Most Recently Added Most commentedBy Title | A-Z

Page 24 of 1,035First1020212223242526272829304050Last

Could robots become ‘aware’ of their own limitations?

April 3, 2013

(credit: Allegra Boverman and Christine Daniloff/MIT)

MIT researchers have developed software for robots that enables them to be more “aware” of their own limitations, such as knowing the whereabouts of an object, or its own location within a room.

Most successful robots today tend to be used either in fixed, carefully controlled environments, such as manufacturing plants, or for performing fairly simple tasks such as vacuuming a room,

But carrying out complicated sequences… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics

Comments (23)

Helmet with ultrasound sensors could help firefighters detect objects in the dark

April 3, 2013

helmet

A “tactile helmet” with ultrasound sensors has been developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield Center for Robotics. It could provide fire-fighters operating in the dark or other challenging conditions with vital clues about their surroundings.

The helmet has a number of ultrasound sensors that are used to detect the distances between the helmet and nearby walls or other obstacles. These signals are transmitted to… read more

Topics: Human Enhancement | Survival/Defense

Comments (1)

High speed cancer-cell testing

April 3, 2013

(credit: EPFL)

Among a significant percentage of patients, the risk of metastasis of cancer is particularly expressed by the presence of an abnormal amount of protein HER2 on the surface of cancer cells.

A new in vitro system for identification of these proteins in diseased tissues. has been developed by EPFL and Institute of Pathology at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) scientists. It is extremely fast, precise, inexpensive, and… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Biotech | Nanotech/Materials Science

Comments (3)

Robot ants mimic real ant colony behavior

April 2, 2013

This image shows the robot ants (Alices) pursuing a light trail around the constructed maze (credit: Simon Garnier et al./PLOS)

Scientists have replicated the behavior of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the open access journal PLOS Computational Biology.

The researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics

Comments (2)

Head-on collisions between DNA-code reading machineries accelerate gene evolution

April 2, 2013

dnasplit

Bacteria appear to speed up their evolution by positioning specific genes along the route of expected traffic jams in DNA encoding. Certain genes are in prime collision paths for the moving molecular machineries that read the DNA code, as University of Washington scientists explain in this week’s edition of Nature.

The spatial-organization tactics that the researchers’ model organism, Bacillus subtilis, takes to evolve and adapt might be… read more

Topics: Biotech

Comments (4)

Obama to unveil specifics of Brain Activity Map project

April 2, 2013

brain-rays

President Obama on Tuesday will announce specifics on the Brain Activity Map project Tuesday, The New York Times reports. The initiative, which will officially be known as Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or Brain for short, has been designated a grand challenge of the 21st century by the Obama administration.

The broad new research initiative, starting with $100 million in 2014, is intended to invent and… read more

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience

Comments (19)

Designer carbon provides longer battery life

Energ2’s nanostructured carbon anodes can boost lithium-ion battery capacity by 30 percent
April 2, 2013

HybridBatteryEnerg2

EnerG2 has developed a carbon anode that improves the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries by up to 30 percent without requiring a new battery design or a different manufacturing process, MIT Technology Review reports.

EnerG2’s new lithium-ion battery anode is made of a form of carbon in which the atoms have a disorganized, amorphous structure, compared to the crystalline structure of graphite, the material normally… read more

Topics: Electronics | Energy | Nanotech/Materials Science

Comments (3)

A Kinect-powered depression detector

April 2, 2013

sim_sensei

Using a Kinect depth camera and some ingenious computer vision algorithms, SimSensei can diagnose whether you’re depressed or not with 90% accuracy, MIT Technology Review reports.

The system uses an interactive digital avatar to conduct a verbal interview with the person being screened for depression.Skeletal polygonal overlays map the depressed human’s posture, gaze direction, and even “smile level.”

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | VR/Augmented Reality/Computer Graphics

Comments (6)

Blue Waters, one of the world’s most powerful computers, opens for research

April 2, 2013

Blue Waters has been configured to solve the most challenging compute-, memory- and data-intensive problems in science and engineering. It has tens of thousands of chips (CPUs & GPUs), more than a petabyte of memory, tens of petabytes of disk storage, and hundreds of petabytes of archival storage. (Credit: NCSA/University of Illinois)

Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, was formally declared available for use today at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Blue Waters, a partnership among NSF, the State of Illinois, the University of Illinois and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, is capable at peak performance of nearly  12 petaFLOPS (12… read more

Topics: Biotech | Computers/Infotech/UI | Environment/Climate | Physics/Cosmology

Comments (7)

Robotic jellyfish could one day patrol oceans, clean oil spills, and detect pollutants

April 2, 2013

Robojelly (credit: Virginia Tech)

 

Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers are working on a multi-university, nationwide project for the U.S. Navy that one day will put life-like autonomous robot jellyfish in waters around the world.

Uses of the robot jellyfish could include conducting military surveillance, cleaning oil spills, and monitoring the environment.

The main focus of the program is to understand the fundamentals of… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Survival/Defense

Comments (3)

Mapping the ‘fountain of youth’

April 1, 2013

Tibolium_castaneum_TERT_structure

University of Copenhagen researchers and an international team have for the first time mapped telomerase, an enzyme with a rejuvenating effect on cell aging.

This is one of the results of a major research project involving more than 1,000 researchers worldwide, four years of hard work, DKK 55 million from the EU, and blood samples from more than 200,000 people.

It is the largest collaboration project… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Biotech

Comments (14)

Smell-o-Vision is finally here

April 1, 2013

smelling_screen

Smell-O-Vision was a system that released odors during the projection of a film so that the viewer could “smell” what was happening in the movie.

Now the “smelling screen,” invented by Haruka Matsukura at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan and colleagues, makes smells appear to come from the exact spot on any LCD screen that is displaying the image of a cup of coffee,… read more

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI | Entertainment/New Media | VR/Augmented Reality/Computer Graphics

Comments (11)

Bitcoin hits $1 billion

April 1, 2013

bitcoin

Bitcoin, the world’s first open source cryptographic currency, has set a new record for itself as the price listed on the largest online exchange rose past US $92, IEEE Spectrum reports. With nearly 11 million Bitcoins in circulation, this sets the total worth of the currency just over one billion dollars.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that runs on a global peer-to-peer network… read more

Topics: Internet/Telecom | Social/Ethical/Legal

Comments (8)

Huge online attack exposes Internet’s vulnerability

April 1, 2013

(Credit: iStockphoto)

It was the largest online attack ever reported. Over the course of the past week, servers belonging to an international non-profit company called The Spamhaus Project, which fights email spammers, were inundated with up to 38 gigabytes of traffic each second, New Scientist reports.

The attackers exploited open domain name server (DNS) resolvers, faking their own IP addresses, replacing them with the address of the target. This… read more

Topics: Internet/Telecom | Survival/Defense

Comments (4)

TED removes TEDxWestHollywood license: ideas that have ‘failed to gain scientific acceptance’

April 1, 2013

Ex-TED

TED has removed the license of TEDxWestHollywood for their planned “Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?” event, says the TEDxWestHollywood blog.

The takedown was only a couple of weeks before the April 14 event (and after they had spent more than a year preparing), the blog says.

In an email to Suzanne Taylor, the organizer of TEDxWestHollywood, a representative of TED outlined the objections: “And when… read more

Topics: Human Enhancement | Innovation/Entrepreneurship | Physics/Cosmology | Social/Ethical/Legal

Comments (78)

Page 24 of 1,035First1020212223242526272829304050Last
close and return to Home