landrew - Slashdot User

Submission + - MIT's mini tractor beam

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @05:51PM

An anonymous reader writes: MIT scientists have developed a way to use light to grab and move minuscule particles on a microchip. The research could lead to fine-grained biological sensors and other precisely built nanoscale devices. Optical tweezers have been used on transparent media — like a microscope slide — that let the light shine through and hold objects in a tractor beam-like embrace. (This is possible because light's individual photons transfer minuscule amounts of force to particles they hit.) What's new in the optical tweezer from MIT's Matt Lang and David Appleyard is the use of infrared light. Unlike visible light, the infrared does not bounce off the silicon used as the basis for microchips. That means that MIT's optical tweezer can be used not just for study but to build structures on the surface of chips. Lang and Appleyard proved their technique by getting 16 live E. coli cells to spell out "MIT" on a chip.

Submission + - CAPTCHA broken - thanks to a virtual stripper (bbc.co.uk) 3

Submitted by

Dynamoo

on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @05:27AM

Dynamoo writes: "A few months ago there was some speculation that spammers had managed to break the security CAPTCHA for many webmail systems and were using them to spread viruses and junk email. The problem was that no-one could actually demonstrate a mechanism to defeat the security code.

However, an novel approach has been documented by the BBC, suggesting that a virtual stripper application may be partly to blame. The woman in the application progressively undresses if the user types in the correct CAPTCHA code.. a code that is actually being generated by the Yahoo! mail security check. The application itself is a trojan, dubbed TROJ_CAPTCHAR.A by Trend."

Submission + - New brushless generator for wind turbines (physorg.com)

Submitted by

sterlingda

on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @01:00AM

sterlingda writes: "A research team from the University of Cambridge have developed a new generator technology for the wind turbine industry to the point of commercial exploitation, for application in a wide spectrum of wind turbines ranging from multi-megawatt systems for wind farms down to domestic micro turbines."

Submission + - Universal Wi-Fi adapter for digital cameras (wifinetnews.com)

Submitted by

Glenn Fleishman

on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @12:44AM

Glenn Fleishman writes: "eyeFi has finally announced their Wi-Fi adapter for digital cameras. At $100, the 2 GB SD card features a full-fledged processing system that operates independent of the camera; no firmware is needed in the camera for the adapter to transfer images over a local network. eyeFi's system lets you configure the adapter to connect to one or more Wi-Fi networks (with or without encryption), while you set up photo-sharing and social-networking logins on their site. You can configure the card, whenever the camera is powered up and within range of a network it's set to use, to upload photos, which are then automatically posted to whichever services you specify. Photos are uploaded at full resolution, and resized only for services that won't accept larger sizes."

Olympic Medalist was Spyware King 336

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday February 16, 2006 @07:17PM from the other-biathlons dept.

Remy writes "Seems that Australian gold medal mogulist Dale Begg-Smith is also a spyware entrepreneur. According to a report at Spam Kings, Begg-Smith has supported himself in style as president of a company responsible for generating 20,000,000 pop-ups per day, thanks to drive-by installs of spyware. I know the concept of Olympians being amateurs is outdated, but shouldn't they be barred from competition for this sort of thing?"

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