Assassin's Creed 4: Revelations Beta Release Details for PSN/PS3

Assassin's Creed Revelations Multiplayer Beta, the early test drive version of the 4th episode of the historical, award-winning science fiction video game is about to Released by Ubisoft, exclusively for Sony Playstation Network, on September 03, 2011.


Assassin's Creed Revelations Multiplayer Beta will be equiped with:

• 3 Maps: Knight’s Hospital, Antioch, Constantinople
• 4 Modes: Wanted, Manhunt, Deathmatch, Artifact Assault
• 9 Characters: The Sentinel, The Vanguard, The Guardian, The Vizier, The Thespian, The Deacon, The Bombadier, The Trickster, The Champion

PlayStation Plus Subscribers and Ubisoft UPlay Service Members will have an exclusive chance to download and play new Assassin's Creed 4 Revelations Multiplayer beta on PS3, for the holiday season, this September 03 to 11. UPlay members will receive their Beta invite via email.

Assassin's Creed 4 Revelations Multiplayer beta is promised to bring a whole bunch of new and updated tools of the trade for players to test out.

Assassin's Creed 4: Revelations multiplayer beta Gameplay
Assassin's Creed 4 Revelations multiplayer beta Gameplay will include a little of the old and the new, bringing back favorite modes and abilities, while throwing out a few of the new ones in the process. Perks, streaks, and loss bonuses have all been redesigned to include things like "Animus Hacking" – where, after a kill streak of six, a player can rain down arrows and kill all Templars on the map.

Assassin's Creed 4: Revelations multiplayer beta Maps
Speaking of maps, the playing field will be freshened up and available at outset to allow players to take one of nine possible assassin’s out for a stroll. Comprised of three new maps – Knight’s Hospital, Antioch, and Constantinople – the new spaces will give a whole list of areas for characters to run, jump, dive, and hide.

Assassin's Creed 4: Revelations multiplayer beta Modes
Though be careful, as the four possible modes have been tweaked since Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, which means they will no doubt be a bit different. Bringing back Wanted and Manhunt, the long-awaited Deathmatch is making an appearance as well. Another new mode, Artifact Assault, asks teams to try and steal the opposing player’s artifact in a "Capture the flag" style of play. The catch is however; players are allowed to kill only when they are in their territory – adding a new level of complexity.

To get away and make those kills, a select few abilities will be available, including Smoke, Morph, Fire Crackers, Throwing Knives and more. There are a few new ones as well, including a Tripwire Bomb and Closure ,which captures enemies or a target, allowing you to step in for the kill (or whatever other action is required).

Assassin's Creed 4: Revelations Release Date for Public
Assassin’s Creed 4: Revelations Release Date for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC is set to November 15, 2011.

Mastering Voice Recognition On Your iPhone, Android, or Desktop

Nobody talks on the phone anymore, but people are talking at their phones. On any platform, check your settings and helper guides to get an understanding of what your app or phone can actually do, as completely misunderstood responses from a speech app can be pretty infuriating. Android phones with Google's Voice Search installed, for example, can make a phone call, compose email, send a text message, get directions, and pull up musical artists-but can't launch applications from vocal commands. This isn't so much an issue on iPhones, but Androids and other phones can have pinhole-style microphones that can get gummed up or partially covered by awkward cases. Intermediate: Stop Slowing Down, But Think Before Speaking You need not talk like a robot to be understood by one, says Vlad Sejnoha, chief technical officer at Nuance, maker of the Dragon speech-to-text software for Windows, Macs, iPhones and iPads.

Dragon's software learns speech styles and tics over time, and you want to aim for a natural speaking flow. Digging around Android forums and elsewhere, I found a good number of tesimonies from speech-to-text enthusiasts who saw better results from simply speaking at a normal clip. Google representative Nadja Blagojevic offered much the same advice for the search giant's voice product in both Android and its Chrome browser: Speak naturally and clearly, but don't strain to enunciate too much or speak slowly. Advanced Dictation: Punctuation and Personalization Another embarrassing thing you can stop doing is holding your phone or desktop microphone directly in front of your mouth. In your Mac's System Preferences, there's a whole range of Speech options, sure; but check in the Input section of the Sound options, and you'll find a check box to Use ambient noise reduction, which Google's Blagojevic recommends for using the Chrome browser's speech function.

The best noise cancellation tools put in cars and hearing aids use multiple microphones to pinpoint the speaker and amplify their Input, but your phone isn't quite as refined an audio tool. Punctuation is no different than words, as Dragon, Google, and most good voice recognition software will train itself to how you say "period," "comma," or even "smiley." Just be sure to actually go back and fix bad Punctuation, as that's often how the software learns. Finally, if you're using an Android phone, be sure that you've enabled Personalized Voice Recognition. It benefits your speech-to-text on Android, in your browser, and, ultimately, your self-driving car.

Breakthrough promises $1.50 per gallon synthetic gasoline with no carbon emissions

UK-based Cella Energy has developed a synthetic fuel that could lead to US$1.50 per gallon gasoline. Apart from promising a future transportation fuel with a stable price regardless of oil prices, the fuel is hydrogen based and produces no carbon emissions when burned. The technology is based on complex hydrides, and has been developed over a four year top secret program at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. Early indications are that the fuel can be used in existing internal combustion engined vehicles without engine modification.

According to Stephen Voller CEO at Cella Energy, the technology was developed using advanced materials science, taking high energy materials and encapsulating them using a nanostructuring technique called coaxial electrospraying.

“We have developed new micro-beads that can be used in an existing gasoline or petrol vehicle to replace oil-based fuels,” said Voller. “Early indications are that the micro-beads can be used in existing vehicles without engine modification.”

“The materials are hydrogen-based, and so when used produce no carbon emissions at the point of use, in a similar way to electric vehicles”, said Voller.

The technology has been developed over a four-year top secret programme at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, UK.

The development team is led by Professor Stephen Bennington in collaboration with scientists from University College London and Oxford University.

Professor Bennington, Chief Scientific Officer at Cella Energy said, “our technology is based on materials called complex hydrides that contain hydrogen. When encapsulated using our unique patented process, they are safer to handle than regular gasoline.”

A Biocomputer Can Now Detect Multiple Signs of Disease from Inside the Body

Wouldn’t it be easier to deal with disease if our bodies just fixed themselves? That’s asking quite a bit from our physiologies, but Israeli researchers are working on tiny nano-computers that could do the job for us. They envision tiny machines made of biomolecules that autonomously troll the body looking for disease, computing a diagnosis and delivering drugs all at the same time. It’s a long way off, but they’re making progress--they’ve just developed a biomolecular computer that can autonomously identify multiple molecules at the same time.

From a biomolecular computing standpoint (as well as from a diagnostics standpoint), that’s pretty huge. The researchers have previously demonstrated a biomolecular computer that could sense disease indicators one at a time. Existing in a two state system, it essentially was programmed in a “yes” state for a certain disease indicator. It then performed a series of computation steps, checking for one mRNA disease indicator after another.

If all the indicators of a certain disease are present, the biocomputer would end unchanged in the same “yes” state. If any of the indicators were not present, it would end in a “no” state. It was rudimentary, but it was a diagnosis if an imperfect one.

The breakthrough here is that the team’s biocomputer now can now detect disease indicators from a variety of sources--mRNA, miRNA, proteins, and a variety of small molecules like ATP. The new biocomputer also needs fewer interactions with disease indicators and is designed with fewer moving parts.

The idea is to someday create swarms of biomolecular nano-computers that can autonomously and continuously patrol our bodies for the signs of disease. Because they can now detect indicators from more than one source, diagnoses would be more accurate. And with more and better computation, the biomachines could also deliver the first round of preventative drugs to the site of burgeoning disease, acting as a first line of defense against infection.

Of course, all this is years--decades, really--away. The idea that of nanomachines--even ones constructed of biomolecules--swimming our bloodstreams loaded up with drug payloads is a bit anxiety-inducing. What if they malfunction or misdiagnose? What if they were to accidentally release too much of a drug at the wrong place at the wrong time, or to inadvertently mix the wrong drugs into a harmful pharmaceutical cocktail?

You might lose sleep at night wondering what the tiny machines inside of you were up to. Even so, the idea of constant, vigilant, autonomous oversight of every organ in the body is pretty tantalizing.

Source: Popsci via PhsyOrg

PossessedHand controls hand movement with electrical stimulation

It's often during those early stages of learning to play a new instrument that many people give up in despair. Even though you swear that you're hitting the right notes, everything still sounds like an old gramophone recording played at the wrong speed. If only you could let someone take control of your hands to fast forward through the arduous repetition phase before muscle memory kicks in and the piece you're trying to play begins to sound more like it should. That's precisely the kind of potential offered by the PossessedHand project. Electrode-packing armbands placed on a user's forearm send electrical pulses through the muscles to take control of the movement of the hand - with fledgling Koto players testing the system having demonstrated greater accuracy and speedier progress.

The goal of the PossessedHand project was to develop a support system for playing musical instruments where users could quickly learn the gestures, positioning and timing needed for a piece of music without having to wear glove-type devices that digitally control the movement of their fingers. By positioning two belts on the forearm of a user - each containing a number of non-invasive electrode pads - researchers were able to effectively take control of five independent and 11 linked joints in the hand to electrically control the movement of individual fingers of the wearer's hand.

Many of the muscles used to move fingers - like the superficial flexor muscle, deep flexor muscle, long flexor muscle of the thumb, common digital extensor muscle, flexor carpi radialis muscle, long palmar muscle, and flexor carpi ulnaris muscle - are located in the forearm. Movement of the joints can be controlled by stimulating these muscles with electrical pulses. The researchers also discovered that muscles at different depths in the forearm respond to different strengths of voltage, resulting in the system being able to take over control of a total of 16 joints in the user's hand.

The PossessedHand prototype consists of a battery, a condenser, a timing volume, a switching board (Photo-MOS Relays Series AQV221), a microcontroller, and solid gel electrode pads on two belts. One armband is positioned on the upper part of the forearm and the other lower down and then connected to PC via USB and controlled by a specially-developed graphical user interface. The pulse width is 0.2 ms and the voltage range is 17 - 29 V.

To overcome difficulties in precise positioning of the electrodes over specific muscles in different users, the researchers crammed 14 electrodes into each of the two armbands and then developed an automated calibration system. The system estimates the relationship between the 28 electrodes, the level of stimulation and the amount of muscle movement required.

Volunteers were blindfolded and asked to identify which joints were being moved by the system and reactions to PossessedHand ranged from Scary, just scary to I felt like my forearm was pushed by someone to I felt like my body was hacked.

The team then transcribed Japanese Koto scores into PossessedHand scores, which included information on which finger should be moved and when. Two beginners then alternated between system supported and non-supported playing of the music, with arm positioning over the 13-stringed instrument being undertaken by the user in both cases. The team noted a significant reduction in timing errors and fewer fingering mistakes when PossessedHand was active.

It's also important when playing a musical instrument to apply the correct amount of force at the appropriate time. Sadly, the PossessedHand experiments could not electrically stimulate enough force to actually grasp an object or play an instrument. As such, this would seem to fit in with learning systems like Piano Hands and Piano Maestro.

Such technology might also find application in the treatment of folks who suffer from impaired muscle control or be used by professionals looking to quickly improve dexterity, such as surgeons.

The paper entitled PossessedHand: Techniques for controlling human hands using electrical muscles stimuli by Emi Tamaki, Takashi Miyaki, and Jun Rekimoto was presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, Canada in May 2011.

The PossessedHand system was recently demonstrated at the World Haptics Conference in Istanbul, Turkey.

Source: Gizmag

Japanese Supercomputer Unseats Chinese Supercomputer, Is Now the World's Fastest

A Japanese supercomputer is now the world’s fastest, unseating the previous record-holder by nearly a factor of four. The K Computer, based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, can perform 8 petaflops — that’s 8 quadrillion calculations per second.



The next-best computer is China’s Tianhe-1A , which set a record at 2.6 petaflops last fall. The U.S.-based Jaguar computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is now in third place with 1.75 petaflops.

K Computer topped the newest TOP500 List of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg.

K Computer, built by Fujitsu and entirely made in Japan, has 672 racks equipped with a current total of 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, each with eight cores. It will eventually have 800 racks and will be capable of performing 10 petaflops, according to a news release from RIKEN. RIKEN and Fujitsu plan to have the computer fully operational by November 2012.

At least two American 10-petaflop machines are set to come online next year — IBM is building Mira, based at Argonne National Laboratory, and Blue Waters, based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a 20-petaflop IBM model called Sequoia.

K computer will be used for global climate research, meteorology, disaster prevention, and medicine, according to RIKEN.

Source: Popsci via Engadget

First Graphene-Based Integrated Circuit Smaller than a Grain of Salt

IBM researchers have built the first integrated circuit based on graphene, a breakthrough the company says could herald a future based on graphene wafers instead of silicon. The circuit, a 10 gigahertz frequency mixer, could give wireless devices greater range. At higher frequencies, the technology could someday allow law enforcement and medical personnel to see inside objects or people without the harmful effects of X-rays, according to IBM.



It's yet another advancement in the use of graphene—which, in case you forgot, is that fantastic, ultra-thin "wonder material" that won two scientists the Nobel prize for physics. Graphene is only one layer of (carbon) atoms thick—but despite its ultra-lightness, it's still nearly indestructible. Like, 200x stronger than steel and the strongest substance in the known universe kind of indestructible. But it's also flexible and its conductivity is 100x greater than silicon. So it's badass.


The circuit is a broadband radio-frequency mixer, which, as IEEE Spectrum explains, is a crucial component of radios. It creates new radio signals by finding the sum and difference between two input frequencies. IBM’s circuit performed frequency mixing up to 10 GHz, and worked well up to 257 degrees F. The research team believes it can get even faster — if so, chips like these could improve cell phone and transceiver signals, possibly allowing phones to work in spots where they currently can’t receive service, the company says.


Several teams have been working on graphene transistors and receivers, but it has been difficult to marry the single-carbon-atom sheets to the metals and alloys used on chips. This circuit also uses aluminum, gold and palladium, for instance, which do not adhere well to graphene. What’s more, graphene can be easily damaged in the etching process, as Yu-Ming Lin and colleagues at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center explain in a paper about the new circuit.


The team figured out a new process that clears those hurdles by growing graphene on the silicon face of the silicon-carbide wafer. Then they coated the graphene in a polymer, conducted the necessary etching, and removed the polymer using some acetone. The transistor gates are only 550 nanometers long, and the entire wafer is the size of a grain of salt, IBM says.


Pretty soon, we could be seeing applications of graphene in high-bandwidth communication and low-cost smart phone and TV displays. 


Compared to silicon, the graphene transistor could be less expensive, use less energy and significantly free up room in portable electronics and smart phones.

The research is reported in today’s issue of the journal Science.


Source: Popsci Via Gizmodo

World record 26 terabits per second data transmission achieved

With video content consuming ever more bandwidth, the need for faster data transmission rates has never been greater. Now a team of scientists at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are claiming a world record in data transmission with the successful encoding of data at a rate of 26 terabits per second on a single laser beam and transmitting it over a distance of 50 km (31 miles). The scientists claim this is the largest data volume ever transported on a laser beam and enables the transmission of 700 DVD's worth of content in just one second.

With no electronic processing methods available for a data rate of 26 terabits per second, the team developed a new opto-electric data decoding process. This process relies on purely optical calculations to break down the initial high data rate into smaller bit rates that can then be processed electrically. The record-breaking data encoding also employed the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM) scheme based on Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) mathematical routines that is commonly used in mobile communications networks including digital TV and audio broadcasts.

Because energy is required for the laser and a few process steps only, the team says the new method is not only extremely fast, but also very energy efficient.

"Our result shows that physical limits are not yet exceeded even at extremely high data rates," says Professor Jürg Leuthold, who led the KIT experiment. "A few years ago, data rates of 26 terabits per second were deemed utopian even for systems with many lasers and there would not have been any applications. With 26 terabits per second, it would have been possible to transmit up to 400 million telephone calls at the same time. Nobody needed this at that time. Today, the situation is different."

The latest breakthrough follows on from the previous high-speed data transmission record set by the KIT scientists in 2010, when they successfully exceeded the data rate of 10 terabits (or 10,000 billion bits) per second.

The KIT experiment involved companies and scientists from all over Europe, including members of the staff of Agilent and Micram Deutschland, Time-Bandwidth Switzerland, Finisar Israel, and the University of Southampton in Great Britain. The experiment is detailed in the journal Nature Photonics.

Source: Gizmag

DNA-Based Computing Could Replace Silicon !

 

DNA is the future of computing,” Jian-Jun Shu tells PhysOrg. And why not? Silicon is slow by comparison, computes in a binary system, creates waste heat, and is not particularly easy on the environment. DNA-based computing can perform better than silicon in several respects, Shu says, and he and a few of his students at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore have set out to prove it.

The general idea: the human body performs computations all of the time, and does so far faster than even the fastest silicon-based supercomputer. Moreover, it does so in a parallel fashion, working with more breadth, speed, and agility than the ones and zeros of silicon computation. For massive parallel problems, artificial intelligence problems, and combinatorial problems, DNA-based computing could be far more efficient.

How does it work? Shu and company are just starting to scratch the surface of what DNA computing could do, he admits, but in the lab he and his students have manipulated strands of DNA to do all kinds of things. They have fused strands together, broken them apart, snipped them, and otherwise affected them to a certain goal or end like storing information in DNA molecules that can be later retrieved for computational purposes.

The operations right now are simple: addition or subtraction mainly, nothing as complex as what silicon computers can do on their worst days. The potential for that equation to be flipped is there, but first there are several obstacles that need to be overcome. For one, there is no real interface for DNA-based computing through which humans can interact with and display data. There also exists no equivalent to the CPU--something that can facilitate these complex operations without human interference.

But that will change, Shu says, with increases in technology and more time in the lab. Just don’t expect to be computing with nucleotides anytime in the near term.

Source: PopSci Via PhysOrg

Thin-film flexible 'Paperphone' created

Researchers from the Human Media Lab at Canada's Queen's University have created a fully-functioning floppy E-Ink smartphone, which they also refer to as a paper computer. Like its thicker, rigid-bodied counterparts, the Paperphone can do things like making and receiving calls, storing e-books, and playing music. Unlike them, however, it conforms to the shape of its user's pocket or purse, and can even be operated through bending actions.

"This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper," said its creator, Roel Vertegaal, who is also the director of the Human Media Lab. "You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen."

The device has a 9.5-cm (3.74-inch) thin film flexible E-Ink display, underneath which is a flexible printed circuit incorporating resistive bend sensors. Those sensors allow it to be programmed to recognize different types of bending gestures, which will subsequently result in it doing things such as navigating menus, making calls, selecting songs, or any other function. A built-in Wacom tablet also allows users to draw on its screen – making it even more paper-like.

When not actually being operated, the Paperphone consumes no electricity. Vertegaal's team have also created a similar device, the Snaplet, which can be worn like a wristband. It operates as a watch when in a convex state, becomes a PDA when flat, and can be used as a phone when turned concave.

The technology is the result of a collaboration between Queen's University and Arizona State University, and will be officially presented on May 10th at the CHI 2011 conference in Vancouver.

"This is the future," said Vertegaal. "Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years."

Source: Gizmag

Researchers Succeed in Quantum Teleportation of Light Waves

This is a Teleportation Device The setup Noriyuki Lee and colleagues used to teleport quantum light.

In a real-life use of Schrödinger's theoretical paradoxical cat, researchers report that they were able to quickly transfer a complex set of quantum information while preserving its integrity. The information, in the form of light, was manipulated in such a way that it existed in two states at the same time, and it was destroyed in one spot and recreated in another. The new breakthrough is a major step toward building safe, effective quantum computers.

No felines were harmed in the making of this experiment, which actually studied wave packets of light that existed in a state of quantum superposition, meaning they existed in two different phases simultaneously. This phenomenon is described in Erwin Schrodinger’s quantum mechanics thought experiment, in which a cat is simultaneously dead and alive, depending on the state of a subatomic particle.

In this experiment, researchers in Australia and Japan were able to transfer quantum information from one place to another without having to physically move it. It was destroyed in one place and instantly resurrected in another, “alive” again and unchanged. This is a major advance, as previous teleportation experiments were either very slow or caused some information to be lost.

The team employed a mind-boggling set of quantum manipulation techniques to achieve this, including squeezing, photon subtraction, entanglement and homodyne detection. The photo above depicts their device, nicknamed the Teleporter, in the lab of Akira Furusawa at the University of Tokyo.

The results pave the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of information, according to Elanor Huntington, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who was part of the study.

“If we can do this, we can do just about any form of communication needed for any quantum technology,” she said in a news release.

Instead of using ones and zeroes, quantum computers store data as qubits, which can represent one and zero simultaneously. This superposition enables the computers to solve multiple problems at once. The new, faster teleportation process means scientists can move blocks of this quantum information around within a computer or across a network, Huntington said.

Optics researcher Philippe Grangier at the Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau, France, said it was a major breakthrough.

“It shows that the controlled manipulation of quantum objects has progressed steadily and achieved objectives that seemed impossible just a few years ago,” he wrote in an editorial that accompanies the study.

The results were published today in the journal Science.

Source: Popsci via Science

Brain-Machine Interface a Possibility?

It’s reminiscent of Cartman’s runaway Trapper Keeper notebook in that long-ago episode of South Park, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may be scratching the surface of a new kind of brain/machine interface by creating computer chips that are wired together with living nerve cells.

A team there has found that mouse nerve cells will connect with each other across a network of tiny tubes threaded through a semiconductor material. It’s not exactly clear at this point how the nerve cells are functioning, but what is clear is that the cells seem to have an affinity for the tiny tubes, and that alone has some interesting implications.

To create the nerve-chip hybrid, the researchers created tubes of layered silicon and germanium that are large enough for the nerve cells’ tendrils to navigate but too small for the actual body of the cell to pass through. They then introduced nerve cells to the tubes and found that the cells will readily thread their tendrils through them--even through complex geometries like helical curves--to connect with each other physically.

What isn’t clear is whether or not the cells are actually communicating with each other they way they would naturally. Going forward, the team aims to get sensors into the chips to see exactly how they are interacting. But the fact that nerve cells will follow the tubes along a preset path designed by researchers belies thrilling prospects.

For instance, nerve-electronic hybrid chips would make great places to test neurological drugs or to study the way nerve cells afflicted with disorders like Parkinson’s communicate. But even more tantalizing is the idea of a nerve-computer interface that would enable the kind of Skywalker-esque control of artificial limbs that is the holy grail prosthetics research.

Source: Popsci via Discovery News

Semiconductors threaded with nerve cells could be the first step towards biological computers

We assumed that in the future humans, or other biological entities, would receive mechanical or electronic 'upgrades'. It looks like it could be the other way around. Machines might be getting biological upgrades.

Adding computer chips to someone's brain is a long way away, but adding neurons to a computer may be just around the corner. Researchers have just added nerve cells to specially-constructed semi-conductors, and the results seem to indicate that one day, biological nerve cells will be strung through computers. We won't put the ghost in the machine - we'll put the meat in it.

This particular step in human/machine evolution was taken at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Researchers constructed little tubes of silicon and germanium. These tubes are often used in computer technology, but they were chosen mostly for their ability to insulate the electric impulses that run down nerve cells. After the network of tubs had been constructed, mouse nerve cells were added to the structure. The tubes were specially sized so that the main bodies of the cells were too big to fit inside them, but the long axons - the slender 'arms' of the cells - were perfectly able to fit down the tubes. After a little while, the nerve cells has threaded themselves into the network of tubes.

This represents a very promising direction in mechanical-biological integration, but it also signals that the integration might not go the way we've been expecting. Machines are still struggling with things like walking, recognizing pictures, and the basic manipulation of objects. Humans have no such difficulty. In the future, instead of putting robot hands on a human, they'll put human hands on a robot - and have them controlled by human neurons going to a basic human brain.

Source: PopSci Via Science News.

EvoMouse: Any Flat Surface Is Now Your Multitouch Trackpad

We've seen virtual keyboards before, but not many virtual trackpads, if any in the consumer space. EvoMouse is here to change that, bundling their input device in the cutest piece of plastic possible.


Essentially, you place the toy dog on the surface of your choosing, and its eyes beam out two infrared beams which track your finger movements. You can click, double-click, right click, drag, drop, pinch and swipe your way around a computer desktop. And if you're in need of a keyboard, EvoMouse will project one of those for you as well.

The device can connect via Bluetooth or USB, and works with Windows, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms. Pricing and availability details are still scarce, however.

Source: Gizmodo via PocketLint via Gizmag

Computer: Print me a Kidney (Tissue Engineer)

Long Beach, California - A surgeon specialising in regenerative medicine on Thursday “printed” a real kidney using a machine that eliminates the need for donors when it comes to organ transplants.

“It’s like baking a cake,” Atala said. Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine said as he cooked up a fresh kidney on stage at a TED Conference in the California city of Long Beach.

A few years ago, Atala figured out how to produce human tissue with a desktop inkjet printer, using cells as the printer ink. In a TED talk last year, he described printing heart valves and other tissues. This week at TED, he brought one of his patients on stage. When he was 10, Luke Massella was among the first people to receive a re-engineered organ — he was born with spina bifida and received a new bladder grown from his own tissue. Now he’s a healthy college student.

The organ-printing process employs scanners that collect a 3-D image of the organ that needs to be replaced. A small tissue sample seeds the printer, which replicates the tissue layer by layer to build a new organ, all in about six or seven hours. It would use the patient’s own tissue, so it avoids any organ rejection issues.

During Atala's talk, a specially designed printer was about three hours into printing a kidney model built out of biocompatible materials. He also brought a completed model to show to the audience.
Initial reports suggested Atala had printed a working kidney, but it was actually a kidney-shaped mold with no internal structures or vasculature, according to Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, where Atala is a regenerative medicine specialist.


He said someday, scanners and printers could conceivably be used to treat wounds. A flatbed scanner could scan a patient’s wound, while a printer adds the right types of tissues to fill it back in. “You can print right on the patient,” Atala said, according to a report on the talk at Fast Company.

Atala also described using a patient's failed organ as a scaffold for a new version, filling it with new tissue. This could help address the challenge of building blood vessels, which remains one of the greatest challenges in tissue engineering.




About 90 percent of people waiting for transplants are in need of kidneys, and the need far outweighs the supply of donated organs, according to Atala.

“There is a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs,” Atala said. “Medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer, and as we age our organs don't last.”

Source:Independent Online