The German news site “The Local” reports that a pair of German companies have patented a technology that would let people “send smells” via SMS text messaging on their cell phones. Their initial plan is to incorporate a “smell chip” into cell phones that would come pre-embedded with up to 100 different scents such as vanilla, roses, or “the beach” (don’t let Cosmo Kramer find out about that one). It’s also possible, the spokesperson said, that there might be some “bad smells” available, too.

The companies don’t have any actual product right now, but they hope to convince cell phone manufacturers to incorporate their technology into new cell phone designs within a couple of years. I, for one, will not hold my breath waiting for that to happen (thank you, I’ll be here all week, try the veal).

(via)

Time again to blow through a bunch of assorted but unconnected links to things I’ve read in the science and tech worlds recently:

Mother Jones magazine featured this quasi-interview with MythBuster Jamie Hyneman about alternative energy technologies. I say “quasi-interview” because his responses to their questions are so terse that it’s hard to tell if he actually said them or not, except that Jamie is rather short-spoken in the first place. The piece says that he’s really into alt-energy, and on the show the MythBusters have repeatedly demonstrated that most of the “free energy” stuff you see is total hogwash. Something to think about, since this morning everybody has a link to this “$1/gal Ethanol” story in Popular Mechanics.

RetroThing had me all nostalgic the other day for the very first computer I ever owned, the Sinclair ZX81. Mine was not a kit, it came fully-assembled. I bought it second-hand from my high-school best friend Andy, who had moved on to such cutting edge technology of the day as the TRS-80. It even came with the add-on 16K memory module. The post includes a link to this page which tells you how to build your own ZX80/81 with a couple dozen ICs and a circuit board, but if you don’t feel like building one, you can just download an emulator here.

The science journal Nature has this news article about understanding metabolism as a genetic condition. British researchers re-used some urine samples originally collected for another study and used a new form of spectroscopy to completely identify all the chemicals in the samples. They then identified the geographies of the test subjects and graphed specific metabolites and were able to determine that different populations have unique metabolic rates. People in Southern China, they conclude, have the best metabolisms in the world. People in South Texas have the worst metabolisms in the world. Yet more scientific evidence as to why one should stay away from Texas, if you ask me.

You knew I would have at least ONE nanotech link, right? Of course right! Today’s nano-news is this bulletin that tries to sex up the story with the headline “Nanotechnology paves way for super iPods”. Nice try. The underlying story is that a team at University of Glasgow have figured out how to make molecule-sized switches, which in turn will allow for as many as 1 billion transistors to fit on a single chip (up from 200 million today). That, in turn, would increase the density of electronic storage devices without increasing their physical size: 500 terabytes per square inch (compared to about 3 gigabytes now). No actual mention of iPods anywhere in the article. You just have to make the leap of assumption that someday this technology would be used in some future iPod so that you could store every song ever recorded.

I’ve posted a couple of times about the “Nintendo Fan Network” wireless system that Nintendo tested out last year at Safeco Field in Seattle and also a similar system being tested at DisneyWorld in Florida.

Today, Engadget reports that Safeco Field will offer the service for free this season. Previously, there was a $5.00 fee to use the service; given how much everything else costs at a professional sporting event, it’s pretty amazing that they’ve eliminated the charge instead of jacking it up to $15-20, but, as Chris Anderson wrote in Wired a couple of months ago, in the end anyone providing these kind of services will find themselves giving away the service in order to make money on the extras (the old “give away the razor, make the money on the blades” theory that has served Gillette so well for decades).

To wit: a few weeks ago none other than the mighty Starbucks itself said that they would stop charging for WiFi (sort of), after soaking people for $6 a whack for several years. The service has been spotted in the wild in at least one city, and will take them the rest of 2008 to roll out to every store. In cities like New York, which seem to have a Starbucks every 100 fet, this is as good as having municipal WiFi. I hope they hit the Boston stores soon, because Boston’s own municipal WiFi has more or less gone tits-up.

Posting over at his day job, Adam Gaffin (who spends an awful lot of time here) reports that a company in Hong Kong has announced that theyve developed an improved version of the biometric finger scanner that can tell the difference between a live human finger and any attempt at a reproduction and only allow the real finger to authenticate the user.

While I’m glad to hear that Adam will sleep better at night no longer worrying that some unscrupulous evil-doer will come along and cut off his pinkies, this is actually an important improvement to the fingerprint scanner. A few years ago, a researcher proved that he could produce a replica finger using ballistics gel that would be recognized by the scanner. And the MythBusters have demonstrated that it is possible to use a photocopy of a fingerprint to open one particular brand of “invincible” locks using optical scanners (link goes to a video clip so you can see how they did it).

So, Adam, I guess you can stop wearing those chain-mail gloves to bed now.