Brain Scans Spot Lies Better Than Polygraph Test

When it comes to lying, our brains are much more likely to give us away than sweaty palms or spikes in heart rate. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania in the US found that scanning people’s brains with fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, was significantly more effective at spotting lies than a traditional polygraph test. The study was the first to compare the fMRI scan and polygraph in the same individuals in a blinded a prospective fashion. The approach adds scientific data to the long-standing debate about this technology and builds the case for more studies investigating its potential real life applications, such as evidence in the criminal legal proceedings. Researchers found that neuroscience experts without prior experience in lie detection, using fMRI data, were 24 per cent more likely to detect deception than professional polygraph examiners reviewing polygraph recordings. In both fMRI and polygraph, participants took a standardized “concealed information” test.

Next Cyber Attack Could Come Via Smart Bulbs

The so-called internet of Things, its proponents argue, offers many benefits: energy efficiency, technology so convenient it can anticipate what you want. Now here’s the bad news: Putting a bunch of wirelessly connected devices in one area could prove irresistible to hackers. And it could allow them to spread malicious code through the air. Researchers report in a new paper (not made public till the filing of the report) that they have uncovered a flaw in a wireless technology that is often included in smart home devices like lights, witches, locks, thermostats and many of the components of the much-ballyhooed “smart home” of the future. The researchers focused on the Philips Hue smart light bulb and found that the flaw could allow hackers to take control of the bulbs, according to researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science near Tel Aviv, Israel, and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. That may not sound like a big deal. But imagine thousands or even hundreds of thousands of internet connected devices in close proximity. Malware created by hackers could be spread like a pathogen among the devices by compromising just one of them. And they wouldn’t have to have direct access to the devices to infect them. The researchers were able to spread infection in a network inside a building by driving a car 229 feet away. Just two weeks ago, hackers briefly denied access to whole chunks of the internet by creating a flood of traffic that overwhelmed the servers of a US company called Dyn, which helps manage key components of the internet. Security experts say they believe the hackers found the horsepower the hackers found the horsepower necessary for their attack by taking control of a range of internet connected devices, but the hackers did not use the method detailed in the report. One Chinese wireless camera manufacturer said weak password on some of its products was partly to blame for the attack. Even the best internet defense technologies would not stop such an attack. The new risk comes from a little known radio protocol called ZigBee. Created in the 1990s, ZigBee is a wireless standard widely used in home consumers devices. While it is supposed to be secure, it hasn’t been held up to the scrutiny of other security methods used around the internet. The researchers found that the ZigBee standard can be used to create a so-called computer worm to spread malicious software among internet connected devices. So what could hackers do with the compromised devices? For one, they could set an LED light into a strobe pattern that could trigger epileptic seizures or just make people very uncomfortable. It may sound farfetched, but that possibility has already been proved by the researchers. The color and brightness of the Philips Hue bulb can be controlled from a computer or a smartphone. The researchers showed that by compromising a single bulb, it was possible to infect a large number of nearby lights within minutes. The worm program carried a malicious payload to watch light – even if they were not part of the same private network. In creating a model of the infection process, they simulated the distribution of the lights in Paris over about 40 square miles and noted that the attack would potentially spread when as few as 15,000 devices were in place over that area. The researcher said they had notified Philips of the potential vulnerability and the company had asked the researchers not to go public with the research paper until it had been corrected.

Crack Found In Magnetic Shield Of Earth

The world’s largest and most sensitive cosmic ray monitor located in India has recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays that indicates a crack in the Earth’s magnetic shield. The burst, recorded by the GRAPES-3 muon telescope located at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research’s Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Tamil Nadu, occurred when a giant cloud of plasma effected from the solar corona, and moving with a speed of 2.5 million kilometres per hour struck our planet, causing compression of Earth’s magnetosphere from 11 to 4 times the radius of Earth. It triggered a severe geomagnetic storm that generated aurora borealis and radio signal blackouts in many high latitude countries, according to the study published in the journal Physical Review Letters this week. Earth’s magnetosphere extends over a radius of a million kilometres and acts as the first line of defense, shielding us from the continuous flow of solar and galactic cosmic rays, thus protecting life on our planet form these high intensity energetic radiations.

Soon, Gadgets Will Repair Themselves When Broken; Magnetic Ink Will Help Them Self-Heal

A sports bra that monitors your workout. A suit that lets you swap business cards digitally. A beanie hat that tracks your newborn’s vitals. Smart garments like this hint at a future coming up fast. Most wearable electronics today are expensive and complicated to make, with multiple moving parts. One option for making cheaper components is to print devices using a process with special;, electrically functional inks. The promise of printed electronics is low-cost, flexible devices – including batteries, sensors and wearable circuits that can be incorporated into smart clothing. But the multibillion dollar industry has a major downfall: Printed electronics are fragile. Researchers are now working on a solution: ink that includes magnetic particles. If a fabric or device printed with this magnetic ink breaks, the particles would attract one another and close the gap. In a paper published in Science Advances on 3 November, researcher said that their self-healing ink could repair multiple cuts up to three millimeters long in just 50 milliseconds. Smart clothes typically include sensors that have been woven into or clipped onto the fabrics. For the most part these sensors aren’t printed, which can make them more costly and rigid. Researchers wanted to make wearable devices that were more skin like. Just like the human skin is stretchable and self-healing, they wanted to impart a self-healing ability to printed electronics. The ink that researchers created includes ground neodymium magnets that are found in hard drives and refrigerator magnets. They pulverized these magnets into microscopic particles and incorporated them into the ink. Traditionally, attempts to create self-healing materials have relied on a chemical reaction called polymerization. While this has the benefit of melding broken fragments back together via chemical bonds (as opposed to magnetic attraction holding two pieces together), self-healing polymer systems require external inputs like heat, cannot seal large cracks and can take anywhere from hours to days to repair themselves. Using magnetic particles for self-healing does not require adding heat, light or other chemicals. Magnetic ink is also cheap: researchers estimated that $10 worth of ink materials can yield hundreds of small devices. The next steps are to determine the optimal ratios of ink ingredients for specific applications. These inks could make their way into everything from solar panels to implantable medical devices.