New VR System Lets You Feel Rain, Beating Heart

Researchers have developed a 360-degree virtual reality application using a unique chair to provide full body sensations that enables users to add customizable “feel effects” such as raindrops or a beating heart. Virtual reality has seen a renaissance in recent years as advancements in computer graphics, computing platforms and the seamless flow of information between hardware and software have come together in a powerful way. Researchers team is working to make VR haptic sensations just as rich as the 360 degree visual media now available. Current VR systems provide ‘buzz like’ haptic sensations through hand controllers. But technology exists for much richer sensations. Researchers have created a framework that would enable users to select form a wide range of meaningful sensations that can be adjusted to complement the visual scene and to play them through a variety of haptic feedback devices. The haptic playback and authoring plug-in developed by the researchers connects a VR game engine to a customized haptic device. It allows users to create, personalize and associate haptic feedback to the events triggered in the VR game engine. The haptic definition app, called VR360HD, was developed and tested using a consumer headset and Disney researcher’s haptic chair. The chair features a grid of six vibrotactile actuators in its back and two subwoofers or “shakers” in the seat and back. The grid produces localized moving sensations in the back, while the subwoofers shake two different regions of the body and can create a sensation of motion. Users were able to select from a library of feel effects tested by the team.

This Rewritable Paper Can Be Used More Than 40 Times

Scientists have developed a low-cost, environmentally friendly way to create printed material with rewritable paper that can reduce paper wastage. Even in the present digital age, the world still relies on paper and ink, most of which ends up in landfills or recycling centers. Researchers made the new material by mixing low-toxicity tungsten oxide and polyvinyl pyrrolidone, a common polymer used in medicines and food. To “print” on it, they exposed the material to ultraviolet light for 30 seconds, and it changed from white to a deep blue. To make pictures or words, a stencil can be used so that only the exposed parts turn blue. To erase them, the material can be put in ambient conditions for a day or two. To speed up the erasing, the researchers added heat to make the color disappear in 30 minutes. Alternatively, adding a small amount of polyacrylonitrile to the material can make the designs last for up to 10 days. Tests showed that the material can be printed on and erased 40 times before the quality started to decline. More paper is now recovered for recycling than almost all other materials combined, researchers said. The new material saves energy, water, and landfill space and greenhouse gas emissions.

When The Planet Spun 10 Times Faster

A cataclysmic collision not only created Earth’s moon, but may have also knocked Earth over on its side. In a paper published by the journal Nature, scientists say their numerical simulations indicate that the collision of a Mars size object with the early Earth left our planet tilted at an angle of 60 to 80 degrees and spinning rapidly, once every 2.5 hours, almost 10 times as fast as today. But the simulations also show how the dynamics of the moon and Earth slowed down over the next four billion years of the solar system. For the first time, this paper has a model that says researcher can start in one place; explain all of that without invoking any other follow-on event. “Where did the moon come from?” has been a persistent question over the eons. Among the rocky planets of the inner solar system, Earth is an anomaly. Mercury and Venus have no moons at all, and Mars only has a couple of tiny moons that may be captured asteroids. Earth’s moon, by comparison, is a giant, more than 2,000 miles in diameter. Recently the preferred explanation for the origin of the moon has been “the big whack”: soon after the formation of the solar system, the Mars-size interloper that astronomers have named Theia bumped into Earth. The resulting slosh of debris coalesced into a slightly larger Earth and the moon in orbit around the Earth.

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.