NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Bar-Coded Condoms Track Where You Have Sex

Who would have thought, in this day and age, that our national conversation on sex -- and for that matter, women's reproductive rights -- could be so stunted that it's enough to make 2012 feel downright feudal? Need proof? How about the recent U.S. congressional hearing on birth control whose panel included absolutely no women.

Call me a feminist -- no really, I prefer you do -- but when the opposition gives a thumbs down to health insurance covering contraceptives for women and a thumbs up to Viagra being covered, forgive me if I say that kind of logic sounds a little...cockeyed.

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So here's a story to remind us all that, yes indeed, it is actually the 21st Century: Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest (PPGNW) recently distributed 55,000 condoms with QR codes that track, through their website, WhereDidYouWearIt.com, when and where people have had sex.

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"Condoms are an essential tool in preventing unintended pregnancy and stopping the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV,” PPGNW New Media Coordinator, Nathan Engebretson, said in a press release. “We hope the site promotes discussions within relationships about condoms and helps to remove perceived stigmas that some people may have about condom use. "Where Did You Wear It" attempts to create some fun around making responsible decisions."

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Distributed around community colleges and universities, the condom's bar code can be scanned by smart phones that connect users to the website and allows them to upload their location, along with general details and anonymous reviews of their sexual experience. Users can rate their rolls in the hay on a scale from "things can only improve from here" to "ah-maz-ing -- rainbows exploded and mountains trembled."

PPGNW compares the application to Foursquare and Facebook places, saying their site allows people to anonymously "check-in" their safe sexual activity.

"Planned Parenthood wants users to be part of the solution and to be smart, sexy and responsible -- not just during National Condom Week -- but every week," added Engebretson.

(via GizMag)

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Surfing at a Billion Bits Per Second

From the street in the town of Sebastopol, Calif., only one thing hints that a house there has among the fastest residential broadband sold in America: an extra wire off the telephone pole, notably thinner than the adjacent electric, telephone and cable-TV wires.

That fiber-optic cable provides on block in Sonoma County with downloads at up to one billion bits per second, or 1 Gbps. This service from Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Sonic.net will be available to the rest of Sebastopol and, later this year, the Sunset District of San Francisco. It only costs $69.95 a month. And its slower 100-million-bits-per-second service (still over six times quicker than my Verizon Fios connection) costs a mere $39.95 a month.

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At that price, anyone can sign up, not just hard-core techies who are used to paying a lot of dough for faster-than-50-Mbps services. I wrote about Sonic's service (and why something like it probably won't hit your street) in a feature for Ars Technica. In this piece for Discovery News, I'll talk about what it's actually like to have a connection that fast.

Videos play instantly. Almost all of the subscribers who let me into their homes when I went knocking on doors in late December mentioned what I noticed firsthand: On YouTube, that gray bar below the video fills in a blink instead of slowly buffering -- then the clip plays without ever hiccuping. (Even on my 15 Mbps Fios connection, I can't count on Netflix not pausing in the middle of a show.) Unsurprisingly, two customers said they'd dropped their TV services in favor of online-only viewing.

Downloads may not be so fast. The server hosting a file you're downloading sometimes can't send the data fast enough. One attempt to get a copy of the Linux operating system revealed transfers of 13.8 Mbps; another poked along at a woeful 375 kilobits per second, about .04 percent of the speed of the 1 Gbps connection to my laptop. But with the right server, you'll notice the speed: One 100-meg subscriber, who didn't give her name, commented that her son downloaded movies in about two minutes.

Speed-testing sites may not work. Right away, I tried checking Sonic's connection at Ookla's popular Speedtest.net. But it consistently reported download speeds of 40 Mbps or so on 100 Mbps connections; changing one of its settings did send its speedometer gauge redlining to almost 140 Mbps, but then it spat out an incorrect result of about 40 Mbps. The same site said a gigabit connection only hit 100 Mbps and change.

Ookla co-founder Doug Suttles wrote that bottlenecks in the path from a computer to Speedtest's closest testing server could explain those results, adding that "Shifting to 1 Gbps makes this even trickier." A more specialized site, M-Lab, clocked a 100-meg connection at 97 Mbps.

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Your own setup may hold you back. Many home computers need tweaking of their networking settings to handle a 1 Gbps connection -- as seen in the test result from a third diagnostic site, which shows a Windows XP laptop going about 600 Mbps on a gigabit link. Patching the connection through a wired router cut the reported speed again, to "only" 250 Mbps or so, about 17 times faster than my connection at home.

Web sites may still act sluggish. The Web can feel a little slow even at 100 million or one billion bits per second if sites include many different components hosted elsewhere -- ads from different ad services, widgets from various social networks, multimedia from still other servers. You can find yourself waiting for all of these ingredients to come together in your browser window... just not as long as you would on a lesser connection.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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Princess Leia-Like Hologram Coming Soon

Attention Star Wars junkies who've always longed for the day when transmitting holographic messages is as commonplace as a la Princess Leia's "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope." Your day is nigh.

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At a recent tech forum, Microsoft Research unveiled a prototype of an augmented reality application called Holoflector.

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The system includes an LCD panel a few feet behind a large, translucent mirror equipped with a motion-detecting Kinect camera on top. This setup allows for computer graphics to be displayed on and around people and objects that are reflected in the mirror. For the most part, graphics are displayed in real time, however, there's a slight delay.

Check out Andy Wilson, principal researcher on the project, as he explains how the Holoflector could be used in tandem with sensors in a Windows Phone to display Leia-like messages in the palm of your hand.

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"We've seen a lot of examples of augmented reality where you're looking at a phone and you're seeing graphics superimposed onto a video feed," he said in a promo video. "This is much more about rendering graphics onto the real world, or the reflection of the real world. It's also a study of how we can use mobile phones in a complementary way with Kinect."

[Via GeekWire]

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Yeast Gets a Magnetic Personality

Scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute have genetically engineered an organism to sense magnetic fields, showing that it's possible to make organisms react to magnetism even when they normally don't. 

The work points to a lot of applications in medicine, industry and research. For example, cells sensitive to magnetic fields tend to align themselves in a single direction like tiny compass needles. That means one could move them in a specific direction to, say, build up tissue into a specific shape. The technique could be used to target therapeutic cells at diseases and would also be useful in magnetic resonance imaging.

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Some species of bacteria sense magnetism because they have tiny bits of iron or iron compounds inside them. But most plants and animals don't, and when their cells are exposed to iron, they try to stuff it away into tiny, hollow spaces called vacuoles. (Many animals, including humans, need iron to survive, but that iron is metabolized in very different ways).

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Researchers Pamela Silver and Keiji Nishida took ordinary yeast and grew it in a medium containing iron. The yeast cells took in the iron and stored it inside vacuoles. The scientists then put a magnet under the plate where the yeast was and saw the yeast was slightly magnetic.

Nishida added a protein called ferritin, which joins with iron and prevents it from becoming toxic. He also used genetic engineering to block the yeast's ability to produce a protein that's used to carry the iron into the cell’s vacuoles. That let the iron circulate freely throughout the yeast cell and made the cell sensitive enough that it would migrate toward an external magnet.

One interesting effect was that the genetically altered yeast stored iron in its mitochondria. The altered yeast was also about three times as magnetic as wild yeast, which was just given iron supplements.

The researchers found that other proteins in the yeast -- also found in other animals, including humans -- could be combined to amp up the magnetism. The existence of these proteins in other animals means that with a little genetic tweaking, other one-celled creatures that could become tiny, living bar magnets.

Photo: Yeast made sensitive to magnetism by altering how it reacts to iron. The arrows point to two of the larger concentrations of iron in a single yeast cell.

Credit: Harvard Medical School

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Apes Get Apps and iPads

Orangutans are considered to be one of the most intelligent of all primates. And so maybe it's no surprise, then, that app developers are now creating programs for these animals. It's not a marketing scheme, but a way to stimulate the apes. As part of Orangutan Outreach, founder Richard Zimmerman has donated iPads to zoos in Milwaukee, Florida, Houston and Atlanta.

The interactive technologies allow the apes to play drum noises or finger-paint in electronic mediums. Zimmerman says he hopes the animals will also be able to use Skype or FaceTime to communicate remotely with other orangutans at zoos in other cities. For more details, visit Apps for Apes, where you can also donate money.

via Yahoo!

Credit: Redapes.org

Robot Schools Fish

Why stay in school? For fish, the reasons haven't been clear. On the plus side: protection from predators, conserving energy and finding mates. On the down side, though, is the competition for food.

To tease out an answer, Maurizio Porfiri, an engineer at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, and Stefano Marras, of the Institute for Coastal Marine Environment in Italy, designed and built a robotic fish that generates a wake behind it that's similar to a real fish.

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They put the robotic fish in a tank with real fish to see what would happen. The real fish followed the robo-fish around. Later, they attached the robo-fish to the bottom of a channel full of moving water (to simulate a current) and they found the living fish swimming along by the robotic fish, just as though it were leading a school.

One finding was that when swimming near the robot, real fish will fall just behind it, as they get a small boost from the robot's wake. Swimming in formation saves energy, just as it does with other animals, notably migrating geese. This shows that energy conservation is a major factor in forming schools, and possibly offsets the increased food cost.

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This opens up a lot of possibilities for leading fish around where people want them to go. One application is in getting fish to swim away from oil spills, or the intakes of a power plant.

That said, there are a few unanswered questions. The robot fish may swim like a real one, but it's a lot bigger than the fish that followed it, and isn't even the same color. The fish followed anyway.

via PhysOrg, Journal of the Royal Society

Credit: Polytechnic Institute of New York University

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Hospital Live-Tweets Open-Heart Surgery

Many moons ago, on a late-night whim, I decided to live-tweet my umpteenth watching of the movie "La Bamba." Just before Ritchie (Lou Diamond Phillips) launches into his lacerating, rock-n-roll version of the Son Jarocho folk song in Brooklyn, he says "Here's a bit of a rattle snake." That line still gives me chills, as does the following guitar lick. And don't even get me started on the Santo & Johnny-laced ending, unless you want to see a grown man cry.

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Live-tweeting one of your favorite childhood movies may seem ambitious, but there's always going to be someone to one up you, like the medical team from Memorial Hermann Medical Center who live-tweeted double-bypass open-heart surgery and totally upstaged me.

As the beating heart of an anonymous 57-year-old male patient lay exposed on the operating table, the Texas hospital's Twitter account, @houstonhospital, was pumping out tweets like this:

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Patient is supine, arms padded/tucked at side, leg bolster under legs to expose saphenous veins, roll is placed under chest. #mhopenheart

-- Memorial Hermann (@houstonhospital) February 21, 2012

The account's #mhopenheart hashtag invited those tuning in to pose questions to a present cardiologist during the morning's procedure. Also tweeted were surgical updates, Twitpic photos and a helmet-cam video feed for followers to watch while lingering over their bowls of Cheerios.

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Wielding the scalpel was cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon, Dr. Michael P. Macris, who stitched up the procedure in roughly two hours.

Not a bad performance, considering the hospital's 5,728 followers and more were potentially watching from Twitterverse's virtual operating room gallery. From that vantage point, at least no one had to worry about Junior Mints being dropped into the open chest cavity.

via Yahoo News

Credit: Lester Lefkowitz

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Bus Stop Ad Reacts Only To Women

 

It was only a matter of time before facial recognition technology showed up in the form of advertisement. However it’s hard to complain when the tech is being used for good. In London, bus stop ads are reaching out the women to raise money for Plan UK, a non-profit organization that’s hoping to raise money to educate women is third world countries.

The billboard has a camera that scans everyone that walks by. If a woman stops to read the ad, a 40-second video will play. It costs £30,000 ($47,598) to install for a two-week period, and has a 90-percent accuracy rate. Men are purposely only shown a link to the advertiser’s website. The organization says it doesn’t play the video to them to give them “a glimpse of what it’s like to have basic choices taken away.”

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If you're a guy who takes education for all seriously, this will probably irk you. It’s a risk to prove a point from Plan UK, and only time will tell if it will drive donations in a positive way. For more information about the organization or to give your opinion on how it’s being done, visit their site. via: TechCrunch

Credit: Plan UK

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Space Elevator, Going Up

Ever ridden in one of those elevators where a softly feminine, robotic voice alerts you to what floor you're going to next? Yeah, me neither. But if I had, wouldn't it be cool if the voice said this instead: Going up. Next floor, outer space.

Well, that dream may be closer than I think, as long as I manage to make it to my 70th birthday.

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According to The Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo construction company, Obayashi Corporation, hopes to erect a space elevator by 2050. As a doff of the cap to our British readers, the space lift would ferry passengers and cargo along a carbon nanotube ribbon from a terrestrial terminal to a spaceport nearly a quarter of the way to the moon.

How is this possible? Well, on paper, here's what's on tap:

At the end of a 59,652-mile-long, carbon-nanotube cable, there would be a counterweight floating in space and anchoring the assembly connected to the ground terminal. Passengers would travel from terra firma to a spaceport research center equipped with residential facilities located 22,369 miles above the Earth's surface.

Interested in beaming yourself up? Well, make sure you pack your toothbrush and an few changes of clothes because even though the elevator will zoom up the ribbon at 124 miles per hour, it's still going to take a week to get there. Those who have ever undertaken a cross-country trip on a Greyhound bus know how pleasant a journey that can be.

Obayashi is keeping mum about the estimated cost of the project, but once it's off the ground, the company hopes to shuttle 30 passengers at a time along the cable, potentially with magnetic linear motors.

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No location has been revealed yet, but because the assembly would rely on centrifugal force to keep the ribbon taut, the base station needs to be located near the equator. Here's looking at you, Pontianak, Indonesia.

An ambitious project indeed, sure to have many ups and downs.

via Gizmag

Credit: NASA (top); Obayashi Corp. (left)

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Who Defends Your Phone: Robots or Humans?

At the start of this month, Google sent a message to Android malware authors: No more Mr. Nice Guy. In a blog post, engineering vice president Hiroshi Lockheimer wrote that Google had been scanning Android Market apps "for a while now" with an automated routine called Bouncer.

Lockheimer's post explained that Bouncer inspects apps for known malware and troubling behavior, in part by running them on simulated Android phones. It works, he said: "Between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40 percent decrease in the number of potentially malicious downloads from Android Market."

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Since the prior defense on the Market had consisted of Google yanking rogue apps after users reported them, this was a major advance. But is it enough?

On one level, you could say so. Symantec's database of threats only lists one recent case of Market malware (separate from apps hosted elsewhere, which you can't install on Android by default), an app that Lookout Mobile Security and others ruled was merely a pushy advertising operation. The latest report of Market malware from another security firm, Sophos, was a December warning about malicious games.

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Remi Harrad, a publicist for Lookout, wrote Friday that "we haven’t found any more significant malware on the Android Market" since early February. But Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser at Sophos, wrote that the major problem on the Market was "dodgy apps" that steal personal data -- and that Bouncer hadn't helped.

Past studies of automated scrutiny of mobile apps suggest caution. A 2011 report (PDF) by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the automated screening of Nokia's Ovi software store had apparently OK'd five of 24 malicious apps. A 2008 paper (PDF) by IBM, Samsung and University of Michigan researchers suggested that well-crafted "behavioral detection" could identify malware "with more than 96 percent accuracy" -- not good enough to surrender judgment to the likes of Bouncer.

Two security professionals suggested possible gaps in Google's scrutiny.

Peter Szor, a researcher who joined McAfee Labs last spring, said some Android malware is "very device specific" -- targeting particular models -- and so might look safe in virtual-machine testing. He also noted that rogue applications could download malicious code after being installed.

Chris Ensey, director of government relations for SafeNet Inc., echoed that concern. He added that while security firms like his employ "virtual execution" techniques to check attachments and links sent to employees, that's easier work: Those items shouldn't run any code. Flagging a malicious application "requires far more advanced inspection tactics."

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Meanwhile, you can and should consult the useful data Google provides about Market apps (including recent additions like "+1" recommendations for apps from Google Plus users) before downloading them. Don't install anything from outside the Market unless you know exactly what you're doing -- the latest attack Sophos reported was a download from a site listed on a Facebook profile.

Or you could switch to Apple's iOS, where human reviewers' rigorous scrutiny stops software from abusing your trust.

Except when it doesn't. Earlier this month, the photo-sharing app Path was caught uploading users’ address books without permission. Path's developers wanted to help users find friends on their service, but that action violated Apple's guidelines for iOS developers. Path apologized and Apple said it would require apps to ask permission before uploading contact information.

That episode -- and the growing problem of scam apps in Apple's App Store -- show that human scrutiny doesn't ensure safety, either.

What might? Be skeptical about new apps and slow to install them. Remember, nobody's handing out prizes to be the first to install a new program.

Photo Credit:

Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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