pittsburgh

Jan Scheuermann can't use her limbs to feed herself, but she's pretty good at grabbing a chocolate bar with her robot arm.

She's become the first to demonstrate that people with a long history of quadriplegia can successfully manipulate a mind-controlled robot arm with seven axes of movement. Earlier experiments had shown that robot arms work with brain implants.

Scheuerman was struck by spinocerebellar degeneration in 1996. A study on the brain-computer interface (BCI) linking Scheuermann to her prosthetic was published online in this month's issue of medical journal The Lancet.

Training on the BCI allowed her to move an arm and manipulate objects for the first time in nine years, surprising researchers.

It took her less than a year to be able to seize a chocolate bar with the arm, after which she declared, "One small nibble for a woman, one giant bite for BCI." Check it out in the video below. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The Super Bowl takes place in just over 72 hours, and Brian Grey and his lieutenants are trying to plan what is by far their most important day of the year.

Grey is the CEO of Bleacher Report, one of the largest sports Web sites in the U.S., and a place nearly 26 million people visited in January for the latest insights into their favorite teams.

Unlike many sports publications, Bleacher Report doesn't concentrate on breaking news with a team of paid writers. Instead, it relies on sports enthusiasts around the country and the world who are … Read more

New fitness technology products like Fitbit and Jawbone Up are aimed at pushing healthier lifestyles. The eButton isn't yet ready for prime time, but the University of Pittsburgh project really knows how to get all up in your business.

The eButton tracks all those little details that you would hesitate to confess to your personal trainer. The device combines a miniature camera, accelerometer, GPS, and a set of sensors into a gadget that you wear pinned to your chest.

The eButton is kind of like the Santa Claus of fitness tools. It knows if you've been out jogging or if you haven't gotten up from the couch since that "Battlestar Galactica" marathon started 12 hours ago.… Read more

ARLINGTON, Texas--NFL teams including the Dallas Cowboys could soon be abandoning their traditional paper playbooks and game-day printouts of plays in favor of iPads or other tablets.

Pete Walsh, head of technology for the Cowboys, said his team and at least a "couple" of others are currently considering abandoning their playbooks in favor of iPads, a move they feel could save them as much as 5,000 pages of paper printouts per game.

Walsh explained this potential philosophical and technological shift to CNET during a discussion about Cowboys Stadium technology at Super Bowl Media Day here Tuesday. The … Read more

ARLINGTON, Texas--In my role as a reporter, I've had the good fortune to visit a number of control and/or command centers, such as those running a massive radio telescope, a nuclear submarine, a national laser fusion facility, and several others.

For anyone who remembers the Matthew Broderick vehicle "War Games," the bar for what a control room looks like is high: massive screens, dozens of workstations, long tables, and people moving around everywhere. But in the commodity PC era, that kind of room is mostly long gone. While I've seen NASA control centers that approach … Read more

These days, the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is dominated by cluster designs assembled from many independent computing nodes. But there's still a place in the world for an earlier approach, as evidenced by a new machine called Blacklight at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

Blacklight is a mammoth $2.8 million shared-memory machine built by SGI for the center. The system comes in two halves, each with 16 terabytes of shared memory. Either half would be the largest such amount of memory so far built, PSC said, and with a bit more programming effort, the … Read more

A Washington Post sports columnist was suspended for a month on Tuesday after the newspaper concluded that he was too cavalier with the publication's reputation when he intentionally used his Twitter account to plant a false story.

Mike Wise, a well-known columnist at The New York Times before moving to the Post in 2004, was out to illustrate how sloppy sports journalism has become in the age of shoot-first blogging and social networking. On Monday, he posted to Twitter this message: "Roethlisberger will get five games, I'm told."

He was referring to Ben Roethlisberger, quarterback for … Read more

LATROBE, Pa.--When you're driving randomly across Pennsylvania and fate hands you a chance to visit the training camp of the Pittsburgh Steelers, you don't stop to consider whether you've got the time.

That was my conclusion Sunday as I was driving east on U.S. Route 30 on an all-day trek toward Gettysburg. These are the last days of my six-week Road Trip 2010 project, and I'm making my way back to Washington, D.C., to fly home.

In my book, the last few days of driving had better have the least amount of time … Read more

A video of teenagers using a brand new iPad for batting practice is white-hot on YouTube.

The video, which as of early Monday morning had more than 257,400 views, is sort of a send up of the traditional "stress tests" that reviewers sometimes do on gadgets. The teens bought the brand-new device at a Best Buy store and went out to the parking lot to film their demolition. First, they dropped the device on the cement. Then, out came the aluminum baseball bat.

"Batter up, bro," says one teen. "Give it a swing." … Read more