Digital artist Salvatore Iaconesi, an engineer, artist, hacker and 2012 TED fellow who teaches interaction and digital design at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, hacked his medical records to put them online on his site artisopensource.net/cure in a global search for the best treatments, New Scientist reports.
What happened?
It’s been incredible. I have been able to become an expert in… read more
As the U.S. launched what’s expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops (peak performance), China announced it is building a machine intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015, IT World reports.
China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second) peak performance, designed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to the Guangzhou… read more
A landmark project that has sequenced 1,092 human genomes from individuals around the world will help researchers to interpret the genetic changes in people with disease.
This first study to break the “1000 genomes barrier” will enable scientists to begin to examine genetic variations at the scale of the populations of individual countries, as well as guiding them in their search for the rare genetic variations related… read more
Stanford University scientists have built the first solar cell made entirely of carbon, a promising alternative to the expensive materials used in photovoltaic devices today.
“Carbon has the potential to deliver high performance at a low cost,” said study senior author Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of… read more
Researchers from NYU, Harvard, and Dow Chemical have created new colloidal microparticles that spontaneously self-assemble into structures resembling molecules made from atoms.
These structures were previously impossible to make and hold promise for manufacturing advanced optical materials and ceramics, such as photonic crystals that could improve displays and computer chips.
The method was developed by a team of chemists, chemical engineers, and physicists at New York University (NYU), the Harvard School of… read more
A new powered exoskeleton that enables people with severe spinal cord injuries to stand, walk, sit and climb stairs has been developed by Vanderbilt University’s Center for Intelligent Mechatronics. Its light weight, compact size, and modular design promise to provide users with an unprecedented degree of independence.
Parker Hannifin Corporation has signed an exclusive licensing agreement to develop a commercial version of the device, which it plans to introduce in… read more
Able to guide itself through forests, tunnels, or damaged buildings, an autonomous flying robot developed by Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, and his team could have tremendous value in search-and-rescue operations, according to the researchers.
The test vehicle is a quadrotor, a commercially available flying machine table with four helicopter rotors. Human controllers can’t always react swiftly enough, and radio signals may… read more
Look closely and you can find digital graffiti — videos, animations, and comments superimposed on buildings and streets around the world.
They are created using apps for smartphones or tablets to edit augmented reality (AR) YouTube videos, New Scientist reports.
Most major cities are teeming with these digital annotations. You just need to identify a tagged location using your smartphone’s map, and watch through the… read more
A whopping 100,000 entangled photons have been detected for the first time, beating the previous record of just 12, New Scientist reports.
The technique could be useful for safely sharing keys used in encrypted communications.
Entangled photons have linked quantum states, such that measuring the state of one photon determines the state of the others, no matter how far apart they are.
Detecting entanglement usually… read more
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have determined that healthy young adults ages 18–25 can improve their working memory by increasing their Omega-3 fatty acid intake.
Before they began taking the supplements, all participants were asked to perform a working memory test in which they were shown a series of letters and numbers. The young adults had to keep track of what appeared one, two,… read more
Brigham Young University (BYU) researchers have created stronger microstructures that can form precise, tall and narrow 3-D shapes for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).
MEMS are ultra-tiny devices, often built on the scale of microns (millionths of a meter). Conventional MEMS structures tend to be made out of silicon-based materials familiar to the micro-electronics industry, but this ignores a suite of useful materials such… read more
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has launched a new era of scientific supercomputing today with Titan, a system capable of more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second — or 20 petaflops — peak performance by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units (GPUs) first created for computer gaming.
Titan is now one of the world’s fastest supercomputers,… read more
While powerful transcanial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the frontal lobe of the brain can alleviate symptoms of depression, those receiving the treatment did not report effects on sleep or arousal commonly seen with antidepressant medications, researchers have found.
“People’s sleep gets better as their depression improves, but the treatment doesn’t itself cause sedation or insomnia.” said Dr. Peter B. Rosenquist, Vice Chair of the Department of… read more
Imperial College London scientists have developed a prototype ultra-sensitive sensor that would enable doctors to detect the early stages of diseases and viruses with the naked eye.
The visual sensor technology is ten times more sensitive than the current gold-standard methods for measuring biomarkers. These indicate the onset of diseases such as prostate cancer and infection by viruses including HIV.
The researchers say their sensor… read more
A video shows a woman carrying a box into a building. Later, it shows her leaving the building without it. What was she doing?
Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Mind’s Eye program is creating intelligent software that will recognize human activities in video and predict what might happen next. It will also flag unusual events and deduce actions that may be occurring off-camera.
Automating the time-consuming job of… read more