Scott Olson/Getty

The scourge of counterfeit drugs in the global marketplace is nothing new. As Passport noted in February, the World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of all drug packets on the streets of developing countries are fake. Such medicines are responsible for the deaths of 300,000 people each year in China alone (pdf).

But now there's even more bad news. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)—called the "most promising technology for electronic track and trace across the drug supply chain" by the Food and Drug Administration—may not be so promising after all.

CSO, a publication dealing with private security issues, recently published a piece dispelling the five big myths surround RFID technology and its ability to prevent and mitigate drug counterfeiting operations. Given that big pharma companies including GlaxoSmithKline, Purdue Pharma and Pfizer have adopted RFID for a number of their products, this is important news. A quick summary:

- Myth 1: RFID tags are anti-counterfeiting devices. Why not? Their primary function is as an inventory tracking device—not a security one. They are simply a "record of a drug's journey through the supply chain."

- Myth 2: RFID technology is necessary to track the movement of legitimate drugs. Why not? The "two-way communication" part of RFID tracking, which is the most crucial component of protecting distribution, is still unreliable. This means that often-unreliable 2-D barcodes are often as the principal means of identifying the drugs instead.

- Myth 3: RFID technology can be used to mark pills, tablets and elixirs themselves. Why not? Only the packaging gets marked, not the drugs themselves. And many drugs are repackaged on their journey from producer to market, creating easily exploitable loopholes for the savvy counterfeiter. As the Chief Security Officer of Novartis explains, "We have had experience with counterfeit product in genuine packaging, and genuine product in counterfeit packaging.... The packaging isn't what's important."

- Myth 4: RFID technology will let consumers verify that they have purchased legitimate products. Why not? The tension between privacy and security is still too strong. So far, it seems as if the RFID tags are disabled before they reach the hands of consumers.

- Myth 5: The pharmaceutical industry is this close to widespread RFID adoption. Why not? It's costly to switch to a new system—especially one whose benefits are still unclear.

RFID may still offer some hope for effectively monitoring drug supply and distribution, but it's not a panacea for addressing counterfeiting by any means. Tackling fake drugs will require greater international cooperation and information exchange between supply channels, and better efforts to crack down on counterfeiters by policing agencies. Until then, parents will continue to face the risk of unwittingly poisoning their own children.

China has developed first-strike cyberwarfare capabilities, according to an annual Pentagon report (pdf) on the status of the country's military:

The PLA has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks, and tactics and measures to protect friendly computer systems and networks. In 2005, the PLA began to incorporate offensive CNO [computer network operations] into its exercises, primarily in first strikes against enemy networks.

iStockphoto.com

Experts say that the emphasis on first-strike capabilities represents a shift in Beijing's cyberwar thinking. As recently as two years ago, the PLA was focused on defensive technologies that would allow it to deter attack, thanks in part to the fact that the country was primarily running off-the-shelf, Western software. "Now there's no mention of that," says University of New Hampshire cyberwar expert Andrew MacPherson. "[M]uch more of the discussion is about first-strike capabilities."

Tensions with Taiwan might explain the change in Chinese strategy. Theories have been floating for years that taking down Taiwan's technological infrastructure would be a key element to any Chinese military campaign against the island and its American allies. And the Pentagon's report makes this point:

A limited military campaign could include computer network attacks against Taiwan’s political, military, and economic infrastructure to undermine the Taiwan population’s confidence in its leadership.

MacPherson goes even further, suggesting that, if backed into a corner, China may try to take down the Internet writ large: "Maybe [China] would be willing to unplug from the Internet if they saw the advantage to their side was great" by launching a virus assault on a global scale. It seems an unlikely scenario, but scary none the less.

When you think of expanding waistlines, the first people you think about probably aren't the Japanese (unless, of course, you're picturing a sumo wrestler). Nevertheless, obesity is becoming a growing problem in a country known for a traditional low-fat diet of fish and rice. Last year, Japan's Health Ministry estimated that more than half of men and about 20 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 70 are at risk of metabolic syndrome, a group of symptoms associated with obesity, high cholesterol, and risk of Type 2 diabetes. 

Now a group of public health insurance officials in Osaka are trying a new way of combat in the battle of the bulge. Dieters can use their cell phones to take photos of meals they're about to eat, and then send the photos to a health expert who can then evaluate the meal for calorie count and nutrition. According to Yukata Kimura, a doctor who's worked on a similar prgoram:

''Patients used to fill out meal logs, but people tend to forget things or underestimate their portions. Photographing meals and e-mailing them in is easier and gets more accurate results.''

The only drawback is that it can take three days for the results to get back. Still, better late than never.

© CI-Cambodia/David Emmett

Phnom Penh, Cambodia – One of the world's largest and least studied freshwater turtles has been found in Cambodia's Mekong River, raising hopes that the threatened species can be saved from extinction.

Scientists from Conservation International (CI), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Cambodian Fisheries Administration, and the Cambodian Turtle Conservation Team captured and released an 11-kilogram (24.2-pound) female Cantor's giant softshell turtle (Pelochelys cantorii) during a survey in March.

Thanks to the nice people at Conservation International for allowing us to use this very cool photograph. 

DESHAKALYAN CHOWDHURY/AFP

Fishermen in the southern Indian state of Kerala used to have to throw their fish catches back into the sea whenever there was an oversupply of fish and they couldn't sell them at their local beach markets. What a waste of a scarce resource. Since 1997 though, mobile phones have made Kerala fish markets more efficient and boosted profits while lowering fish prices for consumers, as quantitatively documented in an article by Robert Jensen to appear in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this August.

With mobile phones, fishermen can now call around to several markets along the coast to see which is offering the highest price. Previously, no fishers traveled beyond their home markets to sell fish. It took a lot of time—and fuel—to go from market to market, looking for the best price, and markets are only open for a couple of hours. Over the course of Jensen's study, the percent of fishermen who sold their catches beyond their home markets jumped from zero to about 35 percent. Their profits also rose 8 percent, while fish prices dropped 4 percent. And, by the end of the study, no fish were being dumped back in the sea—down from a 5 to 8 percent waste rate at the beginning.

Phones promote economic growth, and this study proves there's nothing fishy about that.

A German research team has created software to reassemble 45 million pages of shredded documents from East Germany's communist State Security Service, the Stasi. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Stasi agents began destroying the documents into 600 million pieces. The shredding machines got overloaded, so they resorted to tearing them by hand. (Just think of all the paper cuts.)

The software works like a human putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are scanned. Next, the digital images are analyzed and grouped by color, shape, handwriting, typeface, and other characteristics. Then similar pieces are put together. The main difference? Speed. It took 24 people 12 years to reassemble 323 sacks of paper. The software is expected to finish the remaining 16,000 sacks in about five years.

If the software fails, here's a backup: Iranian carpet weavers. During the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, they reconstructed shredded documents by hand—it wasn't much of a challenge for people who could tie 400 knots per square inch.

Google Earth is fast becoming a tool of choice for looking at big problems like genocide in Darfur. The latest innovative use of the 3-D mapping software? Tracking bird flu.

Researchers led by Daniel Janies, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Ohio State University, used Google Earth to create a color-coded "evolutionary tree" of the avian flu virus (H5N1) over a 10-year time period. They published their findings in the latest issue of Systemic Biology, a bimonthly journal. By showing the data in new ways, the mapping tool could help other researchers and public health officials develop better strategies to fight the virus. (If you've seen the latest episodes of the television show Heroes, it looks somewhat like Hiro Nakamura's map of the past. But in this case, the map's colors refer to different types of hosts for the H5N1 virus.)

If you've got Google Earth, you can check out their data for yourself here. If not, check out the video tour here.

Back in January, Passport posted on a scary Defense Department report that warned of Canadian coins that had been transformed into tracking devices.  It turns out the whole things was a big misunderstanding:

An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a U.S. Defense Department false espionage warning earlier this year about mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters.

The harmless "poppy coin" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them.

The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nanotechnology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

Yes, U.S. defense officials were spooked by Canadian lucre bearing an unusual floral design. Moreover, their fears were transmitted pretty much uncritically to the rest of the defense establishment. And the whole thing could have been cleared up by turning to the nearest friend from north of the border and simply asking, "What's this coin thingy, eh?" 

Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty

A new study of the walking pace in 32 cities around the world has found that Singapore is the "fastest" city, with people taking 10.55 seconds on average to walk 60 feet. Copenhagen followed at 10.82 seconds, while Madrid came in third at 10.89 seconds. Surprisingly, New Yorkers only came in eighth with an average speed of 12 seconds across 60 feet, and London pedestrians didn't even make the top ten.

People all over the world have been walking an average of around ten percent faster than a decade ago, when the pace of city walkers was last measured, the study found. Does this mean that people are fitter and healthier on average? Definitely not, according to Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hartfordshire, which conducted the study along with the British Council. Wiseman explains:

At one level, walking quickly is good, but if it's a way of life - if you're doing it simply to get from A to B as quickly as possible - then it goes with a whole load of other behaviours which are not quite so good for you ... not eating properly, exercising or seeing friends and family. It can lead to all kinds of things, especially heart attacks."

Given that heart disease follows closely behind cancer as the leading cause of death in Singapore, is by far the leading cause of death in Denmark, and is a close second again in Spain, it may be time for walkers in those countries to start slowing down and smelling the roses.

As Carolyn noted back in February, bees are mysteriously vanishing across the United States and, more recently, in Europe. Many news outlets (and even Fidel Castro) have already weighed in on this, but scientists are still baffled about the causes of the Great Bee Die-Off of 2007, a.k.a. "Colony Collapse Disorder," as the phenomenon has come to be known. So far, 27 states have been affected (the following map shows only 25, but it's slightly dated):

I've been tracking the various theories being floated out there to explain CCD, and they are certainly interesting. To stay up to date on CCD, be sure to check in with Penn State University's Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group, which seems to be at the center of research efforts. 

So far, they've ruled out:

1. Chemical use (i.e., miticide treatments to protect bees)
2. Feeding bees (the food source varies from collapsed colony to colony)
3. Queen source (the collapsed colonies got their queens from different places)

Instead, they're concentrating their efforts on the following broad areas:

1. Chemical residue/contamination in the wax, food stores and bees
2. Known and unknown pathogens in the bees and brood
3. Parasite load in the bees and brood
4. Nutritional fitness of the adult bees
5. Level of stress in adult bees as indicated by stress induced proteins
6. Lack of genetic diversity and lineage of bees

They've chosen not to investigate—but haven't ruled out—genetically modified crops and mobile phones as potential causes, noting that "cell phone service is not available in some areas where affected commercial apiaries are located in the west."

As today's Times story notes, researchers at Columbia University have their own theory: that some kind of "bee AIDS" is devastating the honeybees' immune systems. And there's another possibility: The French government banned a pesticide named imidacloprid for causing "mad bee disease" in the 1990s. One Penn State researcher calls the chemical "the number-one suspect" among the pesticides being studied. Stay tuned. 

Back on March 27th, we highlighted the fact that shortages of processed uranium have been driving the price of nuclear fuel to near-record levels in recent months. Now, The Washington Times reports that the price of uranium has jumped another 19 percent in just the last two weeks.

It hasn't been the best week for the nuclear industry. The Washington Post reports:

More than 500 security guards at the nation's only nuclear weapons assembly plant walked off the job just after midnight yesterday to protest what they said is a steep deterioration in job and retirement security since the government changed fitness standards for weapons-plant guards in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The contractor at the plant, BWXT Pantex in Carson County, Tex., replaced the striking guards with a contingency force that it says will secure the plant's weapons, nuclear materials and explosives as long as necessary.

"Contingency force?" That's reassuring. I guess it sounds better than "second string" or "substitute."

No doubt the U.S. State Department hopes the controversial new e-passports that FP wrote about in The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006 will go down more smoothly with a spoonful of patriotism.

That may be why the design of the new travel documents features less-than-subtle U.S. imagery, with famous quotes interspersed with icons from the country's founding era like Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and even—in a move that privacy advocates will find particularly galling—a scan of the heading from the famous preamble to the Constitution on the signature page. But look at it this way: At last, ordinary U.S. citizens can imagine what it was like to be one of the founding fathers.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

STR/AFP/Getty Images

InformationWeek reported today that hourly wages of IT professionals have hit their highest levels since 2001. A study of wage levels found that the average hourly wage of IT workers rose 5.5 percent from the first quarter of 2006 to the first quarter of 2007. Technical consultants are riding highest, pulling down an average of $83.72 per hour.

So what's behind the sudden jump in wages? "There's an unprecedented customer demand and not enough people," says Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing at Yoh, the IT staffing firm that conducted the study.

But it's not only in the United States that demand for quality professionals in the IT field is beginning to outstrip supply, pushing up the price of labor. The salaries of IT workers from Central Europe to India to China have been rising—often by double-digits—every year. In India, around 1.3 million people applied to Infosys, India's IT behemoth, yet fewer than 2 percent were actually employable. The same is true for engineering, where only around one quarter of the 400,000 new engineers produced every year in India are ready to enter the real "job world." Could it be only a matter of time before outsourcing starts to look less than lucrative?

Here's a bizarre science experiment: Researchers at the U.K.'s Birmingham University are fitting 50 wild penguins with heart monitors to measure the effects of climate change on their habits:

The 'guinea pig' penguins live on the Crozet Islands, in the southern Indian Ocean, about 1,500 miles north of the Antarctic.

The monitors record each penguin's heart rate, location, the surrounding pressure and hence water depth, and the temperature at the back of its throat, telling the scientists when it has swallowed a cold fish.

The birds, famously awkward and ungainly on land, are released back into the wild to go on their usual diving expeditions and caught again a few months later when they return to land to breed.

The scientists expect to find that the flightless birds are swimming and waddling further afield to find food. They'll compare these results to data from the control group, ten penguins that were run through their paces on treadmills while their vital stats were recorded.

So, what does a penguin on a treadmill look like? Click on the video below to find out: