The Touch Sight camera approaches new territory, targeting the blind as the primary market and utilizing touch technology to enable those that are visually impaired to take photos and “view” them using senses other than sight. This digital camera has no LCD screen, but it does have several features specifically made for those with vision problems.
A group of scientists at Reading University in the UK have developed a robot that is controlled by rat neurons. In case you’re wondering why anyone would take rat brain cells and stuff them in a robot, the answer is simple: to learn more about the human brain, how it works and potentially make progress in the battle against degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
The purported “invisibility cloak” has been in the news before. However, University of California at Berkley researchers are on the cusp of something big. They’ve developed a material “that can bend light around 3D objects” in effect, causing them to disappear.
Now, of course this material currently only exists on a nano scale. But these recent developments could potentially one day be scaled up to create great expanses of the material that could conceal objects and even people.
If you’re looking for the next generation of PC cooling technology or consumer electronic recharging, you may only have to look so far as a group of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory who have developed a flexible solar cell. This cell could be applied to all sorts of electronics to make recharging a snap and cooling devices a breeze.
As a contact lens wearer, this one has me interested. Apparently, some researchers at UC Davis have developed a special sort of “smart” contact lens that can detect eye pressure, thus catching glaucoma in its earliest stages. These super contacts can even distribute medication on-site, if needed.
It looks like the dream of flexible and stretchy electronics will come true sometime in the semi-near future. A group of scientists at the University of Tokyo have recently developed a material that both conducts electricity and is made of a rubbery material that can be stretched to more than twice its size.
Mammograms are one thing that if you bring it up in a room full of women, you’re bound to here a bit of grumbling. They are uncomfortable and apparently not always that accurate. Well now there is a new method in the works that is more accurate and one that is hopefully less painful.
Women progressing in the technology field is often a hot topic. Mainly because study after study says that women are not interested in technology, much less want to work in a field involving it. For those of us that do enjoy technology, that are female, those studies tend to annoy the piss out of us.
These DIY batgoggles may have a well-intentioned purpose – to teach the principles of echo-location to kids visiting a science center – but they also could make midnight paintballing a whole lot more interesting (and/or painful). Bleeping angrily whenever an object or person is in front of you, they’re part of Suneth S. Attygalle’s “Dynamic User-centered Research and Design” project. Echo-location relies on bouncing high-pitched sounds off of objects in your path, measuring the time it takes for the sounds to return (or the frequency they return at) to calculate how close the object is.
Check out the video of the batgoggles in action after the cut
When you’re playing a round of Halo, which would you say you enjoyed more, killing, or being killed? That’s easy, no one likes to lose, which is why we spend the entire time running around shooting at people. If we actually enjoyed dying, we’d just stand out in the open and wait to be shot, right? According to a new study, it’s quite the opposite.
A study recently observed 36 young-adults as they played James Bond 007: Nightfire and monitored the brain’s reactions. Apparently they found that when a person’s own character was wounded or killed, the person’s brain “elicited an increase in SCL and zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity and a decrease in corrugator activity” (make them less anxious). However, when someone would kill the another player, their brain showed the exact opposite response.
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