Feature Channels: Technology

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The popular Nintendo Wii videogame system is helping radiology students reach new levels! Faculty from Weill Cornell Medical College have coupled the motion-sensitive Wii remote with the same computers used to analyze scans, and have found that the Wii remote makes examining CT and MRI images more ergonomic, heightens the interactivity during classes, and may potentially improve the ability to interpret scans.

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Triage technology comes with a Star Trek twist, at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate (DHS S&T).

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Today's children are coming of age immersed in video gaming, Web browsing, and instant messaging. Many have cell phones, laptops, and hand-held video games. Others have created avatars of themselves, and some are raising robot pets in virtual worlds. What impact does this technology have on children? A new journal issue explores the promises and perils ahead for children in technological environments.

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What can't the iPhone do? Thanks to some researchers, it can now count how many calories you've burned. The Walk n' Play app allows players to compete in real time with another iPhone user or against a simulator as they go about their daily walking. A free download is available in Apple's App Store.

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NIST establishing a testing program to assure that the U.S. government purchases new computers and networking products that work properly on the next-generation Internet traffic system"”known as IPv6"”while meeting standards for federal government use.

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Two speed measuring devices used by the law enforcement community"”the down-the-road (DTR) radar with which officers enforce automobile speed limits and the ballistic chronograph which tracks the velocity of bullets during testing of protective equipment"”soon should be more useful tools thanks to recent research conducted at NIST.

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A working definition for cloud computing"”a new computer technique with potential for achieving significant cost savings and information technology agility"”has been released by a team of computer security experts at NIST.

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Chip manufacturers beware: There's a new flaw in our understanding of transistor noise, a phenomenon affecting the electronic on-off switch within computer circuits. According to NIST engineers who discovered the problem, it will soon impede the creation of more efficient, lower-powered devices like cell phones and pacemakers unless we solve it.

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Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology have developed a glass-based coating for reinforcement bars that helps prevent corrosion and strengthens the bond between steel and concrete. This material could help engineers build stronger bridges and increase the longevity of other steel-reinforced structures.

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The Spelman College robotics team, SpelBots, tied for first place in the RoboCup Japan 2009 Standard Platform League Nao League humanoid soccer championship on May 10, 2009, in Osaka, Japan.

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While hippotherapy works to improve the quality of life for children and adults with physical and mental impairments through riding a horse, just getting some patients onto the horse can be a major obstacle. But now, Baylor University researchers have built a custom mechanical horse to help those with physical and mental impairments get the same benefit from hippotherapy without having to actually get on to a horse.

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A new low-bandwidth, high-frame-rate videoconferencing technology that creates the appearance of three-dimensionality and a strong sense of co-presence without the use of expensive motion-tracking devices or multicamera arrays could eventually become available for cell phones, laptop computers and personal digital assistants, according to a researcher at the University of Virginia.

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NIST has issued for public comment a draft publication describing the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), a new method to automate the task of verifying computer security settings.

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The Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech has developed a unique robotic hand that can firmly hold objects as heavy as a can of food or as delicate as a raw egg, while dexterous enough to gesture for sign language.

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Engineering students have developed a low-cost, battery-powered surgical lamp to be used in developing nations where electricity isn't reliable.

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Penn State materials researchers have reported the largest known energy storage capacity for a bulk glass, making it a potential new candidate for capacitors for electric vehicles and portable power applications.

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Put that needle down, doctor! Scientists with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute are developing a noninvasive, needle-free system that uses light to measure tissue oxygen and pH. The new system will soon be an alternative to the painful use of needles to draw blood and cumbersome equipment to determine metabolic rate.

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The University of Maryland Dental School is the first to add "Second Life" lessons for students on a virtual dental school island.

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Ian Bogost's students re-create visual artifacts of old TV video games for the flat-screen age.

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Smokers can turn to their iPhones to help them quit smoking with evidence-based treatment through a free app downloadable from iPhone or iTunes. The app links users to the National Cancer Institute's quitline service where they speak to a live quitline coach or use live text to get advice on quitting.

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To improve its film-recommender algorithm, Netflix put a price on its head.

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These chips unleashed earthshaking technologies and gadgets--and are part of the reason why engineers don't get out enough.

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Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a technique for efficiently suppressing errors in quantum computers. The advance could eventually make it much easier to build useful versions of these potentially powerful but highly fragile machines, which theoretically could solve important problems that are intractable using today's computers.

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When an employee has so many complex passwords to remember that he keeps them on a sticky note attached to his computer screen, that could be a sign that your organization needs a wiser policy for passwords, one that balances risk and complexity. New guidelines for institution-wide password management issued by NIST could help.

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Many of the piezoelectric transducers used for medical ultrasound imaging will soon be replaced with capacitive transducers, which are fabricated using techniques borrowed from the microelectronics industry.

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Two very different types of kiosks fashioned from recycled electronics took top honors in their respective categories in the first Sustainable E-waste Design Competition recently at the University of Illinois.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today it is accepting proposals for a program to support high-impact scientific advances through the use of some of the world's most powerful supercomputers located at DOE national laboratories. Approximately 1.3 billion supercomputer processor-hours will be awarded in 2010 through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program for large-scale, computationally intensive projects addressing some of the toughest challenges in science and engineering.

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Low-power, high-efficiency electronic memory could be the long-term result of collaborative research led by Cornell materials scientist Darrell Schlom. The research, to be published April 17 in the journal Science (Vol. 324 No. 5925), involves taking a well-known oxide, strontium titanate, and depositing it on silicon in such a way that the silicon squeezes it into a special state called ferroelectric "“ a result that could prove key to next-generation memory devices.

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Teams of high school students from all over Iowa will compete in the second annual IT-Olympics at Iowa State University. They'll do their best to defend computer networks from hackers, build LEGO robots capable of sumo-style moves and design educational computer games.

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A Northeastern University physicist and his team tracked the spreading potential of Bluetooth and multimedia messaging service (MMS) viruses and predict that these viruses will become a real threat to users of smartphones, like iPhone and Blackberry, once an operating system increases its market share.

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Most science research programs that run on high-performance computers like the IBM Blue Gene/P Intrepid at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) generate enormous quantities of data that represent the results of their calculations. But scientists can also use the ALCF to visualize, explore and communicate their findings as highly accurate simulations and often beautiful images.

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Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, will visit China later this month, where she will speak about the challenges of managing the exponentially increasing amount of digital information, and how a coordinated cyberinfrastructure will accelerate solutions to societal challenges, such as predicting the effects of large-scale earthquakes.

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Preliminary due diligence and fund development of new medical device technologies can cost up to $75,000 and take up to three months. But innovators, device manufacturers, service providers, venture capital firms, researchers, healthcare providers and others now have access to a new online membership community with software that shortens this process to about 90 minutes for only a few thousand dollars.

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Baby Steps is a multimedia system that combines sentimental snapping with medical record-keeping. The experimental product feels like a fun toy for parents, but researchers found in a pilot study that parents who used it regularly collected twice as much medically relevant information about their child's developmental progress.

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Research could make it easier for cell phone uses in a given area to share information and save money doing so.

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Local Buffalo scientist Dr. Russ Miller is leading the rollout of "Magic," one of the most powerful computers in New York State to qualified users worldwide for solving computationally-demanding problems.

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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a mobile application known as Sun Dial, which alerts Muslim users when it's time to perform the five daily prayers known as salat. The device is being discussed this week at the human-computer interaction conference, CHI, in Boston.

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Engineers are developing a technique for mass producing computer chips made from the same material found in pencils. Experts believe that graphene -- the sheet-like form of carbon found in graphite pencils -- holds the key to smaller, faster electronics. It might also deliver quantum mechanical effects that could enable new kinds of electronics.

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According to a report issued in late March by the FBI and National White Collar Crime Center's Internet Fraud Complaint Center, Internet fraud increased by 33% in 2008, rising for the first time in three years and continuing to grow as the country suffers through a deepening recession.

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There are Web cams focused on falcons, ferrets and fish, virtual tours of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, and robotic dogs, seals and even dinosaurs. But what about the real deal: observing animals in their natural habitat, hiking the John Muir Trail or a playing with a live pet?

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Thursday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, game studies researchers presented their list of the top 10 most unexpected findings for video game designers over the past year.This year audience members "” both at the panel and via Twitter "” ranked the findings in order of their importance.

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A new nanogenerator may charge iPods and cell phones with a wave of the hand. Scientists from Georgia describe technology that converts mechanical energy from body movements or even the flow of blood in the body into electric energy that can be used to power a broad range of electronic devices without using batteries. The study is scheduled for presentation in March at the 237th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society

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One day in the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to type a query into an online search engine and have it deliver not Web pages that may contain an answer, but just the answer itself, says Weiyi Meng, a professor of computer science at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

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Engineers at Vanderbilt University's Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed a system that turns individual soldiers into "smart nodes" in a low-cost sensor network that can identify the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately identify the caliber and type of weapons they are firing.

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Radio frequency identification (RFID) devices have widely been used for tracking for years; recently, scientists from U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have developed a unique tracking technology that also monitors the environmental and physical conditions of containers of nuclear materials in storage and transportation.

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GW University's National Emergency Medical Services Preparedness Initiative announces the launch of Zero Hour: America's Medic, a high-tech video game based learning tool that is designed to train and exercise the first responder and EMS communities through a series of virtual simulations based on the 16 national planning scenarios developed by US Department of Homeland Security. When playing the game and confronted with biological, explosive, chemical and earthquake disasters, first responders must meet the challenges they would face during an actual disaster.

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"Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology," by Morgan McGuire of Williams College and Odest Chadwicke Jenkins of Brown University, was recently published by A K Peters, Ltd. The book is targeted at three different audiences: students, independent developers, and new professionals in the gaming industry. It offers different approaches for each audience group and incorporates a series of worksheets that facilitate the drafting of a game industry design document.

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ASML chief scientist Bill Arnold explains how the diverging paths of memory and logic will shape the future of lithography, and makes the case for extreme ultraviolet lithography as the only feasible next step for chip manufacturing.

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The University of Massachusetts Amherst is hosting a two-day conference April 16-17 that examines the electoral impact of user-created YouTube content on the 2008 election. Conference participants will also discuss new technical and analytic opportunities associated with new media technologies and politics.

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Computer scientists at NIST are playing a major role in making sure that, when entering Web addresses in your browser, what you type is what you get. A draft update of NIST's guidelines for DNS (Domain Name System) security is now available for public comment.