As identity theft continues to rise, authorities are on the lookout for ways to use a person’s physical characteristics to distinguish between an imposter and the genuine article.

Whereas eyes change shape according to facial expression and ears can be hidden away, researchers from the University of Bath have discovered that the shape of a person’s nose is rarely affected by such things and have developed a technique which shows distinct promise for biometric identify verification.

The research team led by Dr Adrian Evans utilized a 3D photographic system developed by the University of the West of England in Bristol and Imperial College London called Photoface. Volunteers had four flash photographs taken from different angles, the resulting images were then processed by software which analyzes all the shadows, colors, surface orientation and depth of each point on a face to produce a composite image of unparalleled detail.

Instead of using data from the whole of the face, the team concentrated on the characteristics of the ridge profile, the nose tip and the naison (section between the eyes and the top of the nose). Examination of the curvature of the ridge, combined with the measurements of the tip and naison allowed the researchers to divide the results into six main nose groups – Roman, Greek, Nubian, Hawk, Snub and Turn-up. Furthermore, the technique revealed a high rate of accuracy in identifying individuals from the 36 volunteers scanned and showed good potential for use as a biometric.

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“Green” mowers like the human-powered Mow Cycle are great for keeping that well manicured lawn along with a clear conscience.

But there’s always the chance of running into a patch of particularly thick grass that makes push mowers that little bit less attractive. The Momentum Reel Mower tackles this shortcoming in an ingenious way – its InertiaDrive Technology (patent pending) stores energy like a flywheel to unleash a burst of extra cutting power when required.

The InertiaDrive combines a large diameter cutting reel and heavy cutting reel blades to store energy expended while mowing less troublesome areas. When a tough spot is encountered the InertiaDrive delivers twice the energy to power through small twigs, weeds, or dense grass that would jam other reel mowers. The mower’s large diameter cutting reel and heavy cutting blades allow it to power through obstructions that would cause the small diameter cutting reels and thin blades of standard reel mowers to a standstill.

Made by Finnish company Fiskars, the Momentum Reel Mower also features the company’s StaySharp Cutting System and VersaCut Design that it says makes the mower 30 percent easier to push in long grass.

StaySharp Cutting System

Standard reel mowers rely on contact between the cutting reel and stationary blade for cutting. The steel on steel contact that is produced creates friction & causes blade wear. As a result, the blades on standard reel mowers dull quickly and require annual sharpening to prevent cutting performance degradation.

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A team of scientists at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland has created what they claim is the world’s first junctionless transistor.

The invention represents a breakthrough in transistors and nanoelectronics, and has the potential to revolutionize microchip manufacturing.

The approach uses a control gate around a silicon nanowire to control the passage of electrons without the use of junctions.

The Tyndall team, led by Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge, says the transistors are relatively easy to make and could help to extend Moore’s law and reduce manufacturing costs.

The transistor is the fundamental building block in electronic devices. On silicon computing chips, the number of transistors reflects the relative amount of processing power the chip has. Since the 1970s the number of transistors built on a silicon chip has grown from just a few hundred to more than two billion transistors on a single chip. Today’s electronic devices are driving the need for more transistors on each chip, while also requiring semiconductor chips that are smaller, more energy efficient, and more cost effective. The conventional transistor architectures used for the last 40 years can no longer keep up with this demand.

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The second most common element in the universe is increasingly rare on Earth—except, for now, in America.

About 20 kilometers northwest of Amarillo, Texas, beneath a geological structure called the Bush Dome, lies the world’s largest repository of a substance that, sooner or later, will become more precious than gold: helium. Though best known as the lifting gas in balloons (and the high squeaky voices it evokes when inhaled), helium’s buoyancy, inertness, and other unique properties make it irreplaceable for some of our civilization’s highest technologies. Without large amounts of helium, liquid-fueled rockets cannot be safely tested and launched, semiconductors and optical fibers cannot be easily manufactured, and cryogenically cooled particle accelerators and medical MRI machines cannot function. Helium may also prove crucial as a working fluid or even a fuel in future nuclear reactors. And unlike gold, which can be eternally recovered and shaped to new functions, only very expensive countermeasures can prevent helium, once used, from escaping into the atmosphere and drifting away into outer space.

Helium’s rarity on Earth and relative abundance in America are cosmic and planetary accidents. After hydrogen, helium is the second most common element in the universe, with the bulk of it formed during the big bang. This primordial material suffuses space, occasionally condensing to form dust, stars, and eventually planets. The Sun is rich in helium, as are the solar system’s gas giant planets. Earth likely once had a wealth of helium too, but this was boiled off by sunlight eons ago. Our modern supply of helium has gradually built up over billions of years in subterranean pockets of natural gas as a byproduct of decaying radioactive elements.

The same tectonic processes that led to the formation of the Rocky Mountains and of North America’s ancient inland sea also created one of the largest and most helium-rich natural gas pockets on the planet, beneath the Great Plains. It was discovered in 1903, when a Kansas oil field jetted a helium-spiked gas plume that wouldn’t burn. Only providence placed the helium in the geographic center of a rapidly industrializing nation that had just gained a capacity to efficiently extract it. The United States has provided the majority of the world’s supply ever since. For more than a century, helium has been as American as apple pie.

Helium’s “Fort Knox” is the Federal Helium Reserve (FHR) near Amarillo, created in 1925 to supply a fleet of military dirigibles that never fully materialized. During the Cold War, when helium was crucial for military and civilian space programs, the FHR linked up to a larger network of gas fields, pipelines, and refineries, growing to contain roughly a billion cubic meters of helium and accruing a $1.4 billion debt in the process. Though the FHR still holds more helium than any other stockpile by far, its stores are rapidly diminishing. Since 2003, the US Bureau of Land Management has been methodically selling off the FHR’s hoard (and repaying the $1.4 billion debt) in compliance with a 1996 Congressional act that called for phasing out the reserve by 2015.

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Waiting in line for movie tickets is still the worst part of going to the movies (unless you are going to see The Bounty Hunter).

With so many mobile phone movie apps, it’s easy to find what’s playing at nearby theaters and even purchase tickets right from your mobile phone, but then you still have to get a paper ticket from the dispenser or the ticket agent. But your ticket could easily be delivered to your mobile phone via a 2D barcode.

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Hydroelectric power specialist Bourne Energy has developed a human-portable hydroelectric generator which can create clean, quiet power from any stream deeper than four feet.

The “Backpack Power Plant”, which joins the company’s Riverstar, Oceanstar and Tidalstar designs, is aimed at bringing cheap, practical energy technology to remote areas.

Bourne Energy has developed two versions of the BPP; BPP-1 is aimed at civilians, while BPP-2 is designed for the military and was recently unveiled at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco. Both measure three feet in length and weigh less than 30 pounds, though the military version is 10% lighter. Both are self-contained with their own integrated power, control, cooling and sensor systems. They collapse into a backpack-sized module comprising three parts; the generator, hub and folded stored blades.

While the military BPP-2 unit produces 20% more power (600W) of high quality continuous power depending on river current, the civilian BPP-1 unit produces approximately 500 W/unit but was not designed to work with a variety of flow rates and produces optimum energy in streams moving at 2.3 meters per second. Both can be arranged singularly or in arrays of 20-30 kW. The BPP-2 however operates silently with no heat or exhaust emissions, is 40% less visible during operation and can also be bottom-mounted to ensure total invisibility if required.

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The photolithography process used to create the features on computer chips has remained largely unchanged in the last 50 years. But as chip manufacturers continue to cram more and more circuits onto a chip the limitation of this process is rapidly being reached. Potential solutions to keep apace with Moore’s Law include using DNA molecules as scaffolding, replacing copper interconnects with graphene and using plasma beams. Now researchers at MIT are developing a process that could see tiny circuits being created using molecules that automatically arrange themselves into useful patterns.

Photolithography involves chips being built up layer by layer. A layer of silicon, metal, or some other material is deposited on a chip and coated with a light-sensitive material, called a photoresist. Light shining through a kind of stencil – a “mask” – projects a detailed pattern onto the photoresist, which hardens where it’s exposed. The unhardened photoresist is washed away, and chemicals etch away the bare material underneath.

This process has served chip makers well for the last 50 years but the problem is that chip features are now significantly smaller than the wavelength of the light used to make them. Manufacturers have developed various tricks to get light to produce patterns smaller than its own wavelength, but they won’t work at smaller scales.

The obvious way to continue shrinking chip features would be to use beams of electrons to transfer mask patterns to layers of photoresist. But unlike light, which can shine through a mask and expose an entire chip at once, an electron beam has to move back and forth across the surface of a chip in parallel lines, like a harvester working along rows of wheat. This makes electron-beam lithography significantly more expensive than conventional optical lithography.

MIT researchers led by Caroline Ross, the Toyota Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Karl Berggren, the Emanuel E. Landsman Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, have developed a new approach that uses electron-beam lithography much more sparingly, to create patterns of tiny posts on a silicon chip. They then deposit specially designed polymers — molecules in which smaller, repeating molecular units are linked into long chains — on the chip. The polymers spontaneously hitch up to the posts and arrange themselves into useful patterns.

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The second most common element in the universe is increasingly rare on Earth—except, for now, in America.

About 20 kilometers northwest of Amarillo, Texas, beneath a geological structure called the Bush Dome, lies the world’s largest repository of a substance that, sooner or later, will become more precious than gold: helium. Though best known as the lifting gas in balloons (and the high squeaky voices it evokes when inhaled), helium’s buoyancy, inertness, and other unique properties make it irreplaceable for some of our civilization’s highest technologies. Without large amounts of helium, liquid-fueled rockets cannot be safely tested and launched, semiconductors and optical fibers cannot be easily manufactured, and cryogenically cooled particle accelerators and medical MRI machines cannot function. Helium may also prove crucial as a working fluid or even a fuel in future nuclear reactors. And unlike gold, which can be eternally recovered and shaped to new functions, only very expensive countermeasures can prevent helium, once used, from escaping into the atmosphere and drifting away into outer space.

Helium’s rarity on Earth and relative abundance in America are cosmic and planetary accidents. After hydrogen, helium is the second most common element in the universe, with the bulk of it formed during the big bang. This primordial material suffuses space, occasionally condensing to form dust, stars, and eventually planets. The Sun is rich in helium, as are the solar system’s gas giant planets. Earth likely once had a wealth of helium too, but this was boiled off by sunlight eons ago. Our modern supply of helium has gradually built up over billions of years in subterranean pockets of natural gas as a byproduct of decaying radioactive elements.

The same tectonic processes that led to the formation of the Rocky Mountains and of North America’s ancient inland sea also created one of the largest and most helium-rich natural gas pockets on the planet, beneath the Great Plains. It was discovered in 1903, when a Kansas oil field jetted a helium-spiked gas plume that wouldn’t burn. Only providence placed the helium in the geographic center of a rapidly industrializing nation that had just gained a capacity to efficiently extract it. The United States has provided the majority of the world’s supply ever since. For more than a century, helium has been as American as apple pie.

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Here’s how to make a solar cell from silicon: take one solid block of doped silicon, saw it into thin wafers, layer said semiconductors beneath a panel of transparent glass, connect them to a metal electrode that can channel away the electrons knocked loose by incoming photons and turn it into a photovoltaic device. That process has at least two flaws: such silicon is expensive, contributing more than half to the final price of a solar photovoltaic, and sawing it turns as much as half of that silicon into wasted grit.*

As a result, solar costs as much as $4 per watt by the time it’s installed on your roof or in a large-scale power plant, says Arun Majumdar, the first director of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA-E. “If you can reduce that to $1.50 per watt it can enable scaling,” or widespread adoption of the clean, renewable electricity source, he told ScientificAmerican.com at last week’s ARPA-E summit.

And a company called 1366 Technologies may have found a way to do just that by growing a nearly pure wafer directly from melted silicon rather than forming an ingot that is then sawed.

That may make silicon photovoltaics, which are the most efficient currently at turning sunlight into electricity, as cheap as thin-film solar cells, whose advantage is cost but which are not as good at creating electric current. In fact, rapidly decreasing cost for solar power means some experts expect such distributed electricity generation to cost the same or less than electricity from today’s grid by as soon as 2015.

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We recently looked at a breakthrough in using sunlight to create hydrogen but now scientists have found a way to use ambient noise to turn water into usable hydrogen fuel. The process harvests small amounts of otherwise-wasted energy such as noise or stray vibrations from the environment to break the chemical bonds in water and produce oxygen and hydrogen gas.

Materials scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison grew nanocrystals of two common crystals, zinc oxide and barium titanate, and placed them in water. When pulsed with ultrasonic vibrations, the nanofibers flexed and catalyzed a chemical reaction to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

When the fibers bend, asymmetries in their crystal structures generate positive and negative charges and create an electrical potential. This phenomenon, called the piezoelectric effect, has been well known in certain crystals for more than a century and is the driving force behind quartz clocks and other applications.

The researchers applied the same idea to the nanocrystal fibers. “The bulk materials are brittle, but at the nanoscale they are flexible,” says UW-Madison geologist and crystal specialist Huifang Xu. He likened them to the difference between fiberglass and a pane of glass.

Smaller fibers bend more easily than larger crystals and therefore also produce electric charges easily. So far, the researchers have achieved an 18 percent efficiency with the nanocrystals, higher than most experimental energy sources.

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