Researchers in South Africa are working on a new kind of artificial larynx that won't have the raspy voice of existing devices. The system tracks contact between the tongue and palate to determine which word is being mouthed, and uses a speech synthesizer to generate sounds.
According to the National Cancer Institute, some 10,000 Americans are diagnosed with laryngeal cancer each year, and most patients with advanced cancer must have their voice box removed.
"All of the currently available devices produce such bad sound--it either sounds robotic or has a gruff speaking voice," says Megan Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. "We felt the tech was there for an artificial synthesized voice solution."
The system uses a palatometer: a device that looks much like an orthodontic plate and is normally used for speech therapy. The device, made by CompleteSpeech of Orem, UT, tracks contact between the tongue and palate using 118 embedded touch sensors. The software for the artificial larynx was written by Russell and colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand. Their work is being presented at the International Conference on Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Engineering this week in Singapore.
To use the device, a person puts the palatometer in her mouth and mouths words normally. The system tries to translate those mouth movements into words before reproducing them on a small sound synthesizer, perhaps tucked into a shirt pocket.
So far, Russell has trained the system to recognize 50 common English words by saying each word multiple times with the palatometer in her mouth. The information can be represented on a binary space-time graph and put into a database. Each time the user speaks, the contact patterns are compared against the database to identify the correct word.
Russell's team has tested the word-identification system using a variety of techniques. One approach involves aligning and averaging the data produced while training the device for a few instances of a word to create a template for comparison. Another compares features such as the area of the data plots on the graph, and the center of mass on the X and Y axes. A voting system compares the results of selected methods to see whether there is agreement. The researchers have also tested a predictive-analysis system, which considers the last word mouthed to help determine the next.
Russell says that when the voting and predictive elements are combined, the system identifies the correct word 94.14 percent of the time, although this doesn't include words that the system classifies as "unknown" and chooses to skip. Russell says that happens about 18 percent of the time. But choosing the wrong word "could lead to some very difficult social situations," Russell says, so it's best for the system to reject unclear words and remain silent.
In the search industry's push to mine online social networks for improved results, the search engine Cuil has become the first to index information from your Facebook friends. Cuil then places direct and thematically related results from your Facebook network beside general Web search results.
The search offering, called Facebook Results, only works if you opt in from a Cuil search-return page. Once you do that, Cuil indexes your Facebook network in a few seconds. Afterward, any Cuil general Web search you perform also turns up items from your Facebook network and posts them in a right-hand column.
Cuil's search algorithms find direct and related results. For example, my search for "asthma" summoned Facebook posts from a friend who had started a health-care networking website, others from a high-school classmate writing about his cancer diagnosis (the word "diagnosis" was deemed relevant), as well as a few posts about people's colds and sinus complaints. A search for "Ecuador" turned up a travel agent acquaintance who was talking about a jungle tour, as well as a post from a journalist friend who was passing along a news story about the Congo (the technology picked up on the developing-nation theme).
In contrast, when I performed my "asthma" and "Ecuador" searches within Facebook, the Facebook engine gave me only general hits such as Facebook pages for asthma sufferers or national fan sites for Ecuador, but nothing at all from any of my friends' posts.
The Cuil technology is built on Facebook Connect, the existing Facebook interface that other websites use to gain exposure within the social network. Facebook permitted Cuil to indexes users' content--when permitted by individual users--on the condition that the information could only be viewed by the searcher, and that Cuil would not let other search engines access the Facebook information, according to Seval Oz Ozveren, a Cuil vice president. Facebook Results is the first such release between Cuil and a social networking site to integrate users' social profile on search pages. It was announced in November; the concept was first discussed by Cuil in July. More such deals are expected to follow, she says.
"Social search is here to stay, and we are certain to see more Facebook integration by other players as well," says Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist and search researcher at the University of Washington, who added that Facebook's permissions will be the key to such efforts. "We see how important Facebook and other social networks are, and we also see how Facebook is seeking to parlay that importance into a role on other sites using initiatives like Facebook Connect, and now this one."
Passwords can be one of the weakest links in online security. Users too often choose one that's easily guessed or poorly protected; even strong passwords may need to be combined with additional measures, such as a smart card or a fingerprint scan, for extra protection.
Delfigo Security, a startup based in Boston, has a simpler solution to bolstering password security. By looking at how a user types each character and by collecting other subtle clues as to her identity, the company's software creates an additional layer of security without the need for extra equipment or user actions.
The software, called DSGateway, can be combined with an existing authentication process. As a user enters her name and password, JavaScript records her typing pattern along with other information, such as her system configuration and geographic location. When the user clicks "submit," her data is sent to the Web server and, provided that the username and password are correct, the additional information is passed on to Delfigo. The company's system then evaluates how well this information matches the behavior patterns of the appropriate authorized user.
Delfigo's algorithms build up a profile of each user during a short training period, combing 14 different factors. The company's president and CEO, Ralph Rodriguez, developed the necessary algorithms while working as a research fellow at MIT. Rodriguez notes that recording multiple factors is crucial to keeping the system secure without making it unusable. If the user types a password with one hand, for example, while holding coffee in the other, the system must turn to other factors to decide how to interpret the variation, he says. If she does this every morning, the system will learn to expect to see this behavior at that time of day.
The idea that a password should completely succeed or completely fail "is an old paradigm that should go away," says Rodriguez. Even if the system sees something strange about the way that a user enters her password, for example, it just assigns a confidence level to that log-in attempt. Access levels can be configured depending on this confidence level. For example, if a user logs in from an odd location, lowering the system's confidence, it might allow her to see her account balance but restrict the funds that she is able to transfer. If the user needs to increase her confidence factor at that moment, Rodriguez says, she could answer additional security questions or have a one-time password sent to her mobile phone or via e-mail.
At a robotics conference last week, a vehicle called ROAMS demonstrated a cheap approach to mobile map-making.
ROAMS (Remotely Operated and Autonomous Mapping System) was created by researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, with funding from the U.S. Army. It uses several existing mapping technologies to build 3D color maps of its surroundings, and it was demonstrated at the 2009 IEEE conference on Technologies for Practical Robot Applications in Woburn, MA last week.
The system uses LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), which involves bouncing a laser off a rapidly rotating mirror and measuring how the light bounces back from surrounding surfaces and objects. The same technology is already used to guide autonomous vehicles, to make aerial maps, and in spacecraft landing systems.
A conventional 3D LIDAR system, which consists of several lasers pointing in different directions, costs over $100,000. The Stevens researchers created a cheaper mapping system by mounting a commercial 2D LIDAR sensor, which costs about $6,000, on a pivoting, rotating framework atop the vehicle. While the system has a lower resolution than a regular 3D LIDAR, it could still be used for low-cost architectural surveying and map making in military situations, the researchers say. "The prototype system is around $15,000 to $20,000," says Bilge Gebre, a research engineer at Stevens who demonstrated the device.
The system takes about 30 seconds to scan a 160-meter-wide area. A color camera also on the rotating frame provides color information that is added to the map later on. And the Stevens researchers developed a way to maintain the same resolution by automatically adjusting the scanning process depending on the proximity of objects. A human operator rides in a larger vehicle that follows the robotic one from up to a mile away, says Kishore Pochiraju, professor and the director of the Design and Manufacturing Institute at Stevens. Ultimately, says Pochiraju, "we want to leave this robot in a location and ask it to generate a complete map." Such a vehicle could, for example, drive into a dangerous area and generate a detailed map for military personnel.
"They're using a relatively low-cost system," says John Spletzer, an associate professor at Lehigh University who uses similar technology to create autonomous wheelchairs. "There's a lot of groups working on it; it's pretty interesting."
Nicholas Roy, an associate professor at MIT who develops autonomous and self-navigating vehicles, also notes that other research groups have developed similar technology. He says that the biggest challenges in autonomous map-making are identifying obstacles and sharing mapping between several robots.
Computer users have been typing on keyboards and clicking on mice for more than 20 years. An experimental new interface under development at Microsoft could give them a completely new way to use their system.
Multi-touch and motion-sensing devices have recently emerged from research labs, offering new ways to operate computers. Microsoft's experimental tactile interface takes things further still, letting users interact by squashing, stretching, rolling, or rubbing.
At the base of the new device a "sensor tile" produces magnetic multiple fields above its surface. By detecting disturbances to these fields, the system can track the movement of a metal object across its surface, or the manipulation of a bladder filled with iron filings or a magnetic fluid. A user can drag a ball bearing across the surface to move a cursor across a computer's screen, or manipulate a ferrous fluid-filled bladder to sculpt 3D virtual objects.
Stuart Taylor of Microsoft Research Cambridge in the U.K. says that the surface can easily be reconfigured to allow for different forms of input. Working with Microsoft colleagues and with Jonathan Hook at Newcastle University, Taylor created arrays of 64 magnetic coils, each wrapped in a coiled wire, within a 100-square-centimeter sensor tile. "In essence, these are modeled on an electric guitar setup," says Taylor. "If you disrupt the field, this causes a current to be induced in the coil."
The researchers have also experimented with applying currents to the coils to induce physical effects on the objects placed on top of the sensor tile. This could allow an input device to also provide haptic force-feedback, says Taylor.
"It's an interesting concept which extends multi-touch to something more tangible," says Anthony Steed, a professor in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at University College London. To have a surface that lets users manipulate different objects would be of great in
However, Steed says, making a device that could switch between an input and output device would be challenging. While moving ball bearings using magnetic fields shouldn't be too hard, "[moving] ferrous fluid bladders would be trickier," he says.
Taylor admits that it's early. As with the very first capacitance-based touch sensors--originally used in experimental electronic instruments but now common in iPhones--it's hard to guess where this could go or what impact it would have in the long term. "We're really at the starting point of thinking about the broader applications," he says.
At 9:22am Eastern today, the Russians will launch a modified Progress cargo ship to ferry a module to the slowly growing International Space Station. Dubbed Poisk (the Russian for "Search," or "Explore") the module's primary function will be to act as an additional docking port for crewed Soyuz and uncrewed Progress and European ATV spacecraft.
The extra port is needed because the ISS crew grew from three to six in May. Two Soyuz spacecraft (each of which seats three) must remain docked to the station in case of a catastrophic accident that forces the entire crew to return to Earth. As a result, there is only one free port remaining to handle any incoming spacecraft bringing supplies or replacement crew members.
The Poisk module is largely a duplicate of the Piers docking module already attached to the ISS. In addition to a docking port, both modules can also act as airlock for spacewalkers. Unlike Piers, some hookups have been added inside Poisk that will allow research racks to be installed later, which is why NASA and the Russian space agency are calling Poisk a "mini-research module". The hookups are something of a face-saving exercise for the Russians, as they were forced to cancel plans for an ambitous research module earlier in the decade due to budget cuts, and in fact Russia has not added a new module to the ISS since Piers was sent aloft in 2001. However, Russia is currently working on a more sophisticated laboratory module, called Nauka, which it hopes to launch in December 2011. Nauka is being constructed from the backup module to the Zarya module, which was launched in 1998 as the founding element of the ISS.
If you haven't heard of metamaterials and what they can do, where have you been? Most of the media coverage so far has focused on invisibility cloaks but that's just the start of the fun physicists can have with this stuff. Only a few weeks ago we were discussing how to recreate the big bang inside a metamaterial. And earlier this year, a group of physicists suggested that it ought to be possible to create a black hole using metamaterials. That's an interesting idea but a demonstration would be more exciting.
Step forward Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui at the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, who have used metamaterials to create the world's first artificial black hole in their lab. Yep, a real black hole.
That's not quite as scary as it sounds. A black hole is a region of space from which light cannot escape (that's why it's black). According to Einsteins' theory relativity, black holes form when space becomes so distorted by a large mass that light cannot escape its gravitational field.
But gravity needn't be involved. Metamaterials also distort space, as far as light is concerned anyway (in fact there is a formal mathematical analogy between these optical and gravitational distortions). Physicists have already exploited this distortion to steer light around an object within a metamaterial to create an invisibility cloak. If that's possible, then more exotic distortions ought to be possible too.
Now Qiang and Tie have created a metamaterial that distorts space so severely that light entering it (in this case microwaves) cannot escape.
Their black hole consists of 60 layers of printed circuit board arranged in concentric circles (see picture below). The printed circuit boards are coated in a thin layer of copper from which Qiang and Tie have etched two types of pattern that either resonate at microwave frequency or do not.
In their experiments, they've measured microwaves at 18 GHz going in and none coming out. And the circular symmetry of their metamaterial means that the microwaves are absorbed in all directions at once. What they've built is the world's first artificial black hole. (In case you're wondering, the energy absorbed by the black hole is emitted as heat.)
That's an exciting piece of physics and not just because it's a headline grabber. Artificial black holes could have important applications not least as light harvesters for photovoltaics. The prospect of a black hole in every household may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.
It's a common complaint in any communication breakdown: "It's not what you said, it's how you said it." For professor Sandy Pentland and his group at MIT's Media Lab, the tone and pitch of a person's voice, the length and frequency of pauses and speed of speech can reveal much about his or her mood.
While most speech recognition software concentrates on turning words and phrases into text, Pentland's group is developing algorithms that analyze subtle cues in speech to determine whether someone is feeling awkward, anxious, disconnected or depressed.
Cogito Health, a company spun out of MIT based in Charlestown, MA, is building on Pentland's research by developing voice-analysis software to screen for depression over the phone.
For years, psychiatrists have recognized a characteristic pattern in the way that many people with clinical depression speak: slowly, quietly and often in a halting monotone. Company CEO Joshua Feast and his colleagues are training computers to recognize such vocal patterns in audio samples.
Feast says the software could be a valuable tool in managing patients with chronic diseases, which often lead to depression. As part of certain disease-management programs, nurses routinely call patients between visits to ask if they are taking their medication. However, symptoms of depression are more difficult for nurses to identify. Feast says voice analysis software could provide a natural and noninvasive way for nurses to screen for depression during routine phone calls. "If you're a nurse and you're trying to deal with a patient with long-term diabetes, it's very hard to tell if a person is depressed," says Feast. "We try to help nurses detect possible mood disorders in patients that have chronic disease."
A few years ago, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer developed voice-analysis software to detect early signs of Parkinson's disease. Pfizer scientists designed the software to recognize tiny tremors in speech. Such tremors offered clues to help gauge patients' response to various medications.
In much the same way, Cogito Health's software detects specific patterns in vocal recordings. For example, the researchers have developed mathematical models to measure a speaker's consistency in tone, fluidity of speech, level of vocal energy, and level of engagement in the conversation (for example, whether someone responds with "uh-huh's" or with silence). "It listens to the pattern of speech, not the words," says Pentland, a scientific advisor to the company. "By measuring those signals in the background, you can tell what's going on."
Most geeks have been curious about Motorola's Droid, the first phone to run the newest version of Google's mobile phone operating system, and the first Android phone on Verizon Wireless, the biggest mobile network in the United States. I took the Droid, which goes on sale Friday, for a test drive--literally, evaluating the phone on a Sunday morning road trip around Austin, TX.
Instead of the soft curves and rounded edges brought into vogue by the iPhone, the Droid has a brick-like look and feel. It's angular and solid, with a flashing green LED on the front to notify you of waiting e-mails, text messages, or voice mails. The QWERTY keyboard slider has a nice, smooth action and locks easily into place. While the Droid matches the iPhone very closely on size, the slider does make the phone ever-so-slightly thicker. The Droid's heft (169 grams to the iPhone's 3GS's 135) also meant that, while I barely notice the iPhone in a jacket or jeans pocket any more, the Droid's weight was more appreciable, pulling the left side of my jacket down on my neck.
The Droid's screen resolution, at 9.3 centimeters diagonally and 480 by 854 pixels, is incredibly sharp and bright, noticeably more so than the iPhone (which has an 8.9-centimeter diagonal screen with 480-by-320-pixel resolution).
Setting up the Droid was dead simple. Using Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk was as easy as entering my Google account username and password once. The phone can support multiple Google accounts, and Android 2.0 adds support for Microsoft's Exchange e-mail server, used by many companies, allowing you to sync e-mails, contacts, and appointments from a corporate Outlook account as well. I did have trouble displaying some Outlook e-mails that displayed perfectly on my iPhone, but I encountered this with fewer than one in 50 messages or so--a minor annoyance.
Pairing Bluetooth devices was also very straightforward; my Plantronics headset was up and running in less than five minutes. One feature I could not get to work, however, was the Wi-Fi connection. I tried accessing four different Wi-Fi networks in three different locations and could never get the Droid to connect. My laptop and iPhone both joined all of these networks without any trouble.
Learning to navigate the Droid's touch screen is fairly intuitive, as well. The phone has three customizable "home" screens, on which you can add shortcuts to applications and file folders, as well as active widgets. Available widgets include a power manager that allows you to turn power-hungry features such as GPS, Bluetooth, and e-mail syncing on and off with a single touch; a Google search box; or live updates from various weather, news, or sports services.
Traditionally, treatment for severe second-degree burns consists of adding insult to injury: cutting a swath of skin from another site on the same patient in order to graft it over the burn. The process works, but causes more pain for the burn victim and doubles the area in need of healing. Now a relatively new technology has the potential to heal burns in a way that's much less invasive than skin grafts. With just a small skin biopsy and a ready-made kit, surgeons can create a suspension of the skin's basal cells--the stem cells of the epidermis--and spray the solution directly onto the burn with results comparable to those from skin grafts.
The cell spray is intended to treat severe second-degree burns, in which the top two layers of skin are damaged but the subcutaneous tissue is left intact. Third-degree burns, which are more severe, still require a skin graft. The spray, already approved for use in some countries, has garnered interest from the United States Army, whose Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine is funding a trial, slated to begin before the end of this year, of more than 100 patients.
The technology, developed by Australian surgeon Fiona Wood, relies on cells, such as skin progenitor cells and the color-imparting melanocytes, that are most concentrated at the junction between the skin's top two layers. With a small step-by-step kit dubbed ReCell, surgeons can harvest, process and apply these cells to treat a burn as large as 10.5 square feet. The kit, marketed by Avita Medical, a United Kingdom-based regenerative-medicine company, is a tiny, self-contained lab about the size and shape of a large sunglasses case.
After removing a small swatch of skin near the burn site (the closer the biopsy, the better for precise matching of color and texture), the surgeon places it in the kit's tiny incubator along with an enzyme solution. The enzyme loosens the critical cells at the skin's dermal-epidermal junction, and the surgeon harvests them by scraping them off the epidermal and dermal layers and suspending them in solution. The resulting mixture is then sprayed onto the wound, repopulating the burn site with basal cells from the biopsy site.
"Currently, treating any burn that requires a skin graft is the same technology we were routinely using 30 years ago," says James Holmes, a surgeon and the medical director of the Burn Center at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Current practice with larger burns requires grafts from donor skin that are anywhere from one-quarter to the complete size of the burn area. ReCell requires only as much as four square centimeters. "This allows you to take a very small skin biopsy and process it at the table there in the operating room using a fully prepackaged device," Holmes says. "You're able to cover an area that's 80 times the size of your biopsy."
Holmes is the lead investigator on an upcoming multicenter trial that will compare skin grafts and ReCell. Patients in the trial will act as their own controls: If a burn victim has a second-degree burn severe enough for surgeons to deem treatable by skin graft, half of the burn will be treated that way, while the other half will be treated with the cell spray.
A language-learning application that's already big in Japan is coming to the U.S. in the form of a new iPhone app. Smart.fm, based in Tokyo, says that the adaptive-learning algorithms behind its software can help users memorize all kinds of information.
Smart.fm is one of several companies selling software designed to help users remember. The company's algorithms were inspired by research that shows people remember information more effectively they try to memorize it at key times, says founder and chairman Andrew Smith Lewis.
Those algorithms determine how often to present a piece of information to the user and in what context. For example, a completely new word and its translation are shown frequently, and a user is asked relatively easy questions about them, designed to jog the memory. But once the user has demonstrated the ability to recall that word and its meaning, this information will appear less often.
"Efficiency is the main thing," Lewis says. "We want to optimize the sweet spot between the minimum number of times you have to see an item and the maximum effectiveness of that presentation."
To use Smart.fm, a person selects an existing list of material--a dictionary of foreign words, for instance--or starts building a new list. The list could be text-only, but the system also supports images and audio. A user might match the names of birds to the sounds they make, or view images of different parts of the human brain in order to learn how to identify them. Someone who snaps pictures of the people she meets at a conference might use the software to commit those people's names to memory.
"Learning applications which present stimuli adaptively based on the forgetting curve are not new but still relatively rare," says Peter Brusilovsky, director of the Personalized Adaptive Web Systems Lab at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences. But Smart.fm's teaching methods can be applied to any type of material, Lewis says. "The adaptive-learning platform doesn't know if you're studying Russian painters or chess moves or French verbs," he says. "It just knows that these are individual objects."
Unlike other memory applications, Smart.fm takes a social approach, letting users share their lists and add comments to other lists. And in the future, Lewis says, there will be more ways to pull information into the system. The company is working on integrating with Freebase, a site that collects user-generated databases. Once the effort is complete, Smart.fm users who are interested in a particular topic should be able to access information about it from Freebase automatically.
"Education apps are one of the most interesting and growing areas of the iPhone app store," says Carl Howe, an analyst focusing on mobile research at the Yankee Group. Howe thinks Smart.fm was wise to broaden the scope of its material beyond just language learning. For education apps, he says, "the central aspect is knowing how to engage people's interest."
Howe notes that the top education apps for the iPhone are geared toward middle-school and elementary-school children. He believes there's a huge opportunity for college-level material, too. But companies designing e-learning apps may find themselves competing with material from established universities such as MIT and Stanford, which offer free material for self-directed study online
Smart.fm's business model is based largely on the prospect of collaboration with other companies and institutions that want to offer online learning. The company has already partnered with the Japanese telecom giant NTT, which has used the software to create learning sites focusing on specific topics.
Lewis hopes that such deals will become Smart.fm's main source of revenue, though he also suggests that Smart.fm may offer premium content to users for a price. The iPhone app, however, is and will remain free.
Borrowing from Mother Nature, MIT researchers have built a school of swimming robofish that slip through the water just as gracefully as the real thing, if not quite as fast. Mechanical-engineering colleagues Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado '99, SM '01, PhD '07 (above), and professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi, SM '81, ScD '85, designed the sleek and inexpensive robots to maneuver into areas where traditional underwater autonomous vehicles can't go. Fleets of them could be used to inspect submerged structures such as boats and oil and gas pipes; to patrol ports, lakes, and rivers; and to help detect environmental pollutants.
"Given the [robotic] fish's robustness, it would be ideal as a long-term sensing and exploration unit," says Valdivia y Alvarado. "Several of these could be deployed, and even if only a small percentage make it back, there wouldn't be a terrible capital loss."
Robotic fish are not new: in 1994, MIT ocean engineers demonstrated the four-foot-long Robotuna. Robotuna had 2,843 parts controlled by six motors, but the new robotic fish, which is less than a foot long, is powered by a single motor and is made of fewer than 10 individual components, protected by a flexible body. The motor, placed in the fish's midsection, initiates a wave that travels along the fish's body, propelling it forward. So far, the MIT prototype fish can swim as fast as one body length per second. That's much slower than real fish, which can cover up to 10 times their body length in a second.
As part of his doctoral thesis, Valdivia y Alvarado created a model that calculates how stiff each part of the robot's body should be to generate the desired speed and swimming motion. With this model, the researchers can use polymers to create a continuous fish body that is stiffer in some places and more flexible in others, instead of building each body section separately and then joining them together. "This philosophy can be used for more than just fish," says Youcef-Toumi. For example, it could help improve robotic prosthetic limbs.
This fall, the researchers plan to investigate more complex locomotion and test some new prototype robotic salamanders and manta rays, says Valdivia y Alvarado. This research should put their approach to a harder test.
Here's the link if you want to see the robofish in action:
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.
Facebook sued Wallace for accessing users' accounts without their permission and sending phony posts and messages. The company said on its blog that in addition to the damage award, the San Jose, Calif., court referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court -- meaning he could face jail time.
Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.
In May 2008, the online hangout MySpace won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, in another case brought under the federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM. In 2006, Wallace was fined $4 million after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of running an operation that infected computers with software that caused flurries of pop-up ads, known as "spyware."
"While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals," said Sam O'Rourke, associate general counsel for Facebook, in a blog posting Thursday. "This is another important victory in our fight against spam."
There was no phone number listed for Wallace in Las Vegas, where he is believed to be living, according to the ruling.
The company said the judgment marks the second-largest anti-spam award ever. In November 2008, Facebook won an $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, who bombarded users with sexually explicit spam messages.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.
Facebook sued Wallace for accessing users' accounts without their permission and sending phony posts and messages. The company said on its blog that in addition to the damage award, the San Jose, Calif., court referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court -- meaning he could face jail time.
Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.
In May 2008, the online hangout MySpace won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, in another case brought under the federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM. In 2006, Wallace was fined $4 million after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of running an operation that infected computers with software that caused flurries of pop-up ads, known as "spyware."
"While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals," said Sam O'Rourke, associate general counsel for Facebook, in a blog posting Thursday. "This is another important victory in our fight against spam."
There was no phone number listed for Wallace in Las Vegas, where he is believed to be living, according to the ruling.
The company said the judgment marks the second-largest anti-spam award ever. In November 2008, Facebook won an $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, who bombarded users with sexually explicit spam messages.
The Blair Witch Project is no longer the most profitable movie in cinema history; Paranormal Activity has just taken that crown. Paranormal was shot for less than one days catering bill for a big Hollywood movie, at a mere $15,000.
Titanic may be the biggest earning movie in terms of turnover, but compared to its production costs Paranormal puts it in the shade. Having already taken over $65 million at the box office Paranoral Activity has made more than 400,000% profit.
The movie started quietly at only a dozen theatres, and slowly expanded to nearly 2000 screens, and it may not be over yet, as this weekend’s box office includes Halloween, which is always good for horror flicks it has presumably added to its box office numbers.
Of course on top of the tiny budget, the studio, Paramount, will have spent several million on marketing the movie, even so its returns are still enormous.
A little brain boost is something we could all use now and then. A new option may be on the horizon. Researchers at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in Bethesda, MD, are studying how applying gentle electrical current to the scalp can improve learning.
Previous small-scale studies have suggested that a stream of current can improve motor function, verbal fluency, and even language learning. To explore how effective such stimulation can be as a learning tool, Eric Wassermann, a neuroscientist at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, is using an approach known as transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), in which an electrical current is passed directly to the brain through the scalp and skull. The technology for TDCS, which has been available for decades, is simple and fairly crude. (In the 1960s, it was used to improve mood in people with psychiatric disorders, although that effect hasn't been repeated in more recent studies.) And in contrast to people undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, a seizure-inducing treatment used for severe depression that requires anesthesia, people undergoing TDCS feel just a slight tingle, if anything.
The device is simple: a nine-volt battery that's been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for delivering drugs across the skin is connected to large flat sponges that are moistened and then applied to the head. It delivers a gentle 2 to 2.5 milliamps of current spread over a 20 to 50 square millimeter area of the scalp for up to 15 minutes. Little of that current actually reaches the brain--about half is shunted away from the target area, and the other half quickly dissipates as it gets farther from the scalp.
Wassermann's team targets part of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in higher-level organization and planning, as well as in working memory. Because activity in this region has been shown in previous imaging studies to predict an individual's ability to recall information, the idea is that giving it an electrical boost will enhance memory function.
In preliminary results from the new study, which is part of a larger government-funded project to examine TDCS for cognitive enhancement, researchers found that direct current stimulation could improve memory in participants asked to learn and then recall a list of 12 words. The effect was significant in the early learning stages: in the first few trials, in which participants were given the same list over and over again, people in the treatment group could remember more words. But the learning curve for those working without the device quickly caught up to the zapped learners. "Now we want to see if we can enhance recall, not just encoding," says Wassermann. "Ultimately, you'd just want to do the stimulation during encoding."
A policy analysis published Thursday in the journal Science calls our attention to something it's much easier to turn away from: what happens to outdated computer monitors, cell phones that aren't smart enough, cables that once powered discarded laptops, even old calculators. Much of this waste, which is largely a product of the developed world, ends up in the developing world, and the hazardous materials it contains accumulate in the food chain and in poor children's blood. In Africa, China, and India, markets for secondhand electronics are having a terrible impact. Children in Guiyu, China have high levels of lead in their blood and swamps in Nigeria overflow with discarded electronics.
So what can we do about it? The United States, one of the largest producers of electronic waste, is one of 23 member countries that has not ratified the United Nations' Basel Convention, which would regulate the movement of hazardous electronic materials across international borders. A bill in the Senate (S. 1397) would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to award grant money for recycling research and ask the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create a database of green electronic materials. According to the authors of the Science article, the European Union and the state of California both have complex and inconsistent waste policies, but we can still learn from them:
For example, Californians are willing to pay extra for "green" electronics products (e.g., containing fewer toxic substances, capable of being economically recycled) and to drive up to 8 miles to drop-off products for environmentally sensitive recycling. In addition, political mandates and economic incentives are key tools for engaging manufacturers,who will need to assume greater responsibility for designing electronic products that contain safer materials and are easily managed after consumers no longer want them.
However, the long-term solution, the authors suggest, is to change the way electronics are made in the first place:
Bart Gordon, Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, said that "we need our future engineers to understand that whatever they put together will eventually have to be taken apart."
If you could reduce a mobile phone to its essence, it would look like the Modu. This tiny phone, which is slightly larger than a domino, is capable of sending and receiving calls and text messages. It can store contacts and MP3s with up to 16 gigabytes of storage capacity, and it has a small but usable screen and a sparse keypad that lacks numbers. Launched this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Modu can be used as a stand-alone phone. But more important, it can also be slipped into a variety of "jackets," such as in-car MP3 players, Global Positioning Systems, and larger cell phones, that expand the Modu's functions and change its look.
Modu Mobile, the Israeli startup that launched the phone, is hoping to change the way that consumers think about their handhelds, explains Itay Sherman, the company's chief technology officer. Today, people generally have one phone that they use all the time, and they use it for a year or two because it's too expensive to buy a new model more frequently. But Sherman says that the idea of one phone for all occasions doesn't mesh with people's lifestyle. Sometimes you want to walk around with the smallest possible phone, he says; other times you want a good messaging device with a large keyboard, or a media player with a large screen. "Instead of buying a completely new phone, the jacket enables you to switch."
In making the Modu, Sherman says, there were a number of technical considerations. While semiconductor technology is at the point where chips are small enough to easily fit into the mini mobile, his team also had to shrink the phone's other features, such as the screen, keypad, and battery. The display, for instance, needed to be specially designed: it uses organic light-emitting diodes and is a mere one millimeter thick. (See "Super-Vivid, Super-Efficient Displays.") Knowing that it would be impractical to put a full, numbered keypad on the Modu, Sherman says, his team designed a simpler keypad that lets people access menus on the screen, similar to those of MP3 players. The lithium-ion polymer battery, which uses the same basic technology as traditional phone batteries, was customized to be thin and long, while still providing about 3 hours of talk time and 100 hours of standby.
Once a user plugs the Modu into a jacket, however, the features improve. "The jacket may also have a battery," says Sherman, and the combined device shares the load between the two batteries. "It extends the talk time and standby time."
One of the main innovations, says Sherman, is that the software that runs the Modu automatically reconfigures when it is put in another device. A resource file defines the way the Modu and jacket will work together. "Every jacket you plug into, you'll get a completely different experience, yet it keeps the basic functionality in all cases so that it's familiar to the user," he says.
Beyond cell-phone jackets, Modu Mobile will offer other consumer-electronics devices in which the phone module can be inserted, improving the basic functions of the device. For instance, a camera with the Modu could wirelessly send pictures to other phones, and a car entertainment system designed for the Modu could let a user access his MP3s while enabling hands-free calling.
This isn't the first time that consumer-electronics companies have tried to build modular phones, says Avi Greengart, the research director for mobile devices at Current Analysis, a market research firm. He points to IXI Mobile, the maker of the Ogo mobile messenger. "It had the notion of connecting multiple devices together via Bluetooth," he explains. A user would have a basic storage module and then connect to a large display or media player. However, the technology didn't catch on because few people think to buy a shell of a media player and then the other pieces to make it work, Greengart says.
Last week Apple released the Magic Mouse, a new computer mouse with a "multitouch" interface that responds to movement of fingertips across its surface in addition to conventional click-and-drag actions. Archrival Microsoft isn't ready to launch a competing product just yet, but the company does have plans for its own multitouch mice. Earlier this month, researchers presented five prototypes at the User Interface Software and Technology in Victoria, British Columbia, and their work won the symposium's best paper award.
With a multitouch mouse, a user can, for example, browse through a virtual stack of digital photos by flicking a finger across the mouse's surface, rotate an image by stroking the mouse, or zoom in on a picture by drawing an arrowhead with a fingertip.
"If the [traditional] mouse pointer is your virtual fingertip, we're giving you a virtual hand," says Dan Rosenfeld, a researcher with Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group in Redmond, WA. There are multitouch surfaces for tabletops, computer monitors, and cellphone screens, he says, but aside from Apple's new device, "there's really nothing addressing the kind of tasks that lots of people do all day long, sitting in front of a desk at a computer."
The first mouse outlined in the Microsoft research paper consists of a piece of clear acrylic lit with infrared light along its edge, where it attaches to a palm rest. Fingertips on the acrylic scatter the light, and an infrared camera captures the light patterns to track the movement of the fingers. The technique, known as frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR), has been used for other multitouch systems before, but this is the first design that also integrates the classic features of a mouse such as an optical sensor underneath and clickable buttons.
Another prototype, the dome-shaped Orb Mouse, also uses an infrared camera and light, but it reflects the light out of its center to make its entire hemisphere touch-sensitive. The dome also acts as a giant click button.
SideMouse, in contrast, positions the palm of the user's hand on top and projects infrared light out of its side to track the user's fingers as they move along the table next to the mouse.
The Cap Mouse abandons the infrared scheme altogether, instead tracking finger movements with a grid of capacitive sensors on its surface. Unlike the mice that rely on infrared technology, Cap Mouse isn't affected by ambient lighting, consumes less power, and offers a less detailed account of finger movements.
Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: "delivering an immortal, invulnerable program." In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Big Sky, MT, a group of MIT researchers, led by Rinard and Michael Ernst, who is now an associate professor at the University of Washington, developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs within a matter of minutes.
When a potentially harmful vulnerability is discovered in a piece of software, it takes nearly a month on average for human engineers to come up with a fix and to push the fix out to affected systems, according to a report issued by security company Symantec in 2006. The researchers, who collaborated with a startup called Determina on the work, hope that the new software, called ClearView, will speed this process up, making software significantly more resilient against failure or attack.
ClearView works without assistance from humans and without access to a program's underlying source code (an often proprietary set of instructions that defines how a piece of software will behave). Instead, the system monitors the behavior of a binary: the form the program takes in order to execute instructions on a computer's hardware.
By observing a program's normal behavior and assigning a set of rules, ClearView detects certain types of errors, particularly those caused when an attacker injects malicious input into a program. When something goes wrong, ClearView detects the anomaly and identifies the rules that have been violated. It then comes up with several potential patches designed to force the software to follow the violated rules. (The patches are applied directly to the binary, bypassing the source code.) ClearView analyzes these possibilities to decide which are most likely to work, then installs the top candidates and tests their effectiveness. If additional rules are violated, or if a patch causes the system to crash, ClearView rejects it and tries another.
ClearView is particularly effective when installed on a group of machines running the same software. In that case, what ClearView learns from errors on one machine is used to fix all the others. Because it doesn't require access to source code, Rinard says that ClearView could be used to fix programs without requiring the cooperation of the company that made the software, or to repair programs that are no longer being maintained. He hopes the system could extend the life of older versions of software, created by companies that have gone out of business, in addition to protecting current software.
To test the system, the researchers installed ClearView on a group of computers running Firefox and hired an independent team to attack the Web browser. The hostile team used 10 different attack methods, each of which involved injecting some malicious code into Firefox. ClearView successfully blocked all of the would-be attacks by detecting misbehavior and terminating the application before the attack could have its intended effect. The very first time ClearView encounters an exploit it closes the program and begins analyzing the binary, searching for a patch that could have stopped the error.
A new gene therapy treatment designed to reduce inflammation can prevent damage in donor lungs, potentially making more organs available for transplant. According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, about 1,800 people in the United States are currently waiting for a lung transplant.
Researchers from the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Toronto had previously developed a novel system to improve the health of donor lungs, which mimics normal physiological conditions by continuously pumping oxygen, proteins and nutrients into the injured organs. In the new study, published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers infused the lungs with the gene for a molecule called Il-10, which reduces inflammation. Both pig and human lungs given the treatment functioned better than untreated organs, with better blood flow and less swelling, an affect that lasted up to 30 days. And the treated lungs functioned better when transplanted into pigs.
They then took human lungs that were considered too damaged for transplantation and subjected them to the same procedure. The treatment significantly improved blood flow through the lungs and improved their ability to take in fresh oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. The higher levels of IL-10 persisted in the lungs for 30 days, suggesting that the procedure could also reduce rejection of the organs. The lungs were not implanted in humans.
The procedure "not only may result in improved preservation of lungs [before transplantation] but also may repair lungs otherwise not suitable for transplantation," Dr. David S. Wilkes of the Indiana University School of Medicine wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.
But several questions remain, he said. Implanting lungs from a human donor might present more problems. And the use of adenoviruses has caused complications in some gene-therapy experiments when the virus inserted the added gene at an inappropriate location.
Keshavjee said the team hopes to begin human trials in a year or so.
SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook lets people leave their marks online after they have shuffled off their mortal coils, with profiles of the dead remaining as tributes in the global social networking community.
‘When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network,’ Facebook director of security Max Kelly said in a blog post Monday.
‘To reflect that reality, we created the idea of ‘memorialized’ profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed.’
Profiles of dead people do not turn up in friend recommendations or general searches at Facebook, according to Kelly. Privacy settings on memorialized accounts only let confirmed friends or family members see them.
No one is allowed to log into memorialized accounts, preventing alteration of profile content, but friends can still post remembrance messages that are displayed on ‘walls’ for visitors to see.
Contact information and status updates are removed from memorialized profile pages.
Only friends or relatives of deceased Facebook members can request profiles be memorialized, and information submitted must include a copy of an obituary, news article or other proof of death.
‘If you have a friend or a family member whose profile should be memorialized, please contact us, so their memory can properly live on among their friends on Facebook,’ Kelly said.
The service is not new to Facebook, but it reminded members of it this week.
It is a special occasion when you capture that one in a million shot, when you witness an amazing spectacle and have your video camera at your side. Natural disasters and unexplained phenomena happen every day. Still, there are few videos of these events as they occur. With the expansion of personal video cameras in the last 20 years, sometimes we get a glimpse at something unusual and amazing. YouTube makes it possible for us to view these videos from all around the world. Here is a collection of 10 amazing videos you can find on YouTube. I am always on the lookout for new finds, so be sure to let me know of any other unbelievable youtube videos that are not mentioned here.
10. Ride That Mega-Tsunami
Mike Parsons is one of the most amazing athletes on the planet. He is a big wave surfer and one of the best at his profession. He was made famous by this video which shows him riding a 65 ft. wave off the beaches of Jaws, Hawaii. The footage was filmed from a helicopter and is 100% real. At the time, it was the biggest wave ever surfed, but Parson’s broke his own record in 2008 at Cortes Bank. He has numerous extreme surfing videos, including Billabong Odyssey, which I recommend.
9. Mythbusters Play with Helium and Sulfur Hexafluoride
This is an amazing and simple scientific experiment featured on the show Mythbusters. Everyone knows what happens when someone inhales helium, their voice gets high and squeaky for a couple of seconds. Adam Savage decides to see what happens when he inhales sulfur hexafluoride, which is much denser then air and has the exact opposite effect as helium. Basically, it will make your voice sound deeper and like you are from the dark side. This video demonstration is hilarious as Adam inhales both helium and sulfur hexafluoride.
8. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 Crashes
Ethiopian Flight 961 was hijacked on November 23, 1996 by three Ethiopians who were seeking political asylum. Flashing a fake bomb, the attackers demanded that the flight be re-routed to Australia. The pilot explained that there was not enough fuel on board to make that trip, but the hijackers ignored him. Secretly, the pilot headed towards the Comoro Islands, which are halfway between Madagascar and the African mainland. The plane was nearly out of fuel as it approached the Island group. The pilot was forced to ditch in the shallow waters of the Indian Ocean of the Coast of Grand Comoro Island. As the plane landed, a coral reef hit the engine causing the plane to spin to the left and break apart. Tragically, 125 of the 175 passengers and crew aboard were killed in the accident. A tourist recorded this video later proclaiming that she thought the 767 aircraft was part of a surprise air show. It might be the most clear and devastating plane crash video ever taken.
7. Route 168 Landslide in Japan
A landslide is a geological phenomenon that often plagues the country of Japan. Around 75% of land in Japan is forested, mountainous, and unsuitable for agriculture or residential use. Because of these steep elevations, levels of rainfall, earthquakes, and soft ground, Japan is extremely landslide prone. In Japan, many busy roads are built across mountain slopes. Route 168 is a national highway connecting Shingu, Wakayama to Hirakata, Osaka. Landslides like this often cause much heartache to the area. Highways routinely become blocked and many people don’t have an alternative way to get home. This has caused city officials to adopt many landslide prevention and safety programs. In the video you can see the slide abolish everything including the protective fence surrounding the highway.
6. The Ghost Car
One night the Garden City police were in pursuit of a car. The vehicle was driving sporadically and would not pull over to the side of the road. It seemed to be speeding up and slowing down at abnormally rapid levels. It was all captured by the police officers’ dash camera. As the pursuit ensues, the car enters a fenced-in parking lot and the chase seems to be coming to an end. Suddenly, the car turns directly toward the fence and seems to mysteriously drive right through it. All that you can see is a faint view of the car’s tail lights as it barrels into the fence. There are no signs of a crash on the fence or behind it. The cop cruiser comes to a stop and the car and its occupants are never located. Supernatural or not, you decide.
5. Christian the Lion
In 1969, John Rendall and Anthony Bourke purchased a baby lion from Harrods department store of London. They raised Christian for a year and then ultimately had him released back into the wild. After hearing that he had been successfully reintroduced to his natural habitat they took an expedition to Kenya to visit their lion. It was one year later and the men were accompanied by a documentary film crew. Many conservationists warned Rendall and Bourke that Christian would not remember them. The reunion that ensues is touching to the heart. Christian cautiously approaches, but then runs and jumps into the men’s arms. The documentary also shows two female lions and one foster cub that are friendly with the crew. With many tragedies on this list I figured a light-hearted story of friendship would fit nicely.
4. Challenger Explosion
It was the United States’ 25th official space shuttle launch and the Challenger’s tenth trip into space. It was a special mission and included American teacher Christa McAuliffe, who won a contest to participate in the NASA Teacher in Space Project. The Challenger mission was delayed many times and finally was set to launch on January 28, 1986. Sadly, 73 seconds into the launch the Challenger broke apart and exploded leading to the death of all seven crew members. It was later determined that the accident occurred when a faulty O-ring seal on its right rocket booster failed. The failure allowed a plume of flame to explode out of the rocket booster and damage the external fuel tank and attachment struts. By that time it was too late to save the shuttle. It was one of the most costly and tragic accidents in United States history and was all caught live on television.
3. Paul Potts sings Nessun Dorma
Paul is a British tenor who won the first series of Britain’s Got Talent. Before the competition he was a mobile phone salesman. This video shows his rendition of “Nessun Dorma,” which immediately made him the front-runner on the show. You can see Simon Cowell laughing at him before he begins and then enter into a state of shock as Potts performs. This is one of the most popular videos in YouTube history. Paul was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show whose topic was YouTube videos. After winning the competition Potts went on a massive world tour, consisting of 97 concerts in 85 cities spanning 23 countries. Paul Potts first album One Chance was a multi-platinum masterpiece. It reached the #1 spot in 13 different countries around the world, proof positive that everyone can enjoy some good opera music. A similar scenario took place with Susan Boyle.
On December 26, 2004 a 9.3 earthquake struck off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. What followed was a devastating tsunami that traveled all along most coasts of the Indian Ocean. It was one of the most deadly natural disasters in recorded history and more than 225,000 people were killed in eleven different countries. The hardest hit areas were Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. There were many sad and terrifying videos taken of the tsunami as it struck the mainland. Beach resorts and tourist attractions were hit first in many instances. This clip shows a couple of different videos of the tsunami as it reached land. It truly gives you a sense of the deadly power of this disaster. Watch as the ocean completely engulfs a large pool at a beach-front hotel.
1. The Battle at Kruger
You know that a YouTube video has become famous when it has its own Wikipedia page. That is the case for the Battle at Kruger. The video was shot in September of 2004 at a watering hole in Kruger National Park, located in South Africa. It shows an epic real life battle between a pride of lions, a herd of Cape buffalo, and one or two crocodiles. It all begins when the lions attack one of the baby buffalo and tackle it into the river. While the lions are trying to finish off their meal, a crocodile grabs onto the buffalo and tries to take it. The lions prevail and pull the buffalo from the water only to then be attacked by the herd. It is truly an amazing clip that shows an animal’s true struggle for survival.
People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it -- and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.
"These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away," said Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
This gene variant limits the availability of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor during activity. BDNF keeps memory strong by supporting communication among brain cells and keeping them functioning optimally. When a person is engaged in a particular task, BDNF is secreted in the brain area connected with that activity to help the body respond.
Previous studies have shown that in people with the variant, a smaller portion of the brain is stimulated when doing a task than in those with a normal BDNF gene. People with the variant also don't recover as well after a stroke. Given these differences, the UCI scientists wondered: Could the variant affect an activity such as driving?
"We wanted to study motor behavior, something more complex than finger-tapping," said Stephanie McHughen, graduate student and lead author of the study. "Driving seemed like a good choice because it has a learning curve and it's something most people know how to do."
The driving test was taken by 29 people -- 22 without the gene variant and seven with it. They were asked to drive 15 laps on a simulator that required them to learn the nuances of a track programmed to have difficult curves and turns. Researchers recorded how well they stayed on the course over time. Four days later, the test was repeated.
Results showed that people with the variant did worse on both tests than the other participants, and they remembered less the second time. "Behavior derives from dozens and dozens of neurophysiologic events, so it's somewhat surprising this exercise bore fruit," Cramer said.
The gene variant isn't always bad, though. Studies have found that people with it maintain their usual mental sharpness longer than those without it when neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and multiple sclerosis are present.
"It's as if nature is trying to determine the best approach," Cramer said. "If you want to learn a new skill or have had a stroke and need to regenerate brain cells, there's evidence that having the variant is not good. But if you've got a disease that affects cognitive function, there's evidence it can act in your favor. The variant brings a different balance between flexibility and stability."
A test to determine whether someone has the gene variant is not commercially available.
"I'd be curious to know the genetics of people who get into car crashes," Cramer said. "I wonder if the accident rate is higher for drivers with the variant."
In addition to Cramer and McHughen, Paul Rodriguez, Laura Marchal-Crespo and Vincent Procaccio of UCI worked on the study, along with researchers from the University of Florida. The National Institutes of Health funded the study.
The video above, from the U.S. army's Benning Report, shows new footage of a robot called BigDog--a sophisticated, four-legged "pack-bot" designed to carry heavy payloads across all kinds of terrain.
Resembling a headless, mechanical canine, BigDog has to be one of the most unsettling robots out there. But it's also one of the more impressive--it can walk up or down hills, through ice, sand, snow and dirt by monitoring sensors in its legs and adjusting its posture accordingly. It can also quickly recover from a stumble or slip. The 250-pound robot, designed by Boston Dynamics, can carry 340 lbs and could provide a valuable safety addition to soldiers in the field.
"There's no robot that can go where a foot soldier goes, helping him carry his load," says Boston Dynamics president Marc Raibert in the video, which documents BigDog testing in at Fort Benning in Georgia. Currently, the combat load for soldiers is 145 lbs. If BigDog could carry some of this payload, soldiers could more deftly maneuver out of dangerous situations. Wheeled and tracked robots are limited, so a robot that could traverse difficult terrain would help save lives, say the soldiers in the video.
The company announced last October that BigDog had used GPS to walk a record distance of 12.8 miles on its own. Conceived in 2003, the robot is still a few years away from helping soldiers in the field. You can see an older video of BigDog successfully recovering from a kick to the gut here.
This bipedal bot walks on two legs and can recover from a push, using the same balancing technology that allows BigDog to recover from a kick or keep its balance when walking on ice.
While BigDog was designed to carry payloads for soldiers in the field, Petman will be used for military chemical suit research. In the final version, which should be ready in 2011, Petman will have a range of motions. According to the company:
Unlike previous suit testers, which had to be supported mechanically and had a limited repertoire of motion, PETMAN will balance itself and move freely; walking, crawling and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics during exposure to chemical warfare agents.
The finished Petman will also mimic human physiology, for example sweating in response to temperature and humidity changes, to make it a realistic testing device for the suits.
According to the IEEE's Automaton blog, the prototype currently has a top speed of 3.2 mph. Watch a video of Petman striding smoothly along a treadmill track below.
At 8 a.m. EDT today, October 27, NASA launched a test rocket called Ares I-X from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket is the first new launch vehicle to be tested in nearly four decades and the test will gather data critical to the design and development of Ares I--NASA's new rocket designed to replace the aging space shuttles and take humans to the moon, and possibly to Mars and beyond as part of the Constellation program.
Last week it took engineers almost seven hours to roll Ares I-X to launch pad 39B where it completed its flight readiness review. Now NASA's biggest concern for lift off is the weather. The agency has a four hour launch window, and while it only needs 10 minutes of clear skies for a "go", the forecasters are calling for 60 percent chance of clouds. If the launch is scrubbed, engineers will try again on Wednesday.
The test flight comes at a trying time for NASA, after its plan for the future of human exploration underwent an independent review and the outcome did not favor the Ares I. Despite these findings, NASA officials support the test flight, saying the data gathered will be useful for the design of any future rocket.
"This is the first time in more than 30 years that NASA has built a vehicle in a new configuration so this has been a valuable learning experience," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in a press release."This test will yield important data to support the nation's next steps in exploration. There is no substitute for hard data--flight testing clarifies the distinction between imagined outcomes and real flight experience."
Follow the launch on Twitter, and the Ares I-X blog, then return to Delta-V for a post-flight analysis.
Just in time for Halloween, researchers have announced the discovery of a new, real-world "monster" -- what they are calling a "unicorn" fly that lived about 100 million years ago and is being described as a new family, genus and species of fly never before observed.
A single, incredibly well-preserved specimen of the tiny but scary-looking fly was preserved for eternity in Burmese amber, and it had a small horn emerging from the top of its head, topped by three eyes that would have given it the ability to see predators coming. But despite that clever defense mechanism, it was apparently an evolutionary dead end that later disappeared.
"No other insect ever discovered has a horn like that, and there's no animal at all with a horn that has eyes on top," said George Poinar, Jr., a professor of zoology at Oregon State University who just announced the new species in Cretaceous Research, a professional journal.
"It was probably a docile little creature that fed on the pollen and nectar of tiny tropical flowers," Poinar said. "But it was really bizarre looking. One of the reviewers of the study called it a monster, and I have to admit it had a face only another fly could have loved. I was thinking of making some masks based on it for Halloween."
This fly lived in the jungles of Myanmar and was found trapped in amber that was from 97 to 110 million years old. The gooey, viscous tree sap that flowed down over the fly and later turned to stone preserved its features in lifelike detail, including its strange horn topped by three functional eyes.
"If we had seen nothing but the wings of this insect, it would have looked similar to some other flies in the family Bibionomorpha," Poinar said. "But this was near the end of the Early Cretacous when a lot of strange evolutionary adaptations were going on. Its specialized horn and eyes must have given this insect an advantage on very tiny flowers, but didn't serve as well when larger flowers evolved. So it went extinct."
Poinar named the new fly Cascoplecia insolitis -- from the Latin "cascus" for old and "insolates" for strange and unusual.
The fly also had other very unusual characteristics, the study found, such as an odd-shaped antenna, unusually long legs that would have helped it crawl over flowers and extremely small vestigial mandibles that would have limited it to nibbling on very tiny particles of food.
Pollen grains found on the legs of the fly suggest that it primarily must have fed on flowers.
This fly lived during the time of the dinosaurs, but also in a period when Triassic and Jurassic species were becoming extinct, modern groups were appearing and angiosperms, or flowering plants, were diversifying. Some of the characteristics of the fly were common to other families found around that time, but others were extremely different -- especially the horn with eyes on top.
The specimen found in amber was well-preserved, lacking only the rear left portion of the abdomen and a portion of the left hind leg. It's rare to find specimens with essentially a complete body as well as wings, scientists noted in the report. The fossil came from an amber mine in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar, first excavated in 2001.
Poinar is an expert on insects and other life forms that have been preserved in amber, and has used them as clues to create detailed portraits of ancient ecosystems.
"None of the specialized body characters of Cascoplecia occurs on previously reported Cretaceous bibionids," the report concluded. "This 'unicorn' fly was one of the oddities of the Cretaceous world and was obviously an evolutionary dead end."
Unless, of course, it shows up once again as a scary looking Halloween costume -- with wings, grasping claws, and a horn with three piercing eyes on top.
