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Health Sciences and Technology (HST) demonstrate for the first time that this battery could power implantable electronic devices without impairing hearing.

The devices could monitor biological activity in the ears of people with hearing or balance impairments, or responses to therapies. Eventually, they might even deliver therapies themselves

“In the past, people have thought that the space where the high potential is located is inaccessible for implantable devices, because potentially it’s very dangerous if you encroach on it,” Stankovic says. “We have known for 60 years that this battery exists and that it’s really important for normal hearing, but nobody has attempted to use this battery to power useful electronics.”

Authorities like NOAA gather storm data from a few different sources--from aircraft circling the weather system from tens of thousands of feet, from stationary weather buoys scattered throughout the Gulf of Mexico, from Earth-orbiting satellites--giving scientists a great view of the area around the storm.

“Currently there are only two or three ways to get this kind of data,” Dr. Alan Leonardi, deputy director of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, says. “First, you can have a storm serendipitously traverse over a buoy that happens to already be in the water, and that doesn’t happen as frequently as some might believe. Another would be to position a ship out there to collect this data, but that creates a dangerous situation for any crew that might be aboard the ship, so we’re not going to do that. The third--and we have done this--is to deploy instruments from aircraft in front of a storm that can collect data as the storm passes. We then go back in a ship and pick up those buoys--if they survive and don’t end up sinking.”

NOAA’s two robotic platforms are being developed independently of one another, yet their roles dovetail neatly. The Liquid Robotics Wave Glider platform is designed as a kind of storm monitoring sentry--like a weather buoy, but one that researchers can move at will. Wave Gliders harvest their propulsive energy from ocean waves themselves and power their onboard electronics with solar energy. This means they are not very fast--too slow to actually chase a storm in most cases--but they can remain at sea for months on end, waiting and watching.

When iris-scanning biometric security systems create a digital imprint of an iris, they don’t actually store that image of the iris for future comparison to the real thing. Rather, when a person scans his or her iris into a biometric system for the first time, the system turns the iris into a code consisting of about 5,000 bits of data. This code is based on about 240 points that are measured in the actual iris image, and is for all intents and purposes a unique digital analog of the iris.

researchers at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and West Virginia University have found a way to reverse-engineer an iris image from the digital code itself using genetic algorithms--an iris image so good it can fool a biometric scanner.

What this essentially means is that if a database containing iris codes were hacked, the hackers could construct iris images that would dupe scanners, and they would never even have to get near the actual owner of that iris.