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Not even your heartbeat is safe
ANDREAS RENTZ/GETTY
Technology ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING
25 metres. The distance from which ThruVision’s terahertz camera can peer through clothing to find concealed weapons
Not even your heartbeat is safe
SOURCE: THRUVISION
ROBOTS of the future may have to learn to make small talk if humans are to accept them. To find out how quickly domestic robots should respond to their owners’ requests, Toshiyuki Shiwa and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, asked 38 students to give orders such as “take out the trash” to a robot, which took between zero and 5 seconds to respond. The students liked delays of no more than 1 second best, with 2 seconds being their limit. However, when the robot took longer, impatient students were assuaged if it filled the time with words such as “well” or “er”. “When the robot used conversational fillers to buy time until it could respond, people didn’t notice the delay,” Shiwa says. He presented the study last week at Human-Robot Interaction 2008 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
–Missing that vital touch–
More data is being created than there is room for on new storage media or leftover free space 1600 1200
Inventor Dean Kamen has created a version of his self-balancing Segway Human Transporter that incorporates a smart seat. While some firms have developed bolt-on, static seats for the Segway, he has filed a US patent application (20080035395) on a movable seat that doubles up as a controller, allowing the rider to steer and shift the Segway’s centre of gravity – all with a twist of the derriere.
Data created or replicated per year Storage space
800 400 0 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
IT GIVES new meaning to the term “heart attack”. Last week researchers led by William Maisel at Harvard University used a commercially available radio transmitter to hijack the software on a device that acts as both a heart pacemaker and defibrillator. The device was not implanted in anyone, but the experiment raises the prospect of hackers
being able to disrupt a person’s heartbeat or stealthily administer damaging shocks. Is the threat of a hackerinstigated heart attack imminent? “The chances of someone being harmed by malicious reprogramming of their device is remote,” says Maisel. However, implanted drug pumps and neurostimulators, which deliver electrical pulses to the brain, could be more vulnerable to such attacks in future as they increasingly have wireless capabilities built in.
GIZMO
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
2011
SOURCE: IDC
Why robots need the gift of the gab
To create more sophisticated sensations, his group strung together combinations of different VibeTonz. A single pulse 30 milliseconds long gives the feeling of a button being clicked, while sliding a finger from one button to another prompts a halfsecond long buzz, providing a “rough” feeling that tells the user they’ve strayed to another key. Sliding the finger across a button causes the buzz to be ramped up and then down, giving the feel of a round button. The team found that users’ typing speed and accuracy were significantly closer to results they achieved using a real keyboard, compared with when the haptics were disabled. The team will present its results at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Florence, Italy, next month.
Exabytes
Touch-screen phones like the iPhone may be cool, but without the tactile feedback provided by a keyboard, they force users to type slowly and lead to typing errors. Now Stephen Brewster and colleagues at the University of Glasgow in the UK say they can banish these problems by using actuators like those that make cellphones vibrate to replicate the feel of a keyboard. Software called VibeTonz made by Immersion of San Jose, California, can get an actuator to move in different ways, such as smoothly or jerkily. Touch-screen phones made by Samsung and LG use this to provide rudimentary “haptic” feedback when a button is pressed, but Brewster says phones could do much more. “The actuators are there, but people aren’t using them in the most effective way.”
Israeli researchers have made a hydrophobic silicon surface that causes water droplets placed on it to form near-perfect spheres that minimise contact with the surface (Nanoletters, DOI: 10.1021/nl080317d). The material, which also immobilises the droplets, could be used to capture protein molecules inside water droplets, so they can be observed unfolding unhindered by contact with the surface.
“It’s the same thing, whether it happens in software or lead paint” Yossi Sheffi, a professor specialising in supply-chain management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on electrical gadgets that are landing on store shelves pre-installed with viruses that steal passwords, open the door to hackers and get computers to spew out spam (Associated Press, 14 March)
www.newscientist.com
22 March 2008 | NewScientist | 23
Technology ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING
25 metres. The distance from which ThruVision’s terahertz camera can peer through clothing to find concealed weapons
Not even your heartbeat is safe
SOURCE: THRUVISION
ROBOTS of the future may have to learn to make small talk if humans are to accept them. To find out how quickly domestic robots should respond to their owners’ requests, Toshiyuki Shiwa and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, asked 38 students to give orders such as “take out the trash” to a robot, which took between zero and 5 seconds to respond. The students liked delays of no more than 1 second best, with 2 seconds being their limit. However, when the robot took longer, impatient students were assuaged if it filled the time with words such as “well” or “er”. “When the robot used conversational fillers to buy time until it could respond, people didn’t notice the delay,” Shiwa says. He presented the study last week at Human-Robot Interaction 2008 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
–Missing that vital touch–
More data is being created than there is room for on new storage media or leftover free space 1600 1200
Inventor Dean Kamen has created a version of his self-balancing Segway Human Transporter that incorporates a smart seat. While some firms have developed bolt-on, static seats for the Segway, he has filed a US patent application (20080035395) on a movable seat that doubles up as a controller, allowing the rider to steer and shift the Segway’s centre of gravity – all with a twist of the derriere.
Data created or replicated per year Storage space
800 400 0 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
IT GIVES new meaning to the term “heart attack”. Last week researchers led by William Maisel at Harvard University used a commercially available radio transmitter to hijack the software on a device that acts as both a heart pacemaker and defibrillator. The device was not implanted in anyone, but the experiment raises the prospect of hackers
being able to disrupt a person’s heartbeat or stealthily administer damaging shocks. Is the threat of a hackerinstigated heart attack imminent? “The chances of someone being harmed by malicious reprogramming of their device is remote,” says Maisel. However, implanted drug pumps and neurostimulators, which deliver electrical pulses to the brain, could be more vulnerable to such attacks in future as they increasingly have wireless capabilities built in.
GIZMO
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
2011
SOURCE: IDC
Why robots need the gift of the gab
To create more sophisticated sensations, his group strung together combinations of different VibeTonz. A single pulse 30 milliseconds long gives the feeling of a button being clicked, while sliding a finger from one button to another prompts a halfsecond long buzz, providing a “rough” feeling that tells the user they’ve strayed to another key. Sliding the finger across a button causes the buzz to be ramped up and then down, giving the feel of a round button. The team found that users’ typing speed and accuracy were significantly closer to results they achieved using a real keyboard, compared with when the haptics were disabled. The team will present its results at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Florence, Italy, next month.
Exabytes
Touch-screen phones like the iPhone may be cool, but without the tactile feedback provided by a keyboard, they force users to type slowly and lead to typing errors. Now Stephen Brewster and colleagues at the University of Glasgow in the UK say they can banish these problems by using actuators like those that make cellphones vibrate to replicate the feel of a keyboard. Software called VibeTonz made by Immersion of San Jose, California, can get an actuator to move in different ways, such as smoothly or jerkily. Touch-screen phones made by Samsung and LG use this to provide rudimentary “haptic” feedback when a button is pressed, but Brewster says phones could do much more. “The actuators are there, but people aren’t using them in the most effective way.”
Israeli researchers have made a hydrophobic silicon surface that causes water droplets placed on it to form near-perfect spheres that minimise contact with the surface (Nanoletters, DOI: 10.1021/nl080317d). The material, which also immobilises the droplets, could be used to capture protein molecules inside water droplets, so they can be observed unfolding unhindered by contact with the surface.
“It’s the same thing, whether it happens in software or lead paint” Yossi Sheffi, a professor specialising in supply-chain management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on electrical gadgets that are landing on store shelves pre-installed with viruses that steal passwords, open the door to hackers and get computers to spew out spam (Associated Press, 14 March)
www.newscientist.com
22 March 2008 | NewScientist | 23