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Methanol is nasty stuff. Careless distillation in many a backwoods still has caused it to blind the imbibers of "alternative" alcoholic drinks. Yet it has its uses, and one of them may be to restore fuel cells to their oft-vaunted role as the power packs of the future--but with a twist. The main role that has been discussed for fuel cells over the past few decades is as replacements for the internal-combustion engine. Their actual use may turn out to be to provide power for portable electronic devices.

That idea has not gone very far, either. But it has provoked another thought. What if it were possible to decompose the methanol without steam, and within the fuel cell itself? And that has, indeed, turned out to be possible. The resulting cells are nowhere near powerful enough to run cars, but they are plenty powerful enough to stand in for small batteries. What is more, they last far longer than batteries and when they do need recharging, it is the work of a moment.

Proton power
In a direct-methanol fuel cell (DMFC) the methanol is oxidised at the anode in the presence of liquid water. The reaction, which requires a catalyst, turns the methanol and water into protons and electrons (in other words, dissociated hydrogen atoms) and carbon dioxide. While the electrons pass along an external circuit as an electric current, the protons diffuse through a membrane to the cathode, where they recombine with the incoming electrons to form hydrogen atoms that react instantly with oxygen to make water. With pleasing symmetry the water is then channelled back to mix with the incoming methanol. Even though DMFCs produce carbon dioxide, the amount is small enough for the cells to count as a much greener technology than batteries. Some companies also think the new cells could be safer than batteries, which can burst into flame if short-circuited.

The efficiency of a DMFC is determined by its membrane. One of the most commonly used sorts is made of Nafion, a polymer developed by DuPont from a variation of Teflon. Nafion, however, can be expensive and it allows some methanol to seep through, which wastes fuel. Researchers are therefore trying to come up with more efficient membranes--and one group, led by Paula Hammond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), appears to have done so.

If you thought training modules by e-learning companies can only be delivered online, think again. Anil Chhikara, president, 24x7 Learning, an e-learning player, claims that the company has already started delivering its modules through podcasts and mobiles.

"The younger generation wants a more collaborative and interactive interface to learn, something they can carry in their iPods and mobiles," he says.

The growth in the e-training market is also pushing Muralidhar Rao, COO and president, NIS Sparta -- an Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group company -- to extend its training modules beyond desktops to mobiles and iPods.

"By the end of 2008, we will enable employees to use e-learning modules on various handheld devices and PDAs during their tedious commutes," says Rao.

Action in India's e-training market is also attracting global e-learning players. Crossknowledge, a Europe-based distance training solution player, has announced an exclusive tie-up with NIS Sparta to launch over 248 e-learning modules.

Crossknowledge boasts of over 1 million users and has tie-ups in 45 countries. "We have a network of 12,000 professionals across 65 countries, who meet regularly to exchange information about managerial issues," says Hervé Gouchaux, co-creator of Crossknowledge.

Back home, NIS Sparta's Rao says that corporate training via ipods and mobiles will help employees make good use of their commuting time. Companies, on the other hand, will get the best out of their investment in e-learning tools.

The content NIS Sparta will make available on the mobiles is designed as a follow-up to classroom teaching and will include text summaries.

These summaries will be simplified to facilitate easy navigation on the mobile phone keyboard. The quizzes will be restricted to short multiple-choice questions.

Yahoo Labs Bangalore will be a centre of excellence for next-gen eration search and advertising technologies, focussed on making the Web more relevant and simple for users and advertisers. Rajeev Rastogi, a fromer Bell Labs director, has been appointed as vicepresident and head of the new lab.

THE NEW laboratory-with an initial team of 100 scientists and engineers-will be part of the expansion of its R&D operations in the country
YAHOO LABS Bangalore will be a centre of excellence for nextgeneration search, focussed on making the Web more relevant and simple for users

"Yahoo Labs Bangalore intends to build a world-class team focused on delivering the most valuable insights and leading-edge technologies to delight all of our customers worldwide," according to Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice-president and head of Yahoo! Research.

He told a news conference in Bangalore, "As an extension of our research and development (R&D) operations here, Yahoo! India Lab will initially have a 100-member team of scientists and engineers. They will work on multiple projects to make the Web more relevant and simple for users and advertisers worldwide. The India lab will work in tandem with the other labs in the US for deriving new algorithms to enhance the performance of our search and retrieval tools. While the R&D centre will write software codes for various functions, the lab will develop products for databases," he said.

For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device
Source Material The New York Times - November 29, 2007 - By MATT RICHTEL and BRAD STONE

For preschoolers. Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year.

Toy makers and retailers are filling shelves with new tech devices for children ages 3 and up, and sometimes even down. They say they are catering to junior consumers who want to emulate their parents and are not satisfied with fake gadgets. Toy makers are also worried that they might be losing their youngest, most devoted customers to the consumer electronics and video game companies. Mr. McGowan said the industry has even coined a term for the anxiety: KGOY, which stands for Kids Getting Older Younger.

Electronics makers, and entrepreneurs, see opportunity in capturing today's bib-wearing consumers. A cellphone company called Kajeet, based in Bethesda, Md., introduced a cellphone this year for children ages 8 and up. In October, Toys "R" Us started stocking the phones, which have software aimed at children but the same hardware as adult models. "When we put devices in front of kids, if they smack of kid-ness, they're much less interested," said Daniel Neal, Kajeet's chief executive. "They want your iPhone, they want your BlackBerry, and they're smart enough to use it better than you do."

Eric Jorgensen, a programmer at Microsoft, has invented PixelWhimsy, a computer program that allows toddlers to sit at a regular computer and bang away on the keys to create sounds and colors and shapes, but without damaging the computer. Asmin Jalis, who also works at Microsoft and whose 2-year-old boy, Ibrahim, has been using PixelWhimsy, said his son liked it better than his toy computer. "We have a toy laptop for him, and he knows it's a fake," he said.

Consider the "hottest toys" list on Amazon.com, which includes the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad from Fisher-Price (to help children surf on "preschool-appropriate Web sites") and the Smart Cycle, an exercise bike connected to a video game.

Jim Silver, editor of Toy Wishes magazine and an industry analyst for 24 years, said there had been "a huge jump in the last 12 months" in toys that involve looking at a screen. "The bigger toy companies don't even call it the toy business anymore," Mr. Silver said. "They're in the family entertainment business and the leisure business. What they're saying is, ?We're vying for kids' leisure time.' "

Technology has been slowly permeating the toy business for a number of years, but the trend has been accelerating. On Wednesday, six of the nine best-selling toys for 5- to 7-year-olds on Amazon.com were tech gadgets. For all of 2006, three of the top nine toys for that age group were tech-related.

The children were the focus of a brain experiment under way at the California Institute of Technology to explore the neural anatomy of indecision. With the push of a button, the woman in the Caltech scanner could distribute meals at the orphanage more fairly, but only by taking food off the table, not by serving more portions. While she pondered, the 12-tonne fMRI scanner at the university's brain-imaging centre traced the synaptic patterns of equity, remorse and reward in her brain. In these rip tides of neural currents, the researchers sought clues to human variables missing from the mathematics of conventional economics.

The quirky experiment exemplifies the new field of neuroeconomics. Behavioural economist Ming Hsu and his Caltech colleagues combined financial-decision theories and medical brainimaging tools to analyse the brain as a living engine of economics, one fine-tuned by evolution through eons of foraging for scarce resources. These scientists studied hard choices, documenting how competing networks of neurons unconsciously shape the way we buy, sell, risk and trust.

During this test, the scientists wanted to see how synapses valued fairness against the desire to avoid harming others. The dilemma can arise when a limited resource is distributed unequally, and the only way to help one person comes at another's expense -whether in profit sharing, setting affirmative action policy, or rationing health care.

In the summer of 2006, when they organized the test, Hsu and his colleagues could imagine no more agonizing choice, within the constraints of medical ethics, than to ask people to take food away from orphans in a war-torn African country.

An online search led them to the website for the Canaan Children's Home, a one-storeyed green building with a clinic next door, set amid the trees and chicken coops a half hour's drive from Jinja, Uganda. As of April, 100 children were living there, many of them orphaned by AIDS, said Frank P.

Crane in Richmond, Virginia, chairman of the Uganda Missions Action Committee, which monitors the home's finances.

Just kidding! But according to a new book by Ian Ayres, an econometrician and law professor at Yale, this is a microcosm of a powerful trend that will shape the economy for years to come: the replacement of expertise and intuition by objective, data-based decision making, made possible by a virtually inexhaustible supply of inexpensive information. Those who control and manipulate this data will be the masters of the new economic universe. Ayres calls them "Super Crunchers," which is also the title of his book, the latest attempt to siphon off a bit of the buzz that surrounds the hugely successful "Freakonomics." In fields from criminal law (where statistical projections of recidivism are taking discretion away from judges and parole boards) to oenophilia (where a formula involving temperature and rainfall is a better predictor of the quality of a vintage than the palates of the most vaunted experts), "intuitivists" are on the defensive against the Super Crunchers.

Super-crunchable data can be broadly statistical or profoundly personal. Illustrating the former, Ayres chose the title of his book by running two Google ads that appeared in random order when someone searched for phrases like "data mining." The decision was made by the plurality who clicked on the ad for "Super Crunchers" rather than the competing title, "The End of Intuition." This is both a more scientific way of making the choice than over lunch with his editor at Michael's and a case study of how super-crunching can make the economy more efficient and productive. But the same explosion of computing power gives large companies powerful new tools with which to entice or, in some cases, to torment their customers. "It's going to be easier to find the products and services we want," Ayres predicts. "The sellers are doing the work for us." Amazon's computers know what we'll like even before we figure it out for ourselves; Netflix customers, says Ayres, like the movies the service recommends better than the ones they choose on their own. But auto dealers can use the same kinds of data to calculate to a fine point just how far they can push their customers on price and loan rates. When airlines cancel a flight, Ayres writes, they use an algorithm to predict which customers are most vulnerable to being lured away by a competitor and to give them, not the airline's own best customers, priority in rebooking.

And this power necessarily resides in a central computer, not with the agent at the ticket counter. Increasingly, jobs that used to call for independent judgment, especially about other people, are being routinized and dumbed down. Banks no longer care about a loan officer's assessment of whether a borrower is a good risk; everything they need to know is in the numbers. Baseball managers increasingly judge prospects by quantifiable statistics, not their "drive" or "hustle." "We are living in an age when dispersed discretion is on the wane," Ayres writes, even in such intimate settings as the doctor's office. Evidence-based medicine, the use of statistical models to guide diagnoses and treatment, is already changing how doctors practice. "Many physicians have effectively ceded a large chunk of control of treatment choice to Super Crunchers," he writes, and the trend will continue despite understandable resistance from the profession. No one wants to throw away a lifetime of specialized training and experience. Which is why the editors request that if you liked this article, or even more so if you didn't ... please keep it to yourself. Just kidding.

A representation of one of the scenarios that scientists used to study out-of-body experiences.

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science. When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.

The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.

The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.

In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.