new scientist
Mind-reading robotic teachers are more... Anyone? Anyone? Attention-grabbing
www.engadget.com
You'd have thought that replacing a human teacher with a swanky robot would be enough to keep the kids interested, but apparently not. The University of Wisconsin-Madison found that supplying a robot teacher didn't in itself max out concentration. In one trial, they put a Wakamaru robot instructor in...
Robot stock traders lose $440,000,000 in 45 minutes, need someone to spell it out
www.engadget.com
Humans never learn and apparently neither do robots. Autonomous trading AIs went on a spending spree at Knight Capital Group in New Jersey this week, buying up shares in everything from RadioShack to Ford and American Airlines (ouch) in a 45-minute frenzy of disobedience. The company tried to offload...
Starlite: the miracle material that was almost lost
www.theverge.com
On a 1990 episode of the BBC TV show Tomorrow's World, presenter Peter McCann showed off a new plastic named "Starlite" in a rather unusual way: by pointing blowtorches at a pair of eggs. While one egg shattered in seconds, the other stolidly bore the heat, glowing red hot...
Regenerative medicine pioneer continues changing lives with first successful laryngotracheal implants
www.engadget.com
Dr. Paolo Macchiarini is no stranger to world firsts, and less than a year after performing a synthetic windpipe transplant, the Karolinska Institute Professor has coordinated no less than two successful transplants of synthetic sections of larynx. Amazingly, both patients were able to breathe and talk normally straight after...
Regenerative medicine pioneer continues changing lives with first successful laryngotracheal implants
Email widget takes on viral rumors, fact checks for you
www.engadget.com
If you're one of those people who actually believes that Facebook is going to start charging users tomorrow, you're probably going to want to skip this post. LazyTruth is working on a Gmail widget -- something that could've easily been borne out of Google Labs -- that will automatically...
Sensitive scales can weigh individual atoms, ensure perfect recipes
www.engadget.com
Those of you who have navigated beyond using an Easy-Bake Oven will know that weighing out ingredients is a chore. Then again, it's nothing compared to the sort of balancing that takes place at the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology, where a team has developed a method of weighing individual...
Tweetbot for Mac
tapbots.com
It’s finally here! (sort of) Tweetbot for Mac is finally available! However it may not be quite as you had hoped. Developing for the Mac is no easy task, especially a full-featured Twitter client. However, we’ve gotten to a point where while not complete, it is useable. We’ve decided to...
Microsoft patent application could match online moods with emotionally-targeted ads
www.engadget.com
It's a match made in marketing heaven: users let their guards down within the internet's virtual walls and ads are served up to complement their fickle mental states. At least, that's one possible version of your hyper-targeted digital future, if a patent application, filed by Microsoft back in December...
Scientists: 'Games are hard'
www.engadget.com
While we've been telling jaded partners and family members for ages, it looks like there's some -- slightly obscure -- proof. The researchers reconstructed their own levels, forcing gamers to choose between one of two paths, with a mix of power-ups, health items and enemies that created a "logical...
New undersea cables planned for arctic passageways, frozen gamers dream of lower pings
www.engadget.com
Hot on the heels of our own reporting of cables in the South Pacific (or the lack thereof), in flies a report that at least two new undersea cables are being planned for the arctic. According to New Scientist, a pair of lengthy fiber optic wires will be laid...
Electronic skin lets machines sense water droplets and heartbeats, wonder why they were programmed to feel
www.engadget.com
A team of researchers at South Korea's Seoul National University have been busy developing biologically-inspired electronic skin that is capable of "feeling" subtle stimulus such as bouncing water droplets and human heartbeats. The skin's surface is covered in two interlocked arrays of 50-nanometre-wide polymeric nanofibres that act like hairs...
Electronic skin lets machines sense water droplets and heartbeats, wonder why they were programmed to feel
Your future hard drive might be grown with magnetic bacteria
www.extremetech.com
In the future, ultra-high-density non-volatile storage — such as hard drives — could be grown using magnetic bacteria.This breakthrough, shepherded by researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, relies on certain strains of bacteria that ingest iron, which is then...
MIT thaumaturges work to turn any windowed room into a camera obscura
www.engadget.com
Those interested in criminology, forensics or the basics of voyeurism probably have a decent grasp on what a camera obscura is. For everyone else in the audience, allow us to explain. Used since way before your birth, these chambers are designed with an optical device that projects an image...
Why LulzSec Was Un-Hackable, And Why That's A Good Thing
www.techdirt.com
The question of service provider neutrality is central to every debate about internet policy. From PayPal cutting off Wikileaks to Twitter pushing back against the feds to the new Righthaven's "spineful" hosting, the responsibility of companies to neutrally protect their customers is a contentious topic. New Scientist has an interview...
Study: free apps drain 75 percent more power, badly built advertising to blame
www.engadget.com
It's often said there's no such thing as a free lunch and that's doubly the case for free apps. A team from Purdue University found that nearly quarters of the power used when you run an app like Angry Birds is actually used for adverts. It developed eprof, an...
Strobe lighting goggles shown to improve short-term memory, all-night ravers feel validated
www.engadget.com
Those goggles you see above aren't for stylish looks while playing dodgeball -- they're the keys to a potentially important discovery about short-term memory. Duke University's Institute for Brain Sciences found that subjects playing catch with goggles simulating strobe lights were noticeably better at memorizing information during tests, even...
1Gbps wireless network made with red and green laser pointers
www.extremetech.com
Back in the olden days, when WiFi and Bluetooth were just a glimmer in the eye of IEEE, another short-range wireless communications technology ruled supreme: Infrared Data Association, or IrDA for short. IrDA was awful; early versions were only capable of kilobit-per-second speeds, and only over a distance of a...
Boot up: Apple's secret development process, how LulzSec hid last summer, Techcrunch droops and more
www.guardian.co.uk
Plus more privacy-invading apps, Google's $1m hacking prize, the web's broken crypto and moreA quick burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology teamApple's China audits don't inspire the same from other companies | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple WeblogThe Bloomberg post notes that...
Boot up: Apple's secret development process, how LulzSec hid last summer, Techcrunch droops and more
MIT scientists create a pinhole camera out of any windowed room
www.theverge.com
MIT computer scientists Antonio Torralba and William Freeman have created a new forensics tool that can be used to help identify the location of any windowed room by using just a few still images. Not unlike a pinhole camera or camera obscura, the new technique takes advantage of light...
Angelina: the experimental AI that's coming for our game dev jobs
www.engadget.com
Ok so, maybe Angelina couldn't have created Skyrim all on her own, but the experimental AI from Michael Cook (a computer scientist at Imperial College London) is still quite impressive. The artificial dev is able program enemy behavior, layout levels, and distribute power ups with random attributes. While many...
Angelina: An AI that makes computer games from scratch
www.extremetech.com
A PhD student at Imperial College London has created a computer AI, called Angelina, that can create computer games autonomously.In a process called “cooperative co-evolution,” which is an emerging field of evolutionary computation, each aspect of the game is broken down into “species” — level layout, enemy behavior, and power-ups...
U.S. Government seeks spying tools for Facebook, Twitter
www.bgr.com
Facebook is a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with friends and family, and Twitter lets users share all kinds of information with their followers. These giant social networks are also packed full of information that advertisers trip over themselves to take advantage of, but another group is looking...
ISPs itching to bring data-cap racket to home broadband services
www.bgr.com
As much as consumers hate having their mobile data capped, there’s no question that caps on wireline broadband services have the potential to be a far greater burden than mobile caps. Well, guess what: New Scientist reports that unless ISPs either make large investments in bringing fiber to the home or improvements...
Happy Valentine’s Day from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider
www.extremetech.com
If this image proves anything it’s that particle physicists have a unique way of displaying their affection. In this photo, the heart of a CERN researcher — Tom Whyntie — is pierced by two proton beams being smashed together with a force of around one trillion elecronvolts.Now, before you get...
Researcher details method for teaching computers to win at board games through short training videos
www.engadget.com
All right, hotshot -- sure, you can trounce your five-year-old niece in a round of Connect Four, but are you ready to do battle with a machine? Łukasz Kaiser of Paris Diderot University in France has detailed a method for teaching computers how to learn relatively simple games like...
Researcher details method for teaching computers to win at board games through short training videos
Microsoft could use Kinect to deliver emotion-based advertising
www.bgr.com
Microsoft recently filed a patent application for technology that would give its Xbox 360 Kinect sensor the ability to read users’ facial expressions and body language, thus enabling Microsoft to send them ads based on their emotional states. Jacob Aron at New Scientist writes that the technology in the...
Mouth-based bling MP3 player puts your tunes on retainer
www.engadget.com
It's time to give your pockets a rest. Take a cue from Parsons student Aisen Chacin and stick your MP3 player where it belongs: in your mouth. The catchily-named Play-a-Grill combines bone-conducting music playback with a classic bit of bling-based technology. This "attempt to provide an unusual display and...
Researchers say crab-based computing possible, lobsters throw up claws in disbelief
www.engadget.com
IBM's Holey Optochip? Yawn. Fujitsu's K supercomputer? Yesterday's news. Forget about boring old conventional computing stuff, the future of computer technology lies in crabs -- lots and lots of crabs. Researchers at Kobe University and the University of the West the England's Unconventional Computing Centre have discovered that properly...
Microsoft Research's MirageTable brings some augmented reality to your tabletop
www.engadget.com
We got a look at a holographic telepresence project from Microsoft Research earlier this week, but that's far from the only Kinect-enhanced rig it's working on these days. This setup dubbed a MirageTable was also shown off at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Austin, Texas this week, offering a...
MinION USB stick decodes DNA in a matter of seconds
www.engadget.com
If you happen to be "special," then this $900 USB device is just about the worst thing ever. The aptly named MINion serves its masters by interrogating the cells of living organisms and rooting out their genetic secrets. We won't pretend to know exactly how it works, but it...
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