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One Per Cent

RFID chips track what you're eating, explore the seabed with Google, and how the IMF was hacked

Do you want chips with that?

Would you relish this cake quite as much if you knew it contained a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip? Hannes Harms, a student at the Royal College of Art in London, has come up with a design for an edible RFID chip, part of a system he calls NutriSmart. It could send nutritional data and ingredients for people who have allergies, or count calories for those on diets, for display on a smartphone. It could even tell your fridge when food is past its sell-by date. But who wants a stomach full of silicon?

“We are demoting the PC and Mac to just a device, like an iPhone. We’re going to move the centre of your digital life into the cloud”

Steve Jobs unveils Apple’s iCloud service at the firm’s annual developer conference in San Francisco last week

Dive beneath the waves with Google

Jules Verne would love it. Armchair explorers can now investigate an area of sea floor larger than North America, thanks to a joint project by Google and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. Only 10 per cent of the ocean floor has been mapped, but half of this is now publicly available via Google Earth. Highlights include the Hudson canyon between Long Island and the New Jersey coast, and the Mendocino fault off California.

IMF hit by hacker attack

A cyberattack on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) may have used a technique called “spear fishing”, in which staff are sent personal emails in the hope they will give away vital information in their replies. The IMF holds valuable data on the fiscal state of many nations, but it is unclear what was stolen in the “large and sophisticated” raid, or who was behind it.

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