsung has an internal goal of mass-producing fully flexible screens by 2014. 

This is purely speculation, but one reason for the delay may be a lack of devices which could properly house a flexible display. By manufacturing these screens now, Samsung gains experience mass producing them for traditional, rigid devices (phones, tablets and so on). When OEMs begin contemplating flexible gadgets though, Samsung will be ready to supply.

Although the upcoming Youm displays aren't expected to be flexible at first, what they will be is thin -- really thin. Even while married to a glass panel, the displays should measure 1mm in thickness. Without the glass layer, the screens boast a thickness of just 0.6mm. It is possible that this glass could be substituted with a material like Willow Glass or plastic in the future though, freeing the panel from its inflexible constraints.

For anyone surprised to learn of the existence of bendable displays, this sci-fi-sounding screen technology may have a peculiar odor of vaporware about it. In an effort to quash such disbelief though, I'll point out that Samsung has demonstrated this technology in the past. Ostensibly,other companies have been making progress on flexible displays too, including LG and HP, although we've yet to see one made commercially available.

password theft soars 300% to 12 million in the first quarter

Cybercriminals illegally trading stolen personal information online such as passwords has soared exponentially to 300% during the first four months of 2012, according to the latest research from Experian CreditExpert and market research agency Opinion Matters.

Experian concluded that 12 million pieces of personal information were illegally sold during the four-month period, 90% of which consisted of login details and passwords. The figures dwarf the credit agency's data for last year, which totaled 9.5 million.

"The reason password and login combinations make up nine out of ten illegally traded pieces of data is because they give access to a huge amount of other valuable information, such as address books and related accounts," said Peter Turner, managing director at Experian Consumer Services in the UK and Ireland.

The research suggested consumers were still not being as careful online as they could be, and revealed that Britons on average used just five different passwords for their 26 online accounts. It also revealed that a quarter of British internet users used a single password for most of their online profiles and accounts.

Experian urges consumers to create different strong passwords for each site, but Websense Security Labs senior manager Carl Leonard disagrees that strong passwords are enough to protect important data.

"They're as strong as a simple lock against professional thieves. Passwords can be guessed, cracked or stolen through social engineering," Leonard said. "Worse still businesses can be attacked and stories of breached password databases make for uneasy reading. Businesses need to think carefully how they secure password information for which they are responsible -- encrypting password records and securing the database makes good sense."

So far this year, an increasing number of sites have succumbed to hackers, with breaches resulting in millions of passwords being published online. With identity theft increasing, it's important to make online accounts as secure as possible.

Leading security authorities recommend passwords at least eight characters long with a mixture of lower and upper case letters, numbers and special characters -- but most importantly, that they are different for each online account you have. Services like LastPass can also help by creating randomly generated passwords for each of your online accounts with one master password to remember.

Physicists set world record with 186Gbps network transfer

Scientists at Caltech managed to squeeze 186Gbps of data through a fiber optic network link between Victoria, B.C and Seattle, WA. This achievement marks the highest speed transfer ever over a long-range network, breaking the previous record of 119Gbps which was also set by the same Caltech team.

The impressive figure was not just data sent one way, but rather the sum of simultaneously sending 86Gbps of data to the University of Victoria and receiving 100Gbps at the Washington State Convention Center. While the 186Gbps link was not fully bi-directional, the highest possible transfer in any given direction was still a whopping 100Gbps, a limit imposed by the networking switches used. The total amount of data transferred during the demonstration was 4.42 petabytes.

The team utilized a cluster of ten cutting edge, pre-production Dell servers with PCIe-3 based network cards. The computers were stuffed with SSDs and joined together between cities via a "state of the art" fiber optic network connected to multiple 100Gbps network switches. Some more details about the setup can be found here.

Caltech hopes their new achievement can be applied to CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is a particle accelerator where scientists can take small amounts of matter, accelerate them to 99.9% the speed of light and collides the matter together in hopes that the resulting "explosion" reveals clues about our universe. During these tests, a massive amount of particle data is generated and that data needs to be collected. The team hopes that their progress in the field of high-speed communications will help high-energy physicists collect, send and receive this tremendous amount of data with greater ease.

MIT develops ultra-fast camera that captures the motion of light

In everyday life, we take for granted how instantaneous light seems. In reality though, the photons which make up the light we see travel around 186,280 miles per second. Researchers at MIT have developed a digital camera capable of capturing data so quickly that we can actually watch light itself unfold in slow motion. Researchers claim the camera captures roughly one trillion frames per second worth of visual data, yet it still has its limits.

The camera is part high-technology and part technique. The equipment itself consists of a "streak" camera, some cleverly used mirrors and a titanium sapphire laser that generates extremely brief (ie. one femtosecond) pulses of light.

The streak camera utilizes an array of 500 sensors which capture light at an astonishing rate of one-trillion times per second. The camera was originally designed to collect information regarding wavelengths of light, a common way to determine the material composition of an object. Different molecules absorb unique wavelengths of light and reflect others. This reflected light is what we call color. Rather handily, scientists can identify molecules by analyzing their spectral density and this camera allows them to do just that.

The system relies on a recent technology called a streak camera, deployed in a totally unexpected way. The aperture of the streak camera is a narrow slit. Particles of light — photons — enter the camera through the slit and pass through an electric field that deflects them in a direction perpendicular to the slit. Because the electric field is changing very rapidly, it deflects late-arriving photons more than it does early-arriving ones.

The image produced by the camera is thus two-dimensional, but only one of the dimensions — the one corresponding to the direction of the slit — is spatial. The other dimension, corresponding to the degree of deflection, is time. The image thus represents the time of arrival of photons passing through a one-dimensional slice of space.

Because of how the camera requires multiple shots of the same exact scene, objects must remain completely still. The camera does not capture an entire scene all at once but rather, it collects one-dimensional strips of data which can be used to determine the departure and arrival of photons in the scene. This data is algorithmically compiled together to recreate a two-dimensional video with astonishing results. Unfortunately, the compilation of this data can take hours of post-processing and the process itself is impractical for use at home, making this unlikely to replace your digital video camera any time soon.

Despite of the obvious drawbacks as a consumer product, researchers claim such equipment and techniques -- in the future -- could allow for studio-quality lighting in virtually any environment and any light source or medical imaging. For now though, the device is useful to scientists as they are better able to study the propagation of photons on scales of speed compatible with human perception.