universityofarkansas
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Scientists prove that microbes could survive on Mars
Microbes could survive on Mars despite its harsh environment, a year-long experiment conducted by a team of astrobiologists from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville has proven. Sure, that's a little less exciting than proving that little green men could have lived on the red planet. But it still brings up the possibility that there may have been life on Mars at one point, no matter how small. The scientists were compelled to conduct a study when Curiosity detected the presence of methane. Most of the methane on Earth is produced by living organisms, and team leader Rebecca Mickol said the "the same could possibly be true for Mars."
Students accelerate cubicle arms race with PlayStation Eye-tracked, iPhone-guided coilgun (video)
DIY weaponry gets more lethal with each passing year; where once we were content with a simple foam missile launcher, technology has progressed such that our automated turrets now spew screwdriver bits, airsoft and paintballs. As progress forges ahead, two engineering students at the University of Arkansas have added injury to insult with this four-stage DIY coilgun. Using an Arduino microcontroller to actuate the firing mechanism and steer the monstrous wooden frame, they nimbly control the badass kit with an iDevice over WiFi, and line up targets using a repurposed PlayStation Eye webcam. While we'd of course prefer to have our phone SSH into the gun over 3G, we're not going to argue with success. We'd like to keep our lungs un-perforated, thank you very much. See it in action after the break.
Researchers say RFID 'fingerprint' could prevent counterfeiting
While it hasn't exactly been a detriment to their widespread adoption, RFID tags have proven to be relatively easy to exploit in a number of cases. Some researchers at the University of Arkansas say they've now found a novel way to change that, however, with a new method that effectively amounts to a "fingerprint" for RFID tags. The short of it is that they discovered that each RFID tag has unique minimum power response at multiple radio frequencies, and that power responses across tags were significantly different, even for tags of the same model. That, along with several other unique, unspecified physical characteristics allowed them to create an electronic fingerprint that's tied to each RFID tag, but doesn't actually depend on any modifications or encryption on the tag itself -- which almost incidentally means it can be implemented with relative ease and at no added cost.
