…Ants Set Animal Kingdom Record, All Touchy-Feely at Work, DOMO Robot Knows Own Strength, and more!

Solving the World’s Problems…One Package at a Time
First, we’d like to congratulate Allison Bebee and Katie Palermo, two Rochester Institute of Technology students who finished first place at the 2006 Paperboard Packaging Alliance Student Design Challenge — for repackaging sugar in what looks like a milk carton.

Except, in the packaging world, it’s not called a milk carton; it’s called a gable top package. The judges liked the functional design and the use of graphics for marketing.

“A big problem with sugar is that it comes in those flimsy paper packages,” Bebee said. “They are really difficult to pour from and nobody knows what to do with it after it’s opened.”

Indeed.

RIT is home to one of only six packaging science degree programs in the nation. (via Fark)

Speaking of awards…

Call for Nominations: 2006 Stupid Security Awards
Privacy International is calling for nominations to name and shame the worst offenders, according to Spy.org’s Spy Blog. The award categories are as follows:

• Most Egregiously Stupid Award
• Most Inexplicably Stupid Award
• Most Annoyingly Stupid Award
• Most Flagrantly Intrusive Award
• Most Stupidly Counter Productive Award

The competition will be judged by an international panel of well-known security experts, public policy specialists, privacy advocates and journalists. Open to anyone from any country, the competition closes on October 31, 2006. Nominations can be sent to — ::snicker snicker:: — stupidsecurity@privacy.org.

While we’re on the topic of security…

National Insecurity
Despite concerns from security experts, the U.S. Visa Waiver Program requirement, which states that all new tourist passports be issued as electronic passports by October, continues to move forward.

Semiconductor producer Infineon Technologies announced that it has been contracted to produce the secure identification chips that will, starting this fall, be used in all new U.S. passports, according to a recent Wireless Tech article. The firm estimates that 15 million new passports will be issued in the first year of the rollout

The announcement comes amid continued allegations from privacy analysts that RFID is a vulnerable technology that can be compromised easily and exploited by hackers, potentially putting millions of e-passport holders at risk.

We think the most questionable part of all of this comes in the article’s second-to-last sentence, on Infineon: The firm also supplies the chips that are used in the U.S. Department of Defense’s secure identification cards.

Does that not make anyone else shudder?

Seeing as we’re already discussing the DoD…

Trucks with Frickin’ Laser Beams on Them
Because the Pentagon has been unable to convert laser weapons into a suitable system after years of tests and billions in investments, now the Department of Defense is aiming for solid-state lasers, which can be powered by electricity rather than chemical fuel, according to a recent New Scientist article.

While these lasers have been in development for years, prototype system designs from two competing U.S. contractors passed the Pentagon’s preliminary review last month. Northrop Grumman and Textron Systems now have until the end of 2008 to demonstrate that their devices can fire a 100-kilowatt beam — enough to take down a high-speed rocket — for 300 seconds in a simulated battle.

Reports New Scientist:

The Pentagon wants to fit such lasers to the back of a truck or assault vehicle, which would move in concert with advancing troops and zap missiles within a few kilometers of them. The lasers could also protect ships against cruise missiles, or give fighter jets a defense against rocket strikes or a means to attack enemy aircraft.

No word yet on sharks with laser beams on them.

Yeah, That’s Pretty Fast
Trap-jaw ants have the fastest self-powered strike in the animal kingdom, outpacing speed demons like the whip-fast chameleon. A new study is out that says the species of tropical ant snaps its jaws together at 145 miles an hour, using the force of that motion not only to capture prey but also to catapult to safety, according to National Geographic.

The study establishes that the ants have adapted a structure normally used for feeding for a completely different purpose: propulsion.

“In terms of basic engineering, ants have solved this incredible problem of producing force using very simple structures at a very small scale,” said Brian Fisher, co-author of the study and curator of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

PSA: Where You’re Allowed to Touch Colleagues
“With President Bush’s bizarre ‘massage’ of German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the recent G8 Summit, it might be a good time to review what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate touching at work.”

The most important rule to remember is that beyond the handshake, according to Forbes (Whoo-hoo! With pictures!!), there are only three locations on the body where skin-to-skin contact is acceptable among co-workers: the forearm, the wrist and the upper back. (Exception: if you’re on a professional ball team and accomplish a notable feat, e.g., a game-winning touchdown or a home run. In such a case, teammates are not only allowed, they’re virtually required to slap butts.**)

Touching should be kept to a minimum, says Jill Bremer, an image etiquette and communication skills instructor. “Longer than a couple of seconds and it can become sexual.”

‘Cause I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shaken a colleague’s hand for a few seconds and thought to myself, “She obviously wants me.”

**Sexual harassment is not funny.

Ancient Waterpark Discovered in Israel
Archaeologists in Israel have unearthed an ancient water system that served “one of the grandest palaces in the biblical kingdom of Judea.”

Reuters reports that recent excavations unearthed nearly 70 square meters (750 square feet) of the unique water system — a network of reservoirs, drain pipes and underground tunnels — that served a palace discovered in 1954.

Yuval Gadot, a biblical archaeology expert from Tel Aviv University who is taking part in the excavation, said it was unclear exactly how the water system worked, but probably rainwater came down on the roof of the houses in the palace complex. “From there,” he said, “it was collected by drains into pools or to the underground reservoir and taken to nearby fields for crops or nice gardens.”

For centuries, water supplies have been one of the most sensitive issues in the Middle East, where most of the region is desert.

Apparently, There is a ‘Cocktail Party Problem.’ Apparently, Mathematicians Have Solved It.
Officials at the CIA and scientists around the world have pondered the “cocktail party problem” for decades, according to PhysOrg. It’s not what it sounds like.

How could they separate one sound — such as a voice — from a group of other recorded sounds, perhaps a multitude of voices at a cocktail party? Two University of Missouri-Columbia researchers have now found a mathematical solution to this problem.

Called “signal reconstruction without noisy phase” (…coulda come up with a better name, if you ask us), theoretically the solution says you should be able to pick up voices on a squeaky old microphone and then separate them all out so that you can hear what each person is saying in his or her own voice.

“In speech recognition technology, a ‘signal’ could be a recording of 25 people in a room talking at the same time, said Peter Casazza, professor of mathematics in MU’s College of Arts and Science. “Our solution shows that we can pull out each voice individually, not just with the words, but with the voice characteristics of each individual. We showed that this ‘cocktail party problem’ is mathematically solvable.”

DOMO Arigato Mr. Roboto

According to Popular Science, DOMO is the first robot to know its own strength, meaning its embedded elastic actuators (muscles) can detect exactly “how hard it’s gripping an object.”
(via TechEBlog)

Cheers.