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Charge a battery in just six minutes

A rechargeable battery that can be fully charged in just 6 minutes, lasts 10 times as long as today's rechargeables and can provide bursts of electricity up to three times more powerful is showing promise in a Nevada lab.

New types of battery are badly needed. Nokia's chief technologist Yrjö Neuvo warned last year that batteries are failing to keep up with the demands of the increasingly energy-draining features being crammed into mobile devices (New Scientist print edition, 28 February 2004).

The highest energy-per-weight ratio in today's batteries is provided by lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. They are also cheaper in terms of energy delivered per unit of weight than alternative types of battery such as nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) and nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd) types. But Li-ion cells have their drawbacks too. They eventually wear out, and they cannot discharge energy quickly enough for applications requiring power surges, such as camera flashguns and power tools.

They may soon be able to. Altair Technologies of Reno has created a new type of Li-ion cell in which the anode has an exceptionally high surface area. This allows electrons to enter and leave it quickly - making fast recharging possible and providing high currents when needed.

Chemical tricks

Li-ion batteries work by forcing lithium ions from a lithium cobalt oxide cathode to migrate to a carbon anode via an electrolyte solution. Altair's patented modification is to make the anode surface out of lithium titanate nanocrystals, using chemical tricks to give it a surface area of about 100 square metres per gram, compared with 3 square metres per gram for carbon.

The firm is keeping the chemistry that allows it to do this pretty close to its chest for commercial reasons. But the patent (US 6689716) reveals that the increased surface area is achieved using a carefully controlled sequence of evaporative steps when making the lithium titanate crystals.

The high current that this modified electrode is able to carry means power-hungry devices can be installed in mobile phones, which until now have been denied them. For instance, camera phones might now have enough power to run a flashgun.

Longer lifespan

Altair says the battery will have other advantages, too. The crystalline surface of a carbon anode is susceptible to damage by the repeated temperature changes that occur as the battery is used and recharged. This limits its life to around 400 charging cycles.

The more rugged lithium titanate anode should make it possible to recharge the battery as many as 20,000 times says Roy Graham, development director at Altair. A longer lifespan should also be better for the environment, he says. "The continual use of polluting cobalt oxides is questionable."

Altair plans to develop its batteries for power tools, which have till now required more expensive Ni-Cd or NiMH batteries to provide the large currents these devices need. The company hopes to license its technology to major battery-makers, who could have the device on the market in two years' time. Altair says it eventually wants to produce batteries for a broad range of devices, from phones to hybrid electric vehicles.

Phone viruses: how bad is it?

You are about as likely to get hit by a falling piano as you are to get a virus on your mobile phone," says Graham Cluley, a security consultant at UK antivirus firm Sophos. Unlike PCs, phones simply have too many different operating systems for viruses to exploit, he says. And there are too few people who own the "smart phones" capable of receiving and transmitting new software - like a virus - to pose a real risk.

Reading the newspapers last week, you may have got the opposite impression. On 21 February reports surfaced of the first two US phones to be infected with a virus outside a lab, sparking predictions of a bleak future in which viruses run rampant, rendering cellphones as useless as PCs hit by LoveBug, Sasser or MyDoom.

The phone virus, called Cabir, was written by a band of European hackers who call themselves the 29a group. They wrote it in June 2004 as a "proof-of-concept" virus, designed to show that phones can suffer viral attacks just like PCs. It first appeared last August in the Philippines on phones running the Symbian 60 operating system, including top-of-the-range Nokia, Siemens and Panasonic models.

The virus drains phone batteries far faster than normal by constantly seeking active Bluetooth radio connections in nearby cellphones. When it finds a phone with Bluetooth switched on, in so-called "discoverable" mode, it asks the user if they want to receive a file. If the user agrees, the virus transmits a file called caribe and asks the user if they want to install it. Enough people have now done so for the virus to spread to a further 11 countries, including the UK, Australia and the US.

"Bad stuff ahead"

Because it can only infect one phone at a time and requires the user's permission, and because battery draining is a relatively harmless effect, Cabir is not seen as a big cause for concern. The real fear is that viruses will get more sophisticated and spread more easily via longer-range internet links like Wi-Fi, which is beginning to appear as a cellphone option. "The really bad stuff is all ahead of us," says Mikko Hypponen of Finnish firm F-Secure.

The class of cellphones hit by Cabir are known as smart phones and sell for at least $500. They fall prey to viruses because they have advanced operating systems capable of executing newly inserted code. The vast majority of phones cannot update their software this way, says Hypponen.

Just 4% of all cellphones sold worldwide in 2004 were smart phones, and it is unlikely to be more than 9.3% by 2009, according to technology research firm Jupiter Research.

But even basic phones are getting smarter. Many have the ability to "sync" with a PC, allowing the phone to do things like download email. This creates another way to insert a virus, says Oliver Friedrichs of Symantec, a company based in Santa Monica, California, US, which sells antivirus software for the Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems.

A virus that spreads through a phone's Wi-Fi connection or through an email attachment could propagate faster and more stealthily than one that spreads over short-range Bluetooth connections. Unlike Cabir it could infect a phone by exploiting its security flaws.

Steal and destory

"To date we have not seen vulnerabilities disclosed for phones but we expect to see them in future, just like we have with the desktop PC," says Friedrichs. Viruses could steal and destroy data from phones, run up bills by making calls to premium-rate numbers, record conversations in which personal data and credit card numbers are exchanged, and even get a phone camera to spy on its owner and transmit photos.

A major factor protecting cellphones is the variety of operating systems they use, unlike the Windows near-monoculture of the PC world. Only half of all smart phones run the Symbian operating system, with most of the others running either PalmSource or Windows Mobile. Linux variants have only a very small share of the smart-phone market. As most viruses are specific to a particular operating system, it is harder for them to spread in this mixed environment.

It is conceivable that virus writers will find a way round this, says Friedrichs. This could be done by building a "cross-platform" virus that could infect any operating system, or one that could exploit vulnerabilities in the small Java programs that all phones run, such as those for games and journey planners.

Countermeasures for smart-phone viruses are already available from Trend Micro, Airscanner, Symantec, F-Secure and McAfee. But Cyrus Peikari, a programmer at Airscanner of Dallas, Texas, believes that antivirus software may not be enough. He thinks "polymorphic" viruses, which continually rearrange their signature codes to evade detection, will make it onto cellphones. The only way to detect polymorphic viruses on PCs is to look for virus-like behaviour, such as programs that continually interrupt the operating system as they scan for new files to infect. Cellphone software does not have the sophistication to detect these interrupts, says Peikari. "Your home computer's antivirus software has its tentacles in every corner of the PC. Airscanner's antivirus software cannot do that and I don't believe anybody's can," he says.

Chameleon-like smart phones do impressions

CHAMELEON-like smart phones that do a more than passable impression of other digital devices are proving a big hit at the annual CeBit electronics conference in Hannover, Germany, this week.

Samsung is promoting its SCH-S250, whose built-in 7-megapixel digital camera offers higher resolution than many dedicated cameras. Keen photographers will appreciate its 3x optical zoom, 5x digital zoom and 16-million-colour screen display. The handset can even be fitted with a compact telephoto lens.

Another Samsung offering, the SGH-i300, takes on the digital music players. Packing in 3 gigabytes of hard-disc space for storing thousands of music and video files, the device runs the latest digital media software, Windows Mobile 2005, and supports a plethora of file formats, including MP3, AAC, MPEG-4 and Ogg Vorbis.

A third Samsung phone is not to be sneezed at either. The SCH-869 comes coated in antibacterial paint to cut the odds of transmitting germs if you lend it to someone else.

New cellphone virus rifles through phonebook

The first mobile phone virus capable of rifling through a phonebook and automatically sending a copy of itself to uninfected phones was discovered by anti-virus researchers on Monday.

Commwarrior has no malicious payload but it spreads more insidiously than any phone virus to date because it appears to come from a friend and can spread over long distances, say researchers at the Finnish security firm F-Secure in Helsinki.

It packages itself in a file and sends itself via a type of enhanced text message service called MMS - or multimedia messaging service - which is commonly used to send photos and sound or video clips between smart phones. "This is the first time we have seen a spreading mechanism like this," says Matias Impivaara of F-Secure. "It is clearly more efficient."

Previous phone viruses such as Skulls and Mosquito have had no way to spread from phone to phone and relied on being downloaded from a website, while Cabir spread via Bluetooth, only to phones within a 10 metre radius. Commwarrior can spread between phones anywhere in the world.

More inviting

To become infected, victims must have a smart phone running the Symbian Series 60 operating system and they must actively download a file. But they are more likely to do this than for viruses such as Cabir, which could come from any stranger standing nearby.

Downloading Commwarrior is also more inviting than Cabir - which simply asks the recipient to "install caribe?" via an onscreen message box. Commwarrior is disguised either as a legitimate software update from Symbian or a set of pornographic images.

But despite this, the phone virus has been surprisingly inactive. "It's not spreading as fast as you would think," says Impivaara. Although anti-virus researchers discovered it for the first time Monday on a phone in Serbia, comments posted online by phone users indicate that it has been spreading since January, and yet it is far from rampant.

This is partly because few people own the $500 smart phones capable of executing newly inserted code and spreading a virus. But Impivaara says Commwarrior also has a curious feature that stops it spreading quickly and is not yet fully understood. "It somehow goes to sleep before trying to spread," he says.

The likelihood of someone else using Commwarrior's spreading mechanism and loading it with a malicious payload - such as one that attempts to steal phone numbers or eavesdrop on conversations - is low, as Commwarrior's source code has not been found online, says Impivaara.

Hands-free cellphones carry car crash risk too

Using hands-free cellphone headsets while driving is not risk free. People who chat on their mobiles while driving are four times more likely to crash - and that includes those using hands-free devices.

The research, conducted in Perth, Western Australia, was based on 456 drivers who had been involved in road crashes requiring hospital attention. By comparing the time of crash with records from phone companies, study leader Suzanne McEvoy and colleagues at the Injury Prevention and Trauma Care Division at the University of Sydney, found that cellphone use significantly increased the chance of a crash. That was regardless of sex, age group, or whether or not a hands-free device was used.

“This is the first study to pin down the risk of an injury-causing crash if a driver is talking on a mobile phone,” says Russ Rader, of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Arlington, Virginia, US. “The bottom line is that people should not be on any kind of a mobile phone while driving.”

Law enforcement In most of the European Union, in Australia and in three east-coast states in the US - New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia - it is illegal to use a hand-held phone while driving. But there are no such laws concerning hands-free phones, which were used by about half of the participants in the Australian study.

“Laws against both types of phone use probably make sense,” says Rader, “but the problem is enforcement. How do you enforce a hands-free phone law?”

The researchers did not assess whether different types of hands-free devices affected outcomes. It might be, for example, that searching for an earpiece to answer a call is more distracting than activating a phone mounted in a hands-free holder, says McEvoy. Six per cent of subjects in the study were using devices that were voice activated - completely hands-free - but the researchers were unable to assess whether this type is safer.

“The accumulating research seems to point to the conversation being a big part of the problem,” Rader notes.

Journal reference: British Medical Journal (Online First)

Text messages double young smokers' quit rates

Smoking cessation programmes that use text messaging can double the quit rate in young smokers, according to a clinical trial in New Zealand.

The trial led by Anthony Rodgers, director of the Clinical Trials Research Unit at the University of Auckland, NZ, is the first to test the use of mobile phones as an aid to giving up smoking.

In the study, over 850 young smokers who wanted to quit received text messages, such as: “Write down 4 people who will get a kick outta u kicking butt. Your mum, dad, m8s?”

The smokers, whose average age was 25 years old, received five messages a day for a week before their designated “quit day”, and for the following four weeks. Then they received three messages a week for a further five months. They were also given one month of free personal texting, starting on their quit day, as an incentive.

A similar group of young smokers received one month free texting six months after their designated quit day, but no text messages designed to help them quit.

Six weeks after quit day, 28% of the group that received the texts claimed to have quit, compared with 13% of the control group. To check these self-reported results, the team analysed levels of cotinine, a nicotine breakdown product, in the saliva of one in 10 of the participants. The results were the same for both groups - about half of those who claimed to have given up were actually still smoking. Quit rates appeared to remain high after six months, although the results are less certain because many of the participants were lost to follow up.

Previously impervious

The study results are published in the journal Tobacco Control. Its editor, Simon Chapman of the University of Sydney, Australia, says he was initially “profoundly sceptical” that texting would help young people quit smoking, but was swayed by the results.

“It’s an extraordinarily interesting development. There’s something about text messaging that seems to get through to young people, who are usually impervious to anti-smoking messages,” he says.

When older smokers attempt to quit, between 15% and 30% are still smoke-free after six weeks, often using traditional techniques such as nicotine gum. But while 30% of young people in Western countries smoke, they have the lowest uptake of smoking-cessation programmes of any age group. That is despite many saying they would like to stop.

Busy hands

Texting probably helps young people stop smoking in several ways, says Rodgers. It acts as “chewing gum for the fingers”, giving smokers something to do other than smoke.

In the trial, the messages were also designed to encourage participants and to help them deal with symptoms of giving up, or to distract them with information about unrelated topics such as music and sport.

The texting approach could be useful in places like China, which has 50 million young smokers, and 250 million mobile phone users with 5 million more signing up each month, says Rodgers.

He also predicts that texting will become an increasingly popular method for public health interventions. “You can deliver bite-sized training courses right to the person’s pocket anywhere in the world,” he says. “There’s huge potential for blood pressure management, for depression, and for nutritional advice for weight control.”

Journal reference: Tobacco Control (DOI: 10.1136/tc.2005.011577)

Mile-high cellphones may block ET's call

IF cellphones get the thumbs-up for use on aircraft, detecting intelligent life on other planets will get a lot harder. Radiation from mobile phones in the sky would swamp any faint radio signals from outer space, seriously hampering radio astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), astronomers warned last week.

The warning came because both the US Federal Aviation Administration and the US Federal Communications Commission are reviewing the ban on cellphone use on aircraft.

Besides transmitting signals at their operating frequencies, cellphones also leak radiation that happens to fall in a frequency band that reveals the molecular signature of newborn and dying stars. It is also among the 2 per cent of frequencies in this part of the spectrum reserved for radio astronomy.

"It could be a disaster for us," says Michael Davis, of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "We have incredibly sensitive radio telescopes - even a single cellphone on a plane 100 miles away could cause pretty serious damage." That is partly because cellphone signals from the sky could be in a telescope's direct line of sight, unlike signals from phones on the ground. "Putting cellphones in a plane is like building a cellphone tower 40,000 feet high," says Davis. Fitting planes with devices that can transmit on a frequency that doesn't interfere with radio signals could solve the problem.

Rural cellphone use may pose tumour risk

Cellphone users in rural areas could be at greater risk of developing brain tumours than those living in the city, according to a controversial new Swedish study.

The research claims that digital cellphone users who live in the countryside for at least three years increase their chances of developing a malignant brain tumour by a factor of three.

One explanation for this is that transmitter base stations tend to be more spread out in rural areas as compared with towns, say the authors, led by Lennart Hardell at the University of Örebro in Sweden. As a result, the phones have to emit more powerful signals to enable them to link with their nearest stations, thereby exposing the user to more powerful radio waves.

In recent years some studies have claimed to have shown connections between cellphone use and a type of brain cancer - called acoustic neuromas.

But repeated attempts by scientists in a number of different countries have consistently failed to find conclusive proof of an adverse health effect from cellphone use. So this new study, which claims to be the first to find a “geographical” effect, is likely to be contentious.

Doubts cast

The team’s findings are based on a new analysis of data from a past study in which nearly 1500 people with brain tumours and 1500 matched controls were asked about their cellphone usage, to examine a possible association with cancer risk.

The hypothesis that cellphones have to emit more energy in rural areas is reasonable, but not a hypothesis that this study proves, says Michael Clark at the UK’s Health Protection Agency. For one thing the study does not take into account position and densities of base stations in relation to where the subjects live.

And co-author Kjell Hansson Mild admits that the study also fails to rule out exposure to agricultural chemicals as a source for any increased risk.

Ever-decreasing numbers

But most damning of the study is the fact that, although an ostensibly large study involving nearly 3000 subjects, the headline conclusion of a threefold greater risk in rural digital cellphone users is based on a subset of only 10 patients and just one control.

“If there was going to be a health effect you are going to see it in urban users as well,” says Clark. He also points out that there are several much larger studies currently underway which collectively represent the largest and most comprehensive research effort into the possible health risks of mobile phones.

When the results are finally published over the next few years, they should reveal whether or not there is a genuine “geographical” effect and at the same time help settle the issue of whether cellphones do increase the risk of cancer, he says.

Journal reference: Occupational and Environmental Medicine (vol 62, p 390)

Cellphones 'should not be given to children'

Recent studies suggesting cellphone radiation may pose a health hazard have prompted UK experts to warn parents against giving mobile phones to young children.

A report issued on Tuesday by the UK's National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), a government advisory body, calls for a "precautionary approach" to cellphone use. The study acknowledges that there is no firm evidence that cellphone radiation is harmful but warns that the possibility also cannot be ruled out.

"I don't think we can put our hands on our hearts and say mobile phones are safe," said Sir William Stewart, chairman of the NRPB, at a press conference in London on Tuesday.

The NRPB report repeats concerns first raised in an influential study into cellphone health affects published in 2000 by the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones, also set up by the UK government and led by William Stewart. However, the new report adds that scientific research published since 2000 provides fresh evidence that cellphone radiation may be harmful to users.

DNA damage

This research includes a European study published in December 2004 indicating that radiation from cellphones may damage DNA, a Swedish study from April 2004 showing a correlation between mobile phone use and auditory nerve tumours and Dutch research from October 2003, linking cellphones to impaired brain function.

But the NPRB report says these studies must be replicated by other research laboratories before any conclusion can be reached.

Zenon Sienkiewicz, principle scientist at NRPB, notes that complicating factors will also have to be investigated, such as whether some people are more susceptible to cellphone radiation than others. "All we're saying in the report is let's not close our minds," he told New Scientist.

Stewart says parents should not give cellphones to children under nine years old because they may be particularly susceptible to any ill effects of cellphone radiation. This is because they have smaller heads, meaning the radiation can affect a greater part of their brain, and less fully developed nervous systems.

Service suspended

"If there are risks - and we think that maybe there are - then the people who are going to be most affected are children, and the younger the children, the greater the danger," Stewart said.

Shortly after the report was published, UK company Commun8, which launched a mobile phone service aimed at children, announced that it would suspend operations.

But other representatives of the industry took a positive view of the report. "The key point of the NRPB advice is that there is no hard information linking the use of mobile telephony with adverse health effects," said Mike Dolan executive director of the UK Mobile Operators Association.

The NPRB report also recommends that older children and adults consider limiting their phone use and sending text messages instead of making voice calls whenever possible.

The rate of cellphone development is another cause for worry, according to the report. Third generation (3G) phones typically produce more radiation than older handsets, but there have been few studies of the health effects of these devices specifically. The board also said further research should be carried out into the effects of wireless networking technology such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

New Nokia cellphone to challenge MP3 players

A cellphone that can store as much music as Apple's popular iPod Mini MP3 player will be launched by Nokia later in 2005.

The move follows Sony-Ericsson's unveiling in March of a music-storing "Walkman" phone and marks another nail in the coffin for pure MP3 players. Cellphone makers are betting that people will prefer to carry one gadget rather than two.

Like the basic iPod Mini, Nokia's new phone incorporates a diminutive 4-gigabyte hard disc drive capable of storing at least 3000 music tracks. By comparison the first Walkman phone - the W800, also to be released later in 2005 - will store about 150 tracks on a 0.5 gigabyte flash-memory card.

"But users can buy their own 2 gigabyte memory cards and store almost 1000 songs," says a Sony-Ericsson spokesman. "And remember this is only the first Walkman phone, we will be launching more with greater storage."

Apple has already struck a deal with US phone and chip maker Motorola to jointly create an "iPod phone" capable of interfacing easily with Apple's iTunes music purchasing and track management service, but the relationship has yet to bear fruit.

Hard-disc jockeying

Nokia's N91 phone was launched in Amsterdam in the Netherlands on Wednesday, where vice-president of multimedia, Anssi Vanjoki described it as a "connected mobile jukebox".

A version with a 3G connection will be available to allow the wireless downloading of music - an approach proving popular in Japan - while the standard GSM phone will use a computer and USB connection. Like the Sony-Ericsson W800, the N91 has a 2-megapixel camera built in. Hard disc drives are being incorporated into small-scale consumer products very rapidly, thanks to research - carried out by firms like Hitachi and Samsung which is shrinking disc size.

But there are disadvantages. The spinning discs make for increasingly power-hungry gadgets, notes Carl Franklin, technology analyst with the stockbroker Bridgewell Securities in London, UK. "Once your phone is running a hard drive your battery lifetime could suffer. That's going to be a major challenge for Nokia's engineers."

“Active working time”

In early tests, Vanjoki says the N91 gave five hours of "active working time", with the phone, music and camera functions frequently used. "Old terms like ‘standby’ power and ’talk time’ are just not applicable concepts anymore because the phones are doing too many other things," he adds.

Sony's W800, based on flash memory - which has no moving parts - offers between 15 and 30 hours of battery life, depending on how often the phone and music player are used simultaneously.

The N91 was one of three multimedia-heavy phones launched by Nokia, all of which stick with the Symbian Series 60 smartphone operating system. One of the other handsets - the N90 - uses a Carl Zeiss lens to improve the quality of camera images users.