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Not long ago we gave you a look at a product manufactured by OCZ that made use of brainwaves as a futuristic but in-the-here-and-now game controller.  Dubbed the NIA, for Neural Impulse Actuator, instead of buttons and joysticks, this device gave user the ability to control in-game movement with their mind.  At the time, it sounded almost a little crazy but it worked, at least in novel sort of way, perhaps for some freaky party fun.  In reality, for us, the product was more of an under-pinning that if mankind can dream it up, for the most part anything can be built.  Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s reality, as they say.

Image courtesy, Southampton University

And so say the rather brainy folks at the University of Southampton as well.  They’ve taken the concept of brain power technology and applied it to communication – as in brain-to-brain direct.  Talk about low latency.  Well actually there is some latency involved, at least for now.  Southampton University’s Dr. Christopher James (Yes, he’s so dang smart he’s one of those double first name guys…) has successfully demonstrated a direct person to person transmission of information without the use of any interface device but instead with an EEG (Electroencephalography or electricity across the scalp) amplifier and some signaling, in binary believe it or not, between the individuals involved in the experiment.  The prof of concept Dr. James put forth, has some striking similarities to the OCZ NIA product in that it uses EEG waves as well, however instead of a controller system, the folks of Southampton U experiment applied a communication medium to the equation.

Their report goes on to offer: “While attached to an EEG amplifier, the first person would generate and transmit a series of binary digits, imagining moving their left arm for zero and their right arm for one. The second person was also attached to an EEG amplifier and their PC would pick up the stream of binary digits and flash an LED lamp at two different frequencies, one for zero and the other one for one. The pattern of the flashing LEDS is too subtle to be picked by the second person, but it is picked up by electrodes measuring the visual cortex of the recipient… The encoded information is then extracted from the brain activity of the second user and the PC can decipher whether a zero or a one was transmitted. This shows true brain-to-brain activity.”

Here’s a video demo of the experiment in action…

Dubbed BCI or Brain Computer Interface, the interface allows for B2B, or brain to brain communication, over the internet.  We think the good folks at Southampton U should get together with the team at OCZ and work on productizing something.  It might not be ready for prime time yet though.  At this point the setup is only able to communicate one digit every three to four seconds.  Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.  Remember that 14.4K modem?

The swine flu is the hottest thing on the news today. Every channel, every news web site, and most most people you talk to are saying something related to the swine flu. This flu strand, known as the H1N1 virus, started in Mexico and has spread to other parts of the world due to travelers carrying the virus.

With United States so close to Mexico people here are very much concerned about the flu. More so, it is common knowledge that the border restrictions between Mexico and the U.S. can be bypassed in a relatively easy manner.

So for all those who are wigging out… check out the FluTracker. FluTracker is an online Google Maps Mashup tracking confirmed cases, suspect cases, deaths and false alarms worldwide. To get the latest straight from the horses mouth check the CDC.

Just in time for the festive season, the company has released its very own men’s body spray, Flame.

Not recommended for vegetarians, Flame is being promoted as “the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broilled meat”.

While the smell itself might not inspire confidence, the price will.

Flame is on sale for the credit crunch-busting sum of just $3.99 (£2.65), suggesting the Burger King promotions department has realised their contribution to the fragrance market might work best as a novelty stocking-filler.

Flame, a body spray for men, was launched this week online and in a selection of US stores – it is sadly not available in the UK, and now even has its own website, the appropriately named firemeetsdesire.com.

The site proudly proclaims to prospective buyers: “The Whopper sandwich is America’s favourite burger,” before going on to extol the virtues of a perfume that smells like cooked meat.

“Flame by BK captures the essence of that love and gives it to you. Behold … now you can set the mood for whatever you’re in the mood for.”

Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.

He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.

Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.

This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)

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A pair of Harvard researchers are saying what everybody who’s grown up with a controller in their hand already knows, violent video games don’t turn children into killers. According to a newly published book, ‘Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do’, psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson dispel common myths about violent games. In their two-year study, they found that there was no data to support any causation between games and real-life violence.

Kutner and Olson studied 1200 middle-school children in a $1.5 million federally funded study. Instead of studying the children in the laboratory, like other studies, the pair actually sat down and talked to kids after long bouts of game playing – sometimes in excess of 15 hours a week. The lucky kids played a variety of games from the very non-violent The Sims to grandma shooting, pedestrian bashing Grand Theft Auto.

They discovered that children who played violent video games – those rated Mature or above – were just relieving stress. Some children did exhibit some playful fighting after playing games, but this was similar to what children have always done after watching action or Karate-type movies.

51% of male children who played 15 hours or more of violent games per week were involved in fights in the past year compared to 28% who played regular video games. For girls, 40% of the violent game players were in fights compared to 14% of the non-violent players. Despite the figures, Kutner and Olson say this is just a correlation and that the fighting was probably due to an underlying psychological problem that children had before playing the video game.

Perhaps the most startling finding (at least for people the likes of Jack Thompson) is that boys that don’t play any video games at all are now considered to be socially inept. A danger sign for boys is “not playing video games at all, because it looks like for this generation, video games are a measure of social competence,” says Kutner and Olsen.

I wonder if Kutner and Olsen will now do a follow-up study to find out if the children who play GTA4 will have increased carjacking skills?

You can get the book online from Amazon for about $16.