virtual

Today, pathologists and researchers must cut super-thin slices of tissue samples to view them on a microscope -- a labor-intensive process that renders 3D images created from hundreds of 2D sections prohibitively expensive.

Not to mention tedious to construct. Imagine if a single scene in Halo was presented as a series of 2D images one must perfectly align before getting the lay of, say, a single battleground.

Now, computer scientists and medical researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom say they've devised a novel workaround in the form of a digital scanning system that produces 3D views of tissue samples … Read more

My wife works for our local school department as an IT support specialist assigned to the town's largest elementary school. Like many U.S. elementary schools, kids and teachers use a variety of personal computing devices, including PCs, notebooks, and now tablets. (Everyone wants to use these 'cause they're way cool.)

Keeping this veritable Noah's ark full of computing animals happy is more than a full-time job. There are more than 400 of them and they have quirks that give most of them unique personalities. If she comes home and tells me she had time for lunch, … Read more

ButtonBeats Virtual Piano Black is a cool Flash app that simulates a piano keyboard on your desktop. You can play it with your mouse or with optional keyboard controls. By tapping out notes in a numbered sequence, even total beginners can play simple tunes like "Happy Birthday" and "Jingle Bells" to more complex melodies such as those by Mozart, Bach, and the Beatles.

Virtual Piano's interface does indeed look like a real piano keyboard, albeit a reduced one, with attractive highlights on the black keys, which are functional. That was a good sign since we'… Read more

With each turn in Triple Town, you are given an object -- grass, a bush, a tree -- to place onto your 6x6 playing board for use as a building block. Place three of the same object next to each other, and they'll combine to form a single, more valuable object. Three patches of grass make a bush, three bushes make a tree, three trees make a house, and so on. Your goal is to build the most advanced town possible before all the slots on your board fill up.

The difficulty of Triple Town lies in planning ahead, … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about the best way to move data from an old user account to a new one, the purpose for the key given to you when you enable FileVault, and how to add new menu extras to the menu bar. Others asked how to manage exceptionally large virtual memory used by programs, and how best to move an OS installation to a new partition. We welcome alternative approaches and views from readers, so if you have any suggestions, post … Read more

Designing a car can take years, but Ford has been able to cut the process in half, from six years to three years, by using virtual reality.

"We are able to cheat reality," says Elizabeth Baron, a VR technical specialist at Ford. She says virtual reality enables the automaker to do all kinds of tests in a short period of time, though there are limitations to the technology too. SmartPlanet correspondent Sumi Das gets outfitted with the automaker's virtual-reality gear for a preview.

This video originally appeared on SmartPlanet with the headline "At Ford, using virtual reality to tweak car design.&… Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about the options for performing a clean install of OS X Lion, restoring an iTunes library after formatting and reinstalling the OS, and whether virtual machines will be affected after reinstalling OS X. In addition, some people have wondered about Intuit getting other older PowerPC-based software packages running in Lion, and whether Address Book contacts can be shared among local user accounts. We welcome alternative approaches and views from readers, so if you have any suggestions, then post … Read more

Kacper Jarecki, a librarian at Queens Library in New York, has 10 other life forms living with him. They just all happen to be electronic toys.

Jarecki's Virtual Pet Shelter is one of the more unusual projects on Kickstarter. It has a modest $250 goal and no backers yet, but there's a certain charm to the concept.

Digital-pet revival In case you missed the fad, virtual pets are little electronic toy creatures that require "feeding" and care--and sometimes, as in the case of Webkinz, have alter-egos in the form of online avatars. Jarecki is looking to … Read more

There is something faintly absurd about dressing for a job interview.

You wear your best clothes--sometimes borrowed from someone you met in a bar--in order to present an entirely false picture of yourself. No, you don't usually wear Armani. No, you don't usually wear shirts with collars. Especially clean ones.

However, now that we all project ourselves through machines, we have to rethink our image. Yes, our online image.

Yesterday, there was some evidence that there might be a few more jobs in America.

One way in which employers find people quickly and cheaply is by dint of … Read more