Technology

Several years ago former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had his doctors disable the wireless capabilities of his heart’s pacemaker to thwart any assassination attempt by hacking into his implant’s software. The ongoing revelations of the many ways the NSA has been snooping into billions of cellphones and emails has roiled nations.As the technology that we use becomes more intimate in our lives and our very biology, the ability to abuse that interaction grows. This fear that there are some dark and nameless forces that know our secrets and can control our destiny is not new, however. Since…

As food science continues to advance, so do calls to label and ban foods that have been modified using modern techniques. In GMOs, the genes of some plants used for food are tweaked to make them more healthful (Golden Rice) or pest-resistant (lots of others). By the end of 2012, farmers were growing GM crops on more than 420 million acres of land across 28 countries without any environmental or health issues but a well-funded campaign against these modifications has made some consumers leery of it. It was only a matter of time before someone created a comprehensive test for people concerned…

There is a great deal of rhetoric and propaganda about "threats to the Internet" floating around the ethernet these days.  It's mostly political talk, in my opinion.  The majority of people don't seem to stop and check the laws before getting onto the Information Highway, so they tend to speed and weave and bob and change lanes and do just about everything imaginably illegal and rude without care.The Internet, we were told 20 years ago, was designed to survive a nuclear war -- so it should be hard to break, right?  Technically, I don't think the net was supposed to survive --…

Want a more accurate estimate of waiting time to get through security at airports?  Obviously monitoring Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is one way to go, but often people shut those off in the airport to conserve energy. Monitoring cell phones and tablets doesn't work if only 30% of people have them on.  As many of us know, queues at airports are arranged in mazes using retractable ribbon barriers. Security personnel adjust the barriers according to the size of the queue, and analysis also 'learns' how the flow of people moves over time. This is then used to give an estimate of how long…

Everyone's heard of microwave ovens by now.  These mass-market kitchen devices were a by-product of a much more narrow application - radar. During World War II, the magnetron, a tube that produces microwaves, was invented to spot German bombers on their way to the British Isles. Later, Percy LeBaron Spencer of the Raytheon Company discovered that these radar waves melted a candy bar in his pocket and so the microwave oven - originally known as the Radar Range - was born. Microwave ovens can do wonderful things but the quality of the cooking is not uniform. So you might be a little…

Crowdfunding is just like anything else; it is wonderfully naive to believe that a great idea will organically take off and be successful - but doomed to fail most of the time. Computer scientists from Georgia Tech are here to help; after analyzing more than 45,000 projects on Kickstarter, Assistant Professor Eric Gilbert and doctoral candidate Tanushree Mitra have revealed dozens of phrases that pay and a few dozen more that may signal the likely failure of a crowd-sourced effort.  The language used in online fundraising, they say, holds surprisingly predictive power about the…

There's no greater feel-good fallacy than the belief that organic food is somehow superior to conventionally farmed food. In reality, organic food isn't more environmentally responsible, it is worse, it isn't better for your health, it is worse and, for the most part, it isn't even grown by small farmers, it is giant conglomerates who, like with gluten-free, fat-free or any other food fad, encourage proponents and the mythology of health benefits because they can charge more money. Many of the reasons we are given to pay more for organic food involve a lot of 'nots' and Americans don't…

A new estimate says that up to 80 percent of scientific data is lost within two decades. The culprits? Old e-mail addresses and obsolete storage devices. For the analysis, the scholars attempted to collect original research data from a random set of 516 studies published between 1991 and 2011. They found that while all datasets were available two years after publication, the odds of obtaining the underlying data dropped by 17 per cent per year after that.  "Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year," says Tim Vines, a visiting scholar at the University…

Open Collaboration, defined in a new paper as "any system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who interact to create a product (or service) of economic value, which they make available to contributors and non-contributors alike" brought the world Wikipedia, Bitcoin and, yes, even Science 2.0. But what does that mean, really? That's the first problem with vague terms in an open environment. It is anything people want it to be and sometimes what people want it to be is money, but hidden behind a guise of public weal. TED's lesser cousin…

By the time they turn two, most children have had respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and suffered symptoms no worse than a bad cold. Yet for some children, especially premature babies and those with underlying health conditions, RSV can lead to pneumonia and bronchitis, hospitalization and have long-term consequences. RSV can be difficult to study. For one thing, the infectious particle can take different forms, ranging from 10-micron filaments to ordinary spheres. The virus can insert more than one genome into the host cells and the RNA orientation and structure are disordered, which makes…