Okay, not exactly.. but scientists have discovered a way to send data through a person's skin.

And it works better than Bluetooth.

Researchers at Korea University in Seoul have transmitted data at a rate of 10 megabits per second through a person's arm, between two electrodes placed on their skin 30 centimetres apart.

Having internet flowing through your body may sound like some geek dream, but the scientists behind it were most interested in the medical applications: how it could help measure blood sugar and electrical activity of the heart, for example.

Certainly considering how gory those electrodes look above, I'll stick to using a USB cable to send pictures from my phone to my laptop for the meantime.

[via New Scientist]

Related: Skinput: why touch a screen when you can touch yourself?

Okay, so whiteboards aren't exactly sexy and conjure up 3rd form French more than that must-have gadget wow factor but Samsung's 650TS Interactive Whiteboard really roused gadget lust in me.

So it's a giant 65inch LCD touch screen pinned to the wall. Choose a line colour and thickness and write on the board with your finger (yes, that is as much fun as it sounds). Select background images, edit text, call up pdfs, power point presentations or control it from a connected PC.

BTW: This chap photographed above spent 10 minutes drawing what looked like blood-soaked explosions on a nice picture of an island. Well, that's tech journalists for you..

In theory the eBooks connect to the Whiteboard too, via a delightfully named connection "Emolink". Imagine a futuristic classroom where a teacher has one of these whiteboards and all pupils are equipped with eBooks: the teacher could call up any given pupil's eBook and display it to class on the board.

But it took two members of Samsung's top brass 10 minutes to get the connection working so while in theory this would be great, I don't imagine it working flawlessly in a classroom situation. You've doomed a PC connection by calling it EmoLink

With high brightness and high definition the 650TS is certainly easy to see but costing around $10,000 it's not something you'd buy for the heck of it. Should be very useful for training or teaching contexts though.

Related: Samsung's ebooks: paper-like and pleasurable to use

A gadget could help deaf people to "hear" sounds with their skin. The device called the Monitor works by converting sound into vibrations. It is aimed at individuals who are deaf and blind or severely hearing impaired and should help them to perceive and recognise sounds.

The Monitor was developed by an engineering researcher in Sweden, Parivash Ranjbar. As you might expect it alerts that a sound is happening, that someone is talking to them for example, but not the details.

"The purpose of the aid is to help people identify different sounds. They can also tell if somebody is talking to them but not what they say." She told the Daily Express.
But it can be more accurate than you think: "However, one of my subjects was able to repeat exactly to me what I had said to my supervisor when I took a phone call. Monitor could make a real difference to people's lives.

"Deaf blind people say they feel fear because they are always surprised by events and cannot plan for them. They cannot hear somebody approaching until they are close enough to smell the person's perfume or to touch them and by that time it is too late to decide how to prepare." Ranjbar said.

[via DNAIndia]

How do you convert your car to run on mushed-up seaweed? It's not something your average man in the street is wondering, but fortunately some intrepid American fuel-pioneers are.

Fed up with the oil industry and pollutant effects of burning petrol, Josh Tickell had been experimenting with biofuels and successfully converted a car to run on waste cooking oil. After concerns that using plant oil created food shortages, they turned their attention to algae. And they reckon that biodiesel created by algae is the answer to the fuel crisis. Well that'd be nice.

In a mini documentary on ViceTV, America's alternative fuel guy shows how you can convert your car to run on alternative fuel. Adding a battery-pack in the boot seems to be the first step, though getting hold of algae gasoline seems to be trickier. Though a group called Solazyme are growing giant vats of algae in the Midwestern desert with an eye to creating biofuel, it's not exactly widely available. Apparently you can condense the oil-making process from 150million years to 3 days. Excellent.

Until some of that seaweedy power liquid ends up in your local fill-up station, it's going to be hard to embrace the algae lifestyle, but it's really interesting. Check out the ViceTV doc below:

Ah, good, somebody is working on making brain chips so we can control computers by thinking about them. And that somebody is not a mad robo-obsessed scientist, but Intel, the commercial chip giant, making it seem more likely that chips will be arriving in a brain near you in the not-too-distant future.

According to ComputerWorld, Intel researchers in Pittsburgh told journalists that brain implants are harnessing human brain waves to operate computers, television sets and cell phones... letting you surf the internet, manipulate documents, and so on.

Of course the wholegetting a- computer-chip-embedded-in-your-skull thing will be voluntary (at least to start with mwhaha etc). But Intel reckons there will be lots of volunteers:

"I think human beings are remarkable adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop [carrying devices]. There are a lot of things that have to be done first but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."

Apparently we're all getting fed up with having to reach into our pockets and use our fingers to operate things. Well, that's what Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau reckons: "users will soon tire of depending on a computer interface, and having to fish a device out of their pocket or bag to access it." Computerworld reports. "He also predicted that users will tire of having to manipulate an interface with their fingers."

"We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," said Pomerleau. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed ... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."

By learning the patterns and electronic signals that certain words or pictures make in your brain, a chip could be programmed to recognise them and could then send that information to a computer.

So thinking the word "water" could be the equivalent of typing it.

Still a distance off, scientists plan to make external headsets first before working on developing a microprocessor that could fit in your head.

Related: EEWWW of the week: get your phone embedded in your arm

Giant solar powered plastic bubbles could soon bob gently over the London skyline if an art project shortlisted for a space in the 2012 Olympics goes ahead. The Cloud, as its designers call it would float above the Olympic park in east London with the giant bubbles capable of displaying data and pictures attached to 400 foot tall towers made of mesh.

The brain child of architects in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Cloud would show information like weather stats, Olympic results and spectator numbers.
It would also serve as an observation deck and a park.

Ideally also films, music videos and that youtube clip of a squirrel, but i imagine that's not in their bid for the prize, judged by a committee set up by Boris Johnson. Other shortlistees include Anthony Gormely and Anish Kapoor.

The creators of the idea want to make The Cloud a reality whether they get the gig in London or not, and have set up a website - Raise the Cloud - asking for micro-donations to see if they can raise enough to create their mesh and bubble dream.

They have released several beautiful mock-up images of the project, browse through them in the gallery below.
Click on the image below to start the gallery.

This is the sort of idea that is a joke until someone actually goes and makes a digital interface that embeds under your skin, allows you to browse the internet on a screen on your arm and gets its power supply from the glucose in your blood.

Called a Digital Tattoo interface and made as a project for the Greener Design Competition, the device is permanently implanted between the skin and muscle in your arm. The interface is visible through the skin like dark marks from a tattoo. You can answer your phone through the device, and a video of your caller comes up, you can browse the internet or just download a picture to sit there, looking like a standard tattoo.

The Science experiment that people feared would end the world, is now available as a coffee-table book, and a damn fine one at that. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the world's largest and most complex scientific experiment but thanks to a British scientist working on the project and Anton Radevsky, a "paper engineer" you can get a glimpse into its workings though a pop-up book.

Surely this is the ultimate geek hardback this Christmas.

Hurrah, an announcement from the department of the bleeding obvious. If it isn't an obesity crisis it's an anorexia scare story and now we have great people shouting that skinny women have more sex than their larger counterparts. Didn't they say the opposite last month?

Ah, well it's in the paper so it MUST be true. And apparently they have 'science' to back it up. A report taken by weight loss specialist Lighter Life (so no ulterior motive then?) says that 12 percent of people with a high BMI have gone at least a year without doing the dirty and six percent admit to six months without sex. So why is this?

Whoever said bad things come in threes was right. First Russell Brand leaves the BBC over *those* phone calls, then the lovable John Sergeant is pushed out of quits Strictly Come Dancing, and now my stint as Shiny Shiny's science guru has come to an end. But here's one final column to go out with a Big Bang (pun intended, sadly).

Science and technology go together hand-in-hand: scientific breakthroughs lead to new technologies and improved technology helps to further science. For example, it was a group of scientists working in a lab called CERN who first created the internet, and now the smart guys at NASA are using the internet to help with their space missions.

Last week I was invited to the press preview of the world's first National Geographic store on Regent Street in London (BTW - the Christmas lights on Regent Street look great). And I have decided to dedicate this week's column to the store. Why? Well, profits made from the deal with the franchise partner will help fund National Geographic's exploration, conservation, research and education programmes. So there. And just think, now you know exactly why you should bother to pop in.

On the ground floor of the store there is a lecture area that doubles as retail floor space. Basically, when a lecture is going to take place, the goods are quickly moved aside in the crates that they're displayed in. Lectures given by National Geographic's own group of Indiana Jones types will begin in January.

Even if you don't plan to buy one of the artefacts from around the world, it's nice to peruse the galleries of National Geographic images on every floor (look out for my favourite: the pic of the high-fiving frog).

Last week, scientists from around the world leapt up from their desks and shouted, "Eureka!" But why are scientists joining in the Obama love-in? I feel the urge to do a list...

1) He has been making all of the right noises for the scientific community, which is why 76 Nobel Laureates officially backed him during the US election race. This is the largest number of Nobel Prize winners ever to support a presidential candidate.

2) His space policy has won him his own science groupies called 'Obamanauts'. How cool is that?

3) Obama has said that he will appoint a science advisor ASAP and it is thought that he will raise this position to a cabinet-level job. He will also be the first President to appoint a Chief Technology Officer. However, the priority right now is to appoint the First Dog.

True Beatles aficionados will be hoping that MTV release a new peripheral for next year's Rock Band-esque Beatles game so that they can play A Hard Day's Night just like the Fabulous Four Five did.

The opening chord to the Beatles classic had been somewhat of a musical mystery for decades, until a cunning professor used a mathematical procedure (called Fourier transform) to split the sound into its original frequencies. Prof Jason Brown found that the Beatles producer lived up to his title of being the fifth member of the band, as the intro included a top-secret let's-baffle-our-fans piano chord played by George Martin himself.

The piano chord included an F note, which is impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. So the new Beatles game clearly needs a piano peripheral. What can I say - I have to be true to my art.

Of course, the pianist in your band is going to have a small role to play. I'd give this instrument to one of the darling *ahem* little brats in your family when you are forced to let them have a go.

I was shocked when my nana rang me the other day to ask what I would like for Christmas, but she quickly pointed out that it is ONLY EIGHT WEEKS ON THURSDAY!!! Yikes.

If like me you would rather put that scary thought to the back of your mind and go off on a bit of a tangent, then here's an interesting discovery: scientists have found that X-rays are emitted when a roll of sticky tape is unwound in a vacuum.

Researchers at the University of California found that they could use this simple setup to take X-ray images of their fingers. Now that's something to think about as you wrap your Christmas pressies.

To watch a video of this experiment in action and to find out how you can test this for yourself at work, continue reading after the jump...

I understand that a lot of science news can underwhelm the masses, but some stories irritate me with their desperate cries for attention - the kind of stories that seem needier for press coverage than a Big Brother evictee.

Take for example the recent discovery of an area of land on the Arizona-Utah border with more than 1,000 dinosaur footprints. Exciting stuff if you happen to be called Dr Ross Geller. But what was the headline for the press release to get everyone else wetting themselves with excitement: 'Dinosaur Dance Floor'. Hmmm...

There has been more than the usual dose of health stories this week, so I've decided to do a recap of the biggest headlines. And continuing Susi's positive week, I'll give you the good news first.

Good times

Open wide, because white wine may be good for you. For years we've been hearing that drinking red wine is good for your heart, and now white wine has joined the party too. Good, because I hate suffering from red wine lips syndrome.

Phew! Just when we thought scientists were going to make us feel bad about our Starbucks addiction, a new study has shown there is no link between caffeine and breast cancer, as was previously suggested. But women with benign lumps may be at a higher risk if they drink four or more cups of coffee daily. (Is that tall or venti?)

New research has shown that men have another use: stem cells can be extracted from the testicles. While it sounds quite painful (*ouch*) the breakthrough could end the debate about the ethics of harvesting stem cells from embryos.

Welcome to the first Sarah's Shiny Science column. Every Wednesday I'll be bringing you the latest news from the weird and wonderful world of science. Right, with introductions over, let's get on with the column.

It's Nobel Prize time again and the worthy winners are being announced throughout the week. So far, three scientists have shared the prize for medicine for discovering the viruses that cause Aids and cervical cancer. And the prize for physics has gone to three researchers for their work on the building blocks of matter, called subatomic particles. The discovery of a protein that glows green, which is being used to study Alzheimer's disease and the spread of cancers, has netted the chemistry prize.

But before you start berating yourself for a lack of personal accomplishment this year, take a look at how some of the world's brainiest boffins have wasted their smarts after the jump...

Dear LHC,

Please don't kill us all. Please don't create a black hole, when you get going on the whole 'particles colliding at the speed of light' thing.

Things I've yet to do yet include find out about the new Apple products, work out exactly how the semantic web works and get picked to appear on My Super Sweet Sixteenth.

Trust me, no one wants to know about the origins of the universe that badly (although apparently they *do* want to know £2.4bn much).

Much love,

All those at Shiny Towers

This is a very strange concept to explain. On one hand it's incredibly simple, but on the other hand you have to see it to believe it. I've been lucky enough to experience it firsthand with a morning at London Aquarium testing manta-rays patience by dunking things in their pool. And what was I dunking? A mixture of tissue paper and cloth that had been coated with a unique treatment.

Hi-Tec have developed something called ion-mask technology which uses nanotechnology to enhance the surface of an object till it's completely water repellent,

Have you got a dog in the room with you whilst you're reading this? If so, watch out, because whilst it might look like the pooch is chewing on your new stilettos, he may actually be plotting to take over the world.

A new study, which only gets stranger the more your read of it, suggests that dogs have adapted through the ages to communicate with humans, and even goes as far as to suggest Fido has a moral compass.