#NASA's drone is part chopper, part airplane Answer: NASA'S latest drone prototype, GL-10.
The Rubik's Cube. iphones. Snuggies. Then there are the things the world needs. The wheel.
"entomologist and science reporter Aaron Pomerantz wrote on his site last month after taking one to the Peruvian Amazon rainforest."
Last year, Prakash and his team distributed 10,000 Foldscopes to eager users willing to test them out.
Users are submitting their findings at the Foldscope site, with investigations ranging from first-graders looking at banana seeds to detection of parasitic worms in fecal samples.
"he said in a Stanford blog post last year. Unfortunately, Foldscope isn't currently available,
and bionic hands that can be controlled through an iphone. The big benefit of Sanchez's approach is being able to use prostheses for people with spinal cord injuries,
#Compulsively checking Facebook will now include impulse shopping Facebook will soon start looking more and more like an online shopping mall.
The social network said Monday that it is adding a new mobile"shopping"tab where you can buy clothes, electronics and other items without ever leaving Facebook's confines.
For example, click on a shirt featured in a Target ad and the site will immediately direct to Target's shopping page where you can select the color
Like many of Facebook's most recent efforts, the goal is to cut down on slow loading speeds
and corral more user activity into the social network's streamlined walled garden rather than directing users off into the messy outside web.
Facebook is hoping that the smoother experience will make mobile shopping more attractive to web surfers,
who still do most of their shopping on desktop despite spending an increasing portion of their Internet time on smartphones.
"Facebook wrote in Monday's announcement.""Customers can experience slow load times and too many steps on the way to checkout.
"Facebook first began testing the new shopping features with a limited number of retailers back in July.
According to a company survey, nearly half of its 1. 5 billion users come to the site actively looking for products,
Mobile advertising is Facebook's fastest growing revenue area by far; last quarter it accounted for 76%of the social network's $3. 8 billion total ads revenue.
But because of the screen constraints and the way people typically use their smartphones, it's traditionally been hard to push mobile ads for anything other than branding purposes that is,
to impress upon you a positive association with a particular company. Facebook has been fervently trying to change that with ads that place more emphasis on prodding users into taking action
whether it be buying a product, signing up for a company newsletter or downloading an app.
it's doing this by absorbing features that would've previously required loading a separate page for an advertiser website.
It's not the only social network trying to break into the shopping game. Rivals Twitter and Pinterest have launched also e-commerce platforms of their own
and Facebook-owned Instagram is also pushing its own version of"buy"buttons t
#Report: Walmart could start using drones to start delivering things to your house Amazon and Walmart have been jockeying for position in the battle to be the number one U s. retailer.
Now it looks like they'll take that battle to the skies as Walmart joins the online retailer in a quest to use a legion of drones for product deliveries and pickups.
Walmart plans to use drones from DJI to monitor inventories outside their warehouses, deliver packages to customers, many of
Nepal's national emergency operation centre said on twitter, less than three weeks after a similar disaster killed more than 8, 000 people.
and avoid jamming the fragile cellphone network.""Please stay in open field, help us make free road,
do not make phone nw (network) busy. SMS is suggested, "said a message from the national police service's Twitter account.
Nepal's National Emergency Operation center tweeted:""Pray to Almighty: Keep all Nepalese Safe in this difficult period of time."
including Bihar where television footage showed residents gathering on the streets and goods having toppled over in shop windows.
#Skype's Real-time Translator Now Open to All Microsoft-owned Skype has cleared the way for anyone to use a new feature that translates video chats or instant messages in real time.
People no longer need to sign up to use a preview version of Skype Translator, which handles spoken English, Spanish, Italian and Mandarin.
with missives written in one language arriving converted into a preferred language, according to Skype.""We are breaking down language barriers that have made historically it challenging for friends
"Yasmin Kahn of Skype said in a blog post. Skype Translator was made available as a free download at the Windows Store for computers
or tablets running on the latest version of Microsoft's operating software, according to Kahn. Skype Translator preview debuted late last year,
but was invitation-only to allow time and testing for refining the service.""Our goal for Skype Translator is to translate as many languages as possible on relevant platforms,
and to deliver the best speech translation experience to our more than 300 million connected Skype customers,
"Kahn said. Google earlier this year debuted a feature for its Translate app that allows people to pair any two of 38 language options for translation,
and also automatically translates when pointed at text items or signs s
#Artificial Octopus Arm Performs Surgery About 10 years ago, the Pentagon funded a science project to build an entire eight-armed artificial octopus,
capable of squeezing, holding and grabbing objects with soft, flexible arms just like a real one.
#Google Self-driving cars Ready for Public roads Google announced Friday its self-driving prototype cars were ready to leave the test track
The move comes after Google's internal testing of the bubble-shaped vehicle over the past year
with our safety drivers aboard,"said project chief Chris Urmson in a blog post.""We've been running the vehicles through rigorous testing at our test facilities,
and ensuring our software and sensors work as theye supposed to on this new vehicle."
"The Google car uses the same technology as its fleet of Lexus SUVS which has logged some 1. 6 million kilometers (one million miles)."
In Google's home town of Mountain view, speeds will be limited to 40 kilometers (25 miles per hour "and during this next phase of our project we'll have safety drivers aboard with a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal,
"Google said earlier this week its adapted vehicles on the road had been involved in 11 minor accidents, but that none were the fault of the technology.
there hasn been a simple, inexpensive and quick way to monitor water quality. But a team of entrepreneurs from Calgary, Canada, has developed a solution.
and then from there you can wirelessly monitor remote locations without needing to go there and physically take a sample yourself,
sends the electrical signal to a mobile phone or a server. The signal can be accessed using 3g, Wi-fi or a USB connection on a computer.
The scientists, who started working on FRED while undergraduates at the University of Calgary, have won several competitions for their device
The device could be used to test water near mining sites, water treatment plants or just about anywhere clean,
before settling in a new site, and are thus very hard to spot. The study, published in the journal Nature Communication, suggests that capturing CTCS would prevent their spread and help halt disease progression."
and implanted two per mouse. The implant--which used immune cells as bait--also contained a scanner to detect the presence of trapped cells."
"Shea said by email.""The initial benefit is detection--catching the metastasis before it spreads widely throughout the body,
Existing neuroprostheses require the user to generate specific brainwave activities for particular motions xtend left arm, for instance.
It artificial intelligence goes beyond reflecting your bad hair day and to actually displaying information about your health from your cholesterol levels to indicators for diabetes.
A breathalyzer is used to detect blood sugar levels that can be influenced by alcohol and smoking. According to the SEMEOTICONS project,
future cell phones may see an increase in run time after many uses, rather than a decrease,
For more details, be sure to check out Wookieepedia, the world best-named wiki fan site.
and you can say same thing for screens on laptops and phones. A team from the University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science are working toward that goal.
The authors used computer simulations to figure out what would happen if engineers removed a whopping 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.
When electrons move through the basic parts of a computer chipogic circuits that manipulate data,
and electrical engineer Wolfram Pernice at the Karlsruhe Institute of technology in Germany, have hit on a solution to the disappearing memory problem using a material at the heart of rewritable CDS and DVDS.
and CDS and DVDS use this difference to store data. To read out the datatored as patterns of tiny spots with a crystalline
or amorphous order CD or DVD drive shines low-intensity laser light on a disk and tracks the way the light bounces off.
the resulting chips have the potential to run at 50 to 100 times the speed of today computer processors f
To do that, they employ a special algorithm that calculates the exact interference patterns needed to levitate an object using this ingle-sided emitter.
But with the algorithm help, Drinkwater and his colleagues were able to dictate the bead motion
or danced from side to side. fter we got the algorithm working, we put the bead in
and it just stayed theret was absolutely amazing The algorithm works by constructing the best possible interference patterns,
As the algorithm tunes the phases, the interference pattern and resulting hologram change, enabling researchers to move the bead around.
The algorithm can fashion acoustic holograms of various spatial configurations, but Drinkwater and his team focused on three:
However, these molecules can also cause collateral damage to healthy tissue around the infection site:
or site of damage in the structure of DNA, called 5-chlorocytosine (5clc) in the inflamed tissues of mice infected with the pathogen Helicobacter hepaticus.
the researchers first placed the 5clc lesion at a specific site within the genome of a bacterial virus. They then replicated the virus within the cell.
when triggered by infection, fires hypochlorous acid at the site, damaging cytosines in the DNA of the surrounding healthy tissue.
On a flat lattice, atoms can easily move around from site to site. However, in a tilted lattice, the atoms would have to work against gravity.
Ramos and his colleagues envision deploying HERMES to a disaster site, where the robot would explore the area,
With computer software, the researchers translated the robot center of pressure to the platform motors,
he lab focuses on how to bring computer science to our physical world, how to program our physical world to assemble itself
Moving forward with 4-D printing Another active area of investigation for the lab is-D printing,
and the software firm Autodesk to print customizable smart materials. raditional smart materials are exciting,
After demonstrating the 4-D printing concept, the lab soon found itself pursuing a number of intriguing applications with several companies.
Tibbits posits. ou can actually transform the wing panels on the car so that when they meet moisture they change
acoustic panels are static, but the acoustics in the room are completely dynamic. Your acoustic panels could adapt to the noise levels in the room to help amplify the noise
or help dampen it. Commercializing collaborations Self-Assembly Lab researchers may have certain applications in mind as they develop new concepts such as 4-D printing.
But their first corporate partners may bring quite different ideas Tibbits says: heyl say, an we do it in sportswear?
#Silicon photonics meets the foundry Advances in microprocessors have transferred the computation bottleneck away from CPUS to better communications between components.
(I/O)- intensive applications such as server farms is required the energy consumption to transport bits of data around.
That means these components can directly follow the spectacular successes of the optical fiber systems that run the Internet, cautions Lionel Kimerling,
on the photonics side, is the difference in design paradigms between computing and optics. In computers, Kimerling explains,
engineers design a Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) circuit and can expect it to work.
He notes that IBM is creating such a kit for its semiconductor foundry in Burlington, Vermont.
says Rajeev Ram, professor of electrical engineering at MIT. His group develops energy-efficient photonics, nd the way we do that is to miniaturize the devices,
and his colleagues are now working to demonstrate full-scale multi-core computing with an entire computer that uses only photons to communicate with memory,
and to show that such a computer should be much more energy-efficient and offer potentially higher performance.
Ram lab aims to overcome major hurdles in integrating optical interconnection for microprocessors within existing manufacturing systems. typical microprocessor fab costs between 1 and 3 billion dollars,
Ram says. Making material progressover time, new materials and devices will provide far more powerful integration of photonics on silicon.
a team of MIT researchers developed a domain-specific programming language for generating custom materials based on a set of design specifications.
The software, dubbed Matriarch for aterials Architecture allows users to combine and rearrange material building blocks in almost any conceivable shape.
Accessible as an open source Python library the program will ultimately be used as a tool for engineers to quickly discover new materials
Category theory is a fairly new field of mathematics, focused on structural relationships and compositionality.
Jagadeesan, writer of the majority of the software library, explained the code follows the mathematics very closely.
From these configurations, the program creates Protein Data Bank (PDB) files to be passed to molecular dynamics software.
To perform this study with existing software would have been nearly impossible and time-intensive, says the team.
Simultaneously, the cost of 3-D printers has fallen sufficiently to make them household consumer items.
Now a team of MIT researchers has opened up a new frontier in 3-D printing:
Like other 3-D printers now on the market, the device can print designs created in a computer-assisted design program,
producing a finished product with little human intervention. In the present version, molten glass is loaded into a hopper in the top of the device after being gathered from a conventional glassblowing kiln.
far higher than the temperatures used for other 3-D printing. The stream of glowing molten glass from the nozzle resembles honey as it coils onto a platform,
Klein says the printing system is an example of multidisciplinary work facilitated by MIT flexible departmental boundaries in this case
an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering. hese bacteriophages are designed in a way that relatively modular.
Cpf1 cuts far away from the recognition site, meaning that even if the targeted gene becomes mutated at the cut site,
it can likely still be recut, allowing multiple opportunities for correct editing to occur. Fourth:
The Cpf1 system provides new flexibility in choosing target sites. Like Cas9, the Cpf1 complex must first attach to a short sequence known as a PAM,
As with earlier Cas9 tools, these groups will make this technology freely available for academic research via the Zhang lab page on the plasmid-sharing website Addgene, through
The Zhang lab also offers free online tools and resources for researchers through its website.
and Hollywood A team of researchers at MIT Computer science and Artificial intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has believed long that wireless signals like Wifi can be used to see things that are invisible to the naked eye.
director of the Wireless@MIT center. ou could also imagine it being used to operate your lights and TVS,
The emitted radiation is approximately 1/10,000 the amount given off by a standard cellphone.
we can extract meaningful signals through a series of algorithms we developed that minimize the random noise produced by the reflections.
the device then monitors how these reflections vary as someone moves in the environment and intelligently stitches the person reflections across time to reconstruct his silhouette into a single image.
In August the team presented Emerald to President Obama as part of the White house first annual Demo Day. n the same way that cellphones and Wifi routers have become indispensable parts
#Wifi Calling offers coverage for UK homes, small offices EE on Tuesday announced the launch of Wifi Calling to make calls and texts available in every home and small office in the UK.
The numbers lead EE to believe that Wifi Calling could benefit the country's increasingly mobile workforce.
What's more, the National Association of Estate agents said Wifi Calling can stop house sellers suffering from losing out because of poor mobile coverage.
The EE release went on to promote Wifi Calling as having a potential change on the value of a home.
"Wifi Calling will make a real difference to millions of customers across the UK, from basement flats in London to the most rural homes in the country."
"Swantee told the BBC that"We have worked more than a year to make sure that everything works like a normal phone connection."
"Ringtone, voicemail, and quality of the conversation remains the same with the EE solution. EE is also promoting ease of adoptiono special app is needed for the service
and it is not necessary that friends be in the same closed user group service for talking and messaging.
Wifi Calling from EE uses the phone's normal dialer and contacts book to make calls,
The launch involves the Lumia 640 and Samsung galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. EE said, "More new and existing devices will be added to the Wifi Calling range in the coming weeks,
and by summer 2015 more than five million EE pay monthly customers will have access to Wifi Calling."
"Initially, said the BBC, The Wifi Calling service will be limited to pay monthly subscribers using Samsung's Galaxy S6 and S5 phones and Microsoft's new Lumia 640."
"Since it requires specific mobile data components to be built into the devices, it cannot be extended to other older models,
"Wi-fi calling allows you to use a Wi-fi network to make and receive phone calls, rather than using the traditional mobile network,
"he wrote. With EE's service,"you may not even notice you're actually using a Wi-fi network rather than the mobile one
-although you do get an icon in the status bar alerting you to the fact."
when using a Wi-fi network to connect to friends. EE is a digital communications company in Britain.
Its mobile and fixed communications services are delivered to consumers, businesses, government and the wholesale market a
#Singapore Telecom to buy US cybersecurity firm for $810 mn Singapore Telecom (Singtel) said Wednesday it will buy almost all of US cybersecurity firm Trustwave for $810 million,
Southeast asia's biggest telecom firm by revenue said it will acquire a 98 percent equity interest in Trustwave under an agreement it signed with the Chicago-headquartered company.
and holds substantial stakes in mobile telecom firms in key Asian markets including India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.
'When social media software firm Sprinklr unveiled its latest funding last month, it vaulted into the club of"unicorns,
which makes a business software collaboration tool, entered the group which includes well-known names like Uber
The use of the term"unicorn"began with a blog from investor Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures in late 2013,
"You have a frenzy of investors looking for the next Facebook. They saw the possibility of a return of 1,
said in a blog post that both investors and startups are pushing too hard, ignoring traditional standards of risk."
"In a running Twitter conversation on the subject, Danielle Morrill of the research firm Mattermark said"I've narrowed it down to 61 potential dead unicorns.
"Prominent equity investor Marc Andreessen, one of the founders of Netscape during the dot-com era, expressed similar concerns in a series of tweets last year, saying too many startups are"burning
Mark Cuban, an early dot-com entrepreneur, said on his blog that the current situation is"worse than the tech bubble of 2000"because of"angel"investors investing in apps
but this produced a Google and an ebay and a number of other standouts.""Peter Barris at the venture firm New Enterprise Associates said investment is flowing
"In a blog post, Barris said he sees unicorns transforming the way we live.""Perhaps there will even be a flameout
$12 billion The private space exploration firm founded by tech entrepreneur Elon musk announced in January that it raised $1 billion in a round led by Google and Fidelity Investments.
$11 billion The bulletin board-style social network confirmed in March a fresh investment round at a valuation of $11 billion,
The fast-growing social network founded in 2010 in San francisco has disclosed not the number of its users
but analysts say it has some 47 million in the United states and additional users worldwide.*
Preventing kinase over-activity The'Phosphosense'technology screens compounds for use in drugs and has produced a new way of detecting the activity of enzymes called kinases.
A software program compares both arcs to determine if the leg is the same length it was before the procedure.
The system used automated speech recognition software to produce"rough-draft"transcripts, displayed on a simple interface,
and Time warner Cables well as many users of video-sharing websites. Today, 3play's system works much as it did at MIT,
Customers upload videos to 3play's site, where automatic speech recognition software produces transcripts and captions,
which are pushed then to the cloud. Then, any of the contracted editors can choose which transcripts to edit.
who co-invented the system in MIT's Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).""The questions we asked were:
and how can we process thousands of files a day to scale up to meet the demands of the Internet?"
and let users click words to bring them to that exact moment in the video. In addition to Johnson, 3play's cofounders and system co-inventors are Josh Miller MBA'09, Chris Antunes MBA'08,
3play has developed also a number of tools aimed at easing workflow. One tool allows users to switch captioning formats with the click of a button;
another lets users cut -and-paste text from the interactive transcript to create clip reels.
so your average Youtube uploader can learn if captioning is worth the cost. To do so, the company drew on third-party data on thousands of Youtube videos that showed significant increases in viewership with the addition of captions.
When given a video link the calculator crawls the user's channel to tally viewership of noncaptioned videos and, based on that data, estimates the boost in traffic and search-engine optimization,
and how that could all add value with more advertising revenue, among other things.""Everyone wants to know,
Automatic speech recognition technology seemed like the clear solution. But, as it turns out, the technology is only about 80 percent accurate, at best,
tried to grow a Web-based company.""We had'Javascript for Dummies'books on our desks,"Johnson recalls."
"We were figuring it all out on the fly.""At one point, they found a list of every college and university in the country,
"The scientist said the Hur-RNA binding site is like a long, narrow groove, not a well-defined pocket seen in other druggable proteins targeted by many current cancer therapies."
"The Hur protein grabs the'rope'r the RNAT a site called'ARE'on the rope.
and involved the collaboration of chemists, cancer biologists, computer modeling experts, biochemists and biophysicists at KUOTABLY the labs of Xu, Jeffrey Aubé in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Jon Tunge in the Department of chemistry.
#Insights into potential substitutes for costly platinum in fuel cell catalysts Replacing inefficient and polluting combustion engines with fuel cells is not currently feasible
because the cells require platinum-based catalysts. The PNNL study shows how to create particles with a similar reactivity to platinum that replace some of the platinum with Earth-abundant metals.
It may be used to create alloy nanomaterials for solar cells, heterogeneous catalysts for a variety of chemical reactions, and energy storage devices."
as well as other tools in DOE's EMSL, a national scientific user facility. While this work focuses on single nanoparticles, the final result is extended an array with implications that stretch from the atomic scale to the mesoscale."
"The researchers are now exploring different metal combinations with various platinum ratios to get the desired characteristics for fuel cell catalysts.
#Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands Most recent advances in artificial intelligenceuch as mobile apps that convert speech to textre the result of machine learning, in
which computers are turned loose on huge data sets to look for patterns. To make machine-learning applications easier to build,
computer scientists have begun developing so-called probabilistic programming languages, which let researchers mix and match machine-learning techniques that have worked well in other contexts.
In 2013, the U s. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an incubator of cutting-edge technology launched a four-year program to fund probabilistic-programming research.
At the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in June, MIT researchers will demonstrate that on some standard computer-vision tasks,
short programsess than 50 lines longritten in a probabilistic programming language are competitive with conventional systems with thousands of lines of code."
"This is the first time that we're introducing probabilistic programming in the vision area, "says Tejas Kulkarni, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences and first author on the new paper."
"The whole hope is to write very flexible models, both generative and discriminative models, as short probabilistic code,
"By the standards of conventional computer programs, those"models"can seem absurdly vague. One of the tasks that the researchers investigate,
It requires a little work to translate that description into the syntax of the probabilistic programming language,
and Pushmeet Kohli of Microsoft Research Cambridge. For their experiments, they created a probabilistic programming language they call Picture,
which is an extension of Julia, another language developed at MIT. What's old is new The new work,
Even though their computers were painfully slow by today's standards, the artificial intelligence pioneers saw that graphics programs would soon be able to synthesize realistic images by calculating the way in
which light reflected off of virtual objects. This is essentially, how Pixar makes movies. Some researchers,
Calculating the color value of the pixels in a single frame of"Toy story"is a huge computation,
what probabilistic programming languages are designed to do. Kulkarni and his colleagues considered four different problems in computer vision,
each of which involves inferring the three-dimensional shape of an object from 2-D information. On some tasks, their simple programs actually outperformed prior systems.
Learning to learn In a probabilistic programming language the heavy lifting is done by the inference algorithmhe algorithm that continuously readjusts probabilities on the basis of new pieces of training data.
In that respect, Kulkarni and his colleagues had the advantage of decades of machine-learning research. Built into Picture are several different inference algorithms that have fared well on computer-vision tasks.
Time permitting, it can try all of them out on any given problem, to see which works best.
so that its inference algorithms can themselves benefit from machine learning, modifying themselves as they go to emphasize strategies that seem to lead to good results."
but probabilistic programming may alleviate rewriting code across different problems, "he says.""The code can be generic
""Picture provides a general framework that aims to solve nearly all tasks in computer vision,
"says Jianxiong Xiao, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton university, who was involved not in the work."
"It goes beyond image classificationhe most popular task in computer visionnd tries to answer one of the most fundamental questions in computer vision:
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