At Ten, Dark Energy "Most Profound Problem" in Physics

Victoria Jaggard in Baltimore, Maryland

National Geographic News

May 16, 2008
What goes up must come down. Few on Earth would argue with the fundamental law of gravity.

But ten years ago this month the Astronomical Journal accepted a paper for publication that revealed there is a dark side of the force.

For decades physicists were convinced that gravity should be causing the expansion rate of the universe to slow.

"When I throw my keys up in the air, the gravity of the Earth makes them slow down and return to me," said Mario Livio, a theoretical physicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.

But the study, along with an independent work released later the same year, showed that the expansion rate is actually speeding up.

This observation, Livio said, is as if "the keys suddenly went straight up toward the ceiling."

Scientists attribute the phenomenon to dark energy, a force that repels gravity. Even more surprising, measurements show that dark energy accounts for about 74 percent of the substance of the universe.

A decade later, a new suite of experiments may pin down the properties of dark energy and solve what some experts are calling "the most profound problem" in modern physics.

"This is game-changing science," Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, told a packed auditorium during the Decade of Dark Energy Symposium held last week at STScI.

"We've gone from establishing the phenomenon to probing the underlying cause," he said. "We're not anywhere near the point where it's time to give dark energy a rest."

Energy in a Vacuum

So far, one of the biggest challenges for dark energy researchers is marrying observations to theory.

Biomedical Technology Has a Home at Livermore

INNOVATIVE science and the exploration of advanced technologies for biomedical applications are needed to improve human health worldwide and to address the national need of affordable health care for an aging population. When facing these challenges, biomedical research institutions benefit from a variety of research and development activities at Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories, which are sources of special capabilities and expertise. However, at times, the question arises, “Why Lawrence Livermore, a national security laboratory?”

The ties between our national security work and human health have deep roots in the Laboratory’s history. In 1963, Livermore formed a biomedical research program to better understand the effects of ionizing radiation on biological systems—an important issue for worker safety within the nuclear weapons complex and for the resettlement efforts in the Marshall Islands following the end of atmospheric nuclear testing. Research efforts focused on chromosome damage soon led to the development of chromosome sorting technology here and at Los Alamos National Laboratory, culminating in the birth of the Human Genome Project. Today, we are a partner in DOE’s Joint Genome Institute and a developer of advanced biological agent detectors and pathogen signatures used for homeland security and health applications.

In addition, the ties between developing technologies for national security and for biomedical applications are numerous. Livermore’s expertise in accelerator technology and radiography stems from our hydrodynamic testing. Radiography is also important for the nondestructive evaluation of weapons as part of stockpile surveillance programs. We are now working with a licensee to develop the first compact proton therapy system, an accelerator that would fit in any major cancer center at a fifth the cost of larger machines in use today. The accelerator is based on a technology breakthrough made at Livermore and is a result of our continuing interest in compact accelerators for future hydrodynamic testing at the Nevada Test Site.

Laser technologies also bridge national security and biomedical applications. Adaptive optics are key to the design and construction of the National Ignition Facility, and a microelectromechanical adaptive optics system is behind a new ophthalmoscope that won a Laboratory team an R&D 100 Award last year. The ophthalmoscope sharpens images of retinal cell layers, allowing clinicians to diagnose macular degeneration and other retinal diseases much earlier than was previously possible. Lasers also are important components in advanced diagnostics for many nondestructive evaluation applications, and they are the reason for our collaboration with the University of California at Davis’s Center for Biophotonics, Science and Technology—one of our many partnerships with Davis in medical technologies and cancer research.

Materials science research for national security and broader applications is also a Laboratory strength. Recent research includes work on shape-memory polymers (SMPs)—a class of “smart” materials that, as a result of an external stimulus, can change from a deformed shape back to their original shape. SMPs are increasingly used in medical devices, aerospace technologies, and textiles, where their dynamic response can change material performance. They are both inexpensive and easy to manufacture.

The article Shaping the Future of Aneurysm Treatments describes an application using SMPs to improve the treatment of aneurysms. The research team has synthesized new materials with superior properties over those commercially available today and demonstrated biocompatibility and utility. Remarkable progress has been made by combining theory, experiment, and simulation. We look forward to seeing such a promising technology adopted by the medical industry.

This multidisciplinary project—and the application of our technological advances to a broad range of important national needs—exemplifies the mission of the Laboratory and the creativity of our scientists and engineers.

Source
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Operated by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, for the
U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration

The Laboratory in the News

Global warming threatens West’s water resources

Water flow in the western U.S. has decreased for the last 20 to 30 years, but scientists have never understood why. Benjamin Santer of Livermore’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison and collaborators from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have for the first time pinpointed humans as the cause of diminishing water flow on a regional scale. By looking at air temperature, river flow, and snowpack during the last 50 years, the team determined that the human-induced increase in greenhouse gases has seriously affected the water supply in the western U.S. “The water flow decrease is a result of temperature change,” says Scripps colleague Tim Barnett, “and that temperature change is caused by us.”

Santer and Barnett presented the research at the American Geophysical Union Meeting in December 2007. The team scaled down global climate models to a regional level and compared the results to their observations. The researchers found they could use the same models to predict the effects of the increase in greenhouse gases on the western U.S. in the future. By 2040, most of the snowpack in the Sierras and Colorado Rockies would melt by April 1 of each year because of rising air temperatures, causing a shift in river flows. With the existing greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, Earth will continue to warm for the next 80 to 100 years. “We are headed for a water crisis in the western United States, and it has already started,” says Barnett.
Contact: Benjamin Santer (925) 422-2486 (santer1@llnl.gov).

Human activities may shape California climate

Through research funded by the California Energy Commission, scientists from the Laboratory, the University of California at Merced, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research found that temperatures in California from 1915 to 2000 have increased by 1.16°C (2.1°F) statewide. The research, which appeared in the December 19, 2007, online edition of Climatic Change, also suggests that the warming may be related to human activities.

The team used data from up to eight observational records and found that warming has been fastest in late winter and early spring. “The trends in daily minimum and maximum temperatures over the last 50 and 85 years are inconsistent with current model-based estimates of natural internal climate variability,” says Livermore’s Céline Bonfils. “It’s pretty clear the increases are not the result of just natural causes. External factors such as greenhouse gases and urbanization come into play.” However, current climate models have not been effective in explaining California’s summertime trend, where warming mainly occurs at night. Previous research by the team indicates that large-scale irrigation in California has had a cooling effect on summer daytime temperatures, which may have counteracted warming from mounting greenhouse gases and urbanization. If this hypothesis is verified, the acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions combined with a leveling of irrigation may result in a rapid summertime warming in the Central Valley in the near future.

Researchers suggest that greenhouse warming will continue to influence climate and may have significant societal impacts in California. Benjamin Santer, also a member of the Livermore team, says, “Our study represents a credible first step toward identifying the effects of human activities on California’s climate.”
Contact: Céline Bonfils (925) 423-9923 (bonfils2@llnl.gov).

Stardust samples reveal unexpected results

Laboratory scientists, working with collaborators from other scientific and academic institutions, have unveiled new research on the dust collected from Comet Wild 2 during the Stardust mission. In a surprising turn of events, the research failed to find the primitive materials that had been thought to abound in comets. Rather, the dust from this particular comet formed very close to the young Sun and is more like material in asteroids. The research appeared in the January 25, 2008, edition of Science.

Researchers used Livermore’s aberration-corrected, monochromated, scanning transmission electron microscope known as SuperSTEM to analyze the Stardust samples. The samples were compared to interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) gathered from Earth’s stratosphere. Believed to be cometary dust, these IDPs contain the most primitive starting materials from which the planets in the solar system formed. Researchers were particularly interested in identifying in the Wild 2 dust two silicate materials unique to the IDPs, GEMS (glass with embedded metal and sulfides) and crystalline silicate enstatite (a rock-forming mineral). The team found only a single sliverlike whisker of enstatite, and it was similar to material in asteroids, not IDPs. Objects similar to GEMS were found, but the team determined they were created during the high-speed impact with Wild 2 dust.

The research emphasizes the continuum between asteroids and comets. “Wild 2 doesn’t match our idealized picture of a primitive comet made of ancient, unaltered material,” says Livermore scientist Hope Ishii. “The Stardust mission was a real success because without it, we never would have learned these things about our solar system. The returned sample is enabling us to continue to unravel how our solar system formed and evolved.”

Contact: Hope Ishii (925) 422-7927 (ishii2@llnl.gov).

Common Virus May Serve As Target For Vaccine In Fight Against Deadly Brain Tumors

By targeting a common virus, doctors may be able to extend the lives of patients diagnosed with the most prevalent and deadly type of brain tumor, according to a study led by researchers in Duke's Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center.

A type of herpes virus called human cytomegalovirus (CMV) is found in up to 80 percent of Americans, though the virus normally produces very few clinical symptoms, is dormant, and usually undetectable in most people. However, more than 80 percent of patients newly diagnosed with the brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) exhibit detectable CMV in their blood as well as in their tumors. The Duke team thought this might provide an opportunity to target brain tumors by going after the virus.

"Previous work has demonstrated the activation of this virus in patients with GBMs, so we took it one step further and tested a vaccine, in a small group of patients, that seems to show some efficacy in stalling the recurrence of these deadly tumors," said Duane Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., a Duke researcher and lead investigator on the study. "We knew there was a connection between this virus and the brain cancer, and we were hoping to take advantage of that connection to treat one by treating the other."

There were 21 patients enrolled in the trial, and the vaccine appears to have delayed the re-growth of tumors from a typical six to seven months after surgery to more than 12 months. Early results also show a lengthened overall survival among GBM patients, from about 14 months with standard treatment to greater than 20 months.

"These results are preliminary and we're comparing survival data to what we know about average survival with standard treatment for this patient population," Mitchell said. "But we are encouraged that we may have found a very plausible target for a new and complementary treatment for this deadly disease."

Patients on the study received the vaccine in conjunction with the chemotherapy drug temozolomide.

"We believe that use of temozolomide can further stimulate immune response to the vaccine because it initially depletes the infection-fighting immune cells," Mitchell said. "We find that their function is re-invigorated as they build back up during recovery. It's the perfect time to introduce a vaccine, which works by stimulating an immune response."

Sandra Hillburn, a GBM patient, has been receiving monthly doses of this vaccine for almost two years, after being diagnosed in April 2006.

"It's a pleasure to be able to worry about the little things in life again, like the weather," Hillburn said. She travels to Duke each month from her home in New Jersey to get her injections.

Researchers are encouraged by these results and larger-scale clinical trials are expected to ensue, Mitchell said.

Other researchers involved with this study include John Sampson, Gary Archer, Sharon McGehee-Norman, Beth Perry, Denise Lally-Goss, Robert Schmittling, Darell Bigner, Allan Friedman, Henry Friedman, David Reardon, James Vredenburgh, James Herndon and Peter Fecci.

The researchers presented their findings in a poster session at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, on Sunday, June 1. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, The Brain Tumor Society and Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure Foundation.



Pulished On : ScienceDaily (May 17, 2008)

Space Tourism Survey Shows Cost, Access Key Selling Points

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 03 October 2006
03:09 pm ET


With the world's first female space tourist, U.S. entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari, safely back on Earth, a new survey spotlights the feelings of prospective travelers hungering to follow in her boot steps.

Called the Adventurers' Survey, the appraisal was done in August and September and conducted by Derek Webber, Director of Spaceport Associates in Bethesda, Maryland and Jane Reifert, President of Incredible Adventures, Inc. of Sarasota, Florida.

The survey was done on line via the web site of Incredible Adventures. Nearly 1,000 responses were obtained and analyzed.

In taking an early look at the survey results, it "provides some much-needed customer perception feedback to those who are putting their first space tourism offerings together," Webber told SPACE.com. The public study uncovered several surprises, he added, especially on spacecraft architectures and perceptions about spaceports.

Reifert and Webber report that there's an untapped market interest for personal space travel adventures. Space travel now takes its place amongst a range of other adventure packages for consideration when funds allow, they suggest, and in this context, spaceflight is regarded as the "ultimate" adventure experience.

Pricey seats

So far, orbital space tourism has been the propelled province of well-heeled millionaires. Even for projected suborbital jaunts - up to the edge of space and return to Earth - the pricey price tag for a Virgin Galactic spaceliner seat slaps your purse or wallet for roughly $200,000.

Several key results of the space tourism survey point out:
The prices of current space treks into suborbital and orbital are generally too high at present, with only 7 percent registering for suborbital and 4 percent for an orbital adventure at current price levels.
Suborbital flights would really take off at $25,000, and orbital flights at $500,000, if such price levels were compatible with an operator's business plan. If price were not an issue, nearly two thirds of the respondents would want to go on a round-the Moon adventure.
A large proportion of those surveyed don't have a firm idea about their preferred design of the tourism spacecraft. But of those who stated an opinion, there was surprising agreement. A majority of adventurers wanted either a direct vertical launch or a "horizontal all the way" approach, with takeoff suspended under a mother craft coming in third.
Spaceports for a suborbital flight do not seem to matter. The survey indicated that 48 percent of those polled would go "anywhere" for the experience, while another 31 percent would go "anywhere provided it was in their country". It should be noted in this context that 63 percent of the respondents taking the survey were from the United States.
In terms of orbital tourism flights, upwards of 70 percent surveyed would be happy with two weeks or less. Regarding spacewalking, 88 percent were interested in an out-the-hatch stroll, but only 14 percent would be willing to pay a 50 percent premium for the opportunity. Only 21 percent indicated the need for a hotel/space station destination on their orbital trip, but of these, most would pay up to a 30 percent premium for the facility.

Four for four

Returning to Earth late last month, Anousheh Ansari is the fourth pay-per-view person to plunk down some $20 million to climb aboard the International Space Station. Her flight was made possible via a deal arranged between Space Adventures, a U.S.-based space tourism firm, and the Russian Federal Space Agency.

Saluting Ansari's flight, Webber called the space trek a "superbly well managed exercise", one that showcased her dedication and commitment to the new space tourism industry.

"It's always good to be able to add another successful space tourism experience to the database," Webber added. Starting with Dennis Tito's excursion in 2001, there are now four for four successes thanks to Russian space tourism operations, he noted, along with: Mark Shuttleworth in 2002, Gregory Olsen in 2005, and Anousheh Ansari in 2006.

"I look forward to the time when we can start including U.S. orbital space tourism flights in the database. At least the U.S. suborbital industry is getting closer to reality," Webber observed, pointing out that NASA's recent Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) awards -- contracting private firms to send cargo and crew to the International Space Station -- may well stimulate orbital space tourism.

"We must wait to see if either of the COTS winners can introduce orbital tourism as a piggyback operation with their vehicles," Webber concluded.

Published On : Space.com

All About Space Tourism

Space tourism is no longer just the outlandish vision of science fiction writers. While still only affordable to the very wealthy, space tourism offers a unique type of adventure that is sought after by a large percent of the traveling population. From the mind-boggling thrill of looking at Earth from space to the feeling of weightlessness, space trips offer the experience of a lifetime to well-funded travelers.

Through Space Adventures, Ltd. and the Russian Soyuz program, American Dennis Tito became the first fee-paying tourist in space. He was later followed by South African Mark Shuttlework and American entrepreneur/scientist Gregory Olsen. Soon after, private space traveling for paying tourists was temporarily put on hold when Soyuz vehicles became the only available transport to the International Space Station after the Columbia disaster.

Private companies in Russia, Europe and the United States are competing to become future leaders of space tourism. Even though analysts envision space tourism travel becoming more and more popular, development is a slow process. Analysts say floating space hotels are on the horizon, but until space travel is more affordable, there will not be a substantial market for the hotels.

For more information on space tourism, simply choose any space tourism article or other interactive feature below.

Published On: Space.com

100 Most Influential People in IT

Ziff Davis Enterprise editors name the people shaping the future of technology.

The editorial staffs of eWEEK and sister publications CIO Insight and Baseline put their heads together to name the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT.

To come up with this year’s list, we looked for people who not only had a tangible track record of IT success, but also have far-reaching influence, the ability to effect change and a deep level of engagement in developing emerging technologies.

The last criteria is especially important, as we wanted to highlight the people who are on the leading edge of technology development—those who are shaping not only the products we use and the model by which they are delivered, but also the way in which we work.


1. Larry Ellison

CEO, Oracle

Ellison's plan to roll up the enterprise applications' space has shown no sign of slowing. Oracle has leveraged its strength in the data center to cement its status as one of the world's most important applications and middleware vendors. For more on Ellison's influence, click here.

2. Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple
Apple’s influence is being increasingly felt in the enterprise.

3. Steve Ballmer
CEO, Microsoft
Microsoft has certainly had some challenges of late. Now, the company moves forward—with Ballmer at the helm.

4. Sam Palmisano
Chairman and CEO, IBM
Palmisano has positioned IBM to generate great returns in a mature market—by expanding internationally and finding opportunities in the enterprise applications' space.

5. Marissa Mayer
Vice president, search products and user experience, Google
Mayer oversees the way Google's search engine is constructed and how usable it is to people all over the world.

6. Jean-Philippe Courtois
President, Microsoft International, Microsoft
Courtois leads global sales, marketing and services for Microsoft International in more than 240 countries outside the United States and Canada.

7. Joe Tucci
Chairman, president and CEO, EMC
Tucci is taking EMC on a trip beyond storage.

8. Mark Hurd
Chairman, president and CEO, Hewlett-Packard
Hurd has beefed up HP’s software division and its services portfolio.

9. John Chambers
Chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems
IP is increasingly becoming the channel by which all communication travels, and Cisco is providing not only the plumbing, but also the applications.

10. Larry Page & Sergey Brin
President of products and president of technology, respectively, Google
The founders of Google changed expectations for search engines, and now they’re doing the same with a growing suite of applications that have paved the way for a top-down model of technology implementation.

11. John Johnson
CIO, Intel
Johnson undertook one of the world’s largest mobile computing efforts: Some 85 percent of Intel employees are now free from their desktops, resulting in
double-digit productivity gains.

12. Kevin Turner
COO, Microsoft
The former Wal-Mart exec has succeeded as COO—while other outsiders have floundered in the role.

13. Ray Ozzie
Chief software architect, Microsoft
Outside Microsoft, Ozzie is known as the person responsible for the company’s forward-thinking services' strategy. Within some quarters of Microsoft, he is known for building out the services' vision and platform, while letting other executives take credit.

14. Marc Benioff
CEO, Salesforce.com

Benioff was at the forefront of the SAAS (software as a service) revolution, and he continues to lead the charge.

15. Linus Torvalds
Developer, Linux Foundation
He developed Linux, which is arguably the first open-source app widely used in the enterprise, and his influence on the kernel continues to be felt on a day-to-day basis.

16. Jonathan Schwartz
President and CEO, Sun
Hitching his company’s horse to open source, Schwartz is making sure the Sun doesn’t set.

17. Jeff Bezos
Chairman and CEO, Amazon.com
Bezos is constantly evolving Amazon.com, from Web-based bookseller to uber-online retailer to cloud computing provider.

18. Michael Dell
CEO, Dell
Dell is back and ready to rumble in the enterprise space.

19. Barbara Desoer
CTO & COO, Bank of America
Banks, mortgages and acquisitions all come together in her tech operations during a difficult economic time.

20. Diane Greene
President and CEO, VMware
Greene believed in virtualization when no one else did. Now she has to defend VMware’s turf as virtualization becomes common wisdom.

21. Nandan Nilekani
Co-chairman, Infosys Technologies
Nilekani has been instrumental in making India an IT force and is still coming on strong.

22. Mendel Rosenblum
Chief scientist, VMware
Rosenblum has enormous influence over the development of the hypervisor and is working on new areas for the company to explore.

23. Rob Carter
CIO, FedEx
Carter is widely considered the most innovative and effective CIO in the United States.

24. Peter Weill
Director, Center for Information Systems Research
As the director and senior research scientist at CISR, a research group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Weill conducts research on the role and value of IT in the enterprise.

25. Henning Kagermann
Co-CEO, SAP
SAP software is used at all the big companies, and Kagermann would like it to run at small and midsize companies, too. It was recently announced that Kagermann will share the post of CEO with Leo Apotheker. Kagermann plans to step down in 2009.

26. Bob Muglia
Senior vice president, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft
If Microsoft's launches of the 2008 versions of SQL Server, Visual Studio and Windows Server go well, the future is Muglia’s.

27. Azim Premji
Chairman, Wipro Technologies
Premji has led Wipro, of Bangalore, India, since 1966, when it was a cooking fat company. Today, Wipro has $5 billion in revenue and it provides IT services via a global delivery platform.

28. Scott Guthrie
Corporate vice president, .Net Developer Platform, Microsoft

Guthrie oversees several development teams responsible for delivering Visual Studio tools and .Net Framework technologies.

29. Eva Chen
CEO, Trend Micro
Under Chen’s leadership, Trend Micro continues to engineer security software that outperforms the competitions.

30. Brendan Eich
CTO, Mozilla Corp.
Eich helps ensure that the browser is up to the task of acting as the operating system— running an increasing number of mission-critical enterprise applications in the cloud.

31. John Halamka
CIO, CareGroup Health System, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Clinical Research Institute
In addition to his CIO role, Dr. Halamka serves as an e-health adviser to both Microsoft and Google.

32. Paul Otellini
President and CEO, Intel
Otellini has helped get Intel back on track as the top producer of x86 processors for servers, desktops and laptops after struggling against Advanced Micro Devices for years.

33. Rollin Ford
CIO, Wal-Mart
The world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, sets technology direction.

34. Steve Mills
Senior vice president and group executive, IBM
Mills oversees all of IBM’s software efforts.

35. Tim Berners-Lee
Director, World Wide Web Consortium
The inventor of the Web—and the man who’s envisioning its future with the Semantic Web.

36. Kevin Martin
Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
Martin sets the telecommunications agenda, with his influence keenly felt lately around spectrum and net neutrality issues.

37. Michael Howard
Principal security program manager, Microsoft
Howard is co-author of Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle. His influence is so significant that companies outside of Microsoft are implementing their own versions of SDL.

38. Andrew McAfee
Associate professor, Harvard Business School
McAfee is a torchbearer for the emerging Enterprise 2.0 market.

39. Nicholas Negroponte
Founder, One Laptop Per Child
Negroponte, also founder and chairman emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab, rocked the IT industry with the introduction of the XO—as much for the laptop’s technology innovations as for the project’s philanthropic spirit.

40. Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Facebook
The 23-year-old Zuckerberg stole the social networking crown from MySpace and has built a thriving community of third-party developers.

41. Elizabeth Hight
Navy rear admiral, vice director, Defense Information Systems Agency
Nominated to take over DISA, Hight is also commander of the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations—a big job any time, but really tough during wartime.

42. Jack Ma Yun
CEO, Alibaba
His Alibaba efforts—an English-language business-to-business site for international buyers looking to contact Chinese sellers and a Chinese language site focused on B2B trades inside China—lead China’s burgeoning e-commerce market.

43. Window Snyder
Chief security something or other, Mozilla
A former Microsoft security strategist, Snyder borrowed a page from Redmond’s playbook and introduced a comprehensive threat-modeling and penetration-testing routine to Mozilla.

44. Robert LeBlanc
General manager, IBM Global Consulting Services and SOA
LeBlanc is leading the all-important SOA charge at IBM.

45. Marc Andreessen
Entrepreneur
Co-author of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, chairman of Opsware and now co-founder of Ning, an up-and-coming social network platform. We’re starting to lose track of Andreessen’s many tech lives—and wide-ranging influence.

46. Tony Scott
CIO, Microsoft
Scott oversees Microsoft’s 4,000-person IT operation, whose practice of “eating its own dog food” makes Scott an early indicator of whether new products are ready for enterprise consumption.

47. Randall Stephenson
Chairman, AT&T
Back from being broken up, AT&T is now calling the shots for a mobile world.

48. Ralph Szygenda
CIO, General Motors

Still the general of CIOs, but his company is challenged.

49. Marc Tremblay
Sun fellow, senior vice president and chief architect of microelectronics, Sun Microsystems
Tremblay helped develop the UltraSPARC family of processors and now the “Rock,” a processor set for release in 2009 designed with parallel computing in mind.

50. Mark Lewis
President, Content Management and Archiving Division, EMC
Previously EMC CTO, Lewis leads the division that helps companies create value from all the data EMC technology stores.

51. Michal Zalewski
Information security engineer, Google
Before joining the search company, Zalewski launched an all-out assault on the security models of modern Web browsers, exposing critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox. His public disclosure of those flaws went a long way toward hardening the browsers.

52. David Barnes
CIO, United Parcel Service
Barnes is getting real efficient with the UPS fleet.

53. John Pescatore
Vice president and research fellow, Gartner
In many ways, Pescatore’s work determines enterprise spending at a very high level, influencing the delivery of Internet-facing products.

54. Robert Samson
Vice president, Worldwide Systems Sales, Systems and Technology Group, IBM
Samson is responsible for worldwide sales of IBM’s servers and storage products, as well as retail store solutions.

55. Faisal Hoque
Founder, Business Technology Management Institute
Hoque champions a form of management science called Business Technology Management, which aims to ensure that sustainable business value can be delivered through technology.

56. Bob Willett
CIO and CEO, Best Buy and Best Buy International
Willett is a forerunner of what we call “the hollowing of big IT”—where IT organizations of the future will be composed of managers and analysts with most specialty work outsourced.

57. Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikia
Co-founder of that fount of shared knowledge, Wikipedia, Wales is now looking to apply the wiki model to search with Wikia Search.

58. Bruce Schneier
CTO, BT Counterpane

Schneier is a leading cryptology expert and a voice for common sense in security policy.

59. Charles Phillips
President, Oracle
Larry Ellison makes the plans, and Phillips has to fuse his boss’ big thoughts with reality.

60. Stefan Esser
Security researcher
Esser’s “Month of PHP Bugs” project thoroughly exposed the insecure nature of the widely deployed PHP language and forced a rethink of security in the open-source world.

61. Martin Roesch
CTO, Sourcefire
The inventor of the open-source Snort, Roesch is a noted expert in the area of intrusion prevention technology.

62. Ann Livermore
Executive vice president, Technology Solutions Group, Hewlett-Packard
Livermore has tremendous influence over the types of products HP offers its enterprise customers, as well as the small and midsize companies HP has begun to pursue.

63. John Doerr
Venture capitalist, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
In tech, it’s all about making the right venture capital bets.

64. Angela Merkel
Chancellor, Germany

The first female chancellor of Germany, Merkel is a physicist by training and has the strongest understanding of technology of any world leader.

65. Ravi Marwaha
General manager, IBM Global Business Partners
The partner program Marwaha oversees actively networks with solution providers from different disciplines to develop innovative solutions that solve real-world customer problems.

66. John Glaser
CIO, Partners HealthCare
Leader in the strategic application of IT in the health care industry.

67. Bill Hilf
Director of platform strategy, Microsoft
Hilf is a key player in Microsoft’s evolving strategy to reach out to the open-source community.

68. Mark Shuttleworth
CEO, Canonical
The leader of the Ubuntu distribution is mainstreaming Linux on the desktop.

69. Randy Mott
CIO, Hewlett-Packard

Formerly CIO at Wal-Mart and Dell, Mott is responsible for HP’s IT strategy and assets.

70. Thomas Davenport
Author
“Competing on Analytics” is an important book at a time when business intelligence is in its ascendancy.

71. Gary Hamel
Author
His ideas in “The Future of Management” validate and expound new ways of working and using IT.

72. Simon Crosby
CTO, XenSource
Crosby is a leading proponent of open-source virtualization with the Xen hypervisor. (XenSource was acquired by Citrix in 2007.)

73. Edward Markey
U.S. Representative, D-Mass.
Markey serves as the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunication and the Internet, and is a major advocate for net neutrality.

74. Ross Mayfield
Co-founder, SocialText

As SocialText’s chairman and president, and former CEO, Mayfield is a thought leader in the burgeoning Web 2.0 collaboration software market.

75. Stan Shih
Chairman, Acer
Shih started Acer—which snapped up Gateway in 2007—and is still the company’s top tech visionary.

76. Desh Deshpande
Founder, Deshpande Center, MIT School of Engineering
From financial flop to billionaire to a new way of developing tech startups.

77. Edward Amoroso
CISO, AT&T
The chief information security officer at AT&T, Amoroso is a pioneer of security in the cloud.

78. Padmasree Warrior
CTO, Cisco
Formerly of Motorola, Warrior plays a key role in the development of Cisco technology.

79. Mark Olsen
Chairman, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
Olsen and the PCAOB are charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with setting the standards for and enforcement of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

80. Mary Lou Jepsen
Founder, Pixel Qi
As CTO of the OLPC, Jepsen introduced innovative display technologies. Now she’s applying that experience at her Pixel Qi startup, which will build components for low-cost information devices.

81. Adeo Ressi
Founder, Thefunded.com
Ressi has built a huge following for his ratings of venture capitalists and his recounting of how they treat would-be entrepreneurs.

82. Bronwen Matthews
Security program manager, Microsoft
Matthews controls the budget for outside hacking teams hired to break Microsoft’s products.

83. Akash Saraf
CEO, Zenith InfoTech

Rather than setting up yet another boutique managed services offering, Saraf built a massive hosting infrastructure in India to deliver affordable managed services that resellers in the United States could brand as their own.

84. Chris Wysopal CTO, Veracode
Wysopal is a poster boy for hackers made good.

85. Lawrence Lessig
Founder, Center for Internet and Society
With his Change Congress Web site, Lessig’s goal is to reduce corruption and the influence of money in politics. Lessig is also an advocate for reduced legal restrictions on the radio spectrum and the creator of Creative Commons license.

86. Patricia Curley
CIO, The Kraft Group

Tasked with managing the technology that keeps the New England Patriots humming, Curley also oversees IT for the New England Revolution soccer team and Gillette Stadium.

87. Jim Collins
Author
“Good to Great” is the most popular and influential book among CIOs.

88. Edward Felten
Computer security and privacy and technology policy researcher, Princeton University

Felten is shining a spotlight on the intersection of public policy and privacy.

89. Evan Williams
Founder, Twitter
Williams asked the question, “What are you doing right now?” and changed the way we communicate in the process.

90. Matt Mullenweg
Co-founder, WordPress

The 24-year-old Mullenweg is a pioneer of the open-source blog.

91. Alan Kay
A computer science legend, Kay’s most recent work has been with the OLPC, whose XO laptop is based in part on his innovations.

92. Ivan Krstic
Former director of security, OLPC
Krstic, who left the OLPC in March, created the innovative Bitfrost security architecture for the XO. If Bitfrost proves itself on the XO, it will influence anti-malware security on mainstream operating systems.

93. Nicholas Carr
Author
Carr shook up the industry by saying that IT doesn’t matter. Agree or not, his ideas continue to shape the way that organizations look at the IT department.

94. Tavis Ormandy
Information security engineer, Google
Ormandy, one of the most visible hackers/researchers on the Google Security Team, faces the unenviable responsibility of making sure all of Google’s products pass the security smell test.

95. Mark Spencer
Chairman and CTO, Digium
Spencer founded Asterisk and the open-source telephony movement.

96. Dave Winer
Software developer and entrepreneur

Winer is the developer of RSS.

97. Thornton May
Florida Community College, IT Leadership Academy
May is a noted technology futurist.

98. William
Cheswick
Lead member of technical staff, AT&T Labs

Cheswick continues to innovate in the area of communications research.

99. Chris Anderson
Author
Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, proffered the notion of the niche in his book, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.”

100. Ben Bernanke
Chairman, Federal Reserve Board
No one will have a bigger impact on the fate of the nation’s banks and financial services companies, interest rates, or access to credit.