News Bits: Sandisk and Sony Developing Memory Stick Pro-HG, Olympus Bioscapes Imaging Competition Winners

[Ben Stafford]

Sandisk and Sony Working on New Memory Stick Pro-HG

Sandisk and Sony have announced that they're working on a new Memory Stick Pro-HG format that improves upon the Memory Stick Pro format. To acommodate the ever increasing storage capacities, they have made improvements to speed up the data transfer to and from the memory card.

An enhanced 8-bit parallel interface, in addition to the standard serial and 4-bit parallel interface, along with a clock speed increase up to 60MHz (from 40 Mhz), allow transfer rates up to 60MB/second. This transfer rate is three times the speed of the current Memory Stick Pro format. The minimum write speed across the 8-bit parallel interface is 15MB/second.

The new Pro-HG format will work in new Pro-HG compliant devices as well as devices that can handled the standard Memory Stick Pro format. Likewise, Memory Stick Pro format will work in Memory Stick Pro-HG compliant devices.

The new Memory Stick Pro-HG memory will be available in 2007.

Winners Announced in Olympus Bioscapes Imaging Competition

The Olympus Bioscapes Imaging Competition has recently announced it's winners from the 2006 competition. The contest awards images and videos of plant, animal, and human subjects captured through light microscopes. Entries are judged on the science that is depicted, the aeshetics of the subject and their technical merit. Any life science subject matter is eligibile. From 1200 entries, the top 10 are awarded along with 54 honorable mention awards.

The top prize this year goes to Thomas Deerinck who captured a great image while performing research into neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that can cause tumors to form on the optic nerve and other locations in the nervous system. The image depicts the optic nerve where it interfaces with the retina of a mouse eye. For this first place prize, Deerinck takes home $5000 worth of Olympus products. Deerinck is a researcher at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research at the University of California, San Diego.

Award winners were recognized recently at the Horton Grand Hotel in San Diego. 21 of the images will be on display from December 12, 2006 to March 5, 2007 at the San Diego Natural History Museum. After leaving San Diego, the photographs will tour museums throughout the U.S. as part of a program developed in tandem with Natural History Magazine. Tour stops include Los Angeles, Woods Hole, Mass., Ann Arbor, Mich., New York City and Philadelphia. Additional BioScapes exhibits will tour St. Louis, Allentown, Penn., Dallas and suburban Washington, D.C.

Read more... [Olympus press release]
See more... [Olympus Bioscapes website]

[ilene]

The folks at Olympus have some beautiful competition images up now on a website called www.olympusbioscapes.com. They have also already corrected an error in the press release posted. The illness neurofibromatosis is not usually fatal - most people who have it do go on to lead full lives. It is, however, a serious disease. The first prize photo was an image captured in researching this serious childhood affliction.

[Ben Stafford]

ilene, thanks so much for pointing that out. I've made the correction in the article.