techgeek0279 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Firefighting robot created by Naval Research Laboratory (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Thursday April 05, 2012 @06:40PM

techgeek0279 writes: "Even in peacetime, fires represent one of the greatest risks to the US Naval Fleet. To this end, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), with support from the Office of Naval Research, is conducting research and developing new technologies to enable shoulder-to-shoulder robotic damage control teammates. The robot in this video is a research platform for testing software for cognitive robotics and human-robot interactions. The knowledge gained from this research will be applied to firefighting robots used on ships. Through a combination of speech and visual recognition, the robot is able to identify trusted individuals, in this case, the human fire-fighting teammate. The human is able to provide situational information to the robot by voice and gestural commands. Here, the human partner is telling Octavia the general location of the fire before she enters the compartment. Using two infrared cameras, Octavia is able to localize the fire, allowing her to target it with the compressed air/water backpack."

Submission + - Analyzing patent by patent of what Facebook is doing to counter sue Yahoo (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @08:52PM

techgeek0279 writes: "What began as the threat of a Yahoo patent jackal coveting the Facebook lion's share soon flashed fangs as a lawsuit on March 12, 2012, with Yahoo alleging Facebook's infringement of these 10 patents. The blatantly opportunistic timing of the move — given Facebook's IPO — is akin to Yahoo's attack against Google during its own IPO in 2004 and has been much decried by the online community as a villainous and vainglorious ploy to seize funds that would have been better earned by legitimate innovation rather than patent trolling. Facebook's former marketing director, Randi Zuckerberg, summed it up best with her tweet, "This Yahoo stuff feels to me like the business equivalent of when celebs do 'Dancing With The Stars' in a last-ditch effort to save a career." In response to Yahoo's attack, Facebook bolstered its 56 patents with some 'white hat' counter-trolling of Yahoo by purchasing 750 IBM patents that created a potential minefield. Armed to the teeth, Facebook today raised its blade and struck ten powerful blows in a countersuit against Yahoo."

Submission + - Seeing beyond the visual cortex (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Thursday March 29, 2012 @07:20PM

techgeek0279 writes: "Damage to the primary visual cortex, the main vision center in the back of the brain, can often cause blindness. But, might it be possible to train the brain to ‘see’ again after such an injury? Yes, according to Tony Ro, a neuroscientist at The City College of New York, who is artificially recreating a condition called Blindsight in his lab. "Blindsight is a condition that some patients experience after having damage to the primary visual cortex in the back of their brains. What happens in these patients is they go cortically blind, yet they can still discriminate visual information, albeit without any awareness." explains Ro. This research holds tantalizing clues to mapping alternative visual pathways that may one day help rehabilitate patients with damage to their primary visual cortex."

Submission + - Microsoft and West Coast Customs: Unlikely partnerships create better business a (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Thursday March 29, 2012 @05:56PM

techgeek0279 writes: "Microsoft, best known for software and the Xbox gaming system, recently worked with West Coast Customs, best known for 'pimping' cars, to create a concept car — based on the automotive architecture of a Ford Mustang — that can not only move with 400 horsepower but also provides immediate access to multiple Microsoft technologies including Windows, Kinect and Bing."

Submission + - Microfluidic chip quickly diagnoses flu (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Tuesday March 27, 2012 @06:17PM

techgeek0279 writes: "The H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009 underscored weaknesses in methods to diagnose the flu, from frequent false negatives to long wait times for results. Now a four-year study has validated a prototype rapid, low-cost, accurate, point-of-care device for diagnosing the flu."

Submission + - Haptic photography develops images that can be both seen and felt (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Monday March 26, 2012 @06:18PM

techgeek0279 writes: "Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation for Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) at the University of Pennsylvania, explains the work she and her research team are conducting on haptic photography. Haptography, like photography in the visual domain, enables an individual to quickly record the haptic feel of a real object and reproduce it later for others to interact with in a variety of contexts. Particular positive ramifications of establishing the approach of haptography are to let doctors and dentists create haptic records of medical afflictions such as a decayed tooth surface to assist in diagnosis and patient health tracking; to improve the realism and consequent training efficacy of haptic surgical simulators and other computer-based education tools; to allow a wide range of people, such as museum goers and online shoppers, to touch realistic virtual copies of valuable items; to facilitate a haptographic approach to low-bandwidth and time-delayed teleoperation, as found in space exploration; and to enable new insights on human and robot touch capabilities."

Submission + - Zapping pathogens: New technologies shows promise in keeping our food safe (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Monday March 26, 2012 @03:09PM

techgeek0279 writes: "Pink slime fed to kids at schools. Listeria and arsenic found in food. Even food packaging can leech unhealthy chemicals into our diet. While the cases of severe foodborne illness are relatively low, these news stories demonstrate how the food we eat can make us sick. This makes recent budget cuts to the microbiological data program, which monitors food borne pathogens, troublesome. Luckily, new innovative procedures appear promising for reducing foodborne pathogens on food."

Submission + - Facebook's 'white hat' counter-trolling of Yahoo (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Monday March 26, 2012 @02:32PM

techgeek0279 writes: "Facebook recently fired a salvo in its defense against Yahoo by purchasing 750 patents from IBM. To backtrack a bit for those who have not been following the latest patent war, Yahoo recently sued Facebook. It’s not hard to see why they did it. Yahoo’s lost nearly five billion dollars for 2011. Compare to Facebook’s $3.71 billion profits for the same time period. The days when Yahoo was one of the hottest buzzwords on the Internet seem far, far away. The days when Facebook becomes yesterday’s news is nearly impossible to imagine."

Submission + - Researchers develop 'swarm intelligence' in the form of driverless transport veh (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Friday March 23, 2012 @06:37PM

techgeek0279 writes: "At the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML in Dortmund, Germany, researchers are working to harness swarm intelligence as a means of improving the flow of materials and goods in the warehouse environment. In a research hall 1000 square meters in size, the scientists have replicated a small-scale distribution warehouse with storage shelves for 600 small-part carriers and eight picking stations."

Submission + - Play to the crowd: Crowdsourcing works for science and businesses alike (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Thursday March 22, 2012 @01:41PM

techgeek0279 writes: "When you’re trained to be a scientist, you learn the fundamental process of experimentation: The scientific method. New-generation scientists see enormous potential in crowdsourcing this revered method. Their attempts to crowdsource science have been successful and even better than some traditional methods using super computers and standard practices."

Submission + - A camera that can see around corners developed by MIT (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @04:28PM

techgeek0279 writes: "MIT researchers are able to produce recognizable 3D images of a wooden figurine and of foam cutouts outside a camera’s line of sight. The research could ultimately lead to imaging systems that allow emergency responders to evaluate dangerous environments or vehicle navigation systems that can negotiate blind turns, among other applications. The principle behind the system is essentially that of the periscope. But instead of using angled mirrors to redirect light, the system uses ordinary walls, doors or floors — surfaces that aren’t generally thought of as reflective. The system exploits a device called a femtosecond laser, which emits bursts of light so short that their duration is measured in quadrillionths of a second. To peer into a room that’s outside its line of sight, the system might fire femtosecond bursts of laser light at the wall opposite the doorway. The light would reflect off the wall and into the room, then bounce around and re-emerge, ultimately striking a detector that can take measurements every few picoseconds, or trillionths of a second. Because the light bursts are so short, the system can gauge how far they’ve traveled by measuring the time it takes them to reach the detector."

Submission + - A blood test with no needles (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:05PM

techgeek0279 writes: "Undiagnosed anemia, and subsequent hemorrhaging, is a major — but completely preventable — cause of death in childbirth around the world. In this inspiring TED talk, Myshkin Ingawale describes how (after 32 tries) he and his team created a simple, portable device that tests for anemia without pricking the skin."

Submission + - Chlorinated silk: Hottest new microbe-stopping fashion in hospital wear? (patexia.com)

Submitted by

techgeek0279

on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @02:49PM

techgeek0279 writes: "Due to its deadly nature and near invulnerability, the fear of anthrax being used in a terrorist attack is quite high; however, scientists have developed a new, simple procedure to chlorinate silk, giving the fabric strong antimicrobial effects."

Submission + - Tracking diseased proteins in the brain (patexia.com)

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techgeek0279

on Monday March 19, 2012 @06:59PM

techgeek0279 writes: "A research team led by the University of Melbourne has developed a new technique to track diseased proteins as they form clusters in brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s. Dr. Danny Hatters and his team used a flow cytometer, which analyzes cell particles through light waves, to track protein clusters in cells at a rate of 1000 seconds per minute."

Submission + - Could Twitter prevent epidemics? Using the Internet to survey public health. (patexia.com)

Submitted by

techgeek0279

on Monday March 19, 2012 @02:40PM

techgeek0279 writes: "Most of us have turned to the Internet when we’ve felt under the weather at one point or another. We Google our symptoms to self-diagnose and sometimes we even tweet our distress, perhaps hoping to gain a little sympathy. Researchers have been looking into how this information we put out can be interpreted to map both disease and the spread of information about disease."

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