In some ways, you could think of the human brain as a complex computer. And like any complex computer, with the right resources, it can be hacked. And now, researchers have apparently figured out a backdoor hack into the human brain, gaining access to your most private of information.

This comes by way of researchers from the Universities of Geneva, California (Berkeley) and Oxford. They connected a number of students with an off-the-shelf Emotive brain-computer interface (BCI). This device measures brain wave activity and through analysis of this data, scientists are able to glean some information for you. More specifically, they looked at the P300 brain signal.

When there is a target stimulus, the P300 signal spikes in recognition. For example, they might get the students to start thinking about the PIN code they have for their debit card and they start showing the different digits on a screen. Even on a subconscious level, the student’s P300 will spike when a familiar number (like the first digit in their PIN) is displayed. Researchers say that through this kind of methodology, they’re able to reduce the entropy (random data) by 10 to 40 percent, resulting in “marked improvements over random guessing.”

There’s more work to be done and the methodology is far from perfect, but it goes to show you that your brain can be “hacked” and your brain waves are already betraying your innermost secrets.

[Source]

Photo Credit: Mondolithic Studios

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Let’s say you drive a car. Every few months you have to change the oil. You can do this yourself or you can take it in to a shop. In either case, you have to discard the old oil and that’s not good for the environment. Scientists at Cambridge, though, may have a better solution.

A good deal of used oil is just disposed of, but the University of Cambridge researchers have developed a more effective strategy for something called pyrolysis. Right now, that process is used to heat up the used oil to a high temperature in the absence of oxygen. This breaks it down.

However, the heating process isn’t terribly efficient at producing liquids and gases that can be converted into fuel. By adding a microwave-absorbent material before heating the oil with microwaves, though, they found that the used oil was heated more evenly and converted almost 90% of the old stuff into usable gasoline and diesel.

No, this still isn’t an ideal solution — the gas and diesel is still being burned away in a conventional vehicle of some kind, rather than in a “greener” vehicle — but it sure beats discarding the used oil altogether. It’s like reusing by recycling. Now we need to work on reducing too.

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Every Star Trek geek has dreamed of this day. We’ve all dreamed of setting our phasers to stun and making use of the Holodeck. Those two innovations aren’t quite here, but it seems like we’re getting closer to tractor beams.

Unlike regular lasers that push things away by plastic them with photons, a tractor beam would effectively be a laser that pulls things toward them. To do this, the Hong Kong scientists need something called a Bessel beam.

Also unlike regular lasers, Bessel beams remain focused at an infinite distance, rather than dispersing as it gets away from its source. Perhaps more interestingly, the Bessel beam is able to reconstruct itself past obstacles. It cannot be blocked.

Without digging too much into the science side of things, what this means it that scientists may be able to generate a large enough concentration of energy on the far side of the object and minimize the concentration of energy on the near side. The net result: the object is “pushed” toward the origin of the Bessel beam.

That’s some crazy stuff. Too bad, for now, it sounds like this is all theory and no practice. Where is Locutus of Borg when you need him?

[Giz via Arxiv.org]

Photo: Thomas Harriman

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