Gizmorama - August 27, 2014

Good Morning,

Did the Curiosity rover find evidence of martians? Did it find a thigh bone of a martian being or was it a plain old rock?

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- High fingerprint matching rate for NEC technology --*
IRVING, Texas (UPI) - Fingerprint identification technology from NEC Corporation of America achieved top place in testing by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The company said its system achieved a 99.47 percent success rate in matching prints in the Proprietary Fingerprint Template Test, which evaluated 120,000-subject datasets.

That score was more than 20 percent higher than that of a second place company's technology in one-finger and two-finger configurations.

"For more than 40 years, NEC has been developing fingerprint identification technologies as one of its key technologies for realizing a safe and secure society and has deployed systems based on these identification technologies in more than 40 countries around the world," said Raffie Beroukhim, the vice president of NEC Biometrics Solutions Division.

NEC said the technology used in the testing has been applied to its Hybrid Finger Identification Products, a solution that combines fingerprint and finger vein identification for even higher accuracy in print matching.


*-- Mars thigh bone is really just a rock spotted by Curiosity --*
WASHINGTON (UPI) - The Internet says thigh bone; NASA scientists say plain old rock.

Is the latest photo from Mars, snapped by the Curiosity rover and beamed back to Earth, proof that human-like aliens once visited the Red Planet? Many online conspiracy theorists seem to think so. Or is it just further evidence that erosion works in strange ways? That's what NASA researchers would have you believe.

But if NASA had something to hide, it's doubtful they would have shared the photo with the public in the first place. Mission science team members say the thigh-bone-shaped rock was most likely sculpted by the eroding forces of wind or water.

"If life ever existed on Mars, scientists expect that it would be small simple life forms called microbes," NASA officials wrote in a press release. "Mars likely never had enough oxygen in its atmosphere and elsewhere to support more complex organisms. Thus, large fossils are not likely."

Seems like sound logic, but facts don't often stand in the way of outlandish conspiracy theories.

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