The line that separates my mind from the Internet is getting blurry, Harvard professor of psychology Daniel M. Wegner writes in the New York Times Sunday Review.
“This has been happening ever since I realized how often it feels as though I know something just because I can find it with Google. Technically, of course, I don’t know it. But when there’s a smartphone or… read more
The gravitational tug of Mars is now pulling NASA’s car-size geochemistry laboratory, Curiosity, in for a suspenseful landing, says NASA JPL Mars Science Laboratory.
“After flying more than eight months and 350 million miles since launch, the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft is now right on target to fly through the eye of the needle that is our target at the top of the Mars atmosphere,” said Mission… read more
Astronomers think they have seen a star being ripped to pieces by a previously unknown black hole (see ‘The awakening of a cosmic monster‘), says Nature News.
The astronomers saw a pulse of X-rays that rose and fell in intensity every 200 seconds. The team thinks that the oscillation is coming from the last bits of the star, which are making their final orbits before being sucked… read more
Gene Dolgoff has developed a converter called 3-D Vision that he claims will instantly transform any 2-D video content — from TV to video games — into 3-D, using algorithms that present stereoscopic image pairs and give the illusion of depth, PandoDaily reports.
His crowdsourced Fundable 3-D Vision project (for design of the box) has reached more than half of its $10,000 goal in only four… read more
Halide programs easier to read, write and revise than image-processing programs written in a conventional language, but because Halide automates code-optimization procedures that would ordinarily take hours to perform by hand, they’re also significantly faster.
In tests, the MIT researchers used Halide to rewrite several common image-processing… read more
An estimated 670 million Indians were affected by this week’s grid outage (see “How Power Outages in India May One Day Be Avoided“). But it would be a mistake to think that India is uniquely vulnerable to large-scale grid failures, Technology Review reports.
The growing complexity and reliance on the electric grid in both developed and fast-growing countries is making stability tougher to achieve.… read more
Graphics experts led by computer scientists at Harvard have created an add-on software tool that translates video game characters — or any other three-dimensional animations — into fully articulated action figures, with the help of a 3D printer.
The project will be presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference on August 7.
“In animation you’re not necessarily trying to model the physical world perfectly; the model… read more
The John Templeton Foundation has awarded a three-year, $5 million grant to John Martin Fischer, distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, to undertake a rigorous examination of a wide range of issues related to immortality.
“People have been thinking about immortality throughout history. We have a deep human need to figure out what happens to us after death,”… read more
A $7.3 million project to convert the tiny island nation of Tokelau to all solar power is nearing completion.
Once activated, the installations should provide more than 90 percent of the power used by the islands’ 1,711 residents, MSN Future of Tech reports.
Tokelau is a remote nation northeast of New Zealand comprising three atolls, to which goods and passengers can only travel by boat. Their… read more
Zeran Li, as an undergraduate student in biological sciences, led a research team that uncovered an enzyme’s role in the regulation of eye size in the fish.
So if the enzyme’s role is similar in human eyes, could it also be relevant to human vision problems, such as nearsightedness and farsightedness?
These vision problems, called refractive errors, occur because the physical length of the eye from… read more
Background
By assembling genetic components into “circuits” that perform logical operations in living cells, synthetic biologists aim to artificially empower cells to solve critical problems in medicine, energy and the environment.
Achieving these complex functions requires controlling many genetic and cellular components, including not only genes but also the regulatory proteins that turn them on and off. In a living cell, proteins called transcription factors often regulate that… read more
With a milliseconds-long flash of blue light, Yale University researchers have regulated a critical type of signaling molecule within cell membranes.
The study is one of the first to use light to regulate metabolic activity in the membranes of cells.
Optogenetics uses of genetically encoded probes to make cell functions sensitive to light to manipulate cell functions and thus to study mechanisms of disease.
“The… read more
Parvoviruses specifically kill cancer cells and are already in the clinical trial stage for treating malignant brain tumors. However, they can also infect normal cells — without doing any harm to them — so a large portion of viruses is lost during therapy.
Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) have now modified parvoviruses in such a way that they initially lose their ability… read more
A study by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers reveals new insight into why the most common, deadly kind of brain tumor in adults recurs and identifies a potential target for future therapies.
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) currently is considered incurable. Despite responding to initial therapy, the cancer almost always returns.
GBM is a fast-growing, malignant brain tumor that occurred in 15 percent of the… read more
Researchers at the Center for Laser Applications at the University of Tennessee Space Institute have invented a system that uses lasers to find, map, and non-invasively destruct cancerous tumors.
The technology uses a femtosecond laser (creating pulses lasting one-quadrillionth of a second). The high speed enables the laser to quickly focus in on a specific region without overheating.
“Using ultra-short light pulses gives us the ability… read more