Newspapers Online 1-14-2013 | ScienceTechnolo

The patent says the tattoo would communicate with smartphones, gaming devices, tablets and wearable tech like Google Glass via a Bluetooth-style connection and would include a microphone and power source. The idea is that wearers could communicate with their devices via voice commands without having to wear an earpiece or the the Glass headset.

And how's this for future tech? It could even be used as a lie detector. "Optionally, the electronic skin tattoo can further include a galvanic skin response detector to detect skin resistance of a user," the 10-page document reads. "It is contemplated that a user that may be nervous or engaging in speaking falsehoods may exhibit different galvanic skin response than a more confident, truth telling individual."

"Galvanic" is a reference to the way some surfaces, even skin, conduct electricity. Google explains mystery barge In images attached to the filing, the tattoo appears to be between a postage stamp and a Band-Aid in size. The filing says that in addition to sticking via an adhesive to the throat, the tattoo could go on a collar or a band around the user's neck.

Other possible uses include making both incoming and outgoing audio clearer. That could mean anything from making smartphone conversations clearer in a crowded room to being able to listen to music without earphones.

And we can't quite figure out the use case for this one, but: "the electronic tattoo can also be applied to an animal as well."

Digital tattoos and mind-reading headphones

With Google Glass, the company has moved to be at the forefront of the rapidly emerging trend in wearable tech. Glass is a wearable computer with a smartphone-like display that lets users text, browse the Web, take photos and run other apps, all hands free.

The latest version rolling out to field testers includes an ear bud, in response to complaints from some that the first version's bone-conduction sound system didn't work well. It's not hard to envision the throat tattoo as an eventual answer to that complaint.

In written testimony submitted to a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee, a Google executive said that the official secrecy was contrary to American values and hurting U.S. economic interests.

"Governments have a duty to protect their citizens. The current lack of transparency about the nature of government surveillance in democratic countries, however, undermines the freedoms most citizens cherish," Google's director for law enforcement and information security, Richard Salgado, said in the written testimony. He was expected to take questions later in the hearing.

Members of Congress are grappling with what changes to make to U.S. surveillance programs and laws after documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to newspapers revealed the extent of the spying.

President Barack Obama's administration has defended the programs and the secrecy around them as necessary to counter militant groups such as al Qaeda.

Some U.S. lawmakers have said they did not intend to authorize programs that are so sweeping, such as the daily collection of millions of pieces of data about telephone calls. At the request of spy agencies and government lawyers, the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees the programs, has allowed them to go on.

Google, Microsoft Corp and other major tech companies have asked that they be allowed to provide the public greater detail on the orders they receive from the U.S. surveillance court.

They want to be able to say, without running afoul of secrecy laws, how many demands they get under various sections of U.S. spying laws. Not being allowed to publish that level of detail represents a "prior restraint of speech" that is presumptively unlawful, Salgado said.

Government lawyers say that level of detail would tell U.S. enemies too much about spying capabilities.

Salgado also quoted reports that U.S. companies may lose billions of dollars in revenue as non-American users of the Internet grow wary of services based in the United States.

"The Apple investigation is under way," the judicial source said on Wednesday, without giving details.

The Italian subsidiary of Apple was not immediately available for comment.

The maker of the iPhone is the latest prominent corporation to become the target of a tax probe in Italy amid a global crackdown on tax cheating by multinationals.

The Moto G will be sold contract-free from £135 in the UK and $179 in the US.

The handset has a 4.5in (11.4cm) 720p high-definition screen, a five megapixel rear camera, a 1.3MP front one, and runs the latest versions of the Android operating system.

Analysts suggests the budget end of the market is set to enjoy huge growth.

"The second wave of smartphone adopters is now starting," said Francisco Jeronimo, a mobile device analyst at the consultancy IDC.

"This wave is characterised by consumers looking to get their first smartphone at the cheapest price they find. "They don't have the need nor the money to afford the most advanced smartphones, as the first wave of adopters had. "

'Fast to assemble' The Moto G is being launched in 30 countries including the UK, US, France, Germany and parts of Latin America and Asia. That contrasts with the country's last model - the Moto X - which is currently only available in the US.

Its price makes it slightly cheaper than Samsung's Galaxy S3 Mini, HTC's Desire X and Sony's Xperia M but still more expensive than Huawei's Ascend G510.

However, Motorola's device is the only one of these to come preinstalled with the Android Jelly Bean operating system. The firm is also promising to release an upgrade to the newest version of its Android platform, KitKat, in the near future.

It also has the highest resolution display and is the only one to feature a quad-core, rather than dual-core, CPU (central processing unit). This should in theory allow it to offer superior processing power while minimising the toll on battery life.

Motorola's chief executive told the BBC it had helped cut each handset's cost by putting in a large orders for their components from the start.

"The engineers also designed this for cost - there's fewer pieces [and] it's designed to be easy and fast to assemble," said Dennis Woodside.

Obama has pledged that the website will work smoothly for most people by the end of the month - a critical deadline for Americans who need to sign up for insurance benefits that would start on January 1.

He has come under fire after millions of Americans discovered they would lose their current health plans in spite of his oft-repeated promise that those who were happy with their insurance would not need to switch.

"We have much work still to do, but are making progress at a growing rate," Todd Park, the chief technology officer at the White House, said in written testimony to the Republican-led House of Representatives' Oversight Committee.

Darrell Issa, the chairman of the committee, said the administration should have known the website did not work before it was launched.

"This wasn't a small mistake," Issa said as the hearing opened. "This was a monumental mistake to go live and effectively explode on the launch pad."

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA, aims to provide health benefits to millions of uninsured Americans. It mandates that most Americans be enrolled for health coverage by March 31 or pay a fine.

The White House had pleaded with the committee to postpone Park's appearance, saying he needed to devote all his time to fixing the website. But the committee subpoenaed him. ID:nL2N0IY01X]

Also slated to testify are Steven VanRoekel, the chief information officer at the White House budget office, and Henry Chao, the deputy chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In his written testimony, Chao sought to address concerns about privacy and security of personal information used to sign up for insurance, and said the website meets "stringent privacy and security controls."

Chao also said the administration failed to test HealthCare.gov for the Web traffic volumes seen on October 1, when it launched, accounting for technical problems.

The reforms, including the establishment of a national grid and the liberalization of the power market for homes, are central to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's drive to overhaul the economy, as high energy costs threaten to derail efforts to reverse decades of stagnation.

Regional monopolies, including Tokyo Electric Power Co and Kansai Electric Power Co, supply almost 98 percent of Japan's electricity and terms for access to their transmission lines make it onerous for new entrants.

Wrenching control of transmission from the monopolies to create a national grid became a big issue after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that sparked the Fukushima disaster and highlighted an inability to transfer power to areas suffering shortages.

The power law was passed by Japan's lower house earlier this month and sailed through the upper house with 202 votes in favor and 29 against, a parliamentary official said by phone.

While the energy companies say they support the thrust of the proposed changes, they have repeatedly urged the government to give priority to stable power supplies and say reform should be slowed down if this cannot be guaranteed.

The utilities have resisted attempts since the 1990s to liberalize the industry. The companies and their affiliates have ties with politicians, fund their campaigns and often give government officials executive roles.

"There are quite a few issues to resolve," Makoto Yagi, chairman of the Japan Federation of Power Companies and president of Kansai Electric, said in a statement after the vote.

"In the separation of power generation and transmission, in particular, to ensure stable supplies, arrangements and rules to supplement the split need to be in place," he said.

NATIONAL GRID

The monopolies were set up in 1951 during the American occupation after World War Two and followed the U.S. model at the time, with regional utilities controlling all aspects of generation and transmission.

Tokyo Electric, which before the meltdowns at its Fukushima Daiichi facility was the most powerful utility, is now under government control and being split into separate units. That process will probably be the template for broader change.

The development would mark a new low point for the talks with Israel that resumed in July and which officials from both sides have said have made little headway.

In an interview with Egyptian CBC television, Abbas suggested the negotiations would continue even if the Palestinian peace delegation stuck to its decision.

"Either we can convince it to return, and we're trying with them, or we form a new delegation," he said.

It was unclear from Abbas's interview when the Palestinian negotiators had quit, but Abbas said he would need about a week to resume the talks.

In a statement to Reuters TV on Wednesday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat did not elaborate on the report of his resignation, but said the sessions with Israel were frozen.

"In reality, the negotiations stopped last week in light of the settlement announcements last week," he said.

Since the talks got underway after a three-year break, Israel has announced plans for several thousand new settler homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The disclosure on Wednesday that Israel's Housing Ministry had commissioned separate plans for nearly 24,000 more homes for Israelis in the two areas raised U.S. concern and drew Palestinian condemnation.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an advocate of settlement construction, intervened late on Tuesday, ordering a halt to the projects and saying he had no prior knowledge of them.

Netanyahu said he feared such settlement activity could trigger an international outcry that would divert attention from Israel's lobbying against a deal between world powers and Iran that would ease economic sanctions on Tehran without dismantling its nuclear-enrichment capabilities.

Nuclear talks resume in Geneva on November 20. Israel, widely believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear power, accuses Iran of pursuing atomic weapons. Iran says its nuclear program has only peaceful purposes. SETTLEMENT PUSH

A statement announcing Netanyahu's move made no mention of the Palestinians or the land-for-peace negotiations. Most countries say Israeli settlements built in areas captured in the 1967 Middle East war are illegal.

A team found genetically engineered mice with Alzheimer's lost thickness in this layer of eye cells.

As the retina is a direct extension of the brain, they say the loss of retinal neurons could be related to the loss of brain cells in Alzheimer's.

The findings were revealed at the US Society for Neuroscience conference.

The team believes this work could one day lead to opticians being able to detect Alzheimer's in a regular eye check, if they had the right tools. Alterations in the same retinal cells could also help detect glaucoma - which causes blindness - and is now also viewed as a neurodegenerative disease similar to Alzheimer's, the researchers report.

Scott Turner, director of the memory disorders programme at Georgetown University Medical Center, said: "The retina is an extension of the brain so it makes sense to see if the same pathologic processes found in an Alzheimer's brain are also found in the eye."

Dr Turner and colleagues looked at the thickness of the retina in an area that had not previously been investigated. This included the inner nuclear layer and the retinal ganglion cell layer.

They found that a loss of thickness occurred only in mice with Alzheimer's. The retinal ganglion cell layer had almost halved in size and the inner nuclear layer had decreased by more than a third.

"This suggests a new path forward in understanding the disease process in humans and could lead to new ways to diagnose or predict Alzheimer's that could be as simple as looking into the eyes," said Dr Turner.

Non-invasive

Treatments developed for Alzheimer's could therefore also be useful for treating glaucoma, he added.

But he also said that so far it was still speculation to say that retinal thinning may predict impending Alzheimer's disease.

"We're hoping that this translates to human patients and we suspect that retinal thinning, just like cortical thinning, happens long before anyone gets dementia," Dr Scott told BBC News.

"Human studies are needed to test this idea as a diagnostic [test]. Current leading biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease are either very costly or invasive. A retinal thickness scan - as measured by optical coherence tomography - would be both inexpensive and non-invasive."

The protocol, used by many pirate sites as well as legal services, allows people to download files bit by bit.

It saw its share of total internet traffic fall to 7%, a drop of 20% in the past six months. However, in Europe traffic continues to grow.

Meanwhile, other video content is riding high - with NetFlix and YouTube accounting for 50% of all net traffic.

The report, from broadband measurement firm Sandvine, shows a sharp decrease in the bandwidth taken up by BitTorrent traffic, some of which is associated with the downloading of illegal music and movies.

Ten years ago, when Sandvine began compiling its twice-yearly Global Internet Phenomena Report, BitTorrent traffic accounted for 60% of the total. The latest figures suggest that, as well as its share falling, there could be less overall BitTorrent traffic on the network.

But in Europe, BitTorrent remains popular, with half of all uploaded traffic still attributed to the protocol.

Torrent-based peer-to-peer file sharing is on the decrease, partly because people are turning to other ways to swap material.

The use of "dark nets" such as Tor and encrypted digital lockers is growing in popularity.

These can be harder to track.

But also people are simply turning to legitimate services.

"If this trend continues I think it can most likely be explained by the increase in legal alternatives people have in the United States. In Europe and other parts of the world, it's much harder to watch recent films and TV shows on demand so unauthorised BitTorrent users continue to grow there," said Ernesto Van Der Dar, founder of news site TorrentFreak.

Mark Mulligan, an independent analyst, agrees. "We are finally at the start of having enough compelling legitimate services that the reasons for piracy begin to fade," he said.

"That doesn't mean that a hardcore of users won't continue to use these sites because they will."

Six strikes Copyright holders in both the US and Europe have taken a tough stance on internet piracy in recent months.

Introducing GimBall -- a spherical flying robot encased in a flexible cage, which allows it to happily smash into surfaces while navigating disaster sites. Unlike other rescue robots, where colliding with obstacles could easily spell the end of an expedition, GimBall is able to bounce back without losing its bearings or damaging its in-built camera.

The futuristic floating ball is the brainchild of scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), and it's hoped that one day it will be used for everything from searching for survivors to measuring gas leaks in collapsed buildings.

Watch: Flying robots perform amazing acrobatics "We were wondering why insects were so capable of going inside any building -- yet had limited senses such as eyesight," explained co-creator Adrien Briod. "One capability that was completely overlooked was their ability to collide into surfaces. For insects this isn't a big deal -- but it is for robots."

Flying to the rescue

Indeed, one of the first major search-and-rescue missions to use robots was in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York's Twin Towers -- an area deemed too dangerous or inaccessible to humans.

However, the ground-dwelling machines sometimes found it difficult to negotiate the collapsed World Trade Center, becoming stuck in the rubble. In the last decade, robotics has come a long way, with scientists increasingly looking at the benefits of flying machines in disaster zones.

"A ground robot will very quickly be limited -- even a staircase is difficult. If you need to reach people on the fifth floor of a building, it won't be able to do it," said Briod. "Flying allows you to overcome large obstacles. And it provides an elevated point of view -- it's very useful to have an image of the scene from eye level, than from the floor." Clever design

So how does Gimball work? With a 37 centimeter diameter, the robot is a little larger than a basketball. Featuring a stable inner frame, and a rotating outer frame made of 90 flexible carbon rods, it is able to bounce off surfaces without damaging the machine. While other robots might need heavy sensors to help avoid collisions, GimBall keeps things light, weighing just 370 grams.

Liquid Telecom has agreed a deal with one of Somalia's largest mobile operators, Hormuud, to connect it to its 17,000 km (10,500 mile) network of terrestrial cables that crosses 11 African countries.

Liquid already provides Somalia with international Internet links via satellite, but will now deliver more capacity faster.

"If there is a place that is not connected, that is the place that attracts us," Nic Rudnick, chief executive of Mauritius-based Liquid Telecom, told Reuters on the sidelines of an African telecoms conference in Cape Town.

Although it has one of the longest shorelines on the continent, Somalia does not benefit from the three undersea cables that run alongside it. All of them land further south in Kenya, from where Liquid Telecom will be linking to it.

The company has access to capacity on all three cables and is a shareholder in one, the East African Marine System.

Liquid provides bandwidth connectivity to clients in 16 countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, through both satellite and cable connections.

Four months ago, our cameras on Cassini were commanded to execute a routine imaging sequence during an event that was anything but routine.

On 19 July, an array of overlapping images framing Saturn, its entire ring system and a host of its moons was acquired while Cassini was deep in the shadow created by the planet's eclipse of the Sun.

This arrangement of Sun, Saturn, and machine made for a rare opportunity to image from the outer Solar System the planets in close to the Sun.

The intent: To catch a precious glimpse of our own planet - tiny, remote, alone - as it would be seen from a billion miles away.

Images of this nature had been taken before. The famous Voyager 1990 "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth became, in the hands of Carl Sagan, a romantic allegory of the human condition and an inspirational call to environmental protection and planetary brotherhood.

And Cassini's previous 2006 version, taken from Saturn orbit, showing the startling juxtaposition of our dot of a planet beside the enormity of Saturn's rings, became the most beloved Cassini image.But from the very start, the plans for the 19 July mosaic included something very special: If all went well, the images would capture a glimpse of Earth alongside Saturn and its rings at the very moment that people all over the globe would be contemplating their connectedness to each other and to all life on Earth, appreciating the rarity of our planet within the Solar System, marvelling at their own existence, and rejoicing at the very thought of having their picture taken from a billion miles away.

And contemplate, appreciate, marvel and rejoice they did!

From Pennsylvania: "What a great way to feel connected to the Universe, the planet, and every single person on it. We are truly all in this together."

From the UK: "What a privilege to be part of such an event with so many people worldwide."