Archive for February, 2012
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 […]
James Cameron Buys Farms, Plans to Move Family to New Zealand
February 1st, 2012Good idea. Via: Stuff: Hollywood movie mogul James Cameron is coming to live in Wairarapa – and he is bringing his family with him. The director of blockbuster films Titanic and Avatar has purchased two large plots of land along Western Lake Rd in south Wairarapa, where he is expected to arrive and live later […]
Pay Fee to Jump to Front of Line at San Francisco International Airport
February 1st, 2012Via: San Francisco Chronicle: Frequent travelers who use San Francisco International Airport once again will be able to get through security a little faster with the return of a fee-based pre-screening program approved by the Airport Commission Tuesday. The CLEAR program, operated by a private company, Alclear LLC, will allow people to move to – […]
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 […]
