Who's Typing Your Password?

Passwords can be one of the weakest links in online security. Users too often choose one that's easily guessed or poorly protected; even strong passwords may need to be combined with additional measures, such as a smart card or a fingerprint scan, for extra protection.

Delfigo Security, a startup based in Boston, has a simpler solution to bolstering password security. By looking at how a user types each character and by collecting other subtle clues as to her identity, the company's software creates an additional layer of security without the need for extra equipment or user actions.

The software, called DSGateway, can be combined with an existing authentication process. As a user enters her name and password, JavaScript records her typing pattern along with other information, such as her system configuration and geographic location. When the user clicks "submit," her data is sent to the Web server and, provided that the username and password are correct, the additional information is passed on to Delfigo. The company's system then evaluates how well this information matches the behavior patterns of the appropriate authorized user.

Delfigo's algorithms build up a profile of each user during a short training period, combing 14 different factors. The company's president and CEO, Ralph Rodriguez, developed the necessary algorithms while working as a research fellow at MIT. Rodriguez notes that recording multiple factors is crucial to keeping the system secure without making it unusable. If the user types a password with one hand, for example, while holding coffee in the other, the system must turn to other factors to decide how to interpret the variation, he says. If she does this every morning, the system will learn to expect to see this behavior at that time of day.

The idea that a password should completely succeed or completely fail "is an old paradigm that should go away," says Rodriguez. Even if the system sees something strange about the way that a user enters her password, for example, it just assigns a confidence level to that log-in attempt. Access levels can be configured depending on this confidence level. For example, if a user logs in from an odd location, lowering the system's confidence, it might allow her to see her account balance but restrict the funds that she is able to transfer. If the user needs to increase her confidence factor at that moment, Rodriguez says, she could answer additional security questions or have a one-time password sent to her mobile phone or via e-mail.

Making 3D Maps on the Move

At a robotics conference last week, a vehicle called ROAMS demonstrated a cheap approach to mobile map-making.

ROAMS (Remotely Operated and Autonomous Mapping System) was created by researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, with funding from the U.S. Army. It uses several existing mapping technologies to build 3D color maps of its surroundings, and it was demonstrated at the 2009 IEEE conference on Technologies for Practical Robot Applications in Woburn, MA last week.

The system uses LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), which involves bouncing a laser off a rapidly rotating mirror and measuring how the light bounces back from surrounding surfaces and objects. The same technology is already used to guide autonomous vehicles, to make aerial maps, and in spacecraft landing systems.

A conventional 3D LIDAR system, which consists of several lasers pointing in different directions, costs over $100,000. The Stevens researchers created a cheaper mapping system by mounting a commercial 2D LIDAR sensor, which costs about $6,000, on a pivoting, rotating framework atop the vehicle. While the system has a lower resolution than a regular 3D LIDAR, it could still be used for low-cost architectural surveying and map making in military situations, the researchers say. "The prototype system is around $15,000 to $20,000," says Bilge Gebre, a research engineer at Stevens who demonstrated the device.

The system takes about 30 seconds to scan a 160-meter-wide area. A color camera also on the rotating frame provides color information that is added to the map later on. And the Stevens researchers developed a way to maintain the same resolution by automatically adjusting the scanning process depending on the proximity of objects. A human operator rides in a larger vehicle that follows the robotic one from up to a mile away, says Kishore Pochiraju, professor and the director of the Design and Manufacturing Institute at Stevens. Ultimately, says Pochiraju, "we want to leave this robot in a location and ask it to generate a complete map." Such a vehicle could, for example, drive into a dangerous area and generate a detailed map for military personnel.

"They're using a relatively low-cost system," says John Spletzer, an associate professor at Lehigh University who uses similar technology to create autonomous wheelchairs. "There's a lot of groups working on it; it's pretty interesting."

Nicholas Roy, an associate professor at MIT who develops autonomous and self-navigating vehicles, also notes that other research groups have developed similar technology. He says that the biggest challenges in autonomous map-making are identifying obstacles and sharing mapping between several robots.

Bendable Magnetic Interface

Computer users have been typing on keyboards and clicking on mice for more than 20 years. An experimental new interface under development at Microsoft could give them a completely new way to use their system.

Multi-touch and motion-sensing devices have recently emerged from research labs, offering new ways to operate computers. Microsoft's experimental tactile interface takes things further still, letting users interact by squashing, stretching, rolling, or rubbing.

At the base of the new device a "sensor tile" produces magnetic multiple fields above its surface. By detecting disturbances to these fields, the system can track the movement of a metal object across its surface, or the manipulation of a bladder filled with iron filings or a magnetic fluid. A user can drag a ball bearing across the surface to move a cursor across a computer's screen, or manipulate a ferrous fluid-filled bladder to sculpt 3D virtual objects.

Stuart Taylor of Microsoft Research Cambridge in the U.K. says that the surface can easily be reconfigured to allow for different forms of input. Working with Microsoft colleagues and with Jonathan Hook at Newcastle University, Taylor created arrays of 64 magnetic coils, each wrapped in a coiled wire, within a 100-square-centimeter sensor tile. "In essence, these are modeled on an electric guitar setup," says Taylor. "If you disrupt the field, this causes a current to be induced in the coil."

The researchers have also experimented with applying currents to the coils to induce physical effects on the objects placed on top of the sensor tile. This could allow an input device to also provide haptic force-feedback, says Taylor.

"It's an interesting concept which extends multi-touch to something more tangible," says Anthony Steed, a professor in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at University College London. To have a surface that lets users manipulate different objects would be of great in

However, Steed says, making a device that could switch between an input and output device would be challenging. While moving ball bearings using magnetic fields shouldn't be too hard, "[moving] ferrous fluid bladders would be trickier," he says.

Taylor admits that it's early. As with the very first capacitance-based touch sensors--originally used in experimental electronic instruments but now common in iPhones--it's hard to guess where this could go or what impact it would have in the long term. "We're really at the starting point of thinking about the broader applications," he says.

terest, he says.

Poisk Poised For Launch

At 9:22am Eastern today, the Russians will launch a modified Progress cargo ship to ferry a module to the slowly growing International Space Station. Dubbed Poisk (the Russian for "Search," or "Explore") the module's primary function will be to act as an additional docking port for crewed Soyuz and uncrewed Progress and European ATV spacecraft.

The extra port is needed because the ISS crew grew from three to six in May. Two Soyuz spacecraft (each of which seats three) must remain docked to the station in case of a catastrophic accident that forces the entire crew to return to Earth. As a result, there is only one free port remaining to handle any incoming spacecraft bringing supplies or replacement crew members.

The Poisk module is largely a duplicate of the Piers docking module already attached to the ISS. In addition to a docking port, both modules can also act as airlock for spacewalkers. Unlike Piers, some hookups have been added inside Poisk that will allow research racks to be installed later, which is why NASA and the Russian space agency are calling Poisk a "mini-research module". The hookups are something of a face-saving exercise for the Russians, as they were forced to cancel plans for an ambitous research module earlier in the decade due to budget cuts, and in fact Russia has not added a new module to the ISS since Piers was sent aloft in 2001. However, Russia is currently working on a more sophisticated laboratory module, called Nauka, which it hopes to launch in December 2011. Nauka is being constructed from the backup module to the Zarya module, which was launched in 1998 as the founding element of the ISS.

Artificial Black Hole Created in Chinese Lab

If you haven't heard of metamaterials and what they can do, where have you been? Most of the media coverage so far has focused on invisibility cloaks but that's just the start of the fun physicists can have with this stuff. Only a few weeks ago we were discussing how to recreate the big bang inside a metamaterial. And earlier this year, a group of physicists suggested that it ought to be possible to create a black hole using metamaterials. That's an interesting idea but a demonstration would be more exciting.

Step forward Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui at the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, who have used metamaterials to create the world's first artificial black hole in their lab. Yep, a real black hole.

That's not quite as scary as it sounds. A black hole is a region of space from which light cannot escape (that's why it's black). According to Einsteins' theory relativity, black holes form when space becomes so distorted by a large mass that light cannot escape its gravitational field.

But gravity needn't be involved. Metamaterials also distort space, as far as light is concerned anyway (in fact there is a formal mathematical analogy between these optical and gravitational distortions). Physicists have already exploited this distortion to steer light around an object within a metamaterial to create an invisibility cloak. If that's possible, then more exotic distortions ought to be possible too.

Now Qiang and Tie have created a metamaterial that distorts space so severely that light entering it (in this case microwaves) cannot escape.

Their black hole consists of 60 layers of printed circuit board arranged in concentric circles (see picture below). The printed circuit boards are coated in a thin layer of copper from which Qiang and Tie have etched two types of pattern that either resonate at microwave frequency or do not.

In their experiments, they've measured microwaves at 18 GHz going in and none coming out. And the circular symmetry of their metamaterial means that the microwaves are absorbed in all directions at once. What they've built is the world's first artificial black hole. (In case you're wondering, the energy absorbed by the black hole is emitted as heat.)

That's an exciting piece of physics and not just because it's a headline grabber. Artificial black holes could have important applications not least as light harvesters for photovoltaics. The prospect of a black hole in every household may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

Software Listens for Hints of Depression

It's a common complaint in any communication breakdown: "It's not what you said, it's how you said it." For professor Sandy Pentland and his group at MIT's Media Lab, the tone and pitch of a person's voice, the length and frequency of pauses and speed of speech can reveal much about his or her mood.

While most speech recognition software concentrates on turning words and phrases into text, Pentland's group is developing algorithms that analyze subtle cues in speech to determine whether someone is feeling awkward, anxious, disconnected or depressed.

Cogito Health, a company spun out of MIT based in Charlestown, MA, is building on Pentland's research by developing voice-analysis software to screen for depression over the phone.

For years, psychiatrists have recognized a characteristic pattern in the way that many people with clinical depression speak: slowly, quietly and often in a halting monotone. Company CEO Joshua Feast and his colleagues are training computers to recognize such vocal patterns in audio samples.

Feast says the software could be a valuable tool in managing patients with chronic diseases, which often lead to depression. As part of certain disease-management programs, nurses routinely call patients between visits to ask if they are taking their medication. However, symptoms of depression are more difficult for nurses to identify. Feast says voice analysis software could provide a natural and noninvasive way for nurses to screen for depression during routine phone calls. "If you're a nurse and you're trying to deal with a patient with long-term diabetes, it's very hard to tell if a person is depressed," says Feast. "We try to help nurses detect possible mood disorders in patients that have chronic disease."

A few years ago, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer developed voice-analysis software to detect early signs of Parkinson's disease. Pfizer scientists designed the software to recognize tiny tremors in speech. Such tremors offered clues to help gauge patients' response to various medications.

In much the same way, Cogito Health's software detects specific patterns in vocal recordings. For example, the researchers have developed mathematical models to measure a speaker's consistency in tone, fluidity of speech, level of vocal energy, and level of engagement in the conversation (for example, whether someone responds with "uh-huh's" or with silence). "It listens to the pattern of speech, not the words," says Pentland, a scientific advisor to the company. "By measuring those signals in the background, you can tell what's going on."

A Test Ride with the Droid

Most geeks have been curious about Motorola's Droid, the first phone to run the newest version of Google's mobile phone operating system, and the first Android phone on Verizon Wireless, the biggest mobile network in the United States. I took the Droid, which goes on sale Friday, for a test drive--literally, evaluating the phone on a Sunday morning road trip around Austin, TX.

Instead of the soft curves and rounded edges brought into vogue by the iPhone, the Droid has a brick-like look and feel. It's angular and solid, with a flashing green LED on the front to notify you of waiting e-mails, text messages, or voice mails. The QWERTY keyboard slider has a nice, smooth action and locks easily into place. While the Droid matches the iPhone very closely on size, the slider does make the phone ever-so-slightly thicker. The Droid's heft (169 grams to the iPhone's 3GS's 135) also meant that, while I barely notice the iPhone in a jacket or jeans pocket any more, the Droid's weight was more appreciable, pulling the left side of my jacket down on my neck.

The Droid's screen resolution, at 9.3 centimeters diagonally and 480 by 854 pixels, is incredibly sharp and bright, noticeably more so than the iPhone (which has an 8.9-centimeter diagonal screen with 480-by-320-pixel resolution).

Setting up the Droid was dead simple. Using Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk was as easy as entering my Google account username and password once. The phone can support multiple Google accounts, and Android 2.0 adds support for Microsoft's Exchange e-mail server, used by many companies, allowing you to sync e-mails, contacts, and appointments from a corporate Outlook account as well. I did have trouble displaying some Outlook e-mails that displayed perfectly on my iPhone, but I encountered this with fewer than one in 50 messages or so--a minor annoyance.

Pairing Bluetooth devices was also very straightforward; my Plantronics headset was up and running in less than five minutes. One feature I could not get to work, however, was the Wi-Fi connection. I tried accessing four different Wi-Fi networks in three different locations and could never get the Droid to connect. My laptop and iPhone both joined all of these networks without any trouble.

Learning to navigate the Droid's touch screen is fairly intuitive, as well. The phone has three customizable "home" screens, on which you can add shortcuts to applications and file folders, as well as active widgets. Available widgets include a power manager that allows you to turn power-hungry features such as GPS, Bluetooth, and e-mail syncing on and off with a single touch; a Google search box; or live updates from various weather, news, or sports services.

Spraying on Skin Cells to Heal Burns

Traditionally, treatment for severe second-degree burns consists of adding insult to injury: cutting a swath of skin from another site on the same patient in order to graft it over the burn. The process works, but causes more pain for the burn victim and doubles the area in need of healing. Now a relatively new technology has the potential to heal burns in a way that's much less invasive than skin grafts. With just a small skin biopsy and a ready-made kit, surgeons can create a suspension of the skin's basal cells--the stem cells of the epidermis--and spray the solution directly onto the burn with results comparable to those from skin grafts.

The cell spray is intended to treat severe second-degree burns, in which the top two layers of skin are damaged but the subcutaneous tissue is left intact. Third-degree burns, which are more severe, still require a skin graft. The spray, already approved for use in some countries, has garnered interest from the United States Army, whose Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine is funding a trial, slated to begin before the end of this year, of more than 100 patients.

The technology, developed by Australian surgeon Fiona Wood, relies on cells, such as skin progenitor cells and the color-imparting melanocytes, that are most concentrated at the junction between the skin's top two layers. With a small step-by-step kit dubbed ReCell, surgeons can harvest, process and apply these cells to treat a burn as large as 10.5 square feet. The kit, marketed by Avita Medical, a United Kingdom-based regenerative-medicine company, is a tiny, self-contained lab about the size and shape of a large sunglasses case.

After removing a small swatch of skin near the burn site (the closer the biopsy, the better for precise matching of color and texture), the surgeon places it in the kit's tiny incubator along with an enzyme solution. The enzyme loosens the critical cells at the skin's dermal-epidermal junction, and the surgeon harvests them by scraping them off the epidermal and dermal layers and suspending them in solution. The resulting mixture is then sprayed onto the wound, repopulating the burn site with basal cells from the biopsy site.

"Currently, treating any burn that requires a skin graft is the same technology we were routinely using 30 years ago," says James Holmes, a surgeon and the medical director of the Burn Center at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Current practice with larger burns requires grafts from donor skin that are anywhere from one-quarter to the complete size of the burn area. ReCell requires only as much as four square centimeters. "This allows you to take a very small skin biopsy and process it at the table there in the operating room using a fully prepackaged device," Holmes says. "You're able to cover an area that's 80 times the size of your biopsy."

Holmes is the lead investigator on an upcoming multicenter trial that will compare skin grafts and ReCell. Patients in the trial will act as their own controls: If a burn victim has a second-degree burn severe enough for surgeons to deem treatable by skin graft, half of the burn will be treated that way, while the other half will be treated with the cell spray.

An App so You'll Never Forget

A language-learning application that's already big in Japan is coming to the U.S. in the form of a new iPhone app. Smart.fm, based in Tokyo, says that the adaptive-learning algorithms behind its software can help users memorize all kinds of information.

Smart.fm is one of several companies selling software designed to help users remember. The company's algorithms were inspired by research that shows people remember information more effectively they try to memorize it at key times, says founder and chairman Andrew Smith Lewis.

Those algorithms determine how often to present a piece of information to the user and in what context. For example, a completely new word and its translation are shown frequently, and a user is asked relatively easy questions about them, designed to jog the memory. But once the user has demonstrated the ability to recall that word and its meaning, this information will appear less often.

"Efficiency is the main thing," Lewis says. "We want to optimize the sweet spot between the minimum number of times you have to see an item and the maximum effectiveness of that presentation."

To use Smart.fm, a person selects an existing list of material--a dictionary of foreign words, for instance--or starts building a new list. The list could be text-only, but the system also supports images and audio. A user might match the names of birds to the sounds they make, or view images of different parts of the human brain in order to learn how to identify them. Someone who snaps pictures of the people she meets at a conference might use the software to commit those people's names to memory.

"Learning applications which present stimuli adaptively based on the forgetting curve are not new but still relatively rare," says Peter Brusilovsky, director of the Personalized Adaptive Web Systems Lab at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences. But Smart.fm's teaching methods can be applied to any type of material, Lewis says. "The adaptive-learning platform doesn't know if you're studying Russian painters or chess moves or French verbs," he says. "It just knows that these are individual objects."

Unlike other memory applications, Smart.fm takes a social approach, letting users share their lists and add comments to other lists. And in the future, Lewis says, there will be more ways to pull information into the system. The company is working on integrating with Freebase, a site that collects user-generated databases. Once the effort is complete, Smart.fm users who are interested in a particular topic should be able to access information about it from Freebase automatically.

"Education apps are one of the most interesting and growing areas of the iPhone app store," says Carl Howe, an analyst focusing on mobile research at the Yankee Group. Howe thinks Smart.fm was wise to broaden the scope of its material beyond just language learning. For education apps, he says, "the central aspect is knowing how to engage people's interest."

Howe notes that the top education apps for the iPhone are geared toward middle-school and elementary-school children. He believes there's a huge opportunity for college-level material, too. But companies designing e-learning apps may find themselves competing with material from established universities such as MIT and Stanford, which offer free material for self-directed study online

Smart.fm's business model is based largely on the prospect of collaboration with other companies and institutions that want to offer online learning. The company has already partnered with the Japanese telecom giant NTT, which has used the software to create learning sites focusing on specific topics.

Lewis hopes that such deals will become Smart.fm's main source of revenue, though he also suggests that Smart.fm may offer premium content to users for a price. The iPhone app, however, is and will remain free.

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Robofish

Borrowing from Mother Nature, MIT researchers have built a school of swimming robofish that slip through the water just as gracefully as the real thing, if not quite as fast. Mechanical-engineering colleagues Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado '99, SM '01, PhD '07 (above), and professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi, SM '81, ScD '85, designed the sleek and inexpensive robots to maneuver into areas where traditional underwater autonomous vehicles can't go. Fleets of them could be used to inspect submerged structures such as boats and oil and gas pipes; to patrol ports, lakes, and rivers; and to help detect environmental pollutants.

"Given the [robotic] fish's robustness, it would be ideal as a long-term sensing and exploration unit," says Valdivia y Alvarado. "Several of these could be deployed, and even if only a small percentage make it back, there wouldn't be a terrible capital loss."

Robotic fish are not new: in 1994, MIT ocean engineers demonstrated the four-foot-long Robotuna. Robotuna had 2,843 parts controlled by six motors, but the new robotic fish, which is less than a foot long, is powered by a single motor and is made of fewer than 10 individual components, protected by a flexible body. The motor, placed in the fish's midsection, initiates a wave that travels along the fish's body, propelling it forward. So far, the MIT prototype fish can swim as fast as one body length per second. That's much slower than real fish, which can cover up to 10 times their body length in a second.

As part of his doctoral thesis, Valdivia y Alvarado created a model that calculates how stiff each part of the robot's body should be to generate the desired speed and swimming motion. With this model, the researchers can use polymers to create a continuous fish body that is stiffer in some places and more flexible in others, instead of building each body section separately and then joining them together. "This philosophy can be used for more than just fish," says Youcef-Toumi. For example, it could help improve robotic prosthetic limbs.

This fall, the researchers plan to investigate more complex locomotion and test some new prototype robotic salamanders and manta rays, says Valdivia y Alvarado. This research should put their approach to a harder test.

Here's the link if you want to see the robofish in action:

http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=455

Web marketer ordered to pay Facebook $711M damages

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.

Facebook sued Wallace for accessing users' accounts without their permission and sending phony posts and messages. The company said on its blog that in addition to the damage award, the San Jose, Calif., court referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court -- meaning he could face jail time.

Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.

In May 2008, the online hangout MySpace won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, in another case brought under the federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM. In 2006, Wallace was fined $4 million after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of running an operation that infected computers with software that caused flurries of pop-up ads, known as "spyware."

"While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals," said Sam O'Rourke, associate general counsel for Facebook, in a blog posting Thursday. "This is another important victory in our fight against spam."

There was no phone number listed for Wallace in Las Vegas, where he is believed to be living, according to the ruling.

The company said the judgment marks the second-largest anti-spam award ever. In November 2008, Facebook won an $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, who bombarded users with sexually explicit spam messages.

Web marketer ordered to pay Facebook $711M damages

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.

Facebook sued Wallace for accessing users' accounts without their permission and sending phony posts and messages. The company said on its blog that in addition to the damage award, the San Jose, Calif., court referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court -- meaning he could face jail time.

Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.

In May 2008, the online hangout MySpace won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, in another case brought under the federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM. In 2006, Wallace was fined $4 million after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of running an operation that infected computers with software that caused flurries of pop-up ads, known as "spyware."

"While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals," said Sam O'Rourke, associate general counsel for Facebook, in a blog posting Thursday. "This is another important victory in our fight against spam."

There was no phone number listed for Wallace in Las Vegas, where he is believed to be living, according to the ruling.

The company said the judgment marks the second-largest anti-spam award ever. In November 2008, Facebook won an $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, who bombarded users with sexually explicit spam messages.

Paranormal Activity is the most profitable movie ever

The Blair Witch Project is no longer the most profitable movie in cinema history; Paranormal Activity has just taken that crown. Paranormal was shot for less than one days catering bill for a big Hollywood movie, at a mere $15,000.

Titanic may be the biggest earning movie in terms of turnover, but compared to its production costs Paranormal puts it in the shade. Having already taken over $65 million at the box office Paranoral Activity has made more than 400,000% profit.

The movie started quietly at only a dozen theatres, and slowly expanded to nearly 2000 screens, and it may not be over yet, as this weekend’s box office includes Halloween, which is always good for horror flicks it has presumably added to its box office numbers.

Of course on top of the tiny budget, the studio, Paramount, will have spent several million on marketing the movie, even so its returns are still enormous.

Want to Enhance Your Brain Power?

A little brain boost is something we could all use now and then. A new option may be on the horizon. Researchers at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in Bethesda, MD, are studying how applying gentle electrical current to the scalp can improve learning.

Previous small-scale studies have suggested that a stream of current can improve motor function, verbal fluency, and even language learning. To explore how effective such stimulation can be as a learning tool, Eric Wassermann, a neuroscientist at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, is using an approach known as transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), in which an electrical current is passed directly to the brain through the scalp and skull. The technology for TDCS, which has been available for decades, is simple and fairly crude. (In the 1960s, it was used to improve mood in people with psychiatric disorders, although that effect hasn't been repeated in more recent studies.) And in contrast to people undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, a seizure-inducing treatment used for severe depression that requires anesthesia, people undergoing TDCS feel just a slight tingle, if anything.

The device is simple: a nine-volt battery that's been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for delivering drugs across the skin is connected to large flat sponges that are moistened and then applied to the head. It delivers a gentle 2 to 2.5 milliamps of current spread over a 20 to 50 square millimeter area of the scalp for up to 15 minutes. Little of that current actually reaches the brain--about half is shunted away from the target area, and the other half quickly dissipates as it gets farther from the scalp.

Wassermann's team targets part of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in higher-level organization and planning, as well as in working memory. Because activity in this region has been shown in previous imaging studies to predict an individual's ability to recall information, the idea is that giving it an electrical boost will enhance memory function.

In preliminary results from the new study, which is part of a larger government-funded project to examine TDCS for cognitive enhancement, researchers found that direct current stimulation could improve memory in participants asked to learn and then recall a list of 12 words. The effect was significant in the early learning stages: in the first few trials, in which participants were given the same list over and over again, people in the treatment group could remember more words. But the learning curve for those working without the device quickly caught up to the zapped learners. "Now we want to see if we can enhance recall, not just encoding," says Wassermann. "Ultimately, you'd just want to do the stimulation during encoding."

Electronic Wasteland

A policy analysis published Thursday in the journal Science calls our attention to something it's much easier to turn away from: what happens to outdated computer monitors, cell phones that aren't smart enough, cables that once powered discarded laptops, even old calculators. Much of this waste, which is largely a product of the developed world, ends up in the developing world, and the hazardous materials it contains accumulate in the food chain and in poor children's blood. In Africa, China, and India, markets for secondhand electronics are having a terrible impact. Children in Guiyu, China have high levels of lead in their blood and swamps in Nigeria overflow with discarded electronics.

So what can we do about it? The United States, one of the largest producers of electronic waste, is one of 23 member countries that has not ratified the United Nations' Basel Convention, which would regulate the movement of hazardous electronic materials across international borders. A bill in the Senate (S. 1397) would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to award grant money for recycling research and ask the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create a database of green electronic materials. According to the authors of the Science article, the European Union and the state of California both have complex and inconsistent waste policies, but we can still learn from them:

For example, Californians are willing to pay extra for "green" electronics products (e.g., containing fewer toxic substances, capable of being economically recycled) and to drive up to 8 miles to drop-off products for environmentally sensitive recycling. In addition, political mandates and economic incentives are key tools for engaging manufacturers,who will need to assume greater responsibility for designing electronic products that contain safer materials and are easily managed after consumers no longer want them.

However, the long-term solution, the authors suggest, is to change the way electronics are made in the first place:

Bart Gordon, Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, said that "we need our future engineers to understand that whatever they put together will eventually have to be taken apart."