Cutting Edge

The weak economy of 2009 took its toll on venture capitalists, though the year ended with hints of a recovery in store, says a new MoneyTree report.

VCs spent only $17.7 billion on 2,795 different deals last year, the lowest dollar amount and number of investments since 1997, according to the report released Friday by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters.

The numbers amounted to a 37 percent drop in dollars and a 30 percent fall in the volume of deals from 2008, marking the second consecutive year of declines. … Read more

Post-traumatic stress, which is estimated to afflict one in five veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone, is typically diagnosed through behavioral screenings and is often considered a "soft" disorder with no known biomarkers.

"It's like depression in that it can be hidden by the sufferer, it can be latent, and it can be re-activated," says Apostolos Georgopoulos, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. "That's a major issue for the Army, which has to decide whether to re-deploy troops who have had it."

Georgopoulos has previously discovered biomarkers … Read more

Another famous apple has been in the news this week. A 1752 manuscript revealing how Sir Isaac Newton formulated the theory of gravity is now online for people to view and read.

A conversation between Newton and scholar William Stukeley about Newton's life, notably his alleged encounter with a falling apple, prompted Stukeley to write Newton's 1752 biography "Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life." Experts carefully transformed the delicate 250-year-old book into an electronic version that now is on display at Britain's Royal Society Web site.

The online interactive manuscript can be viewed in full 3D or as a Microsoft Silverlight presentation where you can turn each page, zoom in or out, and magnify any section. Some of the passages beautifully handwritten by Stukeley can be a bit difficult to read, but floating commentaries along the way do a fine job of explaining key sections. The interactive 3D effect is nicely done--you do feel as if the actual manuscript is sitting in front of you.… Read more

If you'd like to know whether you're a natural video gamer, just measure the volume of three structures in your brain, according to a new study conducted by several research institutions at the University of Illinois.

Research has already shown that expert gamers outperform novices across several measures of attention and perception, while other studies have found that training novices on video games for 20-plus hours rarely results in measurable cognitive benefits--a contradiction that suggests that brain structure itself, not training, could predict gaming abilities, according to the study.

"This is the first time that we've … Read more

The UK-based McLaren Group, which sponsors the likes of Jenson Button in Formula 1 racing, has created a wireless system that stores data and telemetry info for other athletes as well, including cyclists, rowers, and sailors.

UK Sport, which plans to invest about $500 million (300 million British pounds) in various Olympics endeavors as the country preps to defend its turf during the 2012 games in London, approached McLaren because it has "unique expertise" in data mining, according to the group's head of research and innovation Scott Drawer.

McLaren's Applied Technology division could eventually develop commercial … Read more

One of NASA's seemingly immortal Mars rovers might soon be at the end of its days.

The Spirit rover had been cruising around the Red Planet, along with its companion, Opportunity, since they both arrived six years ago this month. (Spirit landed on January 3, 2004, while Opportunity landed on January 24 of that year.) Their mission to send back photos and data about the Martian surface was expected to last a mere 90 days. Instead, the two traveling research bots blew away all expectations, continuing their treks year after year.

However, scientists warn that Spirit's most recent … Read more

Google employees who got Nexus One mobile phones weren't the only ones who benefitted from the company's largesse this holiday season. The search company also gave more than 600 schools five computers each in an effort to foster science, technology, engineering, and mathematics skills.

The schools were selected from a list of 1,000 of the country's top-rated high schools, said Google spokeswoman Emily Wood.

"These high schools have significant populations of students from under-represented backgrounds as far as technology goes," she said. "We wanted to look at schools already doing a good job … Read more

IBM is once again king of the patents.

For the 17th year in a row, Big Blue earned the most U.S. patents of any company in the world, grabbing 4,914 patents in 2009. Second place Samsung took home 3,611 patents, while Microsoft batted third with 2,906 patents.

Just one of the patents IBM earned for the year was given to Big Blue inventor John Gunnels for an invention to ensure that the internal communications network for the company's Blue Gene supercomputer is running properly.

With almost 5,000 under its belt for the year, IBM … Read more

She may have all the charm of flesh-colored silicone, but a negligee-clad rubber doll named Roxxxy is being billed as the first of a legion of sex robots poised to become man's new best friend.

Unveiled at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas over the weekend, Roxxxy was developed by New Jersey-based True Companion and engineer Douglas Hines, and she's way more than a blow-up doll. She's basically an anatomically correct bot engineered to interact with users by responding to simple conversation through an internal speaker. All responses, though, are prerecorded.

Depending on the personality you … Read more