A preliminary study suggests that patients with cancer in the head and neck region may have inferior performance in some driving skills compared with individuals without the disease, according to a new article.

Filed under: Robots

While robotic hands typically have no trouble demolishing objects they grab, Intel researchers are looking to make these stereotypically brawny gizmos a bit more sensitive. The technology, dubbed pre-touch, incorporates sensors into a mechanical hand, which enables it to scan objects before it grabs them and react accordingly. Notably, the goal is to "improve the ability of robots to grasp objects in unstructured human environments," potentially making them more useful in the home. Go on, check out the video below -- it won't pinch.

[Via The Raw Feed]
Read - Robots that sense before they touch
Read - Pre-touch video demonstration

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops

While the OLPC continues its slow rollout and finds its price slowly climbing, it looks like other companies are aggressively going after NickNeg's target markets -- Macedonia just announced a deal with NComputing to provide every student with a thin client "classroom computing device" that will link up to an account on a Linux server PC. The deal calls for NComputing to deliver 180,000 of the devices at a price that's only quoted as "less than half the cost of any other proposed solution," -- a number we're guessing is in that all-important $100 range. Macedonia's schools were also impressed with the device's ability to be remotely updated and maintained, a feature that significantly cuts support costs. No word on when Macedonians will see these things pop up in schools, but we'd bet quite a few people in other countries wouldn't mind getting their hands on one either.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

You've already seen bits and pieces of this morning's Today Show, but another segment in the broadcast managed to grab a trip inside Microsoft's Mobile Design Lab where engineers and "audio geeks" look to be hard at work as they try to "redefine cool." Notably, the video fails to show any undercover shots of prototype mobiles that Microsoft may have up its sleeve, and it seemed that this "sneak peek" was intentionally devoid of innovation (secrets we can't know about?). Nevertheless, we do get a chance to see dedicated ringtone makers, and while it's already understood, any future mobiles coming out of Redmond will reportedly attempt to cram "as much of your PC into your cellphone as possible." Best of all, however, is the aptly-dubbed isolation room, which left the interviewer grumbling over how tough it was to peck out an email on the tiny keys of his smartphone. And whether you want to believe it or not, Robbie Bach was seen stating that the iPhone "doesn't change Microsoft's strategy nor its approach."

[Thanks, Toph]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Research into the effects of strokes has furthered our understanding of the different roles of the left and right sides of our brains. A study has highlighted differences in the ability of people to perform basic tasks, depending on whether the left or right sides of their brains have been damaged by a stroke. The research identified the role of the right side of the brain in noticing and correcting errors.

The Invisible Hand

With all the debate about whether or not music actually requires the use of any Digital Rights Management at all, it's worth getting the collective opinion of the Motion Pictures Association of America on the subject. And if we believe the word of MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman this week, DRM is definitely here to stay when it comes to films and TV.

Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 will include a selection of the security improvements and features Microsoft put into Office 2007.

Oh no you didn't!

AMD's anti-trust trial against Intel hasn't even started yet, and the companies are already pinching, scratching and pulling hair.

Earlier in the week, we noted how difficult it was to come up with "good" internet laws that politicians had enacted. Perhaps we should do that more often, as since then, legislation has been proposed that would overturn the pointless ban on online gambling, while now, two congressmen have introduced a bill that would overturn the recent decision of the Copyright Royalty Board to drastically increase internet radio royalty rates. The CRB rejected webcasters' appeal of those new rates (which were pushed through by the RIAA). The bill sets compromise rates that would be significantly lower for most, if not all, net radio programmers: 7.5 percent of revenues "directly related to" its broadcasts, or 33 cents per hour of recordings transmitted to a single user. The original article says the law would also apply to "satellite and cable radio" broadcasters, but it's not clear if that extends to companies like XM and Sirius, which are locked in fight with RIAA over the level of royalties they pay, with the industry group wanting 30 percent of their revenues. Obviously the bill's a long way from becoming law, and the RIAA is sure to send its lobbyists to visit its friends on Capitol Hill to see what they can do. While it's nice to see these good internet laws, it's too bad they all seem to exist solely to reverse bad ones.

An electrical circuit that should carry enough power to produce the long-sought goal of controlled high-yield nuclear fusion and, equally important, do it every 10 seconds, has undergone extensive preliminary experiments and computer simulations at Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine facility.

A remarkable new core was extracted during the recent Antarctic summer from record-setting drilling depths 4,214 feet below the sea floor beneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, the Earth's largest floating ice body. Laced with sediment dating from the present day to about 10 million years ago, the core provides a geologic record of the ice shelf's history in unprecedented detail.