• Sensors in development can
  detect the faintest whiff of chemical warfare agents, a single cancer protein
  molecule, illegal drugs, and human deceit.
• Combination PET/CT scanners produce much
  more useful imaging while dramatically shortening scanning time.
• Plans for a multi-billion dollar fusion reactor remind us that given
  enough time, technological hype can turn into reality.
• A liquid that can be induced by a low-power electric field to turn solid in a hundredth of a second
  could be rather useful.
• Prototype spectacles serve as subliminal memory aides.

Our favorite by far is the development of implanted chips to serve as credit
cards. Eventually, thinks robotics expert Rodney Brooks, chips implanted in the
brain will connect wirelessly to the Internet, puttng Google, email, instant
messaging, and all the other powerful tools of the Net inside our heads.
Eventually may be sooner even than Brooks thinks — see the Therapeutics section
for news of an impending trial of a brain chip that comes awfully close.

Chemwar Nanosensors

Carbon nanotubes turn out to be sensitive to extremely small traces of
chemical nerve agents. US Navy researchers have made a prototype sensor from
single-walled carbon nanotube transistors that was able to detect traces of a
substance that simulates sarin, the nerve gas used in a Tokyo subway in 1985.
The presence of a nerve agent increased the nanotubes’ resistance to
electricity.

The sensors are inexpensive, require little power, and could be built into
handheld or remote devices to detect sub-parts-per-billion concentrations of
chemical warfare agents and other toxic chemicals within the next two to five
years.

Reference: Unknown (2003).”Nanotubes Detect
Nerve Gas.” Technology Research News, November 21.

Molecular Cancer Detector

A multidisciplinary research team at Intel has adapted a nanotechnology-based
laser spectrometer, normally used to detect imperfections in silicon chips, to
detect cancer in human samples instead; potentially far more accurately and
precisely and at much earlier stages than current methods. Though the prototype
“Raman Bioanalyzer System” takes up a 600-square-foot room, it can detect single
protein molecules. However, it will be take a year or more to assess the
device’s capacity to fulfil its theoretical potential.

The prototype is being replicated and tested at a cancer center.

Reference: Philipkoski, Kristen (2003). “Name That Cancer
in One Molecule.” Wired News, November 3.

Drug Sniffer Chip

Georgia Tech researchers have developed a “Dog on a Chip” that can quickly
detect the presence of microscopic amounts of illegal drugs from several feet
away. The device consists of a small plastic box attached to a cube containing
the detector chip. Surrounding air is circulated through the cube via tubes
protruding from the cube.

Reference: Associated Press (2003). “New Machine Can
Detect Drugs Like Dogs.” Excite News, November 20.

See also “It
Can Smell Your Disease“, “Bioterror Early
Warning Device“.

Lie Detection

“In labs across the nation,” writes Richard Willis in USA Today,
“researchers are using technologies originally developed to examine diseases,
brain activity, obesity and even learning disorders to try to solve some of the
mysteries of human conduct.” He is writing specifically about the human conduct
of lying, and describes a “War on Terror”-inspired surge in efforts to build a
better lie detector than the notoriously unreliable polygraph. The US Defense
Department has a Polygraph Institute running some 20 such projects. DARPA (the
US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the FBI, and the CIA are also
backing such research. Some of the approaches being tested are described
below.

• Near-infrared light sensors mounted on a headband to measure blood and
  oxygen flow in subject’s brains when they were asked to lie reveals that forming
  a lie produces a milliseconds-long burst of bloodstream activity in the
  prefrontal cortex. In a Defense Department test, the device correctly fingered
  the liars but also picked “false positives” — truths it read as lies.
• Scanning the brain using MRI suggests that lying is a two-part cognitive
  process: first, suppressing the truth; and second, creating the lie. But using
  an MRI to record this activity requires a compliant subject willing to keep
  perfectly still, and is expensive and cumbersome.
• A thermal imaging approach that shows up sudden stress in the form of heat
  spots on the face is also showing early signs of relative success.
• Another approach uses a sort of content analysis, looking for “weasel words”
  such as “maybe,” “possibly” or “to the best of my knowledge,” and for tell-tale
  obfuscatory or irrelevant responses. This approach has so far had a 75 percent
  success rate, and has the added advantage of also spotting lies-by-omission.There will arise some interesting ethical and legal issues should any of
  these approaches ever succeed in producing unobtrusive and near-infallible
  thought detection.

  Reference: Willing, Richard (2003). “Terrorism
  lends urgency to hunt for better lie detector.” USA Today, November 4.
  

  See also “Magnets
  about transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and “Brain
  Fingerprinting,” already used in an Iowa court case.

  PET CATs

  The latest in scanning devices combines PET (positron emission tomography)
  with CT (computed tomography). Whereas CT basically takes pictures of the inside
  of the body, which can then be examined to look for tumors and other
  abnormalities, PET fingers tumors directly by producing a picture of the body
  showing cancer cells’ metabolic activity as they digest radioactive sugar. PET
  and CT have been used jointly before, to give the physician a more complete
  understanding of what is happening inside the patient, but precisely matching a
  CT image to its corresponding PET image is extraordinarily difficult. By taking
  both pictures at the same time, a PET/CT device not only improves the accuracy
  rate but also dramatically shortens the scanning time to 20 minutes. In other
  words, the new device raises the quality of care and lowers the cost — other
  things, such as the capital cost of the new devices, being equal.

  Reference: Anderson, Charlie (2003). “Advances
  in scanning technology help put cancer in the cross hairs.” Business Journal
  of Kansas City, November 14.

  Not Your Father’s Old Implant

  Credit Card Implants

  RFID (radio frequency identification) tagging is already more commonplace
  than most people realize. ExxonMobil’s Speedpass for buying gasoline and
  (in a limited trial) hamburgers from McDonald’s, contains one. MasterCard is
  testing an RFID-enabled credit card called PayPass. The wireless RFID
  tags are used to access the user’s financial information without need for slots,
  signatures, and store clerks. A MasterCard executive told USA Today
  recently: “Ultimately, it could be embedded in anything — someday, maybe even
  under the skin.”

  Someday has arrived. The maker of the VeriChip implant has announced
  the VeriPay service, in which an implanted VeriChip will identify
  you to the gas pump or supermarket checkout and dun your credit card or bank
  account for the cost of your purchases. It may take a few years to get the
  system accepted and integrated with financial institutions, not to mention with
  consumers; but the VeriChip itself is already on the market as an
  anti-kidnapping device, medical emergency ID device, and secure-area access
  control device.

  Reference: Scheeres, Julia (2003). “When Cash Is
  Only Skin Deep.” Wired News, November 25.

  Internet Implants

  MIT’s robotics superstar Rodney Brooks is “starting to think that by 2020 we
  might actually have wireless Internet interfaces that ordinary people will feel
  comfortable having implanted in their heads. . . . All the signs — early
  experimental successes, societal demand for improved healthcare, and military
  research thrusts — point in that direction,” he writes in Technology
  Review.

  The early experimental successes to which he specifically alludes
  include:

• Rats given brain implants that mimicked signals from their whiskers and
  stimulated pleasure centers in their brains, enabling researchers to
  remote-control the rats’ movements by sending signals to the implants.
• Monkeys given brain implants that enabled them to control a robot arm simply
  by thinking of moving it. A few totally paralyzed patients have received similar
  implants, enabling them to “telepath” their thoughts via a computer.
• Cochlear implants already enable thousands of once-deaf people to hear.
• Experimental visual implants have enabled blind patients to perceive
  something of their surroundings.”It’s not really such a vast leap from here to a thought-activated Google
  search,” says Brooks. Everything we would need to connect wirelessly, inside our
  heads, to the Internet and use it to find information or communicate essentially
  telepathically with others, is available.

  But at least as important as these examples of technology push, as Brooks
  notes, is demand pull from healthcare and the military. The large market of
  aging boomers can be expected to demand the capabilities these devices confer
  (and when boomers demand, politicians and corporate executives listen), and
  military planners have long poured research dollars into direct neural control
  of complex weapons and other machines.

  There remain some hillocks to climb, but overall it’s all downhill from here;
  and it is not too soon to start seriously considering what it will mean to have
  all the information, communication, and control capabilities — all the power —
  of the Internet essentially inside our heads. Or some of our heads.

  Reference: Brooks, Rodney (2003). “Toward a
  Brain-Internet Link: Surfing the Web via chips implanted in your brain isn’t as
  far-fetched as you might think.” Technology Review, November.

  Memory Glasses

  A pair of spectacles called “memory glasses” with a TV screen embedded in one
  of the lenses is connected to a PDA programmed to send messages or images to the
  screen, depending on what the wearer happens to be looking at. (The reference
  article does not mention a camera, but it is hard to see how the system could
  work without one). The spectacles are designed to be a memory enhancer; so if
  the wearer sees a person on the street, for example, the system will flash up
  the person’s name if the person is in the system to begin with.

  The system provides “a noninvasive wealth of information and memory cues
  about appointments, shopping-list items, meeting agendas, and the spouse’s
  birthday,” reports Louise Knapp, as well as the name or an image of the last
  meeting you had with the person you meet in the street. For that function, the
  system uses voice- and/or face-recognition technologies.

  Messages are flashed subliminally in just 1/180 of a second, but the inventor
  points out that the potential for mind control via subliminal messaging, much
  feared in the 1970s, turned out to be baloney under the lamp of serious
  research. Some researchers are skeptical that subliminal messaging works at all,
  whether for mind control or memory enhancement. Others are cautiously optimistic
  that it might work if the subliminal messages relate to “something you already
  have on your mind.” The prototype glasses improved memory recall among test
  subjects 1.5 times, and none were aware of the subliminal messages. The glasses
  could be on the market in two years for about $300.

  Reference: Knapp, Louise (2003). “Memories in the
  Corner of My Eye.” Wired News, November 11.

  Fusion II

  At a time of rapidly accelerating technological innovation, it is salutary to
  be reminded that “failed” or “hyped” technologies ain’t necessarily so. Take
  fusion — fusing atoms to produce energy, instead of smashing them — for
  example. The fact that billions of dollars are being invested on a reactor is a
  strong vote of confidence that fusion is back. The International Thermonuclear
  Experimental Reactor (ITER) to be built in France or Japan by a consortium of
  Canadian, Chinese, EU, Japanese, Korean, Russian and US interests, will be the
  first to produce a lot more power than it consumes.

  ITER will be the second largest international cooperative research and
  development project ever (the International Space Station is the biggest.) It is
  intended to lead to commercial fusion plants to produce cheap, plentiful, and
  clean energy from a virtually inexhaustible fuel supply derived from deuterium
  (extracted from water) and tritium (manufactured from lithium, an abundant light
  metal.) One kilogram of this fuel will produce the same amount of energy as ten
  million kilograms of fossil fuel.

  Reference: Whitehouse, David (2003). “Europe
  puts France up for reactor.” BBC News Online, November 26.

  Solid Liquid

  Hong Kong University researchers have used nanoparticles to create a
  substance with the viscosity of silicone oil that turns “as solid as hard
  rubber” in about a hundredth of a second in the presence of a low-power electric
  field. The substance contains nanoparticles that confer upon it a powerful
  electrorheological (solidifying particle-filled liquids in the presence of an
  electric field) property, which would be useful in dampers, valves, clutches and
  other mechanical devices that need to react quickly and automatically to
  environmental changes.

  We suspect it will find applications in healthcare.

  Reference: Unknown (2003). “Jolts Turn Liquid
  to Solid.” Technology Research News, November 19.