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Sunday, 8 May 2005    
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Compiled by Vimukthi Fernando

Doing the laundry : It's his turn

by Virginia Phillips

Time to give up those beers and do some house chores.

A Spanish designer has come up with what could be the perfect solution for the woman who feels frustrated that she has to do all the house chores. It is a washing machine called 'Your Turn', which will not let the same person use it twice in a row.

It uses fingerprint recognition technology to ensure that the job of loading is not dumped on just one individual. Pep Torres was approached by a Spanish white goods manufacturer to come up with an innovative Father's Day gift. "I thought it would be good to finish with macho man from the ice age who doesn't do anything around the house except drink beers," said Torres, from DeBuenaTinta in Barcelona.

"Spain is changing a lot, and I wanted to come up with an invention to enable men to do more around the home."

Some men may disagree that it is a good present for Father's Day and argue that it is more of a gift for the lady of the house.

"It was a tongue-in-cheek idea which seemed to catch the imagination," said Torres.

"It's an invention that has a philosophy behind it and I hope both women and men will think it's time for the men to do more around the house."

Your Turn requires both partners to register their fingerprints on the sensor while it is hooked up to their home computer.

When the sensor is then plugged into the washing machine, the software will only allow the wash programme to start if a different finger is placed on it each time.

So what about the cheats - how can you get round it? Torres has an unusual solution: "I suggest the man can leave his finger at home... we have 10 fingers, so he won't miss one - well, you don't use the little finger a lot. "Seriously though, the only way to override the system is to crawl around the back of the machine, unplug the sensor, take it back to the home computer and re-programme it - not that easy.

"We have to make it difficult to change otherwise it defeats the object of the exercise."

Your Turn is also childproof. Parents can be confident that young fingers will not be able to operate the washing machine as it is only their fingerprints that can start it.

But there is one bone of contention.

The same person can still load the washing time after time. The finger print sensor only controls who starts the programme.

In future designs, Torres hopes to bring the door release mechanism under the thumb of the fingerprint sensor, too. In the meantime, Your Turn is expected to go on sale in the next couple of weeks. The one thing it will not do though is something that most guys are notoriously bad at - separating the whites from the coloureds.

Courtesy: BBC Science and Technology News


A new species of dinosaurs

Scientists have discovered a mass graveyard of bird-like feathered dinosaurs in Utah. The previously unknown species provides clues about how vicious meat-eaters related to Velociraptor ultimately evolved into plant-munching vegetarians.

Discovery of the bizarre new species, Falcarius utahensis, is reported in the Thursday May 5 issue of the journal Nature by paleontologists from the Utah Geological Survey and the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah.

Scientists do not yet know if the creature ate meat, plants or both, says James Kirkland, Utah state paleontologist at the Utah Geological Survey and principal scientist for the new study. But "Falcarius shows the beginning of features we associate with plant-eating dinosaurs, including a reduction in size of meat-cutting teeth to leaf-shredding teeth, the expansion of the gut to a size needed to ferment plants, and the early stages of changing the legs so they could carry a bulky body instead of running fast after prey."

The adult dinosaur walked on two legs and was about 13 feet long (4 meters) and stood 4.5 feet tall (1.4 meters). It had sharp, curved, 4-inch-long (10 centimetre) claws.

Falcarius, which dates to the Early Cretaceous Period about 125 million years ago, belongs to a group of dinosaurs known as therizinosaurs. The group includes feathered dinosaurs such as Beipiaosaurus that were found in southeast China in recent years.

Falcarius and Beipiaosaurus are about the same age and appear to represent an intermediate stage between deadly carnivores and later, plant-eating therizinosaurs. Falcarius is anatomically more primitive than the Chinese therizinosaurs.

The therizinosaurs are maniraptorans. Birds evolved from maniraptorans, a group that includes sharp-clawed meat-eaters such as Utahraptor and Velociraptor, the dinosaur popularized by chasing children through the kitchen in the hit film "Jurassic Park."

- Newswise


Determining the final outcome

by Susan Llewelyn Leach

Convicts on death row can wait for years while appeals are filed and protests lodged. Many never get beyond this limbo. Others are executed.

What determines the final outcome? That is the question two professors, one a criminologist, the other a computer scientist, asked as they took 28 years of data on prisoners facing the death sentence and fed it into a software program.

What the software - known as an artificial neural network - managed to do is to predict with more than 90 percent accuracy who would be executed.

The neural network, which learns by constantly scanning the data for patterns, was given 1,000 cases from 1973 to 2000 where the outcome was known. Once trained on that information, it was fed another 300 cases but without the outcome included. That's when its prediction proved highly accurate.

What some observers find alarming about the outcome is that the 19 points of data supplied on each death-row inmate contained no details of the case. Only facts such as age, race, sex, and marital status were included, along with the date and type of offence.

Harper and Professor Karamouzis are now working to further refine their software model to give the research greater impact.

Courtesy: The Christian Science Monitor


Libido on cue

by Roxanne Khamsi

Fast flashes of certain words can affect your libido. The thought of beer might make your libido sink or soar. The mere thought of beer or wine can influence your sex drive, according to a study of undergraduates.

Alcohol has long been known to have a number of effects on dating behaviour: some good, some bad. Enough booze can wipe away inhibitions and act as an aphrodisiac, or it can dampen sexual performance. It can even produce what are jokingly called 'beer goggles', which mean you judge people as more attractive when you are drunk.

But scientists now say that whatever effect someone expects from alcohol can be produced by simple exposure to flashes of alcohol-related words on a computer screen. Ronald Friedman, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and his colleagues tested the idea on 82 male undergraduate students.

The researchers first questioned the men about how they felt alcohol affected their libido, and then presented them with rapidly flashing words and jumbled letters on a computer screen. One group was exposed to cue words that suggested alcohol, including beer, whisky, martini and malt; the other, control group was exposed to words such as smoothie, espresso and ice.

The men then rated 21 female high-school graduation photos on a scale of 1 to 9 in terms of attractiveness. The men who expected alcohol to boost their libido rated photos more favourably after subconsciously viewing alcohol cue words. Those who expected alcohol to reduce their performance actually rated the girls as less attractive after boozy words.

"What is most surprising is that mere expectancy can influence perception," says Markus Denzler, a co-author of the report, based at the International University Bremen, Germany. The findings appear in the May issue of the journal Addiction.

Courtesy: News@nature

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