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Modified Tetris has calming effect
Technology
A BRAIN implant is being created that should more reliably detect and forestall epileptic seizures. Neuropace of Mountain View, California, is already testing in humans an implant that detects seizures and then delivers an electric current to stop them. However, it only monitors eight locations in the brain and so can give false positives, says Pedro Irazoqui of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. His team has built an implant that can monitor up to 1000 regions, lowering the risk of false alarms. This will be connected to a “living electrode”, also in the brain and covered with neurons that have been modified to release a neurotransmitter that suppresses the seizure. Using chemical rather than electrical signals to stop the seizure could reduce brain trauma from the implant, says Irazoqui.
25 per cent: the rise in the stock price of the Prime Time Group when it was the subject of a “pumpand-dump” spam scheme
–Dogged by snoops, but not for long–
BioBlox, the game that soothes
SOURCE: NASDAQ
Stopping epilepsy before it starts
and the person’s pupils and uses this to work out what they are looking at. When tested on 18 users, mistakes occurred just 3 per cent of the time. However, it took 10 seconds to enter passwords about eight characters long, compared to just 2.5 seconds by typing. A previous attempt at preventing “shoulder surfing” used graphical passwords. Users had to select the part of a screen where a picture they had previously chosen was displayed, among a bunch of other images. But Kumar found that people liked the familiarity of alphanumeric passwords and PINs. Security specialist Paul Dunphy of the University of Newcastle, UK, now wants to see how EyePassword fares when users are “in a busy street, with a queue of people behind them”.
Bucking its copycat reputation, China has seen a dramatic rise in patent applications (&&*
(&&+
9.5%
US China 32.9% South Korea 0
Bendy batteries made with nanotube paper could power flexible electronic displays. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, grew carbon nanotubes on silicon and coated them in dissolved cellulose. Later they peeled off the silicon, creating a piece of paper with nanotubes on one side to act as an electrode, and used the paper to make lithium-ion batteries that work even when bent.
Increase of 0.9%
Japan
14.8% 100
VIDEO games are notorious for raising adrenalin levels but now there’s one that calms you down. Julian Spillane of game studio Frozen North Productions in Toronto, Canada, together with a programmer who goes by the name Ne0nRa1n, have created a version of Tetris called BioBlox. Players put one hand on a device that measures their pulse rate. As
their pulse rises, so does the speed of the blocks falling from the top of the screen. That makes the game harder, creating an incentive for the player to calm down and so get a higher score. “I’m a big fan of weird input devices,” says Spillane. In 1999, Nintendo released Tetris 64, which also used pulse rate to control the speed of play, but it ran only on Nintendo’s console. BioBlox runs on Windowsbased PCs and will be available online soon.
GIZMO
INVENTED IN CHINA
200
300
400
Patent applications filed (thousands)
SOURCE: WIPO PATENT REPORT, 2007
Snoopers won’t stand a chance if you enter your PIN using only eye movements. A system that uses infrared light to track the position of your eyes as you look at numbers and letters displayed on a screen could soon make that possible. “While it is simple to look over someone’s shoulder to tell what keys they are pressing, it’s harder to tell exactly where on the screen the user is looking,” says Manu Kumar, who helped create the system, called EyePassword, at Stanford University in California. EyePassword works by shining an invisible infrared beam on the user’s face. That produces a reflection or “glint” in their eye that stays in the same spot no matter where they look, in contrast to their pupils, which move whenever their gaze shifts. A camera tracks the relative positions of the glint
REX
PASSWORDS GLINT IN YOUR EYE
If you’re bored with breaststroke try the PowerSwim, a carbon-fibre “tail” inspired by seals and dolphins. Strapped to a swimmer’s shins, it helps them maintain a speed of about 4 kilometres per hour. Its inventors at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency reckon the super-flipper, showcased at the DARPATech 2007 symposium in Anaheim, California, could help military divers zip through the water.
“Email now causes us the most problems in our working lives” Karen Renaud, a computer scientist at the University of Glasgow, UK, who fitted monitors to the computers of 177 people. She found that they checked email up to 40 times an hour. One-third of the participants said they felt stressed by the volume of email and the need to reply quickly (The Times, 13 August)
www.newscientist.com
18 August 2007 | NewScientist | 21
A BRAIN implant is being created that should more reliably detect and forestall epileptic seizures. Neuropace of Mountain View, California, is already testing in humans an implant that detects seizures and then delivers an electric current to stop them. However, it only monitors eight locations in the brain and so can give false positives, says Pedro Irazoqui of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. His team has built an implant that can monitor up to 1000 regions, lowering the risk of false alarms. This will be connected to a “living electrode”, also in the brain and covered with neurons that have been modified to release a neurotransmitter that suppresses the seizure. Using chemical rather than electrical signals to stop the seizure could reduce brain trauma from the implant, says Irazoqui.
25 per cent: the rise in the stock price of the Prime Time Group when it was the subject of a “pumpand-dump” spam scheme
–Dogged by snoops, but not for long–
BioBlox, the game that soothes
SOURCE: NASDAQ
Stopping epilepsy before it starts
and the person’s pupils and uses this to work out what they are looking at. When tested on 18 users, mistakes occurred just 3 per cent of the time. However, it took 10 seconds to enter passwords about eight characters long, compared to just 2.5 seconds by typing. A previous attempt at preventing “shoulder surfing” used graphical passwords. Users had to select the part of a screen where a picture they had previously chosen was displayed, among a bunch of other images. But Kumar found that people liked the familiarity of alphanumeric passwords and PINs. Security specialist Paul Dunphy of the University of Newcastle, UK, now wants to see how EyePassword fares when users are “in a busy street, with a queue of people behind them”.
Bucking its copycat reputation, China has seen a dramatic rise in patent applications (&&*
(&&+
9.5%
US China 32.9% South Korea 0
Bendy batteries made with nanotube paper could power flexible electronic displays. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, grew carbon nanotubes on silicon and coated them in dissolved cellulose. Later they peeled off the silicon, creating a piece of paper with nanotubes on one side to act as an electrode, and used the paper to make lithium-ion batteries that work even when bent.
Increase of 0.9%
Japan
14.8% 100
VIDEO games are notorious for raising adrenalin levels but now there’s one that calms you down. Julian Spillane of game studio Frozen North Productions in Toronto, Canada, together with a programmer who goes by the name Ne0nRa1n, have created a version of Tetris called BioBlox. Players put one hand on a device that measures their pulse rate. As
their pulse rises, so does the speed of the blocks falling from the top of the screen. That makes the game harder, creating an incentive for the player to calm down and so get a higher score. “I’m a big fan of weird input devices,” says Spillane. In 1999, Nintendo released Tetris 64, which also used pulse rate to control the speed of play, but it ran only on Nintendo’s console. BioBlox runs on Windowsbased PCs and will be available online soon.
GIZMO
INVENTED IN CHINA
200
300
400
Patent applications filed (thousands)
SOURCE: WIPO PATENT REPORT, 2007
Snoopers won’t stand a chance if you enter your PIN using only eye movements. A system that uses infrared light to track the position of your eyes as you look at numbers and letters displayed on a screen could soon make that possible. “While it is simple to look over someone’s shoulder to tell what keys they are pressing, it’s harder to tell exactly where on the screen the user is looking,” says Manu Kumar, who helped create the system, called EyePassword, at Stanford University in California. EyePassword works by shining an invisible infrared beam on the user’s face. That produces a reflection or “glint” in their eye that stays in the same spot no matter where they look, in contrast to their pupils, which move whenever their gaze shifts. A camera tracks the relative positions of the glint
REX
PASSWORDS GLINT IN YOUR EYE
If you’re bored with breaststroke try the PowerSwim, a carbon-fibre “tail” inspired by seals and dolphins. Strapped to a swimmer’s shins, it helps them maintain a speed of about 4 kilometres per hour. Its inventors at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency reckon the super-flipper, showcased at the DARPATech 2007 symposium in Anaheim, California, could help military divers zip through the water.
“Email now causes us the most problems in our working lives” Karen Renaud, a computer scientist at the University of Glasgow, UK, who fitted monitors to the computers of 177 people. She found that they checked email up to 40 times an hour. One-third of the participants said they felt stressed by the volume of email and the need to reply quickly (The Times, 13 August)
www.newscientist.com
18 August 2007 | NewScientist | 21