Wireless Drug Delivery

Wireless Drugs: iStockPhoto

The annoying physical exertion associated with lifting a pill to your mouth and washing it down with a Dixie cup full of H20 could soon be history. Much excitement is building around electronic implants that dispense medicines automatically or via a wireless medical network. According to a team of Australian and US researchers, however, remote Intelligent Drug Delivery Systems (RIDDS) are rife with security issues.

RIDDS devices are implanted under the skin and connected wirelessly to a medical control center where healthcare workers can adjust medication frequency or levels as necessary, based either on direct patient observation or sensor outputs. The technology is being created for patients with physical disabilities, learning difficulties, or who are otherwise unable to give themselves medication.

As with any unproven wireless communications technology, RIDDS are open to various hacking and cracking issues, including eavesdropping, jamming, and tampering. And that’s where the researchers caution RIDDS devices could prove deadly. They claim a hacker might intercept data, steal personal information, or even trigger commands to release medication inappropriately and so harm or kill a patient.

Gulp.

Via: EurekAlert

Largest Snake Ever Uncovered!

Holy reticulated snake spine! A fossil reveals a 2,500 pound prehistoric python (along with some surprising facts about global temperature)

Sliding Easy: An artists conception of the snake in its natural habitat, 60 million years ago. Jason Bourque/University of Florida

Any character in a B-list film would yelp "Snake? Snaaaake!" upon spotting a specimen stretching longer than a school bus – and now scientists have uncovered the remains of such a beast.

A research team found the vertebrae of the 43-foot long snake down the Cerrejon Coal Mine in northern Colombia. Their report appears in Nature this week, and gives a conservative estimate that the snake weighed 2,500 pounds when it lived 60 million years ago.

Big Changes: A comparison of the fossil vertebra (Titanoboa, left) and a similarly placed vertebra from the spine of a 10-foot-long boa constrictor (right). Jason Head, Univ. of Toronto.

"At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips," said David Polly, a geologist at Indiana University-Bloomington. "The size is pretty amazing. But our team went a step further and asked, how warm would the Earth have to be to support a body of this size?"

"Titanoboa" would have needed an average annual temperature of 86 to 93 degrees F to survive, according to Jonathan Bloch, a paleontologist at the Florida Museum of natural History. The average annual temperature of the Colombian city Cartagena is just above 82 degrees F.

"Tropical ecosystems of South America were surprisingly different 60 million years ago," Bloch said. "It was a rainforest, like today, but it was even hotter and the cold-blooded reptiles were all substantially larger."

The new find represents an ancient relative of non-venomous constrictors, which wrap themselves around prey to suffocate them before swallowing whole. That contrasts with the approach taken by smaller, poisonous snakes.

Scientists also found skeletons of giant turtles and crocodilian relatives near the "Titanoboa" remains – possibly examples of the prehistoric monster's prey. That seems to fit with a general evolutionary drift toward "bigger is better," even if smaller has its advantages under other circumstances.

"Truly enormous snakes really spark people's imagination, but reality has exceeded the fantasies of Hollywood," Block noted. "The snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the movie Anaconda is not as big as the one we found."
Yep. That's one solid snake.

By Jeremy Hsu Posted 02.04.2009 at 11:56 am 2 Comments

Finer Wine

Spotting fake wine with an atom smasher, and growing perfect grapes

Vintage Vino: Particle accelerators and electronic tongues ensure that your rare wine is the real thing Grant V. Faint/Getty Images

Robot Sommelier

Is your $30,000 bottle of Chateau Petrus Bordeaux truly a rare vintage, or is it just $30 merlot? Counterfeits plague rare-wine auctions, but researchers in Spain have built a handheld "electronic tongue" that detects them instantly. It measures the signature chemicals, acidity and sugar content in a drop of wine (typically one bottle from a case) and runs those against a database of certified vintage wines to catch fakes that might fool human tasters.

Wine = MC²

Forget finding the 11th dimension -- how old is that wine? Scientists at Arcane, a nonprofit technology group in France, can confirm a wine's age using a particle accelerator. Analysis of the x-rays created as the protons hit the bottle reveals what type of furnace the glass was fired in, and thus where and when the bottle was made. The process costs $500, so the Antique Wine Company in London, which owns the rights to the test, uses it to validate only extremely valuable bottles of 19th-century Bordeaux.

Irrigation 2.0

Irrigating vines is a game of chance. Too much water drowns the grapes; too little, and they become raisins. A new system by the biotech start-up Fruition Sciences monitors water flow through plants with vine-mounted thermal sensors. A computer considers these readings, the variety's demands and climatic conditions, and determines irrigation settings so that grapes get their optimal daily water. The company, which is busy making less-expensive sensors, has rolled out the tech in California and is looking to bring the tech to France.

By Lisa Katayama Posted 01.26.2009 at 2:49 pm 5 Comments

A Real Cloaking Device

Fiction inches closer to fact as an invisibility generator passes preliminary tests

It's like something out of a science fiction novel or a Harry Potter book. Engineers from Duke University have constructed a device that can "cloak" items placed on a mirror surface.

First designed in 2006, the new version of the device is a more sophisticated and complicated design that can cloak a wider variety of waves. To create the new device, the researchers developed a new set of mathematical algorithms which, in turn, are used to engineer artificially structured "metamaterials" that have properties not found in natural materials. The metamaterials are what form the cloaking structures, which bend electromagnetic waves, like light, around an object, so it appears the object is no longer there.

We see ordinary objects, like the flat surface above, when light bounces off them to our eyes.

To test the new device, the researchers aimed a beam of microwaves at a bump on a flat mirror surface. Normally, this bump would cause the beams to scatter, as seen here.

But in the experiment, the metamaterial cloaking structure was able to bend the waves around the object, removing any sign of scattered beams, so that the reflected image resembles that of the flat plane, as if the bump were not there.

To think of it another way, the device acts like the mirages created on the road in the summer.

"You see what looks like water hovering over the road, but it is in reality a reflection from the sky," says David Smith, William Bevan Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke. "In that example, the mirage you see is cloaking the road below. In effect, we are creating an engineered mirage with this latest cloak design."

While the cloaking device is still in its beginning stages, Smith believes the cloaks show promise and could one day serve as protective shields or improve wireless communications by making signal-blocking obstacles "disappear."

While its uses may be practical, the idea of cloaking objects seems like something straight out of a Star Trek episode. Could H.G. Wells' Invisible Man become a reality? "I still think it is a distant concept, but this latest structure does show clearly there is a potential for cloaking -- in the science fiction sense -- to become science fact at some point," says Smith. "Maybe we wouldn't have something as simple and as all-encompassing as a Harry Potter cloak, but in certain contexts or situations cloaking effects do seem to have some reality."

Cloaking device inside experimental apparatus: The photo also shows the dielectric lens used to shape the incident microwave beam Jack Mock

By Catherine Schwanke Posted 01.15.2009 at 1:59 pm 5 Comments