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Barcelona Clubbers Get Chipped Link BBC Science producer Simon Morton recently journeyed to Barcelona where he had a RFID microchip implanted in his arm in order to gain entry into the exclusive VIP Baja Beach Club. The night club offers its VIP clients the opportunity to have a syringe-injected microchip implanted in their upper arms that not only gives them special access to VIP lounges, but also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks. According to Morton, this sort of thing is handy for a beach club where bikinis and board shorts are the uniform and carrying a wallet or purse is really not practical. The chip is contained in a glass capsule, sized roughly the same as a large grain of rice, and is injected under the skin. Patrons have the option of having the capsule removed when they leave the club. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Power Pack Link At The Futures Lab, we are not really in the cool hunting business although that is not to say that we don't appreciate gadgets in all their shapes, sizes and uses. We did however think this post appropriate, because of its application in unwiring our lives. Sure we have a plethora of wireless devices at our disposal but at this point in time, you still need to plug them in to recharge. Power it seems, is the remaining tether to our technologies, at least for a little while. The Voltaic Backpack is a mobile powerhouse. It holds a Lithium Ion battery pack that is charged by external solar panels, an AC adapter or a car charger. Wires from the battery pack run through the bag to each of the pockets so you can keep your devices charged and ready to go. It comes with all the adapters you could possibly imagine, so you can pretty much trust it will work with whatever you've got (but not a laptop, unfortunately. At least you can carry your computer in the bag!).
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RFIDs : No Choice, No Privacy, No Benefit, No way. Link According to Rajat, "It's rough, it's a first shot, and it's subjective and qualitative. The goal isn't to get precise data of any sort, but to get a quick visual understanding of how viable a consumer application might be." The framework makes it easier to understand why some applications, like chipping clothes and razor blades, cause such an uproar, while others don't. Get the framework (.ppt) [ permanent link to this entry ]
Nanotubes That Form 'Nanocarpets' and Kill Bacteria Link By mixing a salt compound with an hydrocarbon, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have created molecules able to sense their environment. Then they used these molecules to develop self-assembling nanotubes which look like that 'nanocarpets'. These nanostructures can change colors when their environment is modified and can be trained to kill bacteria, such as E. coli. Now, they plan to develop products that would both detect and destroy biological weapons. [ permanent link to this entry ]
The Addictive Internet Link Here is some interesting data on internet usage, including a study on "Internet Deprivation", where people have been asked to go without internet access for 14 days. Apparently, the study was difficult to carry out in the first place - many declined to take part because they weren't willing to cut themselves off from the Net for such a long time. Nearly half the people surveyed in a separate portion of the study said they couldn't do without the Internet for two weeks. The longest they thought they could go was about five days. Nearly half--47%--said the Internet made it easier to manage personal and professional relationships. Many said that relationships with friends suffered from a lack of communication, but 27% said they got around that in part by making more phone calls. During their time away from the Web, their consumption of other media increased: 21% watched more TV, 20% more movies, another 20% said they read more newspapers and 6% listened to the radio more often. The question is, are people 'addicted' or has the Internet just been adopted as part of daily life? And when do we stop making the judgment that the Net is any more foreign to us as brushing our teeth? [ permanent link to this entry ]
Campus Life In An Virtual World Link It's not unusual for teachers and students to use an online environment like a chat room to meet. A few college professors are taking advantage of Second Life's fully three-dimensional virtual world and are the first to teach classes in a world where the students can fly, change body types at will and build fantastical structures that can float in the sky.  [ permanent link to this entry ]
Speakers With Style and Substance Link Aesthetics and sound quality are combined in the "loudspeakers and subwoofers concealed behind striking fabrics and artwork" made by Artcoustic. Designers now have another canvas for the handiwork, "positioning loudspeakers need no longer be at the expense of your room's decor. Whenever you feel your speakers need a new look, it's simple to take out the screens and replace them with new ones." Artcoustic has developed a variety of screen options from which clients can choose for the fronts of their speakers, but you can design your own screen if you want as well. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Instant Messaging Goes Graphical Link For most of the millions of people around the world who regularly use instant messaging, the communications tool has largely been a text-only experience in which typed emoticons offer only minimal clues to someone's state of mind. The recent launch of two services -- a brand new, fully three-dimensional chat-room product known as IMVU, and AOL Instant Messenger's new 3-D SuperBuddy icons -- is putting the spotlight on a major shift by the leading IM providers toward making graphical avatars a fundamental personalization feature. One saving grace if the avatar enhanced IM catches on is that we may never have to see another emoticon again :)  [ permanent link to this entry ]
File-sharing Leaps From Internet to Cellphones Link Music, videos and games could soon be swapped between cellphones using a mobile file-sharing network developed by phone maker Nokia. Lorant Farkas and colleagues, at the Nokia Research Center in Budapest, Hungary, have adapted the peer-to-peer (P2P) schemes used by internet users to share files and tested them on their 6600 model cellphones. Computers connected to a P2P network act as both client and server and also relay messages to neighbouring computers, removing the need for a centralised server. Popular internet file-sharing networks such as Gnutella and Kazaa allow users to search one another's hard drives for music or video files and then download them directly. The prototype network developed by Farkas can currently be used to share images and text. "Nowadays you can take pictures and record videos with a smart phone," Farkas told New Scientist. "We were primarily thinking of this kind of content." But future versions should go further. Farkas says developing the ability to share digital music, compressed in formats such as MP3, is also a priority. Interesting to note that while file-sharing technologies are now beginning to surge, the legislation is still stuck in a holding pattern. But then, such is the path of the framing of a trend. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Neuromarketing Via Anthroscope Link More neuroscience emergent tech came to my attention this past week, work at Sandia National Labs Advanced Concepts Group known as their Mentor-Pal project, which uses a system called an anthroscope to gather physical bio data from people as they are presented with scenarios. The anthroscope consists of some 40 channels of physical information, like a lie-detector with more bandwidth, gathering gigabytes of fundamental data. What Sandia has added is the ability to do advanced pattern recognition on the data stream. The resulting patterns could be used to ultimately adapt and refine machine interaction. They suggest that it could be used to define and track performance in collaborative teams. This is another example of tracking affective interaction between people and machines. Beyond the obvious ideas of tracking human reactions in teams ... this also has potential applications to neuromarketing. A consumer or shopper could be shown products or shopping scenarious and their interactions tracked at a more fundamental level than filling in questionaires. The technique might be seen as less invasive than brain scanning techniques in the quest for more data. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Sniffing Out Airborne Diseases Link You are on a return flight from your summer vacation and notice that someone seated nearby has quite a cough. You don't think much of it, until later that day when you receive a text message advising you that the plane's microbial monitoring system detected SARS on the aircraft. After reporting to a testing site, you're relieved to find out that you haven't been infected. Meanwhile, the passenger carrying the virus is positively identified and quarantined for treatment. This is just one scenario envisioned by UC Berkeley mechanical engineers who are developing air-monitoring technology to help stop the spread of airborne diseases. Amazingly, the powerful sensor in their design is a living human cell. "In the war between humans and diseases, this biosensor could be another weapon in our arsenal," says principal investigator Albert Pisano, chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. "You could imagine these mounted in bus stations, trains, or anywhere else you'd like to get a frequent status report on the microbial population in the air. That way diseases can be isolated so they don't infect the population so rapidly." The system, still under construction, combines several of UC Berkeley's recent advances in nanotechnology, bioengineering, and microfabrication. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Neuroinformatics: Mapping the Brain Link According to Neuroinformatics maven Zack Lynch, amidst the current bioinformatics storm, neuroinformatics is a definite sleeper. Lynch notes that the data about a person's genome can already fit on an ipod, yet the data about one's brain will require petabytes, if not exabytes, of storage capacity. Australia's Brain Resource Company (BRC), has has set up the world's first standardized international database on the human brain. BRC already has a database of over 1,000 normative subjects and over 500 clinical subjects and still growing. This collaboration of scientists and technology partners (such as IBM) gathers information into a neuroscience database which includes demographic, neuropsychological (cognitive), electrical brain-body function, sMRI, fMRI, genetic and lifestyle data along with function, structure and genetics of patients' brains. One of the goals of the BRC is to allow rapid comparisons of a patient profile against the normative data with the goal of predicting a response to particular drugs or anticipate a side effect to a specific intervention. Science has been chasing the ability to predict a personal response to any clinical intervention. Who will respond and who will not respond is extremely valuable information to the pharmaceutical industry as well as to clinicians. [ permanent link to this entry ]
"HyperActive Bob" : Making Fast Food Faster Link Pittsburgh startup, HyperActive Technologies, is testing technology at area fast-food restaurants designed to give kitchen workers a good indication of what customers want before the hungry souls even get close enough to place an order. The system is known as "HyperActive Bob" and is in place in several restaurants around Pittsburgh. It tells employees when they are about to get busy, even how much food to put on the grill. The system uses rooftop cameras that monitor traffic entering a restaurant's parking lot and drive-thru. Currently, the system is all about volume: If a minivan pulls in, there's apt to be more than one mouth to feed. By this time next year, HyperActive Technologies expects to have in place software that keys on the type of vehicle entering the parking lot to determine whether the customers they bear are inclined to order, say,a burger over a chicken sandwich. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Gadget Enthusiasm Cutting Into Irish Beer Sales Link Guinness sales are down in Ireland by six percent and the company's CEO thinks he knows why. The typical modern Irish youth is tragically spending his money on gadgets - iPods and smart phones - "instead of "following his father's footsteps" into costly and debilitating alcoholism. What's the world coming to? [ permanent link to this entry ]
Seven-Year-Olds Carrying Mobile Phones Link A new survey by Norway's dominant telecommunications company Telenor revealed that mobile use by children is enjoying explosive growth, reports Aftenposten. In 2002 only eight percent of 7-9 year-olds had cell phones, a year later this number had doubled to one in six having mobiles. In the age group 10-11 years 58 percent use mobiles, up 12 percent points in a year. Berit Skog, a researcher at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), said there were positive effects. Parents could now find and make contact with their children more easily and writing text messages is considered good literacy training. The Telenor study is also attracting attention abroad as Norway is the first country in the world to have an age group with 100 percent saturation of mobile phones. [ permanent link to this entry ]
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