Tag: technology

Beware the health scan scams: don’t be fooled by the long words

The original Magic 8 BallMagic 8 Ball toys are great fun when you’re a kid. The fortune-telling plastic spheres have been entertaining children since the 1950s and are delightfully simple – you ask the black ball a question, give it a shake, and an answer ‘magically’ emerges out of the inky darkness. “Will I be popular at school?” The ball says: “It is decidedly so.” “Should I ask Debbie to out to the disco?“ The ball replies: “Signs point to yes”. “Will I be a millionaire someday”? “Don’t count on it,” replies the ball. All is not lost, however, for those who aspire after the high life: you can keep shaking until you get the answer you want. Read more

Why it’s time to forget about online dementia tests

Computer - failYou probably remember a time when nobody dared talk about dementia. Comedians would joke about ‘mad granddad’ but no-one seriously wanted to contemplate a life without memory. Thankfully, Alzheimer’s disease charities have started to wake us up to the reality of the 850,000 people who live with dementia in the UK.. Stigmatisation is waning but dementia is still greatly misunderstood and is feared more than cancer or even death. So when the headline “Test to STOP Alzheimer’s: Simple 20-minute quiz could be key to beating the disease” made the front cover of the Daily Express last week, it struck a chord with a great many of us. Promising to “halve the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease”, I decided to try it out to discover just how well it could ease fears of dementia. Read more

How to heal paralysis: modern day miracles

Darek FidykaWithout doubt, Geoffrey Raisman is in line for a Nobel Prize. The little-known British professor has been the brains behind a breakthrough that ‘cured’ a paraplegic man. Bulgarian Darek Fidyka was left paralysed after a knife attack four years ago; images of him now standing upright shot across the globe a few weeks ago. For the first time in history, surgeons had successfully fixed a severed spinal cord. In a bizarre act of surgical jiggery-pokery, surgeons removed nerve cells from Darek’s nose and then transplanted into his damaged spinal cord. Once there, the nose cells stimulated nerves to grow across the 8 mm gap in the spinal cord. And amazingly, this ultimately gave him feeling and movement back in his legs. Read more

The curious case of the phantom vibrating phone

Smartphone in your pocketI’ve only been back in the UK a matter of hours and it’s already started. After a few days abroad, I am taking a stroll through the beauty of Wiltshire’s county town to remind myself how good it is to be back in good ol’ Blighty. And then suddenly – and without warning – my reverie is broken by a vibrating right thigh. It is the tell-tale buzz of my mobile phone, which has now awoken from its vacation slumber. A text message or twitter update perhaps? Neither, as it happens. For when I have prised my phone out from my (now slightly tighter) jeans pocket, I see that the screen is blank. No message, no twitter update and no new email – nichts, nada… nobody loves me today. And yet the sensation was unmistakably real. But, I am not going mad; for this, dear reader, is another case of the ‘phantom phone vibration’. Read more

Take the smartphone addiction test! Are you hooked to your iPhone?

C3GZ by Symic, on FlickrIt’s dinner time and the log fire is burning. My wife and I sitting in a pub on a rainy day and we are eyeing the menus – the seafood looks nice. Yes, this is the stuff of an English holiday by the sea: sitting on wooden chairs near an open fire with harassed-looking bar staff in one corner and a gambling machine in the other.

A family dressed in matching waterproof coats – clearly also on their holiday – take seats next to us. That’s odd, I think, there’s none of the usual sibling squabbling between the kids. No, this family is calm and contented because two of the school age kids are on their smartphones. And so are both the parents. Meanwhile, the six year old is playing on a Gameboy.
Read more

Could you survive a week without emails?

monday
‘You’ve got mail’ – *groan*
It’s 7.30am and the emails have already started. As I sit, savouring a few moments calm over a bowl of muesli before leaving for work, the phone has already started to chime. The ‘silent’ phone setting insists on buzzing on the table top – vibrating my coffee mug. I have resigned myself to the alternative ‘classic’ ding-dong. I guess my working day has begun.

Although I can rarely follow my employer’s ‘good ICT policy’ – fastidiously filing every email into a named subfolder (I never know where to put ‘Today’s Lunch Offer’), most days I click each email just long enough for it to be marked as ‘read’. Few of my colleagues manage this. I guess working part-time has some benefits.

Relentless work emails and calendar invitations that materialise from the electronic ether is the norm for many. This incessant distraction is a drain and – it doesn’t take a genius to figure out – probably drains productivity. The phone is dead: the majority of interactions are now done digitally. Could we sever our digital ties and survive at work without the emails? One group of workers did just that – for one week they went without emails. Researchers watched what they did and remotely monitored their stress levels. How did they cope? Surprisingly well… Read more

Time to Change how we view ‘Nuclear Power’

This article was recently featured in the Tampa Tribune Newspaper – a discussion with experts about alternative nuclear power. Enjoy!


We are in an increasingly energy-hungry world.

Power On Button
We're living in an increasingly energy dependent world
As we sit enjoying breakfast in well-lit, air conditioned homes, Nigeria is crippled by power outages. The most rapidly developing African nation is blighted by near-continuous black-outs. At night, families huddle around kerosene burners for heat and light.

However, we in the West are not immune to the perils of energy shortages. Oil supplies are dwindling, and the USA’s aging electricity grid is buckling under our insatiable appetite for 24/7 air conditioning, computing and entertainment. Washington, D.C., recently saw a new wave of blackouts — one, ironically, causing a shutdown in the nation’s electricity control center. Unless something is done soon, our future could be a very dark one. Read more

Are Robots watching You? Experts Give an Urgent Warning about Spy Robots!

Tomy Omnibot-2000
Robots are often pretty embarrassing. Expect this to change, and soon.
I can imagine what you’re thinking: In a fight between humans and robots, we would win hands-down – we can just pull their plug out!

But robots have come a long way in recent years. Bill Gates recently said that we are standing at the dawn of a new era in robotics, likening this present age in robotic technology to where the computer industry was about 30 years ago. In the coming years, he says, we should expect robots to be a part of our daily lives. And we’re not talking about dumb vacuum cleaners or drinks dispensers here, but flying, walking, crawling, intelligent and autonomous artificial helpers.

Does this all sound far-fetched? Well don’t be too sure because experts in artificial intelligence have just published a stark warning that we must start to tackle some tricky ethical and legal issues now.

Welcome to the fascinating, bizarre and slightly frightening world of of robotics Read more

The Future of Nuclear Power after Fukushima: Thorium Reactors?

UPDATE (5th August 2011): Following the interesting debates and discussions arising from this piece, a follow up article has been written “Time to Change of view of ‘Nuclear Power’” – which was also published in the Tampa Tribune.

Hands up – Who thinks nuclear power is safe?

Before the Japan earthquake and tsunami on March 11, opinion surveys showed that most people thought it was. But as radiation seeps from the stricken Fukushima power plant, the world suddenly seems a very different place…

Fossil fuels are running out and we all want safe, clean and affordable power for this generation and the next. But is this an impossible dream? Today’s post describes how it is possible: It can be done with a hitherto little known type of nuclear power (yes, you read that correctly) – called the Thorium Reactor.

A ‘Thorium Reactor‘ is completely different to the Fukushima power plant design: A Thorium reactor doesn’t produce radioactive waste that lasts a thousand years, it won’t ever have a Chernobyl-like  ‘melt-down’ and it can’t be used to make an atomic bomb… And here’s the Sucker Punch: We’ve known about this super-efficient green technology for over 50 years! Read more

Out of This World! The Amateur’s Guide to Making Your Own Satellite

Money
What would you do with US$10,000? (That's about £6,000) ... Build your own satellite perhaps?
What could you do with $10,000?

Take a trip around the world? Refit the kitchen or replace the ageing car? Perhaps you would invest it in stocks and shares?

But what would you say to building and launching your very own satellite? Forget paying to have a star named after you: Technology is now smaller and cheaper than ever before, so building your very own ‘Sputnik’ is a very real possibility. Utilising the kind of gizmos normally found in a mobile phone, amateurs can buy ‘DIY satellite kits’ and build their very planetary orbiter. These ‘nano-satellites’ are no bigger than a bottle of coke and weigh less than a bag of potatoes – and nice space agencies will let you ‘hitch a ride’ on the next rocket launch for next to nothing!

Amateurs and professionals alike are flocking to get a piece of the action: Ever fancy starting your own satellite TV station? What about monitoring weather patterns or having your personal Hubble Space Telescope?

Read on to find out the steps to making your very own ‘CubeSat’… Read more