Robotelul Asimo al Honda poate fi controlat de mintea unui om

economie.hotnews.ro

USB Lunch Box and Mini Fridge for office lunch

www.mydigitallife.info

New Features in 3ds Max 2010 – Youtube

www.youtube.com

After all, Texas education board sides with evolution

www.physorg.com

A Better, Cheaper Multitouch Interface…with a new dimension added – pressure

www.technologyreview.com:
New research from New York University, however, promises to make multitouch interfaces that are cheap and flexible and can be used by fingers and objects alike. The technology, called Inexpensive Multi-Touch Pressure Acquisition Devices (IMPAD), can be made paper thin, can easily scale down to fit on small portable devices, or can scale up to cover an entire table or wall. The researchers will present IMPAD next week at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Boston.

The iPhone captures information about touch by measuring a change in capacitance when a finger or other conducting object comes in contact with the display. Surface screens use cameras to see the position of objects on the tabletop. Perceptive Pixel’s displays also use cameras, but in a different way. Those cameras are used to track infrared light as it scatters in the presence of a finger or stylus. While Perceptive Pixel’s touch screens collect pressure information, it’s still impractical to use cameras for smaller or touch interfaces. IMPAD takes a different approach by measuring a change in electrical resistance when a person or object applies different pressure to a specially designed pad, consisting of only a few layers of materials.

“One of the problems that’s been endemic to multitouch sensors is . . . you’re either touching it or not touching it,” explains Ken Perlin, a professor of media research at NYU. “A significant amount of potentially useful information is thrown away because the sensor isn’t capturing the subtleties.” But with a pressure-sensitive touch pad, a device can see how hard a person presses, opening up another dimension of the user interface. The researchers have shown that their pressure-sensitive touch pad can be used for virtual sculpting and painting applications and for a simulated mouse with left clicks, right clicks, and drags, as well as for musical instruments like a piano keyboard. (See video.)

BCR si good.bee lanseaza servicii bancare pe telefonul mobil

www.mobilissimo.ro:
Compania good.bee, care face parte din Erste Group, a anuntat lansarea pe piata romaneasca a unor servicii bancare mobile, in colaborare cu BCR.

‘Natural’ breast enlargement using stem cells from spare fat to be made available in Britain

www.dailymail.co.uk:
A new stem cell technique to enlarge the size of a woman’s breasts while reducing the size of her waistline is to made available in Britain for the first time.

Trailer: Ten Reasons ‘You Must Have Prototype’

www.shacknews.com:
Casting aside any subtlety in the marketing campaign for Prototype, publisher Activision just sent over a new trailer dubbed “Top 10 Reasons You Must Have PROTOTYPE.”

Radical’s super-powered open-world game hits PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in June.

GDC: Why OnLive Can’t Possibly Work – Article by Richard Leadbetter

www.eurogamer.net:
I love industry-shaking announcements. I love new, game-changing hardware, and I’m absolutely, almost literally exploding with excitement about the new OnLive gaming concept. I love that front-end, and I love the way OnLive uses video because video is what my company, Digital Foundry, specialises in, and what I spend a lot of my time experimenting with. I want this to be brilliant so much that it’s almost painful.

The concept is remarkably simple. The actual hardware generating the visuals and running the gameplay isn’t owned by you. Instead it’s held somewhere else in the world. That hardware then encodes its visual output and beams it to you over the internet. The player sitting at home simply uses an existing PC or Mac (or ‘micro-console’) to take the video stream over IP, beaming back control inputs to the server. The advantages are very straightforward – you don’t need to upgrade your hardware, the people running the servers do. And that hardware can be state-of-the-art PC kit way in advance of what Xbox 360 or PS3 are capable of, and of course it’s upgradable. You’ll never need to buy a game again; you’ll just rent time on the ones you want to play. You’ll doubtless save money and the publishers will make more of it. Piracy will be impossible.

There’s only one slight problem. Realistically, there is no way it can work to the extent suggested, and no way it can provide a gaming experience as good as the one you already have without inherent compromises. It’s a great idea, and an intriguing demo that is amazing in that it actually works at all. However, away from the concept and the tech demos running in controlled conditions, OnLive raises so many technical questions and seemingly overcomes so many impossible challenges that it can’t possibly work.

First Look at Tesla’s Stunning Model S

blog.wired.com:
Los Angeles — Tesla Motors’ Model S is a stunningly beautiful car that that builds upon the cachet of the Roadster and proves the company is serious about pushing electric vehicles into the mainstream.

Zeebo – the game console made for developing countries

www.physorg.com:
The Zeebo unit is light, and a little larger than the Nintendo Wii. But instead of playing video games on disks, the Zeebo will use digitally downloaded games – distributed through cell phone networks that players don’t even have to subscribe to.

Scientists film HIV spreading for first time – Video

www.telegraph.co.uk:
Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding how HIV spreads through the human body after filming the process for the first time ever.

Scientists discovering more about genetic cues and a person’s physical traits

www.tgdaily.com:
Researchers are beginning to identify the genes which makeup a person’s physical traits, including facial structure, skin tone, hair and eye color and more. The technology could be employed in the future in a Gattaca-like way, allowing a genetic approximation of your true appearance merely from a DNA sample.

Flying robots to spy on Taliban bombmakers – see video

www.telegraph.co.uk:
A new army of robots will be introduced that could save the lives of many British soldiers, defence chiefs have said.

New metasearch engine leaves Google, Yahoo crawling

www.physorg.com:
 One day in the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to type a query into an online search engine and have it deliver not Web pages that may contain an answer, but just the answer itself, says Weiyi Meng, a professor of computer science at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

For instance, imagine typing in “Who starred in the film Casablanca?” The search engine would respond with “Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.”

Not impressed?

Try asking a more nuanced question, such as “What do Americans think of universal health care?” A search engine will create a report indicating trends in opinion based on what has been posted to the Web.

Search engines may eventually be used to conduct polling and even help sort fact from fiction, said Meng, who is helping to make such possibilities a reality, both through his research and as president of a company called Webscalers.

The amphibious bus – Video

www.dailymail.co.uk:
The coach was recently put through its paces in Maraxlokk Bay, Malta, and the brightly-coloured vehicles are already attracting interest, with ten orders from countries including Germany and Hungary.

Each of the vehicles costs £280,000 and Amphicoach say they can build 12 ship-shape roadsters every year.

Seagate demonstrates laser heating magnetic head for amazing hardrive capacities

www.technologyreview.com:
….
Called heat-assisted magnetic recording, it involves blasting the magnetic regions of a disk with heat to make it possible to use more stable recording media. It should make it possible to record data at densities 50 times greater than will be possible when today’s technologies reach their limits.
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The heat is provided by a rapid laser blast that must be focused down to a spot the size of an individual grain–less than 100 nanometers in diameter. This is impossible to do using conventional optics. Instead, it requires a new generation of optics that work in what’s known as the near field. The Seagate technology uses optical antennas, which can focus light energy onto areas smaller than any lens-based instrument can.
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Wheel Motors to Drive Dutch Buses

www.technologyreview.com:
A company based in the Netherlands called e-Traction has developed a new kind of hybrid bus that uses in-wheel electric motors to improve efficiency and a GPS system to reduce pollution in congested areas of a city. The bus is a series hybrid: a diesel generator charges a battery, which in turn supplies electricity for two motors, one in each rear wheel. Thanks largely to its in-wheel motors, the bus can travel twice as far as a conventional bus on a liter of diesel, says Arend Heinen, who is both an engineer and spokesperson for the company. That translates into a reduction in fuel consumption of 50 percent. The company has been awarded contracts to retrofit seven commercial buses with its technology, with the first to be completed next month.
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Făptaşi căutaţi după culoarea ochilor

www.cotidianul.ro:
Poliţia dispune de noi teste ADN care ghicesc culoarea ochilor şi rafinează căutarea amprentelor genetice în bazele de date ale criminaliştilor.

Un cercetător român a produs curent electric din lapte

www.cotidianul.ro:
După ce a studiat ani întregi proprietăţile şi posibilele aplicaţii ale unei enzime, cercetătorul Leonard Stoica a ajuns să producă mici cantităţi de curent electric din lactoză, o metodă al cărei principiu şi-ar putea găsi potenţial aplicativ în industria laptelui şi în medicină.
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Experimentul lui însă ar putea duce la producerea laptelui fără lactoză. “De exemplu, dacă considerăm că procesarea industrială a laptelui pentru producerea laptelui fără lactoză, destinat celor intoleranţi la lactoză, ar decurge fără consum de energie sau cu un consum minim, atunci implementarea acestei biotehnologii şi-ar găsi o aplicaţie rentabilă economic.”

 

Totodată, printr-un exerciţiu de imaginaţie, pereţii unei căni pot lua locul celor doi electrozi, conducând astfel la eliminarea lactozei din lapte chiar pe masa consumatorului. “În România, din câte am văzut în statistici, în jur de 50% dintre consumatori sunt intoleranţi la lactoză. În Asia şi în Africa se ajunge până la 95% din populaţie.”

 

Posibile aplicaţii medicale

 

“Un proiect european în care sunt implicat este cadrul ideal pentru dezvoltarea, optimizarea şi posibila implementare a unei astfel de pile de combustie pe bază enzimatică. În colaborare cu alţi zece parteneri din Europa încercăm să ajungem la utilizarea unei astfel de minibaterii pentru aplicaţii medicale. De exemplu, dacă am ajunge ca o astfel de pilă de combustie să poată să fie implantată unui pacient, ar putea să controleze, de exemplu, o micropompă de insulină.”

 

“Un bolnav de diabet, în loc să-şi măsoare nivelul de glucoză din timp în timp şi să-şi facă injecţii cu insulină, ar putea beneficia de o continuă monitorizare a nivelului de glucoză, care să fie balansat în timp real de o micropompă de insulină”, mai spune cercetătorul român.