ALS, often called Lou Gehrig’s disease in the US, paralyses muscle cells that control movement. There is no cure or treatment, and no conclusive evidence of what causes it. Those with the condition almost always die within a few years.

The new discovery, by at the University of Alabama in Birmingham and colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, has highlighted a protein that may be a culprit. The protein, called MSP, was first found in male nematode worms 11 years ago. It is secreted by sperm cells to prepare eggs for fertilisation.

In 2004, a similar protein was discovered in a large human family with the inherited form of ALS. In humans it appears to be involved in signalling between cells, especially muscle cells.

Miller’s team has now found that if worms and fruit flies have a mutation that makes them produce less MSP, they suffer mitochondrial defects like those in people with ALS. This suggests that a lack of the protein might help trigger the disease. Every person with ALS studied so far also has less of the protein than healthy people, adds Miller.

“The science is certainly interesting,” says , director of the Robert Packard Center for the Study of ALS at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “But I don’t know that there is a therapy in there somewhere.” He says that although the protein may be involved in inherited forms of ALS, it is not yet clear that it is also relevant to the more common non-familial forms of the condition.

Journal reference:

VOTERS in the US often struggle to make it to the polls to elect a president. In 2004, just over 60 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot, but this was the highest turnout since 1968. In 2008, an “energised” populace topped that, and installed Barack Obama in the White House. Even then, that involved just 62 per cent of voters.

How can more Americans – and citizens of other democracies – be convinced to vote? Smartphones and tablet computers may help.

Bryan Campbell and his team at Rice University in Houston, Texas, designed an iPhone app for casting votes. They then asked 55 people aged between 18 and 69, with and without smartphone experience, to vote using either the app or via conventional electronic and paper systems.

All users typically took 90 seconds longer to cast their vote on the smartphone system. However, the app did seem to reduce the number of mistakes made in voting, at least among people familiar with smartphones. This group was more accurate when selecting the candidate of their choice using the app than on a conventional system. The researchers think they will be able to reduce the time taken by making adjustments to their app. The team will present the work this week at the annual meeting of the in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Existing electronic voting systems have been slow to catch on. They were only used in of ballots cast in the 2010 US federal midterm elections, despite having been available for several election cycles. This is in part due to lingering security issues, and it is likely that such problems will only be amplified if voting goes mobile.

“Today’s mobile devices are on a platform that is much more insecure than the PC you have at home. There is no separation of applications,” says Avi Rubin of the in Baltimore, Maryland. Malware embedded in other apps could easily invade voting software, he says. “You can’t be sure your Angry Birds application isn’t changing your vote.”

“At the moment, you can’t be sure your Angry Birds application isn’t changing your vote”

The US government wants to see voting practices improve. The 2000 presidential election was decided by a close result in Florida, but voting records there became mired in controversy. After this debacle, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, a law that many have interpreted as designed to bring voting practices into the 21st century.

“Some form of internet voting seems inevitable and it follows that smartphones and other internet-capable mobile technologies will play a role,” says Campbell.

Campbell and his colleagues say they are aware of the security issues, and expect they will be addressed in the coming months and years. An app might not lead to a sudden rise in voter turnout, though, even among young people. They tend to be more electronically savvy, but young people are often apathetic towards politics, says Michael McDonald of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and the .

The ballot itself is just one step, he says. People still have to register to vote and download the app. Easy as it may be, in order to do all of that, “you have to care”, he says.

SMARTPHONE users, listen up: your precious apps are being held to ransom. A war brewing in the US over patents threatens to stifle the development of new apps for some of the planet’s most popular cellphones and kill off the small technology businesses that make them. But the app industry isn’t about to give in without a fight.

At the centre of this battle is the firm Lodsys, which holds four patents for software inventions that let consumers use apps to buy things online, or are used in online polling systems. In May, Lodsys filed lawsuits against seven small software development firms, claiming the apps they create to run on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems infringe their patents.

This isn’t your typical tech-company legal squabble. Lodsys didn’t even invent the technology it holds the patents for – an independent inventor called Daniel Abelow did. In fact, all Lodsys does is sit on the patents it owns and demand payment whenever a developer invents an app that may have used an Abelow process.

The tech industry has dubbed this practice “patent trolling”. The tactic tends to work well with rich tech firms like Google, Apple and Microsoft, which can afford to pay the relatively small licensing fees that firms like Lodsys demand for use of their patents.

But Apple’s wildly profitable App Store and Google’s thriving counterpart, Marketplace, rely on small developers to build smartphone apps. Without them, the firms would lose a lot of money as they get a cut of each sale, plus millions of iPhone and Android phone users would be deprived of their apps.

Trolls may soon lose the upper hand. Apple stepped into the fray last week, asking a court in the Eastern District of Texas, where Lodsys has brought its claims, to be allowed to intervene. That may be enough to get Lodsys to back down. But the legal district is known for decisions that favour the “trolls” and the company is nominally based there, even though its only registered employee works in Chicago.

Another firm, ForeSee Results, which makes polling-form software for the internet, is taking things even further. The company asked a federal court in Chicago last week to say that all four Lodsys patents are invalid.

Michael Wokasch, an intellectual property lawyer at Quarles & Brady in Madison, Wisconsin, said: “What ForeSee Results is doing is essentially entering into patent litigation. It has the same potential costs as you might expect, with one huge advantage: it’s not in east Texas.”

This is not an isolated case. A company called MacroSolve is notorious in the industry for churning out suits similar to Lodsys’s. It has now targeted not only Apple but Blackberry and Android developers.

So far, no one has taken on MacroSolve, but if ForeSee is successful the trolls’ days could be numbered.

A new way to protect digital secrets promises an end to accidental leaks, but may dismay law enforcers

IN JUNE 2009, 45,000 people linked to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, suddenly had their privacy compromised. Personal data including social security numbers of students, former students, staff and faculty were exposed. But this was no high-tech hack – all of the information was contained in a single stolen computer. Had the data been safely encrypted there would have been virtually no risk, but typical encryption methods require specialised software that few are willing to invest in.

Computers are usually protected by a password stored in the disc’s operating system, such as Windows or Mac OS. But the data on the disc itself is not protected, so a savvy technician can sidestep the password protection and access the information.

There is a solution: hard disc and flash drive manufacturers have begun distributing storage media that automatically encrypt data as it is stored and decrypt it when it is read back. With only a password required, the need for special security software is eliminated. Within a year or two, researchers say, all hard discs will be protected using this method, known as full-disc encryption.

Many businesses and governments use software-based full-disc encryption to protect against such intrusions, but that requires installing software above and beyond standard security packages, which are geared towards defending against viruses and online attacks. Even then, such encryption software can be difficult to use effectively, as a user must specify which files need special protection.

Self-encrypting devices instead pack the encryption process into a chip on the disc or drive. Everything on the disc – not just the operating system, but file directories and all of the files themselves – is automatically encrypted and can be accessed using a conventional password only the computer user knows. Anyone trying to access the disc without the password would have to contend with protection that rivals 128-bit or 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard keys, which are virtually unbreakable.

“Hardware is faster than software, more reliable and harder to hack,” says Simson Garfinkel at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Of course, if the password to a drive protected in this way is lost, the data is essentially locked forever, making it a very unforgiving system for everyday consumers. Still, manufacturers including Samsung, Fujitsu, Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi have all recently announced plans to begin producing self-encrypting media.

Government agencies will likely be their first customers: between 50 and 60 per cent of US-government laptops are currently unprotected by specialised encryption software, says Jon Oltsik, an analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group, an IT and business strategy firm based in Milford, Massachusetts.

Such devices becoming widely available to all will likely prove to be a massive headache for law enforcement agencies, because their investigations often depend on recovering stolen or illicit information held on the computers of suspects.

People “tweeting” mundane 140-character messages on are creating evolving regional dialects just like those of spoken language. The dialects are so pronounced that senders in the US can be located just by marking the words they use.

Regional dialects are one of the joys of spoken English. In the US, “y’all” marks someone as a southerner; “cab” a New Yorker. Depending on where you live, a long sandwich can be a “hero”, a “sub” or a “hoagie”. But now those peculiarities are also evolving in social media.

, a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleagues used a Twitter service called Garden Hose that collects tweets to analyse a week’s worth of the messages posted by cellphone in the US last March. All the tweeters had turned on their phones’ GPS system, so the messages were geotagged.

The researchers found that if you are cool in the San Francisco area, you will probably write “koo” on Twitter, but in southern California, you write “coo”. You are “hella” tired in northern California, “deadass” tired in New York, and in Los Angeles you use an acronym for an obscenity. Other words can also give away location, including references to sports teams and rock bands.

Thousands of tweets

To eliminate commercial messages and spam, the researchers looked only at people who had written at least 20 messages that month, had fewer than 1000 followers and who followed fewer than 1000 others. They came up with 9500 users and 380,000 messages using 4.7 million words, with a total vocabulary of 5216 words, and then went looking for regionalisms in the tweets.

When they compared what the words told them with the locations tagged in the messages, the geographic touchstones “are correct to within 300 miles”, Eisenstein said.

Giving yourself away

This, of course, raises privacy issues: if you are giving away your location by your messaging, you are providing useful commercial data someone can use or sell.

, associate director of digital strategy for the Pew Internet & American Life Project, points out that only 4 per cent of internet users say they reveal their specific locations by using services like or , but this new research shows that people’s general whereabouts may be found out by analysing what they talk about on Twitter – or even how they talk.

“The limitation of this study, of course, is that only 8 per cent of online adults say they use Twitter,” says Fox.

The researchers reported their findings on Friday to a in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Word of the government’s block came from , a Saudi website.

MobileMe is Apple’s cloud service, a conduit for email, contacts and calendar services, as well as storage for pictures, video and backups. It syncs with Macs, iPhones and iPads. Apple has a huge investment in MobileMe because of the growing interest in cloud computing, reportedly spending $1 billion to build a 4.6-hectare server farm in North Carolina for the service.

Last summer, the Saudi government threatened to shut down Blackberry services unless the Canadian company that runs Blackberries, Research in Motion (RIM), granted access to encrypted text and email messages sent from the devices. The Saudis claimed the step was necessary to hamper communication by terrorists. RIM worked out a , agreeing to put a Blackberry server in Saudi Arabia and gave a government a key to the encryption code.

RIM shots

Other countries’ governments also have leaned on RIM for access as well, threatening to block service without compliance.

between Google and the Chinese government over the Communist party’s “great firewall” remains largely unresolved as well.

, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said the Saudi government may have been sending a warning to Apple that there might be an upcoming change to its online security policy.

“I’ll bet the issue is not censorship of content per se but a warning to Apple that it is going to have to give up its [encryption] key,” Rubin said.

A few hours after posting the story about the blockage, Apple World posted that the service was being restored. The Arabic-language website suggested it might just have been an error.

Tracking Arctic wildlife and monitoring the local climate is dangerous and difficult work, often requiring unusual approaches. For instance, instrument-bearing narwhals have recently improved ocean-temperature estimates. Now, military technology is providing biologists with their data.

An unmanned aircraft, the , was adapted from military use by ‘s team at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and researchers with the and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Launched from ships, it has a wingspan of 3 metres and uses image-recognition software to identify individual seals after first measuring the extent of the white ice against the black water.

It’s already known that polar ice is receding. According to the US in Boulder, the area of sea ice is at historic lows. That’s bad news for the region’s seals, which use ice for breeding and nursing, and as a refuge from predators. One species, the – which never goes ashore – is already listed under the US .

Cold skies

Scan Eagle is owned and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and has produced 27,000 images in two years. Flights over the Bering Sea last from 2 to 8 hours, at altitudes of between 90 and 300 metres. As it flies over the icy waters, the drone sends data back to the researchers.

However, it doesn’t solve all the problems of research in the Arctic. “It’s probably not a silver bullet, because seals are in the water a large proportion of the time and that proportion varies with weather or ice conditions,” says , a high-latitude oceanographer at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Solomons. “So the aircraft is primarily going to work for animals resting on ice.

“But it’s an interesting piece of the emerging puzzle for how to improve observations in the Arctic and should provide new data of interest to Arctic researchers.”

Weatherhead reported the research at the in San Francisco this week.

You can try out your own seal-spotting skills on the .