Judy Estrin, the former chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, is worried that short-term thinking, reluctance to take risks, and decline in federal and university financing for research are causing Silicon Valley — and the United States as a whole — to no longer foster the kind of innovation necessary to develop groundbreaking technologies and sustain economic growth.
The author of SETI@home has created a new system that will make it possible to run several distributed computing projects on a single computer and let you specify what proportion of the computer’s resources is donated to each project.
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) acts like a software platform that can run a number of screen-saver-style applications on top of the PC’s own operating system. The… read more
EcoMotors is currently developing an engine prototype that could improve fossil-fuel economies by up to 60 percent (achieving 100 miles per gallon), while halving the weight and size of standard gas and diesel-powered engines.
Scott Wall is one of the first people in Britain to be fitted with a bionic foot after he had part of his left leg amputated.
The Proprio Foot, designed by Icelandic company Ossur, is the first to use sensors to detect surfaces and slopes, which activates a motor to adjust itself to cope with a changing environment. Its software recognizes such things as hills and stairs and then… read more
A study of how people’s ideas about robots are influenced by fiction could help design robots that make the most of those expectations.
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
MIT computer science professor Marvin Minsky has written a new book, “The Emotion Machine,” in which he argues that, contrary to popular conception, emotions aren’t distinct from rational thought; rather, they are simply another way of thinking, one that computers could perform.
“Being angry is a very useful way to solve problems, for instance, by intimidating an opponent or getting rid of people who bother you,” he said.
Fitbit, a startup based in San Francisco, has built a small, unobtrusive sensor that tracks a person’s movement 24 hours a day to produce a record of steps taken, calories burned, and even the quality of sleep.
Data is wirelessly uploaded to the Web so that users can monitor their activity and compare it with that of their friends.
Steve Mann, an engineering professor at the University of Toronto, spends hours every day viewing the world through a little monitor in front of his eye connected to a wearable computer and wirelessly to the Internet.
Mann manipulates the computer through a handheld device he invented and he has experimented with putting electrodes on his skin and trying to control the cursor with brain waves. He records video with… read more
A new massively parallel approach for manipulating single DNA and protein molecules and studying their interactions under force, called “single molecule centrifugation,” has been developed by researchers from the Rowland Institute at Harvard University.
The “The Centrifuge Force Microscope” (CFM) allows for improvements in throughput and cost in studying biological systems ranging from DNA replication to blood clotting, compared to technologies such as optical and magnetic tweezers and the… read more
Google’s new site, www.google.com/patents, lets anyone search for U.S. patents by keyword, patent number, inventor and filing date, and makes it easier to find relevant patents than the USPTO site.
Intel has conducted an experiment in New Mexico showing it’s possible to use outside air 91 percent of the time to save $2.87 million on cooling a 10MW datacenter.
Jon Blake Cusack, from Holland, Michigan has named his new-born son “Jon Blake Cusack 2.0,” as if he were a software upgrade.
“There’s a lot of new features from Version 1.0 [Mr Cusack himself] with additional features from [wife] Jamie,” he said.
The first 178 reference microbial genomes have now been analyzed and catalogued by the he Human Microbiome Project (HMP) by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
A microbiome is the full complement of microorganisms populating a “supraorganism,” such as a human. These symbiotic microbes outnumber an adult’s own somatic and germ cells by up to a 10:1 ratio; the interactions between our human and… read more