A survey of 1 million top websites finds that 88 percent share user data with third parties, according to Tim Libert, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The study was published in an open-access paper in the International Journal of Communication.
These websites, listed on Alexa, contact an average of nine external domains, indicating that… read more
A Northeastern University research team has found “extensive” leakage of users’ information — device and user identifiers, locations, and passwords — into network traffic from apps on mobile devices, including iOS, Android, and Windows phones. The researchers have also devised a way to stop the flow.
David Choffnes, an assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information Science, and his colleagues developed a simple, efficient cloud-based system called … read more
Researchers at Toyohashi University of Technology and Kyoto University have found the first neurophysiological evidence of humans’ ability to empathize with robots in perceived pain — at least when it comes to losing a finger.
They monitored event-related electroencephalography (EEG) signals from 15 healthy adults who were observing pictures of either a human or robotic hand in painful or non-painful situations, such as a finger… read more
The Rice University lab of chemist James Tour has created single-molecule, 244-atom submersibles with motors powered by ultraviolet light, as they reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.
With each full revolution, the motor’s tail-like propeller moves the sub forward 18 nanometers, but with the motors running at more than a million RPM, that translates into almost 1 inch per second —… read more
Cornell biomedical engineers have developed specialized white blood cells they call “super natural killer cells” that seek out cancer cells in lymph nodes with only one purpose: to destroy them, halting the onset of cancer tumor cell metastasis.
“We want to see lymph-node metastasis become a thing of the past,” said Michael R. King, the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor of Biomedical Engineering and senior author of a… read more
In previous research, Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers disproved neurobiology dogma by “reprogramming” neurons — turning one form of neuron into another — in the brains of living animals. Now they’ve taken it a step further, showing that networks of communication among reprogrammed neurons and their neighbors can also be changed, or “rewired.”
The finding, by Paola Arlotta, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology, in close collaboration… read more
Johns Hopkins researchers report they have uncovered the role of an another enzyme crucial to telomere length in addition to the enzyme telomerase, discovered in 1984.
The researchers say the new test they used to find the enzyme should speed discovery of other proteins and processes that determine telomere length. Shortened telomeres have been implicated in aging and in diseases as diverse as lung and… read more
Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, and partners have invented a “porous liquid” that can dissolve unusually large amounts of gas, with the potential for a wide range of new uses, including carbon capture.
They designed the new liquid from the bottom up, designing the shapes of the “cage molecules” to form empty holes. The researchers say the concentration of unoccupied cages can be around 500… read more
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers, working with student teams, trained a cloud-based version of IBM’s Watson called the Watson Engagement Advisor to provide answers to questions about biologically inspired design (biomimetics), a design paradigm that uses biological systems as analogues for inventing technological systems.
Ashok Goel, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing who conducts research on computational creativity. In an… read more
Researchers at The City College of New York (CCNY) have determined the optimal wavelengths for bioimaging of the brain at longer near-infrared wavelengths, which permit deeper imaging.
Near-infrared (NIR) radiation has been used for one- and two-photon fluorescence imaging at near-infrared wavelengths of 650–950 nm (nanometers) for deep brain imaging, but it is limited in penetration depth. (The CCNY researchers dubbed this Window I, also known as the therapeutic… read more
A new onion-like nanoparticle developed at the State University of New York University at Buffalo could open new frontiers in biomaging, solar-energy harvesting, and light-based security techniques.
The particle’s innovation lies in its layers: a coating of organic dye, a neodymium-containing shell, and a core that incorporates ytterbium and thulium. Together, these strata convert invisible near-infrared light to higher energy blue and UV light with record-high efficiency.… read more
Duke University scientists have invented a technology that can identify and image different wavelengths of the infrared spectrum.
The fabrication technique for the system is easily scalable, can be applied to any surface geometry, and costs much less than current light-absorption technologies, according to the researchers. Once adopted, the technique would allow advanced infrared imaging systems to be produced faster and cheaper than today’s counterparts and with higher sensitivity.… read more
Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have developed a way to build precision-sculpted 3-D strontium titanate nanostructures as small as one nanometer, using scanning transmission electron microscopes, which are normally used for imaging.
The technique could find uses in fabricating structures for functional nanoscale devices such as microchips. The structures grow epitaxially (in perfect crystalline alignment), which ensures that the same electrical and mechanical properties extend… read more
Now you can design and build your own customized walking robot using a 3-D printer and off-the-shelf servo motors, with the help of a new DYI design tool developed by Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University.
You can specify the shape, size, and number of legs for your robotic creature, using intuitive editing tools to interactively explore design alternatives. The system takes over much of the… read more
Stanford electrical engineers have developed an enhancement of technology intended to safely find buried plastic explosives and spot fast-growing tumors, using a combination of microwaves and ultrasound to develop a detector similar to the legendary Star Trek tricorder.
The work, led by Assistant Professor Amin Arbabian and Research Professor Pierre Khuri-Yakub, grows out of DARPA research designed to detect buried plastic… read more