Technology

Keys at your fingertips, but the technology isn't there yet. Credit: Rachmaninoff, CC BY-SA By Andrew Smith, The Open University How can we ensure that someone is who they say they are? How can be sure that the person in our system, both digitally speaking or physically in front of us, is who whom they claim to be? You may think that a good password is the answer, but with so many ways to break into a computer system these methods are clearly not always effective – as can be seen from the unfortunate hacked celebrities whose naked pictures were strewn across the internet recently, or the Oleg…

Artificial hearts were invented at a time when progress in science couldn't come fast enough. In 1969, when they first went into human use, DDT hadn't been banned, vaccines were considered the medical highlight of the century, and the Green Revolution promoted genetic modification as the way to feed the world's poor in the future. In 2014, the cultural landscape is much different. An alarming subset of the American public thinks food can be chemical-free if they pay extra for it, vaccines are only for poor people in red states, and a Bt protein leads to Frankenfood while Bt spray leads to an…

Data from an initial representative 938-subject sample of  a 4,800-subject colorectal cancer trial at Hvidovre Hospital, Copenhagen demonstrated that the NuQ® blood-based diagnostic platform  is able to correctly diagnose 84% of colorectal cancers, including early-stage cancers. Despite the existence of screening programs for the disease, colorectal cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the U.S., partly due to cost, and to low compliance with colonoscopies and other screening methods like fecal tests. Colorectal cancer is often found after symptoms…

Rebuilding Microsoft one block at a time.Credit: animeareftw, CC BY-NC-ND By Mark Skilton, University of Warwick Just as the game Minecraft sees players build their virtual world block by block, Satya Nadella’s bid for its parent company is his first solid move in Microsoft’s new platforming strategy. The IT giant has been stumbling along in recent years as it sees tech upstarts all around it pulling revenue streams from under its feet. While its corporate business has kept bringing in the revenue, the consumer side of the operation has been flailing around in search of a new identity as…

Snooping is not allowed. Credit: Paul Walsh, CC BY-NC-SA By Grant Blank, University of Oxford Standing on a stage in San Francisco in early 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that as Internet users had become more comfortable sharing their lives online, privacy was no longer a “social norm”. He had an obvious commercial interest in relaxing norms surrounding online privacy, but this attitude has nevertheless been widely echoed in the popular media. It is assumed that young people are increasingly comfortable sharing their private lives online. Older people assume this is because…

A 'less is more' approach is not only making 3-D printed parts lighter and stronger, but faster and more economical. A new technique under development is high speed sintering (HSS). Unlike commercial 3-D printers that use lasers, HSS marks the shape of the part onto powdered plastic using heat-sensitive ink, which is then activated by an infra-red lamp to melt the powder layer by layer and so build up the 3-D part. The researchers from the University of Sheffield have discovered they can control the density and strength of the final product by printing the ink at different shades of grey…

VFH and UFH portions of the radio spectrum are reserved for over the air television broadcasts and the FCC keeps plenty of space between channels to prevent interference. But unused UHF TV spectrum could be used for fat streams of data over wireless hotspots that could stretch for miles, according to a presentation at the Association for Computing Machinery's MobiCom 2014 conference.   Researchers from Rice University's Wireless Network Group unveiled a multiuser, multiantenna transmission scheme for UHF, which combines several proven technologies that are already widely used in…

An ortho-oncology team at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center successfully adapted a shoulder surgical aid, the Spider Limb Positioner, to conduct a left hip disarticulation on a melanoma patient.  The Spider Limb Positioner is a pneumatic arm with three fully articulating joints that can be infinitely adjusted in relation to the operating table where it is mounted. The positioner mobilizes patients' limbs so surgeons don't have to, thereby freeing up both their hands to operate. The device is usually used at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center to place patients in beach chair…

Since the failures of some metal on metal hip implants were brought to light, the introduction of new joint implants has been the focus of major scientific and policy discussions, but regulation 'requires major overhaul,' say a group of experts, because the safety of several new technologies "could be compromised". An International team led by Art Sedrakyan, Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, argues that the momentum for change generated by these recent high profile failures is important and there is an urgent need to evaluate the evidence for introducing new…

Statistics - learning from data and of measuring, controlling and communicating uncertainty - has become important to science and it is vital to the future of science, Science 2.0. Over the last 200 years, and certainly with the advent of large-scale computing in the last 30 years, statistics has been an essential part of the social, natural, biomedical and physical sciences, along with engineering; and business analytics. Statistics helps quantify the reliability, reproducibility and general uncertainty associated with discoveries, because one can easily be fooled by complicated…