Sony President Kunitake Ando foresees a future personal computer that knows a person’s individual tendencies and tastes, functioning almost like a surrogate brain.
Hybrid PC-television devices will evolve for consumers and people will be able to retrieve their personal information from powerful networks that allow anytime, anywhere across a variety of individual devices.
Sony has demonstrated a walking robot that can smoothly simulate running. The breakthrough required sophisticated features in the robot’s joints and CPU to keep its balance and manage delicate maneuvers.
Global warming looks set to be much worse than previously forecast, according to new research.
Three top climate researchers claim that the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere should have warmed the world more than they have. The reason they have not, they say, is that the warming is being masked by sun-blocking smoke, dust and other polluting particles put into the air by human activity.
But they… read more
The “Digital Bill of Rights” debuted at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City on Monday. The document draft comes from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), two key figures in the battle against SOPA.
Issa and Wyden created the Digital Bill of Rights because they were concerned about what seemed like a legal oxymoron: lawmakers trying to regulate the Internet without understanding how individuals use… read more
Magnetic and non-magnetic materials have been coaxed to self-assemble in a “ferrofluid” into intricate permanent nanostructures by researchers at Duke University and the University of Massachusetts, raising the possibility of using these structures as basic building blocks for applications such as advanced optics, cloaking devices, data storage, and bioengineering.
A virtual golf course has been created with the strengths of male and female golfers. It rewards precision, while penalizing shots that are too long or too short, leveling the playing field between men and women.
In a simulated four rounds of golf, golfer Annika Sorenstam was the winner.
A research team has developed a device that could be used to detect the extremely rare tumor cells that circulate in cancer patients’ blood, helping doctors predict whether a tumor is going to spread.
Developed by researchers from MIT, Pennsylvania State University, and Carnegie Mellon University, the dime-sized device separates out tumor cells from white blood cells by exposing the cells to sound… read more
A technique to selectively sort semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes and conducting nanotubes has been discovered by researchers at Stanford University, University of California-Davis, and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.
When nanotubes are manufactured, semiconducting nanotubes, which work for transistors and solar cells, are mixed with conducting nanotubes, which work for batteries. Mixtures of conducting and semiconducting nanotubes do not carry enough current for wires or battery… read more
German researchers report a simple
electrical technique to divide
semiconducting and metallic nanotubes by using an electric field
to draw the more conductive metallic tubes to an electrode.
According to chemist Richard
Smalley of Rice University, the technique is long overdue and will find immediate use.
The technique is described in a paper published online by Science this week (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/
abstract/1086534).
Intelligence augmentation (IA) is a catch-all term for a wide variety of methods that use actual human beings, with actual human brains, as part of computer programs. The idea is that by having a human deal with the specific parts of a problem that are difficult or impossible for a computer, but trivial for you or me, you can have a program that seems to possess real human intelligence.… read more
A group of US scientists has developed an acoustic lens made of a metamaterial that can focus acoustic waves with greater energy than ever before possible to produce “sound bullets” that could find many uses, including effective, nonintrusive sonic scalpels for destroying tumors or kidney stones.
It could also be used to produce near photo-quality images of the inside of the body, but without the radiation risks of X-rays.
University of Bristol and University of Laguna researchers have developed a system using video from portable cameras that calculates the distance of obstacles, predicts the movements of people and cars, and generates three-dimensional acoustic maps, compensating for head positioning using a gyroscopic sensor.
UPDATE: The bubble bursts
An inexpensive “tabletop” device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions could lead to a new source of clean energy and a host of portable detectors and other applications.
A key component of the experiment was a glass test chamber about the size of two coffee mugs filled with a liquid called deuterated acetone, which contains a form of hydrogen… read more
By using surface acoustic waves (SAWs) to manipulate biological samples on a “lab-on-a-chip,” rapid, on-the-spot chemical analysis and diagnosis of disease has moved closer to reality.