Advances in robotics could revolutionize healthcare, pushing the limits of what surgeons can achieve, from worm-inspired capsules to crawl through your gut, and systems swallowed in pieces that assemble themselves inside the body, to surgical robots that will soon be ready to embark on a fantastic voyage through our bodies, homing in on the part that's ailing and fixing it from the inside.
Swimming camera capsule (The Royal College of Surgeons / Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna)
IBM scientists have created a fast, one-step point-of-care-diagnostic test, based on a siliconchip that uses capillary forces to analyze tiny samples of blood serum for the presence of disease markers.
It requires less sample volume, is significantly faster, portable, easy to use, and can test for many diseases, including cardiovascular disease -- a small sample of a patient's serum could be tested immediately following a heart attack to enable the doctor to quickly take a course of action to help the patient survive.
Sergei Mayburov at the Lebedev Institute of Physics in Moscow suggests that optical communication is a natural process in many cells of body, closely related to photosynthesis.
North Carolina State University researchers have identified a gene, FoxJ1, that tells embryonic stem cells in the brain when to stop producing neurons.
The research could lead to new treatments to replace damaged or diseased brain tissue.
HP Labs has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE): a R&D program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of tiny accelerometers that detect motion and vibrations, and later, ones for light, temperature, barometric pressure, airflow and humidity.
The nodes could be stuck to bridges and buildings to warn of structural strains or weather conditions and along roadsides to monitor traffic, weather and road conditions. Other uses include in everyday electronics, tracking hospital equipment, sniffing out pesticides and pathogens in food, and ultimately even "recognize" the person using them and adapt.
HP Labs' ultimate aim is to have a worldwide network of a trillion of these CeNSE sensors.
In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site.
The technology will also open YouTube videos to a wider foreign market and make them more searchable, giving users the choice of using its automatic translation system to read the captions in 51 languages.
Playing sound cues associated with a picture in a specific location while people slept helped them remember more of what they had learned before they fell sleep, to the point where memories of individual facts were enhanced, scientists at Northwestern University report in the journal Science.
By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers, who are close to gaining the ability to build brain sensing technology into a headset that culd be used to manipulate a computer, working with associates at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.
Their next step is development of a tiny, far less cumbersome sensor that could be implanted inside the brain.
Finding old versions of web pages could become far simpler thanks to Memento, a "time-travelling" web browsing technology being pioneered at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Andrew S. Grove, the 73-year-old former chief executive of Intel, is advocating a new master's degree program in translational medicine (the art of taking laboratory, one-off discoveries and putting them into mass production -- in higher volume and at lower cost than previous treatments).
The degree would combine the talents mainly of engineering and medical schools, with some business know-how tossed in.
Blindness causes structural changes in the brain, indicating that the brain may reorganize itself functionally in order to adapt to a loss in sensory input, say UCLA Department of Neurology scientists.
For long-term blind subjects, they found significant enlargement in areas of the brain not responsible for vision, such as working memory and improved ability to feel subtle changes in temperature and distinguish between the auditory echoes caused by walls and windows.
Solar cells made from cheap nanocrystal-based inks have the potential to be as efficient as the conventional inorganic cells currently used in solar panels, but can be printed less expensively, says Solexant, which expects to sell modules for $1 per watt, with efficiencies above 10 percent.
The real power of natural language processing can only be unlocked by acknowledging its limitations and filling in the gaps with humanintelligence, says Damon Horowitz, chief technology officer and cofounder of Aardvark.
"We wanted to let another human being answer and have the machine do the heavy lifting of indexing everybody--the tens of thousands of people who are in your extended network and all of the things that those people know," he said.
Tiny insects could be as intelligent as much bigger animals, despite only having a brain the size of a pinhead, say scientists at Queen Mary, University of London.
Research repeatedly shows how insects are capable of some intelligent behaviors scientists previously thought was unique to larger animals.
This must mean that much "advanced" thinking can actually be done with very limited neuron numbers. Computer modelling shows that even consciousness can be generated with very small neural circuits, which could in theory easily fit into an insectbrain.
In fact, the models suggest that counting could be achieved with only a few hundred nerve cells and only a few thousand could be enough to generate consciousness. Engineers hope that this kind of research will lead to smarter computing with the ability to recognize human facial expressions and emotions.
Stephen Wolfram wants Wolfram Alpha to generate knowledge of its own.
Alpha has been exposed to more utterances than a typical child would hear in learning a new language, allowing it to get smarter at understanding how people phrase their requests, he says.
"You'll be able to ask it a question, and instead of it using knowledge that came out of a method invented 50 years ago it will invent a new method on the fly to answer it."
The device produces magnetic multiple fields above its surface. By detecting disturbances to these fields, the system can track the movement of a metal object across its surface, or the manipulation of a ferrous fluid-filled bladder to sculpt 3D virtual objects.
Results of massively parallel cortical simulations of a cat cortex, with 1.5 billion neurons and 9 trillion synapses, running on Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer, will be presented by IBM and LLNL researchers today at the SC09 Conference on High Performance Networking and Computing in Portland.
"The simulations, which incorporate phenomenological spiking neurons, individuallearningsynapses, axonal delays, and dynamic synaptic channels, exceed the scale of the cat cortex, marking the dawn of a new era in the scale of cortical simulations," according to the ACM proceedings abstract.
BlueMatter, a new algorithm created in collaboration with Stanford University, exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the humanbrain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communicationnetwork and understanding how it represents and processes information. (IBMResearch)
Betavoltaics, batteries that harvest energy from the nuclear decay of isotopes to produce very low levels of current and last for decades without needing to be replaced, are being developed by Widetronix.
The U.S. Department of Energy has begun holding workshops on building a system that's 1,000 times more powerful than today's top supercomputer (Jaquar's 2.3 petaflops): an exascale (10^18 calculations per second) system, which would likely arrive around the year 2018.
Exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design.
The Energy Department, which is responsible for funding many of the world's largest systems, wants two machines somewhere in the 2011-13 timeframe that will reach approximately 10 petaflops.
Building an exascale supercomputer that can deliver a billion billion (10^18) calculations per second is going to force designers to change the way they think about putting these supercomputers together.
Graphics processors (GPUs) are the first step in that process, although more esoteric technologies may emerge.
YouTube has signed up NPR, Politico, The Huffington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle for YouTube Direct, a new method for managing video submissions from citizen journalists.
The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its Word Of The Year for 2009: unfriend (v. To remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook).
Up to 1000 galaxy clusters have found to be streaming at up to 1000 kilometers per second towards one particular part of the cosmos, a possible sign that other universes are out there.
Google and a coalition of authors and publishers are hoping a second draft of a legal settlement will clear the way through a thicket of copyright laws to let Google build the library of the future.
Over the last week, Singularity University has been holding an Executive Program with the goal of preparing executives for the "imminent disruption and opportunities resulting from exponentially accelerating technologies."
European researchers in the MESH project have created the first integrated semantic searchplatform that integrates text, video and audio.
The platform can search annotated files from any type of media -- photographs, videos, sound recordings, text, document scans -- using optical character recognition, automated speech recognition and automatic annotation of movies and photographs that track salientconcepts.
Georgia Tech scientists have developed microscopic polymer beads that can deliver an antioxidant enzyme made naturally by the body into the heart, reducing the number of dying cells and resulting in improved heart function in rats.
The enzyme in the particles, called superoxide dismutase (SOD), soaks up toxic free radicals produced when cells are deprived of blood during a heart attack.
The action figures in toy stores for James Cameron's forthcoming Avatar film add an an "augmented reality" feature to toys, the first to add artificial reality to a product.
