The most alarming thing about taking your hands off the steering wheel when hurtling along the road at 90 kilometres an hour is just how quickly you get used it. There is a brief moment of initial uncertainty, but then you quickly stop worrying about who is control and just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

Welcome to the brave new world of semi-autonomous cars. I say “semi” because this car is not entirely driving itself. Volvo calls it a platoon: a convoy of moving cars that are wirelessly coupled together, one behind the other, into a road train, all under the control of a single professional lead driver.

With the adaptive cruise control already turned on, all it took was the push of two onscreen buttons and the car appeared to take on a mind of its own. The steering wheel began to move by itself as though possessed, while the car gently accelerated to close the gap to just 6-metres behind the vehicle in front.

Besides freeing up some time for drivers to catch up on reading, crack open the laptop, watch a movie or grab a bite, Volvo believes there are broader gains to be had from this kind of technology. Vehicles driving in such tight formations with fewer speed fluctuations should dramatically reduce congestion, says Erik Coelingh, Volvo’s senior technical specialist who is heading the research near Gothenburg. The reduction in drag could potentially cut fuel consumption by as much as 20 per cent, he says.

Safety issues

Then there’s the issue of safety. With as many as 10 vehicles linked together via a vehicle-to-vehicle version of Wi-Fi – an IEEE standard called 802.11p – the train as a whole moves as one, with all vehicles mimicking the actions of the lead.

This means that even though they are travelling much closer than is normally advised – or even legal in some countries – their reaction time disappears in an emergency braking scenario, with all vehicles breaking in unison, avoiding a collision.

So confident is Volvo in this safety mechanism, it says that if the lead vehicle were to drive off a cliff, the next vehicle could stop before reaching the edge. Luckily, I don’t have to put this hypothesis to the test.

At least that’s the theory. But, given the recent advances in autonomous vehicles, do we really need platoons? Sitting in the passenger seat beside me, Coelingh points out that cars like Google’s fully-autonomous prototypes are highly impressive but they are still very much research prototypes, consisting of vehicles with expensive equipment bolted on. “We wanted to use existing technology to the largest extent possible,” says Coelingh.

There isn’t a wire or circuit board in sight in the I’m sitting in. With the exception of a discrete aerial on the roof and a touch screen on the dashboard, it looks and feels like a finished product. Almost all the sensors and actuators that keep me from flying off the road now come as standard in most new Volvos (and other manufacturers for that matter). They are the exact same ones that enable cars to stay in lanes and avoid hitting other cars and pedestrians.

What’s more, we are not yet ready for autonomous cars. With the exception of only a few places in the world, such as , autonomous cars could not legally drive on roads. There are still a host of legislative and liability issues to sort out first, says Coelingh.

For platoons, it’s possible that many of these issues can be overcome sooner – roughly 10 years – and in the process act as a stepping-stone towards full autonomy, he says. Platoons have already been tested on public roads in Spain.

And even when autonomous cars arrive, the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive, says Dave Shemmans, CEO of Ricardo, a British engineering firm involved in the EU’s €6.4 million Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE) project. “Even with fully autonomous vehicles you can still do platooning,” he says.

As my time on the test track comes to an end and I prepare to disengage from the platoon, it occurs to me that the notion of driving as a form of freedom – with the wind in your hair and the open road before you – no longer applies. But for most drivers, the reality is much more mundane anyhow, with countless hours spent in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

I disengage from the platoon, gently apply the brakes and suddenly I’m on my own again, the road demanding my attention once more. Where’s the freedom in that?

FOR the avid reader who has left paper books and magazines behind, the world is a complicated place. Do you shell out for a tablet computer with sleek LCD screen, only to be foiled by the glare of a sunny day? Or turn to the economical e-reader – its electronic ink easy on the eye, but trapped in black and white?

A new type of colour e-ink – the common term for electrophoretic displays – could solve the dilemma by powering e-readers that rival print magazines in their vivid readability.

Naoki Hiji of , Japan, and colleagues have built a prototype system that uses tiny fluid-filled cells containing cyan, magenta, yellow and white particles to produce almost any colour.

Black-and-white e-ink displays work by having negatively charged black particles and positively charged white particles suspended in fluid inside a cell. Apply a negative electrical field to the cell, and white particles move to the top and become visible; flip the current, and black shows up.

Hiji’s display uses the same principle, but each colour particle responds to a certain intensity of electrical field, while the white particles are uncharged (see diagram).

Colour e-ink is nothing new – but one typical approach, which involves simply placing a red, green or blue filter in front of each cell, means that three cells need to be combined to produce most colours, resulting in low resolution. Other techniques are criticised for creating washed-out colours that can’t compete with the brightness of LCD screens.

“Colour e-ink is nothing new but typical approaches are criticised for creating washed-out colours”

Hiji says his team’s device achieves a resolution of 300 dots per inch, on a par with LCD. “But under sunlight, our technology can provide superior colour quality to LCD,” he says. And like all electrophoretic displays, it uses very little power, increasing battery life.

E Ink, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the company that provides the technology behind the Amazon and Sony e-reader displays, uses for its Triton displays. Colour readers will always be niche, says Sriram Peruvemba of E Ink. “Most long-form reading is done in black and white. I have yet to see people preferring to read orange on blue or cyan on magenta.”

SMARTPHONES may soon get a lot better at finishing your sentences for you – with the help of words and phrases gleaned from crowdsourcing.

The software packages in today’s phones often struggle with texts and voice commands if a user attempts words or phrases that aren’t included in the phone’s database.

To see if the crowd could help, of Montana Tech in Butte and at the University of St Andrews, UK, called upon workers of the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The plan was to try and improve a predictive system used in Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices, which help disabled people to communicate by painstakingly typing out words interpreted from their muscle twitches or blinks.

The researchers paid 298 Mechanical Turk workers to imagine phrases they might need if they had motor neuron disease or cerebral palsy. Their responses produced nearly 6000 useful phrases. Next, by trawling through Twitter postings and other social media texts the workers extracted sentences and phrases with similar structures to the initial phrases, expanding the corpus to tens of millions of entries.

The result is a system that needs 11 per cent fewer keystrokes than a standard AAC device. For anyone struggling over every word it is a big improvement, says Kristensson. It should also work when applied to more standard text and speech recognition systems, he says. The work appears in the .

at the University of Sussex, UK, agrees that the system has potential. “Getting adequate quantities of good quality data to build statistical [language] models is one of the most significant challenges in this area,” he says.

It may look like an ordinary USB memory stick, but a little gadget that can sequence DNA while plugged into your laptop could have far-reaching effects on medicine and genetic research.

The UK firm Oxford Nanopore built the device, called MinION, and claims it can sequence simple genomes – like those of some viruses and bacteria – in a matter of seconds. More complex genomes would take longer, but MinION could also be useful for obtaining quick results in sequencing DNA from cells in a biopsy to look for cancer, for example, or to determine the genetic identity of bone fragments at an archaeological dig.

The company demonstrated today at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference in Marco Island, Florida, that MinION has sequenced a simple virus called Phi X, which contains 5000 genetic base pairs.

Proof of principle

This is merely a proof of principle – “Phi X was the first DNA genome to be sequenced ever,” says Nick Loman, a bioinformatician at the Pallen research group at the University of Birmingham, UK, and author of the blog Pathogens: Genes and Genomes. But it shows for the first time that this technology works, he says. “If you can sequence this genome you should be able to sequence larger genomes.”

Oxford Nanopore is also building a larger device, GridION, for lab use. Both GridION and MinION operate using the same technology: DNA is added to a solution containing enzymes that bind to the end of each strand. When a current is applied across the solution these enzymes and DNA are drawn to hundreds of wells in a membrane at the bottom of the solution, each just 10 micrometres in diameter.

Within each well is a modified version of the protein alpha hemolysin (AHL), which has a hollow tube just 10 nanometres wide at its core. As the DNA is drawn to the pore the enzyme attaches itself to the AHL and begins to unzip the DNA, threading one strand of the double helix through the pore. The unique electrical characteristics of each base disrupt the current flowing through each pore, enough to determine which of the four bases is passing through it. Each disruption is read by the device, like a tickertape reader.

Long strands, and simple

This approach has two key advantages over other sequencing techniques: first, the DNA does not need to be amplified – a time-consuming process that replicates the DNA in a sample to make it abundant enough to make a reliable measurement.

Second, the devices can sequence DNA strands as long as 10,000 bases continuously, whereas most other techniques require the DNA to be sheared into smaller fragments of at most a few hundred bases. This means that once they have been read they have to be painstakingly reassembled by software like pieces of a jigsaw. “We just read the entire thing in one go,” as with Phi X, says Clive Brown, Oxford Nanopore’s chief technology officer.

But Oxford Nanopore will face stiff competition. Jonathan Rothberg, a scientist and entrepreneur who founded rival firm 454 Life Sciences, also announced at the AGBT conference that his start-up company, Ion Torrent, will be launching a desktop sequencing machine. Dubbed the Ion Proton, it identifies bases by using transistors to detect hydrogen ions as they are given off during the polymerisation of DNA.

This device will be capable of sequencing a human genome in 2 hours for around $1000, Rothberg claims. Nanopores are an “elegant” technology, he says, but Ion Torrent already has a foot in the door. “As we saw last summer with the E. coli outbreak in Germany, people are already now using it,” he says.

Pocketful of DNA

The GridION will take several hours to complete a human genome, by contrast. The MinION, while not designed for full human genome sequencing, will be marketed for use in shorter sequencing tasks like identifying pathogens, or screening for genetic mutations that can increase risk of certain diseases. Each MinION is expected to cost $900 when it goes on sale later this year.

“The biggest strength of nanopore sequencing is that it generates very long reads, which has been a limitation for most other technologies,” says Loman. If the costs, quality, ease of use and throughput can be brought in line with other instruments, it will be a “killer technology” for sequencing, he says.

As for clinical applications, David Rasko at the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, says the MinION could have huge benefits. “It may have serious implications for public health and it could really change the way we do medicine,” he says. “You can see every physician walking around the hospital with a pocketful of these things.” And it will likely increase the number of scientists generating sequencing data by making the technology cheaper and more accessible, he says.

Correction: When the article first appeared, it stated that the MinION could completely sequence a human genome in 6 hours. This is incorrect – a single MinION cannot complete a human genome. The article has been amended to reflect this.

IT’S a problem familiar to most of us: you circle for ages waiting to find a parking space and just when you’ve spotted one, someone else darts in first.

Now a “parking patch” could change that by bringing together wireless sensors and mobile apps to steer drivers towards those elusive vacant spots, while also allowing traffic wardens to home in on parking offenders.

Some local authorities have already started embedding radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in parking permits. But while this makes it easier for wardens to check their validity with a quick scan by a handheld reader, it does little else, says Adrian Bone, CEO of , a start-up that developed the new parking patch at the in Brighton, UK. The real challenge lies in telling when a parking space is empty or occupied without having to fit a car with any special equipment, he says.

Bone’s solution, developed with company co-founder John Bartington at the University of Essex in Colchester, is to attach cheap, low-powered wireless sensors to the road surface in each parking bay. These 7-centimetre-wide patches are glued down in the centre of each bay, where they can detect when a car is present or not. As the firm is currently filing a patent, it won’t yet reveal exactly how the sensor works, but the device will wirelessly relay information to a base station via a mesh network with its neighbours. This means the system does not require any new infrastructure. It is designed to work in conjunction with RFID permits if required, and a smartphone app. A trial is due to begin at the University of Sussex in the next few weeks.

The app would give drivers real-time information about available parking spaces near where they were, with streets colour-coded depending on how many spots were free at the time.

The system can also alert traffic wardens when drivers have parked on no-stop zones, helping to reduce congestion. It could allow local authorities to use dynamic parking tariffs, says Bone. This is where real-time data about the occupancy of spaces is used to set parking prices. So parking in less congested areas and at quieter times of day would be cheaper. “You can set prices to encourage people to park elsewhere,” he says.

Some modern shopping centres and car parks can already guide customers towards vacant parking bays, and even remind them of where they parked when they return. But these systems, developed by in Australia, rely on expensive networks of cameras, one for each bay, and so can only be deployed in covered multistorey car parks.

Another approach in San Francisco is to bury magnetometers in each bay. Developed by Georgia-based StreetSmart, it covers more than 8000 bays and, like the patches, uses a wireless mesh network. The trial is also experimenting with dynamic pricing.

Parking is ripe for a revamp, and this kind of app-based technology is going to play a vital role, says Paul Watters, head of road policy with the UK’s Automobile Association in Basingstoke. But it is equally important that the information is controlled, he says. Drivers wouldn’t like it if there was no leeway and fines were issued as soon as their time was up. And while the apps could easily warn drivers when their time is running out, they could also alert wardens. “It could end up as a race to get to the car,” he says.

“If an app warned both drivers and traffic wardens when time is up, it could end up as a race to the car”

WE WALK about with thousands of songs, photos and videos in our pockets, but we won’t be able to keep cramming more and more onto our memory cards forever. While last week’s news that a single bit of digital information has been stored on just 12 atoms was remarkable, at some point we are going to reach a limit. What happens when we can store a single bit on an atom, for example?

Now a radical approach could solve our impending memory crisis and allow a massive increase in storage density – without making chips any bigger. It may also force us to reassess the notion that all things digital must be made up of 1s and 0s.

The idea is simple: why use a single memory cell to store two binary states when it could hold many more? The technology relies upon phase change materials (PCMs) that can hold information by switching between an amorphous state and a crystalline one. PCM memory can write and retrieve data 100 times faster than Flash memory, which is used in many consumer gadgets and computers. It is also extremely durable and can be reused at least 10 million times; Flash can cope with just 3000 uses.

“Why use a single memory cell to store two binary states when it could hold many more?”

But PCM memory’s true potential lies in its ability to store more than a single bit per cell. “If you are able to control the current you can create states between the two, something that is not fully crystallised and something that is not fully amorphous,” says Evangelos Eleftheriou, head of storage technologies at in Switzerland.

Precisely how many states can be created remains to be seen, but some researchers, like at the University of Exeter in the UK, have already demonstrated 512 discrete states in a single 20-nanometre cell – about the same size as a Flash memory cell, which usually only holds two.

Challenges still remain, however. Differentiating between these distinct states requires highly sensitive and expensive equipment, which wouldn’t be practical in a chip, says Wright. Another issue is drift, where the resistance of the material changes over time. This is not a problem when storing two states but could be a nuisance for multiple states.

IBM believes it has a two-fold solution: electrically measuring the amorphous thickness of the material instead of the resistance, and reading multiple cells at the same time to gauge their relative drifted positions. For now most research is focused on the slightly less ambitious goal of storing four states, or two bits of data per cell, says Eleftheriou. “It gives you double the capacity for more or less the same cost,” he says.

So is this the death of binary? Not necessarily. Storing multiple bits doesn’t mean we have to abandon binary – and the decades of technology and programming that come with it – and switch to base-4. Four states can be just as easily used to store two binary bits as it can four separate pieces of data: in information terms they are the same.

However, the PCM revolution is not here yet, says Wright. The three big memory companies – Samsung, Micron and Hynix – are unlikely to start rolling out multistate PCM until they have finished squeezing revenues from Flash, says Eleftheriou, which will probably be in 2016. “They will really milk that cow as much as they can,” he says.

of the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, has done just that. She has built a device that exploits our thumbs’ natural ability to line up with our fingers even when we can’t see them – a talent known as proprioception.

Wolf attached two iPads back-to-back to create what she calls a PinchPad. It can sense when a user’s fingers and thumbs make a pinching motion with the two tablets sandwiched in between.

For example, touching your thumb to your index finger on opposite sides of the PinchPad can be interpreted as a “select” or “undo” command, while sweeping the thumb from one finger to the next could adjust volume or brightness, Wolf says. And moving the thumb in little circles over each finger can let you manipulate on-screen dials. Wolf will present her work next month at the in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

This is not the first device with a touch-sensitive back, says Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Microsoft once built a prototype device called with this feature, and the next version of Sony’s handheld PlayStation console, the Vita, will have it too. Harrison says Wolf’s work is useful because of the novel gestures it offers. “And you get extra buttons for free without having to put anything on screen,” he says.

ONE of the biggest drawbacks with owning an electric vehicle (EV) is range anxiety – a driver’s nagging fear that the battery charge will not get them to their destination. Now IBM claims to have solved a fundamental problem that may lead to the creation of a battery with an 800-kilometre (500-mile) range – letting EVs potentially compete with most petrol engines for the first time.

Standard electric vehicles use lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are bulky and rarely provide 160 kilometres (100 miles) of driving before they run down.

A newer type, known as a lithium-air cell, is more attractive because it has theoretical energy densities more than 1000 times greater than the Li-ion type, putting it almost on a par with gasoline. Instead of using metal oxides in the positive electrode, lithium-air cells use carbon, which is lighter and reacts with oxygen from the air around it to produce an electrical current.

But there’s a problem. Chemical instabilities limit their lifespan when recharging, making them impractical for use in cars, says physicist at IBM’s Almaden laboratories, based in San Jose, California.

So Wilcke studied the underlying electrochemistry of these cells using a form of mass spectrometry. What he found was that oxygen is reacting not just with the carbon electrode, as it was known to, but also with the electrolytic solvent – the conducting solution that carries the lithium ions between the electrodes.

“Instead of using heavy metal-oxides, the cell’s carbon electrode reacts with the oxygen in air”

However, if the electrolyte reacts with the oxygen when the car is in use it will eventually be depleted. So, working with his colleague Alessandro Curioni at IBM’s Zurich research labs in Switzerland, Wilcke used a Blue Gene supercomputer to run extremely detailed models of the reactions to look for alternative electrolytes. This included a form of atomistic modelling right down to the quantum mechanics of the components, says Curioni.

“We now have one which looks very promising,” says Wilcke. He won’t reveal what material it is but says that several research prototypes have already been demonstrated. And as part of Battery 500, an IBM-led coalition involving four US national laboratories and commercial partners, the hope is to have a full-scale prototype ready by 2013, with commercial batteries to follow by around 2020.

If it works, this would solve a major obstacle with lithium-air batteries, says Phil Bartlett, head of electrochemistry at the University of Southampton, UK. There are other practical issues to address, such as enabling such batteries to cope with moist air. “Lithium in water spontaneously catches fire,” he points out.

SHOULDER surfers could be thwarted and ATMs made more secure by allowing customers to enter a tactile PIN via their smartphone instead of using the normal keypad.

The basic problem with traditional PINs and passwords is that when used in a public space they can easily be observed, says at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon.

So he and his colleagues have developed a range of touch-based code-entry systems which aim to prevent prying eyes from getting a look in. They hinge on allowing phones to communicate securely with ATMs, such as by using near-field communication readers, so smartphones could be used instead of the highly visible keypads.

The team has explored two main approaches, says Bianchi’s colleague at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute at the University of Madeira in Funchal, Portugal. “In one approach you try to recognise what you feel and with the other you count what you feel.” In a system called PhoneLock, for example, alphanumeric icons on a smartphone touchscreen are replaced with a set of up to 10 different tactile cues known as tactons. “They’re the touch equivalent of icons,” Oakley explains.

“Icons on a smartphone touchscreen are replaced with a set of alternative tactile cues, called tactons”

The tactons, which are easy to distinguish from each other, are placed in a circular grid that is divided into several radial segments so that when the user moves their finger over a segment the vibrate motor in the device will vibrate in a specific pattern depending on which tacton is there. All the user has to do is feel the different segments until they find the right one in a sequence they have remembered and then press an icon at the centre of the circle to enter it.

In another approach, called SpinLock, the user is presented with a circular wheel, much like the click-wheel on old iPods. This works like the dial of a old-fashioned combination safe, but with the user running their finger around it in one direction until they have felt the appropriate number of clicks in a sequence, before running it in the other direction.

Although it takes longer to enter a PIN like this, any observer would be unable to reproduce it because the tacton positions are randomised, says Oakley. This could make it more secure to make online purchases on mobile devices or punch in an access code to gain entry to a secure area.

“It’s a very novel approach,” says Paul Dunphy, a researcher at Newcastle University, UK, who has looked at ways of making PINs more secure. One potential weak spot is the possibility that a would-be hacker could use microphones to pick up the faint buzzing sounds produced when a tacton is activated, he said. The team’s alternative approach – using audio feedback through headphones instead of tactile cues – could avoid such attacks. The work was presented last week at the OzCHI conference in Canberra, Australia.