A prize of $25 million for anyone who can come up with a system for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere was launched on Friday.
It calls for devises a system to remove a “significant amount” of greenhouse gases — equivalent to 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide or more — every year from the atmosphere for at least a decade.
It is the biggest prize in history,… read more
Driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices cause as much as 25% of all U.S. car accidents, researchers at the Governors Highway Safety Association have found, WinBETA notes.
A major finding was that being distracted was the cause of 15 to 25% of all accidents, ranging from minor property damage to death.
Their findings suggest that distracted driving accidents be reported… read more
Ray Kurzweil has been named to Inc. magazine’s “26 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs” list “because he is Edison’s rightful heir.”
Kurzweil in number 8 in Inc.’s slide show profiling innovative entrepreneurs, joining Richard Branson, Martha Stewart, Trip Hawkins, Michael Dell, and others.
“Kurzweil’s businesses rely on one basic theme: pattern recognition,” the Inc. slide show explains. “‘I gather as much data as I can to develop patterns at every… read more
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded Monday to three American scientists who solved a longstanding puzzle involving telomeres (the ends of chromosomes, counting off the cell’s allotted span of life), with importance to aging and cancer.
UCLA researchers have developed a prototype of a small digital microscope without a lens that costs just a few dollars.
It can plug into a cell phone and perform basic medical diagnostics that would ordinarily require expensive lab equipment.
The device can generate blood counts and identify disease cells and bacteria from simple images sent through a USB cord to a cell phone that uses software… read more
Research in diamond mechanosynthesis (DMS) — building diamond nanostructures atom by atom using scanning probe microscopy — just received a major boost with a $3 million grant from the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, awarded to Professor Philip Moriarty at the University of Nottingham for a “Digital Matter” project, the Nanofactory Collaboration plans to announce Monday.
The… read more
A new 648-megapixel panoramic image of the full night sky, melded together from 3,000 individual photographs with mathematical models, shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae.
IBM’s Zurich Research Lab has developed an avatar to allow doctors to visualize patient medical records.
The Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME) allows a doctor to click on a particular part of the computer avatar “body” to trigger a search of medical records and instantly see all the available medical history and information related to that patient’s problem area, including text entries, lab results and medical… read more
In their new book, Infinite Reality, Dr. Jim Blascovich and Dr. Jerry Bailenson insist that 3-D conferences with avatars are nigh because consumer technology has suddenly caught up with the work going on in virtual-reality laboratories in academia.
These psychologists point to three developments in the past year: the Microsoft Kinect tracking system for the Xbox, the Nintendo 3DS gaming device, and the triumph on “Jeopardy!”… read more
Imagine a high-quality 3-D camera that provides more-accurate depth information than the Microsoft Kinect, has a greater range, and works under all lighting conditions — but is so small, cheap and power-efficient that it could be incorporated into a cellphone at very little extra cost.
That’s the promise of recent work by Vivek Goyal, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, and… read more
Chipmakers are pursuing a pair of innovations in performance and power consumption by building up and into the third dimension at the level of both the individual transistor and the full microchip.
In 2012, the chip will start to become the cube.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) researchers have created the first 3-D invisibility cloak for ordinary (non-polarized) visible light, limited at this time to the 700 nm. (red) range.
Cloaking was first developed, in 2006, for the microwave range, and has more recently been extended to the infrared (IR) range. In 2010, CFN researchers presented the first 3-D… read more
A new technique called collaborative design-space exploration, developed by the Virtual Worlds Group at Stanford University, aims to make it easy for anyone to create 3-D designs for virtual worlds.
The group has prototyped its interface in a program called Dryad, which allows users to design trees, and plans to extend it for use with other types of objects.
A new virtual reality room at the University of Calgary lets researchers and medical students visualize body structures instead of requiring dissection. Four projectors display representations of the body on the walls of a 2.5-cubic-meter room, allowing scientists to view the images via stereoscopic lenses. They can also program the simulations remotely, using Java3D technology on a PC.
The University of Calgary plans to add the image set of… read more
Stanford University researchers have developed a Web service that lets users turn a single two-dimensional image of an outdoor scene into an immersive 3-D model.
This had been a mathematically complicated problem. To solve it, the researchers developed a machine-learning algorithm that associates visual cues, such as color, texture, and size, with certain depth values, based on what they have learned from studying two-dimensional photos paired with 3-D data.