Just think how eerie it would be, yet also how peaceful - people all around having conversations on their mobile phones, but without uttering a sound.

Thanks to some military research, this social nirvana just might come true. DARPA, the US Department of Defense's research agency, is working on a project known as Advanced Speech Encoding, aimed at replacing microphones with non-acoustic sensors that detect speech via the speaker's nerve and muscle activity, rather than sound itself.

One system, being developed for DARPA by Rick Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, relies on a sensor worn around the neck called a tuned electromagnetic resonator collar (TERC). Using sensing techniques developed for magnetic resonance imaging, the collar detects changes in capacitance caused by movement of the vocal cords, and is designed to allow speech to be heard above loud background noise.

When comparing wireless transmission range, longer is almost always better. Yet the developers of a new technology called Near Field Communications, or NFC, boast not about how long a distance it works over, but how short.

With a range of just 10 centimeters, NFC can get by with a very small, low-cost radio transmitter that draws only a pittance of power. Its very feebleness of transmission helps to ensure security. Forget about a hacker snooping on your Wi-Fi session from a laptop outside the building—with NFC, even a colleague sitting next to you at a meeting may be too far away to sniff the signal. Yet if you do want to swap data and move your NFC device next to hers, the connection is immediate. What's more, you can take the same device down the hall and use it to buy a soda from a vending machine. These attributes were enough to convince Nokia, and as of August 30, Samsung, to announce that their next-generation cell phones will come equipped with NFC chips. Nokia's NFC-enabled handsets are promised by the end of the year.

A joint research project of Fujitsu Ltd. and The University of Tokyo has made progress towards realizing a viable quantum cryptography system. Such a system allows parties to share encryption keys via telecommunication networks with full confidence that they have not been compromised en route.

The team has succeeded in generating and detecting a single photon at wavelengths useful for telecommunications, said Yasuhiko Arakawa, director of the Nanoelectronics Collaborative Research Center at The University of Tokyo and leader of the research project, in an interview on Tuesday.

Internet download speeds could be improved dramatically by mimicking Darwin's evolution to "breed" the best networking strategies, say computer scientists.

Transferring popular data across the internet repeatedly can be inefficient and costly, so networking companies have developed ways of temporarily storing, or "caching", data at different locations to reduce costs and increase download speeds.

But figuring out where to store data and for how long is a complex problem. One solution might be to have caches "talk" to each other repeatedly, but this is inefficient as it takes up a lot of bandwidth.

To tackle the challenge, Pablo Funes of US company Icosystem and Jürgen Branke and Frederik Theil of the University of Karlsruhe in Germany used "genetic algorithms", which mimic Darwinian evolution, to develop strategies for internet servers to use when caching data. Using a simulation they were able to improve download speeds over existing caching schemes.

hen everything is working right, an e-mail message appears to zip instantaneously from the sender to the recipient's inbox. But in reality, most messages make several momentary stops as they are processed by various computers en route to their destination.

Those short stops may make no difference to the users, but they make an enormous difference to the privacy that e-mail is accorded under federal law.

Last week a federal appeals court in Boston ruled that federal wiretap laws do not apply to e-mail messages if they are stored, even for a millisecond, on the computers of the Internet providers that process them - meaning that it can be legal for the government or others to read such messages without a court order.

A four-year skunk works effort at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston has cut the size of an antenna by as much as one-third for any frequency from the kHz to the GHz range. Using conventional components, the four-part antenna design cancels out normal inductive loading, thereby linearizing the energy radiation along its mast and enabling the smaller size.

NTT DoCoMo Inc revealed at the International Conference on Beyond 3G Mobile Communications-2004 (ICB3G-2004) the detailed test results of its 4G field experiment now being conducted at Yokosuka, Kanagawa prefecture.

The ICB3G is an international conference on fourth-generation (4G) mobile communication systems. It was held on May 26 and 27, in Tokyo.

The company said that the test achieved a maximum downstream data rate of 300Mbps with an average rate of 135Mbps in a car running at the speed of 30 kilometers per hour in areas 800m to 1km away from the 4G wireless base stations.

Privacy advocates fear consumers will face a flood of unwanted calls and junk e-mail.

After years of anonymity, the numbers of most of the nation's mobile phones will be compiled later this year in the first wireless directory.

The database being assembled by the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Assn. is expected to include about 75% of the 163 million mobile phones in the United States, making looking up a wireless number as easy as dialing 411.

The association is pitching the directory as a boon for real estate agents and other on-the-go professionals who want people to be able to find their mobile numbers.

But privacy advocates, some members of Congress and even a major cellular carrier — Verizon Wireless — fear that mobile phones, once immune to telemarketers and e-mail spammers, could become as vulnerable as home telephone lines and computer in-boxes.

Pointing to the obvious, In-Stat/MDR releases research stating Bluetooth products are poised to go mainstream - with headsets and Personal Mobile Gateways at the forefront.

Although Bluetooth-enabled devices haven't quite entered the true mainstream yet, they are poised to take that next step, finds the latest research by In-Stat/MDR. With mobile phones, PDAs, and headsets making significant strides over the last year, the automotive market beginning to make an impact, and PMG (Personal Mobile Gateway) products expected to emerge, shipments of Bluetooth-enabled manufactured equipment are expected to increase steeply.

Many wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) are anxious to deploy WiMAX metropolitan area network equipment, but most believe it will be 2006 before they can offer the wireless broadband service to their users, a just-released survey indicates. In the survey by ABI research, more than half of those who responded said they plan to deploy WiMAX wireless broadband service. However, only about a quarter believed they could deploy WiMAX equipment within the next two years. By contrast, half said they expected WiMAX to be available to customers in 2006, according to the researchers.

Speaking without using vocal cords, knowing which direction a telephone call comes from, or even communicating with the five senses are some of the dreams of Japanese researchers for the mobile phones of the future.

Nokia Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) and Sony Corporation establish the Near Field Communication (NFC) Forum to enable the use of touch-based interactions in consumer electronics, mobile devices, PCs, smart objects and for payment purposes. Touch-based interactions will allow users to access content and services in an intuitive way by touching smart objects and connecting devices just by holding them next to each other. The new forum will promote implementation and standardization of NFC technology to ensure interoperability between devices and services.

President Bush has set a goal of broadband access for all Americans in three years to boost competitiveness with other nations and create new business opportunities at home.

"We ought to have a universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to purchasing the broadband carrier," Bush said during a recent campaign swing through the Southwest.

Motorola Inc. will bring a revised ultrawideband (UWB) proposal to a meeting of the IEEE 802.15.3a task group in Orlando, Fla., this week, along with what it says is proof that the new scheme offers a tenfold efficiency improvement — at very short ranges — over a competing technology vying for the nod as the IEEE UWB standard.

The altered proposal reflects Motorola's be-lief that the application sweet spot for UWB is no longer full-room networked video distribution over distances of up to 10 meters, but wireless links for handheld devices and peer-to-peer cable replacement applications within a range of about 3 meters.

More than two-thirds of American adults were users of the Internet in 2003, according to a poll published by market research company Harris Interactive.

The figure of 69 percent of those polled represents around 146 million people.

Internet use among adults is growing constantly, Harris Interactive said, noting that the figure had risen from 67 percent in 2002, 64 percent in 2001, and 56 percent in 1999.