VR and Haptics for Rehabilitation
March 26, 2010
At the IEEE’s Virtual Reality 2010 conference, researchers and companies are demonstrating technologies that combine virtual reality and haptics, some designed for medical rehabilitation.
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VR accommodates reality
August 4, 2003
Researchers have advanced the representatiom of real objects in virtual environments by allowing real and virtual objects to coexist in a shared virtual space.
The system uses four cameras and object recognition software to determine the shapes and positions of real objects in the environment. The camera data is used to generate virtual three-dimensional shells in the shapes of the real objects, and the shells are forbidden zones for… read more
Voyage of the Bacteria Bots
October 31, 2008
Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal have coupled live, swimming bacteria to 150-nanometer beads to develop a self-propelling “nanobot” device steered through the body using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
The bacteria swim at 200 microns/second using tiny corkscrewlike tails, or flagella, and are just two microns in diameter–small enough to fit through the smallest blood vessels in the human body. The beads are treated with antibodies… read more
Volvo has tested its fuel-saving”road train” technology on public roads in Spain, finding the historic test “highly successful.”
Volvo used one lead vehicle and four trailing vehicles — consisting of a Volvo S60, a Volvo V60 and a Volvo XC60 plus a truck — that drove autonomously for 200 kilometers (124 miles) at 85 kilometers an hour (53 miles per hour) on the roads outside Barceolona.
Existing safety… read more
Volunteers wanted for planet hunt
January 16, 2012
Members of the public are being asked to join the hunt for nearby planets that could support life.
Volunteers can go to the Planethunters website to see time-lapsed images of 150,000 stars, taken by the Kepler space telescope. They will be advised on the signs that indicate the presence of a planet and how to alert experts if they spot them.
“We know that people will… read more
Volkswagen’s intelligent car: the next step in connected cars
February 16, 2012
The next step in the evolution of connected cars is making cars intelligent.
The goal of the Urban Intelligent Assist project, which Audi is undertaking in collaboration with four U.S. universities, is to help the driver deal with driving conditions and navigation.
The goal is for the cars to recognize individual motorists behind the wheel, and know preferred destinations, routes the motorists have most commonly traveled, and the time… read more
Volkswagen has presented its “Temporary Auto Pilot” technology. Monitored by a driver, the technology can allow a car to drive semi-automatically at speeds of up to 80 mph on highways.
It works using a combination of existing technology such as adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping assist, rolling them all into one comprehensive function.
In the semi-automatic driving mode, the system maintains a safe distance to the vehicle ahead,… read more
Volcanoes may reveal secrets through ‘song’
August 10, 2006
Active volcanoes are being made to “sing” by researchers who convert seismic data into frequencies audible to human ears.
The sonification ttechnique could make it easier to detect patterns that warn of an eruption.
Volcano could trigger tsunami disaster for New York
August 11, 2004
A collapsing volcano could trigger a vast tidal wave capable of wiping New York, Washington and Miami off the map, warn geologists.
Geologists are concerned that an unstable flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canaries is in danger of sliding into the sea.
If shaken loose by a volcanic eruption, the huge slab of rock would send a tsunami more… read more
Volcanic lightning may have sparked life on Earth
October 17, 2008
Scientists have detected additional amino acids in the original samples from the classic Miller-Urey experiment: a mixture of gases and water that Miller thought were present on early Earth was heated and zapped with electricity to mimic lightning. This created five identifiable amino acids.
But one of the two lesser-know experimental setups — a volcanic apparatus adding steam — created 22 amino acids that could be positively identified, and… read more
Two new organizations — the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Nanotechnology Policy Forum — are addressing public concerns (fueled by Bill Joy’s article in Wired Magazine and Michael Crichton’s novel Prey) about the risks of nanotech, cultivating informed public dialogue on the issues.
Voicemail software recognises callers’ emotions
January 11, 2005
A voicemail system that labels messages according to the caller’s tone of voice could soon be helping people identify which messages are the most urgent.
The software, called Emotive Alert, works by extracting the distribution of volume, pitch and speech rate – the ratio of words to pauses – in the first 10 seconds of each message, and then comparing them with eight stored “acoustical fingerprints” that roughly represent… read more
Voice control is finally taking over
September 11, 2003
Using phone numbers, remote controls and computer keyboards will likely seem quaint within a decade as new capability to turn human speech into accurate, efficient computer code radically changes the ways we live and work.
That’s the outlook of Lawrence R. Rabiner, associate director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in an overview of speech processing, “The Power of… read more
Vivid insight provided into workings of the brain
January 21, 2002
Researchers at the Institute of Psychology, King’s College London, have developed Vivid (virtual in-vivo interactive dissection), a system that noninvasively detects patterns of nerve connections inside the brains of living people.By reprogramming MRI scanners, Vivid tracks the random oscillation of water molecules, which can move more easily along a bundle of nerve fibers. A program makes it possible to construct a 3-D representation of the nerve connections.
The group… read more
Vitamins ‘may shorten your life’
April 17, 2008
Copenhagen University research has suggested that certain vitamin supplements do not extend life and could even lead to a premature death.
A review of 67 studies with trials involving 233,000 people found “no convincing evidence” that antioxidant supplements cut the risk of dying,” and suggested that vitamins A and E could interfere with the body’s natural defences, and that beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E seem to increase mortality.… read more