Archive for the 'Technology' Category
A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors
February 2nd, 2012Via: YouTube: Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. Research Credit: jakdmsy
Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’
February 2nd, 2012Via: Threat Level: Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required. Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic. It said it had acquired the ability to censor tweets in the countries only where it was ordered removed, […]
South Korea: Dr. Smartphone?
February 1st, 2012Not The Onion: Check. Not April 1: Check. Via: Reuters: Tired of long waits at the hospital for medical tests? If Korean researchers have their way, your smartphone could one day eliminate that — and perhaps even tell you that you have cancer. A team of scientists at Korea Advanced Institute of Science of Technology […]
Surveillance Video Becomes a Tool for Studying Customer Behavior
February 1st, 2012Via: Technology Review: Software mines security footage to help business owners see what people do once they’re inside the store. The huge success of online shopping and advertising—led by giants like Amazon and Google—is in no small part thanks to software that logs when you visit Web pages and what you click on. Startup Prism […]
Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex
February 1st, 2012Via: PLoS Biology: How the human auditory system extracts perceptually relevant acoustic features of speech is unknown. To address this question, we used intracranial recordings from nonprimary auditory cortex in the human superior temporal gyrus to determine what acoustic information in speech sounds can be reconstructed from population neural activity. We found that slow and […]
Bullets with Guidance Systems
January 31st, 2012Via: Wired: The U.S. military has been after self-guided bullets for years. Now, government researchers have finally made it happen: a bullet that can navigate itself a full mile before successfully nailing its target. The breakthrough comes courtesy of engineers at the government’s Sandia National Laboratories. They’ve successfully tested a prototype of the bullet at […]
25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore
January 31st, 2012Funny and sad, all at once. Via: Salon: 1. People are getting rid of bookshelves. Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money. Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs. 2. While you’re drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. People are getting rid of bookshelves. 3. If someone […]
Bill Would Require Independent Study of X-Ray Body Scanners
January 31st, 2012The TSA gets to choose the laboratory? Via: Pro Publica: Sen. Susan Collins, the top Republican on the homeland security committee, plans to introduce a bill in the coming days that would require a new health study of the X-ray body scanners used to screen airline passengers nationwide. … Shortly after our report, the European […]
U.S. Detained and Deported Irish and British Citizens Over Idiotic Twitter Messages
January 31st, 2012Via: The Sun: TWO pals were barred from entering the US after innocent tweets joking about “destroying America” were picked up by the country’s anti-terror cops. US special agents monitoring Twitter spotted Leigh Van Bryan’s messages weeks before he left for a holiday in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. Leigh, who also quipped about […]
UC San Diego: Artificial Cell Membranes
January 31st, 2012“Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once – but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.” —Bill Joy, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us Via: UCSD: Chemists have taken an important step in making artificial life forms […]
