Science and research

Doomsday isn't far from many people's imaginations, whether it's the end of the Mayan calendar, the rapture, or a massive asteroid smashing into the Earth. Now, one of these far-flung scenarios may become even less likely.

The European Space Agency announced this week that it's in the beginning phases of an "Asteroid Impact and Deflection Mission" with its U.S. partner Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The eventual goal of the mission is to verify whether scientists can collide with an asteroid that's hurtling through space -- so as to avoid any possible … Read more

Leap Motion, the makers of the innovative Leap hands-free motion control system, said today that it has struck its first retail partnership, an exclusive launch deal to sell the device at Best Buy.

According to Leap Motion, Best Buy stores and BestBuy.com will begin taking pre-orders in February and selling the Leap sometime this spring. The deal comes on the heels of the company's recent agreement to bundle the device with Asus PCs once it launches, as well as a $30 million B round of funding.

The San Francisco startup's technology is capable of measuring motion with … Read more

Mirror, mirror on the wall, will drinking affect my looks at all?

The very week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the results of a survey on drinking patterns among U.S. females (notably that 1 in 5 high school girls and 1 in 8 women report binge drinking), the Scottish government launched its Drop a Glass Size campaign, complete with app, in an attempt to get people to drink a little less every day.

The free Drinking Mirror app, for iPhone and Android devices, has users take or upload existing photos of themselves and watch their faces age over the course of 10 years based on their current rates of alcohol consumption.

The developers fully admit that they are playing the vanity card -- and targeting women in particular.… Read more

Famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil joined Google last month to work on "some of the hardest problems in computer science," specifically machine learning and language processing.

"The project we plan to do is focused on natural language understanding," Kurzweil told Singularity Hub in an interview (see video below). "We want to give computers the ability to understand the language that they're reading."

As Google's director of engineering, Kurzweil's said the challenge isn't just one of the hardest but also the most important.

"It's ambitious, in fact there'… Read more

Earthlings can breathe a sigh of relief; NASA scientists have officially ruled out the possibility of the 22 million ton asteroid Apophis smashing into the planet in 2036.

"The impact odds as they stand now are less than one in a million, which makes us comfortable saying we can effectively rule out an Earth impact in 2036," manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office Don Yeomans said in a statement. "Our interest in asteroid Apophis will essentially be for its scientific interest for the foreseeable future."

Apophis is still en route to come exceedingly close … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Touchless gesture control may soon be possible on Apple's iOS devices, thanks to a startup that will be releasing a software development kit enabling the technology.

For some time, Israeli company PointGrab has been making its technology -- which allows users to control activity onscreen with little more than a wave of the hand -- available on a series of platforms, namely Windows 8, Android, and Linux. And next month, Apple's iOS will join the party.

In a demo at CES here today, Assaf Gad, PointGrab vice president of marketing and product, showed CNET how the technology … Read more

Ah, the old copy/paste. Such a handy keyboard shortcut for such a wide range of applications. But would you want your doctor using it while maintaining your oh-so-personal and unique-to-you medical records?

Because chances are good that your doc does, according to new research out of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Excuse me while I take a moment to summarize, rather than copy and paste, some key findings from the research.

Assistant professor of medicine and lead author Daryl Thornton and his team scrutinized 2,068 electronic patient progress reports at an ICU in Cleveland. Some 62 … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Touch screens are so last year.

These days, touchless gesture control is the hot thing. Just last week, San Francisco startup Leap Motion, which developed a motion-control technology with sub-millimeter accuracy, announced a $30 million B round of funding. And at CES here, there are multiple companies showing off technology that lets users control their computers with little or no physical contact with a screen or a mouse.

One of them is Palo Alto, Calif.-based Elliptic Labs, which has pioneered an ultrasound-based touchless gesture control system. In a demo for CNET, Elliptic showed off its Windows 8 Gesture … Read more

If you're heading to the International Space Station, try to bunk in the Japanese section. It's as quiet as a Zen temple.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recently went aboard the ISS and has been recording what it sounds like. It's not quite the elegant "2001: A Space Odyssey" experience you might expect. It's more like a noisy tin can.

After recording last week the ambient sounds of the U.S. lab, with its noisy air pumps and fans, Hadfield managed to get samples of what the ISS toilet sounds like, as well as the relative serenity of the Japanese Experiment Module (aka Kibo). … Read more