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Biological systems to be modelled as computer programs
WORKBOOK STOCK/JUPITER
Technology CELLPHONE PRIVACY ALERT
A MAGNETIC resonance imaging (MRI) scanner has taken its first blurry shots of the human brain without using massive magnets. MRI scanners image the human body by detecting how hydrogen atoms respond to magnetic fields. They typically require fields about 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s, making it dangerous for people with metal implants, and expensive. Now Vadim Zotev of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and colleagues have eliminated the need for large fields by using ultra-sensitive magnetic sensors called superconducting quantum interference devices (www.arxiv. org/abs/0711.0222). The biggest field they used was 30 millitesla, just 1000 times the Earth’s. This could make MRI scans cheaper and more widely available.
60 years. The sentence faced by a Los Angeles man who infected 250,000 PCs with malicious software that turned them into a botnet
–What secrets might it reveal?–
Programs help make sense of life
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES
Safer and cheaper MRI scanners
histories and a cellphone’s ability to reveal your location and store the numbers you have called. Simon Davies of the watchdog Privacy International in London says that if Android merges location and calling data with that gathered by search engines, Google will be able to retain more detailed information on users. “Android has the potential to be a privacy Chernobyl,” he says. Ian Brown at the Oxford Internet Institute agrees: “I wouldn’t want Google having a day-to-day history of my searches, where I have been and who I am phoning. I wouldn’t buy such a phone.” It doesn’t have to work out this way. “With the right combination of user controls, privacy safeguards and responsible action, it could create privacy gains,” Davies says.
By slashing current leakage, a novel gate and insulator will boost the efficiency and performance of Intel’s 45-nanometre transistor
A secure wireless connection between two cellphones could soon be a shake away. To set up a connection between two phones using a system developed at Lancaster University, UK, the user must hold them together and give them a vigorous shake. The phones record the experience using built-in accelerometers and transmit their recordings to each other. Software compares the recordings on each phone, and if they are identical allows the phones to stay connected (http://tinyurl.com/25kea6).
LOW-RESISTANCE LAYER
METAL GATE HAFNIUM
COMPLEX living systems would benefit from being modelled as if they were computer programs. Biologists have amassed huge data sets, such as the entire human genome, but how the components work together is often a mystery. Most simulations require detailed knowledge of the rates at which components change, which often aren’t known.
Now Jasmin Fisher of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and Thomas Henzinger of the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland, suggest using models structured like computer programs, where many “subroutines” run in parallel and produce outputs that depend on each other (Nature Biotechnology, DOI: 10.1038/nbt1356). By representing proteins, say, as subroutines, it is possible to work out how the overall system works without knowing some details.
GIZMO
TRANSISTOR TRANSFORMED
INSULATOR
Insulator leakage cut by 90%
Source
Drain
Source-drain leakage cut by 80% SILICON SUBSTRATE
SOURCE: INTEL
A cellphone operating system designed to encourage web surfing on the go could trigger a fresh assault on privacy. On 5 November, Google and 30 partners unveiled a joint venture called the Open Handset Alliance that aims to develop a Linux-based open-source cellphone operating system to be called Android. Anyone will be able to write applications for Android, and Google hopes this will lead to applications that free users from today’s clunky handset browsers and web portals. “They are trying to take the ‘mobile’ out of the mobile internet, making it as close to the experience on a PC as possible,” says Ben Wood of telecoms consultancy CCS Insight in Solihull, UK. What worries some privacy experts, though, is the combination of Google’s policy of retaining users’ search
Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, is building an aircraft with foldable wings so that it can double up as a car. To ensure the wings don’t fold up mid-flight, the mechanism remains locked unless the vehicle is on the ground and the engine is switched off. Terrafugia hopes to have a prototype plane, called Transition, by 2008.
“You have to wonder if they might not be potential dangers” Video blogger TheAmazingAtheist speaking in a clip posted on YouTube earlier this year. He is warning about YouTube videos made by Finnish teenager Pekka-Eric Auvinen, which glorify the Columbine killers. Last week Auvinen killed eight people at his school in a shooting spree (YouTube, 7 June)
www.newscientist.com
17 November 2007 | NewScientist | 27
Technology CELLPHONE PRIVACY ALERT
A MAGNETIC resonance imaging (MRI) scanner has taken its first blurry shots of the human brain without using massive magnets. MRI scanners image the human body by detecting how hydrogen atoms respond to magnetic fields. They typically require fields about 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s, making it dangerous for people with metal implants, and expensive. Now Vadim Zotev of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and colleagues have eliminated the need for large fields by using ultra-sensitive magnetic sensors called superconducting quantum interference devices (www.arxiv. org/abs/0711.0222). The biggest field they used was 30 millitesla, just 1000 times the Earth’s. This could make MRI scans cheaper and more widely available.
60 years. The sentence faced by a Los Angeles man who infected 250,000 PCs with malicious software that turned them into a botnet
–What secrets might it reveal?–
Programs help make sense of life
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES
Safer and cheaper MRI scanners
histories and a cellphone’s ability to reveal your location and store the numbers you have called. Simon Davies of the watchdog Privacy International in London says that if Android merges location and calling data with that gathered by search engines, Google will be able to retain more detailed information on users. “Android has the potential to be a privacy Chernobyl,” he says. Ian Brown at the Oxford Internet Institute agrees: “I wouldn’t want Google having a day-to-day history of my searches, where I have been and who I am phoning. I wouldn’t buy such a phone.” It doesn’t have to work out this way. “With the right combination of user controls, privacy safeguards and responsible action, it could create privacy gains,” Davies says.
By slashing current leakage, a novel gate and insulator will boost the efficiency and performance of Intel’s 45-nanometre transistor
A secure wireless connection between two cellphones could soon be a shake away. To set up a connection between two phones using a system developed at Lancaster University, UK, the user must hold them together and give them a vigorous shake. The phones record the experience using built-in accelerometers and transmit their recordings to each other. Software compares the recordings on each phone, and if they are identical allows the phones to stay connected (http://tinyurl.com/25kea6).
LOW-RESISTANCE LAYER
METAL GATE HAFNIUM
COMPLEX living systems would benefit from being modelled as if they were computer programs. Biologists have amassed huge data sets, such as the entire human genome, but how the components work together is often a mystery. Most simulations require detailed knowledge of the rates at which components change, which often aren’t known.
Now Jasmin Fisher of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and Thomas Henzinger of the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland, suggest using models structured like computer programs, where many “subroutines” run in parallel and produce outputs that depend on each other (Nature Biotechnology, DOI: 10.1038/nbt1356). By representing proteins, say, as subroutines, it is possible to work out how the overall system works without knowing some details.
GIZMO
TRANSISTOR TRANSFORMED
INSULATOR
Insulator leakage cut by 90%
Source
Drain
Source-drain leakage cut by 80% SILICON SUBSTRATE
SOURCE: INTEL
A cellphone operating system designed to encourage web surfing on the go could trigger a fresh assault on privacy. On 5 November, Google and 30 partners unveiled a joint venture called the Open Handset Alliance that aims to develop a Linux-based open-source cellphone operating system to be called Android. Anyone will be able to write applications for Android, and Google hopes this will lead to applications that free users from today’s clunky handset browsers and web portals. “They are trying to take the ‘mobile’ out of the mobile internet, making it as close to the experience on a PC as possible,” says Ben Wood of telecoms consultancy CCS Insight in Solihull, UK. What worries some privacy experts, though, is the combination of Google’s policy of retaining users’ search
Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, is building an aircraft with foldable wings so that it can double up as a car. To ensure the wings don’t fold up mid-flight, the mechanism remains locked unless the vehicle is on the ground and the engine is switched off. Terrafugia hopes to have a prototype plane, called Transition, by 2008.
“You have to wonder if they might not be potential dangers” Video blogger TheAmazingAtheist speaking in a clip posted on YouTube earlier this year. He is warning about YouTube videos made by Finnish teenager Pekka-Eric Auvinen, which glorify the Columbine killers. Last week Auvinen killed eight people at his school in a shooting spree (YouTube, 7 June)
www.newscientist.com
17 November 2007 | NewScientist | 27