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Eye movement biometrics
phys.org
A biometric security system based on how a user moves their eyes is being developed by technologists in Finland. Writing in the International Journal of Biometrics, the team explains how a person’s saccades, their tiny, but rapid, involuntary eye movements, can be measured using a video camera. The pattern of saccades is as unique as an iris or fingerprint scan but easier to record and so could provide an alternative secure biometric identification technology. Martti Juhola of the University of Tampere and colleagues point out that fingerprint and face recognition are perhaps the most usual biometric means to verify identity for secure access to buildings and computer resources and even at international borders. Other techniques such as iris scanning are also occasionally used in some circumstances. The most obvious disadvantage of such biometrics is that they might be forged through the use of an Read more…Sunspots Can Trigger Frigid Winters in Europe
A major part of the climate change that scientists have documented over the past few decades comes from human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Not all of it, however. Natural climate cycles haven’t magically disappeared — the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, for example, is entering a phase that will likely boost global temperatures temporarily — and scientists are still discovering new ones.
Credit: flickr/mrbeany
The latest comes in a new report published in Geophysical Research Letters. It’s well known that the Sun varies slightly in brightness every 11 years, and while those changes pale beside the effect of human-generated greenhouse gases, according to the report, they’re enough to trigger unusually cold winters in Central Europe.
The smoking gun is the freezing of the Rhine river, something that doesn’t happen often because it’s difficult to freeze such a large, free-flowing volume of water. Those unusually cold winters might come along at random, but by looking back at records dating to all the way back to 1780, a Read more…
320,000 could die in triple earthquake: Japan
Friday, Aug 31, 2012
JAPAN – Up to 323,000 people could die if three earthquakes occur simultaneously along the Nankai Trough, killing about 70 per cent of victims in subsequent tsunami, according to new predictions by two Cabinet Office panels.
The panels on Wednesday released predictions of damage that would be caused by a magnitude-9 Nankai Trough triple quake. This is the largest triple quake expected to occur in the trough–which stretches from off Shizuoka Prefecture down to Shikoku and Kyushu–with the so-called Tokai, Tonankai and Nankai earthquakes happening simultaneously.
The size of the predicted focal area is twice that of the magnitude-8.7 triple quake predicted by the government’s Central Disaster Management Council in 2003.
One of the study panels was tasked with estimating the height of tsunami and the area of inundated regions, while the other was a Read more…
Yikes. Supervolcano found under Hong Kong
Hong Kong geologists have revealed for the first time the full extent of an ancient supervolcano with a diameter of 18km sitting beneath the former British colony.
The giant ash monster is thought to be of the same collapse caldera type as the infamous Krakatau volcano which killed tens of thousands and literally rocked the world when it blasted open near the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra in 1883.
The discovery – one of only around 50 such volcanoes in the world – is a coup for the local rock boffins, who have been digging around the Geopark in Sai Kun in the east of the Special Administrative Region for several years.
A supervolcano is one which is capable of producing 1,000 cubic kilometers of ash in an eruption. To put that in perspective, the hugely destructive Krakatau, whose explosion was Read more…
Tiny Seal Of Great Importance Discovered – Is It The First Archaeological Evidence Of Samson, The Biblical Slayer Of Philistines?
MessageToEagle.com – TAU researchers uncover a 12th Century BC seal depicting a man and Lion In Battle in Tel Beth Shemesh.
Beth Shemesh, or “House of the Sun,” is located about 19 miles (30 km) west of Jerusalem in the Sorek Valley and near the ancient border between the Israelites and Philistines in the Iron Age.
According to the book of Judges, Samson was born, lived part of his life, and was buried in the area across the valley from Beth Shemesh (Judges 13:2, 25; 16:31). Further, the story of Samson fighting and killing a lion (Judges 14:5-6) is recorded as having occurred on the way from his family home to Timnah–a site identified as Tel Batash and located only a few miles from Beth Shemesh. Read more…
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