anton544 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Current A.I. Projects

Submitted by no1nose on Thursday August 23, 2007 @11:12AM

no1nose writes: Are there any artificial intelligence projects that I can participate in at home? A colleague of mine said he had heard of a project started by some programmers at Microsoft several years ago that ran as a service on a PC. This service had the ability to interact with the A.I. services running on other PC's it knew about. Unfortunately, neither of us can find any information about this project.

I'm not looking for a stand-alone A.I. program. I would like something that runs locally and communicates its knowledge to other PC's (either by a mesh network or a central server).

Submission + - Milestone In The Regeneration Of Brain Cells (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by

Raver32

on Thursday August 23, 2007 @10:51AM

Raver32 writes: "The research group of Prof. Dr. Magdalena Götz at the Institute of Stem Cell Research of the GSF — National Research Centre for Environment and Health, and the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, has achieved an additional step for the potential replacement of damaged brain cells after injury or disease: functional nerve cells can be generated from astroglia, a type of supportive cells in the brain by means of special regulator proteins. The majority of cells in the human brain are not nerve cells but star-shaped glia cells, the so called "astroglia". "Glia means "glue", explains Götz. "As befits their name, until now these cells have been regarded merely as a kind of "putty" keeping the nerve cells together. A couple of years ago, the research group had been already able to prove that these glia cells function as stem cells during development. This means that they are able to differentiate into functional nerve cells. However, this ability gets lost in later phases of development, so that even after an injury to the adult brain glial cells are unable to generate any more nerve cells. In order to be able to reverse this development, the team studied what molecular switches are essential for the creation of nerve cells from glial cells during development. These regulator proteins are introduced into glial cells from the postnatal brain, which indeed respond by switching on the expression of neuronal proteins. In his current work, Dr. Benedikt Berninger, was now able to show that single regulator proteins are quite sufficient to generate new functional nerve cells from glia cells. The transition from glia-to-neuron could be followed live at a time-lapse microscope. It was shown that glia cells need some days for the reprogramming until they take the normal shape of a nerve cell. "These new nerve cells then have also the typical electrical properties of normal nerve cells", emphasises Berninger. "We could show this by means of electrical recordings"."

Gen Con 2007 In A Nutshell 125

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @03:11PM from the just-look-at-all-the-stormtroopers dept.

Another year, another Gen Con? Hardly. This year was the 40th anniversary of Gen Con, marked the announcement of the newest edition of Dungeons and Dragons, and was the first year videogame companies were actively sought out as exhibitors. Put together this resulted in what felt like record crowds, a healthy dealer's hall, and an instant conversation-starter with every other person at the event. Read on for notes on the new tabletop releases, thoughts on the new edition of D&D, impressions of the videogames that were in attendance, and a shameful admission of weakness.

Submission + - British report describes e-mail stress (itwire.com)

Submitted by

WaltonNews

on Tuesday August 14, 2007 @09:44AM

WaltonNews writes: "British researchers have found that pressures from handling emails throughout the work day cause stress and frustration with workers."

Submission + - iPhone/iTunes 7.3.2 Requires MS Outlook for PC (apple.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward 2.0 on Tuesday August 14, 2007 @09:09AM

Anonymous Coward 2.0 writes: I got an iPhone and was reasonably happy. There has only been one major issue... on the PC platform, the only program to sync calendars to is a full version of Outlook (Express won't do). That was annoying and represented a $65 hidden cost (under my company's MS Employee purchase plan). I get paid fairly well so I just shelled it out. But now with the new iTunes Apple has made it mandatory that MS Outlook be the default mail client!

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