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Real-Time Flight Information - World Wide Frequent fliers will bless a new Web 2.0 site called Flightstats. Launched by Conductive Technologies, Flightstats mashes together real-time flight information from arrivals and departures boards of all of the world's major airports. Enter a departure airport and a destination and Flightstats provides a view of the times planes have actually left (compared to scheduled times) and estimated departure and arrival times for flights still in the air and yet to take off. The service is FREE. What's more, Flightstats also provides an historical analysis of how different airlines are doing over the same route. During June and July 2006 American Airlines was proving the most efficient with 77% of its flights between Heathrow and JFK arriving on time while BA was struggling to land 63% of its planes on schedule (this was before the recent security scare at Heathrow). It is also possible to analyse which time of day is best for a particular route and which time slot is most prone to delay. Still more: Flightstats offers registered users a complete display of lowest fares across all major world routes. American readers may also be interested to learn that the Web 2.0 flight-cost prediction website, Seattle-based Farecast.com, has now extended its coverage to 55 U.S. cities. Farecast monitors fares offered by airlines and sends you an email when the lowest fare is likely to be available. International expansion please. Internet-Connected Pet Rabbit Companions Appear The first pet bunny with an internet connection has arrived to keep you company in your home or office. The plastic bunny has ears like TV antennae and can read out emails and mobile phone text messages, tell children to go to bed, alert owners to a stock collapse and give traffic updates by receiving Internet feeds via any wireless Wi-Fi network. The bunny, which stands 9 inches tall and has a white cone-like body that lights up when it speaks, is called Nabaztag, which means rabbit in Armenian, its creator's mother tongue. It can also wiggle its ears and sing songs. Find out where you can buy your Nabaztag here. Price is 115 Euros. If you doubt that such inanimate objects will become our intimate companions, read this short extract from my 2002 novel, Emergence. 3-D Body Imaging From 2-D Scans Body imaging is a field exploding with potential as scanning resolution doubles every year. Now researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah have developed a software product called Live Surface which converts 2-D MRI or CT scans to 3-D virtual renderings which can be examined from all angles by physicians and surgeons. The importance of doctors being able to see clearly inside human bodies before surgery or invasive treatment cannot be overemphasised. It is claimed that Live Surface allows users to easily isolate 'tricky' anatomy such as soft tissue – blood vessels, hearts and muscles – that a lot of other techniques can't readily extract. Radios That Work Underground The American Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed 'Underground Radio,' a method of transmitting radio signals successfully through rock, earth, stone, concrete and brick. The technology is now being commercialised by Vital Alert Technologies and will provide radio systems that can be used underground - in tunnels like those of the New York or London subway systems. Emergency workers would have found such a radio network very useful immediately after the terrorist attacks of 7/7. 'This is a technical solution to the problem of voice communication in underground areas,' said David Reagor, the principal investigator of the Los Alamos team who originally developed the technology.' It is also inexpensive to build.' Underground Radio is a 'through-the-earth' communications mechanism which uses very low frequency (VLF) electromagnetic radiation and digital audio compression technology to carry voice and text data. The VLF signals also can transmit tracking and location data for radio users in the case that they are unable to respond. A Slide Show That Keeps Its Eye On That eBay Auction One of the founders of PayPal (which was sold to eBay) has re-emerged with a new start-up called Slide. The software creates a portable slide-show of your images which runs on your desktop, your MySpace page (check out this Justin Timberlake MySpace page), your blog or as your screensaver. Slide incorporates not just your photographs but also can get feeds from other sites such as eBay, where you can follow a specific auction, or Yahoo, where you can get a continuous and updated stream of the latest news, or from iTunes, where you can get a stream of the latest, hottest songs. eBay sellers, meanwhile, can take pictures of their products and feature them in a slide show on their eBay page. Bringing Web Visual Disability Aids To Mobile Phones There are several important aids such as screen-readers which assist visually impaired Web users to understand the content of web sites when viewed on computers. Now a research team at Manchester University, England is undertaking a project to bring the same browsing aids to web sites when they are displayed on internet-capable mobile phones. Funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the core part of the project will be the development of a validation engine which will screen websites to ensure they are accessible and mobile web compatible. The validation engine will work in tandem with a transcoding programme which will de-clutter web pages and reorder them into a web mobile friendly format. Once transcoded the aim is to let the user determine how the pages are displayed (and spoken) by their mobile phone. Wikipipedia Turns To Travel Guides The amazing and gratifying success of the collaborative on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia (currently with 1,339,181 entries and increasing at a rate of over 2,000 articles per day), has spawned a new collaborative project, World Wikia. World Wikia is a travel guide which will be written, edited and updated by its users and, knowing how much people love writing about their travels (and posting their pix), I predict World Wikia will be a huge hit. Check out the San Francisco page and the London page. Aren't you tempted? And a slice of Wikipedia trivia: On Saturday August 19th, Wikipedia's page on "vandalism" was vandalized prompting the online encyclopedia to lock down the entry. 'On or around 19:25, 19 August 2006 (UTC), the article page associated with this talk page was linked from Fark, a high-traffic Internet site,' the Wikipedia entry read on Monday 21st. Another box near the top of the entry stated 'Because of vandalism, editing of this project page by anonymous or newly registered users is disabled.' View the restored Vandalism page.
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An Effective Sexual Stimulant For Women? Despite much research, Viagra and other drugs for male sexual dysfunction have proven ineffective in treating most women who suffer from lack of libido and impaired sexual arousal. Now Palatin Technologies of New Jersey has announced the conclusion of a second phase of a clinical trial in which a drug called 'bremelanotide' was tested on a group of post-menopausal women who had been diagnosed with female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD). The results suggest that 73% of women who took bremelanotide reported increased sexual desire and physical response compared to 23% of women who were given a placebo. The next step is for the company to carry out large-scale trials of the drug across 20 clinical centres in the United States before applying for FDA approval to market the drug. Do You Want To Be Frozen When You Die (or just to live for a bit longer)? In the next few decades science will offer us the chance to extend our lives through better medical treatments. Later in the century technology will help to prolong human lifespans dramatically (at least, in the rich world). Alcor, a cryogenics company in Arizona which hopes you will pay to freeze your corpse in hope of a subsequent revival to life, is organising its 6th Annual Conference (PDF) with the title 'An Inside Look At The Science And Medicine Of Tomorrow.' Taking place in Scotsdale, Arizona in October 2006, the conference is notable in that Alcor (which has been freezing dead people since 1972) has widened its agenda to include discussion of life-extension technologies, anti-ageing research and nanomedicine. Alcor has signalled what it thinks are the near term prospects for such advances by running its traditional seminars on 'Whole Body Cyropresevation' and 'Cyronic Revival' alongside the more optimistic presentations. See you there. Segway Riding 'Now Like Skiing' (but not in the UK) If you have fallen off your original Segway scooter one too many times, you might like to know that the latest model allows riders to steer by leaning in the desired direction, rather than by turning the handlebars. Claiming that the new way of steering is far more intuitive - 'more like skiing' says the company - it may be that the much hyped Segway could, after a disappointing initial launch, start to find some important market niches. The UK is unlikely to provide any of those niches however. Citing the Highways Act of 1855, the forward-looking British government last month banned the Segway from all public roads and pavements. A spokesman for BAE Systems, the British company which manufacturers the gyroscopes that keep the Segway upright, said that four Department of Transport officials attended a testing session to assess the scooter. Three of them refused to ride the Segway. The fourth travelled only 100 yards. The result of their visit to the British manufacturer was a ruling called 'Regulations For Self Balancing Scooters' which ended the Segway's future in the UK. The United States and most other countries in Europe allow the Segway to be used on pavements and, in some cases, on roads. Hurrah! Micropayments Arrive At Last Within the last couple of weeks Coca-Cola and Mastercard have installed over 1,000 vending machines in the United States which will accept payments of $2 and under from credit cards. For the last 15 years the main credit card franchisees - MasterCard, Visa and American Express - have backpedalled against allowing small payments to be made with cards, but at last the concept is taking off. 'If you need to pop a quarter in the parking meter, can you do that with your card instead?' says Niki Manby, senior vice president of product innovation for Visa. 'We're looking at the whole gamut.' But although using credit and debit cards at parking meters and vending machines will be helpful, it will be in e-commerce where the most benefit is found. Expect small value on-line transactions to skyrocket over the next few years and pick your stocks accordingly. Encryption For Mobile Phone Calls A new piece of encryption software has been released which will encrypt and protect conversations over mobile phones. The software, from Babylon nG of Cheshire, UK, uses the GPRS capabilities of mobile phones to provide a secure channel for voice communication. The encryption changes every time a call is made and each handset has its own unique encryption key. Babylon nG uses 256K bit technology with a 124K bit key to give several layers of encryption. When the encryption is not required, the handset maintains all the usual functions of a mobile phone, whether encryption is used or not. Police and anti-terrorist investigators will, no doubt, be interested in customers who sign-up to buy Babylon's encryption software. And Finally - Beware When You Send a Fake Text Message Just as handwriting experts can detect a forged letter, psychologists at the UK's University of Leicester say that they are conducting experiments to try and see how well an individual can be identified by their texting style. A prior case where this technique was used was the investigation of murder a few years ago. At the 2002 trial an alibi was broken based on the evidence that the murderer and not the victim had sent crucial messages from her phone. Text analysis revealed that the texts had not been written by the victim herself, but that they had been faked to deflect suspicion from the killer as there were a number of differences in the texting styles between the victim and murderer. You have been warned.
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