Inspired by the complex fly eye, researchers have developed a nearly hemispherical digital camera with 180 tiny lenses, delivering exceptionally wide-angle field of view and sharp images.
Humans capture pictures using the two lenses of our relatively flat eyes, while a top-of-the-line SLR camera has just one flat lens.
The new camera — a rounded half bubble, similar to a bug’s eye — has 180 microlenses mounted… read more
Teodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, envisions a day in the not too distant future when a patient with severe memory loss can get help from an electronic implant, MIT Technology Review reports.
In people whose brains have suffered damage from Alzheimer’s, stroke, or injury, disrupted neuronal networks often prevent long-term memories from forming. For more than… read more
Researchers have found a way to see synthetic nanostructures and molecules, using a new type of super-resolution optical microscopy that does not require fluorescent dyes, representing a practical tool for biomedical and nanotechnology research.
“Super-resolution optical microscopy has opened a new window into the nanoscopic world,” said Ji-Xin Cheng, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and chemistry at Purdue University.
Conventional… read more
The XPrize Foundation has teamed up with Sony Pictures Entertainment and Overbrook Entertainment to launch a robotics competition celebrating the release of After Earth, in theaters May 31.
In Phase 1 of the challenge, teams will create a 2–3 minute video essay that answers targeted questions and describes their thinking on the importance of space exploration, and the relationship between sustainability and survival. Video entries will be judged, and ten… read more
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) scientists have developed a method for determining the magnetic structure of living biological specimens down to a sub-cellular level.
In their study, they use “magnetotactic” bacteria (MTB), which contain magnetic nanoparticles.
The researchers, David Le Sage, David Glenn, and Ron Walsworth, together with their collaborators, place these live bacteria onto a diamond surface that has been modified to contain crystal defects… read more
A team of neuroscientists and engineers at Clemson University is using neurons grown in a dish to control simulated power grids.
The researchers hope that studying how neural networks integrate and respond to complex information will inspire new methods for managing the country’s ever-changing power supply and demand.
“The brain is one of the most robust computational platforms that exists,” says Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy, Ph.D., director… read more
Microsoft is developing a 3D telepresence technology for remote workers, The Verge reports.
The company says it is also looking to extend the technology to Skype, allowing consumers to enjoy “high-definition communication” in its voice and video calling software and “a realistic physical ‘body-double’ or proxy in a remote meeting.”
Microsoft’s job listing suggests it is looking to develop its Viewport research project into… read more
Two researchers working in France report the creation of a nanowire transistor that could be scaled down to to power the microprocessors of the 2020s, IEEE Spectrum reports.
It consists of an array of 225 doped-silicon nanowires, each 30 nm wide and 200 nm tall, vertically linking the two platinum contact planes that form the source and drain of the transistor. Besides their narrowness, what’s… read more
Soon, we might interact with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds, suggests The New York Times.
“Some crude brain-reading products already exist, letting people play easy games or move a mouse around a screen.
“But the products commercially available today will soon look archaic. ‘To really be able to understand what is going on with the brain today you need to surgically implant… read more
Scientists have long observed that species seem to have become increasingly capable of evolving in response to changes in the environment.
But computer science researchers now say that the popular explanation of competition to survive in nature may not actually be necessary for evolvability to increase.
In a paper published this week in open-access PLOS ONE, the researchers report that evolvability… read more
Prototype mobile devices that can change shape on-demand and lead to high “shape resolution” devices of the future.were presented on Monday at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris.
In the presentation, Dr. Anne Roudaut and Professor Sriram Subramanian, from the University of Bristol‘s Department of Computer Science used shape resolution to… read more
KurzweilAI has covered a number of recent developments aimed at giving robots a better sense of touch and humans better control of devices, such as TakkTile (Robot hands gain a gentler touch), allowing a robot to pick up a balloon without popping it (see “Related” below for other examples).
Now Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have taken it to a whole new level.… read more
Is the world’s only commercial quantum computer really a quantum device, or a just regular computer in disguise? Controversy has long swirled around the computer produced by D-Wave, a company based near Vancouver, Canada.
Now a paper published on the arXiv preprint server takes a step forward in showing that it really does operate on a quantum level, Nature News Blog reports.
In… read more
Scientists from the Manchester Collaborative Center for Inflammation Research (MCCIR) have discovered why a particular cancer drug is so effective at killing cells. Their findings could be used to aid the design of future cancer treatments.
Professor Daniel Davis and his team used high quality video imaging to investigate why the drug rituximab is so effective at killing cancerous B cells. It is widely used… read more
The macroscopic effects of certain nanoparticles on human health have long been clear to the naked eye. What scientists have lacked is the ability to see the detailed movements of individual particles that give rise to those effects.
Now, scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute have invented a technique for imaging nanoparticle dynamics with atomic resolution as these dynamics occur in a liquid… read more