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Issue no. 32, 2005 Published: Oct 28, 2005
Report urges: Switch off PCs at the end of the day
Microsoft promotes third-world computing
US to require RFID chips in passports
An open-source rival to Google's book project
Japanese firm transmits movie in 0.5 seconds
Brain implants could control blood pressure
Robot surgeons scrub up
NASA helps with eavesdropping through walls
Invention: Backlit prints
Canon tests hydrogen fuel cell
How Einstein managed his inbox

Report urges: Switch off PCs at the end of the day
Companies should encourage employees to switch off PCs at night, or they will continue wasting thousands of euros per year, according to research by Fujitsu Siemens. The PC maker claimed that £123m (EUR 181m) is wasted every year in the UK alone powering PCs that could have been shut down or left in hibernation mode. The report also pointed out the environmental impact of all the wasted energy. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide are needlessly produced every year by computers, digital set top boxes, chargers and many other products left on standby mode. Fujitsu Siemens surveyed 1,000 employees, and found some 370 never turned off their computers before leaving the office for the day. According to some estimates, just turning off a monitor can save 75 per cent of the overall energy consumption of a PC. With energy prices having soared in recent months, plus growing concerns over climate change, the amount of power used by PCs is a hot topic. The European Union recently agreed legislation to cut down on energy wasted by idle computers, including those left in standby.
ZDNet UK Oct 24, 2005	back to top

Microsoft promotes third-world computing
Microsoft has created a $1.2m fund to stimulate academic research and bring computers and internet access to every corner of the world. The Digital Inclusion Programme will focus on research leading to new infrastructures, applications and mobile devices. It also seeks to bring communications to regions of the world that currently lack stable network connections, and to adapt current technologies to make them easy to use for consumers with little experience in using technology. Microsoft will be accepting proposals for research grants between 7 November and 13 January 2006. The software developer also unveiled a programme called Inspire that aims to increase the cooperation between scientists from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Inspire will fund visits by researchers and lecturers in computer sciences, and create summer school programmes in developing economies teaching basic computer skills. The programme will also hand out awards for PhD research proposals in the field of computer sciences that will benefit developing nations.
VNUNet UK Oct 21, 2005	back to top

US to require RFID chips in passports
The US government will require nearly all of the passports it issues to have a chip containing the passport holder's personal information by October 2006, according to regulations published this week. Starting in early 2006, the US Department of State will begin issuing passports with 64K byte RFID chips containing the name, nationality, gender, date of birth, place of birth, and digitised photograph of the passport holder. The chip would match the data on the paper portion of the passport and improve passport security by making it more difficult for criminals to tamper with passports, backers say. The RFID chips will use encrypted digital signatures to prevent tampering, and they will employ so-called passive RFID chips that does not broadcast personal information unless within inches of an RFID reader machine. The e-passports will protect against data leaks by putting an 'antiskimming' material to block radio waves on the passport's back and spine.
Infoworld / IDG Oct 26, 2005	back to top

An open-source rival to Google's book project
When it comes to digitising books, two stories appear to be unfolding: One is about open source, and the other, Google. Or so it seemed at a party held by the Internet Archive on Tuesday evening, when the nonprofit foundation and a parade of partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Microsoft, rallied around a collective open-source initiative to digitise all the world's books and make them universally available. The Internet Archive only plans to scan books that are in the public domain and those that copyright holders have given the green light for scanning. The Internet Archive recently introduced the Open Content Alliance. Members include Adobe Systems, Columbia University, the European Archive, the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Last week, the Internet Archive launched openlibrary.org, a website that will eventually house all the world's books. The foundation will digitise 18,000 works of fiction chosen from the University of California archive project that are no longer bound by copyright.
CNET News Oct 26, 2005	back to top

Japanese firm transmits movie in 0.5 seconds
A Japanese company has developed technology to transmit a two-hour film in 0.5 seconds, the world's fastest speed achieved with fibre-optic cables in the field. Kansai Electric used fibre-optic cables on power-transmitting steel towers to achieve the speed of one terabit per second, which is more than 100 times faster than inter-city data transmissions currently in use. The company, Japan's second-largest power supplier, has not decided when to put the technology into practical use but said it was possible that it would come in 2010 or later.
Physorg / AFP Oct 27, 2005	back to top

Brain implants could control blood pressure
Zapping the brain with an electrical current could one day control high blood pressure in people, a new study suggests. UK researchers at Oxford University have shown for the first time that stimulating a certain part of the brain with implanted electrodes can influence arterial blood pressure in a predictable way in patients. Short bursts of electrical stimulation were applied in an area in the midbrain called the periaqueductal grey matter (PAG) in 15 awake patients. The stimulation lowered blood pressure in patients who had the electrodes near the front (or ventral) part of the PAG. In patients where the electrodes were near the back (or dorsal) part, blood pressure could be increased. The team stimulated the patients’ brains for periods of about 5 minutes at a frequency of 10 Hertz, followed by a 3-minute recovery period. The researchers saw that the systolic blood pressure dropped by an average of 13.9 per cent in seven patients, in whom the ventral PAG had been stimulated. In six patients, systolic blood pressure shot up by an average of 16.4 per cent after the dorsal PAG was stimulated.
New Scientist / Neuroreport (vol 16, p 1741) Oct 25, 2005	back to top

Robot surgeons scrub up
Meet the robots that can perform surgery from within your own body. Their creators hope that the remote-controlled surgeons are a step towards a time when traditional open surgery is a thing of the past. Just 8 centimetres long, the devices are designed to be slipped inside a patient's abdomen through a tiny incision. Once inside the body, the robots can be controlled by surgeons either on-site or hundreds of kilometres away. The miniature medics are equipped with lights and a camera to relay video images back to their operator, and an array of different tools that could help surgeons stop internal bleeding by clamping or cauterizing wounds. The devices were invented by a team of engineers and doctors from the University of Nebraska Medical Centre, Omaha, and the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
Nature Oct 27, 2005	back to top

NASA helps with eavesdropping through walls
With half a century's experience of listening to feeble radio signals from space, NASA is helping US security services squeeze super-weak bugging data from Earth-bound buildings. It is easy to defeat ordinary audio eavesdropping by sound-proofing a room and drawing the curtains can defeat the newer laser-based systems. So the new 'through-the-wall audio surveillance system' uses a powerful beam of very high frequency radio waves, which can easily penetrate walls. The system uses a horn antenna to radiate a beam of microwave energy through a building wall. If people are speaking inside the room, any flimsy surface, such as clothing, will be vibrating. This modulates the radio beam reflected from the surface. Although the radio reflection that passes back through the wall is extremely faint, the kind of electronic extraction and signal cleaning tricks used by NASA to decode signals in space can be used to extract speech.
New Scientist Oct 25, 2005	back to top

Invention: Backlit prints
Imagine wallpaper that switches on to brighten the room, or floor tiles that glow underfoot, or even a photo album with pictures that glow on demand. Kodak recently filed patents that reveal how photographic prints, or inkjet printing paper, can be made to self-illuminate. Kodak's new paper has a backing sheet made from a three-layer sandwich. A thin metallic sheet is coated with a smooth layer of white-light phosphor, and the phosphor layer is topped with a transparent metal film. The backing sandwich is then either coated with the silver halide chemicals used to make conventional photo prints, or the dye absorbing layers used for inkjet printing paper. Polymer glues hold the layers together, add strength and seal against atmospheric damp. When electrical current flows from one metal layer, through the phosphor powder, to the other metal layer, a glow is produced. This provides a uniform backlighting for the images printed over the top. Kodak has made the backlit paper thin enough to pass through a conventional printer and flexible enough to fit in a photo album.
New Scientist Oct 25, 2005	back to top

Canon tests hydrogen fuel cell
Canon has unveiled a prototype hydrogen fuel cell it has developed to power portable electronics products such as digital still cameras. The prototype is the result of several years research. It was shown fitted inside the extension battery pack for Canon's EOS Kiss Digital N professional digital still camera. At present the fuel cell provides about the same amount of power as a rechargeable lithium-ion battery of the same size but Canon's final goal is for the fuel cell to offer between three times and five times the amount of power. Fuel cells produce electricity when hydrogen reacts with oxygen through a catalyst and most companies are working on fuel cells that derive hydrogen from methanol fuel. Canon's prototype, however, uses hydrogen.
PCWorld / IDG Oct 27, 2005	back to top

How Einstein managed his inbox
If you are like Einstein, you respond to some e-mails immediately and let others wait. And, of course, some you never answer. And every now and then, you find an old one in your inbox that you did not even realise you had, and you reply. A new study by the University of Aveiro in Portugal finds that the correspondence of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin followed patterns similar to modern e-mail communication. Einstein sent more than 14,500 letters. But he received more than 16,200, and responded to only a quarter of them. Darwin mailed more than 7,500 letters. He responded to 32 per cent of the roughly 6,530 letters he received. The mathematical relationship between quick replies and delayed responses is similar to that of e-mail communication. Of Einstein's responses, 53 per cent were sent within 10 days. For Darwin, the figure was 63 per cent. But now and then they replied months or years later. The upshot: Einstein and Darwin exhibited a 'fundamental pattern of human dynamics' that plays out every morning when you check your inbox.
MSNBC / LiveScience.com / Nature Oct 26, 2005	back to top