Security: Full Body Passwords (simple and very secure)

Using your own physical body structure's electrical bio-signature as a password....ultimate security and personalization.

Passive authentication using a wristwatch and your body’s bioelectric signature

• By Sebastian Anthony on August 8, 2012 at 7:16 am
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Computer scientists at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire have developed a device that can ascertain your identity by measuring yourbioimpedance– or, less euphemistically, how fat you are.

The device, developed by Cory Cornelius and friends, takes the form of a bracelet with eight electrodes on the inside. Two of these electrodes are used to pass a weak alternating current through your wrist, while the other six electrodes work in unison to measure how your bioimpedance affects the current. Your bones, muscle, fat, and blood vessels all interfere with the flow of electricity, generating a unique bioelectrical signature.

The purpose of the device is to act as a passive authenticator — you wear the bracelet 24/7 (perhaps in the form of a wristwatch), and it would then communicate to other devices that you are you. Instead of keying in a password on your smartphone, it might instead simply query the bracelet to confirm that it’s you holding the phone, and not someone else. Likewise, when you sit down in front of a computer, the bracelet could automatically authenticate you. You’ll have to visit the sysadmin’s office when you go on a diet, but that’s a small price to pay for convenience.

Cornelius and co have another use in mind, though: securing medical devices. Medical devices — monitors, pacemakers, insulin pumps — are becoming increasingly high-tech, with many of them using wireless communication links. These can massively increase a patient’s quality of life — but, as is usually the case with emergent technologies, these devices are very insecure. Last year, a hacker detailed how he could break into a wireless insulin pump and deliver a killer dose of insulin.

Another use-case is the modernization of patient tracking in hospitals, and mHealth (mobile health). At the moment, it’s down to nurses and doctors to keep track of you and your records/charts. With a biometric bracelet, nearby monitoring devices could automatically upload your data to a central server. Instead of paper charts, digital charts could be displayed on a tablet held by the doctor — the doctor would swipe the tablet over the bracelet, and your records would magically download.

Cory Cornelius presented his biometric bracelet at HealthSec 2012 [research paper link], one of the many security conferences that occur in July and August. If you haven’t checked out this year’s Black Hat and DEF CON hacks, I recommend you start with the unkillable Rakshasa virus, and the hacker who gained access to 4 million hotel rooms with just an Arduino.

Built-in Wireless Charging (in Laptops)

Intel working on ultrabooks and smartphones with built-in wireless charging tech

• By Sebastian Anthony on August 13, 2012 at 1:02 pm
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According to the Taiwanese rumor mill, Intel is developing wireless charging technology that will be built into laptops (ultrabooks) and smartphones in 2013.

This rumor follows on from the Computex convention in June, where Intel demoed an all-in-one PC and keyboard with built-in wireless charging tech, and an Acer laptop and Samsung smartphone with prototype wireless charging kits. In both cases, you simply place the device (smartphone/keyboard) near the computer, and it starts charging. As you can see in the video below, the charging process is rather smooth.

At its most basic, wireless charging uses a pair of wire coils that are tuned to resonate at the same frequency. By applying power to one of the coils, an oscillating magnetic field is produced, which in turn creates an electric field in the other, paired coil. So far, wireless charging has only really used to charge medical devices (pacemakers), RFID chips (NFC), and general purpose “charging mats” that can charge compatible devices (there aren’t many). Theoretically, wireless charging could be used to power electric cars on the road, or — my personal favorite — an army of UAV quadcopters could fly around recharging ailing mobile phones.

In this case, Digitimes is reporting that Intel will roll out wireless charging technology in the second half of 2013, possibly in a few Haswell-powered ultrabooks. Haswell is the tocksuccessor to Ivy Bridge — the same 22nm process, but a new architecture. Perhaps more interestingly, though, the rumor also extends to smartphones, which could mean that possibly Silvermont (Saltwell/Medfield’s successor) could have wireless charging tech built in. As we know, Intel is very interested in carving out a segment of the Android market, and wireless charging would be a very desirable unique selling point.

Before we get too excited, though, we should actually consider the merits of wireless charging tech. For a start, it’s not as efficient as wired charging — and the efficiency drops dramatically if the devices aren’t aligned almost perfectly, at exactly the right distance from each other. Then there’s the matter of charging your smartphone from your laptop: You are just moving juice from one battery to another — and it’s not like your laptop’s battery lasts any longer than a smartphone. Yes, it’s fine if your laptop is plugged into mains power — but is perfectly aligning your smartphone next to your laptop really that different from plugging in a USB cable?

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1-minute full car battery charging - Korea

Scientists develop lithium-ion battery that charges 120 times faster than normal

• By Sebastian Anthony on August 17, 2012 at 7:11 am
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A group of Korean scientists, working at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), have developed a fast-charge lithium-ion battery that can be recharged 30 to 120 times faster than conventional li-ion batteries. The team believes it can build a battery pack for electric vehicles that can be fully charged inless than a minute.

One of the main issues with rechargeable batteries is that they take longer to recharge as their physical volume grows. When you recharge a battery, it charges from the outside in — so the fatter the battery, the longer it takes. You can somewhat avoid this by breaking larger batteries into smaller individual cells, but that technique only gets you so far.

The Korean method takes the cathode material — standard lithium manganese oxide (LMO) in this case — and soaks it in a solution containing graphite. Then, by carbonizing the graphite-soaked LMO, the graphite turns into a dense network of conductive traces that run throughout the cathode. This new cathode is then packaged normally, with an electrolyte and graphite anode, to create the fast-charging li-ion battery. Other factors, such as the battery’s energy density and cycle life seem to remain unchanged.

These networks of carbonized graphite effectively act like blood vessels, allowing every part of the battery to recharge at the same time — thus speeding up recharge by 30 to 120 times.

Now, for all intents and purposes, this is a standard lithium-ion battery that could be used in smartphones and laptops — but the network of conductive traces does increase the overall size of the battery, so it’s probably better suited for use in electric vehicles (EVs). Obviously, an EV that can be recharged in under a minute is pretty crazy — though it still only brings them in-line with their gas-guzzling cousins. Being able to charge quickly is convenient, but it doesn’t get around the fact that li-ion battery packs are incredibly expensive — and the Korean carbonized LMO battery certainly won’t be cheap.

I could see fast-charge batteries as being a nice option for smartphone and laptop users, though: You could have a normal battery and a fast-charge battery, and switch in whichever one makes most sense for your daily routine. Fast-charge batteries could be convenient in wireless mice and keyboards, and other gizmos, too.

Finally, just thinking out loud: The battery in a Tesla Roadster stores 56 kWh of electric energy. To recharge that in under a minute would require an awful lot of power and some very thick cables, right?

Little Bits: next gen Lego

http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/03/meet-the-creator-of-a-next-generation-lego/

Helmet: inflatable for cycling

http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/17/meet-the-inflatable-invisible-bike-helmet/?hpt=hp_c2

Book Written in using DNA Sequences

An Entire Book Written in DNA

Researchers at Harvard encode information in DNA at a density on par with any other experimental storage method.

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SUSAN YOUNG

Thursday, August 16, 2012

DNA can be used to store information at a density about a million times greater than your hard drive, report researchers in Science today. George Church of Harvard Medical School and colleagues report that they have written an entire book in DNA, a feat that highlights the recent advances in DNA synthesis and sequencing.

The team encoded a draft HTML version of a book co-written by Church called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. In addition to the text, the biological bits included the information for modern formatting, images and Javascript, to show that “DNA (like other digital media) can encode executable directives for digital machines,” they write.

To do this, the authors converted the computational language of 0's and 1's into the language of DNA--the nucleotides typically represented by A's, T's G's and C's; the A’s and C’s took the place of 0's and T’s and G’s of 1's. They then used off-the-shelf DNA synthesizers to make 54,898 pieces of DNA, each 159 nucleotides long, to encode the book, which could then be decoded with DNA sequencing.

This is not the first time non-biological information has been stored in DNA, but Church's demonstration goes far beyond the amount of information stored in previous efforts. For example, in 2009, researchers encoded 1688 bits of text, music and imagery in DNA and in 2010, Craig Venter and colleagues encoded a watermarked, synthetic genome worth 7920 bits. In this study, Church and company stored 5.27 megabits of data.

DNA synthesis and sequencing is still too slow and costly to be practical for most data storage, but the authors suggest DNA’s long-lived nature could make it a suitable medium for archival storage.

Erik Winfree, who studies DNA-based computation at Caltech and was a 1999 TR35 winner,hopes the study will stimulate a serious discussion about what roles DNA can play in information science and technology.  

“The most remarkable thing about DNA is its information density, which is roughly one bit per cubic nanometer,” he writes in an email.

“Technology changes things, and many old ideas for DNA information storage and information processing deserve to be revisited now -- especially since DNA synthesis and sequencing technology will continue their remarkable advance.” 

This post was revised with additional information on August 17.

E-Car: CODA All Electric Car

http://www.codaautomotive.com/

Geeks on Robotic Steroids: AUVSI conference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZ-fkFKXmE&feature=related

Autonomously Flying Plane..Amazingly accurate!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYs215TgI7c

Olympic Tech: UK Cycling Team tech 2012

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443659204577573311601298598.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Olympic Technology Race: FastSkin Suits-swimming Beijing 2008

http://www.acsm.org/about-acsm/media-room/acsm-in-the-news/2011/08/01/fastskin-suits-improve-performance-in-swimmers