“If you’ve just downed your fifth cup of coffee and you seem to be hearing things that aren’t actually there, well, you might want to blame the caffeine in your cup of joe,” says The Huffington Post. “Australian researchers found that drinking five regular cups of caffeinated coffee may raise the risk of auditory hallucinations, according to a small study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. La Trobe University researchers asked 92 people with varying levels of caffeine intake and stress to listen to three minutes of white noise via headphones. The study participants were told that Bing Crosby’s White Christmas would be playing in the headphones, and when they heard it, to hit a buzzer. While the song never actually played, the people who were hopped up on five or more cups of coffee buzzed three times on average, while the low-caffeinated people buzzed just once on average, the Herald Sun in Australia reported.”
Police in Fullerton, Calif., “estimate that a computer repairman took hundreds of thousands of images of partially clothed or naked women inside their homes as part of an elaborate scheme that used spyware,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “Authorities said they are looking for other potential victims of the suspect in the case, who allegedly planted software on unsuspecting victims’ computers that allowed him to spy on them. [The 20-year-old technician] … provided home computer services to users with Macintosh computers, said Fullerton Police Sgt. Andrew Goodrich. [The suspect] went to elaborate lengths to ensure that he got lurid images, even convincing users through system messages that they needed to take their computers into steamy environments, such as near their showers, Goodrich said.”
Marc Goodman, a writer and consultant, is the author of Future Crimes, a new blog on Bigthink.com. He says: “While many are focused on the common cyber crimes of today, I have been taking a futurist’s approach that looks beyond today’s cyber crimes in anticipation of the next generations of criminality.” What gives him the most concern? “Biological threats. Biohacking or … Do It Yourself Biology are about to explode. For the first time in human history, we are beginning to understand how biology works. Decoding the human genome was just the first step; neurology will be next. There are significant groups of hackers out there ‘hacking’ biology every day. … The burgeoning fields of synthetic biology, genomics and nanotech may provide significant opportunities for criminals and terrorists to pursue a whole new bag of weaponry previously unavailable to them.”
“Solar activity is approaching the 2013 peak of its 11-year cycle, called the ‘solar maximum,’ and the developed world finds itself ever more dependent on systems vulnerable to massive solar storms,” says The Christian Science Monitor. “Perhaps most important, the power grid is 10 times larger than it was in 1921, when the last solar superstorm hit, effectively making it a giant new antenna for geomagnetic current. A far stronger solar outburst could overload and wreck hundreds of critical high-voltage transformers nationwide, blacking out 130 million [Americans] for months and costing as much as $2-trillion [U.S.], according to an Oak Ridge National Laboratory study. … The first confirmed ‘solar tsunami’ occurred in 1859. British astronomer Richard Carrington was busily sketching sunspots through his telescope when he observed a brilliant, oval-shaped light erupting from the sun that lasted several minutes. Days later, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. There was so much geomagnetically induced current on the lines that some telegraph operators reported being able to use the systems without batteries. In other cases, telegraph offices caught fire and wires melted. The northern lights could be seen as far south as Cuba.”
“Hotel companies are racing to create a better room key,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Some chains are adopting permanent keys that repeat guests can carry in their wallets and use for multiple trips at a variety of properties. Other establishments are doing away with physical keys altogether; instead, guests can open their room doors by holding their cellphone next to the lock. The big selling point of the new keys, executives say, is that they let travellers skip the front desk and go straight to their rooms.”