The British love affair with cameras as a tool of law and order continues, with the announcement that traffic wardens in the city of Manchester will be fitted with hat-mounted web-cams to prevent people arguing against their parking fines.
In more surveillance-related news, Microsoft is developing software that may be able to identify individuals by examining the breadcrumb trail of their web-browsing history. I’ve done nothing wrong, though, so I have nothing to fear …
Another marvel of miniaturisation – or another thing for conspiracy theorists to worry about, perhaps. Hitachi have been showing off their new microscopic RFID chips, which at 0.002 inches square are small enough to be embedded in a piece of paper. How long before we have active circuitry that size? [BeyondTheBeyond]
It’s literally impossible for a healthy person to understand what’s going on in the mind of a schizophrenic, but a new training device offers the opportunity to experience a simulation of the hallucinatory episodes that a person undergoing a schizophrenic episode can experience. Although initially designed with the purpose of encouraging greater empathy in professionals who work with the mentally ill, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before this sort of hardware makes it to street-level and gets repurposed as a form of recreation.
NASA’s Spirit rover has discovered levels of silica in the Martian soil that NASA claims is the best evidence so far that Mars once had liquid water on its surface. Don’t get me wrong – I’d love to think that Mars harboured life at one point, or at least had the potential to do so – but the ‘water on Mars’ meme seems to flip-flop every couple of months. Pretty soon, some boffin or another will explain away these silica levels. Then, a little further on, something new will crop up and it’ll be back to “OMG Mars had teh w3t!!!” Can’t we just get on with sending some sort of mission that will solve the debate conclusively, please?
A gang of Canadian physicists have created some reading material that could give you serious eyestrain. The tiny book, less than 0.1mm square, was made by etching letters onto 30 slices of polished silicon crystal using a focused ion beam. The book even has its own ISBN, and you can buy a limited signed edition for around $US 20,000 – but don’t forget to set some money aside for the electron microscope you’ll need to read it with.