A tiny remote-control helicopter is being used for surveillance on the front line to detect enemy threats to British troops.
British troops are using a nano drone just 10cm long and weighing 16 grams on the front line in Afghanistan to provide vital information on the ground, Sky News reports.
They are the first to use the state-of-the-art handheld tiny surveillance helicopters, which relay reliable full… read more
Newspapers have continued to churn out the same content while watching their advertisers steadily flee for sites like Craigslist, Yahoo, the Huffington Post/AOL, Facebook, and Google, says writer Will Oremus in Slate Future Tense. .
The chart above, from Statista’s Felix Richter, plots Google’s digital advertising revenue against the print advertising revenue of all U.S.… read more
There is a popular belief that sexual orientation can be revealed by one’s pupil dilation when viewing attractive people, but there has been no scientific evidence.
Now Cornell University researchers have confirmed it in an experiment, using a specialized infrared lens to measure pupillary changes in participants watching erotic videos.
Pupils widened most to videos of people who participants found attractive, thereby revealing where they were on… read more
As part of an update to the national fingerprint database, the FBI has begun rolling out facial recognition to identify criminals, New Scientist reports.
It will form part of the bureau’s long-awaited, $1 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) program, which will also add biometrics such as iris scans, DNA analysis, and voice identification to the toolkit. A handful of states began uploading their photos as… read more
Kim Suozzi, diagnosed at age 21 with brain cancer while studying neuroscience at college, passed away Thursday, January 17, 2013 at age 23.
The Society for Venturism, a cryonics advocacy and support group, started a charity fund for her cryonic suspension in August of 2012 and through an overwhelming amount of support from the extreme life extension community, enough funds were raised for her to be cryopreserved with Alcor.… read more
The International Federation of Robotics tracked a 50 percent jump in purchases of advanced industrial robots by Chinese manufacturers in 2011, to 22,600 units, and now predicts that China will surpass Japan as the world’s largest market in two years, Technology Review reports.
Foxconn, said last July that the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant would add up to one million industrial robots to its assembly lines inside of three years.
The… read more
“The world is getting richer, healthier, better educated, more peaceful, and better connected, and people are living longer; yet half the world is potentially unstable,” according to Jerome C. Glenn, CEO of The Millennium Project and co-author of the “2012 State of the Future,” an overview of our global situation, problems, solutions, and prospects for the future.
The 16th Annual Edition includes 145 pages and… read more
They might be caused by common medications used to treat insomnia, anxiety, itching or allergies, according to Dr. Cara Tannenbaum, Research Chair at the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM, Montreal Geriatric University Institute) and Associate Professor of Medicine and Pharmacy at the University of Montreal (UdeM).
Up to 90 percent of people over the age of 65 take at least one prescription medication. Eighteen… read more
Every 30 seconds or so, an algorithm developed by Narrative Science produces a computer-written news story, Wired reports.
The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private).
Niche news services hire Narrative Science to write updates for their subscribers, be they sports fans, small-cap investors, or fast-food… read more
The China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) proposed on Nov. 2 a joint collaboration for a space solar power mission with India and met with former Indian president APJ Abdul Kalam.
“Kalam assured, certainly he will take up this interest to the Government of India and ISRO [Indian Space Research Organization], so that a hard cooperation and collaboration between ISRO, DRDO [Defence Research & Development Organisation of India] and CAST is… read more
If Dennis Tito has his way, two people will leave our planet in January 2018 and make a trip to Mars and back, with a quick flyby, SpaceRef reports.
The project is being spearheaded by a non-profit organization, the Inspiration Mars Foundation.
Tito’s mission will be facilitated by donors, not investors.
Tito and a group of coauthors from NASA and several aerospace companies… read more
Are American workers losing their jobs to machines?
That was the question posed by Race Against the Machine, an influential e-book published last October by MIT business school researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
The pair looked at troubling U.S. employment numbers — which have declined since the recession of 2008-2009 even as economic output has risen — and concluded that computer technology was… read more
Driverless vehicles will safely wiz through intersections at the full speed limit, according to researchers from Virginia Tech Transportation Research.
Autonomous vehicles will turn themselves over to an automated intersection controller, with the controller tweaking their trajectory to prevent crashes, explained Ismail Zohdy of Cairo, Egypt, a Ph.D. student in civil engineering at Virginia Tech, and Hesham Rakha, director of the Center for Sustainable… read more
Why is the polyp Hydra immortal? Researchers from Kiel University decided to study it — and unexpectedly discovered a link to aging in humans.
The study carried out by together with the Keil University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH)
The tiny freshwater polyp Hydra does not show any signs of aging and is potentially immortal. There is a rather simple biological explanation for this: these animals exclusively reproduce… read more
Summary of an IEEE Spectrum report
In the next few weeks, Google will start shipping its Google Glass to developers. More-polished consumer models are expected in 2014.
Details about Glass are still sketchy but here’s what we know: