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Issue no. 25, 2007 Published: Aug 10, 2007
Researchers find way to fight spam scams
Scientists see solution to Darfur in scrap metal
MIT team cooks up simple fuel recipe
Copycat trap
Invention: Blood-staunching bandages
Rubber finger probes sense of touch
Photo tool could fix bad images

Researchers find way to fight spam scams
US computer scientists have revealed striking differences between the infrastructure used to distribute spam and the infrastructure used to host the online scams advertised in these unwanted email messages. The researchers from University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering reported that, while hundreds or thousands of compromised computers may be used to relay spam to users, most scams are hosted by individual web servers. The scientists analysed spam- advertised web servers hosting online scams that either offer merchandise and services or use malicious means to defraud users. The researchers followed the URLs embedded in spam back to the hosting servers, probed the servers and analysed the webpages advertised in the spam. Based on the analysis of over one million spam emails, 94 per cent of the scams advertised via embedded links are hosted on individual web servers. 'A single takedown of a scam server or a spammer redirect can curtail the earning potential of an entire spam campaign,' wrote the UCSD computer scientists.
VNUnet UK Aug 07, 2007	back to top

Scientists see solution to Darfur in scrap metal
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California have created a device that, though it can be built out of scrap metal, has the potential to alleviate suffering for some of the 2.2 million displaced people in Sudan's troubled Darfur region. The device is a wood-fired stove, meant to replace the traditional campfire over which the refugees typically boil water and cook powdered grain into bread. These fires are so inefficient that for many refugees, each day has meant a new struggle to find enough wood to survive. Physicist Dr. Ashok Gadgil said that once he learned about the refugees' plight, he was gripped by a vision of a more efficient stove that could reduce the number of exhausting wood-seeking journeys on which women are vulnerable to attack. Three years and countless prototypes later, Gadgil and a small group of volunteers have given birth to an angular, oddly shaped contraption, which is nearly four times more efficient than a traditional 'three-stone' fire. Gadgil is determined not to subsidise the purchase price using foreign aid as profiteers along the way might to sell it for scrap and make more money. Instead, he hopes to organise a micro-financing scheme, in which the stoves would be rented to families at a price they could afford.
MSNBC / Reuters Aug 07, 2007	back to top

MIT team cooks up simple fuel recipe
Deforestation is not only an environmental problem, but it also makes life difficult people who rely on wood to cook their food. Now, a team of MIT students is working to bring affordable, environmentally friendly cooking fuel to developing countries. The technique offers a simple way to produce charcoal briquettes from organic material such as sugarcane waste. The production process has three steps. First, organic waste is carbonised in a drum in a low-oxygen environment, which prevents it from turning to ash. Second, the resulting powder is mixed with a binder to help hold it together. Then, it is pressed it into briquettes with a simple machine press and allowed to dry. The entire process takes two and a half to three hours, but the team wants to speed up and automate the process. Their plan is to develop a small- to medium-scale manufacturing business to distribute the fuel to people. Although the team is currently focusing on Haiti, the briquettes could be beneficial in other places where trees are scarce, such as Africa and India.
MIT Aug 01, 2007	back to top

Copycat trap
Plagiarists should beware. The next time they submit a paper to a journal, a red flag may pop up on the editors' screen warning them that the article's word patterns are suspiciously similar to those of a published paper. A pilot of 'CrossCheck' was launched on 1 August by CrossRef, a group of 2,046 scholarly publishers. Commercial software of this kind has been available for some time, but until now subscription firewalls have prevented its use with online literature. CrossCheck is able to access the databases of its member publishers. Six publishers are taking part in the pilot: the Association for Computing Machinery, BMJ Publishing Group, Elsevier, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell. The program computes the similarity of word strings to yield an originality score. Suspect scores are flagged-up, and it displays similar excerpts of text from different sources. But an editor will need to examine the flagged up papers to confirm plagiarism. If all goes well, the service could be available as soon as November and other software providers could request access in the future, according to CrossRef. Publishers could also get authors to test their papers before submission, which would spread out the work and allow honest authors to check they had not inadvertently 'cut and paste' verbatim. The downside is that the program would let hardened plagiarists play the system by rewording detected passages.
Nature Aug 08, 2007	back to top

Invention: Blood-staunching bandages
Loss of blood after an injury is a common cause of accidental death. The situation is particularly critical on the battlefield where uncontrolled bleeding is the leading cause of preventable death. So there is clearly a desperate need for a material that can quickly staunch the flow of blood from a wound. Conventional gauze bandages do not work well enough because, although they absorb blood, they do not prevent its flow. Researchers at the Francis Owen Blood Research Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill think they may have the solution. The team has discovered that bandages made from about 65% glass fibre and 35% bamboo fibre not only absorb blood but also stimulate the body's ability to staunch the flow by triggering the release of blood-clotting factors such as thrombin or fibrinogen. They say the bandages work even better if they are themselves impregnated with blood-clotting factors.
New Scientist Aug 06, 2007	back to top

Rubber finger probes sense of touch
What is it about a cat's fur that makes us want to stroke it, and how do you create a rubbery grip that you just can't resist squeezing? An artificial finger that can gauge a raft of tactile characteristics for materials should help to find out. Researchers at the University of Leeds are building a life-size silicone rubber finger. To get the measure of how rough or smooth a material is, they place a sample on a pressure-sensitive platform and allow an attached motor to 'stroke' the finger across it. Software then compares the sideways pressure that the platform feels with the sideways force applied to the finger. This gives a reading for friction or roughness. At the same time, the software gauges how much downwards force the material absorbs by comparing the force applied by the finger with the force felt by the platform. Softer materials absorb more force. Meanwhile, a sensor at the finger's tip measures temperature. The researchers plan to get volunteers to touch different materials and supply descriptions of what they feel to match the artificial finger's data on the same materials. They hope to gather all the smoothness, softness and temperature measurements associated with a range of tactile sensations. The team plans to use these to design packaging materials.
New Scientist Aug 06, 2007	back to top

Photo tool could fix bad images
Digital photographers could soon be able to erase unwanted elements in photos by using tools that scan for similar images in online libraries. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have developed an algorithm that uses sites like Flickr to help discover light sources, camera position and composition in a photo. Using this data the tools then search for objects, such as landscapes or cars, that match the original. The researchers aim to create image libraries that anyone can use to edit snaps. The parts being removed could be unsightly lorries in the snaps of the rural idyll where they took a holiday or even an old boyfriend or girlfriend they want to rub out from a photograph. To find suitable matching elements, the researchers' algorithm looks through a database of 2.3 million images culled from Flickr.
BBC News Aug 08, 2007	back to top