“Video chatting” is getting easier and more popular thanks to a growing number of service providers, fast broadband connections, and new cameras.
Using lightweight portable minicameras mounted on computer screens, people can see and be seen by friends or virtual strangers who are invited into the home to talk and take a look around.
A new web-based program tells you how an asteroid or comet collision will affect your spot on the globe by calculating several environmental consequences of its impact, including thermal radiation, seismic shaking, ejecta deposition, and air-blast effects.
Dr. Avrim Fishkind, a psychiatrist in Houston, rarely sees any of his patients in person, and that’s the way they like it.
Fishkind is part of a fast growing movement in the mental healthcare field where therapists counsel patients via inexpensive, Web-based video conferencing technology.
“We’ve had just over 60,000 patient encounters. To my knowledge, only six have refused to be seen via teleconferencing,” he said. “When it… read more
Using little more than a Web search engine and some simple software, a computer-savvy criminal or terrorist could easily leap beyond the boundaries of cyberspace to wreak havoc in the physical world, a team of Internet security researchers has concluded.
Automated order forms on the Web could be exploited to send tens of thousands of unwanted catalogs to a business or an individual, which could also paralyze the local… read more
A majority of U.S. home Internet users now have broadband: an estimated 63 million broadband users, or 51 percent of all home Internet users, as of July.
Special offers for broadband services, the growing use of multimedia on the Web, and the availability of music and video downloads drove Internet users to the faster service.
GeneDesign, a new web-based program that simplifies many tricky steps involved in designing artificial DNA, has been released by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researchers.
But this is also a source of concern. An investigation conducted by New Scientist in November 2005 revealed that few gene synthesis companies check that the genes they are being asked to make are safe, or perform customer background checks after receiving an… read more
Mash Maker, A new research project from Intel Research, aims to let people use their ordinary Web browsers to combine information from different sites.
Mash Maker is one of a handful of services and products intended to help the motivated noncoder combine information from different websites, including Microsoft’s Popfly, Yahoo Pipes, and IBM’s Lotus Mashups.
Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier Internet, the network would enter “a dark period.”
![Correlation of aerosol optical depth for the same instrument [the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)] operating on different satellites (Terra and Aqua) for the year 2008. The visualization reveals that there is a zero-correlation anomaly centered on the date line with the shape of an orbital character. [Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (G. Leptoukh)]](http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/MODIS.jpg "MODIS")
Fox and Hendler, both professors within the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, outlined a new vision for the visualization of scientific data, in a perspective piece titled “Changing the Equation on Scientific Data Visualization.”
As the researchers explain, visualizations provide a means to enable the understanding of complex data. The problem with the current use of visualization in the scientific community, according to Fox… read more
A new browser called RockMelt is built on the premise that most online activity today revolves around socializing on Facebook, searching on Google, tweeting on Twitter and monitoring a handful of favorite websites.
Rockmelt tries to minimize the need to roam from one website to the next by corralling all vital information and favorite services in panes and drop-down windows.
A University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) team has developed ImageJS, a free app system that analyzes tissue images.
The ImageJS module enables pathologists to drag a digitized pathology slide into a Web app and analyze it for malignancy based on color. Cancer cells change color when exposed to standard dyes. It is available from the Google Chrome App store, Google Code and Github.
ImageJS… read more