When someone is bitten by a rabid animal in the US, it still makes the news. Maybe not national news, but incidents of people being bitten by bats and dogs and raccoons — even if no one dies — still merit local headlines. And the prospect of rabies is enough to send Americans into fits of worry. A recent story out … Read More → "Man bites dog: a new rabies antidote could save 55,000 lives per year"
Even a good teacher may not always be able to tell, at a glance, which students are quietly struggling and which need more of a challenge. Fortunately, laptops may soon come with enough emotional intelligence built in to do the job for them.
A recent study from North Carolina State University shows how this might work. Researchers there used video cameras to monitor the faces of college students participating in computer tutoring sessions. Using software that had been trained to match facial expressions with different levels of engagement or frustration, the researchers were able to recognize … Read More → "Facial analysis software spots struggling students"
Teleportation is one of the more extraordinary phenomena in the quantum world. It allows a quantum object, such as a photon or electron, to travel from one location to another without passing through the space in between.
Teleportation is a standard procedure in any decent quantum mechanics laboratory. Physicists use it on a daily basis for quantum communication and quantum computation.
If that sounds exotic, you ain’t seen … Read More → "Physicists discover the secret of quantum remote control"
GPU stands for graphics processing unit, but these tiny chips can be used for much more than just graphics. Google is using GPUs to model the human brain, and Salesforce leans on them as a way of analyzing data streaming across Twitter feeds. They’re particularly suited to what’s known as parallel processing, where thousands of tasks are executed at the same time.
< … Read More → "Man invents new language for turning graphics chips into supercomputers"
Get it? Leg O?
This is a time-lapse video of Youtuber AmputeeOT fashioning herself a prosthetic leg out of LEGO bricks. It’s a LEGO leg! It really got me thinking — it’s amazing how most of us go out of my way to AVOID stepping on LEGO bricks, and here she is PURPOSEFULLY doing it. That really blew my mind. Also, those new … Read More → "Woman fashions own prosthetic leg out of LEGO"
Engineers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have proven once again that they know how to make a snazzy looking robot. Quietly announced to little fanfare, DLR’s Robotics and Mechatronics Center recently put the finishing touches on its DLR-Biped, a pair of shiny blue legs that first stepped onto the scene in 2009. Those legs have now been upgraded to the status of a full-fledged humanoid robot, sporting an all-new upper body and a new … Read More → "Introducing TORO, Germany’s new humanoid robot"
A Toronto-area technology startup is pre-selling a series of postage stamp-sized sensors that connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth and let you remotely monitor the environment in your home and garden.
Markham, Ont.-based WiMoto is offering four different models of the devices, called “motes,” including one designed for home security that features an infrared motion detector and accelerometer; and another targeted at gardeners that detects when your plants … Read More → "Tiny sensors let smartphone users monitor their homes"
Say you want to visit Titan, to study the bizarre chemistry happening on the surface of Saturn’s fascinating, cloudy moon. After all, Titan has moved to the top of many astrobiologists’ wish list in recent years, as the Cassini spacecraft has beamed back grainy images of methane and ethane lakes. There’s even been talk of a salty liquid water ocean lurking beneath the frigid outer shell.
But as with … Read More → "Why spacecraft of the future will be packed with microfluidics"
As space exploration becomes democratized, the entry price for such endeavors has fallen dramatically. One company taking advantage of this is Pocket Spacecraft, a Bristol-based enterprise that thinks it can send thousands of personalized probes to the heavens for a few hundred dollars apiece. While it may look more like a used coffee filter, the Earth Scout / Lunar Scout is a CD-sized, paper-thin probe that contains a bonded solar cell, system-on-a-chip and antennas. … Read More → "Pocket Spacecraft launches crowdsourced lunar mission on Kickstarter"
