Artists play an equal role with research scientists in the futuristic research “collaboratory” being assembled by astrophysicist Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, a $400 million research consortium assembled over the last five years.
One current project is to create a pack of “feral” robotic dogs with artificial intelligence capabilities and let them loose in a San Diego neighborhood. The robots… read more
Advocates of “Fab Labs” think they have the potential to vastly expand the creative powers of tinkerers and usher in a revolution in do-it-yourself design and manufacturing that can empower even the smallest of communities.
MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms began setting up Fab Labs three years ago as free community resources, using part of a $12.5 million National Science Foundation grant and local financing.
Each lab… read more
Google’s recent moves have stirred concern in industries from book publishing to telecommunications. Businesses already feeling the Google effect include advertising, software and the news media, real estate and auto sales.
Google could extend its economic reach in the next few years as more people get high-speed Internet service and cellphones become full-fledged search tools, according to analysts. And ever-smarter software, they say, will cull and organize larger and… read more
xG Technology has demonstrated wireless broadband 1000 times more efficient than WiMax, and claims the technique could also make wireless LANs that will run for years on watch batteries and could allow anyone to set up as a wireless ISP.
“Scientists built a robot that thinks like we do and set it loose to explore the world. New Scientist discovers what happened next
“The infant crawls across a floor strewn with blocks, grabbing and tasting as it goes, its malleable mind impressionable and hungry to learn. Before my eyes it is already adapting, discovering that the striped blocks are yummy and the spotted ones taste bad.
“Its exploration… read more
Motivated by a love for invention and for interacting with the musicians who used his technology, the synthesizer whiz had a profound impact on the music world, as Ray Kurzweil notes.
“In the 20th century, musical devices went beyond such natural ones (which were sometimes electrically amplified) to fully embrace high technology in the form of electronic music synthesis. The first synthesizers appeared in the early 1900s, but they… read more
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today. Inventor Andrew Knight will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against the entertainment industry.
Knight will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against anyone whose activities may fall within the scope of his published claims, including all major motion picture manufacturers and distributors, book publishers and distributors, television studios and broadcasters, and movie theaters.
Source:… read more
Google said Wednesday that it had completed the first major expansion of its Google Print database of searchable books, adding the full text of more than 10,000 works that are no longer under copyright, culled from the collections of four major research libraries.
The entire text of the works can be searched and read online through the Google Print site. Users can also save individual pages and cut and… read more
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers have deciphered a key part of the regulatory code that governs how motor neurons in the spinal cord connect to specific target muscles in the limbs.
The researchers said that understanding this code may help guide progress in restoring motor neuron function in people whose spinal cords have been damaged by trauma or disease. The studies suggest that the code — which involves… read more
A silicon chip that can carry light and even slow it down by a factor of 300 has been unveiled by IBM researchers in the US.
The idea is that such a device could synchronise data streams by slowing some streams, allowing others to catch up.
The chip demonstrates some of the essential techniques for creating high-speed photonic memory, which many researchers believe will one day make electronic… read more
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope may have detected the infrared glow from the very first generation of stars, a new study reports. If confirmed, the work would reveal the structure of the universe a few hundred million years after the big bang, when the galaxies that exist today were just beginning to take shape.
Astronomers have obtained the closest glimpse yet of the supermassive black hole thought to lurk at the center of our galaxy. They focused on radio emissions around the black hole over an area equal in width to the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
If astronomers are able to see up to the edge of the black hole’s event horizon — beyond which no light can… read more
A torrent of startups has surfaced recently to help us filter, manage, and control the flood of information on the Web. Some rely on insightful algorithms that understand popularity to filter the news, while others rely on the preferences of readers.
For example, Digg is a San Francisco startup that ranks news items by letting people choose which stories they like.
On Nov. 1, Bill Gates proclaimed this the era of “Live” software and insisted that Microsoft will play a major role in birthing a new generation of computing.
He laid out plans to create two families of Web services, one for consumers, called Windows Live, and one for small businesses, called Office Live.
Unlike traditional programs, such as Microsoft’s Office productivity suite, which reside on a PC, Web… read more
The group velocity of an ultrasound wave could theoretically jump by five orders of magnitude over its ordinary values and exceed c (the speed of light), when pulses of high-frequency sound strike a mixture of water and tiny (approximately 0.1-mm diameter) plastic spheres.