Technology

When most of us, especially in the SB community, think of supercomputers we usually think of large-scale hydrodynamics or fusion reaction simulations which stretch our knowledge of the universe and provide us with a validation or a denial or of some complicated physical theory. Indeed, this is what most supercomputers are up to: simulating climate change, the structure of proteins, or the dynamics of a supernova, while producing awesome pictures like this one: An awesome picture of the ascending Space Shuttle and the pressure coefficients of the outside. Photo Credit: NASA Advanced…

Cryptography isn't just for spies anymore - it's absolutely everywhere around us. Every time we use an ATM or buy something online we are sending data that we hope isn't intercepted on its way, because that would mean our finances were at risk. Additionally, corporations and the government have an interest in securing communications within their organizations and with other companies or governments so that information doesn't fall into the wrong hands. How do these large organizations keep malicious people (commonly called "adversaries" in cryptology circles) from intercepting and reading…

European researchers say they have developed the most advanced spontaneous language understanding (SLU) system ever devised for both Polish and Italian languages.  That's because it is also the first one, according to the Luna project behind the work. Spontaneous language understanding is far more advanced than the traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems that people may already be familiar with. In traditional IVRs, the user is required to answer questions with specific words or short sentences proposed by the systems. But with SLU, language systems are designed to respond…

Manhattan Research, a global healthcare and pharmaceutical market research company, today announced the release of Taking the Pulse(R) Europe v8.0, its European physician study and strategic advisory service. It offers in-depth market data and analysis of how physicians across Western Europe integrate the Internet and technology into their practises. Taking the Pulse(R) Europe also looks at key trends in pharma company/sales rep interactions and electronic detailing. According to the study, European physicians are more reliant than ever on technology - over 80% who are online reported that…

Are we ""natural-born cyborgs", as Carl Zimmer argues? We tend to think of the mind as separated from the world; we imagine information trickling into our senses and reaching our isolated minds, which then turn that information into a detailed picture of reality. The Internet and iPhones seem to be crashing the gate of the mind, taking over its natural work and leaving it to wither away to a mental stump. As plausible as this picture may seem, it does a bad job of explaining a lot of recent scientific research. In fact, the mind appears to be adapted for reaching out from our heads and making…

The cast of "House" won't need to find new jobs any time soon but using a robotic assistant to remove a patient's gallbladder by key-hole surgery (laparoscopic cholecystectomy) was as safe as working with a human assistant, a Cochrane Review has concluded. Comparisons between robot- and human-assisted surgery showed that there were no differences in terms of morbidity, the need to switch to open surgery, total operating time, or length of stay in hospital. Between 10 and 15% of the adult western population develop gallstones, placing a huge demand on health services. In the USA alone, more…

A new report, co-authored by a University of Hertfordshire academic, which will be launched this Thursday (22 January), has revealed that girls are more likely to have new technologies at home than boys and it is mothers rather than fathers who assist them. The Learning in the Family report which looked at how families are involved in children’s learning, was funded by Becta, commissioned by Intuitive Media Research Services and co-authored by Robert Hart of Intuitive Media and Professor Karen Pine, at the University’s School of Psychology. They conducted two online surveys with a sample of 4…

Take heart, parents.   If your teenager is brandishing a virtual shotgun in their new video game, you're not raising the next Columbine kid.    If they're enjoying themselves, it's because of the healthy pleasure of mastering a challenge rather than from a disturbing craving for carnage.  Research in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin shows that, contrary to popular belief, violence does not make video games more enjoyable. The study by investigators at the University of Rochester and Immersyve Inc., a player-experience research firm, found that for many people…

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute say their new polarization-matched type of light emitting diode (LED)  has significantly improved lighting performance and energy efficiency. The new LED, developed in collaboration with Samsung Electro-Mechanics, exhibits an 18 percent increase in light output and a 22 percent increase in wall-plug efficiency, which essentially measures the amount of electricity the LED converts into light, but it also achieves a notable reduction in "efficiency droop," a well-known phenomenon that provokes LEDs to be most efficient when receiving low-…

We're always trying to keep the 'footprint' of the site pretty small while maintaining as much functionality as possible.    You've all seen 'new' versions of lots of sites that seem to add a bunch of whiz-bang stuff that developers fell in love with but for most people they take away from the speed and ease-of-use of the site. Comments are one of those areas where you can have too much or not enough so it's better to just try things and ask what you think.    As an experiment we have added back email notifications for comments but I'll explain in some more detail all the…