Covering World

Lego is launching a Curiosity rover set

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Danish blocksmith Lego <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57616139-76/mars-curiosity-rover-transforms-into-an-official-lego-model/">will
be releasing</a> a Curiosity rover set on 1 January 2014, following a campaign
by fans.<br />
The 1:20 scale Lego set will have an articulated robotic arm, multiple
cameras, six-wheel rocket suspension and little Lego mars rocks for you to roll
over.<br />
In fact, it's remarkably similar in many ways to the real-life Curiosity
rover rolling around Mars, and that's no coincidence -- it was designed by
mechanical engineer Stephen Pakbaz, who worked on the real-life Curiosity.<br />
He <a href="http://lego.cuusoo.com/ideas/view/3431">submitted the design</a>
in 2011 to Lego's <a href="http://lego.cuusoo.com/">Cuusoo platform</a>, which
allows members of the public to suggest new sets they'd like to see. After more
than 10,000 people voted for it, Lego reviewed the project and accepted it.<br />
"For me, the building experience was similar to what I felt when the
real Curiosity rover successfully landed on Mars," Pakbaz <a href="http://blog.lego.cuusoo.com/2013/12/18/lego-nasa-mars-curiosity-rover/">said</a>.<br />
"It can be used to explore the unknown regions of your house or office.
After climbing the outer walls of Carpet Crater and descending into Couch
Canyon you will finally be able to determine if your living room was ever
capable of supporting microbial life."<br />
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Lego is launching a Curiosity rover set

Danish blocksmith Lego will be releasing a Curiosity rover set on 1 January 2014, following a campaign by fans. The 1:20 scale Leg...

17:03

How to become a World Memory Champion in ten steps

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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbiV7fIQadVGAX-2mzpls7IDQKb-imSxcnUYC2K_ozBjqEgjjMtnpwlJbpOY65_zSHcnG6c6V4CO6bzBQpLHMOk7Cje9Wa_S16eQWZO_DRl33FfGE3p9nWXXLsuCaMoH3f9ydetGrJTAk/s1600/shutterstock_132466931.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbiV7fIQadVGAX-2mzpls7IDQKb-imSxcnUYC2K_ozBjqEgjjMtnpwlJbpOY65_zSHcnG6c6V4CO6bzBQpLHMOk7Cje9Wa_S16eQWZO_DRl33FfGE3p9nWXXLsuCaMoH3f9ydetGrJTAk/s1600/shutterstock_132466931.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="intro">
As you throw back another egg nog, mulled wine or other variety
of sickly Christmas cheer, save a thought for the brain cells that take a hit
with each swig. Your memory might not fare so well the morning after, but
thanks to these tips from England's eight-time World Memory Champion and author
of <i><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;">How to Develop a Brilliant Memory Week by Week</span></i> Dominic
O'Brien, there are a few things you can do to improve it in the future -- or at
least, give the impression you remember the night's events. This man can recall
a binary list of 2,385 digits, so pay close attention.</div>
<h3>
1. The Link Method</h3>
To remember a list of words or shopping items make a link between each of
the objects. For instance, with Torch, Grapes, Ring, Sherry, imagine shining a
Torch on a bunch of Grapes. Inside one of the Grapes you see a Ring sparkling
with diamonds. As you squeeze the grape, the ring falls into a glass of Sherry.<br />
<h3>
2. Acronyms</h3>
Use extended acronyms to remember a series of data by creating a fun
sentence. For example "My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming
Planets" gives you the order of the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth,
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.<br />
<h3>
3. Mental Pictures</h3>
Turn data such as facts and figures into pictures. Arctic or Antarctic? If
you think of looking up at an arch and down at an ant you'll never confuse the
two again.<br />
<h3>
4. The Journey Method</h3>
To remember a list of information, choose a familiar route or journey, maybe
around your house, to picture each item on the list.<br />
To remember a sequence of numbers -- say, 1024337864 -- you could also choose
a route around your house, to picture each number pair. By picturing David
Cameron at my front door, an alarm clock in the hall and two blackbirds flying
up the staircase, I can remember these three pairs of numbers easily: 10, 24,
33.<br />
To add more pairs of numbers, just extend the journey: in my bedroom I hear
an old 78 record and in the bathroom Paul McCartney is in the shower singing
"when I'm 64".<br />
<h3>
5. Remembering to spell correctly</h3>
Accidentally or Accidently? Turn tricky words into scenes to help you
remember correct spellings. Picture an accident in an alley…
accidentally.<br />
<h3>
6. The Rule Of Five</h3>
To avoid information gradually fading from your memory banks it's important
to know when to review information. Apply the "Rule of Five":<br />
First review : Immediately<br />
Second review: 24 hours later<br />
Third review: One week later<br />
Fourth review: One month later<br />
Fifth review: Three months later<br />
<h3>
7. PIN Numbers</h3>
If you can remember your name, you'll never forget your PIN number. Just
make up a memorable sentence and count the number of letters in each word. For
instance: "My name is Dominic": 2 4 2 7; or "This number is
secret": 4 6 2 6.<br />
<h3>
8. The Story Method</h3>
To remember a group of information, create a story which links them all
together. In chemistry the Noble gases are: Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon
and Radon. Imagine taking off in a Helium balloon lit up with a Neon light. An
Argon welder turns into superman who takes you to the planet Krypton, and so
on.<br />
<h3>
9. The Body System</h3>
This works by associating parts of the body with key images of whatever it
is you want to remember, like a to-do list of things. Let's say you have to buy
cheese, eggs and a bottle of milk. Picture cheese on your head, an egg balanced
on your nose and a bottle of milk on your shoulder.<br />
<h3>
10. Healthy Body, Healthy Memory</h3>
Exercise and diet can help to maximise the effects of memory. Gently raise
your heart rate with daily physical exercise and include foods rich in
antioxidants as well as vitamins A, C and E. Oily fish such as salmon contains
folic acid and omega-3 oils are ideal for maintaining a healthy brain and
nervous system.<br />
<h3>
Quick Test</h3>
By using the memory tips outlined, see how many of the items in the festive
list below you can remember. First, choose a location that is familiar to you
such as your home, your place of work, your hometown or a nearby park. The idea
is to use this location as a backdrop for a short journey consisting of a
series of places or stops along the way. The places are then used to mentally
store items of the list you wish to memorise. The route you take will preserve
the natural order of the list, assuming, that is, that you don't forget the
journey or the stops along the way.<br />
Try positioning them along a familiar route around you house and garden or
down the street:<br />
Mistletoe             <br />
Smoked Salmon<br />
Santa Claus         <br />
Holly<br />
Brandy Butter     <br />
Snowman<br />
Turkey               <br />
Stocking<br />
Xmas Tree         <br />
Chestnuts<br />
How many of those items can you now recall in the correct order?<br />
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How to become a World Memory Champion in ten steps

As you throw back another egg nog, mulled wine or other variety of sickly Christmas cheer, save a thought for the brain cells that ...

17:02

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

Android becomes the new Linux

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<em>Each year, Wired publishes a 132-page standalone magazine (and app) in
which our expert writers forecast the year ahead. Here's a sneak preview of
the </em><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/id730948705?mt=8"><i>Wired
World in 2014</i></a><em> -- from bitcoin fraud to the men's lib
movement. </em> Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content
by <a href="https://www.circules.com/subscribe/wired-uk/60606"><em><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">subscribing
online</span></em></a>.<br />
Google's open-source OS has come from nowhere to global mobile dominance.
Gaming and the internet of things are next in its sights for 2014.<br />
lan Cohen, former director of systems engineering at Logic PD, which makes
miniature medical devices, has decades of experience working with
operating systems such as Windows Embedded or Linux. But these days he
prefers a different blend of software: Android.<br />
"It's a great choice for sophisticated purpose-built devices with
rich human interfaces," says Cohen. "[It's] a platform that nicely
handles many of the issues developers encounter when building sophisticated
embedded systems."<br />
He's not alone in his point of view. Normally associated with phones
and tablets -- Android powers 80 per cent of the world's smartphones and
features in about 900 million devices worldwide -- Google's mobile operating
system is powering an ever-widening array of devices. It's now being used in
connected watches such as the Sony SmartWatch, fitness devices such as
Motorola's MOTOACTV, Samsung's Wi-Fi-enabled fridges, Saab's iQon in car
entertainment system and the Polaroid SC1630 smart camera. And the ease in
which it can be customised means that in 2014 it will become the developers'
open-source platform of choice.<br />
In June 2013, Julie Uhrman, former vice president, digital at GameFly, based
in Los Angeles, launched a potentially groundbreaking games console on
Kickstarter. The diminutive OUYA games box raised more than $8.5 million (£5.4
million) on the site, making it one of the most successful crowdsourcing
campaigns ever. The hardware was styled by celebrity designer Yves Behar, but
-- thanks to Android -- it was made from cheap, off-the-shelf parts, which
allowed Uhrman to keep the price below £65 per unit.<br />
According to Uhrman, her Android console is democratising the world of
gaming, opening it up to indies and not just the big publishers on the Xbox and
PlayStation. Dubbed the "people's console", OUYA already claims that
more than 12,000 developers, including Final Fantasy creator Square Enix, have
signed up to work with them.<br />
As more and more devices get connected to the internet of things, Android
will become the operating system that powers everything. And it might be
Google's most important leg-up in its fight with Apple.<br />
Android was first conceived as a system for building networked cameras, but
it rapidly diversified. It's now backed by the Open Handset Alliance, a
powerful consortium of 84 hardware and software vendors that includes giants
such as Samsung Electronics and HTC. Android has become the foundation for some
of the most popular devices in the consumer electronics world, including
smash-hit bestsellers such as Samsung's Galaxy S4, which sold a record ten
million units in the first month, and Amazon's Kindle range.<br />
The open and customisable nature of Android allows it to be used on a wide
range of electronics. It's as easy to use as Windows CE, but, because it is
free and open source, developers don't have to pay any licensing fees, which
can add up with high-volume devices. And they're able to adapt and modify the
code base as they see fit -- something Microsoft would never allow.<br />
It's also well suited to today's advanced devices, which are smarter and
better connected than previous models. Off the shelf, Android handles a range
of complex functions, such as graphics, communications and database support.
"There's tremendous built-in functionality out of the box that must be
cobbled together -- usually with significant pain -- when using other platforms
and operating systems," says Cohen.<br />
Android is not always ideal, however. It is overkill for dumber devices such
as sensors or actuators that don't need a rich human interface. It is a good
fit for a hospital monitor, say, that responds to touchscreen commands from hospital
staff, but is overpowered for a wearable heart sensor that just beams
information to a smartphone.

Android becomes the new Linux

Each year, Wired publishes a 132-page standalone magazine (and app) in which our expert writers forecast the year ahead. Here's ...

16:59

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