AMD Announces High-Performance Chip Set : A technology commonly found in graphics processors to speed performance.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.N: Quote, Profile, Research) launched a new graphics chip on Thursday modified to crunch huge amounts of data, with potential customers in financial, engineering and scientific industries.

The new product, called FireStream, gives AMD an answer to a similar initiative launched by rival Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O: Quote, Profile, Research) this year to find broader uses for increasingly powerful graphics chips.

AMD's high-end FireStream 9170 uses a technology commonly found in graphics processors to speed performance.
AMD is introducing a high-performance chip package that uses a technology commonly found in graphics processors, called parallelism, and applies it to general purpose computing, the company announced Thursday.

Parallelism breaks computing work into individual tasks that are worked on by a processor concurrently, or in parallel, instead of one after the other, as many general purpose processors do today.

Parallelism has been in use for a long time in graphics chips from companies like ATI and Nvidia. AMD, which bought ATI last year, said the technology also works well for some types of mathematical computation, so it is using it to speed up other applications.

Called the FireStream 9170, the chip package is aimed initially at high performance computers (HPCs) like those used by scientists for climate research and oil exploration, and by financial analysts for advanced number crunching. But it could also be used more widely in the enterprise for tasks like video-editing and security tasks, AMD said.

The 9170 will be priced at US$1,999, making it one of AMD's most expensive products, but it offers up to 500 gigaflops of computing power, according to AMD, or about 100 times the performance of one of its dual core Opterons. It will be offered in new computers, but it could also be added to an existing server or workstation with a PCI Express 2.0 x16 interface.

Software applications will need to be modified to take advantage of the FireStream's architecture, and AMD will release a software developer kit along with the chip package for application tuning.

AMD calls the computing style Stream Computing, and it began life at ATI before it was bought by AMD. ATI announced the first Stream product last year, but AMD didn't work hard to promote it. It is throwing more weight behind the second iteration.

The FireStream is being manufactured on an advanced, 55 nanometer manufacturing process and will use a "double precision" floating point technology for scientific and engineering calculations. The processor board includes 2G bytes of GDDR3 (Graphics Double Data Rate 3) RAM, a type of memory designed by ATI, and consumes under 150 watts of power, AMD said.

AMD also announced it has joined Hewlett-Packard's HPC Accelerator Program, suggesting the product will be offered in computers from HP.

Technorati : AMD, chip, high performance chip, new product, technology

A Warning !!!! :Chemical weapons create toxic waste nightmare

We want environment for us , for next generation , so in all espect we have to think the reaction of thing or policies we are innitiating , have to clear about CONFLICT: EVOLUTION AND FUTURE OF COMBAT AND WEAPONS

MEETING in the Hague next week, the signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) will celebrate the fact that Albania and the UK have destroyed their last chemical weapons and that India and South Korea are almost done. But there will be an elephant in the room: in their scramble to destroy weapons by a 2012 deadline, Russia and the US, which possess over 95 per cent of the world's chemical weapons, are creating thousands of tonnes of a nasty, toxic residue that they are having trouble disposing of.

Chemical weapons can be incinerated directly. But fearing a release of toxic gases, half the American and all the Russian weapons sites are breaking down the lethal molecules by adding alkali, a technique called hydrolysis. This creates a new problem: how to dispose of the resulting toxic soup, known as the hydrolysate.

Technorati : chemichal weapons, environment, futiure world, toxic

FlashbacK : 50 Years Ago: The First Dog in Orbit

It's today :Research on space is showing the unlimited fortune of creation ,

Just a month after the Soviet Union stunned the world by putting the first artificial satellite into orbit, it boasted a new victory - a much bigger satellite carrying a mongrel dog called Laika.

The mission, 50 years ago Saturday, ended sadly for Laika but helped pave the way for human flight.

As with other episodes of the Soviet space program, Laika's mission was hidden under a veil of secrecy, and only after the collapse of the Soviet Union could the participants tell the real story behind it.

The satellite that carried Laika into orbit was built in less than a month in what was perhaps the world's fastest-prepared space mission ever.

Excited by the international uproar over the launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev summoned Sergei Korolyov, the father of the Soviet space program, and ordered him to come up with "something new" to celebrate the Nov. 7 anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Khrushchev's demand was a shock even for Korolyov, whose team had managed to put together the first Sputnik in less than three months, said Georgy Grechko, a cosmonaut who started his career as a space engineer.

"We didn't believe that you would outpace the Americans with your satellite, but you did it. Now you should launch something new by Nov. 7," Korolyov quoted Khrushchev telling him, according to Grechko.

Boris Chertok, Korolyov's right-hand man, said the short notice made it impossible to design a principally new spacecraft, but there was also little sense in simply repeating the Sputnik launch.

"Korolyov rightly feared that this holiday gift could end up in an accident that would spoil a hard-won victory," Chertok wrote in his memoirs. But they couldn't argue with Khrushchev, and the decision to conduct the launch was made on Oct. 12.

When someone on Korolyov's team suggested putting a dog into orbit, he jumped at the idea.

Little was known about the impact of space flight on living things, and some believed they would be unable to survive the launch or the conditions of outer space.

The Soviet Union had experimented with launching dogs on short suborbital missions during ballistic missile tests, and some of them survived several such missions. All of them were stray mongrel dogs - doctors believed they were able to adapt quicker to harsh conditions - and all were small so they could fit into the tiny capsules.

Just nine days before the launch, Doctor Vladimir Yazdovsky chose one of them - 2-year-old Laika - for the mission.

Stories about how she was chosen vary. Some say Laika was chosen for her good looks - a Soviet space pioneer had to be photogenic. Others say space doctors simply had a soft spot for Laika's main rival and didn't want to see her die: Since there was no way to design a re-entry vehicle in time for the launch, the glory of making space history also meant a certain death.

"Laika was quiet and charming," Yazdovsky wrote in his book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine. He recalled that before heading to the launchpad, he took the dog home to play with his children.

"I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live," Yazdovsky said.

Working round-the-clock, Korolyov and his team combined a capsule that would carry the dog with basic life-support systems and elements of the first Sputnik. To simplify the design, they decided not to separate the satellite from the booster's second stage.

They worked without blueprints at a pace that was breathtaking even at the time of the space race and seems utterly impossible by today's standards.

"Now when we have computers, sophisticated industrial equipment, lasers and other things, no one is capable of making a new satellite in just one month," Grechko said in an interview. "Now it would take a month just to start doing the paperwork. Korolyov told us later that it was the happiest month of his life."

As a result of some last-minute technical problems, Laika had to wait for the launch in the cabin for three days. The temperatures were low, and workers put a hose connected to a heater into the cockpit to keep her warm.

On Nov. 3, Laika blasted off into space in Sputnik 2, which weighed 1,118 pounds - a show of Soviet ability to take big payloads into space.

Sputnik 1 weighed just 184 pounds. The first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, launched on Jan. 31, 1958, weighed about 31 pounds.

When Laika reached orbit, doctors found with relief that her pulse, which had risen on launch, and her blood pressure were normal. She ate specially prepared food from a container.

According to official Soviet reports, the dog was euthanized after a week. Laika's mission drew a wave of protests from animal protection activists in the West.

It wasn't until after the Soviet collapse, that some participants in the project told the true story: Laika indeed was to be euthanized with a programmed injection, but she apparently died of overheating after only a few hours in orbit. There was no information to indicate when exactly she died.

"It was impossible to build reliable life-support and thermal-control systems in such a short time," Chertok said in his memoirs.

Several other dogs died in failed launches before the successful space flight - and safe return to Earth - of Belka and Strelka in August 1960. After a few other flights with dogs, the Soviet Union put the world's first human - Yuri Gagarin - into space on April 12, 1961.

Gagarin is said to have joked: "I still don't understand who I am: the first human or the last dog in space."

Technorati : First Dog in Orbit, creation, research, space

Space : One Collective Soul in Outer Space

A reality check on dreams for space: the repairsThe crews from the shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station had a farewell ceremony today and closed the hatch between the two craft. Discovery will undock tomorrow and prepare for its return to Earth on Wednesday.
It was a blubberfest.
This has been an intense mission - the planned tasks involved some of the toughest technical challenges in the history of the space station's construction process, and included adding a new room to the station, the Harmony module, and moving an enormous solar array and truss from its temporary position on top of the station to its far left side.
Astronaut Scott Parazynski worked along the truss assembly of the International Space Station on Saturday, preparing equipment for mounting on the boom extension.
NASA/Reuters

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But beyond those efforts, problems made the mission even tougher. The solar array tore as it was being re-deployed, setting off a scramble to come up with a spacewalk that could repair the tear and get the array functional before the shuttle left. Without that array fully extended and able to be rotated on its own rotary joint, space station construction would have been stalled and upcoming missions delayed.
And on top of that, spacewalkers detected damage to the rotary joint on the right side of the station, one that keeps the right-side solar arrays facing the sun - a problem that will have to be addressed down the road. In a high-risk, high-stakes spacewalk Dr. Scott E. Parazynski fixed the array on Saturday.
So it's no surprise that the farewells are more than a little emotional. Clayton Anderson, who spent 137 days as a space-station crew member and will be coming home on Discovery, kept turning off his microphone as he was overcome with emotion as he thanked the "folks on the ground" - flight-control engineering and training teams in Houston, Huntsville and Moscow. "I say thank you," he said, his voice breaking. "You are indeed the best and the brightest that our world has to offer."
Over the communications loop, there was loud applause from the "folks on the ground."
Mr. Anderson then played the song "Reunion," by Collective Soul. His crewmates swayed to the music (which in zero gravity has to be seen to be believed) as it played, tinny over the orbit-to-ground transmission:
Change will come
Change is here
Love fades out
Then love appears
Now my water's turned to wine
And these thoughts I have
I now claim as mine
I'm coming home
Change has been
Change will be
Time will tell
Then time will ease
Now my curtain has been drawn
And my heart can go
Where my heart does belong
I'm going home
Discovery's commander for this mission, Pamela A. Melroy, also teared up as she thanked the the station commander, Peggy A. Whitson, and the Russian cosmonaut on board the station, Yuri Malenchenko, and said goodbye to crew member Daniel M. Tani, who will stay aboard the station. "We promise we'll send somebody to come pick you up and bring you home," she joked.
"We're family now," she said.
Mr. Tani wiped his eyes repeatedly as well.
Col. Malenchenko made headlines in 2003 during his last stint aboard the station, when he got married from orbit: his bride, Ekaterina Dmitriev, was on earth in the Villa Capri restaurant near the Johnson Space Center. A justice of the peace did the honors; Col. Malenchenko wore a bowtie with his flight suit and was represented on the ground by a paper cut-out.
One can only wonder what the stoic Col. Malenchenko thought of the waterworks from his American crewmates, but when it came time to say goodbye, he gave Mr. Anderson what looked like a real rib-crusher of a hug.
Anyone who wants to see the emotional session can tune in to NASA television, where the farewell ceremonies are replayed as part of the highlights reel that runs on the hour.

Technorati : harmony, space station, space station repair

Neurology : Big MIT contingent at Society for Neuroscience meeting

MIT's excellence in brain research will be showcased next week in San Diego as Institute scientists give five of the 24 invited talks at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

"This is an extremely high representation from one institution," said Mriganka Sur, chair of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and one of the MIT speakers.

The Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest organization of scientists devoted to studying the brain. Some 30,000 people are expected to attend the group's annual -conference.

One of the five MIT researchers, H. Sebastian Seung, professor of computational neuroscience, will give the Presidential Special Lecture on "The Once and Future Science of Neural Networks." In his talk, Seung will describe a revolutionary new way to create a nanoscale-level map of the brain's axon and dendrite "wires" based on actual human brain tissue. This cutting-edge field, called computational neuroanatomy, is expected to confirm or deny long-held basic assumptions about how the brain works.

Seung's laboratory is one of a handful in the world working on a new initiative called "the connectome," which seeks to translate three-dimensional images of the brain at nanoscale resolution into a circuit diagram of all the brain's neurons and synaptic connections.

Current models of the human brain revolve around the belief that synapses' connections determine brain function and that synaptic plasticity underlies learning and memory. But now, "we have seen tantalizing hints that these basic ideas are at least partially true, as well as examples where they fall short," said Seung, who also is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. "The advent of high-throughput methods for gathering neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data will transform our ability to test the foundations of neural network theory."

The other MIT speakers and their topics are:

Mark F. Bear, Picower Professor of Neuroscience, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and HHMI investigator, will speak on "Modification of Cerebral Cortex by Experience." More than four decades of research on how synapses are formed, strengthened, weakened and lost under the influence of sensory experience have culminated in a deep understanding of the mechanisms for this synaptic plasticity. The knowledge ranges from novel insights into the pathophysiology of developmental disorders to new strategies to enhance perceptual learning and recovery from environmental deprivation, he said.

Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience and HHMI investigator, will speak on "Mechanisms Underlying Prevention of Cognitive Decline and Restoration of Memory in Age-Dependent Neurodegenerative Disorders." The number of people with Alzheimer's disease is expected to triple from 5 to 15 million by the year 2050. Age-dependent neurodegeneration and dementia is currently incurable. Tsai's lecture will focus on recent research of cellular mechanisms, including synaptic plasticity, which have provided models for understanding neurodegeneration and memory loss. A particular emphasis will be placed on new strategies to prevent decline or restore memories.

Mriganka Sur, Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience, will speak on "New Approaches for Revealing Cortical Function: Plasticity and Dynamics of Visual Cortex Networks." Sur will talk about how a range of novel tools, including in vivo high-resolution imaging of neurons, synapses and astrocytes, cell-specific markers and genetically engineered probes, along with new experimental paradigms, are transforming the analysis of cortical networks.

Susan L. Lindquist, professor of biology, member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and HHMI investigator, will give the Albert and Ellen Grass Lecture. Proteins begin as long strings that must fold precisely. The misfolding of certain amyloidogenic proteins associated with neuronal cells is responsible for certain neurodegenerative diseases. Surprisingly, she said, similar changes in the folding of other proteins may have beneficial effects in learning and memory. Lindquist's lecture will investigate therapeutic strategies to control the folding of amyloidogenic proteins.

Technorati : Cognitive Sciences, Neurology, Neuroscience, brain science

Technology : MIT develops 'tractor beam' for manipulation of cells on silicon

E. coli cells are manipulated on a silicon chip by MIT researchers using 'optical tweezers' to form the letters 'MIT.'

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Tool could manipulate tiny objects on a chip,

In a feat that seems like something out of a microscopic version of Star Trek, MIT researchers have found a way to use a "tractor beam" of light to pick up, hold and move around individual cells and other objects on the surface of a microchip.

The new technology could become an important tool for both biological research and materials research, say Matthew J. Lang and David C. Appleyard, whose work is being published in an upcoming issue of the journal Lab on a Chip. Lang is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Appleyard is a graduate student in Biological Engineering.

The idea of using light beams as tweezers to manipulate cells and tiny objects has been around for at least 30 years. But the MIT researchers have found a way to combine this powerful tool for moving, controlling and measuring objects with the highly versatile world of microchip design and manufacturing.

Optical tweezers, as the technology is known, represent "one of the world's smallest microtools," says Lang. "Now, we're applying it to building [things] on a chip."

Says Appleyard, "We've shown that you could merge everything people are doing with optical trapping with all the exciting things you can do on a silicon wafer … There could be lots of uses at the biology-and-electronics interface."

For example, he said, many people are studying how neurons communicate by depositing them on microchips where electrical circuits etched into the chips monitor their electrical behavior. "They randomly put cells down on a surface, and hope one lands on [or near] a [sensor] so its activity can be measured. With [our technology], you can put the cell right down next to the sensors." Not only can motions be precisely controlled with the device, but it can also provide very precise measurements of a cell's position.

Optical tweezers use the tiny force of a beam of light from a laser to push around and control tiny objects, from cells to plastic beads. They usually work on a glass surface mounted inside a microscope so that the effects can be observed.

But silicon chips are opaque to light, so applying this technique to them is not an obvious move, the researchers say, since the optical tweezers use light beams that have to travel through the material to reach the working surface. The key to making it work in a chip is that silicon is transparent to infrared wavelengths of light--which can be easily produced by lasers, and used instead of the visible light beams.

To develop the system, Lang and Appleyard weren't sure what thickness and surface texture of wafers, the thin silicon slices used to manufacture microchips, would work best, and the devices are expensive and usually available only in quantity. "Being at MIT, where there is such a strength in microfabrication, I was able to get wafers that had been thrown out," Appleyard says. "I posted signs saying, 'I'm looking for your broken wafers'."

After testing different samples to determine which worked best, they were able to order a set that was just right for the work. They then tested the system with a variety of cells and tiny beads, including some that were large by the standards of optical tweezer work. They were able to manipulate a square with a hollow center that was 20 micrometers, or millionths of a meter, across--allowing them to demonstrate that even larger objects could be moved and rotated. Other test objects had dimensions of only a few nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Virtually all living cells come in sizes that fall within that nanometer-to-micrometers range and are thus subject to being manipulated by the system.

As a demonstration of the system's versatility, Appleyard says, they set it up to collect and hold 16 tiny living E. coli cells at once on a microchip, forming them into the letters MIT.

The work was supported by the Biotechnology Training Program of the National Institutes of Health, the W.M. Keck Foundation and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

Technorati : Chips, MIT, MIT news, Star Trek, silicon

Nanotechnology :MIT works toward 'smart' optical microchips

Light-powered micro-machines could advance telecommunications,

Rings, one millionth of a meter in size, are the moving parts of a 'smart' micromachine that could be powered and controlled by light on an optical chip. The rings move around and adapt to the color of light that is traveling through the bar, right.

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A new theory developed at MIT could lead to "smart" optical microchips that adapt to different wavelengths of light, potentially advancing telecommunications, spectroscopy and remote sensing.

Postdocs Peter Rakich, left, and Milos Popovic of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics stand in front of a monitor that shows a demonstration of the way they propose to control microchips with light.

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Drawn by the promise of superior system performance, researchers have been exploring the concept of microchips that manipulate light instead of electricity. In their new theory, the MIT team has shown how such chips could feature tiny machines with moving parts powered and controlled by the very light they manipulate, giving rise to fundamentally new functionality.

"There are thousands of complex functions we could make happen by tinkering with this idea," said Peter Rakich, an MIT postdoctoral associate who invented the theoretical concept along with postdoc Milos Popovic. The work was described in the cover story of the November issue of Nature Photonics.

For example, such chips could one day be used to remotely adjust the amount of bandwidth available in an optical network, or to automatically process signals flowing through fiber-optic networks, without using any electrical power, Rakich said.

Coauthors on the paper were Marin Soljacic, assistant professor of physics; and Erich Ippen, the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of physics.

"The idea that opto-nanomechanical devices can be designed to self-adapt to all-optical control--i.e., by self-aligning their resonances to optical control frequencies and by permitting all-optical tuning and dimension control--is new and exciting," said Ippen.

Earlier this year an MIT team composed of many of the same researchers showed that photonic circuitry could be integrated on a silicon chip by polarizing all of the light to the same orientation. The current work shows how tiny mobile machines can be built on such chips, taking advantage of the substantial pressures exerted by photons as they strike the walls of a cavity.

In the macroscopic world, light waves do not exert significant forces, but in the unique world of the microscopic, coupled with ultrapure laser light, photons bouncing off the walls of a cavity can build up a measurable force called radiation pressure. This is similar to the pressure exerted by gas molecules trapped in an aerosol can.

To take advantage of this radiation pressure, the researchers propose machines built from ring-shaped cavities only millionths of a meter in size located on the chip surface. When pressure on the cavity walls is high enough, the cavity is forced to move. This movement forms a critical part of an optical micromachine, which adjusts its configuration to respond to light in a predesigned way.

A unique application of this concept involves processing data that travels in fiber-optic networks. Today resonators employed in fiber-optic networks have to be synchronized with the incident light to ring at its frequency, in the same way an opera singer has to tune the pitch of her voice to make a wine glass ring.

Remarkably, a "smart" resonator based on the MIT concept could chase the frequency (color) of the laser light incident upon it. As the frequency of the laser beam changes, the frequency of the resonator will always follow it, no matter where it goes.

In other words, this new, unique resonator is like a wine glass that self-adjusts to the pitch of the singer's voice and follows it along throughout a song, Rakich said. He noted that physical systems that adapt to driving light and behave like these nanomachines do not exist elsewhere in nature.

By coupling the resonating cavities with nano-scale cantilevers, optical devices analogous to microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices can be created.

Although the researchers focused on ring-shaped cavities, their model could be applied to other structures as well.

"Our objective now is to develop a variety of light-powered micro- and nanomachines with unique capabilities enabled by this technology," explained Popovic. "But the first step will be to demonstrate the concept in practice."

The research was funded in part by the Army Research Office through MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Technorati : MIT Research, Nanotechnology, new chips, smart' optical microchips

TECH Market and economy : Silicon Valley economy despite uncertainty nationwide

Technology companies are prospering while Wall Street continues to deliver shocks like Merrill Lynch's $7.8 billion write-down due to a collapsing mortgage market and the reported looming departure of Citigroup Chief Executive Charles Prince. Adding to the woes, oil prices have topped $90 a barrel.

A week of turmoil in the financial industry and stock market has left technology stocks and Silicon Valley largely unscathed, reflecting trends that are making the region an economic star.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index finished slightly higher over the past week, while the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 index had significant drops.

Apple had a surprisingly strong quarter, and Google stock passed $700 a share as the Mountain View Internet search company joined eBay, Yahoo, Intel, Seagate Technology and Genentech in reporting strong revenues. Microsoft revenue was up more than 23 percent from the same quarter in the previous year.

The strength extends to the broader Silicon Valley economy. A forecast by Spectrum Economics, released last month, reports that the region "unleashed itself from a faltering U.S. economy" during the past two years.

"Silicon Valley soared while the U.S. economy swooned," said the September 2007 update to the study, done for the San Jose Redevelopment Agency.

The United States may have lost its global competitive advantage in many areas, bua clear advantage, said Sung W. Sohn, Hanmi Bank's chief executive and president.

The housing market's troubles haven't affected the valley's overall economy, Spectrum said, while rising energy costs benefit high tech and green tech, one a valley staple and the other an emerging growth area.

"If you want to save energy, you have to use more electronics," Spectrum's chairman, Richard Carlson, said in an interview.

Venture capital is making a comeback in the wake of the mortgage bubble. "Compared to those screwball collateralized mortgage obligations, high tech looks simple," Carlson said.

Exports are buoying up the regional economy, too, as the declining dollar makes U.S. products a bargain to foreign buyers.

American technology companies "are huge exporters," Carlson said.

Though there was a drop of almost 2,200 in valley jobs in September over the month before, the numbers were skewed by a decline in public-sector hiring. That may be due to a late start for the school year, he said. Computer manufacturers added 1,800 jobs in September compared with a year earlier, but posted small losses from the previous month.

"The nation's economic problems will continue, but not at a level that is likely to threaten Silicon Valley's growth," the Spectrum study concluded.

The valley's job growth may slow somewhat but should outpace the nation's, according to Stephen Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

"We'll be affected by housing, but less so because we didn't have a surge in home building or subprime loans," Levy said.

"We have the strongest new exciting sector in the world of opportunities around clean tech and the new funding for it," Levy said. "We are alive on the venture capital side and the Internet side. Nothing that's happened has threatened the resurgence of our economic base."

While the U.S. Commerce Department reported that the national economy turned in a solid 3.9 percent third-quarter growth in gross domestic product, economists worry that it may be the last encouraging quarterly number for a while.

That's because while consumer spending has remained strong, economists puzzle over where consumers were getting their spending money. The refinancing boom is over, and that was believed to have propelled consumer spending over the past two or more years.

"The 'Energizer Bunny' of the U.S. economy is the consumer," Carlson said. "The consumer has been taking some pretty serious hits, but it just keeps going."

t technology is one where it retains .

Technorati : economy control, silicon valley, technology market

EARTH QUAkE : Living on a fault: Homeowners shake off quake risk

Earth quake :

While only a few people in the east foothills experienced the shaking so near the epicenter, the Sabins are hardly alone living close to danger. There are at least 369,000 more people living near three major faults - the San Andreas, the Hayward and the Calaveras - than during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. That 6.9 temblor, centered in the Santa Cruz Mountains, killed 62 people and caused $6 billion in destruction.

The newer population .

estimate comes from a 24hoursNews review of U.S. Geological Survey fault maps and data collected in 1990 and 2007 by the U.S. Census Bureau and the California Department of Finance. It is almost certainly low.

It does not include the populations of unincorporated areas of Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa and San Mateo counties. And it does not include the growth of cities such as San Jose and Palo Alto, only parts of which are within five miles of one of the faults.

But for perspective, those 369,000 people represent more than 40 percent of the total population growth in those four counties since 1990.

The most growth - more than 200,000 people - has been along the Hayward Fault, particularly in Milpitas, Fremont and Hayward - an area seismologists say could be primed for another big shake.

A tour of fault country, days after the Bay Area's strongest quake since Loma Prieta, took a reporter from the redwood-clad billionaire estates of Woodside to the sunny suburban hillsides of Fremont to the rural hills above San Jose, where somebody like Kathy Sabin can still have enough land to keep 47 animals near the nation's 10th-most-populous city.

Homeowner after homeowner, when asked why they moved so close to a known fault, said accepting earthquake danger is part of the bargain you strike in exchange for the incredible views, weather, culture and outdoor life of the Bay Area. None of them intends to move. And there is also a subtle psychological adjustment: It's not so much a discounting of earthquake danger, but a sense that other natural disasters elsewhere are somehow worse.

As a California native, "I'm kind of used to earthquakes," said Kathy Sabin. "I would be more afraid of a tornado or a hurricane."

If the East Coast and the Gulf Coast have their hurricanes and blizzards, and the Midwest its tornadoes and floods, earthquakes are "our" natural disaster. Even as they threaten us, they also seem to define who we are.

San Andreas Fault

Loaded with plywood building materials, the truck wound its way through the rural groves of Woodside, past gated estates, past women on horseback, past an aptly named "Why Worry Lane."

The center of Woodside is less than a mile from the San Andreas Fault, but there's a lot of construction. Town records say the value of building permits for new construction, additions and alterations is up 35 percent in 2007 over the same period last year.

Real estate agents can recount multimillion-dollar sales falling through because of a mountain lion in the back yard, but hardly ever due to the nearby fault.

Though people are aware of the fault, it has not hurt real estate values, said Jayne Williams, an agent with Coldwell Banker. She was speaking with a friend - Pam McReynolds of La Honda - in the Woodside center, across the street from where Williams had been during the Loma Prieta quake.

"We've grown up with it," Williams, a Woodside native, said of the fault.

Of course, Williams' sister moved to Cape Cod to escape earthquakes. But Williams and McReynolds said they wouldn't trade natural disasters with her.

Farther south along the San Andreas - even on Loma Prieta Way in the mountains above Los Gatos, where a wag might say you're asking for trouble - new homes are being built.

But asked for the most earthquake-safe place to build a house in the Bay Area, USGS seismologist Tom Brocher only chuckles.

"As a rule of thumb, if you're within five miles, you are going to be strongly shaken," he said.

"If I told you to live in San Ramon, you're living on the Calaveras Fault, or close to it. In Pacifica, you're on the San Andreas Fault. Almost all of us live within five miles or so of one of the major faults."

Brocher said people should consider the earthquake hazard zone disclosures amid the stack of papers they sign when they buy a home.

"All you want to do is sign and take ownership of the house," he said. "We would like people to pay attention to that. They should definitely be aware of the risk."

And where in the Bay Area does a USGS seismologist live?

Brocher said he chose his home in Millbrae as much for its flat lot - safe from earthquake-triggered landslides - and its distance from soil liquefaction hazards around San Francisco Bay, as for its relative proximity to a fault line. He's just 1.5 miles from the San Andreas.

"I told my wife, 'Look you're not going to have any view of the bay,' " he said.

Hayward Fault

A good chunk of the Bay Area's population wasn't living here during the Loma Prieta quake. Many weren't even alive. About 29 percent of the population of Santa Clara County is under 21 - too young to remember Loma Prieta even if they had been born in 1989.

So for many, the Alum Rock quake was a first. But not for Sandy Movahed. The Fremont resident definitely remembers 1989: The Loma Prieta quake demolished her office in San Francisco. And yet she bought a home with her husband a few hundred yards from the Hayward Fault. A court reporter who transcribed lengthy state hearings on earthquakes, Movahed knows plenty about the phenomenon. She is confident the Bay Area's strict building codes will provide some protection.

"Bottom line," she says, "nobody knows when there's going to be an earthquake."

And one more thing: Her sunny neighborhood under the grassy hills, which overlooks the silver sweep of San Francisco Bay, has "probably the most perfect weather in the world."

Calaveras Fault

At the epicenter of Tuesday's quake, nobody seemed too concerned about future quakes.

Don and Joann Reed said the Loma Prieta quake caused a mini-tsunami that washed right out of their swimming pool. This quake did nothing like that.

"We're on fractured rock here, and I hear tell that fractured rock is better for you than solid rock," Joann Reed said.

Living on the Calaveras Fault for 32 years, the retired couple dismissed the thought of moving to escape a quake.

"Earthquakes don't happen as often as the hurricanes, and the tornadoes and the floods and those bad electrical storms and the awful heat with the humidity in the summertime and the just intolerable cold in the wintertime," Joann Reed said of the troubled life elsewhere. "Here it's an occasional earthquake and the rest of the time it's just like heaven."

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Technorati : Calaveras, Hayward, San Andreas, earth quake