Luckily it set off the alarm system and animal control was able to capture it, but it could have been dangerous because it likely would have attacked my mother if she had unknowingly gone downstairs during its rampage.

FORBES: A Lesson In Keeping An Elderly Parent Safe In Their Own Home

Applying an electric current and getting a muscle to jump is easy. (Alessandro Volta jolted a frog's legs 218 years ago.) Peckham is harvesting the body's own electrical signals to control muscles that have been cut off from the nervous system, a process called functional electrical stimulation, or FES. Peckham runs a group called the Cleveland FES Center, a collaboration among Case Western Reserve and two Cleveland hospitals.

FORBES: Technology

Say just one car's stability-control system is activated at an unusually slow speed on a highway off-ramp.

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From the government's point of view, a new system would mean that they could sell off spectrum currently used by air traffic control.

BBC: UK mulls 'radical' shake-up of air traffic control

Experts said that once in the system, a hacker could gain control of thousands, even millions, of meters and shut them off simultaneously.

CNN: 'Smart Grid' may be vulnerable to hackers

In the SDN approach, those control functions are split off to be managed by one central program, which may be run on an inexpensive server system.

WSJ: An Upgrade Race for Data Centers