Carnegie Mellon University researchers have created a robot football team designed to play the game with humans riding ordinary Segways.
The exercise could help engineers develop robots capable of working effectively with humans in the future in tasks such as construction work, search and rescue operations, and space exploration.
Bill Gates kicked off the annual International Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday night by touting a mix of “seamless computing experiences” inside and outside the home, driven by Microsoft technology:
Researchers may have pinpointed the cause of Alzheimer’s disease: a rogue protein called amyloid beta that forms plaques in the brain.
Drugs that reduce this protein in humans may have the same protective effect.
In experiements with a strain of Alzheimer’s disease-prone mouse, as the animals age, amyloid beta levels rise and their memory declines. But when a key enzyme, called BACE1, is eliminated through genetic engineering, the… read more
Two deaf women have become the first people to undergo the risky procedure of having implants in their brainstems. The devices are designed to restore hearing by directly stimulating nerves.
The procedure is needed by people with a damaged cochlea or auditory nerve, where cochlear implants cannot help. The researchers hope that the implant, in which eight electrodes of different lengths are inserted into the brainstem, will be able… read more
Verizon is rolling out its “BroadbandAccess” (300 to 500 kbit/s, with with bursts of 2 Mbits/s) cell phone service nationwide this year.
Verizon promises its “iobi” service will offer features such as programmable call forwarding or voice mail showing up as email and much closer integration between landline, IP and cellular networks.
fMRI studies “confirm the existence of an active forgetting process and establish a neurobiological model for guiding inquiry into motivated (voluntary) forgetting,” say Stanford University scientists.
They showed that the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism, and it has a biological basis. The findings could encourage the development of new ways for people to overcome traumatizing memories.
Microscopic pollutant particles given off by traffic and industry can enter the bloodstream and the brain after being inhaled, scientists have found.
The particles are known to cause lung damage in susceptible patients, and are implicated in cardiovascular disease. Experiments on rats and humans have now discovered they can penetrate further into the body, including the brain, with unknown results.
UK scientists are calling for vigilance over the… read more
Nanotubes caused less scar tissue and stimulated neurons to grow 60 percent more fingerlike extensions, called neurites, needed to regenerate brain activity in damaged regions, according to a paper in the journal Nanotechnology.
Conventional silicon probes cause the body to regard them as foreign invaders and surround them with scar tissue. The nanotubes were designed so that their surfaces contained nanoscale bumps that mimic features found on the surfaces… read more
The Army’s Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) has awarded $2.25 million to two robotics firms to prototype a big mechanical dog capable of carrying ammunition, food and supplies into battle.
Depth perception is essential for recognizing obstacles and avoiding them, so NASA JPL developed a way for robots to see in three dimensions, using two separate cameras that take images of the same scene. JPL built a similar system… read more
A research project just beginning in Indonesia is examining correlations between the way concepts are expressed in languages and how native speakers of these languages think. This is a test of a hypothesis first made by Benjamin Lee Whorf, an early 20th-century American linguist, that the structure of language affects the way people think. Whorf’s hypothesis fell into disfavor half a century ago; it is now undergoing something of a… read more
Coming new types of jobs will include A.I. programmer, bio-informatician, Wireless engineer, fuel-cell engineer, and nanotechnologist.
Digital radio receivers finally go on sale nationwide Wednesday, pairing CD-quality audio in over-the-air broadcasts with text information such as song titles, weather and news alerts.
The Internet is set to become the basis for just about every form of communication, according to net pioneer Vint Cerf.
The Enum initiative attempts to turn phone numbers into net addresses and give people a universal way of contacting anyone, provided they know at least one e-mail, address, phone or pager number for them.
Naming Authority Pointer (NATPR) allows almost anything, such as book or magazine ISBN… read more
Physicists have quantified differences in the patterns of various musical genres and their correlations to subjective, qualitative musical aspects of these genres by using a technique called detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). DFA has been used to study complicated signals in economic, genetic and heartbeat data.
The method produces a number, “alpha,” that quantifies the complexity of patterns in a signal, in this case, the volume of music. Western classical… read more