Technology

ST. HELENA, CA – It’s a fine Saturday, and the traffic lines up on Highway 29 as the day’s crop of tourists meander from vineyard to vineyard along the road that bisects Napa Valley.  By year’s end, 4.5 million people will have passed through, sampling vintages from the state that grows 92% of the nation’s grapes and supplies 60% of its wine. More than 200 million cases of California wine are sold within the United States each year; a further 250 million find their homes abroad. California is the world’s fourth largest wine exporter, after Italy, France, and Spain. And Napa Valley is…

Isn’t it nice when someone does your work for you?  For some years now, NIL Technololgy have been sending me science news emails as a form of advertising.  Mostly these are to do with nanotechnology, but the most recent directed me to this: Scientists propose a solution to a critical barrier to producing fusion Physicists have discovered a possible solution to a mystery that has long baffled researchers working to harness fusion. If confirmed by experiment, the finding could help scientists eliminate a major impediment to the development of fusion as a clean and abundant source…

Wikipedia is crowdsourced knowledge and therefore discourages people from writing about themselves. As a result, 60 percent of Wikipedia articles about companies contain factual errors, according to research published in Public Relations Journal. Marcia W. DiStaso, Ph.D., assistant professor of public relations at Penn State University, surveyed 1,284 public relations people from the Public Relations Society of America's (PRSA). Results of the survey indicate a gap exists between public relations companies and Wikipedia concerning the proper protocol for editing entries. When respondents…

Noise levels, fine particulate matter that leads to smog and traffic volumes are a big concern to  urban planners and residents now but they will be even bigger issues in the 'city of tomorrow'. Three-dimensional tools will soon make it easier to simulate those issues: as the user virtually moves through his city, the corresponding data are displayed as green, yellow or red dots. Fine dust, aircraft noise and the buzz of highways have a negative impact on a city‘s inhabitants. Urban planners have to take a lot of information into consideration when planning new highways or airport…

Want to get an autism diagnosis but are just too darn busy? Researchers at Harvard Medical School are here to help.  Yes, the process of diagnosing autism is complex and subjective but what about if qualified people are not there to help or you are in a rush? Autism used to be diagnosed through a careful analysis of an individual's behavior. Children took the Autism Diagnostic Interview, Revised, known as the ADI-R, a 93-question questionnaire, and/or the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, known as the ADOS exam, which measures several behaviors in children. Those evaluations can…

Despite claims that there is not enough diversity in anonymous, voluntary efforts, it often comes down to choice.  Women are not discriminated against on Wikipedia, though more men do it, and white people are not prevented from blogging just because more black people do it.   Black people, nee African-Americans in American sociology papers, are more likely to blog than their white and Hispanic counterparts, according to surveys analyzed by a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley - one and a half times to nearly twice as much as whites."Blacks consume less online…

It's the team-up no one ever expected to see; video game characters and...fashion.  But it has. The latest issue of Arena Homme+, a men's fashion magazine, has a CGI photo shoot of Final Fantasy video game characters showing off the Prada 2012 Men's Spring/Summer Collection. So much for continuity.  What's next, medieval knights driving tanks? Cylons fighting Jedi? Whatever.  If you want to see Lightning, Noel, Snow, Sazh and Hope styled for action in Prada, your wish has come true.  If you ever thought models looked unrealistically unattainable before, it's only…

Robots don't understand subtlety - what is effortless to a human, like pouring juice into a cup, is a challenge for a machine. While one hand holds the glass bottle firmly, the other one must gently grasp the cup. Researchers at Saarland University together with associates in Bologna and Naples have developed a robotic hand that can accomplish both tasks and the actuator is barely larger than a human arm. They use a novel string actuator, making use of small electric motors to twist strings, making the new robotic hand suitable as a helper around the house or in catastrophic scenarios. The…

Will review reports published with articles enhance peer review quality?  Elsevier, a global provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, thinks so, and has launched a pilot project aimed at improving the quality of peer review. Review reports for articles in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology will be published alongside the article on SciVerse ScienceDirect in a pilot program will last until the end of 2012. If successful, the initiative will also be applied to other Elsevier journals.  Before the article appears on SciVerse ScienceDirect,…

After WikiLeaks released classified and sensitive government documents, predictions of the scale and significance of their impact were overstated. The desire/hope of proponents that the WikiLeaks disclosures of 2010 meant conventional mechanisms for controlling government-held information wee breaking down, heralding a new world of 'radical transparency', were short-lived. Old-style secrecy is still there, argues Alasdair Roberts of Suffolk University Law School.  Leak, publish, and wait for the inevitable outrage is easily defeated in practice. It turns out radical transparency is hard…