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... GLOBAL NEWS. ... NEWS above these normal rates that scientists Technology, which holds the rights to a become concerned that brain damage of fabrication process that suspends tiny semi- some kind could be a factor. conductor devices in a liquid that's deposit- The growing evidence that ultrasound _ ed over a substrate containing holes of cor- affects unborn babies may cast new light responding shape. The devices settle on on the puzzling rise in left-handedness over _ the substrate and self-align. recent years. Rather than working on the interconnec- (Source: by Robert Matthews, Telegraph, tion to an RF antenna one chip at a time, Dec. 20, 2001, www.news.telegraph.co.uk) "we can do a massively parallel intercon- nection," Pounds said. Banknotes are not EURO BANKNOTES TO HAVE Alien's primary focus at present, he said. RADIO-FREQUENCY ID TAGS (Source: EE Times, December 19, 2001. AC ccording to an EE Times story pub- www.eetimes.com/story/OEG2001 12195001) chad in Danambhar tha Dy travelling at more than twice their speed. "What happens then is that the waves simply pile up on top of each other to cre- ate a monster. The result is an almost ver- tical wall of water which towers up to 36 metres in height before collapsing on itself. Any vessel caught by one of these has little chance of surviving." (Source: Sydney Morning Herald, January 10, 2002, www.smh.com.au/news/0201/09/ nationalational18.html) EURO BANKNOTES TO HAVE RADIO-FREQUENCY ID TAGS ccording to an EE Times story pub- lished in December, the European Central Bank is working with technology partners on a hush-hush project to embed radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags into the fibres of euro banknotes by 2005. A spokesman for the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, Germany, con- firmed the existence of a project but was careful not to comment on its technologies. Although euro banknotes already include such security features as holograms, foil strips, special threads, microprinting, spe- cial inks and watermarks, the ECB believes it must add further protection to keep the euro from becoming the currency of choice in the criminal underworld. "The RFID allows money to carry its own history" by recording information about where it has been, said Paul Saffo, Director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California. Banknotes present "an interesting future application for us," said Tom Pounds, Vice President of RFID Projects at Alien www.eetimes. com/story/OEG20011219S001) THERMAL DEVICE CAN DETECT LIES BY READING YOUR EYES LOSS OF SUPERTANKERS AT SEA new lie detector that measures sudden BLAMED ON GIANT WAVES flashes of heat from around the eyes cientists blame the disappearance of may soon be available. more than 200 supertankers and con- "This is the first technology that allows tainer ships during the past 20 years on _ lying to be measured or lying to be detect- monster waves of up to 36 metres in height. ed without any contact with the subject A team of oceanographers at the whatsoever, instantaneously, in real time," Technical University in Berlin re-created in said lead researcher James Levine, an a tank the gigantic "one-off" seas that are endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic in capable of breaking a 180-metre-long ship Rochester, Minnesota. in half. "You don't need to hook them up to any- "Even in the tank the effect was awe- thing; you don't need any sophisticated inspiring," said the research leader, experts to analyse the data." Giinther Clauss. "The exploding wave was "As people lie, there is a massive so powerful that it broke through the ceil- increase in blood flow around the eyes, and ing of the building in which the tank is associated with that there is sudden warm- located." ing around the eyes, where the colour Using a computerised, hydraulically changes to white in the thermal imaging powered wave-making machine, Professor system," Levine explained. Clauss's team established that the monster (Source: UPI, January 2, 2002) waves could occur with little or no warn- ing. He said slow-moving waves were UN PROPOSAL TO REGISTER caught up by a succession of faster waves EVERY PERSON ON EARTH A oahama + wr narcan in tha UN PROPOSAL TO REGISTER EVERY PERSON ON EARTH scheme whereby every person in the world would be fingerprinted and reg- istered under a universal identification scheme has been put to a United Nations round-table meeting by Pascal Smet, the head of Belgium's independent Asylum Review Board. Mr Smet said the European Union was already considering a Europe-wide system, using either fingerprints or eye-scanning technology to identify citizens, and said that the plan could be extended worldwide. "If you look to our societies, we are already registered from birth until death. Our governments know who we are and what we are. But one of the basic problems is the numbers of people in the world who are not registered, who do not have a set identity, and when these people move with real or fake passports you cannot identify them. (Source: AAP, December 13, 2001) fon Cc a aaa a ee ptt 8 ¢ NEXUS WWW.NeXU smagazi ne.com FEBRUARY — MARCH 2002