Michigan Technological University is patenting a way to track the position of a cellphone user (WO2004/105356). A vehicle-mounted transmitter drives around the area under investigation and prompts phones in the area to respond with their identity numbers. When the receiver detects a signal from the phone in question, it uses a directional antenna to work out which direction the phone is in. By sending out a brief clock signal and checking the time it takes to get a response, it can tell how far away the phone is, so pinpointing its position.
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Disney has a neat idea for making electronic toys move in time with music while avoiding the need for an expensive Bluetooth-based control system (US2004/0081078).
The trick is to hide the control signals for, say, a toy bear in a musical soundtrack. The signal is broken down into several data streams which in turn control the loudness of different notes within a chord. So if a 3-bit code makes a toy bear jump, a corresponding three-note 鈥渄ata chord鈥� is sounded in the soundtrack to, say, a kid鈥檚 story. This would allow an audio book played on a car stereo to make the toy perform tricks for the kids in the back.
The ideal make-up simultaneously sticks to skin, feels soft and absorbs sweat. Now chemists at Merck of Darmstadt in Germany have observed a chemical reaction that might lead to a formulation that does all these things (US 2004/0011253).
Watching through an electron microscope, they noticed that when a warm solution of magnesium sulphate was trickled into sodium hydroxide at just the right speed, the resulting magnesium hydroxide dried in leaf-shaped flakes. Because the leaves slip and slide over each other, the powder feels soft, while the capillary action of the narrow spaces between them absorbs sweat.
