Baked with potatoes? Better not, it’s a robot, not a fish!!

October 10th, 2009 admin No Comments »

Mechanical fish? Yes, we’ve been there and we’ve seen that, along with a wide range of other robot animals created by scientists who probably did not have enough time to take care of them at home, so they were making up their own robotic pets. The RoboFish, created by a team of scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at least, is imitating the natural movements of fish, speeding through the water by flexing its mechanical “muscles”.

Its body, approximately 20 centimeters long, is made up of a single shell in polymeric material, which moves in a natural way just like real fish, through vibrations coming from the inside, generated by the engine which powers it. The fishes’ natural movement, in fact, comes from contraction of their muscles, which allows them to travel underwater at a speed around 10 times the length of their body per second.

The RoboFish has currently a very low speed in comparison, speeding at just one length per second, but this speed is achieved naturally, as the engine inside can increase or decrease the stiffness of different sections on the shell, thus obtaining a motion that flows much smoother when compared to older versions of mechanical fish; this motion is mostly concentrated in the tail section.

Thanks to the single-piece body, and to the durability of the material with which they are built, robotic fishes are certainly more solid now, and scientists are planning to power them with batteries rechargeable through motion, thus being able to use them, for example, for underwater inspection of ships, to examine tubes and pipes in search of any leaks or imperfections, or for underwater patrolling and surveillance of ports and rivers in areas infested by smugglers or pirates.

The mother of all leaks: anti-leaks manual ends up on… Wikileaks!

October 10th, 2009 admin No Comments »

Recently on Wikileaks, the independent site which collects classified and confidential material, often coming from government agencies and published anonymously, a manual was published, which instructs agents and businessmen how to protect themselves from… uhm, leaks!

To be specific, the manual dates back to 2001, and is coming from the Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom, teaching its agents how to prevent news and information from leaking, and how to protect themselves against investigative journalists, terrorist cells and foreign agents.

The manual against leaks describes characteristics of secret services from countries like Russia and China, their operating procedures, how they build a rapport with foreigners to gather as much information as possible.

The manual is aimed not only at agents, but also at businessmen who travel frequently abroad, and the idea is not to discourage them from trading with Chinese or Russian companies, but rather to warn them against any possible threat to national security which might be hiding behind a face of respectability and professionalism.

According to some excerpts from this document, shoes leak was labeled as “non relevant” by the Ministry due to the eight years passed since it was written, Chinese agents use alcohol and blackmail, especially of a sexual kind, along with planting bugs inside hotel rooms, while the Russians are extensively using eavesdropping technologies such as hidden recorders.

The manual may be outdated, but certainly the fiasco for Her Majesty’s secret service is new… and for those who travel to those countries on business, the information could be useful anyway!

Can batteries be small and almost eternal? Yes, if they are nuclear!

October 10th, 2009 admin No Comments »

Don’t be afraid, we are certainly not recommending you to put a nuclear reactor in your cameras or in your pocket calculators. The idea of a nuclear battery may sound dangerous at first, but to tell the truth, devices such as pacemakers are employing them since years, due to their endurance and high performance.

The only problem is given by weight and size. In order to solve it, a research carried out at Missouri University is working on nuclear batteries the size of a coin.

Thanks to this type of batteries, you will be able to power some small electro mechanical systems and devices, like for example digital micro recorders, miniature cameras or covert listening devices, used by law enforcement agencies or private detectives for long-term monitoring and surveillance operations.

The innovative part in this kind of battery lies not only in its tiny size, but also in the means used to conduct energy: in fact the semiconductor used in this battery is liquid instead of solid. Thanks to this, it is possible to avoid that the gathered energy could damage the outer shell which covers the conductor, as it is the case with other radioactive batteries using solids.

In a possibly near future, researchers hope to obtain batteries more powerful, smaller in size and with a practically endless life, in order to be able to use them as power supply for an ever increasing range of miniature devices and equipments.

Of course, it is worth mentioning that nuclear batteries are certainly not as dangerous as one may think, as they do not generate their energy via a chain reaction like nuclear reactors do, but instead they use a radioactive isotope. You can sleep tight, your pacemaker will certainly not cause another Three Mile Island or Chernobyl in your heart!

Are you being harassed on the phone at all times? Change your voice!

October 8th, 2009 admin No Comments »

Voice Changer

As we know, in your life you cannot always trust all the people you meet, and sometimes you may happen to give your phone number to persons who later prove unworthy of your trust, and may even end up harassing or threatening you by phone, at any time of day or night.

This kind of occurrence is happening more frequently to women, especially if they are living alone, who might become the subject of unwanted attention not only from hard-headed telemarketing operators, but also from stalkers or sexually-oriented molesters.

To protect yourselves from this kind of trouble, you may want to have a voice changer at home. It is a device that, when connected to your phone line (but there are also models for mobile phones), allows you to speak normally with your voice, while changing it according to standard presets, so that the person on the other side will believe that he is talking to an adult man, a boy or a girl, or even an elderly or a child!

The voice is changed by electronically working on the frequencies of the human voice, in a completely natural way, without metallic sounds as it may be the case with voice synthesizers, and the person you are talking to will not suspect that the child he hears is actually a man, a woman or what else.

You can also add sound effects such as the bark of a dog or a buzzer ringing, thus giving you the opportunity of putting an end to an unwanted call.
In short, a lonely woman will be safe, without changing her identity, but just changing… her voice!

Are your neighbors stealing your Wi-Fi signal? Paint your walls!

October 8th, 2009 admin No Comments »

If you are not too computer-savvy, and are unable to configure the security settings of your home wireless network, but are able to give a hand of paint on your wall, Tokyo University has the solution for your problem: a special paint that blocks Wi-Fi waves!

This particular paint contains an iron-aluminum oxide, which resounds at exactly the same frequency of Wi-Fi or radio waves, thus effectively absorbing and blocking these waves from reaching the outside. By painting the walls of a room like that, the signal cannot go outside, nor can any other signals reach you from the outside.

For businesses, this might be a cheap and effective way to prevent hackers from attacking their computers, spending just over 10 Euro for one Kg of paint, instead of investing thousands in complicated and expensive encryption systems.

Besides data security in offices, such a shielding system could effectively find a place in several other environments and for several applications, such as for example disabling mobile phone signals inside a cinema or theatre, or even, still in a cinema, protecting the video transmission from any interference with other projectors.

Or more simply, it could be possible to protect your health from electromagnetic waves coming from the outside. At the current stage, the shielding paint is still in its development phase, especially concentrating on studying the effects on human body, caused by retaining electromagnetic waves within a room.

Of course, if you would like to use this special paint to make your wireless network secure, I would recommend setting up also a software protection with a security key, you never know…

More protection from molesters, with a digital peephole viewer

October 6th, 2009 admin No Comments »

Peephole

If you are living in a neighborhood where attacks and harassment are on the rise, if you are afraid that someone might try to sneak into your house for a robbery, or more simply if you value your privacy dearly and do not want to be disturbed by just anyone, the Digital Peephole Viewer, manufactured by Brinno, is the perfect tool for you!

It consists of a small LCD screen which, by simply pushing a button, will allow you to see who is knocking at your door, thus deciding whether to open or not. With a first click on the button, you can see the outside for 10 seconds. Another click will zoom in, so that you can clearly see the face, with a better detail than the standard wide-angle view.

One of the clearer advantages when compared to a normal peephole is that the person on the outside will not be able to figure out that they are being watched, as the hole will be occupied by the Digital Peephole Viewer and will not darken when viewing.

Easy to use, it is perfect for people with visual problems thanks to the display’s brightness and the zoom function. Just press the button repeatedly to switch between zoom and normal view, and each click will restart the timer for another 10 seconds. The viewing angle of 54 degrees will give you enough view on the landing of your floor.

DPV is powered by two AA batteries, enough for 1500 views. A red light will alert you when the battery is running out and needs to be replaced. Currently, Digital Peephole Viewer, which can be fitted on almost any door, is sold exclusively in Australia, at a price around 140 US Dollars.

A new satellite navigation system, for a better-than-GPS accuracy

October 6th, 2009 admin No Comments »

The European Commission has just announced the official start of operations of the EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service) system.

EGNOS is a satellite system which improves the accuracy of the current U.S.-based Global Positioning System (GPS), used as a standard in this field, as well as that of the Russian GLONASS, by reducing the error margin from 10 meters to a maximum of 2 meters.

Just like GPS, EGNOS will be accessible for free if you are equipped with a GPS/SBAS compatible receiver (that is, most of the receivers available today in Europe) within the operating range of the EGNOS system, that is, most European countries. Coverage will soon be extended to EU-neighboring countries and to Northern Africa.

The transponders which form EGNOS are mounted on 3 geostationary satellites, and communicate with a network of 40 positioning stations and 4 ground control centers, all of which are interconnected. EGNOS will pave the way to Galileo, a system scheduled to start its operations by 2013 to provide an even higher accuracy, with a margin of just 1 meter. Even after Galileo is in function, EU will keep on supporting and extending the scope of its EGNOS.

Thanks to EGNOS, benefits will be reaped not only by car drivers and truckers, but there will be improvements also in other fields such as agriculture (for spraying fertilizers with high precision level) or, in the transport sector, automation of toll payments. As far as personal navigation is concerned, it will be possible to have pedestrian guidance systems for the blind.
Furthermore, within the framework of the Single European Sky air navigation project, EGNOS will be used to increase safety in the Euro skies.

Optical fibers up to 27 times faster, for the future of the Web

October 5th, 2009 admin No Comments »

time lens

Nowadays, most of the telecommunications are carried out at a speed of 10 Gbit per second, but researchers are constantly at work to push this limit forward. At Cornell University, they are working on the time telescope project, that is, a system capable of multiplying the modern optical fibers’ speed, making connections up to 27 times faster by compressing more information into a single burst of light.

Improving the 10 Gbit threshold is one of the great challenges in the optical fibers telecommunication field, because due to technological limitations, at the current stage this limit can only be improved by using a huge amount of energy, at an equally huge cost.

The so called “time telescope” that Cornell is working on, is made up of two silicon chips, called “time lenses” which work like the lenses of a telescope, sending ultra-compact light bursts which can contain much more information if compared to the continuous beam of light used in the current optical fiber cables.

This result is achieved through a complicated process that works on the frequencies of each burst of light. Through the time lenses, the frequency of the front side of a burst is reduced, while the rear frequency is augmented, effectively resulting in a compression of the signal.

As explained, the process is not easy to describe, but what matters is the result, that is, a significant increase in speed of optical transmissions, with no increase in terms of energy consumption.

Future implications might be ground-breaking, not only as far as communication speed is concerned, but also in terms of energy saving for our Internet and telephone lines.

Even your shirt can become a satellite antenna

October 5th, 2009 admin No Comments »

A few weeks ago, we talked about a bulletproof shirt that can be worn on open air parties that personally speaking, I would not be willing to join.

Definitely less risky could be the subject of a recent research in the satellite transmission and telecommunications field, that is, a flexible antenna that can be placed within the fabric of a jacket, a coat or a shirt, giving the opportunity to the wearer to communicate via satellite and obtain a wide array of information such as the GPS location and whatnot.

This research is mostly focused on the choice of materials to be used, which must be capable of conducting satellite radio signals without creating too much of an encumbrance or discomfort for the wearer. The material must be capable of automatically adapting its form to the user’s body, without showing differences in performance, and without losing its consistency with time.

A further challenge is posed by resistance to cleaning and to cleaning agents (detergent, bleach etc). In a few words, the aim of the research is to create a material that is light, cheap, does not need complicated installation procedures and requires minimal maintenance, robust and undetectable by civilian or military surveillance devices.

In a few words, the perfect tool for personal communication: in these terms, the challenge is definitely interesting. The project, approximately 18 months after its start, is still in its early stages, but should it be successful, there would be interesting developments not only in the satellite telecommunication field, but also concerning surveillance and espionage.

Night guards need their security too

October 4th, 2009 admin No Comments »

Alarm

Private security agencies’ personnel, employed in surveillance of banks, office buildings, large firms, shopping malls and so on, is exposed to a high level of risk due to the extremely sensitive nature of the targets guarded, especially if they are on a night route and not inside a building behind bulletproof glass.

To minimize the level of risk connected to this job, GuardTrax has launched GT2 Security Force Locator, a system designed to keep surveillance personnel’s position under control in real time.

GT2 is made up of a small transmitter, more or less as small as a normal mobile phone, housed in a sturdy weather-proof plastic shell, which includes a series of functions and features useful both for patrolling routes and for communication with control center.

For example, via the “panic button” the surveillance operators can send an instant message to the control center, while entering preset codes at fixed intervals, they will be able to inform the center on their activities and operating conditions. Also, the motion detection sensor can determine a lack of motion for a certain time interval, and send a top priority alert to the supervisor who will be able to contact the staff member via mobile phone to make sure that all is fine.

GT2 also works like a normal mobile phone, calling up to 4 preset emergency numbers. Furthermore, like a GPS locator, it can send an automated alert if it leaves a certain area or if it enters a designated “danger zone”, thus allowing to determine if the guardian is being held hostage by thieves or terrorists.

Thanks to GT2, working conditions of those who work in the security and surveillance field will certainly be improved, with understandable benefits for the operator, for his employers, and ultimately, for the client whose security is being guarded.

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