Body odour may be your new password
Researchers are developing a new biometric technique that would allow identification of people through their body odour. Scientists at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in Spain found that there are recognisable patterns of each person’s body odour that remain steady. Therefore, every person has their own odour and this would allow their identification within a group of people at an accuracy rate of 85 per cent, researchers said.
The findings lead the way to improve personal identification that is less aggressive than other biometric techniques being used today. Several biometric techniques like the iris recognition and fingerprint recognition have a low error rate. However, these two techniques are usually related to criminal records and for this reason when people are required to identify themselves, they are not so willing to collaborate. (PTI)
Crisis hotlines’ new best friend: Texting
While counselling by phone remains far more prevalent, texting has become such a fundamental way to communicate, particularly among people under 20, that crisis groups have begun to adopt it as an alternative way of providing emergency services and counselling. Texting provides privacy that can be crucial if a person feels threatened by someone near them. It also looks more natural if the teenager is in public.
“They can still look ‘cool’ to their peers or friends while receiving assistance that they are in desperate need of,” said Jerry Weichman, a clinical psychologist in Newport Beach, California, who deals with adolescent issues. For counsellors, texting allows them to deal with more than one person at a time and to introduce experts into a conversation without transferring or placing a caller on hold. Exchanges by text, they point out, can also resume more seamlessly after an interruption, because a written record of previous conversations already exists. (NYT)
Nightmare Prediction: Rats Could Grow as Big as Sheep
In a prediction which is the stuff of nightmares, scientists are saying that rats could easily evolve to the size of sheep by filling “vacant ecological niches.” In the days of the dinosaurs, mammals existed, but they were tiny creatures as the dinosaurs filled all the brackets for larger beings. It was only after the dinosaurs were wiped out that mammals began to evolve into different shapes and sizes. Some of these were pretty enormous, like horses, mammoths and rhinoceri. Rats, known to be super-adaptable, could grow to fit the niches left by current larger mammals becoming extinct.
Jan Zalasiewicz, from the geology department at the University of leicester, says that all animals are conditioned to adapt to whatever form will best ensure their survival and allow them to continue to procreate. Currently, the largest rodent in the world is the capybara, that has reached weights of 80 kg. This is similar to the weight of a sheep. Rats could easily get to this size, but if there were “empty ecospace” to fill, they could get bigger still. This is an evolutionary phenomena known as gigantism, when smaller creatures grow into larger versions of themselves to fill a gap in the ecological chain. A good example of this is the blue whale. Fifty million years ago the blue whale was the same size as a wolf. (PTI)
Fisherman washes up in Islands after year adrift
A fisherman thought to be from El Salvador who washed ashore on the Marshall Islands said he survived more than a year adrift in the Pacific Ocean, drinking turtle blood and catching fish and birds with his bare hands. Jose Salvador Alvarenga, 37, told officials he set sail on a shark fishing trip from Mexico in late December 2012 but was blown out to sea. He was found in a disoriented state on a remote coral atoll where he had been washed up over the weekend in his 22-ft fiberglass boat. A police patrol boat took him to Majuro, the capital of the islands. “It was supposed to be a one-day fishing expedition, but they were blown off course by the northern winds,” Thomas Armbruster, the US Ambassador to the Marshall Islands, said. (Reuters)
A syringe can help seal gunshot in 15 seconds
Dealing with gunshots wounds on the battlefield is a brutal process. The only way to stop the bleeding is to stuff the wound with gauze, sometimes as deep as five inches into the body — and even then the treatment can fail, meaning the gauze has to be removed and new material put in. Using this almost medieval process it’s no surprise that haemorrhaging is still the leading cause of death for soldiers in the field.
Now a company named RevMedx has designed a device that they claim can stop a wound bleeding in just 15 seconds. This is the XStat, a modified syringe that injects tablet-sized sponges directly into the wound and that was inspired by the design of emergency tire repair kits. “That’s what we pictured as the perfect solution: Something you could spray in, it would expand, and bleeding stops,” a US Army Special Operations medic said.
(The Independent)