A device identifying the iris of the eye has been designed and produced by researchers of Iran’s Telecommunications Research Center.
Mohammad Shahram-Moin, head of the center’s Multimedia Research Department, said biometric systems to identify an individual’s face, fingerprint, shape of ears, DNA and other personal characteristics have been used before.
However, Shahram-Moin pointed out that the device’s precision, which focuses on the iris for identification, is 10 times higher than for a fingerprint, Mehr News Agency said.
“This is because the information provided by the iris is so unique that no two people have similar irises,“ he said.
He explained that a camera mounted on the device is the most important piece.
“The camera emits infrared rays to the iris of the eye and what is refracted by the eye towards the camera are absorbed by special lenses and the device begins identification by processing the image obtained from the iris of the eye,“ he said.
Commenting on the applications of the device, he noted that it can increase a computer system’s safety, as only the designated user surfs in the protected software environments.
The official referred to the control of immigrants, employees and passengers at airports as other applications.
Shahram-Moin also said that setting up an iris bank for identifying people is necessary.
“In this kind of image-taking, no bright spot should be seen in the subject’s eyes since the infrared will not function properly,“ he said.

Species of orchid can look the same but be genetically different.

Scientists say that a ’barcode’ gene that can be used to distinguish between the majority of plant species has been identified.
This gene can be used to catalogue plant life as it has a slightly different code between species but is nearly identical within a species, BBC wrote.
Species that look the same to the human eye can be told apart with a small leaf sample.
DNA barcoding is already a well-established technique in animals.
The work is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
Co-author Dr Vincent Savolainen, from Imperial College London and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew told the BBC News website: “It was our dream to find the gene in plants that could identify species.
“We found that a small gene, gene matK located in the chloroplast of the plant, has enough variation to identify between species but is nearly identical in plants of the same species.“
Work over the last few years has shown the chloroplast, the area involved in photosynthesis, is a good place to look for a barcode gene.
Dr Savolainen explains, “Nuclear genes usually evolve too rapidly to distinguish between the same species, but chloroplast genes evolve at a slower rate, allowing for this, yet fast enough for differences to occur in the DNA code between species.“
Animal barcoding too uses a gene found outside the nucleus, the CO1 gene. This is found in the microscopic powerhouses of a cell--its mitochondria.
While the plant barcode gene will not be able to identify every plant species on Earth, it is most likely to be able to distinguish between 90 percent of them.
Dr Savolainen explains why, “In the case of very rapid bursts of speciation, matK may not record enough variation between species. Also hybrids have their genome rearranged, which may confuse the information provided by matK.“
Hybridization, where species cross-breed, is much more common in plants than animals and therefore a bigger problem when sequencing at the barcode gene in plants.

Network of cell phones fitted with radiation detectors could monitor cities for ’dirty’ bombs.
So say Andrew Longman and colleagues at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. They have equipped phones with detectors so small they add only an imperceptible weight to a regular smartphone, and just a few dollars to the cost, Newscientist.com said.
Readings from thousands of phones, plus their location, can be combined to produce a “radiation map“ of a city, says Longman. “Every cell phone sold should be carrying a detector,“ he says, to guard against terrorist bombs.
In 2004, cell phones containing sophisticated radiation detectors (New Scientist, 11 December 2004, p 21) were designed. But they were so big and expensive, they could only be carried by police and would not have blanketed a city.

A car-fueling robot is seen unscrewing the gas tank cap before fueling up a car in Emmeloord, central Netherlands, February 4.

Motorists nostalgic for the time they could sit tight while attendants braved windswept garage forecourts to fill their tanks may yet see those heady days return--compliments of a Dutch robot.
Dutch inventors unveiled on Monday a 75,000 euro ($111,100) car-fuelling robot they say is the first of its kind, working by registering the car on arrival at the filling station and matching it to a database of fuel cap designs and fuel types, according to Reuters.
A robotic arm fitted with multiple sensors extends from a regular gas pump, carefully opens the car’s flap, unscrews the cap, picks up the fuel nozzle and directs it towards the tank opening, much as a human arm would, and as efficiently.
“I was on a farm and I saw a robotic arm milking a cow. If a robot can do that then why can’t it fill a car tank, I thought,“ said developer and petrol station operator Nico van Staveren. “Drivers needn’t get dirty hands or smell of petrol again.“
He hopes to introduce the ’Tankpitstop’ robot in a handful of Dutch stations by the end of the year. It works for any car whose tank can be opened without a key, and whose contours and dimensions have been recorded to avoid scratching.
Asked whether he would trust his car to a robotic garage attendant, Jelger De Kroon, filling his black Alfa Romeo at a nearby gas station, said: “Why not? I guess I could keep my hands free and clean, but I’d hope they have good insurance.“

Researchers at Barts and the London School of Medicine have discovered that drinking just 500ml of beetroot juice a day can significantly reduce blood pressure. The study could have major implications for the treatment of cardiovascular disease.
Led by Professor Amrita Ahluwalia of the William Harvey Research Institute at Barts and the London School of Medicine, and Professor Ben Benjamin of Peninsula Medical School, the research reveals that it is the ingestion of dietary nitrate contained within beetroot juice--and similarly in green, leafy vegetables--which results ultimately in decreased blood pressure. Previously the protective effects of vegetable-rich diets had been attributed to their antioxidant vitamin content, ScienceDaily reported.
Professor Ahluwalia and her team found that in healthy volunteers blood pressure was reduced within just 1 hour of ingesting beetroot juice, with a peak drop occurring 3-4 hours after ingestion.
Some degree of reduction continued to be observed until up to 24 hours after ingestion. Researchers showed that the decrease in blood pressure was due to the chemical formation of nitrite from the dietary nitrate in the juice.
The nitrate in the juice is converted in saliva, by bacteria on the tongue, into nitrite. This nitrite-containing saliva is swallowed, and in the acidic environment of the stomach is either converted into nitric oxide or reenters the circulation as nitrite.
The peak time of reduction in blood pressure correlated with the appearance and peak levels of nitrite in the circulation, an effect that was absent in a second group of volunteers who refrained from swallowing their saliva during, and for 3 hours following, beetroot ingestion.
Hypertension causes around 50 percent of coronary heart disease, and approximately 75 percent of strokes. In demonstrating that nitrate is likely to underlie the cardio-protective effect of a vegetable-rich diet, the research of Professor Ahluwalia and her colleagues highlights the potential of a natural, low cost approach for the treatment of cardiovascular disease--a condition that kills over 110,000 people in England every year.
Professor Ahluwalia said, “Our research suggests that drinking beetroot juice, or consuming other nitrate-rich vegetables, might be a simple way to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system, and might also be an additional approach that one could take in the modern day battle against rising blood pressure.“

Giving infants a small dose of a sugar solution just before they get injections seems to make the pain more tolerable, a study shows.
“Administration of 2 milliliters of a 24 percent oral sucrose solution 2 minutes before routine immunizations is effective in decreasing maximum immunization pain and shortens the time before returning to a near normal state in infants at 2 and 4 months of age,“ the research team reports in the medical journal Pediatrics.
Dr. Linda A. Hatfield, at the Pennsylvania State University School of Nursing in University Park, and her associates gave the sugar solution to 38 infants and plain water to 45 infants before they were to get a series of injections, Reuters reported.
The first, second and third injections were administered at 2 minutes, 5 minutes, and 7 minutes after the solutions were given.
To assess the babies’ experience of pain, the investigators used a validated composite pain scale that measures crying, facial expression, behavior, body movement, and sleep. The scale goes from 0 to 5, with higher scores representing greater pain. Pain was assessed immediately after each injection, and at 9 minutes.
Scores ranged from 1.19 to 3.80 immediately after each injection in the group given the sugar solution, versus 3.02 to 4.81 in the group given water. At the 9-minute assessment, mean scores were 0.59 and 2.75, respectively.
“Although sucrose did not eliminate pain at any point in time,“ Hatfield and her associates write, “other pain reduction or comforting measures (acetaminophen, distraction, holding, feeding, etc) used in conjunction with sucrose administration could provide additional comfort for infants.“

An artist's impression of the A2 jet.

A British firm claims to have designed a hypersonic passenger plane that could one day fly between Europe and Australia in less than five hours.
The A2 airplane, designed by Reaction Engines in Oxfordshire, would carry 300 passengers at a top speed of 4,000mph, BBC said.
The company said the aircraft, which is still at the concept stage, could be operating within 25 years.
It said the A2 would be able to keep a sustained speed of 3,800mph, more than twice the speed of Concorde.
At 143m (156yds) long, the A2 is roughly twice the size of the biggest current jumbo jets.
It would run on a liquid hydrogen engine being developed by Reaction Engines, based at Culham near Abingdon.
The first man-made object to reach hypersonic speeds was the two-stage US ’Bumper’ rocket, assembled from a captured German V-2 rocket in 1949.
Astronauts and cosmonauts have all reached hypersonic speeds while passing through the atmosphere on their way to and from orbit.
Current research, however, focuses on sustained hypersonic manned flight within the Earth’s atmosphere, which has not yet been achieved.

Darts players could boost their scores by imagining they are aiming at their worst enemy, a study suggests.
Researchers found that people tend to throw more accurately when they are aiming at a picture of someone they dislike rather than something seen as neutral or well-liked, according to Telegraph.co.uk.
The finding could prove useful not only to darts players but also to competitors in other sports such as archery or shooting.
A unique experiment conducted for The Daily Telegraph also discovered that Sir David Attenborough, the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, and other leading scientists are guilty of “magical thinking“.
The experiment was conducted in the Royal Society, London, the nation’s venerable academy of science, to study “magical thinking“--irrational ideas such as mind over matter--which psychologists believe is influenced by what they call the law of similarity, a law of superstition and not of science.
This law says that the “action taken on an object affects similar objects“ and is the reason some people believe that sticking pins into a voodoo doll of an intended victim causes harm.
The results of the experiment suggest that, subconsciously, many scientists thought that if they hit a picture of someone’s face with a dart, that person would be harmed.
“If the superstition theory is valid, it means that scientists might be a surprisingly superstitious lot,“ says Prof Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire, who did the experiment, aided by fellow psychologists Sarah Woods and Jenny Mirani.