Covering World: Technology

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Air umbrella produces a "force field" of air to keep you dry

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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9cTDi9iU33ZmOnThx90QIwE6-gP94iTSVJn9zl64U7gWV7U8w4EH0WF3fJ_pczlNmNxjE8GE9XOgKS463bvght9oP2_VGSLwVp4sDKFiIX5ZH4vi1zqkJbLbXW1IdmOVZ8LqqcuN4yLw/s1600/air_umbrella.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9cTDi9iU33ZmOnThx90QIwE6-gP94iTSVJn9zl64U7gWV7U8w4EH0WF3fJ_pczlNmNxjE8GE9XOgKS463bvght9oP2_VGSLwVp4sDKFiIX5ZH4vi1zqkJbLbXW1IdmOVZ8LqqcuN4yLw/s1600/air_umbrella.jpg" /></a><i style="background-color: white; color: #999999; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: x-small; line-height: 32px;">A team of Chinese designers has developed the Air umbrella with the aim of making tangles of metal poles and fabric a thing of the past</i></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">People certainly haven't been afraid to try and reinvent the umbrella over the years. There was the solar-powered </span><a href="http://www.gizmag.com/vodafone-solar-powered-signal-boosting-umbrella/22957/" style="background-color: white; color: #1e8dd7; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Booster Brolly</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">, the windproof</span><a href="http://www.gizmag.com/rainshader-umbrella/27442/" style="background-color: white; color: #1e8dd7; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Rainshader</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"> and the lopsided </span><a href="http://www.gizmag.com/rain-shield-umbrella/25038/" style="background-color: white; color: #1e8dd7; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Rain Shield</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">, just to name a few. But now a team of Chinese designers is looking to do away with the awkward metal poles and canopy entirely, relying instead on a "force field" of air to keep you nice and dry.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;"><b><i> <span style="line-height: 32px; text-align: center;">The Air umbrella uses a lithium battery to power a motor and fan, which creates a cycle of air flowing through its tip</span></i></b></span></div>
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 The idea of using air flow to shield users from pelting rain has been explored before. A pair of designers developed a <a href="http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/01/12/try-air-to-stay-dry/" style="background-color: transparent; color: #1e8dd7; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">similar concept</a> back in 2010, though this version seemingly never made it to market.<br />
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The latest take on the Air umbrella uses a lithium battery to power a motor and fan, which creates a cycle of air flowing through its tip to deflect the drops and form the protective layer. So how much protection are we talking about exactly? Well, the designers say at the current stage of development the umbrella will provide enough shelter for two people, though if the rain isn't too heavy more people can be squeezed underneath.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSsxxtVdALydoG69L53MliroS0cpSOmYeDKT_zfmr1PdG85gEBEGjJrDxmkO-OjlXzHPRNICv7pwdkRPIDfWS_KG6ySTlZRjZMB6KKcayMgfVbQ6Qe757o14CLLe6T8hlGu22TLEsIvsI/s1600/air_umbrella-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSsxxtVdALydoG69L53MliroS0cpSOmYeDKT_zfmr1PdG85gEBEGjJrDxmkO-OjlXzHPRNICv7pwdkRPIDfWS_KG6ySTlZRjZMB6KKcayMgfVbQ6Qe757o14CLLe6T8hlGu22TLEsIvsI/s1600/air_umbrella-3.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i><span style="color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">The Air umbrella uses a lithium battery to power a motor and fan, which creates a cycle of air flowing through its tip</span></i></h2>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 22px;">The team is working on three models, all resembling something of a detached shower head. The first claims to be designed for females and is 30 cm (1 ft) in length and 500 g (1.1 lb) with a battery life of 15 minutes. The second is 50 cm (1.64 ft) long, weighs 800 g (1.76 lb) and has a 30 minute battery life. The third is extendable, ranging from 50 cm (1.64 ft) to 80 cm (2.62 ft), weighing 850 g (1.87 lb), also with a 30 minute battery life.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #cccccc; font-size: xx-small;"><i>A team of Chinese designers has developed the Air umbrella with the aim of making tangles of metal poles and fabric a thing of the past</i></span></h2>
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With these battery times you wouldn't want to be stranded in a rainstorm, but they might just be enough to get you home from the bus stop without becoming a cold, shivering mess.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNFuXiesI0PYGleg9612YeVVUeu2KUv72O9FQuxxPChp2BGvRfjsKIa0gyViDRoHlRbBZWl2m0MQUHux_nximlDIalCVhL9EL5_mSPbLntbezXX9z6h-QCqRuPqLBnzLqii34u7aYHcUU/s1600/air_umbrella-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNFuXiesI0PYGleg9612YeVVUeu2KUv72O9FQuxxPChp2BGvRfjsKIa0gyViDRoHlRbBZWl2m0MQUHux_nximlDIalCVhL9EL5_mSPbLntbezXX9z6h-QCqRuPqLBnzLqii34u7aYHcUU/s1600/air_umbrella-2.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;"><i>The team is developing three models, all resembling a detached shower head</i></span></h2>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">The team is looking to raise US$10,000 on Kickstarter for the production of its Air umbrella and looks to be having reasonable success to date. At the time of writing it has attracted almost $12,000 in pledges with 10 days to run on the campaign. Most of the early bird pledges are already gone, with $108 the minimum pledge to reserve the shorter "female" version of the umbrella. Deliveries are slated to commence from December 2015 if all goes to plan.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: ProximaNova, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">You can see a demonstration of the Air umbrella in the following pitch video.</span></div>
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Air umbrella produces a "force field" of air to keep you dry

A team of Chinese designers has developed the Air umbrella with the aim of making tangles of metal poles and fabric a thing of the past Pe...

13:04

Outsource your empathy with life prediction tool

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 An Israeli designer wants to squash your digital fingerprint into one algorithm that can predict when your friends are about to be sad or the best time to propose to your girlfriend.<br />
Predictables is a design concept by Dor Tal, crafted to provoke debate over the potential consequences -- good and bad -- of our reliance on big data.<br />
He imagines the front end will be a kind of pico projector, which maps your life onto any surface. It's a predicative calendar that makes handy suggestions to make your life run smoother. In a video depicting the technology, for example, your life is portrayed as a series of coloured blobs in a kind of floating calendar of potential future happenings. A green blob activates and catches your attention, so you point to it and flick your wrist (the future is entirely gesture-enabled as well, of course). A warning appears that says it's three days till an important meeting, before asking if you'd like to reschedule because your team is probably ill-prepared.<br />
How does it know this? It's using data gathered by an app you've downloaded onto your phone that scrapes your social media, email, Google searches, GPS data, photos, credit card transactions -- anything with a digital trail. Maybe it spotted a few ropey looking photos of your friends on a night out earlier that week, or recognised that their Facebook posts were actually coming from a beachside bar, not an office.<br />
So far, so intrusive. But the system wouldn't make any decisions for you. In the video, the subject's response is to text his team to see if its ready for the meeting. Later the same man's watch projects the same calendar onto the palm of his hand, warning him his girlfriend's probably about to be sad, so he buys her some flowers.<br />
"It is clear that today we are leaving our digitals fingerprints everywhere," Tal tells Wired.co.uk. "We can also see how these fingerprints are being used in order to create a precise profile of us for commercial uses. I suggest to return that data to the user."<br />
The technology does not exist yet, but we're not a million miles away. Summly scrapes the news so you don't have to, and Google Now scrapes your life in much the same way Predictables is now proposing -- though for the more mundane things in life that feature in your calendar.<br />
"The biggest challenge in this project is to create the forecasting algorithms," says Tal. "However, the further I advance in my research and the more I meet with specialists, the more I believe it will happen sooner than expected. For just one example, I have been in contact recently with Kira Radinsky who has made a lot of advancement in this field and recently even founded a start-up company that uses this kind of forecasting-algorithm application."<br />
Radinsky, last year named one of MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35, has been working on predicting real world events using algorithms that take in data from millions of news items and web searches, billions of tweets and much more. With it, she predicted riots in Sudan, Turkey, Syria and Egypt, a cholera outbreak in Cuba and the outcome of a drug dealer's trial. Although these kinds of systems take in billions of data points, it's argued many of these predictions could easily be done by humans. In an interview, Radinsky explains, "You can see a recurrent pattern in the riots: The price of a staple begins to climb -- in Egypt it was bread, in Sudan it was cooking gas -- and this sparks riots."<br />
But the point is not always to come up with novel predictions a human could not have otherwise. But to have a machine always working in the background as a backup, as a reminder of where your attention should be focused and as an early warning system.<br />
The individual in Tal's video could surely have put two and two together and realised his girlfriend was probably having a bad day -- she texts him about how much she hates her boss and starts job hunting. He could have decided to do something about it, but of course the majority of people might not take immediate action. The proposed service is simply cutting corners and prompting you to do something you should probably do anyway.<br />
Suggesting you propose to your other half soon -- as the system does in the video -- is quite another matter, though. And allowing the app access to every corner of your digital world just to encourage you to take the time in your busy life to do the things you should be doing anyway (be nice to your girlfriend, not necessarily propose to her) sounds like quite a stretch for even the least privacy conscious among us.<br />
"I think that the world that we live in today, and even more so the world of tomorrow, doesn't leave any room for privacy," Tal says. "And I am saying it with a lot of sorrow. I believe that if we won't stop and ask ourselves some serious questions about the role of technology in our personal lives, we will find ourselves in a world in which Facebook or Netflix suggest us when and who to marry."<br />
So he has not necessarily developed what is a rather Silicon Valley-like promo for his concept to say this is what we should be doing. He tells us he's more interested in the user interface and user experience side of technology, and "presenting the cultural consequences deriving from an up-coming technology". He calls Predictables his "answer to the new emerging issues of big data".<br />
Tal wants us to question where this kind of all-encompassing data sharing could lead us. And it sounds like it will lead us to become some pretty lame, lazy humans that need prompting to be nice.

Outsource your empathy with life prediction tool

An Israeli designer wants to squash your digital fingerprint into one algorithm that can predict when your friends are about to be sad ...

17:22

Kobo Arc 10HD review

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E-reader maker Kobo's biggest, baddest model delivers a
stonkingly sharp screen and powerful quad-core processor. Who needs
a camera?</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb4vrKkP4eWfvd0Wmiqh7QYUyMi7wqoDpvhGlBGEEn_Fg7mesnw5hr7rYM_ci2ukaDQxqPDNTi2Ecr85CN4gQS6-uBQa6iSYJjRRQnitDNwQrq93Qj1iY3hYsx_ciA8_YrMZTj99b-WjM/s1600/kobo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb4vrKkP4eWfvd0Wmiqh7QYUyMi7wqoDpvhGlBGEEn_Fg7mesnw5hr7rYM_ci2ukaDQxqPDNTi2Ecr85CN4gQS6-uBQa6iSYJjRRQnitDNwQrq93Qj1iY3hYsx_ciA8_YrMZTj99b-WjM/s1600/kobo.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<strong>Design</strong><br />
The Kobo has quite a distinctive style with its matte black
rubberised rear characterised by sharply tapering edges. It's a bit
on the heavy side at 627g, certainly weighty enough to make it feel
very different to Kobo's ebook reader line-up. Another distinctive
feature is the red power slider on top and it's nice to see a micro
HDMI output on the side so you can hook it up to your TV for those
times when you just need a bigger screen.</div>
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Not that there's anything wrong with the Arc's 10.1 inch display
which delivers a terrifically sharp resolution of 2,560x1,600
pixels, which boils down to 300ppi -- just a little less than the
latest <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/reviews/tablets/2012-11/ipad-mini-review">iPad mini's</a> Retina display. Movies look great as do busy web
pages and they sound good too thanks to a decent pair of stereo
speakers on the back -- they're a little bass-lite compared to the
drivers on the <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/reviews/tablets/2013-12/amazon-kindle-fire-hdx-8">Kindle Fire HDX 8.9</a> (which is also considerably lighter) but
pretty good nonetheless.</div>
<strong>Processor, Android and features</strong><br />
The quad-core processor is clocked at 1.8GHz and backed by a full
2GB Ram, which gives it plenty of poke. In our AnTuTu benchmark
test it delivered a score of 29,300 making it one of the highest
ranking tablets we've seen, losing out to Samsung's <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/reviews/tablets/2013-12/samsung-galaxy-note-10-1">Galaxy Note 10.1</a> but ahead of the <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/31/nexus-10-hands-on">Google Nexus 10</a>.<br />
It's running a heavily customised version of Android 4.2.2 Jelly
Bean, only a little behind the very latest 4.4 KitKat. The
customisation mostly affects display of Kobo's own content, of
which there is much to choose from, including books (3.5 million
apparently -- count 'em!), games, music, movies and magazines.
There are a few samples already on board but you'll need to open an
account and pay for most of what's available. Where the Arc scores
over the Kindle HDX however is that you can access full Google Play
and download whichever apps you fancy.<br />
There's no main camera but there is a 1.3-megapixel shooter on
the front. The colour balance seemed alarmingly off on our test
model however, which could lead to some unusual video calls.<br />
Unfortunately, there's only 16GB storage on board, which you'll
soon dig into if you're downloading a lot of the HD content the
display craves. It really is a shame that there's no option to
expand the memory via microSD card.<br />
Battery life proved to be capable rather than exceptional and we
easily got a full day's use out of it, but not much more.<br />
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<strong>Conclusion</strong><br />
The Kobo Arc 10HD offers a wonderful screen and a searingly fast
processor as well as easy access to a huge range of Barnes &
Noble books, mags, music, films and games. But it's nearly twice as
heavy as the slightly more expensive Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 which also
has an 8 megapixel camera, though at least the Arc offers full
Google Play. Otherwise this is a mid-price tablet (cheaper than the
Nexus 10 and iPad Air) that ticks all the boxes.</div>

Kobo Arc 10HD review

E-reader maker Kobo's biggest, baddest model delivers a stonkingly sharp screen and powerful quad-core processor. Who needs a camera? ...

11:47

Turkey skin-inspired sensor can detect TNT

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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">A team of
bioengineers <a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140121/ncomms4043/full/ncomms4043.html"><span style="color: blue;">has developed a sensor</span></a> for detecting nearby
undetonated explosives based on the same biological principles that cause
turkey skin to change colour. An accompanying app in development lets users
know whether they've just encountered explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT), or just
a spot of methanol. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Seung-Wuk
Lee of UC Berkeley led a team in the development of the system, which relies on
engineering the virus <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M13_bacteriophage"><span style="color: blue;">M13 filamentous bacteriophage</span></a> to resemble
and behave like the collagen fibres found under turkey skin. You might not
think a turkey would inspire anything more than an annual attempt at making its
whole-roasted-self tasty, but its wattle was the source of inspiration since it
changes colour when the bird gets hot and bothered. This is down to a series of
blood vessels altering the dispersion of the collagen fibres as they inflate or
contract, depending on the turkey's temperament or activity. This, in turn,
causes lightwaves to scatter differently and the result is a colour-changing
jowl.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Rather
than visualising when rage or impatience is present, Lee and his team wanted
the biomimicry sensor to seek out substances including hexane, isopropyl
alcohol, methanol and TNT vapours. By engineering the M13 virus to develop
nanofibres interspersed in a similar fashion to those in turkey collagen, the
team was able to generate a substance sensitive to environmental changes. This
included humidity -- the sensor became bluer the drier the air was, and more
red if the air was moist as the nanostructures expanded and contracted like
blood vessels -- but the main objective was to test the aforementioned series
of chemicals. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">"Both
natural materials and their synthetic analogues lack selectivity towards
specific chemicals, and introducing such selectivity remains a challenge,"
write the authors in the journal <i><a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140121/ncomms4043/full/ncomms4043.html"><span style="color: blue;">Nature Communications</span></a></i>, where the experiment
results have been published. "Here we report the self-assembly of
genetically engineered viruses (M13 phage) into target-specific, colourimetric
biosensors."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">They
found the biosensor became swollen or shrunk down depending on which chemical
was present, generating different colours that could be attached to a
particular chemical. It could then be photographed using the accompanying
iColour Analyser smartphone app, which automatically identifies the substance.
It's like a turkey-themed pH test for dangerous substances. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The
system was also tweaked to become a sensor solely for detecting TNT, by
engineering the virus to bind with particular sites within the molecule. When
the sensor was exposed to two molecules the team says are similar to TNT -- DNT
and MNT -- it was able to clearly spot the difference between them and the real
McCoy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In a statement,
Lee said: "Our system is convenient, and it is cheap to make. We also
showed that this technology can be adapted so that smartphones can help analyse
the colour fingerprint of the target chemical. In the future, we could
potentially use this same technology to create a breath test to detect cancer
and other diseases." </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">"Our
tuneable, colourimetric sensors can be useful for the detection of a variety of
harmful toxicants and pathogens to protect human health and national
security," conclude the authors. Right now though, one stumbling block
will surely be the fact that by their own admission, the authors do not
comprehend the mechanisms behind the sensitivity of the blood vessel stand-ins.
They suggest it might down to water content within the virus. The success will
also depend on the system's sensitivity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Current
proposals for new TNT detectors superior to a sniffer dog often have to <a href="https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2012/acs-press-pac-august-8-2012/advanced-explosives-detector-to-sniff-out-previously-undetectable-amounts-of-tnt.html"><span style="color: blue;">increase levels of the substance</span></a> present in the
air significantly in order to confirm detection. A team from India might
provide some competition as well, where a gel has been engineered that <a href="http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2012/February/tnt-explosives-detection.asp"><span style="color: blue;">turns fluorescent</span></a> when exposed to TNT.</span></div>

Turkey skin-inspired sensor can detect TNT

A team of bioengineers has developed a sensor for detecting nearby undetonated explosives based on the same biological principles th...

11:44

Triple-star system could reveal 'true nature' of gravity

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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEied3znCeRUbXTFoxb6-NdDmvzulYcV2ZbOpjY1qW4fDU8NMxzfTApOJFp-NqGklE7ZAx2O0mzOB3g7Lovue4PG27Elwcow7bE_rgxcfHtp0BitqIHOiP5Ayv-nGUKbV5be4vLNgt7qSi4/s1600/Triple_System_nrao.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEied3znCeRUbXTFoxb6-NdDmvzulYcV2ZbOpjY1qW4fDU8NMxzfTApOJFp-NqGklE7ZAx2O0mzOB3g7Lovue4PG27Elwcow7bE_rgxcfHtp0BitqIHOiP5Ayv-nGUKbV5be4vLNgt7qSi4/s1600/Triple_System_nrao.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
A triple-star system <a href="https://public.nrao.edu/news/pressreleases/pulsar-in-stellar-triple-system">discovered
by astronomers</a> could help resolve problems with Einstein's theory of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity#General_relativity">General
Relativity</a> and shed light on the true nature of gravity.<br />
The unique system is comprised of two white dwarf stars and a superdense
neutron star (pulsar) packed into a space smaller than the Earth's orbit around
the Sun. The constellation allows scientists to measure the complex
gravitational interactions between the stars in a way that hasn't been possible
before to help reveal the true nature of gravity.<br />
The pulsar -- a neutron star that emits lighthouse-like beams of radio waves
through space as the object spins -- was first discovered by a graduate at West
Virginia University called Jason Boyles using the <a href="https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/gbt/">National Science Foundation's
Green Bank Telescope (GBT)</a>. It is 4,200 light-years away from Earth and
spins 366 times every second. These sorts of rapidly-spinning pulsars (known as
millisecond pulsars) are very useful to astronomers, who can use them to study
gravitation.<br />
After spotting the pulsar, astronomers noticed two white dwarf stars -- one
in close orbit with the pulsar and another more distant one. It is the first
time a millisecond pulsar has been found in such a system, which provides, in
the words of Scott Ransom, "tremendous opportunity to study the effects
and nature of gravity".<br />
Ransom is an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He
says: "This triple system gives us a natural cosmic laboratory far better
than anything found before for learning exactly how such three-body systems
work and potentially for detecting problems with General Relativity that
physicists expect to see under extreme conditions".<br />
Having identified the system, scientists observed it intensively with the
GBT, the <a href="http://www.naic.edu/">Arecibo</a> radio telescope in Puerto
Rico and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands,
incorporating additional data from other satellites and telescopes.<br />
"The gravitational perturbations imposed on each member of this system
by the others are incredibly pure and strong. The millisecond pulsar serves as
an extremely powerful tool for measuring those perturbations incredibly
well," says Ransom.<br />
By recording the lighthouse-like beams of radio waves with accuracy, the
team was able to calculate the geometry of the system and the masses of the
stars with 'unparalleled precision' -- some of them are accurate to hundreds of
metres, according to Anne Archibald from the Netherlands Institute for Radio
Astronomy. Archibald used the measurements gleaned from the system to build up
a simulation.<br />
The research combines techniques pioneered by Isaac Newton to study Earth's
gravity with the alternate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity">theory of gravitation
proposed by Albert Einstein</a>. It is hoped that it could pave the way for the
next theory of gravity.<br />
The team is particularly interested in looking for a deviation from the
Equivalence Principle, which states that the effect of gravity on a body
doesn't depend on the size of material of that body. It explains why on the
Moon, where there is no air resistance, a feather and a hammer will fall at the
same speed. It also explains why balls of different materials will roll down a
slope at the same time -- as first shown by Galileo.<br />
Ransom explains: "While Einstein's Theory of General Relativity has so
far been confirmed by every experiment, it is not compatible with quantum
theory. Because of that, physicists expect that it will break down under extreme
conditions. This triple system of compact stars gives us a great opportunity to
look for a violation of a specific form of the equivalence principle called the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle#The_strong_equivalence_principle">Strong
Equivalence Principle</a>."<br />
When a star explodes and then collapses into a superdense neutron star, some
of its mass is converted into gravitational binding energy that holds the star
together. According to the Strong Equivalence Principle, the binding energy
will still react gravitationally as if it were mass. Most of the alternative
theories to General Relativity suggest that it will not.<br />
The triple star system should allow astronomers to know which is the case
through high-precision observation of the pulsar's "lighthouse"
flashes. If the Strong Equivalence Principle holds, then the gravitational
effect of the outer white dwarf would be identical for both the inner white
dwarf and the pulsar. If it doesn't hold, then the outer star's gravitational
effect on the inner white dwarf and pulsar will be slightly different.<br />
"Finding a deviation from the Strong Equivalence Principle would
indicate a breakdown of General Relativity and would point us toward a new,
correct theory of gravity," said Ingrid Stairs of the University of
British Columbia<br />
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Triple-star system could reveal 'true nature' of gravity

A triple-star system discovered by astronomers could help resolve problems with Einstein's theory of General Relativity and sh...

17:05

Glitter nail polish can protect your laptop's data

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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXPVPhVSk4I7mKcaFpW99hSUTQQbmBwpPfo5HXbmqma6Q2lU38SNCtdyDBpssh7kJmke0aojQRmG7EHZ0U57Zwl5QgZyP5MuoatD7OfOGdf-1X8sAypX0rxSnwEky1exkolCuPIti_86U/s1600/lockpick.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXPVPhVSk4I7mKcaFpW99hSUTQQbmBwpPfo5HXbmqma6Q2lU38SNCtdyDBpssh7kJmke0aojQRmG7EHZ0U57Zwl5QgZyP5MuoatD7OfOGdf-1X8sAypX0rxSnwEky1exkolCuPIti_86U/s1600/lockpick.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
If you're traveling overseas, across borders or anywhere you're afraid your
laptop or other equipment might be tampered with or examined, you've got a new
secret weapon to improve security. Glitter nail polish.<br />
Don't laugh. It works.<br />
Security researchers Eric Michaud and Ryan Lackey, making a presentation at
the <a href="https://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/wiki/Main_Page">Chaos
Communication Congress</a> on Monday, highlighted the power of nail polish
-- along with metallic paints and even crappy stickers -- to help people know
when their machines have been physically tampered with and potentially
compromised.<br />
"Government agencies have so much money, they can build their own
custom procedures," said Ryan Lackey, founder of the CryptoSeal VPN
service. "But if you're a private person who travels to a country to do
work, you have to take your stuff."<br />
Physical tampering with machines, whether by governments, corporate
competitors or data thieves looking for bounty, is a growing problem. Business
people traveling to China in particular have reported problems with data theft
and hardware tampering. While drive encryption, strong passwords and
software-based measures might keep causal thieves out, traveling offers many
ways for prying eyes to physically compromise a laptop, Lackey and Michaud
noted. Border areas can be especially dangerous, as authorities can confiscate
a laptop or cell phone to "examine" it, then return it with the
drives imaged or malware installed. Once at a destination, many travelers lack
the option to carry their laptop at all times. This raises the risk of
attackers breaking into a hotel room to steal data or compromise machines.<br />
Short of keeping a machine with you 24/7, there is little you can do to be
absolutely sure these things don't happen, the researchers said. If there is a
serious question, they advise against traveling with sensitive data and wiping
or simply discarding potentially compromised devices upon returning home. But
those extreme measures don't help you while you're actually on the road, making
it critical to know if your machine has been compromised.<br />
Some travelers affix tamper-proof seals over ports or chassis screws. But
these seals can in fact be replicated or opened cleanly in minutes by anyone
with even minimal training, Michaud and Lackey said. They instead advise
borrowing a technique from astronomers called blink comparison. Here's where
the glitter comes in.<br />
The idea is to create a seal that is impossible to copy. Glitter nail
polish, once applied, has what effectively is a random pattern. Once painted
over screws or onto stickers placed over ports, it is difficult to replicate
once broken. However, reapplication of a similar-looking blob (or paint stripe,
or crappy sticker) might be enough to fool the human eye. To be sure, the
experts recommend taking a picture of the laptop with the seals applied before
leaving it alone, taking another photo upon returning and using a software
program to shift rapidly between the two images to compare them. Even very
small differences -- a screw that is in a very slightly different position, or
glitter nail polish that has a very slightly different pattern of sparkle --
will be evident. Astronomers use this technique to detect small changes in the
night sky.<br />
By taking the picture with a cellphone that is kept with you at all times,
you can be reasonably sure the original picture hasn't been tampered with or
replaced. In order to guard against typical user forgetfulness, the experts
recommend using a two-stage remote verification system. Such a tool would require
that two pictures match exactly, for example, before allowing the user to log
in to a potentially vulnerable system such as a VPN.<br />
"This makes it non-skippable by users," said Michaud, CEO of Rift
Recon. "If the user doesn't do the check, it doesn't work."<br />
The pair said they will within a few months release an inexpensive tool that
will support this two-step verification system. Such machine-assisted
verification was necessary to help travelers overcome their own mistakes, they
argued.<br />
"Users are lazy," Michaud said. "It's really unlikely that
we're going to build a system based on users making the correct security
decisions all the time."<br />
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Glitter nail polish can protect your laptop's data

If you're traveling overseas, across borders or anywhere you're afraid your laptop or other equipment might be tampered with o...

17:00

Zoom, enhance. Corneal reflections can reveal bystanders

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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3pGbH1k1wndvymmfaBeG9TzqrJU2G_ImEjgeqqsYF_QsgAKT9odx9GGvtnn1a76HAnyXsyBIiCawwPdkfA9otW80yepD2wrSn3OftnOHjqTHj4JYRLG4VDFjQnpXVXAiYeOz9JnOBe4Y/s1600/eyes_2_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3pGbH1k1wndvymmfaBeG9TzqrJU2G_ImEjgeqqsYF_QsgAKT9odx9GGvtnn1a76HAnyXsyBIiCawwPdkfA9otW80yepD2wrSn3OftnOHjqTHj4JYRLG4VDFjQnpXVXAiYeOz9JnOBe4Y/s1600/eyes_2_1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
Researchers at the Universities of York and Glasgow have managed to
successfully extract identifiable images of bystanders from reflections in
subject's eyes.<br />
The technology, which is limited to high-resolution photos, showed promise
in a series of tests where participants were asked to identify people from
these images.<br />
Those who were unfamiliar with the subject's face were able to successfully
match them with another photo of that subject 71 percent of the time, while
those who were familiar with the subject's face had an accuracy rate of 84
percent. In a second test, observers were able to reliably name a familiar face
from an eye reflection image.<br />
"Corneal reflections can reveal surprisingly rich information about the
social environment," wrote Rob Jenkins and Christie Kerr in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0083325">their
paper</a>, published in <em>PLOS One</em>. "These bystander images were
not merely informative about facial appearance, they were properly identifiable
to viewers who knew the faces."<br />
While the researchers used very high-resolution cameras in their tests, they
note that "pixel count per dollar for digital cameras has been doubling
approximately every twelve months. This trajectory implies that mobile phones
could soon carry >39 megapixel cameras routinely."<br />
They added: "For crimes in which the victims are photographed (e.g.,
hostage taking, child sex abuse), reflections in the eyes of the photographic
subject could help to identify perpetrators."

Zoom, enhance. Corneal reflections can reveal bystanders

Researchers at the Universities of York and Glasgow have managed to successfully extract identifiable images of bystanders from reflec...

16:58

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