Technology

Windows 10 build 10122 marks the arrival of something like a first beta Build of Windows 10.  As such one can now start to ask the question how will my favorite games fare under Windows 10?  Back when Windows 8 came out many people from corporate IT to Gamers said "We'll wait for Windows 9".  Microsoft has skipped to 10 and kept the live tiles and touch friendly aspects of the interface it was fashionable to hate about Windows 8 and 8.1.  Leaving aside the cosmetic changes needed for a world where people will interact in ways that aren't mouse centered...but still use a…

A multidisciplinary team from Mexico created ACORDE, a full cosmic ray detector, and Sergio Vergara Lemon, researcher at the University of Puebla says it is the first Mexican cosmic ray detector. ALICE is one of five experiments installed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its function is to characterize other detectors and develop physics experiments of high energy with cosmic rays to record their passage. ALICE is made up of several screening instruments. "It's like an onion, you have a detector inside, one outside and one more, ACORDE, is all the way up," says Arturo Fernandez Tellez…

If you have gone to a new web page and seen an advertisement based on things you looked at in your browser history, you have likely been impressed or creeped out. You can thank MIT for a lot of this “programmatic marketing” - and rocket science. It is also why you will probably never make any money on your blog.  Marketing used to be an inexact science - and in many ways it still is. Print publications count on that, because it means companies have to spend a lot and Return On Investment (ROI) is fuzzy. But the Big Data world and the digital environment takes out the black magic. One…

When Brian Bartlett was 24 he was hit by a car from behind so hard it ripped his right leg off instantly. It all happened so fast. He doesn’t like to talk about it. “You really can’t understand,” he told me. “There’s just no way to…until you have an injury where you’re ripped or cut apart instantly.” He turned 25 in the hospital. When he left, fitted above the knee with a prosthetic leg, he wanted to return to his life. Before the accident, Brian had been a competitive skier; he had a sponsorship, and he was on track for the US Olympic team. So after the accident, he was eager to get back to…

Recently on Countryfile (BBC) we saw a presenter and a photographer together in the Pennines, the mountains that form the ‘backbone’ of England.  The photographer makes a living by taking spectacular scenes with a high-end camera and all different lenses, whereas the presenter was comparing what she took with her mobile.  He was worried that in the public domain the best images would be lost in a massive cloud which includes a lot of inferior (though he didn’t specifically use the word) data. This clicked with me, because of my experience of attempting astrophotography with what…

A new assistance system wants to help users in a wide variety of situations and it will do so by measuring user brain activity to determine whether they are pleased or displeased with system-initiated help. NeuroLab is measuring brain activity as part of the EMOIO project that will run until the end of 2017. The project scientists use electroencephalography and functional near infrared spectroscopy to try and measure emotions, focusing on how far a combination of the two methods can improve the accuracy of classification algorithms that can enable emotion recognition in real time, during…

Malaria is a disabling disease that targets victims of all ages, it kills one child every minute. DDT is quite effective, and insecticide-treated bed nets also, but the African malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is developing resistance to insecticides such as pyrethroid. Genetic modification is the solution of the future, though there are clearly obstacles to that, in the form of developed world activists who scare those in developing nations about science. Brian Foy and Jacob Meyers from Colorado State University decided to test whether antibodies targeted at a key component of the malaria…

The Augmented BNCI Communication projects has developed a new brain-computer interface system to enhance communication skills of people with cerebral palsys. Cerebral palsy is a chronic movement disability affects between 2 and 3 per 1,000 people. People with Dyskinetic Cerebral Palsy (DCP), 15% of the cases, have normal intelligence ability but cannot speak or express themselves due to lack of motor control. "Since they cannot express themselves, these children do not connect with other people and end up not developing their intelligence," says Biomechanics Institute of Valencia (IBV)…

By Lisa Marie Potter (Inside Science) -- Machines mimicking a human's sense of taste are going on a beer-tasting binge. Despite being called electronic tongues, these devices aren't party robots, pouring beer onto wagging, mechanical tongues. "It's just a bunch of wires and buttons and computers," said María Luz Rodríguez-Méndez, a professor of inorganic chemistry at University of Valladolid in Spain. "It's an ugly thing full of cables." However it looks, Méndez and colleagues developed an electronic tongue that accurately distinguished between four styles of lager beer 100 percent of the…

Like organic food, open access publishing has shrouded itself in a cultural halo, but it's still a business. No one is pumping out 40,000 articles per year, most of them with just a few check boxes called 'editorial review', because the 40,000 best articles happened to show up in their Inboxes, they do it to keep the lights on. Life is full of practical trade-offs. We carry annoying ads because the best site in the world with no money is a site everyone has forgotten in 3 months.  Open access companies know if they are going to keep signing the fronts of checks and their employees are…