Technology How secure are credit-card devices? THE point-of-sale machines designed to verify chip-and-PIN credit and debit cards may be vulnerable to hardware attacks that allow crooks to steal PINs. Ross Anderson, Saar Drimer and Steven Murdoch at the University of Cambridge computer security lab discovered that it is possible to attach a simple data-tapping circuit between an inserted card and the … 51¶¯Âþ
Health Comment: The pills that make us fat WALK down any street in America and you'll see the effects of the "obesity epidemic". Two-thirds of adults, more than 130 million people, are now considered overweight, and nearly half of these are classified as obese. Those who are overweight by 45 kilograms or more are the fastest-growing group of the overweight in the US. … Opinion
Histories: The military surgeon who hid his female history On 25 July 1865, charwoman Sophia Bishop was asked to lay out the body of James Barry. During 46 years as a British Army doctor, Barry had served in garrisons across the empire, making a name as a zealous reformer who improved the health of soldiers and civilians alike. What Bishop now claimed to have … Features
Review: The Rise of Animals by Mikhail Fedonkin, James Gehling, Kathleen Grey, Guy Narbonne, and Patricia Vickers-Rich EVOLUTION has many frontiers, but for me the most intriguing is the Ediacaran period, from about 580 to 542 million years ago, the era of the first complex fauna. In The Rise of Animals five leading experts have assembled more than 500 figures, mostly colour photos of fossils, and summarised years of research. It's a … Books & Arts
Feedback Beer's effect on citations UNIVERSITY administrators are always keen to boost academics' output. They will surely welcome a paper by Tomáa Grim of the Department of Zoology at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, which is due to appear in Oikos , the journal of the Nordic Ecological Society ( DOI: 10.1111/j.2008.0030-1299.16551.x ). "Despite a … Regulars