British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield.
Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby.
They would swarm into the building and relay images back to the soldiers' hand-held or wrist-mounted computers, warning them of any threats inside.
BAE Systems has just signed a £19million contract to develop the robots for the US Army.
Robot-spy-spiders coming soon to a street near you -- read the full Robobug goes to war: Troops to use electronic insects to spot enemy 'by end of the year' story.
Russia has banned the shipment of medical specimens abroad, threatening hundreds of patients and complicating drug trials by major companies, the national Kommersant newspaper reported on Wednesday.
An anonymous medical source linked the ban to a report by the FSB secret service in May 2007, that he said warned of Russian genetic material being used in Western clinics to prepare biological weapons that would harm only Russians.
We should expect Moscow to complete the protection of Russian DNA by banning hair brushes, shedding skin cells and foreign travel by Russians.
See "Russia bans human tissue export in bioweapon alert" at NewScientist for more.
Now you can repel those annoying teenagers while leaving nice fortysomethings and retirees go about their business unmolested.
Howard Stapleton's "Mosquito" invention emits an ultrasonic sound which can be heard by most kids and teenagers but is inaudible to the majority of adults over 30 due to the inevitable deterioration of hearing with age.
See Inventor deploys hoodie-busting sonic weapon at The Register.
Armed dolphins may be loose in the Gulf of Mexico, freed by hurricane Katrina.
Experts who have studied the U.S. Navy's cetacean training exercises fear that as many as 36 escaped mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Dolphins, considered one of the species with intelligence second only to man's, now threaten divers and surfers. The U.S. Navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.
The Navy started the Cetacean Intelligence Mission in 1989, outfitting dolphins with harness and electrodes, and teaching them to protect Trident subs in harbor. Dolphins have been used to detect mines near an Iraqi port. It is apparent the government has been working on using dolphins as weapons.
The mystery surfaced when a separate group of dolphins was washed from a commercial oceanarium on the Mississippi coast during Katrina. Eight were found with the navy's help, but the dolphins were not returned until US navy scientists had examined them.
Learn more at The Observer's "Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina" or LiveScience's "Armed Dolphins Said Set Loose in Gulf by Katrina" article.
Various organisations have criticised Microsoft for attempting to patent the creation of custom emoticons.
The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.
The patent could be particularly problematic as it covers basic human communication. "Emoticons are a form of language, and a precedent allowing patenting of language constructs is very dangerous indeed," said Marc Taylor, executive director of the Open Source Consortium.
Jonas Maebe, a spokesman for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), said that such a patent could be used by Microsoft to prevent competitors from developing applications that compete with its MSN Messenger application.
"It is unfortunately quite clear such patents have nothing to do with protecting investments nor R&D, and only with obtaining exclusion rights which can help them [Microsoft] maintain their dominant position in the market," said Maebe.
Read the Microsoft frowned at for smiley patent article at ZDNet UK.
An elite squad of real but remote-controlled rats could soon be scouring enemy bases and sniffing out explosives for the US military.
The rodents are directed using a series of brain implants, which can be operated wirelessly from a distance of several hundred metres. Now, for the first time, the researchers behind the project have demonstrated the ability to control the rodents' movements before activating their “sniffer dog” instincts.
John Chapin and colleagues at the State University of New York, US, say the rats could eventually sniff out hidden weapons or act as remote video sensors for military and police forces.
With colleagues from the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, they have previously shown that brain implants can be used to steer the rats over an assault course, or home in on a particular odour. But combining the two tricks is a significant step towards turning them into useful “robo-rodents”.
The rats’ olfactory talents are such that it should be possible to train them to locate explosives or drugs by the tiny chemical traces they emanate, Chapin says.
But, whereas sniffer dogs are trained to crouch down or make some other signal when they locate something, the researchers hope to use brain signals discover when a rat has reached its target, too. Previously they had hoped to monitor the olfactory regions of the brain, but Chapin says monitoring the limbic system within the brain - which shows when the rat thinks it is about to get a reward - is more effective.
The research, which is funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will appear in a forthcoming edition of the journal Physiology and Behaviour.
See the full "Remote-controlled rats to sniff out explosives" article
Canadian privacy advocates have lodged a complaint about a U.S. company that combs cyberspace for personal information and sells the resulting dossiers.
The case is the latest to highlight the growing flow of digital files across borders and the difficulties in regulating the use of sensitive information.
It also raises questions about whether the federal law that governs the way businesses use information has any effect outside Canada.
The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic filed a protest with Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart concerning Wyoming-based Abika, which peddles its services at www.abika.com.
The Ottawa-based clinic contends the company is breaching the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act by collecting and disclosing personal data about Canadians for inappropriate purposes, and without the knowledge or consent of the individuals.
The complaint says Abika gathers and sells a variety of information "one would ordinarily consider to be private" - including police reports, criminal records, telephone logs and even medical records.
"They can't control who is using it or for what purposes," said Philippa Lawson, executive director of the Ottawa clinic. "We did some testing and found out a lot of the information is just plain inaccurate."
Abika insists it is not breaching the law because it is essentially a giant search engine that locates material already available in public and private data bases.
"We have created this search technology which gets you precisely what you are looking for, if it is out there," said company president Jay Patel.
The Ottawa clinic also argues that Abika violates the personal information protection law through the release of inaccurate data about people under its "psychological profile" service.
On its site, Abika says the profile provides the behaviour history of a person, including past and current preferences.
Profiles are compiled from information relating to shopping histories, memberships in various organizations, court records, property deeds, media and opinions expressed in Internet chat rooms, as well as other methods such as statistical comparisons with peer groups, polling and information submitted by friends, co-workers and relatives.
Lawson ordered a psychological profile of herself and found the results "just laughably inaccurate" - including suggestions she was into sado-masochism.
"I remember there was a lot of strange sex stuff in it."
Lawson said she would be very concerned if insurance companies or prospective employers were using such services to make decisions about people.
U.S. firm's sale of personal data about Canadians sparks complaint
Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.
According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.
Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.
"It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.
The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light--say, from a keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use a magnifier.
Full story available at Yahoo news