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Innovation & Technology
Weekly
This is the online version of the latest
UNU-Merit I&T Weekly digest which is sent out by
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This week's headlines:
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Google launches internet browser |
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Cloud-seeding ships could combat climate change |
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Shadow analysis could spot terrorists by their walk |
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New fingerprint method could unlock cold cases |
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Ultrasound to give feel to games |
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Invention: Space satnav |
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| Google launches internet browser |
| Google has launched an open source web browser to compete with Internet
Explorer and Firefox. The browser is designed to be fast, and to cope
with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and
multimedia.
Called Chrome, it has been launched as a beta for Windows machines in
100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come. The new browser will
help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich
web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs.
The launch of Chrome is Google's latest assault on Microsoft's dominance
of the PC business. The firm's Internet Explorer program dominates the
browser landscape, with 80% of the market. |
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| Cloud-seeding ships could combat climate change |
| It should be possible to counteract the global warming associated with a
doubling of carbon dioxide levels by enhancing the reflectivity of
low-lying clouds above the oceans, according to researchers from the
National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, US. They say that
this can be done using a worldwide fleet of autonomous ships spraying
salt water into the air.
Clouds can both heat the planet by trapping the longer-wavelength
radiation given off from the Earth's surface and cool it by reflecting
incoming shorter wavelength radiation back into space. The greater
weight of the second mechanism means that, on balance, clouds have a
cooling effect.
The new proposal involves increasing the reflectivity, or 'albedo', of
clouds lying about 1 km above the ocean's surface. The idea relies on
the 'Twomey effect', which says that increasing the concentration of
water droplets within a cloud raises the overall surface area of the
droplets and thereby enhances the cloud's albedo. By spraying fine
droplets of sea water into the air, the small particles of salt within
each droplet act as new centres of condensation when they reach the
clouds above, leading to a greater concentration of water droplets
within each cloud. |
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| Shadow analysis could spot terrorists by their walk |
| Nearly seven years after Osama Bin Laden disappeared, US intelligence
agencies are still chasing his shadow. And shadows are precisely what
they should be looking for, says NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California.
By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite
footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to
identify people from the way they walk - a technique called gait
analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person's walking style is
very hard to disguise.
Video taken from above shows only people's heads and shoulders, which
makes measuring the characteristic length and rhythm of a person's
stride impossible. However, Stoica says shadows provide enough gait data
to deduce a positive ID. He has written software that recognises human
movement in aerial and satellite video footage. It isolates moving
shadows and uses data on the time of day and the camera angle to correct
shadows if they are elongated or foreshortened. Regular gait analysis is
then applied to identify people. |
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| New fingerprint method could unlock cold cases |
| Scientists from the University of Leicester, UK, have developed a new
crime-fighting technique that allows police to lift fingerprints from
bullets even if a criminal has wiped down a shell casing. Authorities in
Britain and the US used the method to re-open three cold cases,
including a US double murder that police are now optimistic of solving.
The conventional method of taking fingerprints has been around for more
than 100 years and involves creating a chemical reaction with the sweat
left behind on an object to produce an image police can use. But if a
criminal wipes away the sweat, there is little left to react with the
chemical and regular methods are useless.
The new technique allows police to produce a fingerprint even if there
is no sweat impression to work with. The British experts focused on
hair-width bits of corrosion that sweat often leaves on certain metals
in bullets and bombs. They cover the metal with a fine powder and apply
a strong electrical charge that makes the dust stick to the corroded
areas, producing a potential fingerprint. |
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| Ultrasound to give feel to games |
| The field of haptics - integrating computing and the sense of touch -
has been around for some time but has required gloves or mechanical
devices to impart a sense of feeling. Now, a team of researchers from
the University of Tokyohas developed a system that uses focused
ultrasound to do the job.
With the expansion in multimedia on the web, our eyes and ears are
flooded with sensory information, but the sense of touch has been
largely left behind. The popularity of vibrating gaming handsets has
proven that it is a rich but untapped way to increase interaction.
Sound is a pressure wave, meaning that as the inaudible sound waves from
each of the transducers interfere, they can create a focal point that is
perceived as a solid object. The Tokyo team's prototype system includes
a camera which tracks the position of a user's hand and shifts the
output from the transducers to move the focus around with the hand. The
result is a feeling of tracing the edge or surface of the virtual
object. At the moment, the system provides a small force only in the
vertical dimension, but the team is improving the geometry of the array
and the amount of power it can produce so that future devices will
provide a stiffer feel and more contoured objects. |
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| Invention: Space satnav |
| The most accurate way of navigating on Earth is to use the Global
Positioning System (GPS) - a receiver reads the signals broadcast by at
least three orbiting satellites and calculates its position to within a
few metres on Earth.
Arthur Dula, a space lawyer and former NASA consultant, wants to make a
similar version for the whole solar system. A SSPS, if you will. He
suggests placing satellite-like base stations on various moons and
asteroids around the solar system. As long as the orbits of these bodies
are well known, any a passing spacecraft can send a signal to several
base stations and receive positioning signals in return. This would
allow the craft to fix its location within the Solar System. |
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