Posts tagged technology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
The Internet global network is a phenomenon of technological civilization, and its exceptional complexity surpasses anything mankind has ever created. In essence, what we are dealing with here is a huge quantity of utterly unstructured information. The Internet map is an attempt to look into the hidden structure of the network, fathom its colossal scale, and examine that which is impossible to understand from the bare figures of statistics.
Science fiction comes to life in Italian lab
At Italy’s Sant’Anna university, a bionic arm commanded by the human brain or a limb extension that allows rescuers to lift rubble after earthquakes are just some of the futuristic innovations in the pipeline.
“The idea is to get robots out of factories where they have shown their worth and to transform them into household machines which can live together with humans,” says Professor Paolo Dario, director of the college’s bio-robotics department.
The university in the historic town of Pisa in Tuscany is a veritable factory of ideas.
Researchers here are working on projects ranging from a robot that can come to your door to collect your recycling to tomatoes that slow the effects of ageing and plants that survive underwater to help flood-prone regions of the world.
Epidemiology, literally the “study of what is upon people”, is concerned with the dynamics of health and disease in human populations. Research in epidemiology aims to identify the distribution, incidence, and etiology of human diseases to improve the understanding of the causes of diseases and to prevent their spread. Traditionally, epidemiology has been based on data collected by public health agencies through health personnel in hospitals, doctors’ offices, and out in the field. In recent years, however, novel data sources have emerged where data are frequently collected directly from individuals through the digital traces they leave as a consequence of modern communication and an increased use of electronic devices.
Eye-Writing Technology: Writing in Cursive With Your Eyes Only
A new technology might allow people who have almost completely lost the ability to move their arms or legs to communicate freely, by using their eyes to write in cursive. The eye-writing technology tricks the neuromuscular machinery into doing something that is usually impossible: to voluntarily produce smooth eye movements in arbitrary directions.
The technology relies on changes in contrast to trick the eyes into the perception of motion. When viewing that changing visual display, people can learn to control their eye movements smoothly and at will, the new study shows. It doesn’t take very much practice either.
How can you measure someone’s pulse, just by pointing a camera at their face? MIT computer scientists have created an algorithm that can do just that, by amplifying the subtle changes in motion and colour in a video.
Read more: Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World
Californian biotech firm Life Technologies is the first team to register for the $10 million (£6.4m) Archon Genomics X Prize, which will be a race to sequence the genomes of 100 centenarians.
The prize was first announced in 2006, and is a joint effort between the X Prize Foundation and geneticist J Craig Venter. It’s supposed to stimulate the development of less expensive sequencing technologies, and establish a clinical standard for DNA research.
Interested parties have until May 2013 to register. Late that year, in September, each team will have 30 days to sequence the genomes of 100 people, at a cost of $1,000 (£643) or less.
The DNA has been donated by 100 100 year old people from all over the world, to make the competition “scientifically valuable and more meaningful to the general public”. That way, the prize can double up as medical research into the science of healthy aging and longevity.
Life Technologies’ secret weapon is the Ion Proton Sequencer, which it describes as a “semiconductor device that enables chemical signals to be directly translated into digital information for the first time” — a bit like the CMOS imager in an iPhone, which turns photons into electrons.
"It would have cost $100 million and taken 33 years to meet this challenge when the competition was announced in 2006," said Jonathan Rothberg, CEO and founder of Life Technology’s Ion Torrent brand. "The Ion Proton sequencer is designed to sequence a human genome for $1,000 in just a few hours."
Source: Wired