After the EU's announcement that it will ban "backscatter" x-ray body scanners, airports may have to look harder at alternative security measures. From Bluetooth tracking to thermal lie-detector cameras, we take a glimpse into the weird and wonderful future of airport security.

The check-point of the future

Earlier this year, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) demonstrated its vision for the "checkpoint of the future" -- a series of neon-lit tunnels, each equipped with an array of eye-scanners, x-ray machines, and metal and liquid detectors.

Heralding an end to "one size fits all screening," the association says that passengers will be assigned a "travel profile" and ushered into one of three corridors accordingly.

Prehistoric animal bones found at a Daytona Beach construction site have been confirmed as belonging to a mastodon, officials at the local Museum of Arts and Sciences confirmed on Tuesday.

According to reports by both WESH.com and The Daytona Beach News Journal, the bones were discovered by crews working on a storm water retention pond near Nova Road. The construction site was closed down in order to preserve the fossils - a jawbone, some vertebrae, two tusks, pieces of femur and some additional bones belonging to the large-tusked, Ice Age-era mammal.

"We're finding some significant pieces - tusks and vertebrae. We don't know completely what's down there yet, so it gets more exciting the more we dig," Museum of Arts and Sciences representative Zach Zacharias told WESH on Wednesday.

Officials from the museum added that they did not know as of that time whether or not there was a single partial skeleton, a full set of remains, or bones from multiple creatures located at the fossil site. However, they said that they kept finding more and more bones at the retention pond's location, and they believe that they are between 13,000 and 150,000 years old.

For years, many have mocked the idea of implantable microchips and cyborgs as both conspiracy theories and science fiction. Anyone who so much as mentioned these possibilities to their neighbor risked being labeled either as a religious fanatic or delusional and paranoid. However, as they have become more and more prevalent in everyday society, it has become increasingly difficult to ridicule these concepts.

For instance, with stories like the recent Singularity Hub article entitled, "Revolutionary New Brain Chip Allows Monkeys To Grasp AND Feel Objects Using Their Thoughts," these emerging technological possibilities are almost impossible to ignore.

This article discusses how scientists have recently announced the creation of an implantable device that can be placed in the brain and which will allow for the control of computers by thought. Dr. Miguel Nicolelis and company have already tested these devices in monkeys with stunningly accurate results. In addition to allowing the user to control the computer by thought, it also allows the user to feel the virtual object it is manipulating.

Of course, this device is not the first of its kind. For years, implants have allowed monkeys to control computer cursors and even robotic arms in laboratory settings.

Dr. Vallee was born in France, where he received a B.S. in mathematics at the Sorbonne and an M.S. in astrophysics at Lille University. Coming to the U.S. as an astronomer at the University of Texas, where he co-developed the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA, Jacques later moved to Northwestern University where he received his Ph.D. in computer science. He went on to work on information technology research at SRI International and the Institute for the Future, where he directed the project to build the world's first network-based collaboration system as a Principal Investigator for the groupware project on Arpanet, the prototype for the Internet.


A venture capitalist since 1984, Jacques Vallee has served as an early-stage investor and director of over 60 high-technology companies, a third of which went public through acquisitions or IPOs. Apart from his work with information science and finance, Jacques has had a long-term private interest in astronomy, in writing and in the frontiers of research, notably unidentified aerial phenomena. His most recent book, The Heart of the Internet, is available free of charge on Google Books. He was awarded the Jules Verne Prize for a science fiction novel in French.

If a number's not in our address book, attached to a very familiar name, there's no reason to pick it up -- it's probably something evil.

Before, if a number even had a familiar area code, it was probably okay to pick it up. It was the hairdresser confirming an appointment, or the school calling about your good-for-nothing kids. But now that telemarketers and debt collectors have figured out ways to game call-screeners by spoofing phone numbers, as The New York Times's Matt Richtel points out, we have completely lost trust in any unknown numbers.

"You don't know who is on the other end of the line, no matter what your caller ID might say," Sandy Chalmers, a division manager at the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection in Wisconsin, told Richtel.

But in an age when many people carry cell phones stocked with hundreds or thousands of phone numbers accumulated over the years, Caller ID is already behind the times. We're trained to screen calls from numbers we don't recognize. From here onward it's only trusted address book contacts for us. Email us before you try calling us on that bizarrely area-coded Google Voice number.

A new batch of 5,000 emails among scientists central to the assertion that humans are causing a global warming crisis were anonymously released to the public yesterday, igniting a new firestorm of controversy nearly two years to the day after similar emails ignited the Climategate scandal.

Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political "cause" rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.

Regarding scientific transparency, a defining characteristic of science is the open sharing of scientific data, theories and procedures so that independent parties, and especially skeptics of a particular theory or hypothesis, can replicate and validate asserted experiments or observations. Emails between Climategate scientists, however, show a concerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence and procedures.

The Earth's intensely hot and super-pressurized core is even harsher than scientists realized, according to a study published today in the journal Nature.

Oxygen does not have a major presence in the outer core, according to the new research. This has major implications for scientists' understanding of the period when the Earth formed through the accretion of dust and clumps of matter.

The composition of the Earth's core remains a mystery - just last year scientists found it has another layer. Scientists know that the liquid outer core consists mainly of iron, but it is believed that small amounts of some other elements are present as well. Oxygen is the most abundant element on the planet, so it is not unreasonable to expect oxygen might be one of the dominant "light elements" in the core. But that's not so, the new research says.

Engineers fought desperately on Wednesday to save Russia's Phobos-Grunt spacecraft after the Martian probe sent "a first sign of life" more than two weeks after being stranded in orbit.

After days of frustrating silence, contact with the probe was made on Tuesday at 2025 GMT at a European Space Agency ground station in Perth, Western Australia, the Paris-based ESA said.

"ESA teams are working closely with engineers in Russia to determine how best to maintain communication with the spacecraft," it said.

A spokesman at European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told AFP: "We sent an instruction to (the probe) to switch on its transmitter and the probe sent us telemetric data.

"However, we do not have all the details and we are not very sure of what we received. It's a first sign of life," he said.

The probe is in a "very low, very unfavourable orbit (that) is difficult to identify accurately," the spokesman added.

A team of researchers at EPFL, the University of Lausanne and the Salk Institute created super strong, marathon mice and nematodes by reducing the function of a natural inhibitor, suggesting treatments for age-related or genetically caused muscle degeneration are within reach.

It turns out that a tiny inhibitor may be responsible for how strong and powerful our muscles can be. This is the surprising conclusion reached by scientists in EPFL's Laboratory of Integrative Systems Physiology (LISP), in collaboration with a group in the Center for Integrative Genomics at the University of Lausanne and at the Salk Institute in California. By acting on a receptor (NCoR1), they were able to modulate the transcription of certain genes, creating a strain of mighty mice whose muscles were twice a strong as those of normal mice.

In 2008, the Italian satellite PAMELA picked up an unusual signal: a spike in antimatter particles whizzing through space. The discovery, controversial at the time, hinted that physicists might be coming close to detecting dark matter, an enigmatic substance thought to account for 85% of the matter in the universe. Now, new data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope confirm the spike. Alas, they also undermine its interpretation as a sign of dark energy.

Theorists generally believe that when two dark matter particles collide, they should annihilate each other to produce ordinary particles, such as an electron and its antimatter twin, a positron. Thanks to Einstein's iconic equivalence between energy and mass, E=mc2, each of those particles should emerge with an energy essentially equal to the mass of the original dark matter particle. So when the PAMELA team saw a spike in the ratio of positrons to the more abundant electrons over a particular slice of the energy spectrum, some physicists got excited. Perhaps PAMELA was seeing evidence of such annihilations.

However, because positrons are produced elsewhere in the universe, including in pulsars and neutron stars, the result was inconclusive at best - although it stirred quite a frenzy. At a conference where the preliminary PAMELA data was being presented, physicists used cell phones to snap photos of the Italian team's slides, then wrote and published papers on the Internet about the data's dark matter significance, all before the results were prepared for submission to a refereed journal.

The plot thickened in 2009 when the Fermi team released data from its own satellite's look at the cosmic ray spectrum, which showed no signals out of the ordinary. However, in that analysis, the Fermi group considered the sum total of all charged particles, electrons, and positrons. That was because the telescope was designed to measure neutral gamma rays and has no onboard magnet for distinguishing negatively charged electrons and positively charged positrons.