Venice: Curly Pasta shaped Radiowaves to solve congestion

A group of Italian and Swedish researchers appears to have solved the problem of radio congestion by cleverly twisting radio waves into the shape of fusilli pasta, allowing a potentially infinite number of channels to be broadcast and received.

the researchers have demonstrated this in real-life conditions by beaming two twisted radio waves across the waters of Venice.

Their results have been reported today, Friday 2 March, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics and are accompanied by a video abstract that gives an excellent insight into the authors' work.

As the world continues to adapt in the digital age, the introduction of new mobile smartphones, wireless internet and digital TVs means the number of radio frequency bands available to broadcast information gets smaller and smaller.

"You just have to try sending a text message at midnight on New Year's Eve to realise how congested the bands are," said lead author Dr Fabrizio Tamburini.

The researchers, from the University of Padova, Italy, and the Angstrom Laboratory, Sweden, devised a solution to this by manipulating waves so that they can hold more than one channel of information.

In addition to increasing the quantity of information being passed around our planet, this new discovery could also help lend an insight into objects far out in our galaxy. Black holes, for example, are constantly rotating and as waves pass them, they are forced to twist in line with the black hole.

According to Tamburini, analysing the incoming waves from the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A, could help astronomers obtain crucial information about the rotation of this "million-solar mass monster."

More information: "Encoding many channels on the same frequency through radio vorticity: first experimental test" Tamburini F et al 2012 New J. Phys. 14 033001 - http://iopscience. … 3001/article

Face Recognition

There is a new "face" in face recognition and this could be in the form of a dot. This is what Associate Professor Ajmal Mian from the University of Western Australia is working on.

Associate Professor Ajmal Mian is an expert in face recognition and has been in the field for 8 years. His new research study is focused on utilizing satellite technology in order to identify facial features that are located under the skin.

There is also a possibility that people who utilized cosmetic surgery to alter their face could be recognized through the use of this technology.

He further explained his research stating that "multi-spectral imaging can be used to measure light reflected off a face at hundreds of discrete wavelengths in the visible spectrum and beyond".

"Recognition based on sets of facial images from surveillance cameras, YouTube videos, Google Images or personal photo albums is more accurate because they contain more information," he said.

Face recognition technology is being used increasingly for computer log-ons, identity checks and surveillance, and is a boom industry around the world.

"It can be used in any kind of machine such as mobile phones, computers and robots. It's the most user-friendly way to authenticate someone and is now so sophisticated that machines can identify a face no matter what the expression.

"Humans are very good at finding a familiar face in a crowd but less able to identify someone they may have seen only once. This is where machines outperform people because they can memorise images and never tire of matching them to faces in a crowd."

Associate Professor Ajmal said face recognition technology was better than fingerprinting because it didn't require special equipment or an expert to verify the results.

Also, any part of a face could be used, and many images of a person's face - including different expressions and poses - could be merged to make a composite image which was more meaningful to the machine.

"Humans can recognise a person regardless of whether they're laughing, frowning, crying or sleeping. Machines may soon be able to do the same."

Associate Professor Mian is the only West Australian to have won the Australasian Distinguished Dissertation Award from CORE (The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia).

He has won two prestigious national fellowships: the Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Australian Research Fellowship, and has written more than 50 high-impact papers including more than 30 as first author.

Brain activity in speakers and listeners

When two people experience a deep connection, they’re informally described as being on the same wavelength. There may be neurological truth to that.

Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed their neural activity synchronising during storytelling. The stronger their reported connection, the closer the coupling.

The experiment was the first to use fMRI, which measures blood flow changes in the brain, on two people as they talked. Different brain regions have been linked to both speaking and listening, but “the ongoing interaction between the two systems during everyday communication remains largely unknown,” wrote Princeton University neuroscientists Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson in the July 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener. When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects’ brains.

The findings don’t explain why any two people “click,” as synchronisation is a result of that connection, not its cause and while the brain regions involved are linked to language, their precise functions are not clear.

But even if the findings are general, they support what psychologists call the “theory of interactive linguistic alignment” — a fancy way of saying that talking brings people closer by making them share a common conceptual ground.

“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain.”

The researchers didn’t test brain synchronization during phone calls or video conferencing, but Hasson speculates that “coupling would be stronger face-to-face.” He also thinks dialogue will produce especially strong forms of synchronization, and plans to run scans of people engaged in deep conversation, rather than telling or listening to long stories.

“But first, we’ll look at cases where there’s a failure to communicate,” said Hasson.