Crave

(Credit: AT&T)

LAS VEGAS--It's proving to be a big day for AT&T. In addition to announcing five upcoming Android devices, committing to more app development, and launching the Nokia Ovi Store, AT&T President Ralph de la Vega said the carrier would offer two Palm WebOS devices soon. He didn't elaborate beyond that, but perhaps we'll learn more at the Palm press conference on Thursday?

(Via Phone Scoop)

(Credit: NY Daily News)

In middle school, I had to dissect an earthworm, a snail, a frog, and a fetal pig. I did not like doing this. It's not that I was some animal-rights activist, I just found it to be thoroughly disgusting. I decided then in the eighth grade that under no circumstances was I going to be a doctor.

Instead, I became an Internet blogger who writes stories about this new transparent goldfish being developed in Japan. The idea is that taking dead things apart to see how they work is gross. The solution is to mess with nature to the point that you can see how an animal works while it's still alive. That's also gross, but at least you don't feel like you have to sterilize your hands after your study so you can eat lunch.

What's great is that Mie University, the school that's developed the goldfish, fully expects to offer the breed--called ryukin--for sale to the public. It expects the fish to get up to five pounds and to live for up to 20 years. I'm imagining a pond of these could be awesome in a "gross I can see its guts" kind of way. I want one.

Although Rock Band comes pretty close to the "real thing," there's something missing: the vibrations that hit your heart when playing a real drum set.

Immerz, which until recently was a one-man company, created a device that lets you feel real-life sensations of a game, movie, or music. KOR-fx is made up of two plastic devices that lay on your chest and synchronize vibrations with received audio signals.

(Credit: xconomy.com)

President and physicist Shahriar S. Afshar, calls it acousto-haptic technology, something he turned to after three years participating in privately funded research. The result of Afshar's experiment contradicted a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics. Just as he expected, the physics community rejected Afshar's findings.

Lucky for us, his attention shifted to KOR-fx. The idea came from irritation with college students playing video games so loudly. Can't they just turn it down? No, he realized, increasing the volume to disturbingly high levels was an attempt to feel bass, like the physical sensation of a bomb explosion in Counter Strike.

Is this ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are throwing their weight behind OsiriX, a medical imaging app that can be used to diagnose acute appendicitis with surprising accuracy.

(Credit: OsiriX)

Just over a year ago, the open-source Mac image viewer OsiriX released its widely hailed medical imaging software for the iPhone. The software was created by a group of radiologists who also proved to be sophisticated programmers, and was hailed by a wider net of radiologists as an app with serious promise.

More recently, scientists from Johns Hopkins University rallied formally behind the app when they presented the results of a study conducted at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville of patients suspected of having acute appendicitis. Reviewing nothing more than computed tomography (CT) scans over an encrypted wireless network using an iPhone 3G with the OsiriX app, researchers were able to diagnose acute appendicitis correctly in 99 percent of the scans of 25 patients, with one false negative.

"This new technology can expedite diagnosis and, therefore, treatment," says Asim Choudhri, a neuroradiologist at JHU who led the study. "We knew that recent advances in handheld device technology allowed viewing of medical imaging, but it [was] unproven whether viewing on a small screen allows a reader to reliably and reproducibly obtain information."

The findings of this study, which Choudhri tells me was funded internally at the UVA Department of Radiology (and yes, his allegiance is clear--he owns an iPhone and in fact supplied it for the study) are encouraging not only for possible appendicitis cases, but a wide range of illnesses such as aneurism and stroke that require fast diagnosis. ... Read More

Guinness World Records has certified a Japanese researcher's camera as having the most lenses in the world at 158.

(Credit: Nagoya Institute of Technology)

Yojiro Ishino of the Nagoya Institute of Technology created the super camera with his students in August to photograph flames from many different angles to better understand their structure.

The research goal is to find more efficient ways of burning fuel for engines.

The camera images can be used to create realistic computer-generated graphics of the flames in 3D. Ishino created a lower-res camera with only 40 lenses in 2003.

His latest camera measures 1.5 feet in diameter and 2.8 inches tall. It took Ishino and his students about six months to assemble the 158 high-power lenses into four rows along a semicircle.

Each lens cost about 200 yen, or $2.24, and the team bought 800 lenses for the project. Guinness required that each of the 158 lenses in the camera was operational before certifying the machine.

Want an excuse to play a third-person shooter video game? Fear not, my intrepid adventurers--so long as you are willing to navigate the microscopic world of immune system proteins and cells to save a patient trying to fight off a raging bacterial infection. And if you think that sounds good, there's more: it's free.

According to an evaluation of a few hundred 7th grade students, the difference in understanding of cellular and molecular biology was "measurably improved" among the 180 students who played the free, 3D third-person shooter game Immune Attack, which was devised by Melanie Stegman and Michelle Fox of the Learning Technologies Program at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.

The study's findings are being presented at the American Society for Cell Biology's annual meeting this week in San Diego, Calif.

To play the game, simply control the Microbot Explorer, so named because it is just 25 microns wide (a micron being a millionth of a meter), as you travel through the suffering patient's bloodstream and connective tissue in an attempt to capture such things as white blood cells.

"Additionally, we have used Immune Attack to inspire high school computer programming classes to create their own new videos games based on [it]," Stegman said.

Immune Attack 2.0 is due to be officially released in early 2010 but is available for free download now for people with PCs here. (A Mac version is coming in the future.)

A group of researchers from Stanford University have figured out a way to transform ordinary copy paper into storage units for electricity.

This week a group led by Yi Cui, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, demonstrated (see video) the use of an ink consisting of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires. Once dipped in the ink and then baked, ordinary paper turns into a black paper that can act as a battery or supercapacitor. The paper retains its ability to hold a charge regardless of whether it's bent, crumpled, or rolled.

The ink looks identical to common India ink, which makes sense given the fact that Cui's ink is also made of carbon, albeit carbon nanotubes.

Cui and his team tried the ink on plastic, but found paper to be preferable because of its absorbent properties and its ability to endure crumpling. The ink could also be used as paint to create conductive walls.

The nanotechnology paper would have applications in electricity storage devices connecting to electrical grids, and could last through 40,000 charge/recharge cycles, according to Cui.

Cui said the nanomaterial transfers electricity more efficiently than normal conductors. He sees the paper providing a lightweight storage solution for energy sources, like wind and solar, which contend with the problem of not always being available on-demand. It could also be used in hybrid or all-electric cars.

Ink or printing has become a common method for scientists using nanotechnology to convey unusual properties onto ordinary objects. Innovalight has developed a proprietary silicon ink for ink-jet-manufacturing solar cells. In 2007, IBM and ETH Zurich researchers developed a method for "printing" molecules.

Cui's Stanford team for the ink project includes Liangbing Hu and JangWook Choi, both post doctoral scholars, and Yuan Yang, a graduate student.

Credit: Jack Hubbard/Standford News Service

As Eric Jones fought off cancer a few years ago, his weakened immune system left him vulnerable to strep pneumonia and sepsis, which developed into the blood-clotting disorder known as Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation.

Without enough blood supply to his extremities, he wasn't expected to come out of a month-long, medical-induced coma and be able to keep his arms and feet.

Eric Jones, who lost the fingers and thumb in his right hand as he battled cancer, holds a Lego block with his ProDigits prosthetic.

(Credit: Touch Bionics)

Jones was fortunate to fare better than expected, but he did lose movement in his left hand, his right hand's fingers and thumb, his toes, and parts of his feet. Even with intensive physical therapy and the aid of crutches, his mobility was severely affected, and he was unable to do such previously simple tasks as walk while holding a coffee mug, play Legos with his kids, or perform on the piano.

Enter ProDigits, believed to be the world's first powered bionic finger solution, whose commercial launch developer Touch Bionics announced Tuesday. With a silicone skin designed specifically to fit around his right hand, the ProDigits prosthesis gave Jones, who began to use the latest model this summer, a movable thumb.

In other words, it gave him opposition, without which the hand is considered to be 40 percent impaired.

"I didn't want to wait even one more day before I could start using it," Jones says. "ProDigits offers me functionality that I can't get anywhere else; it offers me the ability to grasp... I can pick something up and walk out to the car with it, rather than have to put it in a bag. Most importantly, I'm able to take care of my kids--play games with my kids, take them to school, make dinner."

Prosthetic fingers aid fine motor skills (photos)

Touch Bionics is probably best known for its i-Limb Hand, a full-hand prosthetic with five individually powered digits released in 2006. ProDigits takes this prosthetic a step further, because it caters to patients like Jones with partial hands on a case-by-case basis. The sockets themselves are custom-designed by clinicians to suit individual needs.

(Credit: ABC/Wikimedia)

This week we told you about a couple of breakthroughs in bionics, including a Luke Skywalker-like artificial hand controlled by the brain, and a bionic larynx that uses a speech synthesizer to let people who've had their voice boxes removed speak more realistically. Those are both awesome.

They also hint that we may be on the threshold of a new wave of bionic devices that will boost the quality of life for people around the world. But what's next? What bionic science will most wow us in coming years?

Vote in our poll, and be sure to leave a comment in our TalkBack section telling us what sort of bionic feats you'd like to see accomplished.