Science & Technology archives: November-Decmber 2003

• 31 December 2003
  "Cyber blackmail artists are shaking down office workers, threatening to delete computer files or install pornographic images on their work PCs unless they pay a ransom, police and security experts said." Here's a new (to us) example of the convergence of IT and crime aimed at corporations. It's especially insidious because it is easy and cheap to implement on a wide scale, yet offers substantial returns. You can read the Reuters story at CNN.com.



• 30 December 2003
  "It was the worst year in history for computer worms and viruses. The trouble began in January when the highly contagious Slammer worm infected a quarter of a million computers in just a single day." It was a tough year and it's going to get tougher. Britain's New Scientist summarizes a few of the year's trends in IT.



• 26 December 2003
  "It's late on a Sunday afternoon and nearly dark inside the tiny, windowless lab; fluorescent light is said to be bad for human embryos. I'm sitting beside Robert Lanza, medical director at Advanced Cell Technology. He's breathing softly, hands folded neatly in his lap, his head bowed as if in meditation. For years he's been preparing for this day..." It's a longer article than we normally run, but it's a fascinating look in real time at a break-through in the making. Read more at the January 2004 issue of Wired magazine.
  
  
• 24 December 2003
  "Downloaders of free digital music should be aware their computers may be infected with spyware that could compromise passwords and even online bank accounts, says the president of a prominent global Internet security company [Symantec]." It's not just music downloads, but they are good examples of the silent convergence of crime and technology that has even led some banks to go off-line as their only defense. Read more at Canada.com (link no longer active).
  
  
• 23 December 2003
  "A new robot 'brain', based in part on the workings of the human inner ear, has enabled the production of the world's first small robotic helicopter that can see and think for itself, say Australian researchers...Autonomous helicopter flight is characterised by helicopters that can fly without a human pilot or guidance from a remote-controlled device." We are witnessing the first generations of machines that will eventually rival those of 20th century science fiction. Australia's ABC-Science introduces one of the latest innovations.
  
  
• 22 December 2003
  "Semiconducting carbon nanotubes are significantly better at conducting electricity at room temperature than any other known material, according to recent tests at the University of Maryland. The findings are the latest evidence that nanotubes could form the basis for future generations of powerful electronics." The nanotube is a subject we'll be returning to here at FB in days to come, but this article at News.com will introduce us to the closest thing we have to a one-dimensional object and hints at its potential impact.
  
  
• 19 December 2003
  "Officials who attended a world Internet and technology summit in Switzerland last week were unknowingly bugged, said researchers who attended the forum...Researchers questioned summit officials about the use of the [RFID] chips and how long information would be stored but were not given answers." In light of Jeff Harrow's paper here at Future Brief, this report at the Washington Times takes on added significance.
  
  
• 18 December 2003
  "Injecting human stem cells into sheep fetuses produces animals with partially human organs - a possible source of matched transplants." This work being done at the University of Nevada might help researchers grow human organs in animal tissue, which may allow doctors and scientists to create tissue and organs for human implants without utilizing human stem cells. Read more about this promising and potentially contraversial study at New Scientist.
  
  
• 17 December 2003
  Making human protein using yeast as a base would be a major achievement. Tillman Gerngross set out to do just that and has made great progress. But the story behind the story is what comes through most clearly in this report at Scientific American. In technology, the commercial approach can be far more effective, far more quickly, than the government grant approach.



• 16 December 2003
  "The president of the United States wants to ban it. A lab in Massachusetts is working to perfect it." Read about a controversial experiment being run by a company that is trying to harvest stem cells from cloned human embryos. By Wendy Goldman Rohm at Wired magazine.



• 15 December 2003
  "By the time he was 45, cardiologist Mark Keating had reached the pinnacle of a doctor's career...But oddly, Keating couldn't keep his mind off newts." A newt can regerate a lost leg, even repair a severed spinal cord! How do they do it? If we can answer that, we may have made a tremendous medical advance, or so Dr. Keating hopes and Jennifer Kahn explains at Wired magazine.



• 12 December 2003
  "The United Nations' push to transform the developing world into tech-ready nations could partly backfire, delegates to an IT summit aimed at bridging the "digital divide" said on Thursday. The overwhelming consensus at the U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) summit this week is that bringing the Internet and telecoms innovations to the world's poor is a noble cause that needs embracing now. But there are unpredictable consequences that also need to be considered, experts said." Find out more at Reuters (link no longer active).



• 11 December 2003
  "Universities, corporations and tens of thousands of Web site providers across the country probably never imagined they would be rooting for the pornography industry. But millions of their dollars could be riding on a court fight between a coalition of Internet video-porn providers and a small California research firm, which early this year began enforcing the eye-opening claim that it owns the patents on how most audio and video is sent over the Internet." Read the story at Washington Post.



• 10 December 2003
  "The deputy director of the National Science Foundation called for closer cooperation between the scientific and engineering research communities on nanotechnology development in a keynote speech at this year's International Electron Devices Meeting." Read more about "nano transformations" and ways in which nanotechnology might catalyze the "next industrial revolution" at EE Times.



• 9 December 2003
  "Neuroscientists have given up looking for the seat of the soul, but they are still seeking what may be special about human brains, what it is that provides the basis for a level of self-awareness and complex emotions unlike those of other animals. Most recently they have been investigating circuitry rather than specific locations, looking at pathways and connections that are central in creating social emotions, a moral sense, even the feeling of free will." If one area of science enquiry can be seen as a threat by the rest of the public, it would be a challenge to the concept of free will. And yet, as described at the New York Times, this is one element of today's research and possibly tomorrow's reality.



• 8 December 2003
  "Antimatter is the very stuff of science-fiction: witness the matter-antimatter drives that power the starship Enterprise. Yet for all its weirdness, antimatter is real not fictional, and has already proved useful in medicine." Already used in diagnosis, antimatter may provide a treatment for cancer as well. Britain's Economist provides the details.



• 4 December 2003
  "She's young, beautiful, and fluent in several languages. Sakura Sanae, one of the newest entrants to the Japanese diplomatic corps, and Tokyo's goodwill ambassador to the ASEAN nations, is also entirely computer generated." Read more at the Japan Times.



• 3 December 2003
  "Researchers at Cornell University have tapped a pair of unlike sources -- on-line journalism and computational biology -- to make it possible to automatically paraphrase whole sentences...The method could eventually allow computers to more easily process natural language, produce paraphrases that could be used in machine translation, and help people who have trouble reading certain types of sentences." Read more at Technology Research News.



• 1 December 2003
  "A small company in London, UK, claims to have developed a technique that overturns scientific dogma and could revolutionise medicine. It says it can turn ordinary blood into cells capable of regenerating damaged or diseased tissues. This could transform the treatment of everything from heart disease to Parkinson's." Read the article at Britain's New Scientist.



• 30 November 2003
  "Rain, snow, heat, and gloom of night won't stop the inevitable: In a few years, wireless will become the dominant form of communication service in the U.S. Already, there are about 147 million cell phones in the country, compared with 187 million traditional phone lines..." Read the article at the Business Week.



• 27 November 2003
  Black silicon (silicon bombarded with ultra-short laser pulses) has been found to hold amazing potential for efficiently converting sunlight to electricity, communicating by light, and monitoring environmental pollution. Read the article at the Harvard University Gazette.



• 26 November 2003
  Researchers at MIT's Media Lab are trying to build computers that care about their users. Affective computing proponents believe computers should be designed to recognize, express, and influence emotion in users. Read the article at Wired Magazine.



• 25 November 2003
  For the first time, Intel Corp. has made available its chip-making nanotechnology tools to cancer researchers in the hope that being able to detect tiny defects in silicon chips also will work in human tissue to diagnose and study cancer. Read the article at Business Ink (link no longer active).



• 21 November 2003
  A plan to introduce biometric ID cards in the UK will fail to achieve one of its main aims...The proposed system will do nothing to prevent fraudsters acquiring multiple identity cards...[The problem] is the limited accuracy of biometric systems combined with the sheer number of people to be identified. Read the article at Britain's New Scientist.



• 20 November 2003
  The European Parliament voted Wednesday to fund research using stem cells taken from human embryos, a controversial procedure opposed by anti-abortion activists. The assembly's opinion sends a message to European Union ministers who are due to decide next month whether to lift a moratorium that prevents EU cash from going to such experiments, which are banned in several of the bloc's member states. Read the article at Wired News.



• 19 November 2003
  In 1971 Linus Pauling published a paper in which he analyzed the constituents of human breath. His study showed that an exhalation contained about 200 different compounds, many more than had been previously suspected. In the mid-1970s Michael Phillips, at the time a thirty-something physician from Western Australia...read the paper with fascination..."Pauling opened up a new area of science," he says. "I thought: if all of these compounds are there, they must be signaling something. This grabbed my attention, and I've pursued it since." Read the article at the Scientific American.



• 18 November 2003
  One of the last gaps in the evidence pointing to a human cause for global warming appears to be closing...The result is more consensus than ever that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases are noticeably altering climate. But at the same time, the new research is showing that, at least so far, the influence of greenhouse gases appears to have been more modest than some climate experts once predicted. Read the article at the New York Times.



• 17 November 2003
  A panel of outside experts told the CIA that advances in technology due to genomic research could produce the worst known diseases and the "most frightening" biological weapons, a CIA report said on Friday. "The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man," the panel told the CIA. Read the article at Yahoo News (link no longer active). Download a CIA two-page PDF summary.




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