13 June 2009 | NewScientist | 17

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IN ONLINE games like World of Warcraft, the violence is normally restricted to fantasy realms populated by orcs and wizards. But when a dispute broke out between rival gaming services recently, it brought down large chunks of China’s internet.

Problems started when hackers linked to an unnamed gaming company launched an attack on a server that provides access to a competitor site. The Xinhua News Agency says the attackers disabled the server by flooding it with incoming signals. Other, connected servers were slowed too, in a chain reaction that caused internet problems for 300 million people.

Two suspects were arrested on 29 May. Chinese authorities rate the disruption to the country’s internet as the worst since an earthquake ruptured undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.

Radio chip mimics human earA COMPUTER chip modelled on the

human ear could be used in universal

receivers for radio-frequency signals

ranging from cellphone and wireless

internet transmissions to radio and

television broadcasts.

Devices such as cellphones or FM

radios are generally tuned to only a

narrow frequency band. The new

device is inspired by the network of

hairs in the inner ear, which can pick

up a wide range of sound frequencies.

We can hear because sound waves

make the eardrum vibrate, which

creates waves in the fluid-filled inner

ear. Hairs on the membrane inside the

inner ear are moved by these waves,

and because different hairs respond

to different frequencies , signals from

the hair cells enable the brain to work

out the frequency of the sound.

Massachusetts Institute of

Technology researchers mimicked

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Virtual war spills into real world

this process within a chip that

creates an electromagnetic wave

in response to radio frequencies .

The wave activates a network of

transistors that act like hair cells in

the ear to reveal the wave’s frequency

(IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits,

DOI: 10.1109/jssc.2009.2020465).

Previous universal digital

receivers have required 100 times

the power of the single-frequency

receivers now in use. But the

ear-based analogue version, which

can process frequencies ranging

from 600 megahertz to 8 gigahertz,

draws no more electricity than

single-frequency receivers.

FINDING your way around big shopping centres or airports may soon get a lot easier.

An indoor positioning system, similar to GPS, is being tested by visitors to the Kamppi shopping centre in Helsinki, Finland. GPS doesn’t work in buildings because the satellite signals it uses can’t get through walls. In this system, developed by Nokia, a cellphone can use nearby Wi-Fi transmitters instead of satellites. It triangulates their signals to calculate its position, which it then displays on a map.

It is not the first indoor system

Your phone can always find you

but the others have mostly been for specialist uses, such as helping firefighters find colleagues in smoke-filled buildings. The Nokia system will work with existing infrastructure and handsets.

One thing it does need, however, is access to maps of the inside of buildings. This may not be feasible for private homes, but many public sites such as sports centres and universities already make maps available.

If the Kamppi test is a success, the system could be rolled out much more widely, says project leader Christian Prehofer. It might help people find their departure gate at airports, meet friends in a museum, or locate goods in a superstore.

–No tuning dial–

Swedish votes cast for the Pirate Party in the European Parliament elections last week. The party wants to legalise file-sharing

7.1%

Computer programmer Alexey Pajitnov on creating the game Tetris 25 years ago .

Pajitnov developed the game as a distraction from his work at the Computing Centre

of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (telegraph.co.uk, 6 June)

“I started playing and I couldn’t stop”

“A network of transistors act like hair cells in the ear to reveal the wave’s frequency”