July 2010
68 posts
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Computers: Will They Ever Learn? →
Ask most computer programmers what would happen if, suddenly, their computers got a thousand times faster. Most would rhapsodize about being able to immediately put that extra power to good use.
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Unraveling the Matrix →
A new way of analyzing grids of numbers known as matrices could improve signal-processing applications and data-compression schemes.
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We humans can mind-meld too →
There’s now scientific backing for the old adage that when two people “click” in conversation, they have a meeting of minds. The evidence comes from fMRI scans of 11 people’s brains as they listened to a woman recounting a story.
The scans showed that the listeners’ brain patterns tracked those of the storyteller almost exactly, though trailed 1 to 3 seconds behind....
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Multifunctional nanoparticle enables new type of... →
Spotting a single cancerous cell that has broken free from a tumor and is traveling through the bloodstream to colonize a new organ might seem like finding a needle in a haystack. But a new imaging technique from the University of Washington is a first step toward making this possible.
UW researchers have developed a multifunctional nanoparticle that eliminates the background noise, enabling a...
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Space Station Robot Gets To Work →
Two years after arriving at the International Space Station, the Canadian-built Dextre robot is ready to get to work.
The robotic handyman, which is attached to the station’s exterior crane, was designed to tackle some simple maintenance chores to cut down on time-consuming and risky spacewalks by station crewmembers.
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Life in a Virtual World →
If you could live in a world that was just the way you wanted it to be, with specifications you’d chosen, customized and personalized to meet your every need and fulfill your fondest desires, would you spend all your time there? Or would you prefer to stay here, in the real world?
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Neurons to inspire future computers →
Researchers are developing novel computers by mimicking the way that neurons are built and how they talk to each other.
Basing computers around neurons could lead to improvements in visual and audio processing on computers.
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Consumer gene test results misleading →
People who send off their saliva to genetic testing companies to find out their risk for prostate cancer or diabetes are likely to get different results, depending on the company they choose, government investigators told lawmakers on Thursday.
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Computer Chip Implant to Program Brain Activity,... →
An international team of researchers led by Dr. Matti Mintz at the University of Tel Aviv is working on a biomimetic computer chip for brain stimulation that is programmable, responsive to neural activity, and capable of bridging broken connections in the brain. Called the Rehabilitation Nano Chip, or ReNaChip, the device could be used to replace diseased or damaged brain tissue, restore brain...
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Augmented Reality Tattoo →
Iam a moderately tattooed guy that feels the start of a fanatic interest to get more tattoos. I can honestly say that I have a million ideas for tattoos that I want to get sometime in the future. I am one of those that always draws my own tattoos just to feel that uniqueness about them. I really think it feels weird when someone shows a tattoo and it’s exactly the same one as someone else showed...
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Makerbot 3D Printer Replicates Itself (Kind of) →
Makerbot’s 3D printer is starting to clone itself. Earlier this summer, Christian Arno (aka Webca) used the CupCake CNC to print out the frame for…another CupCake CNC. Usually made of wood, Webca’s printer frame was built entirely of the plastic that the CupCake CNC uses for printing, held together by copious amounts of hot glue. It took Webca a month of solid printing to create the parts. Judging...
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8,000-mile 'driver-less' test drive underway →
It’s a modern-day version of Marco Polo’s journey halfway around the world — but is anyone at the controls?
A team of Italian engineers on Tuesday launched what has been billed as the longest-ever test drive of driverless vehicles: an 8,000-mile, three-month road trip from Italy to China, not in search of silk, but to test the limits of future automotive technology.
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iPhone 4 Gyroscope Brings Silky Smooth Augmented... →
When the iPhone 4 was unveiled in early June of this year, many were surprised by things like the antennae design or the high resolution “Retina Display.” Augmented reality fans, however, were excited to see the inclusion of a gyroscope, but until today no iPhone AR apps had included the technology. Acrossair, makers of a popular iPhone AR browser of the same name, are the first to add...
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Undersea robots are heroes of Gulf of Mexico oil... →
Capable of going where no man can go, powerful enough to lift 1,000 pounds and able to apparently stop a gushing oil well, a colony of undersea robots has emerged as unsung superheroes in the months-long effort to halt the geyser of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.
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Quantum Time Machine Solves Grandfather Paradox →
Of all the weird consequences of quantum mechanics, one of the strangest is the notion of postselection: the ability to trigger a computation that automatically disregards certain results.
Here’s an example: suppose you have a long, tortuous expression in which there are a frighteningly large number of variables. The question you want answering is which combination of variables makes the...
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Mark Cuban Dreams Of Minority Report. So Do I. But... →
“Location Check in is so 2010,” Mark Cuban writes todayon his blog. His thought is that facial recognition hardware/software installed in public venues is going to replace the need for users to actually check-in to a place.
I absolutely agree. But I think we’re ten years away from that happening. And maybe more.
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Paralyzed man walks again with bionic legs →
It may only permit users to take baby steps, but a newly developed set of bionic legs represents a giant step forward in treatment for paralytics.
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$31 million biotech center to benefit crops, food,... →
Crop and food industries will benefit from a new $31 million biotechnology Center of Excellence to be headquartered at the University of Adelaide’s Waite Campus. The University has today been awarded $19.25 million in federal funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), with an additional $12 million of support from partner institutions. The University’s new ARC Center of...
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The Race to Build the Pocket Personal Assistant →
Smart phones promise a lot of computing power and connectivity: We can search the Web and communicate from anywhere. But it can be hard to make full use of all these capabilities on small screens with tiny buttons. Now comes a new wave of applications that combine speech recognition and artificial intelligence to help people carry out simple tasks on their mobile devices.
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Graphene tackles arsenic →
A composite made from reduced graphene oxide and magnetite could effectively remove arsenic from drinking water according to new work by researchers in Korea. Arsenic in drinking water is a huge problem in many areas of South Asia and the western US.
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Computer Simulation Cracks Chicken-Egg Puzzle →
Scientists knew that a specific protein played a roll in eggshell formation.
A simulation shows how that protein acts as a catalyst to prompt eggshell growth.
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A Way to Play Brain-Controlled Games on Airplanes →
Slowly but surely technology is seeping into airplanes, which up until a couple of years ago felt like a final reprieve from the digital world. You can use your cell phone at certain times before take off and after landing, you can watch DVDs on your laptop and you can surf the Internet using in-flight Wi-Fi.
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The Philip K Dick Android Project →
Philip K Dick was brought back to life as a fully autonomous conversational android.
A team of roboticists, computer scientists, designers, and science fiction fans built a “robotic portrait” of the sci-fi author. The project was a collaboration between Hanson Robotics, the University of Memphis, and the Automation and Robotics Research Institute (ARRI) at the University of Texas,...
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Artificial lung breathes in rats →
U.S. researchers have created a primitive artificial lung that rats used to breathe for several hours and said on Tuesday it may be a step in the development of new organs grown from a patient’s own cells.
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Interview With a Robot →
NYT reporter sits down with Bina48 about what it is like to be a robot.
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Fashion Made from Bacteria →
“…textiles grown from bacterial cellulose. Pictured above is a vest and “denim” jacket.”
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Robots Could Be Teachers' Aids →
According to the New York Times, robots will soon be a highly useful and easily available tool for young students, in addition to teachers. The robots that are being used in these educational settings are designed to be social creatures; they respond to a human moving and even talking to it, as if it’s a real person.
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Fibers that can hear and sing →
The Fink lab has demonstrated that it can manufacture acoustic fibers with flat surfaces, like those shown here, as well as fibers with circular cross sections. The flat fibers could prove particularly useful in acoustic imaging devices.
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Should technology get a penalty flag? →
New technology in sporting contests like the World Cup should be used sparingly to increase the fairness of decisions, according to a new study.
Some sports decision aids can be less accurate than they appear, leading to false transparency, says Harry Collins, professor in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.
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Can Robots Run the News? →
To the chagrin of sports reporters everywhere, a team from Northwestern University’s engineering and journalism schools has created a program that automatically generates sports news stories. Stats Monkey uses the box score and play-by-play — even quotes, if they’re available online — to compile articles that follow one of the system’s pre-defined narrative arcs.
Biological Microchip Mimics a Real Lung – It Even... →
Who says biology, engineering, and medicine are different fields? Researchers led by Dr. Donald Ingber at Harvard’s Wyss Institute reported in Science that they have engineered a coin-sized microchip that can be loaded with wet biological cells, mimicking the workings of an actual lung. The bioinspired chip can be used to model drug action, determine the effects of environmental toxins, and could...
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A chemical to make brain cells grow: Mental... →
Scientists have discovered a compound that restores the capacity to form new memories in aging rats, likely by improving the survival of newborn neurons in the brain’s memory hub. The research, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, has turned up clues to a neuroprotective mechanism that could lead to a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
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China to Launch National Internet of Things Plan →
Xi Guohua, China’s vice-minister of industry and information technology, has announced that the MIIT is working toward a national IoT plan. The announcement was made at the recent China IoT Conference in Shanghai.
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Watch
Let me settle you down a little after the headline above. We’re only talking about the ability to have remote control over the behavior of worms here, and merely getting them to recoil at that.
But it is true that researchers at the University of Buffalo have managed to attach nanoparticles to the cell membranes of worms and then heat those nanoparticles up by exposing them to a magnetic field....
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Scientists Find Antibodies that Prevent Most HIV... →
Two potent human antibodies that can stop more than 90 percent of known global HIV strains from infecting human cells in the laboratory have been discovered by scientists lead by a team from the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center.
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Researchers use nanoparticles to shrink tumors in... →
The application of nanotechnology in the field of drug delivery has attracted much attention in recent years. In cancer research, nanotechnology holds great promise for the development of targeted, localized delivery of anticancer drugs, in which only cancer cells are affected.
Such targeted-therapy methods would represent a major advance over current chemotherapy, in which anticancer drugs are...
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Scientists use computer algorithms to develop... →
Defeating the flu is challenging because the virus responsible for the disease undergoes frequent changes of its genetic code, making it difficult for scientists to manufacture effective vaccines for the seasonal flu in a timely manner. Now, a University of Miami (UM) computer scientist, Dimitris Papamichail, and a team of researchers from Stony Brook University have developed a rapid and...
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In Defense of Difference →
Scientists offer new insight into what to protect of the world’s rapidly vanishing languages, cultures, and species.
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Nano Letters publishes Dr. Yong Shi's energy... →
Dr. Shi’s work focuses on miniature energy harvesting technologies that could potentially power wireless electronics, portable devices, stretchable electronics, and implantable biosensors. The concept involves piezoelectric nanowire- and nanofiber-based generators that would power such devices through a conversion of mechanical energy into electrical energy. Dr. Shi uses a piezoelectric...
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WatchThe OpenPCR project was featured on local SF ABC news.
We want to make an OpenPCR machine capable of copying DNA. We plan to make open source designs and kits so anyone can do PCR at their desktop, garage, hackerspace, or community lab for $400 or less.
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U.S. Program to Detect Cyber Attacks on... →
The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.
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Genome signatures enable tracking of algal... →
On the long and difficult road toward a carbon-neutral source of transportation fuels, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is pursuing a diversified approach. This effort involves exploring a range of potential new fuel sources in nature: from plants that may serve as cellulosic feedstocks—fast-growing trees and perennial grasses on land—to oil-producing organisms in aquatic and other...
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Cat amputee fitted with 'bionic' feet →
If cats have nine lives, they may have just acquired a 10th — thanks to a groundbreaking surgery that saved the life of a feline double amputee.
A British cat, Oscar, has made a full recovery after being fitted with a pair of prosthetic feet in November. The cat’s hind paws were severed by a combine harvester.
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Implantable Eye Telescope That Treats AMD Finally... →
A telescopic implant that fits directly into the eye to treat certain kinds of blindness has finally received FDA approval for use in the US after more than five years of waiting. The Implantable Miniature Telescope (IMT) is used to treat age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a condition that affects millions around the world. For many, the center part of their vision becomes blurred or...
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Novel ion trap with optical fiber could link atoms... →
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated an ion trap with a built-in optical fiber that collects light emitted by single ions (electrically charged atoms), allowing quantum information stored in the ions to be measured. The advance could simplify quantum computer design and serve as a step toward swapping information between matter and light in...
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Vibrating car seats give early accident warning →
A new vibrating car seat could prevent accidents by using the sense of touch to alert drivers to cars in the car’s blind spot, and other hard-to-see spots around the rear of the vehicle.
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Quantum dots detect rare cancer cells →
Scientists have demonstrated that quantum dots—tunable fluorescent nanoparticles—make ideal tools for distinguishing and identifying rare cancer cells in tissue biopsies.
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Smart Tech Halts Heat Wave Blackouts →
It’s so hot, scrolling through the list of National Weather Service heat advisory areas will give you a hand cramp. The heat wave smothering the East Coast is straining sanity and the electric grid. While waiting for smarter grid systems, this is the perfect time to help avoid blackouts with your own smart tech.
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Mental decline thwarted in aging rats →
Scientists have discovered a compound that restores the capacity to form new memories in aging rats, likely by improving the survival of newborn neurons in the brain’s memory hub. The research, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, has turned up clues to a neuroprotective mechanism that could lead to a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
