Technology

“We are blessed to have each other to depend on. If you have to go through something bad like cancer, you’re glad to have a friend to go through it with,” said one of two brothers from Savannah, Georgia recovering from robotic prostate cancer surgery. The two siblings flew to The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York to have lifesaving surgery on the same day this week. Dr. David B. Samadi, M.D., Chief of Robotics and Minimally Invasive Surgery in the Department of Urology at Mount Sinai successfully performed the robotic prostate cancer surgeries on the siblings one after another on Monday…

Ethology is the study of animal behavior, with a focus on behavioral patterns in natural environments. A new paper shows that researchers are now taking a machine-learning approach. The work by Csaba Molnár from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and his research team shows that a new piece of software is able to classify dog barks according to different situations and even identify barks from individual dogs, a task humans find challenging. The aim of Molnár and colleagues’ experiments was to test a computer algorithm’s ability to identify and differentiate the acoustic features of dog…

Helius to Enhance Hughes' Business IPTV and Managed Network Service Offerings Hughes Communications, Inc. (HUGHES), the global leader in broadband satellite network solutions and a leading broadband managed network services provider, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Helius, Inc., a portfolio company of Canopy Ventures. The acquisition is expected to be completed on or about February 4, 2008. Upon completion of the acquisition, Helius will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Hughes and will operate closely with Hughes' North America and International…

FREMONT, California, January 3 /PRNewswire/ -- - USB Drives Have Capacity to Hold Over 16 Full-Length High-Definition Movies or an Entire Season of a TV Series Corsair(R) http://www.corsair.com, a worldwide leader in high performance computer and flash memory products, announced today that it is expanding its Flash Voyager and Flash Survivor USB family lines with new 32GB capacity offerings. The new Corsair 32GB Flash Voyager and Flash Survivor USB drives will be debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show 2008 (CES) next week in Las Vegas in the Corsair Suite at the Wynn Hotel and at…

SANTA CLARA, California, January 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Marvell announced the TopDog 11n-450, an 802.11n 3x3 WLAN solution with three spatial streams, the industry's first 802.11n chip operating at 450 Megabits-per-second (Mbps). With maximum bandwidth more than eight times faster than 802.11g 54 Mbps versions and 1.5 times faster than current 802.11n 300 Mbps offerings, the new product will enable significant performance enhancements for notebooks and desktop PCs, printers, routers, set top boxes, digital TVs, gaming devices and DVD players and recorders. The TopDog 11n-450 provides 500 percent…

A thin polymer bio-film that seals surgical wounds could make sutures a relic of medical history. Measuring just 50 microns thick, the film is placed on a surgical wound and exposed to an infrared laser, which heats the film just enough to meld it and the tissue, thus perfectly sealing the wound. Known as Surgilux, the device’s raw material is extracted from crab shells and has Food and Drug Administration approval in the US. Early test results indicate that it has strongest potential for use in brain and nerve surgery because it can avoid the numerous disadvantages of invasive stictches/…

Tiny copper structures with pores at both the nanometer and micron size scales could play a key role in the next generation of detonators used to improve the reliability, reduce the size and lower the cost of certain military munitions. Developed by a team of scientists from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, the highly-uniform copper structures will be incorporated into integrated circuits – then chemically converted to millimeter-diameter explosives. Because they can be integrated into standard microelectronics…

Although there have been great improvements in the field of robotics in the last fifty years, much work remains in order to introduce androids into our daily life. Rafael Muñoz Salinas, a researcher from de Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Granada, is the author of a doctoral thesis which represents a major improvement in the interaction between robots and human beings. His study, entitled ‘Soft-Computing and Computer Vision Techniques Applied to Autonomous robot navigation and Human-robot Interaction’, has managed to develop a series of…

On Wednesday 21 November, TU Delft will demonstrate how improved control techniques can reduce the risk of aircraft crashes. The demonstration involves reconstructing troubled flights – such as the El Al flight which crashed in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam in 1992 – in a flight simulator and adding the newly developed technology. The presentation in Delft forms the final phase of a research project involving the GARTEUR international research partnership (participants include TU Delft and the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR) into Fault Tolerant Control. This involves techniques for…

A group of Scottish scientists at The Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen, have received funding to mass-produce a revolutionary food testing kit that will detect the presence of a host of potentially fatal contaminants from bugs such as Compylobacter, Listeria and Salmonella - but it will do it in five hours rather than the six days it currently takes, making it the fastest such technology in the world. According to the Macaulay Institute’s Dr Brajesh Singh, who leads the project, the new technology could prevent thousands of deaths every year from food poisoning outbreaks. “The conventional…