Microsoft To Provide Free Anti-Virus

The software giant Microsoft has been criticised in the past for failing to include free security software with Windows.

Its first security package, Windows Live OneCare, failed to attract many customers and will be discontinued.

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) promises to provide people with basic protection against viruses, trojans, rootkits and spyware.Microsoft is hoping that MSE, available as a free download from its site, will prove more popular. It has said it will automatically update it for users.

However, rival security vendors have questioned whether Microsoft can compete with more established anti-virus players.security firms like Symantec,AVG have had their fare share of criticism regarding the effectiveness of the free anti-virus provided by Microsoft.

A trial version of Microsoft's free anti-virus software has been launched in the US, China, Brazil, and Israel.Initially 75,000 trial versions of MSE, codenamed Morro, will be available in the US, Brazil, China and Israel.

The software will be rolled out in other countries later this year.

Researchers Identify "Gangsta Gene"

Scientists say that its possible to predict whether a person is a gangster or not through DNA tests.Males with a particular form of gene called MAOA are twice as likely to join a gang, compared to those with other forms, finds a new study of more than 2000 US teens. What's more, gang members with these mutations are far more likely to use a weapon than other members.

According to Kevin Beaver, a biosocial criminologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who led the study.The relatively common mutations result in reduced levels of a protein, called monoamine oxidase A, which recycles several of the chemicals that foster neuron connections. Low MAOA activity has been linked previously to antisocial behaviour in people who experienced child abuse. While two brain regions involved in perceiving and controlling emotions are shrunken in people with no history of criminality or abuse who have the mutation.

To determine whether an environment besides an abusive childhood could elicit MAOA's connection to violence, Beaver's team looked at the genotypes of 1155 females and 1041 males who participated in a long-term study of adolescent health that covered the period 1994 to 2002.

During two rounds of interviews, participants indicated whether they had been in a gang in the past year and whether they had ever used a weapon in a fight.Overall, 42 per cent of males possessed the low activity form of MAOA, and about 5 per cent of all males said they had joined a gang. However males with the low activity form were twice as likely to join a gang as those with the high activity form.

Similarly, males with the low activity form were about twice as likely to have used a weapon as other teens. While male gang members with the same mutations were four times as likely as other members to wield a weapon.

"This gene is predicting gang membership, but it's really predicting it for the very violent gang members," Beaver says.

Nonetheless, he cautions against over-interpreting his team's results. "It doesn't mean that everyone with this particular allele is going to be violent and is going to become a gang member – or vice versa," he says.

Rather, in communities where gangs are common, people with low MAOA activity could be slightly more likely to join a gang than others, Beaver says.

However, given the high prevalence of these mutations and low rates of gang membership, genetic counselling to identify youth at an increased risk of joining gangs would be unfeasible.

PhonePoint Pen LetsYou Write On Thin Air !

The phrase"writing on thin air",atleast up till now has referred to something that gets vanished quickly.Researchers at Duke University have created what they are calling a "PhonePoint Pen" that uses a modern cell phone's built-in accelerometer to detect writing in thin air, and then automatically send a note to a designated e-mail account. There are still some bugs to work out, but the researchers believe they've proven that the idea really works.

"We are convinced that this is feasible and this will become something that people will use," Romit Roy Choudhury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke.

"The existing technology wasn't all that great," he added. "And the idea struck me that maybe it's possible that I could have a pen with an accelerometer and I could just write in the air with the pen."

The accelerometer would detect the movement of the pen, and "then and I could press a button or something and the writing would get e-mailed to my mailbox. But getting a pen with an accelerometer was hard."

As an assistant professor, Roy Choudhury had a gaggle of creative students at his disposal, and he suggested they try to figure out how to use a cell phone as the magic pen he had wanted in college.

One cell phone manufacturer, Nokia, donated "a bunch" of phones, and the students found that if they held the phone like a pen, grasped between the thumb and the forefinger, they could control it's movements well enough for it to recognize letters of the alphabet.

They had to be pretty big letters, about six inches tall, and the user had to learn how to write with no frame of reference other than an imaginary blackboard, but it worked well enough to jot down a phone number, or an address, or where the car was parked at the airport.

That's progress, but it's not good enough. The researchers now say they've figured out how to make the phone recognize script, and translate that into text before sending it to a designated e-mail account.

"The phone can track what you are writing," Roy Choudhury said, and even if your penmanship isn't perfect it should be able to figure out which letter of the alphabet you are trying to write. Meanwhile, the accelerometer will track other movements as well. It should be possible to "write" yourself a note while driving your car.

"There are a lot of signals that the accelerometer captures," he added. "From all those signals, we can pluck out the part that comes from the moving vehicle, because there is a particular signature from a car's movements, and we can subtract that. "

A moving hand, for example, can change direction much more frequently and more quickly, than a vehicle. So the car can be taken out of the equation.

That may not sound too safe, but it could be a lot better than trying to text-message yourself on a keyboard that just seems to get smaller and smaller.

The device would also be able to clean up the signal while the user is walking, or doing just about anything else, he added.

The Duke researchers are also working on an idea that has intrigued many other scientists since the advent of cell phones with accelerometers. Theoretically, it should be possible for cell phones to provide real-time alerts on traffic congestion.

Prototype Game Review and Gameplay

One of the most anticipated games of 2009,'PROTOTYPE' hits PC,PS3 and XBOX 360 this week.You are Alex Mercer. What exactly that means is initially unclear because this is a man who has lost his memory, but awoken in a morgue to a world in which he possesses untold power. A viral outbreak has claimed Manhattan, forcing the island into a military quarantine. The infected citizens are undergoing radical, monstrous changes -- none more drastic than Alex himself. This anti-hero finds himself with the ability to shape shift and absorb other beings. As the most powerful being on a closed island, the entire city is your playground. And it is a game world that feels unfinished.

Prototype is a single player, open-world action game in the style of Crackdown or The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. You play as a man gifted with superhuman powers and the option to go most anywhere you like and do most anything you want once you get there. It's sandbox gaming with a heavy focus on pure action.

Though you play as a man bestowed with superhero power, Mercer is anything but heroic. There are no moral choices here. Mercer has vowed to destroy those responsible for his current situation and he has the means to do it. To gain new powers or refill your health bar, you'll literally absorb other living beings. Find yourself a little low on hit points and you can simply grab an innocent bystander, crush his or her head, and then consume them for a quick boost. If you find yourself in a pinch with attack choppers chasing you through the roads, you can absorb a person and morph into their likeness to blend in with the crowd.

As you work your way through the game you'll unlock new and ever more exotic powers. There's an air dash and a glide move that help you quickly travel from one side of Manhattan to the other. There's a massive elbow drop that can destroy a tank in one hit. There's even a whiplash arm that can be used to latch onto passing helicopters to hijack them, Just Cause style. These moves give Prototype its personality. These are what set it apart from most other sandbox games and make it worth a look. Sure there are a few guns to fire and some tanks you can drive around, but the real draw here is the fact that you can turn your arm into a giant blade and then dice monsters with it. Or, if you're a bit twisted, the draw is the fact that you can grab a person by the neck and simply run across the city with their flailing body in tow.

But how long can you do flying elbow drops onto tanks or throw people off of rooftops before it gets boring? The world itself here is far from the most engaging...
The answer to that will vary by the player, but obviously messing around with the powers isn't all there is to do in Prototype. The storyline involves 31 missions including everything from simple seek and destroy affairs to stealthy infiltrations to escort missions and massive boss battles. Most of these missions are standard in design. In fact, if you've played many open-world games, you've probably played identical copies of these in the past. And since repetition is oftentimes the name of the game here, you can be sure you'll be doing uninspired tasks over and over again.

Quite often Prototype follows the design philosophy of everything and the kitchen sink. Instead of fighting a few enemies, the game tosses dozens upon dozens at you. Then it throws in a few tanks and helicopters as well as a couple dozen innocent bystanders for good measure. It's a design that creates a lot of tension, though I found the action too chaotic at times. Even the policing system is dialed to the max and too aggressive. You can't do something as simple as run through the city while leaping off of buildings without alerting the Strike Teams, at which point you're forced into some shape shifting or combat. This can make the basic act of exploration more work than it should be. There is very little downtime to counteract the high stress of the missions.

Prototype's design leans heavily on the fact that you can refill your health by consuming victims at any time. Some attacks can drain half of your health bar or more. Others juggle you in the air leaving you open to frustrating combos from enemies. And sometimes you'll think you've dodged an attack only to get hit a few feet away anyway. But it's OK, because you can always go get more health, right? Not really. The action heavy sequences involve barely surviving to the next checkpoint or running in and out of the action ad nausea trying to stay alive. Skilled players won't have too much trouble, but Prototype's chaos could quickly become overwhelming for others. I found several points of the game to be unnecessarily aggravating to the point where I would have turned Prototype off and walked away if I weren't reviewing it.

Alongside the main quest is a set of side missions called events to tackle at your discretion. Beat them and you earn some Evolve Points (EP) used to upgrade Mercer's powers. Radical smartly hands out EP like candy. Complete just a mission or two and you'll quickly find yourself spending EP to grab new powers and abilities early and often. It's hard to stop playing when you know you'll get a new move by making it through just one more mission.

Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of variety in these events and I often found myself wishing they made better use of Mercer's vast array of powers. Those included here are dominated by things like checkpoint races and killing sprees -- things that have been done so often as side missions in games like this that they're hardly worth mentioning. It's cookie cutter game design at this point. There is one exception: A mission that tasks the player with gliding long distances towards a bulls-eye. Why aren't there more imaginative events like this? You can throw a person hundreds of yards. Why not include some sort of shot-put event? There was a real opportunity to get creative here, but instead too many of the side missions directly mirror the mindless killing or limited stealth of the main game.

More interesting than the halfhearted side events are the undirected diversions. These don't pop up on your city map and aren't missions in a traditional sense. These diversions merely exist within the world -- even while playing through one of the main missions -- for you to tackle. The concept of collectibles has been extended to what's called the Web of Intrigue. These are people that, by being hunted down and consumed, reveal splintered visions of the infection's history. They're slick and wonderfully tantalizing -- little in Prototype is more exhilarating than being in the midst of a tough mission only to see one of these targets stroll by.

There are a couple of other diversions that I found interesting, as well, including army bases that must be stealthily infiltrated to score weapon and skill upgrades. It's through these that you can even unlock the ability to call in airstrikes. I quickly had this skill maxed out -- infiltrating the bases is pretty darn fun -- only to learn that the airstrikes look rather poor. Which brings us to one of the biggest problems with Prototype.

Even while confined to a relatively small game world -- Manhattan is not recreated to scale -- Prototype manages to have visuals that range from bland to downright ugly. The only real savior is the smooth animations which do a great job towards making Mercer's powers feel real. Running up the side of a building, doing a flip over a railing, and then leaping off into a charged drop attack just feels cool.

Unfortunately, there's the rest. The blandness is seen throughout in a city recreated with few landmarks and instead filled with generic, lifeless buildings. It's seen in the drab color palette. And it's seen in a city filled with what appears to be a dozen or so identical clones all wandering the streets together. Just climb a building or get in a helicopter and look out at the skyline to get an eyeful of Prototype's ugliness. The draw distance in Prototype is atrocious. Move quickly along the building tops and trees, bushes, cars and other structures pop in and out as the game struggles to draw them. Everything else is shrouded in an ugly fog. In a game where you spend much of the time pouncing from one roof to the next, this ugliness is felt throughout.

It isn't just the streaming world that suffers in the looks department. Aside from specific infected buildings, no structural damage can be done. You can't even knock over billboards. And when you do take down the few buildings you're allowed to damage, the resulting explosion is laughably bad. All of the real chaos you can create is limited to vehicles and passing pedestrians. Your cool powers don't feel quite so cool when you can't even break a window by throwing a tank at it.

These technical issues are so severe that they do in fact impact the game's ebb and flow. There are 250 orbs scattered throughout Manhattan for you to collect. Unfortunately, you oftentimes can't see them until you are literally on top of them. The game engine fails to draw them at any meaningful distance. You can be across a street and not know that you're within 20 yards of one of these orbs. Without any other ways to find them -- there are no maps or sound indicators -- tracking down all of the orbs is less fun than it is chore.

It seems Prototype's developers didn't know when to say when. Tons of enemies are tossed into the mix, and so the visuals suffer and the gameplay occasionally becomes too chaotic and unfocused. Some cutscenes feel out of place and pointless while others are well done. Nobody ever put the finishing touches on Prototype to tidy it up and make it fully presentable.

A case in point is the power set. There are a ton of upgrades to nab in Prototype and improving your character is some of the most rewarding gameplay offered here. There are so many powers, in fact, that cramming them all on a controller proved difficult. The most disappointing moment I had while playing Prototype came when I finally earned enough EP to unlock the Cannonball move. I don't think I need to point out how cool that sounds. And then I looked up how to do a cannonball: Hold the X Button and then hit B at the same time while in the air. X and B, two buttons that require you to tie your fingers in a pretzel to hit at the same time. That's just awful design.

Now lets take a look at the story background trailer and some gameplay movies

opening Cinematic Teaser

Video Games | Prototype | Opening Cinematic Teaser

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Story Background

Top 10 reasons why Prototype must me given a try

Video Games | Prototype | Top 10 Reasons Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Variety mission walkthrough

Video Games | Prototype | Mission Variety Walkthrough

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Top 7 Ways In Which Gadgets Can Hurt You

Recently, doctors are noticing an uptick in more ignoble injuries, such as the "cell phone elbow."

Instead of the usual carpal tunnel syndrome from typing, Dr. Peter Evans of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio began to see more of his patients coming in with an unexplained stinging, burning and tingly feeling in their hands.

"When the elbow is flexed greater than 90 degrees you're now stretching the nerve around your elbow," explained Evans, who authored a "one-minute" consultation about cell phone elbow in this week's Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine.

Evans said the longer the nerve is stretched, the greater the risk of cutting off blood flow to the nerve.The cell phone elbow sufferers are not alone. In the past two years, doctors have reported an array of rashes, nerve damage, phantom pain and inconvenient injuries that all seem to stem from our sit-and-click lifestyle.

Cell Phone Elbow

Formally called "cubital tunnel syndrome," cell phone elbow has much more in common with carpal tunnel syndrome than tennis elbow.

When a person continually stretches the nerve around the elbow, that particular nerve, the "ulnar nerve," can stop functioningproperly.

"The analogy I give is putting your foot on the garden hose," said Evans. "It's the nerve when people say, 'I've hit my funny bone.'"

Source Behind Cell Phone Elbow Pain

The ulnar nerve controls feeling from the elbow into the ring and pinky fingers. But Evans said it also controls tiny muscles in the hand that work to grip objects. That's why people with cell phone elbow can have sensory symptoms or muscle control problems.

Usually, Evans' patients can reverse the symptoms simply by switching hands, cutting back on cell phone use, or using a hands-free device. In more seriouscases, patients can wear a brace to bed to keep their arm extended and increase the blood flow in their elbows while they sleep.But in some cases, the damage from cell phone elbow can be permanent.

"That's if they come when there's advanced neuropathy -- where the muscles have atrophied," said Evans.Unfortunately, Evans said people with cell phone elbow come in with greater damage than the usual carpal tunnel syndrome."We can usually improve numbness and pain, but when they come late we can't get their muscle control back," he said.Compared to other technology-induced injuries, like Xbox thumb, Evans said cell phone elbow is, by far, more prevalent.

Video Game Muscle Spasms

Although both sit in front of a screen, a video gamer's pose differs widely from a couch potato TV-watcher's body. A gamer sits forward, tense, eyes glued to th e screen -- often for hours. As many early gamers reach middle age, doctors warn the muscletensing habit can lead to injuries.

A child or teenager might walk away from hours of game playing with nothing more than a sore neck or back. But it's likely harder for an adult to do the same.

According to theEntertainment Software Association, the average video game player is 35 and has been playing for 12 years. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that adults average four to five hours each day spent on the computer or in front of the television.

Muscles, held in one position for a sustained period of time, can cause painful inflammation and sore areas. Trigger points -- tiny areas where the muscle spasms -- can occur, too.

Cell Phone Allergy

Putting the phone down after a long conversation has always left the check a bit warm, if not sweaty. But once people began to switch to cell phones, dermatologists noticed a curious skin condition in which people appeared to be allergic to their phones, or, more specifically, the nickel in their cell phones.

"Some people are extremely nickel-sensitive," Dr. Lionel Bercovitch, a professor of dermatology at Brown Medical School.

Nickel is used in a wide variety of products, including jewelry, belt buckles and watch bands. The metal is actually the most common cause of contact dermatitis in the developed world.

People with a nickel allergy have symptoms that can range from redness to a rash or blisters.Luckily, not all cell phones contain nickel.In an attempt to get an idea of how many phones might have the metal, Bercovitch tested 22 models of cell phones to see which makes are likely to contain the metal.Roughly half -- a total of 10 devices -- tested positive for the metal, according to her 2008 findings published the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Bercovitch found nickel in menu buttons, on decorative logos, around the edge of the screen and even on the handset if the paint was chipped.

Wii Injuries

Wiiwas supposed to be a breath of fitness fresh air to counter the typical inactivity of playing video games. Butas inexperienced and older players started to use the Wii, some exercise troubles ensued.

Wrist strains,Hamstring injuries,Knee pains are some of the injuries reported by WII users.

Phantom Mobile Phone Vibrations

Apparently a so-called "crackberry" addiction to mobile phone and e-mail devices can cause some symptoms in the form of "phantom" vibrations.

Many people who kept their phones in their pockets or purses have reported feeling vibrations when their phones are on silent, or even when their phones are not there.

When you take it off, you still feel it there on your foot. Ifyour cell phone is not there, you still feel like it is."

Barr said our reliance on our cell phones actually may be "training" some of us to believe it is vibrating when it is not.

Think of Pavlov's dog: Ring a bell enough times when you feed a dog and the dog will salivate at the ring of the bell whether or not there's food to smell.

As people repeat this behavior over and over again, connections between nerves in their brain become stronger and new ones are formed, which helps to make the behavior automatic.And sometimes, as is thecase with vibrating cell phones, the behavior becomes too automatic.

"People have gotten so good at detecting vibrations that they start responding to false positives," Kaas said. "They think something is there when it is not."

Texting Thumb

Those people with their eyes downward, wildly tapping on their mobile devices at meetings, may be putting themselves, and their thumbs, at risk.

The sores and blisters that some experience from too much texting and typing have earned monikers such as "BlackBerry thumb."

But teens might be at risk too.

According to a 2008 Nielsen Media Research report, U.S. teens sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month, or nearly 80 a day.

"They are really repetitive stress injuries -- pain, numbness, discomfort in the base of the thumbs from overuse," Margot Miller, a physical therapist and president of the Occupational Health Section of the Orthopedic Section of the American Physical Therapy Association.

These sorts of injuries, known as repetitive strain injuries or as repetitive motion disorders, are sometimes minor. But they can also lead to serious medical problems.

Guitar Hero Wrist

It didn't take long after the 2005 release of "Guitar Hero" for fans to start injuring themselves with the video game that simulates guitar playing for pop music groups.

The game has proliferated into handheld devices, mobile phones and the like, but people who play too long on the original "Guitar Hero" fake guitar might risk tendonitis of the wrist.

Anonymous Internet forum questionsabound about annoying wrist pain caused by the game. But the "Guitar Hero wrist" became famous after a Detroit Free Press report that Detroit Tigers pitcher Joel Zumaya suffered from the injury.

The injury couldn't have struck at a worse time -- during the American League Championship Series in October 2006.

According to the Detroit Free Press, team doctors became suspicious when Zumaya's sore wrist showed symptoms more similar to a guitar strain than a pitching injury. Upon the discovery of the pain, the team asked him to give up the game for the World Series.