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Smell what’s wrong Artificial noses are big business these days. These electronic sniffers, or e-noses, are mostly cumbersome and expensive contraptions, which are employed by industries ranging from food processing to airport security to health care, sell for anywhere between $ 10,000 and 50,000. Enter Pampa, designed by researchers in Argentina, a hi-performance e-nose that’s small enough to be portable yet less expensive than its older, larger rivals. It weighs less than two pounds, fits into a small plastic container about the size of a shoe box and sells for $ 5,000 to 10,000. The Pampa can be modified to identify the properties of many food products, such as coffee, tea and olive oil. It may also be used to detect substances like poisonous gases and toxic chemicals, says a report in The Wired. The current market for electronic sniffers is growing fast. Fruit-can antennae Here’s an idea for geeks who have a hard time accessing broadband. Build your own high-speed Internet service and what’s more, it can be accessed for free by anyone with a few hundred dollars’ worth of hardware and a tin of fruit as an antenna! According to the Sydney Morning Herald, nearly a thousand techies in Sydney have successfully tried this by registering with a non-profit organisation, Sydney Wireless, and setting up high-speed, community-run wireless networks known as WiFi. A map on the Website, which is located at www.sydneywireless.org, shows over 150 access points. All are welcoming freeloaders. Once someone sets up an access point anyone within a six-to-seven-kilometre radius can hop on. You can build your own antenna with a ‘no frills’ tropical fruit tin for $ 1.20. You also need a connector and wireless access card for your computer, which will cost $ 250. The networks are ideal for sharing music, video, software files and multi-player games. To dyslexics’ rescue A computer program using flashing lights may soon be able to help dyslexics improve their reading and writing skills. According to its makers, Brightstar, trials have shown a great improvement in both adults and children with dyslexia. Researchers claim that children who went through the six-week programme improved their reading to a great extent. Under the programme, a person’s heart is monitored and they are shown flashing lights and colours. The developers say that watching the lights trains structures in the brain to work more efficiently and so helps word recognition, reports BBC. Jim Hinds the Chief Executive of the company behind Brightstar said that the results of trials have been very impressive. PC helps botanists A computer tool called
FloraMap is helping botanists find and conserve rare plant species. The
program is useful when a plant has already been found but little or
nothing is known about its physiology. All it needs is the latitude,
longitude and altitude of each site where earlier specimens were found.
FloraMap then produces probability maps showing other likely locations.
The program, on a CD-ROM, has been developed — Agencies
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