A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a “voiceless” phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

A video (right) shows the system being used to place the first public voiceless phone call on stage at a recent conference held by microchip manufacturer Texas Instruments. Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation, which developed the neckband, demonstrates the device, called the Audeo.

Users needn’t worry about that the system voicing their inner thoughts though. Callahan says producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires “a level above thinking”. Users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment.

The Audeo has previously been used to let people control wheelchairs using their thoughts. Watch a video demonstrating thought control of wheelchairs

“I can still talk verbally at the same time,” Callahan told New Scientist. “We can differentiate between when you want to talk silently, and when you want to talk out loud.” That could be useful in certain situations, he says, for example when making a private call while out in public.

The system demonstrated at the TI conference can recognise only a limited set of about 150 words and phrases, says Callahan, who likens this to the early days of speech recognition software.

At the end of the year Ambient plans to release an improved version, without a vocabulary limit. Instead of recognising whole words or phrases, it should identify the individual phonemes that make up complete words.

This version will be slower, because users will need to build up what they want to say one phoneme at a time, but it will let them say whatever they want. The phoneme-based system will be aimed at people who have lost the ability to speak due to neurological diseases like ALS – also known as motor neurone disease.

Happy birthday, Universe!

Kinda. It’s not really the Universe’s birthday, but now we do know to high accuracy just how old it is.

How?

NASA’s WMAP is the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (which is a mouthful, and why we just call it WMAP). It was designed to map the Universe with exquisite precision, detecting microwaves coming from the most distant source there is: the cooling fireball of the Big Bang itself.

New results just released from WMAP have nailed down lots of cool stuff — literally — about the Universe.

I am about to explain the early Universe to you. I’ll be brief, but if you want to skip to the results, then go ahead.

Here’s the quick version: the Big Bang was hot. The Universe itself expanded outward from a single point — actually, it’s space itself that expands, not the objects in it — and like any expanding gas it cooled. After about a microsecond, it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to form. Three minutes later (yes, just three minutes) it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to stick together. Hydrogen, helium, and just a dash of lithium were created, and these would be the only elements for some time (hundreds of millions of years, in fact). The Universe was a thick soup of matter and energy.

It kept expanding and cooling. At this point, it was opaque to light. A photon couldn’t travel an inch without smacking into an electron and then getting sent off in some other random direction. However, after a few hundred thousand years, an amazing thing happened: neutral hydrogen could form. Before this point, the Universe was still too hot; as soon as an electron bonded with a proton, some ultraviolet photon would come along and whack it off. But at that golden moment the cosmos had cooled off enough that a lasting atomic relationship was in the offing. Neutral hydrogen was born. At that moment — astronomers call it recombination, which is a misnomer, since it was the first time electrons and protons could combine — the Universe became transparent; without all those pesky electrons floating around, photons found themselves free to travel long distances.

It’s those photons WMAP sees. After 13.7 billion years, the expansion of the Universe has cooled the light, stretched its wavelength from ultraviolet to microwave. Another way to think about it is that the temperature associated with each photon went from thousands of Kelvins down to just a few, less than 3, in fact. That’s -270 Celsius, and -454 Fahrenheit.

Brrrr.

That light emitted just after recombination tells us a vast amount about the Universe at that time. By carefully mapping the exact wavelength of the light and the direction from where it came, we can tell the density and temperature of the matter at that time. Incredibly we can also tell how much dark energy there was, and even the geometry of the Universe: whether it is flat, open, or closed.

All this, from the dying glow of the Big Bang itself.

WMAP Results

A lot of this information was determined a while back, just a couple of years after WMAP launched. But now they have released the Five Year Data, a comprehensive analysis of what all that data means. Here’s a quick rundown:

1) The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.

2) The image above shows the temperature difference between different parts of the sky. Red is hotter, blue is cooler. However, the difference is incredibly small: the entire temperature range from cold to hot is only 0.0002 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin, so you’re seeing temperatures from 2.7248 to 2.7252 Kelvins.

3) The age of the Universe when recombination occurred was 375,938 years, +/- about 3100 years. Wow.

4) The Universe is flat.

5) The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

We occupy a razor thin slice of reality.

There are other important things that have come from the WMAP data, and if you’re interested, you can read all about them on the WMAP site and in the professional journal papers.

But if you only want to peruse the results I’ve highlighted here, that’s fine too. But remember this, and remember it well: you are living in a unique time. For the first time in all of human history, we can look up at the sky, and when it looks back down on us it reveals its secrets. We are the very first humans to be able to do this… and we have the entire future of the Universe ahead of us.

Scientists have filmed an electron in motion for the first time, using a new technique that will allow researchers to study the tiny particle’s movements directly.

Previously it was impossible to photograph electrons because of their extreme speediness, so scientists had to rely on more indirect methods. These methods could only measure the effect of an electron’s movement, whereas the new technique can capture the entire event.

Extremely short flashes of light are necessary to capture an electron in motion. A technology developed within the last few years can generate short pulses of intense laser light, called attosecond pulses, to get the job done.

“It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10^-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe,” said Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden.

Using another laser, scientists can guide the motion of the electron to capture a collision between an electron and an atom on film.

The length of the film Mauritsson and his colleagues made corresponds to a single oscillation of a wave of light . The speed of the event has been slowed down for human eyes. The results are detailed in the latest issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Mauritsson says the technique could also be used to study what happens in an atom when an electron leaves its shell.

Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. This phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access. Cold reboots can be used to mount attacks on popular disk encryption systems — BitLocker, FileVault, dm-crypt, and TrueCrypt — using no special devices or materials. We experimentally characterise the extent and predictability of memory remanence and report that remanence times can be increased dramatically with simple techniques. New algorithms are available for finding cryptographic keys in memory images and for correcting errors caused by bit decay.

Full research paper [PDF]

Introductory blog post

Frequently asked questions

Experiment guide

Videos and images

• The genome is the complete list of coded instructions needed to make a person.
• The 4 letters in the DNA alphabet - A, C, G and T - are used to carry the instructions for making all organisms. The order (or sequence) of these letters holds the code just like the order of letters that makes words mean something. Each set of three letters corresponds to a single amino acid.
• There are 20 different building blocks - amino acids - used in a bewildering array of combinations to produce our proteins. The different combinations make proteins as different as keratin in hair and haemoglobin in blood.
• The information would fill a stack of paperback books 200 feet high.
• The information would fill two hundred 500-page telephone directories.
• Between humans, our DNA differs by only 0.2%, or 1 in 500 bases (letters). (This takes into account that human cells have two copies of the genome.)
• If we recited the genome at one letter per second for 24 hours a day it would take a century to recite the book of life.
• If two different people started reciting their individual books at a rate of one letter per second, it would take nearly eight and a half minutes (500 seconds) before they reached a difference.
• A typist typing at 60 words per minute (around 360 letters) for 8 hours a day would take around 50 years to type the book of life.
• Our DNA is 98% identical to that of chimpanzees.
• The estimated number of genes in both humans and mice is 60,000-100,000; in the round worm (C. elegans), the number is approximately 19,000; in yeast (S. cerevisiae) there are around 6,000 genes; and the microbe responsible for tuberculosis has around 4,000.
• The vast majority of DNA in the human genome - 97% - has no known function.
• The first chromosome to be completely decoded was chromosome 22 at the Sanger Centre (now the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) in Cambridgeshire, in December 1999.
• There is 6 feet of DNA in each of our cells packed into a structure only 0.0004 inches across (it would easily fit on the head of a pin).
• There are 3 billion (3,000,000,000) letters in the DNA code in every cell in your body.
• There are 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) cells in the body.
• If all the DNA in the human body was put end to end it would reach to the sun and back over 600 times (100 trillion x 6 feet divided by 93 million miles = 1200).
• 12,000 letters of DNA are decoded by the Human Genome Project every second.
• If all three billion letters were spread out 1mm apart they would extend 3,000 km or about 7,000 times the height of the Empire State Building.
• If all three billion letters were spread out 3mm apart they would extend 9,000km more than twice the length of the Mississippi river at 3,779km.