A piece from New Scientist’s Back Page may help explain why iris recognition, originally touted as one of the ID Card’s biometrics, was recently dropped:
Anything that makes air travel less miserable has to be worth a try, so we jumped at the chance of registering for the fast-track Iris Recognition Immigration System, aka IRIS, being tested by the British government.
You register at the airport by looking into a camera that stores your iris pattern and passport number. Our first attempt at registering failed, however, because the official in charge of the camera at London’s Heathrow airport could not remember the PIN needed to work his machine.
A second try a few weeks later was successful. So on the way back into Heathrow after our travels we smugly left our friends in a long passport queue, went into the IRIS cubicle and looked into the camera. After many failed attempts at aligning our eyes with optical markers, the machine lost patience and told us to leave. An official appeared and said the malfunction might be down to the machine thinking our suitcase was a child being smuggled through.
As there was no one else waiting we tried again, this time holding the suitcase well clear. Again the computer said no. After a third failed attempt, the official reappeared and said spectacles must be the problem.
“But we need spectacles to see the eye markers,” we complained. By this time all our friends had long since shown their passports, sailed through and were waiting with mocking smiles on their faces.
The IRIS machine screen was now also showing a Windows message, “Symantec PC Anywhere - Unknown error”.
“Ah,” sighed the official. “We’ll have to reboot the whole thing now.”
British government electronic technology triumphs again.
Molecular scientist and chemist Dr. Alan H. Goldstein returns to open up our Spring Season with a two part interview about the A Prize. This prize, conceived by Goldstein is “awarded to the person or organization responsible for creating an Animat/Artificial life form with an emphasis on the safety of the researchers, public, and environment OR the person or organization who shows that an Animat/Artificial life form has been created. (The second case is to uncover unpublicized or unsafe projects.)” The project has been sponsored by the Lifeboat Foundation.
Researchers in Switzerland have developed a novel form of propulsion for microrobots that mimics the way bacteria zip about using corkscrew-like appendages called flagella. Tests show that the tiny rotating nanocoils–just 27 nanometers thick and 40 micrometers long–are capable of spinning at 60 revolutions per minute and that it is possible to propel an object at nearly 5 micrometers per second.
Biomimetics like this could be used as an engine for nanorobotics, especially for drug delievery vehicles. Read the entire article at MIT Tech Review.
Russian ultranationalists may have nuclear material:
Vladimir Vlasov, a former employee of the Academician Bochvar All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Inorganic Materials, was sentenced on Tuesday along with his accomplice, Mikhail Klevachyov, who was given 19 years in prison.
… There have been documented cases of employees of Russian nuclear facilities stealing enriched uranium and plutonium. There was also one case in which a Russian nuclear physicist stowed away his own stash of plutonium before retiring “just in case” he might need it. In comparison, Vlasov’s case represents a dangerous phenomenon: Here, a veteran of the Russian nuclear industry has committed a grave crime based on his racist beliefs, rather than greed.
…Otherwise, the next nuclear industry insider - who is driven into murderous rage by ultranationalist feelings or any other violent ideology - may be armed with radiological weapon rather than a conventional bomb.
The Oxford Research Group has published “Beyond Terror: The Truth About the Real Threats to Our World”. The report focus on the disproportionate attention given to terrorism compared to the imminent threat from environmental degradation. The report looks at climate change, competition over resources, “marginalisation of the majority world” and global militarisation.
Dr. Gregory Stock (Director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA’s School of Public Health) discuss ethical issues of life extension with Daniel Callahan (Director and cofounder of The Hastings Center, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Medical School and a Senior Fellow at Yale).
Technologies are emerging that extend survival by delaying death from chronic fatal diseases. Pushing this envelope may briefly quench our insatiable thirst for extended life and temporarily quell our fear of death, but continuing to do so may turn out to be harmful unless it soon becomes possible to scientifically engineer an extension of the vigor of youth in both body and mind. In this article we go beyond usual scientific reasoning and imagine how the human body might have been designed differently if biology were goal-oriented.
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