Acoustic sensors make surfaces interactive

November 28, 2006

A series of acoustic sensors that turn any surface into a touch-sensitive computer interface have been developed by European researchers.

Two or more sensors are attached around the edges of the surface. These pinpoint the position of a finger, or another touching object, by tracking minute vibrations. This allows them to create a virtual touchpad, or keyboard, on any table or wall.

The system, called Tai-Chi (Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer-Human Interaction), was developed by researchers from Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France and the UK. "We have made a system that can give any object, even a 3D one, a sense of touch," says Ming Yang, an engineer at Cardiff University, UK, who is coordinating the project.
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Police brutality ... again

November 27, 2006

This sunday a demonstration against the church Faderhuset turned into resulted in police brutality and mass arrests.

At around 1 pm sunday a demonstration arrived at the church of the right wing christians who are trying to evict Ungdomshuset. Apparently their was some vandalism by a smaller group while the demonstration was still arriving.

Suddenly the police announce that all demonstrators are under arrest. Some run away, some fight back and some just try to defend themselves but the police do not care who is who. Several cops repeatedly hit sitting arresties with battons. One demonstrator was hit several times in the face and another had his arm broken.

We can only see this police violence as part of a campaigne against supporters of Ungdomshuset to scare people away from taking part in demonstrations, actions and parties.

83 people were arrested and 8 was still detanyed monday morning.

We hope that this video will not make anybody change their mind about comming to Copenhagen. In stead we hope that you will understand our call for support. And get even more freinds to come.

You can watch the video here: The Politiken newspaper online

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Why do all our gadgets break?

November 28, 2006

Those among you suffering from seasonal affective disorder-induced nostalgia may find yourselves dragging old friends back into the dim winter light this month. For me it was an old IBM XT that has lain dormant in the garage for eleven years. A fox had urinated down the side of the chassis and there was a implausibly fat, dead tropical spider wedged in the 5¼-inch drive. But still, the machine started up without a hitch. This belching, staggering monster from times past still worked like a dream. Why is it, then, that my 11-month-old Motorola Razr V3 is all but dead?

Consumer electronics have largely reached a point where their top performance already far outreaches any demand the average user will put on them. Who is likely to tax a Core 2 Duo processor with a Word document? Who will blow the address book memory of a 64MB mobile phone -- even if they're friends with half of London? My V3 did everything I needed a phone to do. It stored contacts, it made calls, it was small enough to fit in a pocket, but not small enough to be inhaled. Nevertheless, it's falling apart because its delicate clamshell design made it too fragile for the real world.
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Detecting Video Forgeries

November 29, 2006

Researchers can already detect sophisticated tampering in still images, but they are only beginning to tackle the same problem in video.

Some of the early video-forensics efforts are coming out of Dartmouth College, where Hany Farid, professor of computer science, and researcher Weihong Wang have illustrated a method for detecting if a high-quality video has been re-saved--a telltale sign that someone has tampered with the original file.

While Farid's technique would not work well with low-quality YouTube videos, he says, it is well suited for high-quality video such as that from surveillance cameras. "The tools are becoming increasingly more sophisticated for manipulating video and audio," Farid says. "We may as well get a jump on it."
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The evolution of video games

Malachi Ritscher: A Martyr For Peace

November 7, 2006

A Chicago activist burns him self alive for the cause of peace.
During the Viet Nam War, Buddhist monks in Saigon set themselves on fire to protest the war. The whole world watched as these martyrs for peace went up in flames.

Last Friday, a man approached the "Millenium Flame" sculpture on the Kennedy Expressway near the Ohio Exit, and set himself aflame, leaving a not stating: "Thou Shalt Not Kill." The local media just wrote this off as another unfortunate case of mental illness.

But it wasn't mental illness. It was an anti-war protest. Malachi Ritscher was a martyr for peace. Here is his testament:
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BioGuard to team up with Turkish co

November 20, 2006

Biometrics start-up BioGuard Components and Technologies Ltd. has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Ergosis of Turkey. BioGuard said Ergosis was Turkey’s leading developer of biometrics-based access solutions.

The collaboration will begin with a regional distribution agreement. In the second stage, BioGuard’s biometrics access solutions will be included in Ergosis’s products. BioGuard CEO Ofer Gol said a large international bank that operates in Turkey, which was a customer of Ergosis, will install the product in all of its branches in the country during December. The project is estimated at $300,000.

In September, BioGuard confirmed that it was planning an IPO on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) next year. The company was founded in 2001, and, so far as is known, has been financed to date by private investors. The company has offices in Rosh Ha’Ayin and in the US. Its first product was launched two years ago.

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Motorists to give fingerprints

November 22, 2006

Drivers who get stopped by the police could have their fingerprints taken at the roadside, under a new plan to help officers check people's identities.
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The Biometric Door: Keyless, Safe Home Entry

November 22, 2006

One of the most frustrating things to realize it that you’ve forgotten your keys, locked yourself out of your house, had them lost or stolen, or that an intruder has broken in. These are worries homeowners and residents alike have when it comes to securing their homes.

While locks and alarm systems have been used in the past to help protect the home from unauthorized intruders, now biometric technology is introducing the first consumer available, biometric deadbolt lock for doors that ensures authorized entry and eliminates the need for keys.
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Slippery ships float on thin air

February 18, 2006

YOSHIAKI KODAMA is weaving a magic carpet large enough to carry a ship. Conjured up from thin air at the flick of a switch, this slippery blanket will help transport a fully laden tanker or container ship across the ocean at higher speed, and using far less fuel, than ever before.

Kodama is director of the Advanced Maritime Transport Technology Department at Japan's National Maritime Research Institute (NMRI) in Tokyo. His work is just one of several major programmes under way in the US, Russia, Japan and Europe that focus on how to make ships more slippery.
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Swiss Big Brother Awards 2006

November 22, 2006

On 16 November 2006, Sudhaus cultural centre of Bâle hosted the Swiss Big Brother Awards ceremony of 2006 organised by Archives de l'Etat Fouineur Swiss and the EDRI-member Swiss Internet User Group SIUG.

The jury deciding on the winners included 11 people from various institutions and organizations having acted against control and surveillance. The winners received concrete trophies, a certificate and were mentioned on the "Hall of Shame" list.

The trophy for the category "State" was awarded to the Federal Council of Corpore represented by Christoph Blocher, the head of the Federal Department of Justice and Police for the application of internal security measures involving phone tapping, secret search of information systems and installation of secret microphones in apartments without concrete basis just under the cover of preventive investigations.
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New law proposal on data retention submitted in Italy

November 22, 2006

Thanks to Italian MP Maurizio Turco (Rosa nel Pugno) a law proposal on data retention authored by the Winston Smith Project has been recently submitted to the Italian Parliament as DDL (Disegno di Legge) number 1728.
The proposal, whose title is "Regulations for the collection, usage, retention and deletion of geo-referenced or chrono-referenced data, containing unique user identifiers, through automatic devices" aims to limit the "side effects" of the current "data retention culture", in which - due to political and technological reasons - logging and retention of all sorts of data is the norm rather than the exception.
According to the explanatory text of the proposal, ISP connections, web surfing patterns, mail, news, chats can be logged and stored indefinitely with relatively small investments, even by small and medium organisations. The phenomenon is not limited to the Internet "per se": GSM "cell data", i.e. the list of cells to which a mobile phone connects while the owner moves, or data resulting from RFID usage are two other examples.
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German draft law on data retention made public

November 22, 2006

On 8 November 2006, the German Minister of Justice Brigitte Zypries presented a draft law aimed at transposing the EU directive on data retention. The law would override the recent jurisprudence on IP logging by mandating the retention of traffic data for a period of six months.
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Terraforming the Earth, Now In the Spotlight

Geoengineering -- aka planetary engineering, aka (re-)terraforming the Earth -- has once again popped up into the public limelight. The latest issue of Wired has an article about Nobel-prize-winner Paul Crutzen's proposal to spray sulfur particles into the high atmosphere over the arctic, reflecting sunlight and cooling the region, allowing icepack to reform. Coincidentally, the November 16 issue of Rolling Stone (of all places) has a profile of Dr. Lowell Wood, former nuclear weapons designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Wood has proposed a sulfur-seeding plan essentially identical to that of Dr. Crutzen. The idea that we may have to engineer the planet to avoid climate change disaster is taking off.
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High-Definition Carbon Nanotube TVs

November 24, 2006

Carbon nanotube displays that outperform today's flat-panel televisions are ready to move out of the lab and into factories, say researchers at Motorola. The carbon nanotubes make possible high-definition TVs with the color, contrast, and fast response characteristic of bulky screens based on cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), but in a flat-screen format.
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Morphing Materials Take On New Shapes

November 21, 2006

The researchers who developed self-tying sutures that change shape when exposed to light have now made morphing structures that can take on three consecutive shapes in response to changes in temperature. The shape-changing polymers could eventually be employed as removable stents and self-closing fasteners used in assembling complex parts.
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Simulator is next step on road to quantum computers

November 27, 2006

Scientists have proven theoretically a novel way to build a simulator that can recreate the way atoms and particles behave in a quantum system, says research published today. The proposed simulator is unique because it could let researchers control how individual particles move and interact with each other. This ability to control individual parts of a quantum system is key to the development of powerful quantum computers in the future.
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Genetics finding hailed as major breakthrough

November 23, 2006

We always knew that we each had our own, individual copy of The Book of Life, where the spellings of our genetic code differed ever so slightly. But a series of scientific studies published today show that it's not only single letters but sentences, paragraphs, and even whole pages that can be missing or duplicated. In the leading publication in Nature, an international team has produced a map of such changes among 270 copies of the human genetic code that is already revealing new routes for finding genes involved in disease.

The Human Genome Project delivered a reference sequence for a human genome. To identify genes involved in disease, many focused studies, including the HapMap Project, have mapped single-letter differences (called single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs) between individuals and compared them to the human reference DNA sequence.
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Camera technology to combat anti-social behaviour

November 20, 2006

From today, Haringey officers will be using the latest high-tech camera technology in an effort to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Operation Aventail will target a number of offences over a five-day period and Safer Neighbourhood (SN) officers will set off on patrol using unique head-mounted cameras.

Being used for the first time the cameras, which are the size of an AA battery, are mounted on to police headgear. Officers can then patrol as usual with the cameras recording digital images to a special utility belt.
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A quantum (computer) step

A University of Utah physicist took a step toward developing a superfast computer based on the weird reality of quantum physics by showing it is feasible to read data stored in the form of the magnetic "spins" of phosphorus atoms.

"Our work represents a breakthrough in the search for a nanoscopic [atomic scale] mechanism that could be used for a data readout device," says Christoph Boehme, assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah. "We have demonstrated experimentally that the nuclear spin orientation of phosphorus atoms embedded in silicon can be measured by very subtle electric currents passing through the phosphorus atoms."
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European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs

"We reject every form of legislation," the Russian aristocrat and "father of anarchism" Mikhail Bakunin once thundered. The czar banished him to Siberia. But now it seems his ideas are being rediscovered.

European traffic planners are dreaming of streets free of rules and directives. They want drivers and pedestrians to interact in a free and humane way, as brethren -- by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs.
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New Copyright Laws Risk Criminalising Everyday Australians

November 8, 2006

The Internet Industry Association today warned that changes to Australia’s copyright laws being rushed through Parliament risked making criminals out of everyday Australians.

The IIA which represents a broad range of internet businesses in Australia, in conjunction with the QUT Law Faculty Intellectual Property Research Program, has identified a number of scenarios which could trip up Australians in their everyday use of copyrighted materials.

Said IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos: “We can’t be sure if this is the government's intent, or whether there has been a terrible oversight in the drafting of this Bill. Either way, the consequences for the average Australian family could be devastating.”

“As an example,” said Mr Coroneos, “a family who holds a birthday picnic in a place of public entertainment (for example, the grounds of a zoo) and sings ‘Happy Birthday’ in a manner that can be heard by others, risks an infringement notice carrying a fine of up to $1320. If they make a video recording of the event, they risk a further fine for the possession of a device for the purpose of making an infringing copy of a song. And if they go home and upload the clip to the internet where it can be accessed by others, they risk a further fine of up to $1320 for illegal distribution. All in all, possible fines of up to $3960 for this series of acts – and the new offences do not require knowledge or improper intent. Just the doing of the acts is enough to ground a legal liability under the new ‘strict liability’ offences.”
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Hyperlinking Reality via Phones

A Nokia research project could one day make it easier to navigate the real world by superimposing virtual information on an image of your surroundings. The new software, called Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA), is designed to identify objects viewed on the screen of a camera phone.

The Nokia research team has demonstrated a prototype phone equipped with MARA software and the appropriate hardware: a global positioning system (GPS), an accelerometer, and a compass. The souped-up phone is able to identify restaurants, hotels, and landmarks and provide Web links and basic information about these objects on the phone's screen. In addition, says David Murphy, an engineer at Nokia Research Center, in Helsinki, Finland, who works on the project, the system can also be used to find nearby friends who have phones with GPS and the appropriate software.
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Scientist regrow chicken wing

November 17, 2006

Chop off a salamander's leg and a brand new one will sprout in no time. But most animals have lost the ability to replace missing limbs. Now, a research team at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has been able to regenerate a wing in a chick embryo -- a species not known to be able to regrow limbs -- suggesting that the potential for such regeneration exists innately in all vertebrates, including humans.
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UCLA Police Taser Student For Not Showing ID

November 15, 2006

The UCLA student was hit with the Taser shocks multiple times while he was in the Powell Library Computer Lab.
Another student recorded the incident on a camera phone. On the video, Mostafa Tabatabainejad can be heard screaming during the incident, which took place at about 11:30 p.m., the Daily Bruin reported.

According to the paper, Tabatabainejad did not show ID to community service officers who were conducting a random check. UCLA police said Tabatabainejad was released by police after he was cited for obstruction/delay of a peace officer in the performance of duty.
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Anarchists set fire to banks in Athens

November 15, 2006

Athens - Greek anarchist groups carried out arson attacks on four bank branches in Athens overnight to Wednesday, Greek media reported.
Household gas canisters were set alight at the entrances to the banks, causing considerable damage, according to the reports.

A police officer was seriously injured in a clash between police and anarchists in Athens Tuesday evening.

Police used tear gas and batons to disperse the crowds who threw Molotov cocktails at the officers.

The Greek police fear further riots as November 17 approaches.

On November 17, 1973, a student uprising against the military which ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974 was suppressed violently.

Street battles between anarchists and police in Athens take place around this time every year.

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Researchers have built a self-aware robot that can spot damage and make allowances

Making robots self-aware could be the key to enabling them to become more resilient to damage, according roboticists in New York.

They have designed a robot that is capable of building internal models of its own body to enable it to sense and recover from damage. "It continuously models itself and updates those models on the fly to reflect the current state of its body," says Josh Bongard, who carried out the research with colleagues at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY.
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U.S. Coast Guard to Implement Biometrics Program

November 15, 2006

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has announced a pilot program that will collect biometric information from illegal migrants. The info will then be run against the US-VISIT database to determine past illegal activity, should any exist. The new system hopes to make it nearly impossible for migrants to use forged documents to gain access to U.S. soil.
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Physicist Trying to Send a Signal Back in Time

November 15, 2006

If his experiment with splitting photons actually works, says University of Washington physicist John Cramer, the next step will be to test for quantum "retrocausality."

That's science talk for saying he hopes to find evidence of a photon going backward in time.

"It doesn't seem like it should work, but on the other hand, I can't see what would prevent it from working," Cramer said. "If it does work, you could receive the signal 50 microseconds before you send it."
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Learn While You Sleep

November 06, 2006

A team of researchers in Germany has found that a certain type of memory improves when a person's brain is stimulated with a mild electric current during a particular phase of the sleep cycle.

Neuroscientist Jan Born, of the University of Lubeck, has been studying the role of sleep in human memory for the past decade. In recent years, there's been evidence to suggest that REM sleep and non-REM sleep serve to strengthen neuron connections for different kinds of memories. While the scientific community is split on just how these phases influence memory, Born and his colleagues have recently focused on non-REM sleep, specifically the initial, drowsy, slow-wave phase. They're interested in its role in strengthening declarative memories, otherwise known as fact-based memories, as opposed to other types of memory such as motor-skill, or procedural learning.

"You remember the things consolidated during sleep better than not during sleep," says Born. "Our research is finding out which stages are more important for memories."
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Weaving Barrels from DNA

Good things really do come in small packages, according to a group of students at Harvard University. They constructed a tiny container--about 30 nanometers in diameter--made entirely of DNA, which could one day be used to deliver drugs or gene or protein-based therapies to specific tissues in the body.

"We know DNA is a very stable building material," says Valerie Hoi-Ting Lau, one of the students involved in the project. "Now we're trying to take advantage of the fact that it's programmable." Lau and others presented their barrel at the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition at MIT earlier this month.
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Fast food drive-throughs go long distance

When Jairo Moncada pulled up to the drive-through at Wendy's in Burbank, Calif., for his usual cheeseburger, fries, and soda, he knew things looked different. There was an extra lane.

But the 25-year-old could not see the biggest change: The woman taking his lunch order was sitting 3,000 miles away at a computer terminal in Nashua, and fielding calls from Wendy's customers at drive-throughs as far away as Florida and Washington, D.C.

"I had absolutely no idea I was talking to someone in New Hampshire," Moncada said in a phone interview later that day. "Our order was ready at the window. It was really quick."

It took a total of 66 seconds.
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Recording your life

Have you ever wished for a backup brain -- a device that could remember everything in your life from the smallest of details to your most memorable moments?

Computer engineer Gordon Bell, a researcher for Microsoft Corp., is working on just such a mechanism. He's trying to devise what amounts to a digital diary, a searchable database that contains digitized versions of nearly everything in his life.
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How to Resurrect an Extinct Retrovirus

November 4, 2006



French researchers have resurrected a retrovirus that became trapped in the human genome about five million years ago. Pieced together from existing sequences in human DNA, the reconstructed virus was able to infect mammalian cells weakly, suggesting that it works similarly to the extinct organism.
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Secret of Heart Regeneration Uncovered

November 4, 2006



New evidence to explain how a common tropical fish mends a broken heart may suggest methods for coaxing the damaged hearts of mammals to better heal, researchers report in the November 3, 2006 issue of Cell, published by Cell Press.

The researchers found that the hearts of zebrafish harbor progenitor cells that spring into action to restore wounded heart muscle. Cells from a membrane layer that surrounds the heart, called the epicardium, follow suit, invading the wounded cardiac tissue and stimulating the growth of new blood vessels.
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Reduced body temperature extends lifespan

November 4, 2006

“Our study shows it is possible to increase lifespan in mice by modest but prolonged lowering of core body temperature,” said Bruno Conti, an associate professor at Scripps Research who led the study. “This longer lifespan was attained independent of calorie restriction.”

Prior to this study, researchers had known that core body temperature and aging were related in cold-blooded animals. Scientists had also known that lifespan could be extended in warm-blooded animals by reducing the number of calories they consumed, which also lowered core body temperature. But the degree of calorie restriction needed to extend lifespan is not easy to achieve, even in mice.

Prior to the current study, critical questions about the relation between calorie restriction, core body temperature, and lifespan remained unanswered. Was calorie restriction itself responsible for longer lifespan, with reduced body temperature simply a consequence? Or was the reduction of core body temperature a key contributor to the beneficial effects of calorie restriction? Conti and colleagues wanted to find out.

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T-ray breakthrough could make detecting disease far easier

November 4, 2006

A breakthrough in the harnessing of ‘T-rays’ - electromagnetic terahertz waves - which could dramatically improve the detecting and sensing of objects as varied as biological cell abnormalities and explosives has been announced.

Researchers at the University of Bath, UK, and in Spain have said they have found a way to control the flow of terahertz radiation down a metal wire. Their findings are set out in a letter published in the current journal Physical Review Letters.

Terahertz radiation, whose frequency is around one thousand billion cycles a second, bridges the gap between the microwave and infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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Government forces attack University

The Mexican government forces are currently attacking APPO supporters in the University Buildings in Oaxaca. Live reporting on the APPO radiostream (ES), with live transcription in English (page refreshes every 20 seconds).

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EU study on RFID tags shows major privacy concerns

October 25, 2006

After a 6-month consultation period, an EU study initiated after Cebit trade show in March 2006 shows concerns related to the use of RFID (radio frequency ID) tags and reveals the necessity to assure the public that these tags will not lead to a large-scale surveillance system.

The RFID tags are more and more used by businesses to monitor goods and governments are presently considering the introduction of these tags in ID documents. The RFID market will probably grow spectacularly in the next years. The EU prediction is that more than 270 billion radio-frequency ID tags could be sold by 2016 in the world.
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Want to live long? Take nature by the beard!

On the 30th of September, the regular 4th International forum, dedicated to the problems of immortalism, was held in the capital of Ukraine. Initially, about 30 participants were registered, but shortly after the official opening a few new “strayed” people came. Some very snazzy persons appeared among the foreign guests: young Iranian businessmen Sayed Mashkhur and Ali Jovkhar along with the executive secretary of the Iran embassy Bakhman Fazelly, who came for company, as well as a biotechnologist from the Kingston University Dr. Dennis Bilk (Great Britain).
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Transforming Clothes

October 20, 2006

Turkish fashion designer Hussein Chalayan is known for his innovative ideas. Earlier this month, he wowed the audience at his Paris runway show with five dresses that automatically transformed in shape and style. Zippers closed, cloth gathered, and hemlines rose--all without human assistance. Beneath each model's skirt was a computer system designed by the London-based engineering and concept-creation firm 2D3D. Rob Edkins, director of 2D3D, talked to Technology Review about how the computers controlled the clothing with motors and wires.
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Shape-Shifting Rovers

October 19, 2006

An innovative rover robot designed to explore planets and moons is undergoing final assembly this week in a lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The robot may also be useful in hazardous environments on Earth, its creators say.

Instead of driving, walking, or rolling around like other vehicles designed to traverse distant, rugged landscapes, the new rover changes its shape and topples along, veering a bit from side to side as it moves ahead. "We call it the drunken-sailor walk," says Pamela Clark, one of the designers of the project at Goddard and a professor at Catholic University of America.
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Tiny Pumps for Diagnostic Chips

October 26, 2006

The potential of "lab on a chip" technology is immense: it could yield fast, cheap, and portable devices to test soldiers for biological or chemical poisoning within minutes, or a handheld device that takes a drop of blood and scans it for diseases such as HIV. But one problem in developing these microfluidic devices is how to precisely pump fluids through a chip without using a significant amount of power. As a result, existing labs on a chip are weighed down by large, bench-top power sources.
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Looking at Your Brain on Drugs

October 30, 2006

For a recovering drug addict, the sight of a hypodermic needle or a crack pipe--or even the exterior of a drug house--can trigger powerful cravings. Now scientists hope to use new brain-imaging technology to train substance abusers to control cravings. The addicts would literally watch real-time images of brain blood flow and use mental exercises to try to control their brain activity.

"We hope to develop a novel therapeutic for addiction, which will create a new way of treating these patients," says Christopher deCharms, founder of Omneuron, a brain-imaging company in Menlo Park, CA, that is planning a study to test the approach.
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Rerouting Brain Circuits with Implanted Chips

October 31, 2006

A new, implantable and wireless brain chip can create artificial connections between different parts of the brain, paving the way for devices that could reconnect damaged neural circuits. Scientists say the chip sheds light on the brain's innate ability to rewire itself, and it could help explain our capacity to learn and remember new information.

"We have a chance of manipulating and repairing [specific] regions of the brain that might be damaged," says Joseph Pancrazio, director of the neural-engineering program at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, MD. "To be able to repair these kinds of lesions on a neuron-by-neuron basis is extraordinary."
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A Life-Extending Pill for Fat Mice

November 02, 2006

A compound found in red wine keeps middle-aged mice on a high-fat, high-calorie diet as healthy as mice on a healthy diet, according to research at the National Institute on Aging and Harvard Medical School.

The compound, called resveratrol, also improves the mice's survival rates, extending them to the same lengths as those of mice on a healthy diet. These preliminary results may demonstrate resveratrol's ability to activate molecular pathways thought to be critical regulators of the aging process. Indeed, the researchers say the mouse study is the first demonstration in mammals of the activation of known genetic pathways affecting life span by a drug--a good sign for researchers and pharmaceutical companies that hope to treat the diseases of aging by developing drugs that intervene in these pathways.
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Is IBM's Blue Brain project a precursor to an AI project?

October 30, 2006

If you want to understand how something works you should model it the best way you can.

This is precisely what IBM and the Brain and Mind Institute (BMI) are trying to do with the brain.

Called Blue Brain, it is a project that was initiated in May 2005 with the lofty goal of modeling the mammalian brain. IBM and BMI claim that the aim is not the creation of AI, but a way to study how neurons in the brain interact with one another. Their intention is not to re-create the actual physical structure of the brain, but to simulate it using arrays of supercomputers.
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Researchers develop DNA switch to interface living organisms with computers

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth, UK, have developed an electronic switch based on DNA - a world-first bio-nanotechnology breakthrough that provides the foundation for the interface between living organisms and the computer world.

The new technology is called a ‘nanoactuator’ or a molecular dynamo. The device is invisible to the naked eye - about one thousandth of a strand of human hair.

The DNA switch has been developed by British Molecular Biotechnology expert Dr Keith Firman at the University of Portsmouth working in collaboration with other European researchers.
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Part Of Human Brain Functions Like A Digital Computer

A region of the human brain that scientists believe is critical to human intellectual abilities surprisingly functions much like a digital computer, according to psychology Professor Randall O’Reilly of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The finding could help researchers better understand the functioning of human intelligence.

In a review of biological computer models of the brain appearing in the Oct. 6 edition of the journal Science, O’Reilly contends that the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia operate much like a digital computer system.
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Immune cell communication key to hunting viruses

Immunologists at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia have used nanotechnology to create a novel “biosensor” to solve in part a perplexing problem in immunology: how immune system cells called killer T-cells hunt down invading viruses.

They found that surprisingly little virus can turn on the killer T-cells, thanks to some complicated communication among so-called “antigen presenting” proteins that recognize and attach to the virus, in turn, making it visible to the immune system. T-cell receptors then “see” the virus, activating the T-cells.
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High-tech school security is on the rise

Each morning, the 16,000 students in the Spring Independent School District in suburban Houston swipe their ID tags as they climb onto the school bus. A radio frequency tag tracks them, as it does when they arrive at school and as they leave the building.

Nearly 1,000 cameras watch them all day. Every visitor — parents, volunteers, the guy who fills the Coke machine — must surrender his or her driver's license to a secretary who checks it against a national database of sex offenders. This fall, nearly one in three schools literally trap visitors inside a "secure vestibule," a bulletproof glass room, until they're checked out.
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Digital age may bring total recall in future

Have you ever wished for a backup brain -- a device that could remember everything in your life from the smallest of details to your most memorable moments?

Computer engineer Gordon Bell, a researcher for Microsoft Corp., is working on just such a mechanism. He's trying to devise what amounts to a digital diary, a searchable database that contains digitized versions of nearly everything in his life.
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Britons 'could be microchipped like dogs in a decade'

Human beings may be forced to be 'microchipped' like pet dogs, a shocking official report into the rise of the Big Brother state has warned.

The microchips - which are implanted under the skin - allow the wearer's movements to be tracked and store personal information about them.

They could be used by companies who want to keep tabs on an employee's movements or by Governments who want a foolproof way of identifying their citizens - and storing information about them.

The prospect of 'chip-citizens' - with its terrifying echoes of George Orwell's 'Big Brother' police state in the book 1984 - was raised in an official report for Britain's Information Commissioner Richard Thomas into the spread of surveillance technology.
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Biodegradable nanospheres offer novel approach for treatment of toxin exposure and drug delivery

A new technology to clean the blood of victims of radiological, chemical and biological terrorist attacks is being developed jointly by Argonne National Laboratory, the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute and The University of Chicago Hospitals.

In addition to cleaning biological and radiological toxins from blood, the technology shows promise for delivering therapeutic drugs to targeted cells and organs. The technology uses components approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a novel approach to magnetic filtration.
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National DNA Database: have your say

November 2, 2006

Wary of "mission creep" in the National DNA Database, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics has launched a year-long project investigating the government's push to fingerprint the DNA of every person in the UK.
The timely intervention comes after a speech by Tony Blair last week. During a visit to the Forensic Science Service he said there should be no limits on the development of the National DNA Database, already the largest repository of human DNA in the world. He said: "The number on the database should be the maximum number you can get."
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United Nations lauds internet's 'arranged marriage'

November 2, 2006

The closing day of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has ended on a high note with attendees from across the world (from business, government, international organisations and civil society) all expressing their delight at the experimental forum.
When the forum opened its doors in Athens four days ago it was uncertain whether the meeting would work, or would even continue next year, despite its five-year remit. But following a series of changes introduced to its structure while the meeting itself was going on, the final session saw two countries vying to host the event in 2010 - Azerbaijan and Lithunia - and the host for next year, Brazil, announcing the date and location for the meeting.
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Spy planes, clothes scanners and secret cameras: Britain's surveillance future

November 2, 2006

It sounds like a scene from the Tom Cruise futuristic thriller Minority Report. A teenager enters a record shop and a scanner hidden in the doorway instantly reads data secreted in electronic tags embedded in his clothes. The scanner clocks the brand of clothing and where it was purchased, flashing to a database which analyses what type of person would have bought that line of clothing and predicts what other products that person would like to buy. In an instant, adverts for those products are beamed to eye-level billboards for the teenager to see.
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Research team identifies human ‘memory gene’

Researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) today announced the discovery of a gene that plays a significant role in memory performance in humans. The findings, reported by TGen and research colleagues at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Banner Alzheimer’s Institute, and Mayo Clinic Scottsdale, appear in the October 20 issue of Science. The study details how researchers associated memory performance with a gene called Kibra in over 1,000 individuals –both young and old– from Switzerland and Arizona. This study is the first to describe scanning the human genetic blueprint at over 500,000 positions to identify cognitive differences between humans.
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Electronic chip, interacting with the brain, modifies pathways for controlling movement

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) are working on an implantable electronic chip that may help establish new nerve connections in the part of the brain that controls movement. Their most recent study, to be published in the Nov. 2, 2006, edition of Nature, showed such a device can induce brain changes in monkeys lasting more than a week. Strengthening of weak connections through this mechanism may have potential in the rehabilitation of patients with brain injuries, stroke, or paralysis.
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