Attention confounded consumers: there's a high-tech solution that could render obsolete your growing jumble of credit card pin numbers and computer passwords -- and it's as plain as the nose on your face or fingerprint.
The concept is based on biometrics -- a branch of technology that identifies individuals based on biological traits -- and has begun to take off in a security-conscious world where credit card fraud and identity theft runs rife.
In what is thought to be an aviation first, the development could lead to the creation of aircraft that do not need to carry onboard fuel.
The flight of the small, model plane was conducted in a hanger at Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
"It really is a groundbreaking development for aviation," said Robert Burdine, laser project manager for the test.
The 300-gram (11-ounce) plane, with a 1.5-metre (five foot) wingspan, was launched from a platform.
Scientists in North Carolina have built a brain implant that lets monkeys control a robotic arm with their thoughts, marking the first time that mental intentions have been harnessed to move a mechanical object. The technology could someday allow people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries to operate machines or tools with their thoughts as naturally as others today do with their hands. It might even allow some paralyzed people to move their own arms or legs again, by transmitting the brain's directions not to a machine but directly to the muscles in those latent limbs.
Heart patients may soon be able to buy underwear designed to detect heart rhythm abnormalities and even call for an ambulance in case of emergency, according to researchers at Netherlands-based Philips Electronics.
The researchers have developed sensors that measure body signals such as heart rate information, which can be sown into bras and shorts and which connect to a thin chip module that monitors the signals.
l33tdawg: Contributed by Anonymous... Nice to see Loke Uei's site being used :D Whuzzup mate? *grin*
Hi guys,
Intech, the tech pullout of Malaysia's more popular national paper, The Star, recently published what they call a smackdown of IBM Websphere vs Dotnet. Have a look at this and tell us what you think.
http://www.star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2003/10/7/corpit/6258973&sec=corpit.
If, like some of our readers, you are either confused about how the new Skype Voice over IP system gets past firewalls and NAT routers, or you are skeptical about it, it's worth noting the answer that Niklas Zennstrom, one of the key architects of both Kazaa and Skype gave us on the subject.
It is particularly difficult to bolt a single sign-on solution -- SSO, the ability to log in once and be authenticated to all your network resources -- onto existing applications, but every developer faces this problem when building sophisticated portals. Because portals need to integrate with back-end resources, each with its own authentication needs, the portal often has to provide the appearance of single sign-on to the user. In this article, Chris Dunne provides a step-by-step description of his experience with building a single sign-on solution for a Web portal.
IBM Corp. has developed a technique for building two different types of silicon transistors atop a single wafer that is expected to boost the performance of communications devices, the company announced Tuesday. The overwhelming majority of transistors built since the mid-1980s are known as CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) transistors. But in the earlier part of the history of computing, most chips used what are known as bipolar transistors, said Ghavam Shahidi, director of silicon science for IBM Research.
No other communications medium has spread through the business community with such vivacity as IM. Analysts believe that of the hundreds of millions of IM users around the world about a third are business users. But don't tell that to chief executives. Most don't believe it even exists in their organisations.
A major European chip maker said this week it had discovered new ways to produce solar cells which will generate electricity twenty times cheaper than today's solar panels.
STMicroelectronics, Europe's largest semiconductor maker, said that, by the end of next year, it expected to have made the first stable prototypes of the new cells, which could then be put into production.
Most of today's solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity, are produced with expensive silicon, the same material used in most semiconductors.
