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By Emily Schmitt  TechNewsDaily Contributor posted: 20 May 2010 Who needs a bloodhound – or even a nose? The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is hoping that soon your cell phone will sniff out poisonous gases. It’s funding three companies to create a small chip – about the size of a dime – that would sit inside of   cell phones   and alert users to potentially deadly smells. Michael Sailor, whose research team at the University of California , San Diego works for Rhevision Technology, Inc. to create the chip, says the chips are most useful for first responders or other emergency workers. Firefighters and police could track the location of, say, a noxious cloud in a subway, by monitoring   GPS signals   from the passengers’ cell phones. They could then use the information to better coordinate a response.   It’s a laudable goal when you think of it like that,” Sailor said. The technology is similar to that of a computer chip. Scientists start ...

By Ron Friedman 05-05-2010 Statistics on all fields of Israeli life. Personal computers are found in 71.1 percent of Israeli households and 90.8% of those homes have an Internet connection. Some 61.8% of households own at least one car and 18.8% have two or more. And the average Israeli has 2.1 mobile phones. Those were some of the findings the Central Bureau of Statistics reported on Tuesday, when it released an initial report from the 2008 national population census, which was concluded in June 2009. It was the first census to employ an integrated method that combines data from administrative sources and sample data from field surveys. The census provides vast amounts of information from all fields of Israeli life. The Jerusalem Post offers highlights of the findings: • Israel is home to 7,409,000 people. The population is 75.6% Jewish, 16.9% Muslim, 2% Christian, 1.7% Druse and 3.8% are defined as belonging to other religions. The median age is 28-29 for males and 30 fo...