Festival extras beamed to your phone
Can鈥檛 get enough of your favourite band? Biographies, discounts on their latest album and games could soon be sent, via sound waves, to the phones of people watching a band on stage. Disney鈥檚 research lab in Zurich, Switzerland, is testing a sound system that hides data in the audio pumped out of the speakers by the stage. Once picked up by the microphones of smartphones, an app decodes the data. It was shown at a wireless conference in Austria on 4 April.
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The number of faces the FBI may have stored in its Next Generation Identification biometric program by next year, according to a by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
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Wikipedia edits spot flu outbreak
The internet will see you now. Flu cases can be tracked by mining data from Wikipedia. Software monitors a handful of entries that a sick person would look up, like 鈥渇lu season鈥� or 鈥渇ever鈥�. Every hour, it records how many people in the US have accessed those pages. When the data was compared with figures from the US Centers for Disease Control, it accurately predicted the number of cases in the country two weeks sooner than the official figures (PLoS Computational Biology, ).
Robot oesophagus for children
About 1000 babies are born every year with part of their oesophagus missing. Treatment can involve many operations and weeks in a medically induced coma. Now Pierre Dupont and a team at Boston Children鈥檚 Hospital have built a robotic implant that pulls the disconnected ends of the oesophagus together. The device measures growth and can slacken or tighten as needed. Animal trials will start later this year.
