Documentary " How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? "

http://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/main/release_artificial-vacuum-enables-atoms-to-perform-logic-with-light

http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=54341

Visit 3d Pompeii in Second Lifehttp://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2009/6753.html

Joking program
http://www.physorg.com/news179736700.html

Surgery on beating heart thanks to robotic helping hand
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/spu-sob120709.php

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality project is one of my interest area , especially in last few weeks when working on a MMO Virtual Reality project with the University Politehnica of Bucharest , Virtual Reality department.

Here's a interesting framework, open source.

Television control for the remote

Over half of the population of Brazil lives in remote towns and villages. Many have no telephone connection. But the Brazilian power line network covers almost 95% of populated areas. And wherever there is power, there are usually television sets.

Digital television signals with java applications embedded within them were broadcast by the SAMBA project into the small Brazilian town of Barreirinhas which is 300km from the nearest major city. Some 30 Barreirinhas households, in the vicinity of a 3km power line, were equipped with special set-top boxes that enabled them to access the broadcast data. The technology was designed for use by non-experts, and developed for delivery at minimum cost to maximise access for people with low incomes.

Read more....

A new invention from Tel Aviv University researchers may change that. Prof. Yosi Shacham-Diamand of TAU's Department of Engineering, working with a team of European Union scientists, has successfully wired a state-of-the-art artificial hand to existing nerve endings in the stump of a severed arm. The device, called "SmartHand," resembles — in function, sensitivity and appearance — a real hand

http://www.aftau.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=10871

Hubble

This is a very nice video about Hubble and amazing images taken by this tellescope.

Communicating person to person through the power of thought alone

New research from the University of Southampton has demonstrated that it is possible for communication from person to person through the power of thought alone.

Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) can be used for capturing brain signals and translating them into commands that allow humans to control (just by thinking) devices such as computers, robots, rehabilitation technology and virtual reality environments.

This experiment goes a step further and was conducted by Dr Christopher James from the University’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. The aim was to expand the current limits of this technology and show that brain-to-brain (B2B) communication is possible.

Dr James comments: “Whilst BCI is no longer a new thing and person to person communication via the nervous system was shown previously in work by Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, here we show, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing. We have yet to grasp the full implications of this but there are various scenarios where B2B could be of benefit such as helping people with severe debilitating muscle wasting diseases, or with the so-called ‘locked-in’ syndrome, to communicate and it also has applications for gaming.”

His experiment had one person using BCI to transmit thoughts, translated as a series of binary digits, over the internet to another person whose computer receives the digits and transmits them to the second user’s brain through flashing an LED lamp.

While attached to an EEG amplifier, the first person would generate and transmit a series of binary digits, imagining moving their left arm for zero and their right arm for one. The second person was also attached to an EEG amplifier and their PC would pick up the stream of binary digits and flash an LED lamp at two different frequencies, one for zero and the other one for one. The pattern of the flashing LEDS is too subtle to be picked by the second person, but it is picked up by electrodes measuring the visual cortex of the recipient.

The encoded information is then extracted from the brain activity of the second user and the PC can decipher whether a zero or a one was transmitted. This shows true brain-to-brain activity.

You can watch Dr James’ BCI experiment at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93p7oDkA5WA&feature=email

Dr James is part of the University of Southampton’s Brain-Computer Interfacing Research Programme, which brings together biomedical engineering and the clinical sciences and provides a cohesive scientific basis for rehabilitation research and management. Projects are driven by clinical problems, using cutting-edge signal processing research to produce an investigative tool for advancing knowledge of neurophysiological mechanisms, as well as providing a practical therapeutic system to be used outside a specialised BCI laboratory.

Dr James also appeared on BBC2’s ‘James May’s Big Ideas’ last year, talking about thought controlled wheelchairs and introducing the field of BCI. You can view the segment here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyrd0uOuyms&feature=related

Nanotech could make humans immortal by 2040, futurist says

Computerworld - In 30 or 40 years, we'll have microscopic machines traveling through our bodies, repairing damaged cells and organs, effectively wiping out diseases. The nanotechnology will also be used to back up our memories and personalities.

In an interview with Computerworld, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil said that anyone alive come 2040 or 2050 could be close to immortal. The quickening advance of nanotechnology means that the human condition will shift into more of a collaboration of man and machine, as nanobots flow through human blood streams and eventually even replace biological blood, he added.

That may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but Kurzweil, a member of the Inventor's Hall of Fame and a recipient of the National Medal of Technology, says that research well underway today is leading to a time when a combination of nanotechnology and biotechnology will wipe out cancer, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and diabetes.

It'll also be a time when humans will augment their natural cognitive powers and add years to their lives, Kurzweil said.

"It's radical life extension," Kurzweil said. "The full realization of nanobots will basically eliminate biological disease and aging. I think we'll see widespread use in 20 years of [nanotech] devices that perform certain functions for us. In 30 or 40 years, we will overcome disease and aging. The nanobots will scout out organs and cells that need repairs and simply fix them. It will lead to profound extensions of our health and longevity."

Of course, people will still be struck by lightning or hit by a bus, but much more trauma will be repairable. If nanobots swim in, or even replace, biological blood, then wounds could be healed almost instantly. Limbs could be regrown. Backed up memories and personalities could be accessed after a head trauma.

Today, researchers at MIT already are using nanoparticles to deliver killer genes that battle late-stage cancer. The university reported just last month the nano-based treatment killed ovarian cancer, which is considered to be one of the most deadly cancers, in mice.

And earlier this year, scientists at the University of London reported using nanotechnology to blast cancer cells in mice with "tumor busting" genes, giving new hope to patients with inoperable tumors. So far, tests have shown that the new technique leaves healthy cells undamaged.

With this kind of work going on now, Kurzweil says that by 2024 we'll be adding a year to our life expectancy with every year that passes. "The sense of time will be running in and not running out," he added. "Within 15 years, we will reverse this loss of remaining life expectancy. We will be adding more time than is going by."

And in 35 to 40 years, we basically will be immortal, according to the man who wrote The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Kurzweil also maintains that adding microscopic machines to our bodies won't make us any less human than we are today or were 500 years ago.

"The definition of human is that we are the species that goes beyond our limitations and changes who we are," he said. "If that wasn't the case, you and I wouldn't be around because at one point life expectancy was 23. We've extended ourselves in many ways. This is an extension of who we are. Ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch, we've extended who we are through tools. It's the nature of human beings to change who we are."

But that doesn't mean there aren't parts of this future that don't worry him. With nanotechnology so advanced that it can travel through our bodies and affect great change on them, come dangers as well as benefits.

The nanobots, he explained, will be self-replicating and engineers will have to harness and contain that replication.

"You could have some self-replicating nanobot that could create copies of itself... and ultimately, within 90 replications, it could devour the body it's in or all humans if it becomes a non-biological plague," said Kurzweil. "Technology is not a utopia. It's a double-edged sword and always has been since we first had fire."

Room’s Ambience Fingerprinted By Phone

DURHAM, N.C. -- Your smart phone may soon be able to know not only that you're at the mall, but whether you're in the jewelry store or the shoe store.

Duke University computer engineers have made use of standard cell phone features – accelerometers, cameras and microphones – to turn the unique properties of a particular space into a distinct fingerprint. While standard global positioning systems (GPS) are only accurate to 10 meters (32 feet) and do not work indoors, the new application is designed to work indoors and can be as precise as telling if a user is on one side of an interior wall or another.

http://news.duke.edu/2009/09/surrsense.html

Google Earth Application Maps Carbon's Course

Tracking carbon dioxide using Google Earth . Very nice indeed, isn't it ?


http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/co2_google.html

Robots in education

EE Times: Latest News


Robots in education



Robotics engineering promises to extend humanity's physical and intellectual reach to remote areas of our universe, enabling exploration and excavation of far-removed places. Such capabilities are the focus of a number of current educational projects in robotics.

Consider the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million privately funded competition among design teams hoping to send a robot to the moon, where the winning bot will travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to Earth. To get the next generation interested in both robotics and space, the X Prize Foundation has teamed with Google, Lego Systems and National Instruments on MoonBots, a competition inspired by the Google Lunar X Prize. Under the program, small teams of children and adults will use Lego Mindstorms kits to design, program and construct robots that perform simulated lunar missions similar to those targeted by the Google Lunar X competition.


http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219700642

By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain

..or at least that's what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics. Now, he believes we're on the brink of a new age – the 'singularity' – when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) – and even live forever. Is there sense to his science – or is the man who reasons that one day he'll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8280864.stm

Google Wave

Google Wave, which combines e-mail, instant messaging and wiki-style editing will go on public trial today.

The search giant hopes the tool, described as "how e-mail would look if it were invented today", will transform how people communicate online.

It will be open to 100,000 invitees from 1600BST, each of whom can nominate five further people to "join the Wave".

The tool is also open source, meaning third party developers can use the code to build new applications.

The developer behind Wave described it as "a communication and collaboration tool".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8280864.stm

Saving the Bucharest from construction Mafia

Together with my friends from "Save Bucharest" ONG (non-guvernamental organisation) from construction Mafia. Protesting in front of Bucharest Mair done the scope of this organisation, from abuses(corruption) of public administation :)


So, for now Victory!



http://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-esential-6224193-video-ziua-marilor-proiecte-imobiliare-consiliul-general-capitalei-bataie-doi-peremisti-54-puz-uri-lasate-aer-iar-costica-costanda-incasa-30-milioane-euro-primarie.htm

Two young UC Berkeley faculty members receive MacArthur 'genius' award

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/09/21_genius.shtml

Researchers using parallel processing computing could save thousands by using an Xbox

A new study by a University of Warwick researcher has demonstrated that researchers trying to model a range of processes could use the power and capabilities of a particular XBox chip as a much cheaper alternative to other forms of parallel processing hardware.

Dr Simon Scarle, a researcher in the University of Warwick’s WMG Digital Laboratory, wished to model how electrical excitations in the heart moved around damaged cardiac cells in order to investigate or even predict cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal electrical activity in the heart which can lead to a heart attack). To conduct these simulations using traditional CPU based processing one would normally need to book time on a dedicated parallel processing computer or spend thousands on a parallel network of PCs.

Dr Scarle however also had a background in the computer games industry as he had been a Software Engineer at the Warwickshire firm Rare Ltd, part of Microsoft Games Studios. His time there made him very aware of the parallel processing power of Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) of the XBox 360, the popular computer games console played in many homes. He was convinced that this chip could, for a few hundred pounds, be employed to conduct much the same scientific modelling as several thousand pounds of parallel network PCs.

The results of his work have just been published in the journal Computational Biology and Chemistry under the title of “Implications of the Turing completeness of reaction-diffusion models, informed by GPGPU simulations on an XBox 360: Cardiac arrhythmias, re-entry and the Halting problem”. The good news is that his hunch was right and the XBox 360 GPU can indeed be used by researchers in exactly the money saving way he envisaged. Simon Scarle said:

“This is a highly effective way of carrying out high end parallel computing on “domestic” hardware for cardiac simulations. Although major reworking of any previous code framework is required, the Xbox 360 is a very easy platform to develop for and this cost can easily be outweighed by the benefits in gained computational power and speed, as well as the relative ease of visualization of the system.” However his research does have some bad news for a particular set of cardiac researchers in that his study demonstrates that it is impossible to predict the rise of certain dangerous arrhythmias, as he has shown that cardiac cell models are affected by a specific limitation of computational systems known as the Halting problem.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/researchers_using_parallel/

AFOSR Funds Super-Fast, Secure Computing

Air Force Office of Scientific Research(AFOSR)-supported physicists at the University of Michigan are developing innovative components for quantum, or super-fast, computers that will improve security for data storage and transmission on Air Force systems.

According to Professor Duncan Steel, lead researcher from the University of Michigan, the long-term goal of this basic research is to push the frontier of modern electronics and optics into the realm of quantum behavior, where more complex computing problems can be solved at faster speeds.

To accomplish this goal, Steel and his team have started by exploring ways to optically create and maintain quantum coherence using a single electron or hole in a quantum dot structure. Maintaining a constant electrical charge for an extended period of time in a solid-state nanostructure, like a quantum dot, is likely key to long-term success.

http://www.wpafb.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123166736

On the road to secure car-to-car communications

A European research project works out how to keep car-to-car data transmissions private and secure from malicious hackers.
T is driving forward a new era of more efficient and safer road travel for European citizens. Just as ABS brake technology dramatically cut accidents and fatalities in the 1980s, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication will make our roads safer still.

But there is a big question to answer before the technology becomes widely adopted: is the communication link secure?

Imagine the chaos that a hacker could cause by sending bogus messages to vehicles. They could tell one car of an accident ahead, make the driver brake hard and actually cause an accident behind. They could invent fake traffic jams, encourage drivers to take alternative routes, then enjoy speeding along clear roads. Insecure communication systems could also let criminals track individual cars (e.g. celebrities, politicians) or harass drivers with unwanted alerts or spam messages.

http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90862

Researchers track 3,000 pieces of Seattle trash

SEATTLE — Where does that coffee cup, disposable razor or unwanted television end up once it's tossed to the curb?

Using an electronic tracking device about the size of a matchbook, MIT researchers are tagging about 3,000 pieces of Seattle trash to get people thinking about what they throw away and where it ends up.

"Seeing where your trash goes allows you to change your behavior," said Assaf Biderman, associate director of MIT's SENSEable City lab and a project leader. "Will you refill a cup instead of throwing away a disposable one?"

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioocmv4EKd1jiy1Thwdbzo7-_iCAD9AMIA9G0

This Is Your Lifelog

This reminds me of the movie Total recall with Arnold
Digital lifelog records everything you do, creating a digital memory.
To keep it short, watch the movie and read the article here

Women in IT

Hopefully...more women in IT.

"Out of the 2500-odd IT professionals and developers at this year's Microsoft Tech Ed, only about 200 are women.
Out of the 2500-odd IT professionals and developers at this year's Microsoft Tech Ed on the Gold Coast, only about 200 are women. The attendance of women is up 50 per cent from last year, but it's still a far cry from the number of men pouring through the doors.

Nonetheless, the women got one back today with an interactive workshop — the first meeting of its kind held at Tech Ed. Women in IT is about growing strong female leaders in the IT industry".

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/317902/tech_ed_women_it

Digital Contacts Will Keep an Eye on Your Vital Signs

Forget about 20/20. “Perfect” vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg.

The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world “augmented reality.” Such technology is already appearing in smartphones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there?

Scientists, eye surgeons, professors and students at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens containing one built-in LED, powered wirelessly with radio frequency waves.

More here...

Virtual Maps for the Blind

The blind and visually impaired often rely on others to provide cues and information on navigating through their environments. The problem with this method is that it doesn't give them the tools to venture out on their own, says Dr. Orly Lahav of Tel Aviv University's School of Education and Porter School for Environmental Studies. To give navigational "sight" to the blind, Dr. Lahav has invented a new software tool to help the blind navigate through unfamiliar places. It is connected to an existing joystick, a 3-D haptic device, that interfaces with the user through the sense of touch. People can feel tension beneath their fingertips as a physical sensation through the joystick as they navigate around a virtual environment which they cannot see, only feel: the joystick stiffens when the user meets a virtual wall or barrier. The software can also be programmed to emit sounds — a cappuccino machine firing up in a virtual café, or phones ringing when the explorer walks by a reception desk

Capsules for Self-Healing Circuits

Nanotube-filled capsules could restore conductivity to damaged electronics.

Dropping a cell phone or laptop can, of course, cause irreparable damage. Now researchers are developing a material that could let a circuit self-repair small but critical damage caused by such an impact.

Electrical band-aid: Polymer capsules filled with carbon nanotubes can restore conductivity to electrical circuits when ripped open. The nanotube suspension inside the capsules is visible in the light microscope image above; the image below, from a scanning-electron microscope, shows the surface of the polymer capsules. Credit: J. Mat. Chem./RSC Publishing

Capsules, filled with conductive nanotubes, that rip open under mechanical stress could be placed on circuit boards in failure-prone areas. When stress causes a crack in the circuit, some of the capsules would also rupture and release nanotubes to bridge the break. The researchers, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are also working on capsule additives designed to heal failures in lithium-ion battery electrodes, to prevent the short-circuiting that can sometimes cause a fire.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23413/page2/

Still trying to crack Nazi Enigma messages

Can you believe that?:)
Blogger: Technology, news, and others - Creaţi o postare
"
You can donate your spare PC processing power to dozens of cool volunteer computing projects simply by downloading some software. Enigma@home is the one that called me.

Enigma@home is based on the M4 Project, an effort spearheaded by German-born violinist and encryption enthusiast Stefan Krah. The M4 Project was designed to break three original messages generated by a famed electro-mechanical Enigma machine and intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942. (The project gets its name from the four-rotor Enigma M4 machine presumed to be used by the Germans for enciphering the signals during wartime.) The project's method for cracking the ciphers is described as "a mixture of brute force and a hill climbing algorithm."

"

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/083109-nazi-enigma-messages.html?t51hb

New computer system to classify music on its beat and tempo

This is a nice artifficial intelligence application

"Taiwanese computer scientists have developed a neural network program that can classify music on its beat and tempo.

They hope that the new system could be boon for music archivists with large numbers of untagged recordings and for users searching through mislabeled mp3 libraries"

http://www.newspostonline.com/science/new-computer-system-to-classify-music-on-its-beat-and-tempo-2009083067778

Iphone app locates H1N1

This is not a spam blogpot ...

Ok let's me what 's new


Boston, Mass. - A new iPhone application, created by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, enables users to track and report outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as H1N1 (swine flu), on the ground in real time. The application, "Outbreaks Near Me," builds upon the mission and proven capability of HealthMap, an online resource that collects, filters, maps and disseminates information about emerging infectious diseases, and provides a new, contextualized view of a user's specific location - pinpointing outbreaks that have been reported in the vicinity of the user and offering the opportunity to search for additional outbreak information by location or disease.

http://www.childrenshospital.org/newsroom/Site1339/mainpageS1339P1sublevel559.html

Good news

Seems that after economic crisis, some good news

Here....

Quantum computer slips onto chips

Researchers have devised a penny-sized silicon chip that uses photons to run Shor's algorithm - a well-known quantum approach - to solve a maths problem.

The algorithm computes the two numbers that multiply together to form a given figure, and has until now required laboratory-sized optical computers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8236943.stm

After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm

Dr. Ross, an I.B.M. researcher, is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics. Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster and more powerful than today’s transistors.

The reason that many computer scientists are pursuing this goal is that the shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits. Increasingly, transistor manufacturers grapple with subatomic effects, like the tendency for electrons to “leak” across material boundaries. The leaking electrons make it more difficult to know when a transistor is in an on or off state, the information that makes electronic computing possible. They have also led to excess heat, the bane of the fastest computer chips.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/science/01trans.html

IBM 'X-Rays' A Molecule

The imaging breakthrough could lead to the development of smaller and faster processors and memory devices.
IBM scientists claim to be the first to image the inner structure of a molecule, opening up new possibilities in building smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient computing components.

The achievement, reported in the August 28 issue of Science magazine, is described as a milestone in surface microscopy, which pushes the exploration of using molecules and atoms in the field of nanotechnology.

Click here for more...

OpenCL: Parallel programmers' new best friend

Apple's Snow Leopard operating system, which hits the streets on Friday, has plenty of new technology--but one of its major new features will soon be available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other major platforms.

OpenCL, the Open Computing Language, was originally proposed by Apple to support parallel programming on GPUs. There are other GPU programming languages, such as Nvidia's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) extensions for C and the Brook stream program language developed at Stanford University and included in Advanced Micro Devices' Stream Computing software development kit, but rather than choosing one of these languages, Apple chose to create a new standard independent of the big graphics vendors.

In fact, OpenCL is even independent of Apple. One of the first things Apple did was offer to hand it over to the Khronos Group, the same independent standards organization that manages the OpenGL standard for 3D rendering.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10319075-23.html

High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation

A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!

Earthlings

EARTHLINGS is a documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals, but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called "non-human providers".








The hope for the animals of tomorrow is to be found in a Human Culture
which learns to feel beyond itself. We must learn empathy,we must learn to see into the eyes of an animal and feel that their
life has value because they are alive.

UK team digs into data from scroll scans

University of Kentucky computer experts are entering the crucial stage of their quest to unlock the secrets of two Roman scrolls buried in a volcanic eruption almost 2,000 years ago.

The UK team, led by computer scientist Brent Seales, spent July in Paris, France, arduously making CT scans of the scrolls, which survived the famous 79 A.D. eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius. The delicate papyrus scrolls haven't been read or even unrolled since the eruption.

Seales' group recently returned to Lexington, bringing back two terabytes of stored computer data generated from the scans. Next, they must subject all that data to sophisticated computer processing at UK's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, aimed at producing 3-D images of the scrolls. The researchers hope that ultimately will allow them to digitally "unroll" the scrolls, and see what's written on them.

http://www.kentucky.com/142/story/905984.html

Humanoid Robot's Latest AI Abilities

PhysOrg.com) -- In August 2007, Le Trung invented Aiko, a Yumecom, or "Dream Computer Robot." Although it took only a month and a half to build Aiko's exterior, the artificial intelligence software has been a work in progress ever since. Recently, Le Trung has demonstrated his most recent improvements to the software, called BRAINS (Bio Robot Artificial Intelligence Neural System).
Aiko has the ability to identify objects, learn what new objects are, understand more than 13,000 sentences, and more. Image credit: Le Trung.



http://www.physorg.com/news170419268.html

Immersive Dome – Don’t just watch, join the action!

Dome projection replaces the flat movie screen – the »Immersive Dome« puts viewers at the heart of the action, and lets them actively participate. And instead of the conventional surround sound, a three-dimensional aural experience awaits visitors. At IBC, the trade show for the electronics media industry in Amsterdam, two institutes of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft debut the »Immersive Dome» in Hall 8, Booth C81.

http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2009/08/immersive-dome.jsp

A-Z of Programming Languages: Scala

Twitter and LinkedIn both use it, but the darling of Web 2.0 start-ups is also popular with big corporates. Computerworld talks to Martin Odersky.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/315254/-z_programming_languages_scala?fp=4194304&fpid=1

Organic electronics a two-way street, thanks to new plastic semiconductor

Plastic that conducts electricity holds promise for cheaper, thinner and more flexible electronics. This technology is already available in some gadgets -- the new Sony walkman that was introduced earlier this summer and the Microsoft Zune HD music player released last week both incorporate organic light-emitting electronic displays.

Until now, however, circuits built with organic materials have allowed only one type of charge to move through them. New research from the University of Washington makes charges flow both ways. The cover article in an upcoming issue of the journal Advanced Materials describes an approach to organic electronics that allows transport of both positive and negative charges.

"The organic semiconductors developed over the past 20 years have one important drawback. It's very difficult to get electrons to move through," said lead author Samson Jenekhe, a UW professor of chemical engineering and chemistry. "By now having polymer semiconductors that can transmit both positive and negative charges, it broadens the available approaches. This would certainly change the way we do things."

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/08-09NexCave.asp

3-D Technology from Modified HDTV LCD Screen

For the first time, a team of researchers at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego, have designed a 9-panel, 3-D visualization display from HDTV LCD flat-screens developed by JVC.

The technology, dubbed "NexCAVE," was inspired by Calit2's StarCAVE virtual reality environment and designed and developed by Calit2 Research Scientist Tom DeFanti, Virtual Reality Design Engineer Greg Dawe, Project Scientist Jürgen Schulze and Visualization Specialist Andrew Prudhomme.

Although the StarCAVE's unique pentagon shape and 360-degree views make it possible for groups of scientists to venture into worlds as small as nanoparticles and as big as the cosmos, its expensive projection system requires constant maintenance — an obstacle DeFanti and Dawe were determined to overcome.

"It's always been our dream to make a projector-free LCD flat panel CAVE," DeFanti says. "The trick was to get the form of the huge StarCAVE into the space of a living room. We took a speculative leap by overlapping 9 panels, and it turned out better than we thought."

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/08-09NexCave.asp

Where Phones in Class Are OK

Auten was one of nine students learning to create iPhone applications, or apps, for a new course at New Jersey Institute of Technology last spring. More than halfway through the seminar, the information technology major dreamed up two apps of his own, developed them with the knowledge gained in class, and sold them on Apple’s online store for $0.99 each.
Auten’s programs have since been downloaded 11,000 times and netted him more than $1,000, with Apple keeping 30 percent of the revenue. “Kids Be Gone” aims to annoy children by emitting high-frequency tones only they can hear, while “Party Music Strobe” shines a strobe light to the beat of any song played on the iPhone. Of their success, the 22-year-old remarked, “The stupider the application is, the more sales you get.”
A growing number of universities are teaching students like Auten to program for the iPhone, Google's Android, and other smart phone systems, fueled by the belief that mobile development is the next technological gold mine. Over the past year, department-sponsored classes have sprouted at Stanford University, University of Southern California, New York University, Seneca College in Canada, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Mississippi State University, with other institutions following their lead. Others are extension or student-taught courses, such as at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University.


http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/20/iphone

Public transport gets personal

European research project has developed technologies that pave the way for highly efficient unmanned public transport systems in our cities.

In our congested cities it is hard to imagine that private cars and taxis could ever be replaced by a public transport system that provides a personal, door-to-door service. But this is exactly the long-term vision of Michel Parent who directs the R&D programme into automated transportation at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA).

“At the moment most public transport needs drivers to control the vehicles,” he says, “and that makes it suitable only for mass transportation. But the more you can automate vehicles and make them work on the existing infrastructure – in other words roads – then personal, rapid transit becomes feasible.

“Automation offers a massive boost in the efficiency of public transportation and is an ideal solution for our polluted and congested city centres. They can complement mass transportation systems by extending the reach of public transport, taking people from the bus, tram and train stations deeper into the heart of cities or to distant suburbs.”

Taking turns

Parent is the coordinator of CyberCars2, a European research project that is developing a wide range of technologies that, together, will make road-based automated transport systems a reality.

CyberCars2 builds on the work of two earlier successful projects funded by the EU. The first, CyberCars, developed a number of sense, control and guidance technologies to enable vehicles to navigate roads and avoid obstacles. These technologies were successfully demonstrated by the CyberMove project with a final demonstration in Antibes.

The technology to control single automated vehicles is therefore tried and tested – and is found in automated transport systems, including the ULTRa system under construction at Heathrow Airport and the Cybercab in Masdar, Abu Dhabi.

“The main challenge we wanted to address in the CyberCars2 follow-on project was how to operate and coordinate several different vehicles at high throughput,” explains Parent.

“Efficient transport systems require vehicles to cooperate with each other. [They need] to be able to communicate and negotiate with each other and with the infrastructure itself. We wanted to make this happen automatically, too.”

One of the most important aspects of the project, then, was to work out the best way to route data between vehicles.

“We have developed the routing layer so that vehicles can communicate even when they can't ‘see’ each other. We came up with the routing protocols to make it possible to do ‘multi-hop’ data exchanges between two vehicles on the move, by using a go-between, which could be another vehicle or part of the roadside infrastructure,” he explains.

The project also developed the data exchange mechanisms (based on web-services) and the standards for exchanging data about position and speed.

The project team is in discussions with the International Standards Organisation and the European Car-to-Car Consortium (a collaboration of stakeholders involved in vehicular communication) about the adoption of its communications layer as a standard for automated vehicle communication.

Speed up take up

Having endowed vehicles with an ability to ‘talk’, CyberCars2 addressed the control software that would allow them to cooperate. The aim was for several different cybercars, using a variety of sense and control technologies, to have the ability to move close to each other, yet remain safe from collisions.

Using computer simulations of intersections and merges, the project partners developed rules for how vehicles must negotiate with each other in close proximity. They also added so-called ‘platooning’ capabilities to the control software so that vehicles could follow closely behind each other.

The results of the project made quite a spectacle. A fleet of six cybercars (electric Fiat Pandas and a Citroen Berlingo van) and three unmanned buggies built by INRIA, were let loose on a figure-of-eight circuit in a special test zone in La Rochelle.

The cars successfully navigated the circuit using a wide range of different navigation systems – but that was just the 'old' technology at work. More importantly, the cars would communicate with other vehicles at the four-way crossover and slow down or stop to avoid collisions, then safely navigate the junction.

Various project partners are incorporating the results of the project into their own products. Demonstrations also take place in several other European cities as part of the CityMobil project.

“Automated transportation makes a lot of sense to reduce congestion and fumy cars, as a complement to mass transport,” says Parent. “We've proven that the technology now exists to deploy a fleet and run an efficient and safe system. We expect many cities will start to explore these options.”

http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90845

Desktop multiprocessing: Not so fast

Some time ago, computer vendors passed the point of diminishing returns concerning processor clock speeds, and could no longer keep hiking frequency rates. To maintain continued performance improvements, suppliers turned to installing multiple instances of the processor -- multiple cores -- on a processor chip, and as a result, multicore processors are now mainstream for desktops. But to realize any performance improvements the software has to be able to use those multiple cores.

And to do that, most software will need to be rewritten.

"We have to reinvent computing, and get away from the fundamental premises we inherited from von Neumann," says Burton Smith, technical fellow at Microsoft Corp., referring to the theories of computer science pioneer John von Neumann (1903 - 1957). "He assumed one instruction would be executed at a time, and we are no longer even maintaining the appearance of one instruction at a time."

But software cannot always keep up with the advances in hardware, says Tom Halfhill, senior analyst for the Microprocessor Report newsletter in Scottsdale, Ariz. "If you have a task that cannot be parallelized and you are currently on a plateau of performance in a single-processor environment, you will not see that task getting significantly faster in the future."

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136633/Desktop_multiprocessing_Not_so_fast?taxonomyId=12&pageNumber=1

Wi-Fi via White Spaces

Long-range, low-cost wireless Internet could soon be delivered using radio spectrum once reserved for use by TV stations. The blueprints for a computer network that uses "white spaces," which are empty fragments of the spectrum scattered between used frequencies, will be presented today at ACM SIGCOMM 2009, a communications conference held in Barcelona, Spain.

TV stations have traditionally broadcast over lower frequencies that carry information longer distances. However, with the ongoing transition from analog to digital broadcasts, more unused frequencies are opening up than ever.

By tapping into these lower frequencies, it should be easier to provide broadband Internet access in rural areas and fill in gaps in city Wi-Fi networks. For example, the spectrum between 512 megahertz and 698 megahertz, which was originally allotted to analog TV channels from 21 to 51, offers a longer range than conventional Wi-Fi, which operates at 2.4 gigahertz. "Imagine the potential if you could connect to your home [Internet] router from up to a mile," says Ranveer Chandra, a member of the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research behind the project.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/23271/page1/

Light Shed On Brain's Mechanism Responsible For Processing Of Speech

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have succeeded for the first time in devising a model that describes and identifies a basic cellular mechanism that enables networks of neurons to efficiently decode speech in changing conditions.
he research may lead to the upgrading of computer algorithms for faster and more precise speech recognition as well as to the development of innovative treatments for auditory problems among adults and young people.

Our brain has the capability to process speech and other complex auditory stimuli and to make sense of them, even when the sound signals reach our ears in a slowed, accelerated or distorted manner.

However, the neuronal mechanisms that enable our brain to perceive a word correctly, for example, that is pronounced in different ways by different speakers or to understand a heavy accent, was a mystery to scientists until now.

Research associate Dr. Robert Gütig and Prof. Haim Sompolinsky of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University have succeeded in describing a cellular process by which sensory neurons in the brain can automatically adjust their perceptual clocks and thus correct large temporal variations in the rate of sounds and speech that arrive from the environment.

According to their findings, which were recently published in the journal PLoS Biology, the bio-physical mechanism that exists in our brain enables single nerve cells in the cerebral cortex to perform word identification tasks almost perfectly.

The understanding of the process of speech decoding and the possibilities of its implementation in technology – by the development of neural network algorithms

for the identification and processing of various patterns of sound signals – could lead to the significant upgrading of speech recognition technology in communications and computing, for instance in telephone voice dialing or in voice and sound monitoring devices.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090812081944.htm

Feeding cancers softens them up for attack

You would think the worst thing you could do to a cancer patient is to "feed" their tumour. Yet drugs that improve the blood supply to tumours can help hasten their destruction, new research has shown.

The hope is that by giving the drugs to sufferers as a pre-treatment, it will make their cancers more vulnerable to subsequent chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

The strategy has already had some success in patients with pancreatic cancer, and a larger trial is planned now that the mechanism by which it works has been demonstrated in mice.

he drugs work by repairing and improving the quality of blood vessels supplying tumours with blood.

Most tumours have blood supplies that leave parts of the tumour starved of oxygen, or "hypoxic". The vessels are also leaky, stopping chemotherapy drugs penetrating deeply enough to kill the growth. The hypoxic regions also promote the genesis of the most malignant types of cancer cells, as they have to be hardier to survive the suffocating conditions.

This means that tumours well supplied with oxygen are actually more vulnerable to chemo- or radiotherapy, and researchers have for years sought ways to make use of this fact, including putting patients in oxygen chambers.

Now four drugs have been found that have the potential to weaken tumours in as little as three days by improving their oxygen supply.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17545-feeding-cancers-softens-them-up-for-attack.html

Why microbes are smarter than you thought

The vast majority of species on Earth are single-celled. Most of these languish in obscurity – many have never even been named – but some of the relatively few species that have been studied exhibit remarkable abilities.

Many of these are physical: some micro-organisms are amazingly strong; others can hibernate for hundreds of thousands of years or thrive in environments so extreme that they would kill off most other life forms in a flash.

But many bacteria and protists also exhibit behaviour that looks remarkably intelligent. This behaviour isn't the result of conscious thought – the sort you find in humans and other complex animals – because single-celled organisms don't have nervous systems, let alone brains.

A better explanation is that they're "biological computers" with internal machinery that can process information.


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17390-why-microbes-are-smarter-than-you-thought.html?page=1

Experimental Tech Turns Your Coffee Table Into a Universal Remote

A new technology combines the coffee table with a universal remote so that people sitting around the table can tap on a screen to change the channel, turn up the volume or dim the lights.

CRISTAL (Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces) is a research project in user interface that attempts to create a natural way of connecting with devices. The system offers a streaming video view of the living room on a tabletop, so users can can walk up to it, see the layout of the room and interact with the TV or the photo frame.

Here is the link:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/coffee-table-remote/

DNA 'Organises Itself' on Silicon

Shapes of DNA have been used to enhance the production of circuits for next-generation computer chips.

Researchers reporting in Nature Nanotechnology have now shown how to get engineered "DNA origami" to self-organise on silicon.

The origami can be designed to serve as a scaffold for electronic components just six billionths of a metre apart.

Making chips with components closer together leads to smaller devices and faster computers.

The six nanometre mark is nearly eight times better than the current industry produces.

Several research groups have shown that DNA itself can be used to store or manipulate data, and the juggling of DNA in a test tube or within bacteria has been shown to solve simple computational tasks.

The current method, by contrast, leverages the ability to design DNA strands into regular shapes such as triangles.

Such structures are tiny and difficult to manipulate, but the chemical groups hanging off DNA helices could be used as anchor points for them.

Because the eventual placement of the components puts them so much closer, the approach could lead to computers that are both smaller and faster.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8204906.stm

Killing Cancer Stem Cells

A new screening method identifies drugs that selectively target these elusive cells in tumors.

Recent evidence suggests that certain cancers may persist or recur after treatment because a small population of cells, called cancer stem cells, remains behind to seed new tumors. Though scientists are not yet certain about the role cancer stem cells play in disease, evidence is accumulating that these cells are particularly resistant to chemotherapy and radiation, and can linger in the body even after treatment.

The researchers used a library of 16,000 chemicals at the Broad Institute to look for compounds that killed these transformed breast cancer stem cells more effectively than they killed normal breast cancer cells. Gupta explains that since cancer stem cells are usually resistant to drugs, relatively few chemicals are effective--a mere 32 compounds were identified in the screen as preferentially treating breast cancer stem cells.

Jeffrey Rosen, a breast cancer researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, TX, says that the study is an early example of a promising new turn in the hunt for cancer therapies. "It's very exciting that some groups are starting not to view tumors as homogeneous entities but to target subpopulations of cells we think are import for drug resistance," he says. However, Rosen notes that the results in mice were not as promising as the drug's performance in cells. He says that the cancer field is hampered by a lack of good animal models to determine which drugs will be relevant for therapies. The problem, he says, is "once you pull out a compound or drug, then how do you actually go the next step and show that it's really going to work?"

Weinberg calls the study "the first step in the direction of trying to eliminate these cells in tumors." He believes that even if the role of cancer stem cells in different kinds of cancer has not been resolved, "we have no doubt that getting rid of them is going to be an important part of creating cures."

Although this study focused on breast cancer, the researchers anticipate that the screen could be applied to any kind of epithelial cancer. Gupta says that while targeting cancer stem cells may not necessarily be a "magic bullet" in cancer treatment, "if you have a certain subpopulation of cancer cells that are resistant to standard treatment, you would want to find a compound that targets these cells." He adds that a drug that targets cancer stem cells could be used in combination with standard treatments to ensure that resistant cells are not left behind.

After some initial testing of several compounds, the researchers focused on one drug called salinomycin. They compared it to the actions of a drug commonly given in breast cancer chemotherapy, paclitaxel (also known by its brand name, Taxol), in cultured cells and in mice. While paclitaxel treatment leads to a higher proportion of drug-resistant cancer stem cells, salinomycin had the opposite effect, reducing the number of breast cancer stem cells in cultured cells more than 100 times more effectively than paclitaxel. The drug also reduced breast tumor growth in mice, although the reduction was less dramatic.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23222/page1/

Hints of How Google's OS Will Work

According to a post written by Sundar Pichai, a vice president of product management at Google, and Linus Upson, the company's engineering director, the open-source Chrome OS will consist of a Linux kernel with the Google Chrome browser running on top inside an entirely new desktop environment.

The Chrome browser was released nine months ago and is Google's effort to reinvent the browser completely: it's designed from scratch with Web applications in mind and is meant to be the only application that a Web-savvy user needs on her computer.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22987/

In Search for Intelligence, a Silicon Brain Twitches

For the last four years, Henry Markram has been building a biologically accurate artificial brain. Powered by a supercomputer, his software model closely mimics the activity of a vital section of a rat's gray matter.

Dubbed Blue Brain, the simulation shows some strange behavior. The artificial "cells" respond to stimuli and suddenly pulse and flash in spooky unison, a pattern that isn't programmed but emerges spontaneously.

Blue Brain is based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The project hopes to tackle one of the most perplexing mysteries of neuroscience: How does human intelligence emerge? The Blue Brain scientists hope their computer model can shed light on the puzzle, and possibly even replicate intelligence in some way.

We're building the brain from the bottom up, but in silicon," says Dr. Markram, the leader of Blue Brain, which is powered by a supercomputer provided by International Business Machines Corp. "We want to understand how the brain learns, how it perceives things, how intelligence emerges."

Despite the challenges, the push to understand, replicate and even re-enact higher behaviors in the brain has become one of the hottest areas of neuroscience. With the help of a $4.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, IBM is working on a separate project with five U.S. universities to build a tiny, low-power microchip that simulates the behavior of one million neurons and ten billion synapses. The goal, says IBM, is to develop brainy computers that can better predict the behavior of complex systems, such as weather or the financial markets.

The scientists behind Blue Brain hope to have a virtual human brain functioning in ten years -- a lengthy time period that underscores the scientific challenge. The human brain has 100 billion neurons that send electrical signals to each other via a network of at least 100 trillion connections, or synapses. How could this dizzying complexity ever be recreated in a virtual model?

Dr. Markram has adopted a systematic, if painstaking approach. He decided to work out the blueprint of its wiring and then use that map to rebuild the brain in an artificial form. He focused on a rat's neocortical column, or NCC, an elementary building block of the brain's neocortex, which is responsible for higher functions and thought. In a rat's case, that includes planning to obtain food.

A rat's NCC, comprised of about 10,000 neurons and their 10 million connections, functions much like a computer microprocessor. All mammals have NCCs, and the ones in humans aren't all that different from the ones in rats. However, humans have far more NCCs, which means far greater brain power. Dr. Markram figured that if a rat simulation did a good job of correctly mimicking activity in a real rat's brain, he could use the same model as a road map for simulating the human brain.

The rat's NCC has 10,000 neurons, and it takes the power of one desktop computer to mimic the behavior of a single neuron. To model the entire NCC, Dr. Markram relies on an IBM computer that can perform 22.8 trillion operations a second. This enables the simulation to be rendered as a three-dimensional object. Thus, when Blue Brain is running, its deepest inner workings are seen in astonishing detail, in the form of a 3-D simulation that unfolds on a computer screen.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124751881557234725.html

Apps 'to be as big as internet'

The market for mobile applications, or apps, will become "as big as the internet", peaking at 10 million apps in 2020, a leading online store says.

"The reality is that this space is only so big and only able to support so many people. Unfortunately the overhype that goes with [Apple's] App Store is what has driven so many to rush to develop for the market. It is fashionable to do apps and every media outlet tells you apps are cool.

Google believes the days of app stores are numbered

"But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%; they will simply not make a return on their investment or make a good enough living at this," said Mr Laurs.

He said that will result in developers taking their talent elsewhere and also slow down the rate of growth in applications.

GetJar acts as an application intermediary, distributing apps and helping its community of 350,000 developers make money from their work.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8157043.stm

Yawn Alert For Weary Drivers

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100,000 road crashes are caused by driver fatigue each year.
But what if your car could keep an eye on you while you drive and nudge you when you starting yawning and warn you to pull over and take a break? That's the aim of a new in-car yawn-detection system being developed by an international team in the US and India.

The new program is based around an in-car camera hooked up to image-processing software that captures a sequence of images of the driver's face. It then analyses changes in the face and accurately identifies yawning as distinct from other facial movements such as smiling, talking, and singing. The yawn frequency is then correlated with fatigue behavior and could then be hooked up to a warning system to alert drivers to the need to take a break.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090727102042.htm

Expensive Parallel Processing: Programming Tools Facilitate Use of Video Game Processors for Defense Needs

Video gaming computers and video game consoles available today typically contain a graphics processing unit (GPU), which is very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics. However, the unit's highly parallel structure also makes it more efficient than a general-purpose central processing unit for a range of complex calculations important to defense applications.

Researchers in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are developing programming tools to enable engineers in the defense industry to utilize the processing power of GPUs without having to learn the complicated programming language required to use them directly.

The researchers are writing functions defined in the Vector, Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL) to run on GPUs. VSIPL is an open standard developed by embedded signal and image processing hardware and software vendors, academia, application developers and government labs. GPU VSIPL is available for download at http://gpu-vsipl.gtri.gatech.edu/ .

http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/news/programming-tools-facilitate-use-video-game-proces

DNA Computation

Biomolecular computers, made of DNA and other biological molecules, only exist today in a few specialized labs, remote from the regular computer user. Nonetheless, Tom Ran and Shai Kaplan, research students in the lab of Prof. Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute’s Biological Chemistry, and Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Departments have found a way to make these microscopic computing devices ‘user friendly,’ even while performing complex computations and answering complicated queries.

Shapiro and his team at Weizmann introduced the first autonomous programmable DNA computing device in 2001. So small that a trillion fit in a drop of water, that device was able to perform such simple calculations as checking a list of 0s and 1s to determine if there was an even number of 1s. A newer version of the device, created in 2004, detected cancer in a test tube and released a molecule to destroy it. Besides the tantalizing possibility that such biology-based devices could one day be injected into the body – a sort of ‘doctor in a cell’ locating disease and preventing its spread – biomolecular computers could conceivably perform millions of calculations in parallel.

Now, Shapiro and his team, in a paper published online today in Nature Nanotechnology, have devised an advanced program for biomolecular computers that enables them to ‘think’ logically. The train of deduction used by this futuristic device is remarkably familiar. It was first proposed by Aristotle over 2000 years ago as a simple if…then proposition: ‘All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.’ When fed a rule (All men are mortal) and a fact (Socrates is a man), the computer answered the question ‘Is Socrates Mortal?’ correctly. The team went on to set up more complicated queries involving multiple rules and facts, and the DNA computing devices were able to deduce the correct answers every time.

At the same time, the team created a compiler – a program for bridging between a high-level computer programming language and DNA computing code. Upon compiling, the query could be typed in something like this: Mortal(Socrates)?. To compute the answer, various strands of DNA representing the rules, facts and queries were assembled by a robotic system and searched for a fit in a hierarchical process. The answer was encoded in a flash of green light: Some of the strands had a biological version of a flashlight signal – they were equipped with a naturally glowing fluorescent molecule bound to a second protein which keeps the light covered. A specialized enzyme, attracted to the site of the correct answer, removed the ‘cover’ and let the light shine. The tiny water drops containing the biomolecular data-bases were able to answer very intricate queries, and they lit up in a combination of colors representing the complex answers.


http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/site/en/weizman.asp?pi=371&doc_id=5565

I guess most of you got a GPS and sometimes get annoyed because of it's accuracy. Now, Linux-based technology developed at NICTA is on its way to help make personal navigation systems more accurate.

Automap , uses machine vision techniques that can detect and classify geometric shapes from video footage.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?q=article/313968/new_linux-based_technology_make_smarter_gps&fp=&fpid=

Touchscreen for everything

Well, it seems that the future is around touchscreen. Both Apple and Microsoft are working on a transition to touch-enabled versions of OS X and Windows. Touchscreen are used for : mobile phones, digital camera, GPS, media players, medical robots( the haptics provide surgeons with tactile feedback that makes the advanced surgery possible).

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135897/Haptics_The_feel_good_technology_of_the_year?taxonomyId=15&pageNumber=2

Game utilizes human intuition to help computers solve complex problems

People love to play games. But what if we can exploit this?

The online logic puzzle is called FunSAT, and it could help integrated circuit designers select and arrange transistors and their connections on silicon microchips, among other applications.
More here...

http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=7252

NIST Demonstrates Sustained Quantum Processing in Step Toward Building Quantum Computers

OULDER, Colo.—Raising prospects for building a practical quantum computer, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated sustained, reliable information processing operations on electrically charged atoms (ions). The new work, described in the Aug. 6, 2009, issue of Science Express,* overcomes significant hurdles in scaling up ion-trapping technology from small demonstrations to larger quantum processors.

http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/ion_trap_computers080609.html

Healthcare, the Road to Robotic Helpers

Robots are whirring away in factories all over the world, building cars, phones and cookers. Yet they can do so much more. Robotics for healthcare has been tipped as the next big wave, and Europe should be poised to ride it, according to a European road-mapping study.

http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=90794

To Teach Computing, a New Tool Calls on The Sims

A beta version of Alice 3.0 will be released, letting students create animated movies and games with new characters from The Sims video games and teaching advanced users the Java programming language in the process. The software is freely available from Carnegie Mellon's Web site.
A previous version, Alice 2.0, introduced a "drag and drop" feature that let students place characters and objects in relationships that resulted in actions, without manually typing in code.


http://chronicle.com/article/To-Teach-Computing-a-New-Tool/47956/

Has a nice tutorial, fun to play with it, here you can download it : http://www.alice.org/

Supercomputer Visuals Without Graphics Chips

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and elsewhere are working on a solution. Rather than moving massive datasets to a specialized graphics-processing cluster for rendering, which is how things are done now, they are writing software that allows the thousands of processors in a supercomputer to do the visualization themselves

Publicaţi postare

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23139/

It's fun to play with it, has a nice tutorial , if you have a time give it a try, you can download it
here.

http://www.alice.org/

Nanoelectronic transistor combined with biological machine could lead to better electronics

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- If manmade devices could be combined with biological machines, laptops and other electronic devices could get a boost in operating efficiency.

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2009/NR-09-08-02.html

Robots to get their own operating system

Operating System for Robots sounds great. Building a robot until now required hardware-level knowledge, also every time a new robot was made, many times from ground-up .
Robot Operating system will help a lot of sharing code. As it state in the article "People reinvent the wheel over and over and over, doing things that are not at all central to what they're trying to do."


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327206.300-robots-to-get-their-own-operating-system.html

Electronic voting not so secure

Computer Scientists Take Over Electronic Voting Machine With New Programming Technique
We thought that now with poweful cryptograpy tehniques, electronic voting will be 100% secure.
Well, turns that it isn't quite so. More here....

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/08-09ElectronicVoting.asp#

Supercomputers for every college

Just 10 years ago, supercomputers cost millions of dollars each and were installed only in elite universities and government labs. These machines were used in just a couple of fields, like astrophysics, or for sensitive military research. Today supercomputers, generally defined as among the fastest currently possible, run simulations to help researchers understand weather, outer space, oceans, economies, human biology, and more. And they can be built on the cheap.
http://chronicle.com/article/Your-College-Gets-a-Superco/47957/