First look at Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1—a free update to Windows 8—is coming later this year, and a prerelease version is available now for you to try. Windows 8.1 has new ways for you to personalize your PC and includes a wave of awesome new apps and services.



How to install Windows 8.1 Preview from an ISO file 

To install Windows 8.1 Preview from an ISO file, you must first convert the ISO file into installation media stored on a DVD or a USB flash drive.

If you're using Windows 8, follow these steps to install Windows 8.1 Preview from an ISO file:

• Download the ISO (.iso) file.


• Double-tap or double-click the ISO file.


• Double-tap or double-click setup.exe and follow the steps.

Download:-

Product Key: NTTX3-RV7VB-T7X7F-WQYYY-9Y92F

Important: Windows 8.1 Preview isn't currently supported on some tablets and PCs with newer 32-bit Atom processors. Get the details

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German 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.8 GB)		0xD36DCEB20A734905D45FCC8A29CAFAEB83D8821F
German 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0xB59B03B978C9B9C79937E77F4FD86E6D4B3F605B
Japanese 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.8 GB)		0x90550D4CF6084177F4D8B15FF1935F04E02A8C91
Japanese 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0x39AC35DC262DE7BA1E4FA76D22840A135F98C383
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Korean 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0xE15BB0ACD03AF0B034BC9C9C35F20C56D7702F97
Portuguese (Brazil) 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.7 GB)		0xFC163AB555EE347C3D70C608DFBC6860C48F1FCD
Portuguese (Brazil) 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0x8EE8EE031C656AE547E4076540562CEC132F741C
Russian 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.7 GB)		0xD23B862AE7FA349BBE84FCE4833CAF6EBE524104
Russian 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0xB2804B267B131C100E030B68EA826CC5328BDAFB
Spanish 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.8 GB)		0x83D93447997167F5DF1C37C1BE5DC897DAC28096
Spanish 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0xE397E9B50FE449BFB3EBD68793CDE8B8C92E9036
Swedish 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.7 GB)		0xEE699B6D8B1B010E2F7AE56CF8A07683E3E077B2
Swedish 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.7 GB)		0x46830490C8A9D8B92FB5C1EB123915D55AB6C973
Turkish 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.7 GB)		0xF82792BD5629FE04CCD67EDA64E03DB1AFD2B7C7
Turkish 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.7 GB)

How to Fit 1,000 Terabytes Onto a DVD

DVDs and Blu-Rays don’t get a lot of respect from technophiles, because the optical disks aren’t able to store as much data as a typical hard drive. A team at Swinburne University in Australia could change that, by making it possible to store an entire year’s worth of video onto an optical disk. That could be good news for movie buffs but would also appeal to big data centers that who prefer to store the tremendous amounts of information they save in the least amount of space.

Storing data on conventional DVDs and Blu-Ray disk involves a single laser that burns a mark into the disk’s surfacing, changing its chemistry. The mark represents a 1 or 0, which is the basic binary language of all computer data. But because the marks can’t be smaller than a half the wavelength of the laser beam, there is a limit, to how many marks can be burned into the surface of a disk.

The Swinburne team, led by optoelectronics professor Min Gu, did something different. They used two lasers instead of one.

Each laser beamed a different wavelength of light onto the disk. The first one was in the near-infrared and created a spot of light, just like an ordinary DVD laser. The second laser beam was violet and partially interfered with the near-infrared beam in a way that ultimately shrank the spot burned into the disk. The technique shrank the size of the spot down to nine nanometers, enough to put 1,000 terabytes on a disk. For comparison, a Blu-Ray disk can hold 50 GB of data and a typical DVD holds about 4.7 GB of data.

The lasers are similar to those used in current players, so building a commercial version wouldn’t require any new technologies. Not too far in the future, the behemoth storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disk might seem as quaint as the 1.4 megabyte floppy disk.

Wearable Solar Clothing Fit For Charging

Whether it’s drone-proof hoodies, eye-tracking dresses or pants that let you text from your pocket, these days, clothing is doing a lot more than just making fashion statements and shielding us from the elements.

New to this task-oriented wardrobe is Wearable Solar, a potential clothing line that incorporates solar panels into garments for charging personal electronic devices.

The project led by Christiaan Holland of Dutch creative agency Gelderland Valoriseert, fashion designer Pauline van Dongen, solar panel specialist Gertjan Jongerden and students from theUniversity of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Two prototypes were created — a dress and a coat. Van Dongen said she carefully studied the layered structure in human skin cells, then translated that research into her designs. For example, with the coat, flaps embedded with solar cells can be unfolded on the shoulder and waist when the sun is shining. Alternatively, the flaps easily fold away and can be worn invisibly. Just a head’s up: Be prepared to feel like a lost character from the Matrix or Mortal Kombat, as unfolding the solar flaps is tough look, full of sharp, jutting shoulders and sweeping accents at the waist.

“The coat contains fairly rigid solar cells, which is why I used a combination of wool and leather. These materials both provide the strength needed and are aesthetically pleasing,” Van Dongen tolda Dutch design website. “In total some 48 solar cells are incorporated into modular leather panels, allowing a typical smartphone to be 50 percent charged if worn in the full sun for an hour.”

She added: “For the dress I used flexible solar cells. These are less efficient but are easier to integrate and more comfortable to wear. The dress is made from a flowing lightweight wool combined with leather. The cells have been subtly integrated in such a way that it’s hardly noticeable when you wear the dress as a normal piece of clothing.”

Future Buildings Could be Made of Artificial Bone

This photo shows the brick-and-mortar pattern of simulated bone and nacre against the backdrop of real nacre found in the inner shell of many molluscs.

 material in town and its origins may surprise you.

Developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), human bone is the inspiration behind the latest high-tech composite, which can be made in just a few hours using a 3D printer.

The new material, which is lauded for its durability, low density and environmentally sustainable constituents, gets its strength from its bone-like structure. Real bones have a complex hierarchical structure thanks to their two main building blocks, collagen protein and hydroxyapatite minerals.

MIT's new material replicates this hierarchical pattern, which is produced in bones with the help of electrochemical reactions. Such reactions are difficult to reproduce in a lab, but with a 3D printer, the researchers were able to replicate the fracture-resistant structure.

Under a microscope, the synthetic material the researchers created looks like a staggered brick-and-mortar wall. A soft black polymer serves as the mortar, simulating the work of collagen, bone's yielding cushion. A stiff blue polymer forms the bricks, behaving like hydroxyapatite, bone's strong but brittle frame.

And just as collagen and hydroxyapatite help a bone withstand fracturing by dissipating energy and distributing damage over a larger area, so too does the lab-made material. In fact, the material may prove to be even stronger than bone.

"The geometric patterns we used in the synthetic materials are based on those seen in natural materials like bone or nacre, but also include new designs that do not exist in nature," said Markus Buehler, lead researcher in the study.

"As engineers, we are no longer limited to the natural patterns. We can design our own, which may perform even better than the ones that already exist."

The 3D-printed bone material is 22 times more fracture-resistant than any of its constituent parts, an impressive ratio for a lab-made composite.

Researchers suggest that the process of 3D printing super-strong metamaterials is both entirely possible and more cost-effective than traditional methods of manufacturing. Buehler hopes that one day, optimized materials like the one created in MIT's lab will form the basis of entire buildings.

"The possibilities seem endless," he said, "As we are just beginning to push the limits of the kind of geometric features and material combinations we can print."

Shape-Shifting Dresses Respond To Stares

A great dress can easily move people into long fits of staring. Conversely, now those long fits of staring can actually move a dress.

It’s not polite to stare. But you might not be able to help yourself if you see someone wearing either of these two dresses made by fashion designer Ying Gao. Each one contorts and lights up whenever it detects a fixed gaze.

“We use an eye-tracking system so the dresses move when a spectator is staring,” Gao toldDezeen. “(The system) can also turn off the lights, then the dresses illuminate.”

The dresses are embedded with eye-tracking technology that reacts to an observer’s gaze by activating tiny motors that move parts of the dress in captivating patterns. Both gaze-activated dresses use glow-in-the-dark thread, creating a psychedelic effect when under black lights. One dress boasts an experimental design with luminescent tendrils, while the other has a more traditional cut.

“A photograph is said to be ‘spoiled’ by blinking eyes — here however, the concept of presence and of disappearance are questioned, as the experience of chiaroscuro (clarity/obscurity) is achieved through an unfixed gaze,” writes Gao.

Wearable Computers Make a Fashion Statement

A wearable computing trend is at the heart of the "quantified self" movement in which people track anything from how many calories they burn to how well they sleep or their moods at any given moment.

The notion of being fashionably smart is getting a makeover as internet-linked computers get woven into formerly brainless attire such as glasses, bracelets and shoes. A wearable computing trend is at the heart of the "quantified self" movement in which people track anything from how many calories they burn to how well they sleep or their moods at any given moment.

"We are heading for the wearable computing era," Gartner analyst Van Baker told AFP. "People are going to be walking around with personal area networks on their bodies and have multiple devices that talk to each other and the Web."

Google Glass and other augmented reality projects are about to break onto the scene. But what does an augmented reality look like and how can it enhance our lives.

Understandably, the trend has found traction in fitness with devices such as the Jawbone UP, Nike's FuelBand, and Fitbit keeping tabs on whether people are leading active, healthy lifestyles. The devices use sensors to detect micro movements and then feed information to smartphones or tablets, where applications tap into processing power to analyze data and provide feedback to users.

San Francisco-based Jawbone jumped into wearable computing years ago, building electronic brains into stylish wireless earpieces and speakers for smartphones. Jawbone recently added muscle to its lineup of fitness lifestyle devices with a deal to buy BodyMedia.

BodyMedia makes armbands used to track caloric burn of fat-shedding competitors on US reality television show "The Biggest Loser." "There's an enormous appetite for personal data and self-discovery among consumers that will only continue to grow," said Jawbone chief executive and founder Hosain Rahman.

A Forrester Research survey conducted early this year found that six percent of US adults wore a gadget to track performance in a sport, while five percent used a gadget like UP or Fitbit to track daily activity or how well they sleep. Worldwide shipments of wearable computing devices could climb as high as 30 million units this year, according to Forrester.

Tiny 3D-Printed Microbattery Offers Big Power

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CHARGE YOUR CELL PHONE IN 5 SECONDS

An interlaced stack of electrodes was printed layer-by-layer to create the working anode and cathode of a microbattery.

Good new, techies: 3-D printers can now do more than make dust-collecting doodads. Researchers have developed a method of producing powerful microbatteries using these trendy contraptions.

Developed by a team of researchers at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, these lithium-ion microbatteries are no bigger than a grain of sand but hold as much energy as their much larger counterparts.

"The electrochemical performance is comparable to commercial batteries in terms of charge and discharge rate, cycle life and energy density," said Shen Dillon, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We're just able to achieve this on a much smaller scale."

To create the microbatteries, researchers used a custom-built 3-D printer to stack electrodes -- each one less than the width of a human hair -- along the teeth of two tiny gold combs. The electrodes were contained within a special ink, extruded from the printer's narrow nozzles and applied to the combs like toothpaste being squeezed onto a toothbrush.

The electrode inks, one serving as a cathode, the other as an anode, hardened immediately into narrow layers, one atop the other. Once the electrodes were stacked, researchers packaged them inside tiny containers and added an electrolyte solution to complete the battery pack.

This novel process created a battery that could one day help power tiny medical implants as well as more novel electronics, like flying,insect-like robots. Such devices have been in development for some time, patiently awaiting an appropriately sized power source.

"[The researchers'] innovative microbattery ink designs dramatically expand the practical uses of 3-D printing, and simultaneously open up entirely new possibilities for miniaturization of all types of devices, both medical and non-medical," said Donald Ingber, the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Jennifer Lewis, a professor of engineering at Harvard University and lead author of the microbattery research study, said her team is looking at using their novel 3-D printing process to create other precise structures with diverse electronic, optical, mechanical or biologically relevant properties.

living computer created with slime mold

The future of computing might just come from slime molds! Turns out these uber smart, super weird molds can do things that even our most advanced computers can't handle. Anthony explains why they're so cool, and what it might mean for next-gen tech.

 

 

 

Tiny Channels Take Salt From Seawater

Drinking water is a vital need in many parts of the world, and one method of getting it is desalination, which is just taking the salt out of seawater. But the plants require either lots of energy or special filters — and both of those things are costly.

Now there’s a possible workaround: a system of tiny channels, built into a chip, that pulls the salt out of the water with little energy and no need for filter technologies that are difficult to make and maintain.

That would be a huge boon to areas where water is scarce, but seawater isn’t. The largest desalination plant is in Saudi Arabia, and some Caribbean islands depend on it. Both locales need a lot of energy to run the plants, though. The world Health Organization says about a billion people around the world have no access to safe water. Many of those people live in arid coastal regions in Africa and the Middle East.

Richard M. Crooks at the University of Texas at Austin and Ulrich Tallarek at the University of Marburg, Germany, developed the idea. They forced salty water down a channel that splits into two branches. Each of the smaller channels was about 22 microns wide. The two small channels were connected to an electrode that juts into the point where they branch.

Then they applied just 3 volts to the electrode. The voltage changes some of the chloride ions, which have negative charges, into neutral chlorine. This has the effect of increasing the electric field strength and making a gradient across the two channels. That gradient forces ions into one channel, while the fresh water flows down the other.

The whole system is cheaper than filters because it won’t get clogged, and it uses a lot less energy than current desalination systems.

The two scientists are developing the technology with a startup, Okeanos Technologies, and presented their work in the journal Angewandte Chemie

Stem Cell Discovery Could Help Regrow Fingers

Fingernail stem cells could be used to develop new treatments for amputees.

Mammals can regenerate the very tips of their fingers and toes after amputation, and now new research shows how stem cells in the nail play a role in that process.

A study in mice, detailed online today (June 12) in the journal Nature, reveals the chemical signal that triggers stem cells to develop into new nail tissue, and also attracts nerves that promote nail and bone regeneration.

Stem cells have produced another scientific "miracle" -- this time allowing a blind man to see with nearly perfect vision.

The findings suggest nail stem cells could be used to develop new treatments for amputees, the researchers said. [Inside Life Science: Once Upon a Stem Cell]

In mice and people, regenerating an amputated finger or toe involves regrowing the nail. But whether the amputated portion of the digit can regrow depends on exactly where the amputation occurs: If the stem cells beneath the nail are amputated along with the digit, no regrowth occurs, but if the stem cells remain, regrowth is possible.

To understand why these stem cells are crucial to regeneration, researchers turned to mice. The scientists conducted toe amputations in two groups of mice: one group of normal mice, and one group that was treated with a drug that made them unable to make the signals for new nail cells to develop.

They found that the signals that guided the stem cells' development into nail cells were vital to regenerating amputated digits. By five weeks after amputation, the normal mice had regenerated their toe and toenail. But the mice that lacked the nail signal failed to regrow either their nails or the toe bone itself, because the stem cells lacked the signals that promote nail-cell development. When the researchers replenished these signals, the toes regenerated successfully.

In another experiment, the researchers surgically removed nerves from the mice toes before amputating them. This significantly impaired nail-cell regeneration, similar to what happened to the mice that lacked the signals to produce new nails. Moreover, the nerve removal decreased the levels of certain proteins that promote tissue growth.

Together, the results show that nail stem cells are critical for regrowing a lost digit in mice. If the same turns out to be true in humans, the findings could lead to better treatments for amputees.

Other animals, including amphibians, can also regenerate lost limbs. For example, aquatic salamanders can regrow complete limbs or even parts of their heart — a process that involves cells in their immune system. By studying these phenomena in other animals, it may be possible to enhance regenerative potential in people, the researchers said.

Cameras Could Take Night Photos Without a Flash

A team of scientists led by Andras Kis at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found a material that could make cameras five times more sensitive to light, reducing or even eliminating the need for a flash or a long exposure. The material — made from a mix of molybdenum and sulfur — was used to make a single-pixel prototype sensor that only needed 1/25th of a second to expose a nighttime streetscape that other cameras would require 1/5th of a second. The sensitivity of the new sensor is fast enough that moving people didn’t get blurred.

It works because molybdenite is much more sensitive to light than silicon, the other material other digital sensors in cameras are made from.

Besides sensitivity, there’s another plus to molybdenite: it’s cheap. Unlike other exotic technologies or semiconducting materials, there’s lots of it around and factories making image sensors out of it won’t need re-tooling.

Transparent Solar-Cell Screen Charges Phone

Transparent solar cells use materials that only absorb infrared and ultraviolet light and let visible light pass through.

Today’s mobile devices are constantly in use—so constantly that battery life is a huge problem. I recently hosted an afternoon barbecue at a community pool; over in one corner, folks jockeyed for a turn to charge their mobile devices at the one available outlet. Meanwhile, the sun shone down brightly on mobile phones scattered across the picnic tables, as the batteries on those idle devices quietly drained.

The SunPartner Group, a 30-employee startup in Aix-en-Provence, France, thinks that’s a real waste. Folks sitting in restaurants, in outdoor cafes, or at their desks typically pull out their phones and put them face up in front of them; put solar cells on the phones and there’d be a lot less scrambling to find a wall outlet. And they’ve built a low-cost transparent panel that does just that. They’re now testing it with a number of manufacturers and expect to see it built into mobile devices early next year.

And you thought it stopped at solar panels? Trace Dominguez has the lowdown on some strange new ways to harness the sun's rays.

iStockphoto/Thinkstock

Sunpartner isn’t the first to think mobile phones should use solar power to charge themselves. A few years ago, several cell phone manufacturers tried putting solar cells on the back of phones—like the Samsung Crest and the Sharp Solar Hybrid. Turns out, though, that people weren’t inclined to put phones face down on the table—they missed alerts, and were worried about scratching the screen. And solar cells on the back of cell phones never caught on widely.

Putting solar cells on the front of a mobile phone is harder, because today phone fronts are virtually all display. Startup Ubiquitous Energy, a spin off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is developing a technology that makes the solar cells themselves transparent by using materials that only absorb infrared and ultraviolet light and let visible light pass through. Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) are taking a similar approach, while researchers at the University of Cambridge are weaving solar cells into organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, where they can capture light leaked from the edges of the OLED elements as well as from outside the phone.

These technologies still appear to have a ways to go. SunPartner is taking a lower tech approach it believes will get to the mass market much sooner. The company is using stripes of standard thin-film solar cells alternating with transparent film. It then adds a layer of tiny lenses that spread the image coming from the screen to make the opaque stripes disappear as well as to concentrate the rays coming in from the sun. (See illustration, below.)

SunPartner’s Matthieu De Broca, visiting Silicon Valley as part of the French Tech Tour, says that the company’s current prototypes are 82 percent transparent; future versions should hit 90 percent transparency. The company has 30 patents on its technology so far. Putting the panel and related electronics needed to convert the voltage from the display costs adds about US $2.30 to the cost of each phone, De Broca said.

The technology doesn’t replace the wall charger; mobile device users can still count on plugging their phone in at night. It does, De Broca said, extend the battery life about 20 percent in normal use. And it can infinitely keep up with the phone’s modest power drain when it is idling in normal daylight. The SunPartner Group, founded by optician Joel Gilbert and businessman Ludovic Deblois, is currently working with three mobile device manufacturers to develop prototypes and expects the first models integrating the technology to be on the market in early 2014. Nokia is reportedly one of those companies.

Transparent Phone Screen Prevents Collisions

Multi-tasking on a smartphone can be dangerous, especially if it involves trying to read the screen while walking. A new application on the Android market should be a requirement for any smart device user taking to busy streets.

The free app, called Transparent Screen, is pretty self explanatory. Created by German Android application developer Sascha Affolter, the widget uses your camera to display an image of what’s going on behind your phone underneath your regular phone functions.

I took Transparent Screen for a spin on my phone around downtown Boulder, Colo. The app let me adjust the transparency level, showing more or less of the camera’s image depending on my preference.

On a sunny and cold day like today, even just seeing the regular phone screen through the glare and operating the phone with my icy fingertips was a challenge. Boulder’s sidewalks feel luxuriously giant compared to New York City, so there was plenty of time to see and avoid walking into dogs and snow banks.

In a major city, this app would certainly come in handy. You’d still need to either adjust the direction your phone is facing or glance up to avoid peripheral hazards like traffic and cyclists. However, Transparent Screen could save you from walking into posts, signs, walls, people and stepping in gross stuff like dog doo.

Using the camera does drain the battery somewhat and I found there was a slight delay in the image tracking, although that could have very well been the cold. On busy sidewalks, those tradeoffs might be well worth it for safety.

Today I noticed other people walking around Boulder with laser-like focuses on their smartphone screens. But nobody stayed like that for long. When the sun is shining and the Flatirons are dusted with snow, it’s easier to pocket the phone and enjoy the view.

Self-Assembling 4D-Printed Materials Take Shape

While the 3-D printing industry remains in a holding pattern of quasi-illegality and bombastic overexposure, some people are moving right along to the next dimension.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing a so-called “4D-printing technology” that will enable macro-sized 3D-printed materials to be programmed to self-assemble into predetermined structures and shapes. The technology could potentially change the construction and manufacturing industries, making it easier to build in environments, like outer space, where extreme conditions would cause construction to be expensive and dangerous.

Led by Skylar Tibbits, director of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, the 4D-printing process involves using materials that shift shapes in response to movement or when brought into contact with water, air, gravity, magnets and/or temperature change. The fourth dimension stands for the materials’ ability to self-assemble.

In a recent TED Talk, Tibbits unveiled a new project in collaboration with 3D-printing company Stratasys.

“The idea behind 4-D printing is that you take multimaterial 3-D printing…and you add a new capability, which is transformation,” he said. “This is like robotics without wires or motors.”

Tibbits demonstrated this process by showing how a strand of 3D-printed “smart” material could fold into the letters M-I-T when placed in water. Tibbits said he believed that this was the first time a program of transformation has been directly embedded into a material itself. Researchers used Autodesk software called Project Cyborg to simulate and optimize how and when the material would fold.

“We can use the same software for the design of nano-scale self-assembly systems and human-scale self-assembly systems,” he said.

Tibbits also said the Self-Assembly Lab is working with a Boston company called Geosyntec to develop a new paradigm for infrastructure piping.

“Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate; or maybe undulate like peristaltics to move the water themselves,” he said. “This isn’t  expensive pumps or valves, this is a completely programmable and adaptive pipe on its own.”

Like its three-dimensional cousin, 4-D printing is not guaranteed to take shape, but those at the Self-Assembly Lab believe the technology has capacity to revolutionize “biology, material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction, the arts, and even space exploration.”

Wi-Fi Enables Whole House Gesture Control

If you have Microsoft’s Xbox 360 with Kinect game console (above) in your home, then you’re familiar with gesture control. Your body becomes the joystick because the device translates your movements into on-screen motion. Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone also works using gestures — just swipe your hand over the screen (without touching it) to answer an incoming call. Both of these devices use a camera or some other kind of motion-tracking sensor to capture movements and convert them into a computer command.

But now computer scientists at University of Washington have shown that it’s possible to attain gesture control with a Wi-Fi signal. According to the researchers, the “WiSee” concept is simpler and cheaper than devices such as Kinect and because Wi-Fi travels through walls, doesn’t require that the person is standing directly in front of the device that they want to control.

The team presented their technology at the 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

Google's 'Magic Ring' Could Kill the Password

Google is researching a way to kill the password, this time with a magic ring.

No, it isn’t a weird metaphorical movie plot. The idea is to use a trinket that plugs into the USB slot on a computer and authenticates the user.

At the RSA Security conference in San Francisco, Mayank Upadhyay, a principal engineer at Google who specializes in security, said the experience of logging on to a computer or website should be as simple as using an ATM machine, which is why the company is looking into the USB technology as an alternative to passwords.

Overall, passwords don’t work well for many people. That’s because people either have too many and need to write them down — violating rule number one of password security — or they have one that they use in several places, increasing their security risk.

Carrying a token could make authentication easier, because a person wouldn’t have to remember all those passwords.

Google’s prototype is a USB drive mounted on a ring or other small piece of jewelry that uses a piece of digital information knows as a cryptographic key. It’s a bit of software that serves as the encoding and decoding method for secret communications. Cryptographic keys used in computer systems are based on complicated mathematical algorithms, but their purpose is simple: encode a message so that it’s unreadable to anyone else but the intended recipient and read a coded message that’s meant only for you.

Here’s how it would work. Let’s say you want to access your checking account information from your bank’s website. First, you must register your cryptographic key with the bank. That would involve inserting the USB drive into your computer, logging onto the bank’s website and walking through a couple of authentication prompts, similar to how creating a new account works already.

During this process, two software keys get generated: one public and one private. The public key gets sent to the bank’s website for use later. The other remains stored on the USB drive.

Later, if you want to transfer money from your checking account to your savings, you visit the website with your USB key inserted in your computer. At the bank’s website, a login screen would pop up, but instead of entering your username and password, you would click a button that said “authenticate” — or even skip that step altogether. The bank uses the public crytopgraphic key created during registration to encode a message that it sends to your USB drive. That message is a mathematical “challenge” that can only be solved by the private key stored on your USB drive.

This kind of public-private key encryption is common; it relies on the fact that some mathematical operations are hard to reverse. For instance, multiplying 3 and 18 is easy to do, but factoring out the result — 54 — into the smallest possible prime numbers (1, 3, 3, 3, and 2) is harder, because you have to do more mathematical steps. Encrypting a message with the public key is like multiplying the two numbers, and the decryption process is like factoring the result and looking for two specific numbers. If you want to decode the message without the key, you don’t know if the numbers you want are 2 and 3, 3 and 3, or 1 and 3, or possibly some other combination like 6 and 9. That’s what makes this kind of cryptography work so well — a big number has billions of possible combinations of factors.

Because a user is not typing in a password, she is safe from hackers who may be using  software that records keystrokes to steal her login information. And a cryptographic key also deals with “man in the middle” hacks, which involve someone monitoring the digital communications between a user and a website and stealing that information to be used later.

A magic ring certainly deals with the problem of password hacks, but it doesn’t necessarily address what happens if the user loses the USB drive. Of what happen if an unscrupulous person got a hold of the ring, he’d most likely be able to access secured websites, assuming he had enough information such as the user’s name. On the bright side, in this sense it is similar to losing your house or car keys — if someone finds your house keys, they can’t break into your home without knowing the address.

It does offer some neat ideas for a modern take on the “Lord of the Rings” movie, though. Would it involve a quest to drop a USB ring into an incinerator?

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Via Technology Review

World's Thinnest Camera Sees a Single Cell

The endoscope radically changed medicine; doctors were able to use a tiny camera at the end of a thread-thin wire to look into a patient’s body without major surgery. Engineers at Stanford University have taken the endoscope a step further: they’ve built the thinnest one ever and it see individual cells.

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Their needle-thin endoscope has the potential to image single cancer cells and peer into organs where larger endoscopes could do more damage than good, like in the brain. And the super thin endoscope would create a much smaller scar than a laparoscope, the instrument typically used to do knee surgery.

Conventional endoscopes are built with multiple optical fibers, some of which illuminate the area and others which record the image and carry it back to the viewer. The more fibers inside the endoscope, the better the resolution of the image. But more fibers also translates into a bulkier endoscope.

Kahn’s team built a endoscope using just one multimode fiber. Multimode fibers are capable of carrying light along many different paths — in fact, a “mode” is a path that light takes. The team’s idea was to use a single fiber to both illuminate an object as well as carry data from the image. The challenge is the information gets scrambled on the way, since the light is moving along different paths.

To make it work, Kahn’s team built a device called a spatial light modulator. The modulator sent a continuous beam of laser light down the fiber in random paths. Because of the random path, once the light exited the fiber it made a speckled pattern. Some of that light bounced back up the fiber.

A computer program created by Kahn’s team analyzed the speckled pattern returning up the fiber and used that to build an image. Their technique pushed the resolution of the image even further than what they had expected, and enabled them to see object that were sizes of individual cells.

Kahn said in a press release that he sees most of the new applications in imaging, to study in detail cells as they operate inside the body.

Sound Waves Focused Into Laserlike Beam

We’ve all seen laser beams — narrow and powerful beams of light used in everything from CD players to weapons. Now researchers have found a way to make sound waves that, like light waves in a laser, travel in step. They call it a phaser and it could open up applications as wide-ranging as precision timer circuits and better ultrasound scans.

The researchers from NTT Basic Laboratories in Japan call their device a phaser because it uses phonons, waves of sound that require a medium, such as a gas, liquid or solid, to travel.

To create the beam, they started with a tiny drum just a few nanometers across, and put it inside a cavity, which acted like a resonator. They vibrated the drum, which transmitted energy to the cavity, and created the phonons. The cavity confined the sound waves. At a certain frequency, called the resonant frequency, the material of the cavity relaxed in a very specific way, creating vibrations that transferred energy back into the drum. Those vibrations are at a specific frequency and if one connected the resonator to a solid material those vibrations would travel away in a narrow beam. That traveling wave is the “laser” sound beam. Since the sound waves are all in step with each other, they would go in straight lines and wouldn’t spread out.

Right now the device is confined to a circuit a half an inch on a side. And it can’t send out beams of sound over a distance, like the sonic weapons used in crowd control or against Somali pirates. That’s because in order for phonons to travel, they need the gas, liquid or solid they’re moving through to be consistent that entire way.

Although the word “phaser” is used to mean a laser-like weapon on the science fiction television show and movie Star Trek, it doesn’t mean that here. But like lasers, phasers end up in common use. For example a resonator could translate the beams of phonon vibrations into electrical signals, replacing the quartz crystals currently used in watches and clocks. And the high frequencies mean that it could provide a better picture than current ultrasound systems.

Friction And Static Could Charge Smartphones

Static electricity is good for sticking balloons to walls, but who knew it could be used to prolong the battery life of a smartphone. Sihong Wang and Long Lin, graduate students in Georgia Tech's materials science department have developed a two-layered material that generates power from static electricity and flexing. Nanoprinter Achieves Insane Resolution.