Now there may be a quick and relatively easy solution to these Wi-Fi woes.

Researchers at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, have developed customised reflectors that can precisely control the shape of the Wi-Fi signal from a router.

While repeaters merely boost an existing signal in hard to reach parts of the home, the new tech also allows it to be reduced it in others, such as near windows, to help prevent anyone outside snooping on your network. This could offer some peace of mind to people worried about their wireless connection being exploited by outside hackers engaged in so-called Wi-Fi sniffing and wardriving.

“We can weaken the signals outside so that it’ll be hard for others to get connected to your access point,” says Xia Zhou, a computer scientist at Dartmouth who led the research.

Bodge it!

Problems with her own Wi-Fi led Zhou to online do-it-yourself reflectors fashioned from cut up aluminium drinks cans that can be wrapped around the router’s antenna. While these have been , Zhou and her colleagues felt they could do better.

°Őłó±đ˛âĚý that can calculate the ideal shape of a reflector needed to change the Wi-Fi signal coverage to a user’s specifications. The user needs to feed the system with a rough 3D model of their home, including the position of walls, doors and windows – something that can be generated using simple software used for home interior design – along with the location of the router.

They can then specify where they want to boost and reduce the wireless coverage. For example, they might want the Wi-Fi in their kitchen to be increased, but to reduce the signal bleeding out the front of their home onto the road.

The algorithm models the signal distribution in the home and then computes the optimal reflector shape needed to change it. The resulting reflector can then be 3D printed – Zhou’s  were printed in plastic before being wrapped in kitchen foil so they could reflect radio waves. “Since we compute the reflector shape by taking into account the environment, such as where the walls are, we can bounce the signals in a way that mitigates the impact of building insulations, partitions, and interior layout,” she says.

As a result, the reflectors were able to boost the strength of a Wi-Fi signal by up to 55 per cent in areas where signal was desired – and reduce it by up to 63 per cent where it wasn’t.

The team are now trying to develop a user-friendly interface to make it easier for people to upload models of their home and shape their Wi-Fi signal. Users could then either print it themselves or upload the reflector specifications to online 3D printing services. Each of Zhou’s prototypes took around 23 minutes to print and cost $35 (£26).

Keep that password

There could be one hitch –  Andrew Nix, head of the communication systems and networks research group at the University of Bristol, warns they might not work on the most modern routers, some of which can have three or four antennas working in an array. “I’d be surprised if accurate radio frequency shaping could be achieved on modern units,” Nix adds.

However, the reflectors could mitigate Wifi’s security problem – as long as the threat you’re worried about is low-tech. “They might not offer much protection from sophisticated equipment such as high-gain antennas.”

And don’t let this tempt you into forgoing password protection. “The only way to secure a WiFi connection with any reliability is to encrypt it,” says Alan Woodward, a computer security expert at the University of Surrey.

Devices like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home can usually deal with requests from a lone person, but like us they struggle in situations such as a noisy cocktail party, where several people are speaking at once.

Now an AI that is able to separate the voices of multiple speakers in real time promises to give automatic speech recognition a big boost, and could soon find its way into an elevator near you.

The technology, developed by researchers at the in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was demonstrated in public for the first time at this month’s show in Tokyo.

It uses a machine learning technique the team calls “deep clustering” to identifies unique features in the “voiceprint” of multiple speakers. It then groups the distinct features from each speaker’s voice together, allowing it to disentangle multiple voices and then reconstruct what each person was saying. “It was trained using 100 English speakers, but it can separate voices even if a speaker is Japanese,” says Niels Meinke, a spokesperson for Mitsubishi Electric.

Meinke says the system can separate and reconstruct the speech of two people speaking into a single microphone with up to 90 per cent accuracy. If there are three speakers the accuracy dips, but is still up to 80 per cent. In both cases, this was with speakers the system had never encountered before.

Conventional approaches to this problem – such as using two microphones to replicate the position of a listener’s ears – have only managed .

In overcoming the “cocktail party effect” that has dogged AI research for decades, the new technology could help smart assistants in homes and cars work better. It could also improve automatic speech transcription, and be used to help law enforcement agencies reconstruct recordings of conversations that had been muddied by music, for example.

In preliminary tests the system was able to separate the voices of up to five people at once. “The system could be used to separate speech in a range of products including lifts, air-conditioning units and household products,” says Meinke.

Indeed, Mitsubishi is now in the process of building its voice recognition technology into lifts and air-conditioners, among other products.

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Fundamental problem

They have a reputation as cunning creatures, and some foxes appear to be living up to it as masters of disguise.

Gray foxes living in the mountains of California have been filmed deliberately rubbing themselves in the scent marks left by mountain lions.

They may be using the scent of the big cats, also known as pumas or cougars, as a sort of odour camouflage against other large predators such as coyotes.

Coyotes often kill gray foxes, which are half their size, to reduce competition.

, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had been studying pumas visiting sites known as “community scrapes”, where males leave scent “signposts” to communicate with others.

Surprise visitors

He was surprised when remote cameras set up to monitor the mountain lions revealed foxes also regularly visiting these sites.

Analysis of footage taken over four years at 26 different sites revealed the foxes were rubbing their cheeks on bits of ground that had been freshly marked by the mountain lions, often within hours of a big cat’s visit.

“The foxes rub very specifically on the areas where the pumas mark,” says Allen. “Coyotes are very reliant upon smell when hunting and are much bigger than the foxes. The foxes have a hard time fighting back, so they use this to give themselves a chance to escape.”

Allen and his colleagues found 92 out of 903 documented visits by foxes involved cheek rubbing. And 85 per cent of the foxes that exhibited this behaviour did so on spots where pumas had deposited their scent. The team did not see any similar behaviour from coyotes or bobcats, which also visited the sites far less frequently than the foxes.

Many animals rub their cheeks and bodies on stones, trees and the ground to leave their scent behind. Allen’s video footage, however, showed the foxes rubbing themselves in the puma scrape five times more often than they did on shrubs or unmarked ground at those sites.

This suggests they were focused on applying puma scent onto themselves, rather than depositing their own scent.

Escape strategy

There are various reasons why foxes might do this. But Allen’s team says that predator avoidance seems the most likely hypothesis and is worth exploring further.

“Gray foxes climb trees to avoid predators,” says Allen. “In many cases, they probably only need a few seconds’ hesitation from a coyote for them to get up a tree. Smelling like a puma might give them that time.”

But there may be another explanation, says , an ecologist who studies foxes at the University of Bristol in the UK.

“Foxes use their saliva as scent and have glands in the region of the lips,” he says. “My impression is that the gray foxes are stimulated by the strong odours left by the pumas and are depositing their own scent.”

Allen and his colleagues hope to use tags on some gray foxes to study whether foxes that have rubbed themselves in puma scent are more likely to survive predation.

Read more: Chameleons fine-tune camouflage to predator’s vision; There are five times more urban foxes in England than we thought

Cooling climate

Big meal

BURNING through the darkness, the fires would have lit up the cave around where the young child lay.

The remains of a series of small fires discovered within a dolomite hillside 93 kilometres north of Madrid, Spain, could be the first firm evidence that Neanderthals held funerals.

The blackened hearths surround a spot where the jaw and six teeth of a Neanderthal toddler were found in the stony sediment. Puzzlingly, within each of these hearths was the horn or antler of a herbivore, apparently carefully placed there. In total, there were 30 horns from aurochs and bison as well as red deer antlers, and a rhino skull nearby.

Archaeologists believe the fires may have been lit as some sort of funeral ritual around where the toddler, known as the Lozoya Child, was placed around 38,000 to 42,000 years ago.

Enrique Baquedano, director of the Regional Archaeological Museum of Madrid, and his colleagues described the discoveries at the meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution in Madrid on 16 September. They think the cave may have been used by Neanderthals as a specific place to mourn and remember the dead.

Baquedano said the position of the remains and stone tools found at the site, known as Des-Cubierta Cave, do not appear to be arranged as we would expect if it had been a dwelling. “They may therefore have been of ritual or symbolic significance.”

Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London said there have been previous suggestions that Neanderthals may have dug graves for their dead and some graves of babies at sites in Syria and Israel include the remains of animal horns – but the new discovery seems far more deliberate.

“It’s certainly difficult to explain the presence of the horns, and that of a rhino skull, without invoking the agency of Neanderthals,” he said.

This article appeared in print under the headline “First known Neanderthal burial rituals”