Those nice, but slightly odd, people at Google must feel rather put upon this week. Everyone seems to be after their blood (although the evidence as to whether they have any is still incomplete).
So, in the spirit of searching for some good news for the Googlies, I managed to find something that will uplift their robotic spirits.
The state of Nevada has, so Forbes tells me, passed a bill that requires its Department of Transportation to create rules and regulations for driverless cars.
You will be aware, unless you have been in an Estonian prison for the last couple … Read more
A Silicon Valley company is promising to bring more color to LCDs.
Nanosys says it has developed a technology that helps deliver 50 percent more color than what's currently available on existing LCD panels. According to the company's site, "that means richer, more viscerally alive reds, a deeper palette of greens, and vivid blues."
Most importantly, the company says it can deliver better color with technology already being used in tablets, televisions, and other products.
Nanosys made headlines yesterday when blogger Robert Scoble gushed over the technology. He said that Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove showed him … Read more
The Green Lantern's Power Ring it ain't, but a ring containing MicroPointing's touchpad is something Q might give 007. With a sensor control area of one square millimeter, the touchpad can easily be embedded in a ring.
Israeli start-up MicroPointing plans to offer the touchpad for embedding in all manner of devices large and small, including smartphones, Netbooks, remote controls, game controls, cameras, steering wheels--anywhere you might want to let your finger do some scrolling.
The touchpad could be on handsets starting in the fourth quarter of next year, according to Avi Rosenzweig, MicroPointing's vice president of business development.
The MicroPointing touchpad works by detecting the force your fingertip produces as it drags across the tiny device's three sensors, according to the company's patent application. The sensors are mounted on tiny posts spaced a few tenths of a millimeter apart--less than the size of a ridge on your fingertip.
The sensors pick up sideways force as your fingertip moves parallel to the touchpad's surface. The company's secret sauce is an algorithm that can pull detailed data from just three sensors, Rosenzweig said.… Read more
A new saliva test developed by geneticists at the University of California, Los Angeles, reveals a person's age within five years, a finding that could have many applications in medicine, at crime scenes, and more.
"With just a saliva sample, we can accurately predict a person's age without knowing anything else about them," says principal investigator Dr. Eric Vilain, a professor of human genetics, pediatrics and urology, in a UCLA news release.
A start-up called Lytro hopes to revolutionize photography by selling a camera later this year that lets people focus their images after the fact.
The technique used is called light-field photography, and it's been an active area of research for years in the optics realm. With it, lens and image sensor technology doesn't focus on a particular subject, but instead gathers light information from different directions; processing after the fact means different aspects of the scene can be recreated.
Lytro has been working on the technology for years--I interviewed Chief Executive Ren Ng three years ago when his … Read more
For aviation junkies, it doesn't get any better than the biggest air show of the year. CNET's coverage includes on-the-scene reporting from our own Daniel Terdiman.
For the first time since 2004, a supercomputer built in Japan can claim to be the fastest on earth.
That's according to the Top500 Supercomputing List, which is expected to be released today at the conference in Hamburg, Germany. The new leader, Japan's K Computer, makes its home in Kobe's RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science. K Computer sped to the front of the class by achieving more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop/s), which pushed it ahead of last November's winner, the Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, which in … Read more
In two days the annual Paris Air Show opens at Le Bourget Airport just outside the French capital. Aviation geeks of all stripes know the event is the biggest and best air show in the world, with just about every airplane you can imagine. And as it has always done, Boeing will be making the flight from Seattle to Paris to show off its newest aircraft, like the 747-8 and the 787 Dreamliner. There, the company will face off with rival Airbus and a number of smaller manufacturers like Bombardier and Embraer.
We've gotten used to touch screens always being flat. Get ready for that to change.
Silicon Valley start-up Tactus Technology has designed a touch screen that grows 3D buttons and knobs where and when you want them.
Smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and kiosks equipped with the technology would sprout physical controls like QWERTY keyboards and knobs on demand. The controls would recede into the touch screen surface after they've served their purpose.
3D controls are often easier to maneuver than today's flat touch-screen controls, as you can use them without looking. Getting the best of both worlds means marrying physical controls' higher accuracy and ease of use with touch screens' elegance, simplicity, and dynamic nature. The physical cues are especially important for people who can't see well or who have trouble with fine hand movements. They also make it easier to control your cell phone when it's in your pocket.
The trick to making a morphing touch screen useful is fitting it in a smartphone. The Tactus design calls for sandwiching a fluid between touch-screen layers and pushing the fluid around with a series of tiny valves. The top layer is flexible, so pushing the fluid to one part of the screen raises the surface there. … Read more
The notion of erasing memories associated with painful or harmful pasts is not a new one. But it has remained just that: a notion.
Now scientists in Israel say they have devised a method to erase memories that trigger cravings in rats addicted to cocaine--a method that works so well it actually results in rats ignoring the place where they had been scoring the drug.
"Memories can trigger a desire for the drug, including memories of the drug itself, the needle, or the environment in which the drug was consumed," says Hebrew University researcher Rami Yaka. "This research indicates the possibility of erasing these memories in a way that will allow addicts to cancel the associations they have in their minds regarding the drug."
The team worked with a small protein called ZIP, which has been found in other studies in recent years to erase memories and even, as a result, inhibit learning processes.
After giving the rats cocaine in a designated spot in their pens for a few weeks, the team injected ZIP into the nucleus accumbens, a brain region known to control pleasure, reward, fear, and more, and then returned the rats to their pens. The rats proceeded to ignore the location they had only recently sought out, suggesting they no longer remembered either the place, the effect of the drug, or perhaps both.
Yaka, who will present his team's findings at the Facing Tomorrow 2011 conference in Jerusalem next week, sees possibilities not just for drug addicts but also those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder and other psychological conditions.
Of course, it remains unclear whether the protein erases selective memories associated with drugs, or if other pleasure-and-reward memories are also affected. Will one also forget the sweetness of chocolate? The ecstasies of copulation? The kiss of a gentle summer's breeze?
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