Discoblog » Technology Attacks!

Black Box Bot Soaks Up Heat, Then Follows You Around and Keeps You Warm

Valerie Ross — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:26:36 +0000

When it gets cold out, staying warm usually means either cranking up the heat—and, thus, the heating bill—or piling on the sweaters and straying from the radiator’s immediate vicinity only when absolutely necessary. But your days of dashing between warm spots, or paying extra for the privilege of not, may soon be at an end. A new robot can keep you warm by saving up the heat you’ve already got until you need it.

HAGENT, as the robot is called, isn’t much to look at; it’s just a plain black cube with a couple barely visible wheels peeking out the bottom. But when HAGENT senses warmth—from an oven, a radiator, or any other heat source—it rolls over and soaks up the heat with its internal phase change material, stuff that turns liquid and stores energy when it’s heated up. Once the bot has its thermal fill, it makes its way to wherever you are and emits the stored heat. Its insides re-solidify in the process, so once it’s made your toes suitably toasty, it’s ready to do the whole thing again. In other words, it’s the automated answer to a housecat that soaks up sunlight, then curls up on your ...

How to Turn a Cockroach into a Mobile, and Kind of Gross, Fuel Cell

Sarah Zhang — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:45:12 +0000

Discoid cockroaches, used in this study, can be up to 3 inches long.

From the digestive system that demolishes glue and toothpaste comes the first living, breathing, digesting cyborg-insect power source. Researchers have created a fuel cell that needs only sugar from the cockroach’s hemolymph (basically the cockroach version of blood) and oxygen from the air to make electric energy. The cell’s power density, 55 microwatts per square centimeter at 0.2V, is also very small compared to lithium batteries, so cockroach power wouldn’t be used as a mass power source. But these cyborg cockroaches could take sensors where no human wants to go: nuclear disaster sites, enemy military camps, inside the neighborhood Dumpster.

LiveScience lays out how electrodes inserted into the cockroach’s abdomen hijack its biochemical machinery:

The fuel cell consists of two electrodes; at one electrode, two enzymes break down a sugar, trehalose, which the cockroach produces from its food. The first of the two enzymes, trehalase, breaks down the trehalose into glucose, then the second enzyme converts the glucose into another product and releases the electrons. The electrons travel to the second electrode, where another enzyme delivers the electrons to oxygen in ...

Tweet Us Not Into Temptaton. OK, Just This Once.

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:05:50 +0000

Oh! Oh God, I spent the last 8 hours on Facebook!!

When you text thousands of people seven times a day for a week, and ask them whether they have felt temptation recently, what do you get? A giant database of thousands of tiny vices and people’s own admissions—some true, some likely edited for the sake of vanity—of whether they caved.

According to researchers who recently performed just such a study, people’s biggest willpower failures related to checking things like Twitter or email. People were more able to control sexual urges or the desire to spend money than they were the desire to check social media (though we note that it may take two people contemporaneously caving for certain sexual urges to be considered indulged). Though the paper isn’t available online yet for us to check on this, the researchers told The Guardian that the number of times people were tempted by cigarettes, coffee, and alcohol was surprisingly low, and that the desire to check social media was much more frequently reported. The fact that media temptation came up so frequently, and was so often indulged, may be because unlike smoking, drinking, or spending gobs ...

“Here, Listen to My Underpants”: The Robot Psychics of India

Valerie Ross — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:26:37 +0000

As technology marches ever onward, robots have taken on more and more of life’s necessary jobs: heavy lifting, precise mechanical manipulations, and, of course, predicting the future.

Peppering the fairs and festivals of India, striking in their boldly colored if battered armor, are a fleet of robots that are part fortune cookie, part street-corner psychic. These bots wait in perpetual readiness to dispense their pre-programmed wisdom, and for only 5 rupees or so, the robot’s handler will allow you to plug a pair of headphones into its metallic underpants and listen as it tells your fortune.

The fortune-telling robots come in a range of shapes and sizes to best suit your fortune-telling needs (there is, in fact, a Flickr pool devoted to the various specimens). One of our favorite designs is the mod/retro combination of a smattering of LED lights and an analog clock, for those mortals bogged down in the worldly concerns of time (below).

The robots’ wisdom, apparently, comes on prerecorded tapes, audio fortune cookies that foresee the future in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Telgu. Not having heard the tapes ourselves—and not having any languages in common with the robots—we ...

To Thwart Hackers, New Security Software Makes Hacking Tedious

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:06:28 +0000

Mykonos’s motto is two-fold.

When you think of protecting a website from hackers, the first thing that comes to mind is probably blocking them out. But what if you just let them on a wild-goose chase, feeding them nuggets of false information and leading them down dead-ends until they get fed up and go do something else?

That’s the strategy behind Mykonos Software‘s security program, which takes a “step right in, let me fetch you a cup of tea and bore you to tears” approach to protection. The tool identifies individuals who are running common searches for security weaknesses on a site, logs their information, and continues to play them for suckers by dribbling out a breadcrumb trail that appears to yield passwords and other tasty vulnerabilities, but ultimately leads nowhere. CEO David Koretz explained to Tom Simonite at Tech Review the various ways in which the software plays with attackers:

A scan that might usually take five hours could take 30, Koretz says. Other tactics include offering up dummy password files, which can help track an attacker when he or she tries to use them. “We’ll let them break the encryption and present a false login ...

Microsoft Patents a Way to Tell You Where Not To Go

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:47:20 +0000

Anyone who’s journeyed on foot through a strange city can confirm that there’s a lot maps don’t show. For instance, whether it would be a really bad idea to wander through certain neighborhoods with an expensive camera around your neck. Or whether there’s a low-lying neighborhood that will be about 3 degrees cooler than it is everywhere else. Those kinds of things.

Though you won’t find that variety of information on Google Maps’ walking directions, you might soon see it on Bing Maps. Microsoft has just received a patent on a method for incorporating information like violent crime statistics into walking directions, so users could choose a specific rate of crime that they are personally comfortable with when planning a route (bike gangs, OK, murders, no). Other layers of information, like temperature measurements or falling-apart sidewalks, could also make appearances.

A tool like that will have plenty of users, though you know people are going to be disgruntled when their favorite neighborhoods get slapped with a D for dangerous (prepare yourself for an Internet freakout, Microsoft). What we’re really looking forward to, though, is a layer that routes you past all the grocery stores with free ...

The Suit That Makes You Feel 75 Years Old

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:22:04 +0000

And reeeach for the shredded wheat…

Pregnancy suit, meet age suit. Just as scientists in Japan made a suit full of balloons, warm water, and accelerometers to give men a sense of what pregnancy feels like, scientists at MIT have put together a suit that simulates being in one’s mid-70s. But it’s a little easier to see the applications with this one. By 2030, 20% of the American population will be over the age of 65, and if you think these folks are going to willingly weather a world designed by and for hyperactive 26-year-old yoga enthusiasts, well, you’ve got another thing coming. By putting on this suit, architects, store designers, and other professionals preoccupied with how people interact with the physical world can get a sense of what old age is like, and design accordingly.

And what does old age feel like? According to the folks at MIT’s Age Lab, where the suit was developed, like having giant rubber bands keeping your limbs from fully extending, braces that make your arms stiff, a helmet that makes your spine curve uncomfortably, and glasses that make small print hard to read, among other impairments. ...

Hacktivists: Doin’ It For the Lulz Since 1903

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:35:25 +0000

Marconi and assistants erecting a radio antenna.

They call themselves hacktivists. Or they say they’re doing it just for the lulz: Some hackers take over sites, swipe users’ information, and then post their exploits online just to make the point that hey, you losers aren’t as safe as you thought you were. Better fix that gaping hole in your electronic chain link fence.

It may seem like the kind of public embarrassment only possible in the networked age (at least, Sony probably remembers the era of the Walkman a lot more fondly than this last mortifying year of being hacked again and again), but as Paul Marks writes in New Scientist, it ain’t necessarily so. Just ask Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the wireless telegraph.

In 1903, Marconi’s assistants in London were prepping for a big demo of their wireless telegraph (aka long-range radio), just like any tech businessmen in the history of technology—setting up the brass lantern projector, getting the telegraph up and running, letting the crowd get nice and excited, you know, the whole shebang. Then, while they’re waiting for their test message to come in from the boss, who’s camped out ...

Got Wrinkles? Smear on the Hottest New Fashion Toxin…Snake Venom!

Douglas Main — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:54:11 +0000

Worried about wrinkles, laugh lines, or crow’s-feet adding years to your wizened countenance? Worry no longer, friend—now you can apply synthetic viper venom to your face… for a price. The product, called Syn-Ake, contains a peptide that mimics the effects of Waglerin-1, a toxin found in the venom of the temple pit viper. It works by temporarily paralyzing facial muscles, binding to receptors (called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors) on the muscles and preventing them from being stimulated and contracting. This has the effect of reducing certain small wrinkles in the short term, according to the sole available study on Syn-Ake, performed by the company that markets it, Switzerland-based Pentapharm. And now, according to the Daily Mail, you can buy a tiny bottle of it for only $60 to gingerly bless your wrinkly visage.

It’s the same basic principle as Botox, except that Botox usually involves injection, lasts longer, and is generally more invasive. Both products work by incapacitating a few of the muscles you use to smile, frown, and laugh, which after years of use and tightening create wrinkles by drawing your skin together into folds the way drapes gather along a ...

Woolly Mammoth Cloned Within Five Years? We’ll Believe It When We Ride It

Douglas Main — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:33:47 +0000

Japan’s Kyodo News reports that Russian and Japanese scientists will start a project early next year to clone the woolly mammoth. The researchers also confirmed that a well-preserved mammoth thigh bone found in August contains remarkably well-preserved marrow cells.

The team, including researchers from a Siberian mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University, plan to extract an undamaged nucleus from the extinct animal’s bone marrow and insert it into the egg of an African elephant, a related animal; if all goes well the elephant could then give birth to a baby mammoth. The team has worked toward cloning the beast for more than a decade but until August, hadn’t found a sufficiently intact source of mammoth DNA (although they did create a copy of mammoth hemoglobin).

What could possibly go wrong? Assuming scientists can extract an undamaged nuclei from tissue that’s been frozen for more than 10,000 years, they then need to successfully insert it into an African elephant’s egg. This won’t be simple, considering that even procuring elephant ova is a challenge, said Japanese researcher Akira Iritani. And the cloning success rate for (non-extinct) animals like cattle is only 30 percent. The cloning technique Iritani plans to ...

The App That Looks Both Ways for You

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:50:33 +0000

The average city street these days sports quite a number of people gazing down into their phones as they walk, unable to tear their eyes from a text or email, or gabbing away to their second cousin while checking their manicure. If you are among those who prefer to walk upright, watching for oncoming semis, you may have noticed that these people don’t look at walk signals to tell when to cross; instead, they wait until their peripheral vision picks up a phoneless pedestrian making a move for it. I am frequently in that pedestrian, and am not above making occasional false starts to watch people jerk like fish on a line. Sorry, folks.

But! A day is coming when these phone addicts may no longer need to watch you from the corner of their eyes to gauge when it’s safe to cross. Scientists at Dartmouth and University of Bologna have built an app that will alert these pedestrians when collision with an oncoming vehicle is imminent with a helpful series of vibrations and chirrups.

The app, called WalkSafe, uses the phone’s built-in camera to watch traffic and apply vision learning algorithms to identify car-like objects, going on to identify the ...

The Greatest Threats to da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”: Milan’s Dirty Air & Visitors’ Oily Skin

Douglas Main — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:19:50 +0000

Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” has survived since the late 1400s on a wall in the Santa Maria delle Grazie Church in Milan, weathering centuries of change and intrigue, such as a World War II bombing. Worried about soiling from air pollution in the city, one of Western Europe’s most heavily polluted, curators installed a ventilation and filtration system to protect it in 2009. The system worked well at reducing levels of fine and coarse particulate matter within the church (according to a new study), which should save the painting from worst effects of air pollution.But a significant threat remains: fatty lipids and organic compounds, such as those emitted from the skin of the 1,000 people that visit the painting each day.

Researchers found elevated levels of lipids and organic compounds (including squalane) inside the chapel, compared to outside. These compounds can combine with soot and stick to and soil the painting, says University of Southern California researcher Nancy Daher. These organic compounds come from visitor’s skin, fire retardants, cleaners, and even wax used in earlier restorations of the painting itself. The researchers recommend finding a way to reduce airborne levels of these chemicals, ...

Angry Birds TMI FTW: Better Gameplay Through Physics

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:41:41 +0000

Why just do this, when you can do…

…this, too?

Cranky flightless birds and their green porcine enemies are on every screen these days. But despite the game’s apparent simplicity, it pays to have an expert unpack the fundamental physics of the Angry Birds universe (better gameplay through physics, and all that). That expert is physics prof and graph maker extraordinaire Rhett Allain, whose rationale is summed up thusly in his first Angry Birds post:

But what about the physics? Do the birds have a constant vertical acceleration? Do they have constant horizontal velocity? Let’s find out, shall we? Oh, why would I do this? Why can’t I just play the dumb game and move on. That is not how I roll. I will analyze this, and you can’t stop me.

His latest offering over at Wired delves into what, exactly, is up with those yellow birds, which you can use to smash the piggies’ wooden structures. Turns out they have some iiiinteresting acceleration properties it would behoove you to grok…dig out your high school calculus and check it out.

Images courtesy of Rhett Allain and Wired

Computer Scientists Crack “Unbreakable” Code, Find Minutes of 250-Year-Old Secret Society

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:56:36 +0000

“Curiosity is inherited with mankind. Frequently we want to know something only because it needs to be kept secret.” Astute psychology on the part of this secret society scribe.

With the most powerful computers ever known , you’d think that modern codebreakers would have utterly smashed our forefathers’ puny ciphers. Well…no. There are quite a number of antique documents that remain mysterious, despite cryptologists’ best efforts. Code breaking still relies on good guesses and flashes of insight more than brute force.

But brute force and clever statistical analyses can help you unravel whether that guess was right in the blink of an eye, and that’s what let University of Southern California computer scientists and their collaborators unravel the text of a slender brocade-bound manuscript that had kept its secrets since the 18th century. The first words they deciphered? “Ceremonies of Initiation.”

Starting out, the team had no idea what language the enciphered text was. The carefully inscribed gobbledegook included Greek and Roman letters and abstract symbols, and for a long time the team worked on just the Roman letters, but that yielded nothing. As their analysis found that German was, by a hair, the most ...

Japan’s Defense Ministry Would Like to Introduce You To Their Little Friend

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:32:08 +0000

Just chillin’…before tearing off at incredible speed.

What’s black, spherical, and can run you down at 40 mph? Japan’s mini Death Star, of course.

The hovering drone was demonstrated at a tech expo in Japan recently, zipping around like a hummingbird and showing off its stability, which is maintained by three gyroscopes. Even if it hits a wall or is whacked by a bystander, the thing hardly pauses.

The drone’s possible uses include reconnaissance and rescue, the presenter for the Defense Ministry remarked. The whole thing weighs just 350 grams and was built from commercially available parts at a cost of about $1400.

You heard me—commercially available parts. So what are you waiting for?

[via PopSci]

Dizzy Discus Throwers, Horny Beer-Bottle Beetles, and the Wasabi Alarm Clock: the 2011 Ig Nobels

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:07:20 +0000

Those classy folks at the Annals of Improbable Research are at it again. Last night, they announced the 2011 winners of some of the most coveted awards in science: the Ig Nobels.

You should watch last night’s ceremony in its entirety, but here are (drumroll) the winners:

First off, in Physiology…from the Cold-Blooded Cognition Lab at the University of Vienna, Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandle, and Ludwig Huber for their paper No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise, published this year in Current Zoology. As it turns out, if one tortoise is yawning, its buddies won’t join in. Not even if you show them movies of yawning tortoises. In Chemistry…Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for determining what concentration of airborne wasabi can awaken sleeping people in case of emergency. They are the inventors of the wasabi alarm, described in US patent application 2010/0308995 A1. In Medicine…Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, and Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff for illuminating how an intense need to pee can affect your decision-making capabilities in their papers Inhibitory Spillover: ...

Newsflash! Scientists Can Use WiFi to Count Your Breaths and Spy on You

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:57:57 +0000

I sense a disturbance in the Force…

Swimming through a sea of wireless radio waves is de rigeur these days (in fact, you have to move to West Virginia if you think you’re allergic to them). But your body leaves a wake in that sea, and watching it can let observers count your breaths per minute, says a researcher who surrounded himself with twenty wireless units to test the idea. Cute, right? But it also means someone on the sidewalk can tell from disturbances in the wireless where you are in your house, and track you as you move from room to room. A little less cute.

The paper, which hasn’t been published yet and is available on the ArXiv, looked to see whether the wireless wake the authors had noticed in previous experiments could be used a medical setting to keep tabs on surgical patients, who occasionally stop breathing after procedures under general anesthesia. Computer scientist Neal Patwari lay in a hospital bed surrounded by transmitters on the same frequency as WiFi and found that after 30 seconds of calibration, the setup could estimate his breaths per minute with an error of just ...

After One Colon-Embedded Bread Clip Too Many, Doctors Provide Design Analysis, Call for Reform

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:07:58 +0000

If you swallowed pony beads when you were a kid, you are not alone. So many teeny plastic dooboppies are just crying out to be ingested…and frankly, doctors are tired of all those irresponsible designs. After finding a bread clip in the colon of a patient, several docs have outlined the clips’ “evolutionary heritage” and “species” classification in a new article in BMJ Case Reports, in hopes of prompting someone, anyone, to make one that isn’t the perfect shape for lodging in the digestive nether regions.

The researchers, drawing on several members’ longstanding membership in the illustrious Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, have given each type of bread clip a handy-dandy Latin name. The bread clip genus (?) is Occlupanidae, presumably for its occluding capabilities, while the species names refer to the relative toothiness—one-toothed, two-toothed, etc.—of the types. They also provide a detailed phylogenetic chart showing the evolution from the smooth proto-bread clip to the many-tined versions adorning our bags today.

Twenty case reports of ingested bread clips exist in the literature, they note; surely this detailed description can help elucidate which types pose the greatest threat and inform ...

The Typewriter That Will Mix You a Drink After a Long Day At the Keyboard

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:46:53 +0000

Making a living as a writer is tough, but if you can drink your words, everything will start looking up. A maker going by the handle Morskoiboy has built a typewriter with syringes for keys that does just that: each syringe sucks up a different fluid for each letter, runs the fluid through a microfluidic-style screen to display the letter, then drains the fluid, which can be any booze or mixer you like, into a glass.

He gives a detailed explanation of how it works on his blog, but here’s the crux: When you push down on a key/syringe, a fluid—let’s say absinthe for A—is drawn up from a bottle. It’s then pumped into several thin plastic tubes, the number of which varies according to the shape of the letter (more on that in the next paragraph), and is routed to the screen.

The screen basically works like the display on your digital alarm clock. It has fourteen different compartments on it that, when just the right arrangements are filled with fluid, can display any letter. To use the example of a digital clock, lighting up the six sections around the edge of the display gives you a “0″. Lighting up ...

Your Bare Feet Betray You, Scientists Say. So Don’t Take Off Your Shoes.

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:34:52 +0000

That’s walking dangerously—better slip on your flip-flops to avoid the cops.

Your walk is surprisingly distinctive, and it’s not just the way you waggle your fanny: it’s how your feet touch the ground. Just a few steps is enough for a program to recognize you 99% of the time, report scientists who had more than a hundred people leave their prints on sensors. The goal? Identifying people through carpet, of course. In case you can’t get to their fingerprints or retinas and so on.

The team had their subjects stroll for five steps and got their software observe how people distributed their weight over the soles of their feet. Once the software had been trained, it was able to link a set of prints to the correct individual 99.6% of the time. This in and of itself isn’t a shocker: Many studies have shown that people’s walks are good identifiers. Using camera arrays or sensors on the floor, previous researchers have trained programs to recognize individuals up to 99% of the time. But those studies never involved more than 10 or 11 people, so it wasn’t clear whether this level of accuracy was possible with a larger ...

WiFi Giving You a Rash? Move to West Virginia.

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:00:01 +0000

Green Bank, WV: Home to a giant telescope and a bunch of people who think they’re allergic to electromagnetic waves.

There’s a quiet, hilly place in West Virginia that’s home to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, as well as radio arrays belonging to Navy intelligence and, purportedly, the NSA. And in one of those weird geographic quirks that you just can’t make up, the isolated area has also attracted a band of people who are convinced that radiation from WiFi and cell phone signals, forbidden there so as not to interfere with the arrays, is giving them rashes, splitting headaches, and chronic pain that make life in the outside world unlivable. It’s there, in the National Radio Quiet Zone, that these folks can find relief.

You might think of them as the WiFi refugees.

A whopping five percent of Americans believe they’ve got something called electromagnetic hypersensitivity—aka, a physical reaction to electromagnetic radiation from common devices like TV, phones, and routers. For most of us, that kind of thing falls squarely in “look at my tinfoil hat!” territory, and experiments don’t support the the theory. But some of the folks’ symptoms, if not the perceived cause, are at least ...

Arctic Blimps and Stealth Snowmobiles. Is There Something You’d Like to Share With Us, Canada?

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:06:49 +0000

Was Canada mocked one too many times at the last UN meeting/G20 powwow? Because they seem to be satisfying a serious manpower inferiority complex with plenty of…blimppower.

The floating objects are NOT blimps, says Hybrid Air Vehicles, the company that makes them and is selling 45 to Canadian flight company Discovery Air—they’re lighter-than-air vessels. But they look pretty blimpy to us. And combined with the Canadian military’s recent purchase of a prototype stealth (wait for it) snowmobile, we see the seeds for an epic motion-picture event: the Great Canadian Wars of 2012. Waterworld at -12 degrees!

But who, exactly, would they be fighting up there? Canada has no northern neighbor, except for wee harp seals and lemmings (there are polar bears, of course, but they’ve got bigger things to worry about). The blimpish vehicles, which lift off using buoyancy from helium and carry up to 55 tons, will be used for moving heavy cargo for industrial projects in the far north, according to a press release from HAV (though the vessels are also useful for military surveillance and materiel transport, according their site). Getting places in the northern climes, where extreme cold and ice ...

If You Build a Ghost Town in the Desert, the Geeks Will Come

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:19:27 +0000

Ghost town available, no apocalypse required.

New Mexico has a lot of land and a lot unemployed folks, and the state government has apparently been casting around for some combo deal that lets them use one to fix the other. And they must have been successful, because a DC-based engineering consultancy recently announced that they will be starting a $200 million construction deal there, building a city large enough for 35,000 on public land. A ghost city. No people allowed.

The ghost town will have all the modern conveniences, including new buildings, old-style buildings, houses, apartments, schools, commercial blocks, and traffic lights. But it will not have all the usual users of such conveniences, including dental hygienists, CEOs, angst-ridden teenagers, commuters, soccer moms, tax lawyers, and executive assistants. In fact, the only people allowed will be scientists and engineers. It’s a scientists-only ghost-town club.

What will the scientists be doing? Testing new technology, of course–Pegasus-Global Holdings got the idea when they had trouble testing their clients’ smart energy tech in a realistic environment and, like many movie producers before them, decided to just build the durned place themselves. They’re calling it The Center. Which isn’t creepy ...

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: What’s Happening in Afghanistan Right Now?

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:51:29 +0000

New York Times R&D Lab: Retail and the “magic mirror” from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

You weren’t thinking tablets and smart phones would stay cool forever, were you? They’ll go the way of the Apple Newton and the Commodore soon enough, and the New York Times will be prepared, reports Neiman Labs. The ol’ Gray Lady is preparing for the next great revolution: bathroom mirrors.

In this video taken at the paper’s R&D labs, Megan Graber of Neiman watches NYT Creative Technologist Brian House put the bathroom mirror 2.0 (codenamed “the magic mirror”) through its paces, showing how the device can respond to voice commands and even take note of RFID-tagged medicine bottles resting nearby, pulling up coupons from manufacturers and prescription information a la Internet of Things. Like the giant-iPad-style table top they’re also working on at the lab, the mirror can show you the Times front page, the latest videos, and so on while you’re brushing your teeth or having breakfast.

Some newshounds will no doubt thrill at having the latest info right there in the bathroom. Myself, I’m not sure about the wisdom of seeing the morning’s civil wars, famines, and ...

German Prostitutes Pay Streetwalking Fee at Parking Meter-Like Machine

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:59:21 +0000

Get yer streetwalking permit here!

From 8:15 pm to 6:00 am each day, prostitution is legal in Germany, where working call girls staff brothels, sauna clubs, and other such establishments. In the city of Bonn, which, uh, “boasts” around 200 prostitutes, an average of 20 freelancers go cruising each night, picking up clients on the street and heading to garage-like structures called “consummation areas” the city put up especially for that purpose. They’ve thought of everything, those Germans!

Girls in the various brothel-like establishments have always been subject to a prostitution tax, but streetwalkers, apparently, haven’t being paying. Now, though, the city has a way to make things fair for everyone: a parking meter for prostitutes.

The meter looks just like the sidewalk ticket-dispensers you’ve probably used in numerous cities to park your car, but for about $8.70, this one dispenses a pass allowing the holder to cruise for johns all night. When the city emptied one after the first night, it yielded a haul of $375, prompting various media outlets to comment on how honorable the city’s prostitutes must be. But one has to wonder how many people just bought a ticket for the novelty and ...

(1) Capture Asteroid. (2) Mine It. (3) PROFIT!! (4)…KABLOOM

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:06:43 +0000

Reel ‘er in!

We all know that asteroids close to the Earth are Bad News. (Although not as bad as many would have you think.) But what if we could catch one? Bring it home? Put it in Earth orbit? Maybe mine it for some valuable minerals; do a little science; potentially, I don’t know, back a new currency? Sure, say some Chinese scientists in a paper on the ArXiv. We should go for it!

In fact, there’s a snazzy little number approaching the Earth right now, they write. It’s about 30 feet wide. Should be pretty easy to hook in, using one of a variety of techniques outlined in the paper, which include “conventional explosive, kinetic impactor and nuclear explosive,” as well as “Enhanced Yarkovsky effect, focused solar, gravity tractor, mass driver, pulsed laser and space tug.” The nuclear route may not be advisable, they opine: “Because the nuclear explosion can release a very large amount of energy, the result may be a fragmentation of the target NEO.” Better to go with the kinetic imapactor, they decide. A little tap to the ol’ asteroid, and it will accelerate just enough to get stuck orbiting ...

Forget the Beer Cooler! Keep Your Still-Pumping Heart in a Box

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:54:00 +0000

The practice of rush-shipping organs for transplants on ice is fertile ground for slapstick comedy. It’s almost too easy—think of five things that could go wrong! Go!

So next time you have a heart that needs transporting, you might consider joining a clinical study currently underway with this little gadget: a cozy box on wheels that recreates the heart’s natural environment, complete with donated blood and tubes to pump that blood through. The study, which is funded and designed by TransMedics, the company that makes the box, is investigating whether keeping the heart going means it can be transported farther and increase the success of transplants by giving doctors more time to test for immune factors that could cause a rejection. The current system, of course, involves shutting the heart down, partaking in crazed race-against-time hijinks, and then jump-starting it once it’s in the recipient’s chest. The whole process can take no more than six hours, chest to chest, or the heart fails.

How long could a heart survive in a box? Perhaps…forever? That’s an iiiinteresting question…for another, madder group of scientists. In the meantime, if you’re anything like us, reading this has given you an urge to revisit this ...

W00t! The OED Catches Up With the Rest of Us

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:02:41 +0000

Last week, the new edition of Concise Oxford English Dictionary—the user-friendly version of the massive, encyclopedic guide to English—debuted with 400 new words, many of them not unknown to those of us here on teh Interwebs. Here’s a selection of the goodies:

cyberbullying: n. the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature.

denialist: n. a person who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.

domestic goddess: n. informal a woman with exceptional domestic skills, especially cookery.

jeggings: pl. n. tight-fitting stretch trousers for women, styled to resemble a pair of denim jeans.

retweet: v. (on the social networking service Twitter) repost or forward (a message posted by another user). n. a reposted or forwarded message on Twitter.

sexting: n. informal the sending of sexually explicit photographs or messages via mobile phone.

woot: exclam. informal (especially in electronic communication) used to express elation, enthusiasm, or triumph.

One quibble: we would have included the alternate spelling of “woot,” the alphanumerical mashup “w00t.” As the evolution of the term from its humble, dungeon-crawling roots has resulted in two separate ...

No More ‘Jersey Shore’: New TV Tells Advertisers, Retailers, and Everybody Else What You’re Watching

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:30:52 +0000

Best friends!!

Modern life is about maximizing information overload. So while you watch your favorite shows on the boob-tube, chances are you’re also surfing the Interwebs, looking for that actor’s screen credits, buying the season on DVD, checking other people’s real-time reactions. Ah, but what if your TV pulled up all that stuff for you, and helpfully displayed it on your computing device of choice, a la Google Ads in your email? Wouldn’t that be…something?

Before the end of the year, just such a TV will be released by a start-up called Flingo—a TV that, should you opt in to the service, will note what you’re watching and customize what your computer shows you. Technology Review got details from some officers of the company:

“Any mobile app or Web page being used in front of your TV can ask our servers what is on right now,” says David Harrison, cofounder and CTO of Flingo. “For example, you could go to Google or IMDB and the page would already know what’s on the screen. Retailers like Amazon or Walmart might want to show you things to buy related to a show, like DVDs, or ...

Move Over Alligator Shoes, It’s Time for Alligator Fuel

Joseph Castro — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:06:21 +0000

It’s a handbag. It’s a wallet. No, it’s biofuel.

A genuine alligator-leather purse could put you out hundreds of dollars, but alligator fuel may come fairly cheap. Large fuel plants could produce biofuel from alligator fat for as little as $2.40 a gallon, suggests a recent paper published in the journal Industrial Engineering Chemistry Research. Last we checked, the old-fashioned stuff from long-dead critters was retailing for a buck or so more.

Why use gator fat for fuel? Well, as chemical engineer Rakesh Bajpai and his colleagues at the University of Louisiana pointed out, some 15 million pounds of alligator fat is wasted each year. Alligator farms harvest the animals’ hides and meat to make fashionable accoutrements and deep-fried appetizers, but the ancient creatures’ fat just gets dumped into landfills.

Knowing that alligator fat has a high lipid content, which is useful for biofuel, the researchers decided to test how feasible making alligator juice really is. After treating the fat with chemical solvents and shoving it into a microwave, the team was able to convert about 61 percent of the fat into lipids for biofuel. They then refined some fuel from the lipids and found that ...