Enter the Matrix, the first commercial video game based on the world and characters of The Matrix, represents the closest collaboration so far between moviemaking and game production.
“There are scenes that start in the video game and will complete the movie,” Joel Silver, the films’ producer, noting that the game was conceived to “feel like it’s a part and experience of the movie.” Some of the plot lines… read more
A new type of micro-endoscope developed by Stanford University researchers lets scientists watch nerve cells and blood vessels deep inside the brain of a living animal over days, weeks, or even months.
Dubbed the optical needle, it is 500 to 1,000 microns in diameter.
Almost one million $35 Raspberry Pi computers have shipped since last February, capturing the imaginations of educators, hobbyists and tinkerers around the world, The New York Times reports.
The Raspberry Pi — about 3 inches by 2 inches and less than an inch high — was intended to replace the expensive computers in school science labs. For less than the price of a new keyboard, a… read more
Tissue-engineering researchers are working on tissue replacement projects for practically every body part — blood vessels and nerves, muscles, cartilage and bones, esophagus and trachea, pancreas, kidneys, liver, heart and even uterus.
A more immediate goal is to improve upon a multitude of smaller therapies: transplantable valves for ailing hearts, cell-and-gel preparations for crushed nerves, injections of skeletal muscle cells for urinary continence or new salivary gland tissue to… read more
University of Washington scientists have developed the initial component of a public system for digitally preserving and authenticating first-hand accounts of war crimes, atrocities and genocide.
The solution is a publicly available digital fingerprint, known as a cryptographic hash mark, that will make it possible for anyone to determine that the documents are authentic and have not been tampered with.
At the heart of the system is an… read more
The first synthetic material that is both sensitive to touch and capable of healing itself quickly and repeatedly if torn or cut at room temperature has been developed by a team of Stanford University chemists and engineers headed by Professor Zhenan Bao.
The advance could lead to smarter prosthetics, resilient personal electronics that repair themselves, and more sensitive soft robotics (such as the “Frankenoctopus“).
Not only is… read more
A new user interface with tactile surfaces — users can feel actual raised keys under their fingertips — has been developed by researchers at the Integrated Actuators Laboratory (LAI) of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
The technology could be used to enrich online texts, drawing the reader’s attention to certain elements on the page, or to make video games even more entertaining, by… read more
To honor Alan Turing, the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) built a simple LEGO Turing Machine — part of the Turing’s Erfenis exhibition at CWI — to show how simple a computer actually is, making every operation as visible as possible and using just a single LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT set.
“A Turing machine is a device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a… read more
“Can a computer fool expert gamers into believing it’s one of them?” was the question posed at the second annual BotPrize challenge, a variant of the Turing test.
To win the big prize, worth $6,000, a bot had to fool at least 80% of the judges; none of the participants was able to pull off this feat.
Sequencing a human genome has become routine enough to generate medically useful information, says Paul Flicek, a bioinformaticist with the European Bioinformatics Institute.
In a few cases, scientists have already been able to find the genetic cause of a disorder by sequencing an affected person’s genome or by identifying differences in tumor vs. normal tissue.
Dr. Raymond Lorie, a researcher at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., has developed a “universal virtual computer” for long-term preservation of obsolescent digital documents.
The system, which uses semantic tags, is designed to be logical and accessible so computer developers of the future will be able to write instructions to emulate it on their machines.
Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Florida, is developing a Survivor Buddy robot to act as an emergency companion for people trapped in earthquakes and other conditions.
She envisions a robot that plays soothing music to trapped victims and features a monitor showing the faces of loved ones and rescuers trying to reach them. It will deliver water and transmit a… read more
Marvin Minsky, MIT professor and AI’s founding father, says today’s artificial-intelligence methods are fine for gluing together two or a few knowledge domains but still miss the “big” AI problem. He says the missing element is something so big that we can’t see it: common sense.
In his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Minsky shares his accumulated knowledge on how people make use of common sense in the context… read more
CodeSpells, an immersive, first-person player video game designed to teach students in elementary to high school how to program in the popular Java language, has been developed by University of California, San Diego computer scientists.
The researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls, ages 10 to 12, who had never been exposed to programming before. In just one hour of play, the girls… read more