How sure? Well, these are scientists so there’s still a note of caution, but Joe Incandela, a spokesman for one of the LHC experiments, went on-record with a pretty confident statement: “The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson.”

However, they’re still not sure what kind of Higgs boson they’re looking at. From today’s statement:

“Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they find that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model. Finding the answer to this question will take time.”

It’s not surprising that this task takes time. CERN said a month ago that its storage systems were holding 100 petabytes of data.

The research organization has been working closely with companies such as Yandex to sift through that information in search of unusual events, and in Thursday’s statement CERN pointed out that finding one event means looking through around a trillion proton-proton collisions.

“To characterize all of the decay modes will require much more data from the LHC,” the statement read. For now, the LHC is turned off – it will come back online next year.

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The new arrangement was announced on Thursday, along with confirmation of Russia’s Yandex becoming an openlab associate in the field of data processing. Huawei’s involvement is a bigger deal than that, as it puts the Chinese firm on a par with Intel, HP, Oracle and Siemens, all of which work particularly closely with CERN to see how their technologies can help with the Large Hadron Collider experiments.

In Huawei’s case, the company is contributing its self-healing UDS cloud storage system for use and validation. UDS is targeting the upcoming exascale (an exabyte is roughly a million terabytes) era with a mass object-based storage infrastructure that uses ARM’s energy-efficient processor architecture alongside cheap SATA disks. It also offers Amazon S3 API compatibility and claims eleven-nines (99.999999999 percent) reliability, so users theoretically don’t need to back up data stored in a UDS-toting cloud.

UDS provides a bit of insight into how openlab works. Huawei first delivered a 384-node version of UDS to CERN in early 2012, after which the researchers played around with it for three months. In September of that year, Huawei released UDS to the general enterprise market (in more normal eight-node configurations). The benefits for both sides of this partnership are clear: CERN has to push technological limits in order to handle the very big data generated by the LHC, and Huawei gets both valuable feedback from the researchers and a glowing report card to show off to the wider world.

As for the next steps in this partnership, CERN has now hired two computer scientists to work with Huawei on its implementation there, and more UDS storage systems will be deployed at the Swiss facility in the next few months.

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While it seems that chip industry has changed a lot in the last five years or so, that’s nothing compared to what will have to happen going forward. In the last five years the advent of iPhone — which brought real computing on a small, mobile form factor — has upended Intel’s dominance in the PC market. Just last week mobile chip maker Qualcomm surpassed Intel in market cap.

And on the server side and in high performance computing, the demand for more performance in a more efficient package has led to the adoption of new accelerator chips. The Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers came out Monday and showcases this trend with 62 supercomputers on the list using an accelerator. The fastest computer, called Titan, contains a mix of x86 chips and graphics processors to reach speeds of 17.59 petaflops. It was only four years ago that a GPU-powered computer had even made this list.

The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor

Already the mobile industry uses a mix of cores to divide different processing jobs on a mobile device as a way to send the right job to the right processor, but also to save battery life by turning cores off when not in use and using a lower power core if possible for a job.

But accelerators can only take the chip industry so far, and are aimed at the high performance computing market. A multipetaflop machine still consumes a lot of power. One way to reduce that power consumption and boost performance is to cram more transistors on a chip by shrinking the space between transistors and reducing the overall size of the chip. This is called moving down the process node, but as the chip industry approaches feature widths of 20 and 14 nanometers, manufacturers are resorting to ever more complicated structures and materials to ensure that the chips perform well.

We’ve covered Intel’s 3-D transistors, Soitec’s new wafers, new materials and a variety of other breakthroughs all designed to keep this process shrinking. But researchers at McGill University have demonstrated that once you get to the atomic scale at levels of sub-five nanometers, the electric current on the chip gets all wonky — delivering a fourfold decrease in current. The researchers theorize when they shrink the channel that the electrons pass through they introduce “quantum weirdness.”

The “quantum weirdness” changes the way the current flows through a channel and so far those changes behave in unpredictable ways because the particles researchers are working with are at the atomic or sub-atomic scale. Which relates the research the top-level chip guys are doing to quantum theory and Schrodinger’s Cat. While Schrodinger’s famous thought experiement is an effort to articulate that the act of observing a quantum particle may change its state, the thought experiment is based on the fact that at subatomic scale materials behave differently.

From a write-up on the research:

As feature sizes in future chips shrink to the level of atoms, the resistance to current no longer increases at a consistent rate as devices shrink; instead the resistance “jumps around,” displaying the counterintuitive effects of quantum mechanics, says McGill Physics professor Peter Grütter.

This means that as chipmakers develop smaller processors or build any electronics with nano materials, the laws of physics will demand they change their materials and likely the structure of those materials, as well as conduct basic research to understand the new rules of playing at the atomic scale. Fortunately scientists at universities and researchers inside labs at place like IBM and HP are thinking about quantum physics and how it will change the rules of semiconductor manufacturing. And yes, there are some that are skipping the electronics part of the equation and skipping straight ahead to quantum computers, but I think our digital bits are here to stay for a few more decades.

Schrodinger’s cat image courtesy of Wikipedia.

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It was also the year that direct current (DC) took a back seat to alternating current (AC) after Niagara Falls Power Company chose AC transmission for its power plant.

Although we live in an AC-dominated world, DC seems poised for a comeback, particularly in data centers. Facebook adopted a DC architecture in its Prineville, Ore., data center. SAP spent $128,000 retrofitting a data center at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to rely on DC power. In 2010 it cut SAP’s energy bills by $24,000 per year.

ABB, the Swiss-Swedish conglomerate, bought a controlling interest last year in Validus DC Systems, which specializes in DC data center equipment. ABB also opened a factory in North Carolina to produce HVDC (high voltage DC) equipment for delivering power from solar and offshore wind farms to the grid. The Tres Amigas “superstation” will rely heavily on HVDC.

General Electric, meanwhile, bought Lineage Power, which produces DC equipment, and it has talked about using DC to power mining shovels and other heavy-duty equipment.

Nextek Power Systems and the EMmerge Alliance are also promoting DC as a way to cut power in buildings.

Behind the DC drive

What’s driving it? Although AC became the standard for electronic transmission, DC didn’t disappear. It just hid. Servers, large numbers of electric motors, batteries, even ships and airplanes run on DC. Solar panels produce DC power. Wind turbines can produce AC or DC power, but the extreme variability of wind power means that electricity generated by turbines has to pass through battery banks before it gets to the grid. As a result, wind farms are effectively DC.

The landline telephone system runs on DC too, notes Brian Fortenberry, a program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute.

To solve the mismatch, a whole industry of AC-DC converters has been developed. National Semiconductor sells billions of dollars’ worth of chips to convert power. Inverters in the solar industry exist to convert DC from solar panels to AC that can run on the wires in your home.

In data centers, the AC-DC gymnastics top the charts. Typically, AC from the grid has to be stepped down in voltage so it can be routed safely in building equipment. Lower-voltage AC then gets converted to DC so it can go to an uninterruptable power supply (UPS). DC power from the UPS then gets converted to AC so it can go over the wires in the building. Then it gets converted back to DC. Usually five conversions, or steps, downward take place.

By converting grid AC at the door of a data center to medium-voltage DC or converting stepped-down AC to DC at the last possible moment, a data center can cut utility bills by 10 to 20 percent or more, according to Trent Waterhouse, the VP of marketing for power electronics at General Electric.

Validus and others have also eliminated some of the technological hurdles involved in transmitting via DC, namely the monster-sized copper cables.

The same dynamics work in buildings. In a retail establishment, DC power from solar panels could go directly to DC-powered LED lights with not-intermediate conversions that sap energy, according to Nextek. Perhaps not coincidentally, Redwood Systems, the lighting networking company, touts that its technology is actually an example of DC networking.

More savings comes in real estate. DC data centers require 25 percent to 40 percent less square footage than their AC counterparts, largely because computer equipment can connect directly to backup batteries.

In a hypothetical example, a 2.5-megawatt data center power module in the AC world might need 7,295 square feet, Ronald Ranaldi, the VP of sales at Validus, told me last year. An equivalent DC power module might occupy only 5,102 square feet, a savings of 2,193 square feet. What’s more, a single data center might consist of several 2.5-megawatt modules.

“Real estate is often greater than the energy savings,” says Ranaldi. “In large, green field data centers, you are literally eliminating buildings.”

DC won’t take over the world. And not everyone is sold. Google is not taking DC for its data centers in part because of the cost that would be involved in retrofitting their existing architecture. But it seems that an idea that was current when Grover Cleveland was in the White House and Japan was just adopting the Gregorian calendar could make a comeback.

Image courtesy of The Planet

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IBM's new memory storing the letters for the word THINK.

Computer and memory chips usually tend to get smaller over time, but a paper published Thursday in Science, IBM details how it’s building memory chips that would be 100 times more dense than today’s hard drives by starting with the smallest building blocks: atoms. Big Blue’s prototype chip is only 12 atoms across (click here for an awesome visualization of how small an atom is. No really, click it!) but is another way of thinking about ways to get beyond the limits of building ever-smaller chips keeping Moore’s Law on track.

Andreas Heinrich, the project lead for IBMs efforts, explained in an interview that this tech may never be realized in part because it requires an entirely new type of manufacturing equipment to be built. However, IBM is learning how to manipulate atoms for storing bits and identified a new type of magnetism that could one day be used. Unlike the type of magnetism that keeps your magnets stuck to your fridge, IBM is looking at the reverse of those properties to make this highly dense type of memory.

It’s called antiferromagnetism, and the benefits of using it are not only its density, but that data wouldn’t be lost if it encountered a magnet. IBM is also playing with memory made using traditional magnets, but unfortunately at the atomic level nearby magnets tend to disrupt one another making it difficult to use them close together to store data. Applying antiferromagnetism prevents this and enables researchers to build smaller structures. Heinrich notes that the 12-atom memory chip prototype was only possible in a very low temperature environment, and to make a stable prototype in a room-temperature environment ,it would take a device that’s 150-atoms thick.

So clearly, these aren’t ready for prime time in a hot data center anytime soon. I kid, but the real value of the research here is that there are folks out there continuing to try to advance computing not just for tomorrow but for decades down the line. When your future mobile phone packs a terabyte of storage, it may be Heinrich and IBM you should thank. For more info, check out IBM’s video below.

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Growth has become such a mainstay of our existence that we take its continuation as a given. Growth brings many positive benefits, such as cars, television, air travel and iGadgets. Quality of life improves, health care improves and, aside from a proliferation of passwords to remember, life tends to become more convenient over time. Growth also brings with it a promise of the future, giving reason to invest in future development in anticipation of a return on the investment. Growth is then the basis for interest rates, loans and the finance industry.

Because growth has been with us for “countless” generations — meaning that everyone we ever met or our grandparents ever met has experienced it — growth is central to our narrative of who we are and what we do. We therefore have a difficult time imagining a different trajectory.

This post provides a striking example of the impossibility of continued growth at current rates — even within familiar timescales. For a matter of convenience, we lower the energy growth rate from 2.9 percent to 2.3 percent per year so that we see a factor of ten increase every 100 years. We start the clock today, with a global rate of energy use of 12 terawatts (meaning that the average world citizen has a 2,000 W share of the total pie). We will begin with semi-practical assessments and then in stages let our imaginations run wild — even then finding that we hit limits sooner than we might think. I will admit from the start that the assumptions underlying this analysis are deeply flawed. But that becomes the whole point, in the end.

A race to the galaxy

I have always been impressed by the fact that as much solar energy reaches Earth in one hour as we consume in a year. What hope such a statement brings! But let’s not get carried away — yet.

Only 70 percent of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget. The rest immediately bounces off clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28 percent of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15 percent efficiency. Let’s assume 20 percent for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes?

When would we run into this limit at a 2.3 percent growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. Two hundred and seventy-five years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. And think about the world we have just created: Every square meter of land is covered in photovoltaic panels! Where do we grow food?

Now let’s start relaxing constraints. Surely in 275 years we will be smart enough to exceed 20 percent efficiency for such an important global resource. Let’s laugh in the face of thermodynamic limits and talk of 100 percent efficiency (yes, we have started the fantasy portion of this journey). This buys us a factor of five, or 70 years.

But who needs the oceans? Let’s plaster them with 100 percent efficient solar panels as well. Another 55 years. In 400 years, we hit the solar wall at the Earth’s surface. This is significant, because biomass, wind and hydroelectric generation derive from the sun’s radiation, and fossil fuels represent the Earth’s battery charged by solar energy over millions of years. Only nuclear, geothermal and tidal processes do not come from sunlight — the latter two of which are inconsequential for this analysis, at a few terawatts apiece.

But the chief limitation in the preceding analysis is Earth’s surface area — pleasant as it is. We only gain 16 years by collecting the extra 30 percent of energy immediately bouncing away, so the great expense of placing an Earth-encircling photovoltaic array in space is surely not worth the effort. But why confine ourselves to the Earth, once in space?

Let’s think big: Surround the sun with solar panels. And while we’re at it, let’s again make them 100 percent efficient. Never mind the fact that a 4-mm-thick structure surrounding the sun at the distance of Earth’s orbit would require one Earth’s worth of materials — and specialized materials at that. Doing so allows us to continue 2.3 percent annual energy growth for 1,350 years from the present time.

At this point you may realize that our sun is not the only star in the galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy hosts about 100 billion stars. Lots of energy just spewing into space, there for the taking. Recall that each factor of ten takes us 100 years down the road. One hundred billion is eleven factors of ten, so 1,100 additional years. Thus in about 2,500 years from now, we would be using a large galaxy’s worth of energy. We know in some detail what humans were doing 2,500 years ago. I think I can safely say that I know what we won’t be doing 2,500 years hence.

Why single out solar?

Some readers may be bothered by the foregoing focus on solar/stellar energy. If we’re dreaming big, let’s forget the wimpy solar energy constraints and adopt fusion. The abundance of deuterium in ordinary water would allow us to have a seemingly inexhaustible source of energy right here on Earth. We won’t go into a detailed analysis of this path, because we don’t have to. The merciless growth illustrated above means that in 1,400 years from now, any source of energy we harness would have to outshine the sun.

Let me restate that important point. No matter what the technology, a sustained 2.3 percent energy growth rate would require us to produce as much energy as the entire sun within 1,400 years. A word of warning: That power plant is going to run a little warm. Thermodynamics require that if we generated sun-comparable power on Earth, the surface of the Earth — being smaller than that of the sun — would have to be hotter than the surface of the sun!

Thermodynamic limits

We can explore more exactly the thermodynamic limits to the problem. Earth absorbs abundant energy from the sun — far in excess of our current societal enterprise. The Earth gets rid of its energy by radiating into space, mostly at infrared wavelengths. No other paths are available for heat disposal. The absorption and emission are in near-perfect balance, in fact. If they were not, Earth would slowly heat up or cool down. Indeed, we have diminished the ability of infrared radiation to escape, leading to global warming. Even so, we are still in balance to within less than the 1 percent level. Because radiated power scales as the fourth power of temperature (when expressed in absolute terms, like Kelvin), we can compute the equilibrium temperature of Earth’s surface given additional loading from societal enterprise.

The result is shown above. From before, we know that if we confine ourselves to the Earth’s surface, we exhaust solar potential in 400 years. In order to continue energy growth beyond this time, we would need to abandon renewables — virtually all of which derive from the sun — for nuclear fission and fusion. But the thermodynamic analysis says we’re toasted anyway.

Stop the madness!

The purpose of this exploration is to point out the absurdity that results from the assumption that we can continue growing our use of energy — even if doing so more modestly than the past 350 years have seen. This analysis is an easy target for criticism, given the tunnel vision of its premise. I would enjoy shredding it myself. Chiefly, continued energy growth will likely be unnecessary if the human population stabilizes. At least the 2.9 percent energy growth rate we have experienced should ease off as the world saturates with people. But let’s not overlook the key point: Continued growth in energy use becomes physically impossible within conceivable time frames. The foregoing analysis offers a cute way to demonstrate this point. I have found it to be a compelling argument that snaps people into appreciating the genuine limits to indefinite growth.

Once we appreciate that physical growth must one day cease (or reverse), we can come to realize that all economic growth must similarly end. This last point may be hard to swallow, given our ability to innovate, improve efficiency, etc. But this topic will be put off for another post.

Acknowledgments

I thank Kim Griest for comments and for seeding the idea that in 2,500 years, we use up the Milky Way galaxy, and I thank Brian Pierini for useful comments.

This post originally appeared on Tom Murphy’s blog, Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and Ph.D. student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test general relativity by bouncing laser pulses off the reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter-range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for nonscience majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.

Photos courtesy of NASA Goddard’s Flickr stream

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For those of you looking for a different desktop experience, BumpTop Mac is now available for public consumption.

Almost four years ago we got a glimpse of the BumpTop prototype, and the application of physics to desktop-based files looked great. Since then, the Windows version has been made available, and the Mac version has been in closed beta (as I’ve mentioned previously). I still like the concept, and it definitely feels like it was made for OS X (versus just a Windows port) which is ideal. To find out more about what BumpTop Mac does, and why (or why not) it may be useful for you, read on.

The good folks at BumpTop brand it as, “Your Mac Desktop, Reinvented,” which I believe is a fair statement. Though I look at it more as what Path Finder did for the Finder — it adds a bunch of features, and makes the standard OS X desktop prettier (in some ways).

Essentially, BumpTop works to make your computer desktop more like your physical desktop. It adds walls around the flat space that allow you to pin things up ‘out of the way’, it lets you click and fling files across the space using physics characteristics (so if one file is represented as larger, it will crash through a group of smaller files), and more. The best, and most useful feature, in my opinion, is the Piles concept. Clicking and dragging a circle around several files allows you to group them together into a pile, signifying relevance to one another. Of course, all of this is great, but assumes that you keep lots of files and ‘stuff’ on your desktop — which goes against my Desktop Zero concept, but to each his/her own!

Does all of this sound interesting to you? If so, you can download BumpTop Mac for free. Should you decide you want to upgrade to the Pro version, it will cost you $29. The Pro price tag brings with it some extra bling features like unlimited sticky notes and the ability to flip through your Piles, as well as ‘Find-as-you-type’ search, multi-touch gestures, and preferred support. (As a note, the multi-touch gestures currently support the MacBook line’s trackpads — there is no mention of the Magic Mouse.) Are those things worth the price to you? It’s very possible that they are, and who are we kidding, it’s a very cool concept to play with. But try the free version first and see if this alternate way of handling your desktop jives with your workflow.

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If you’re a Feynman fan or just interested in physics (or not), then you should head over to Project Tuva. Created by Microsoft Research, Project Tuva is an interactive video collection of Feynman presenting on various physics topics. Built in Silverlight (naturally), Project Tuva provides not only original Feynman lectures, but also searchable transcripts, note taking and links to external, supporting content.

The site currently collects Feynman’s “Messenger Series” of lectures from 1964, which includes talks on such topics as “Law of Graviation,” “The Distinction of Past and Future,” and “The Relation of Mathematics and Physics.” To call them “talks” makes them sound dull, a word I’ve never heard associated with Mr. Feynman.

It’s not too surprising that Microsoft would put together something like this. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is a huge Feynman fan, and passion projects like this are what gobs of money are for.

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Unholster your iPhone and boot up iTunes because it’s that time of the week when we all gather round the App Store and have a look at some of the freshest picks from the last seven days.

While I’ve been wandering the boutiques and bars of Berlin this week, things have been busy for Apple. First up was the Q1 conference call where Tim Cook — standing in for Steve Jobs — revealed that the $199 iPhone price point is working well. 

Less pleasing for those in Cupertino was a court ruling that, due to the fact that the first generation iPod Nano is overly susceptible to scratch damage, Apple is going to have to pay up to $25 to owners of the tiny damaged device.

Setting the serious stuff aside, let’s get down to business with this week’s App Store Roundup.

This week, I’ve been looking at iSniper, Slingshot Lite, Fantastic Contraption and Haruzou – Photo Uploader.

iSniper ($1.99)
Back in my student days, I was an avid online gamer; favorites included Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Battlefield 1942. My class of choice was always sniper — you need to be cunning, patient and then quick on the draw when the time comes. While I’ve ditched the gaming PC for my luxurious but FPS-free Macbook Pro, my trigger-finger still itches for the thrill of shooting faces off. Imagine my joy therefore at discovering iSniper, a game which strips away all the running and jumping, leaving just the satsifying snipey bits.

Slingshot Lite (FREE)
Slingshot Lite brings applied physics to your iPhone, as you literally slingshot your missiles ’round planets in a bid to destroy your target. It’s a game of trial and error, constantly refining the variables until you achieve success. The best thing though is that, due to all the number balancing and variable tweaking, you feel exceedingly clever after completing each stage. It’s like an ego-boost in your pocket. And, if you dig the lite version, the full edition is available for a few bucks.

Fantastic Contraption ($2.99)
First things first, let’s get this out the way: this game is an absolute must have. It should sit in your iPhone game collection alongside  that other essential title, Rolando. The idea is that you craft your own clever contraptions which move themselves — through the joys of phsyics — to the goal area. Chuck together a device using cogs, wood and other bits and bobs, then set your creation in to action. The game even features a built in level editor, extra levels and the ability to share your contraptions with the community. If you’re still not positive that you should immediately purchase this game, go try it out now, online.

Haruzou – Photo Uploader (free)
Even though I’ve just purchased an awesome new camera (Panasonic  DMC LX3, for those wondering), my iPhone (with the help of Polarize) is still getting some photo love. In the past I’ve recommended Klick for uploading to Flickr, it’s feature-rich, polished and free; however, some users may want a more bare-bones solution to getting their snaps on Flickr. Haruzou  uploads to both Flickr and Picasa, includes multiple-image uploading, re-size and rotate, plus it’s totally free.

Just One More Thing

Back in the Summer of ’08, Kentaro Kumagai released an app for touch and iPhone called iview. The description on the App Store was lacking, there was only one preview image and, despite being free, the app has only notched up one review on the store (albeit a four star rating).

General App Store fluff? No, it’s anything but, this is an entertaining toy for passing the time and, at best, a feature-rich re-blogging tool for users of Tumblr. The problem is that Kumagai just ain’t the world’s best copy-writer — he’s not so hot at marketing his wares — as such, this app got lost amidst the general onslaught of App Store releases.

The app allows you to view images from several image book-marking services such as FFFFound!, We Heart It and Vi.Sualize.Us – it’s a great way to wallow in weird imagery or browse for creative inspiration.

For users of Tumblr — a site that is somewhere in between Twitter’s micro-posts and traditional blogging — iview takes it to the next level, allowing users to reblog any image with a quick tap of a button. No forms to fill in, no multiple taps, no text entry. Just click the reblog button and it’s posted to your esoteric corner of the Internets.

For creatives on the look out for inspiration, Tumblr users looking for their next potential meme or iPhone owners with a penchant for visual stimulation, iview is a wonderful app in need of some serious championing. Grab it, use it and tell me if you dig it.

That’s all from the App Store this week, I’ll be back next Saturday with more of the latest releases. In the meantime, drop by the comments and let me know which apps you’ve been looking at.

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