August 8, 2012
Our vehicles, of which about a dozen are on the road at any given time, have now completed more than 300,000 miles of testing. They’ve covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn’t been a single accident… read more
With a mission to bring both new and out-of-print science-fiction books together, Singularity & Co. is poised to launch both an online bookstore and a real-life brick and mortar shop, Tor Blog reports.
Starting back in the spring with a Kickstarter project called “Save the Sci-Fi,” Singularity & Co. raised capital to get their bookshop off the ground.
This Thursday… read more
Just as users of Google Earth can zoom in from space to a view of their own backyard, researchers can now navigate biological tissues from a whole embryo down to its subcellular structures thanks to recent advances in electron microscopy and image processing.
Paris is one of those cities that has a look all its own, something that goes beyond landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and INRIA/Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris have developed visual data mining software that can automatically detect these sometimes subtle features, such as street signs, streetlamps and balcony railings, that give Paris and other… read more
A device that measures someone’s unique response to a weak electric signal could let medical devices such as blood-pressure cuffs automatically identify the wearer and send measurements straight to his or her electronic medical record, Technology Review reports.
Computer scientists and biochemists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed advanced GPU accelerated software and demonstrated for the first time that they could sample biological events that occur on the millisecond timescale using only an upgraded desktop computer equipped with a relatively inexpensive graphics processing card.
These results have the potential to bring millisecond-scale sampling, now available only on a multi-million dollar supercomputer,… read more
In Star Trek, a computer could answer any question, instantly. “Today, we’re closer to that dream than I ever thought possible during my working life — and here are some of the latest steps we’re taking today to make search even more intelligent, says SVP Google Search Amit Singhal on the Google Official Blog
1. Understanding the world
Trusting research over their guts, scientists in New Zealand and Canada examined the phenomenon that Stephen Colbert, comedian and news satirist, calls “truthiness” — the feeling that something is true.
In four different experiments they discovered that people believe claims are true, regardless of whether they actually are true, when a decorative photograph appears alongside the claim.
“We wanted to examine how the kinds of photos… read more
Researchers at Disney demonstrated a computer interface at Siggraph 2012 that changes the way ordinary objects feel, using a weak electric signal fed through a user’s entire body, Technology Review reports.
Wearable technology modifies a user’s tactile perception of the physical world without requiring him/her to wear special gloves or use a force-feedback device. Sensations can be induced when the wearer touches a computer screen, walls,… read more
Astronomers have constructed the largest-ever three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes, which will help the investigation of the mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy” that make up 96 percent of the universe.
The map was produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III).
Early last year, the SDSS-III released the largest-ever image of the sky, which covered one-third… read more
MIT neuroscientists report that two major classes of brain cells repress neural activity in specific mathematical ways: One type subtracts from overall activation, while the other divides it.
The brain has billions of neurons, arranged in complex circuits that allow us to perceive the world, control our movements and make decisions. Deciphering those circuits is critical to understanding how the brain works and what goes wrong in neurological… read more
“With all the things cancer is trying to do to kill our patient, how does it remember it is cancer?” he asked his rapt TEDx audience. Bradner says that the answer lies in epigenetics, the programs that manage the genome.
Findings over the… read more
Researchers in France have fabricated a transistor and two types of diode from undoped silicon nanowires (SiNWs), and combined them into a NAND logic gate.
Nanometer-scale electronic devices fabricated from SiNWs are drawing significant attention in view of their reduction in size and potential application in electronics, optoelectronics, and biochemical sensing.
Unlike the photolithography used in current chip- making, nanowires are easy to make on a nanometer scale.
But at that… read more