This Wall Street Journal ($) article reports on the development of an experimental computer chip at the University of Texas that is like a chameleon in that its able to change its function according to the task at hand.
Steve Keckler, a UT computer scientist and a leader of the design effort, believes that the chip can be configured to perform as a specialized chip for devices such as cell phones and digital music players or even serve as a powerful central processor in a desktop or other general-purpose computer. The team hopes to have a prototype of the device finished in about a year and ready for commercialization by the end of this decade. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Defense Department agency, is funding the UT team’s development.
If the chip works as planned, it will run at a top speed of 10 gigahertz and perform one trillion operations (meaning individual computing tasks) per second. In comparison, Intel Corp.’s current top-speed Pentium 4 processor runs at 3.4 gigahertz and delivers 6.8 billion operations per second. The anticipated performance has led the design team to dub the device a “supercomputer on a chip.”
The UT team has nicknamed their design “Trips,” for Tera-Op Reliable Intelligently Adaptive Processing System. The term tera-op refers to the targeted one trillion operations per second. The system would divide individual processing cores on the chip into tiny sections that could change automatically for several predetermined functions. The idea is that the processing cores would morph as instructions flowed in. Each chip could contain many processing core, which would enable a single chip to perform multiple functions simultaneously while optimizing for each. Conventional chips generally do only one thing at a time. Moreover, the distributed architecture of the UT team’s design would reduce clock delays, which limit the performance of conventional chips.

My late father was a professor of medicine at both the University of Iowa and University of Texas medical schools. As a result of his influence, I have an interest in following developments in medical research.
I have been reviewing an interesting website for those interested in medical and science research. BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. All the original research articles in journals that BioMed Central publishes are immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is central to rapid and efficient progress in science and that subscription-based access to research is hindering rather than helping scientific communication.
BioMed Central is a creative and informative use of the Web to facilitate medical research. If you are interested in such research, I encourage you to take a look. Hat tip to Blog 702 for the link.

Walter Mossberg writes a fine weekly technology column for the Wall Street Journal. In today’s column ($), Mr. Mossberg gives a favorable review of Verizon Wireless‘ new wireless broadband service, which, by the end of 2005, will allow users to connect a laptop, PDA, or celphone to the Internet at real broadband speeds from almost any location in every major U.S. metropolitan area. Mr. Mossberg has been testing the service, and reports as follows:

I’m not talking about the spread of more Wi-Fi “hot spots” in airports, coffee shops and similar places. I’m talking about wireless high-speed Internet service that you can use just about anywhere — even on the street or in a car.
This isn’t a pipe dream. I’ve been testing Verizon’s new service, called BroadBand Access, on a laptop around Washington, D.C., one of the first two cities where the company has rolled it out. I am very impressed. It is simple to set up and works just like any other broadband connection, with your normal Web browser and e-mail program.
Based on a new cellphone technology called EV-DO (short for Evolution-Data Optimized), the new Verizon service is as fast as most wired DSL lines, and it worked effortlessly almost everywhere I tried it in a wide swath of Washington and its suburbs.

This is the next logical step in allowing computer users to access the Internet from virtually anywhere within a city. With Verizon’s marketing muscle, this could be a huge money maker for the company if they can offer the service for a low enough price to attract users to supplement their existing Internet connection with this service.

Tom Mighell over at Inter Alia notes the new feature on Yahoo Maps that provides information on area businesses such as restaurants for any address that you plug into the map building service. A very nice feature.