Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab are trying to build computers that care about their users.
Affective computing proponents believe computers should be designed to recognize, express, and influence emotion in users.
Stanford University researchers have discovered a “proofreading” step used to correct DNA transcription errors in expressing genes from DNA to RNA to proteins.
They made the discovery while observing the molecular process used by the RNA polymerase (RNAP) enzyme to copy individual bases from E. coli bacteria DNA onto strands of RNA.
Papers published in Nature and Cell “push the study of single proteins to new limits,” says… read more
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory will design a high-speed network called Science Ultranet that operates at up to 40 gigabits per second, ORNL has announced.
With $4.5 million funding from the Department of Energy, Science UltraNet will allow for distributed collaborative visualization, remote instrument control, and remote computational steering, which allows scientists to control and guide computations being run on supercomputers from their offices. These tasks require high-speed transfer… read more
The BioMEMS 768 Sequencer can sequence the entire human genome in only one year, processing up to 7 million DNA letters a day, about seven times faster than its nearest rival. It will be tested at Whitehead Institute this fall.
The technology eventually will help scientists quickly determine the exact genetic sequence of the DNA of many different organisms, and could lead to faster forensic analysis of DNA gathered… read more
Inkha (“interactive neurotic King’s head assembly”), an android receptionist, will offer directions and events information to visitors at King’s College London starting next week.
Driven by nine motors and a small laptop computer and equipped with hidden cameras and infrared sensors to detect movement and color plus a touch screen, Inkha leans towards interesting people and shies away from sudden movements. She chats when people are around and offers… read more
Scientists are scrambling to perfect the fuel cell as a methanol-powered source for energy-hungry laptops and other portable devices.
Intel is thinking even smaller: tiny sensor chips that network with each other — inside everything on earth.
It foresees networks consisting of thousands of motes, located wherever there’s a need for data collection, streaming real-time data to one another and to central servers.
The goal is to halve the size and price of a mote (a tiny sensor, transmitter and antenna to communicate with other motes) every… read more
The Internet sits at a crossroads. The World Summit on the Information Society, organized by the International Telecommunications Union, will bring together the heads of over 60 governments in Geneva on December 10 to 12.
The goal: wrest control from ICANN, which is backed by the U.S., Europe and English-speaking partners such as Australia.
Georgia Tech researchers have developed a machine that can instantly sniff out illegal drugs.
From a few feet away, the device can “smell” as little as one-trillionth of a gram. So far it’s only programmed to detect cocaine, but it could be developed to sniff out other drugs, anthrax, bombs, chemical agents and even cancerous cells.
Intel said it has produced chips with the 65-nanometer manufacturing process and will start to mass-manufacture chips on the process in 2005, a strong sign the company will continue to keep pace with Moore’s Law.
Reducing the size of the chip improves performance, reduces costs, and can potentially cut energy consumption. The 65-nanometer chips will contain strained silicon and a low-k (low capacitance) dielectric layer, which, in addition to… read more
“Inventing is about catching the wave,” said Ray Kurzweil, who addressed a national convention of inventors in Philadelphia last Monday. “Most inventions fail not because the inventor can’t get them to work but because the invention comes at the wrong time.”
Kurzweil’s latest invention, with engineer John Keklak, is cybernetic poet, recently awarded patent No. 6,647,395. Like many of Kurzweil’s inventions, it’s based on pattern recognition.
With the pace of innovation doubling every decade, inventors should “target the world when the product is launched, not when the project is launched,” said Ray Kurzweil in a keynote speech at the recent 8th Annual Independent Inventors Conference in Philadelphia, presented by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Kurzweil offered several other tips to inventors. For example:
Intel Corp. has made available its chip-making nanotechnology tools to cancer researchers to diagnose and study cancer.
Intel is building a room-sized machine called the Raman Bioanalyzer System at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. It beams lasers onto tiny medical samples to produce images of the molecules’ chemical structures.
The bioanalyzer also will have applications beyond cancer research for detecting single-molecule changes in any living… read more
Chemists have captured atom-scale images of the melting process, revealing the first images of the transition of a solid into a liquid at the timescale of femtoseconds.
“Imagine being able to see atoms as they move in real time,” says Professor R. J. Dwayne Miller of the University of Toronto departments of Chemistry and Physics. “Chemistry and biology are fundamentally governed by changes in atomic structure. We now have… read more
The first mobile phone designed specifically for blind and partially sighted people will go on sale in Spain next week. A speech synthesizer reads everything that would normally appear on the screen and speaks the name or number of incoming callers.