Technology

Facebook knows what you're doing. What you're watching. How you're feeling. Khakimullin Aleksandr/Shutter/Wired By Paul Levy, University of Brighton Did you recently buy a Samsung smart TV? If you are worried about privacy, you may be wondering how smart that decision was following the manufacturer’s warnings that its voice-activated televisions may record personal information – that is, your conversations – and transmit them to a third party. The voice-activated television monitors spoken conversations to listen for commands and transmits them to another firm which performs the voice…

People who suffer motor disability may soon get a high-technology boost from neurorobotics, neuroprosthetics and virtual reality. The HYPER research project, with a budget of 5 million euros and the participation of the IK4 R&D Alliance under the coordination of the Spanish National Scientific Research Council (CSIC), has been running since 2010 and has led to the development of systems that facilitate new rehabilitation therapies and ways to compensate for gait in patients who have had spinal cord injuries or cerebral strokes. Various prototypes have been developed and one of them…

For patients with type 1 diabetes, the daily routine involves constantly monitoring blood sugar and judging when and how much insulin to self-inject. A miscalculation or lapse in regimen can cause blood sugar levels to rise too high (hyperglycemia) - which could lead to heart disease, blindness and other long-term complications - or to get too low (hypoglycemia), which in the worst cases can result in coma or death. To mitigate the dangers inherent to insulin dosing, a University of Utah biochemist and fellow scientists have created Ins-PBA-F, a long-lasting “smart” insulin that self-…

Raspberry Pi 2. Raspberry Pi By Simon J Cox and Steven Johnston The Raspberry Pi has been a great success, selling millions since launch in 2012 and igniting hobbyists' imagination everywhere. The Pi is a tiny computer at a tiny price, but now the arrival of a seriously upgraded Raspberry Pi 2 has brought the performance that the first lacked, in a package the same size at the same cost of US$35. The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, to give its full name, bumps the memory (RAM) from 512Mb to 1Gb, and introduces a 900mhz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor. The new board also requires less power and is…

Three researchers say they can predict the spread of flu a week into the future with as much accuracy as Google Flu Trends can display levels of infection right now.  The study in Scientific Reports uses social network analysis and combines the power of Google Flu Trends' "big data" with traditional flu monitoring data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "Our innovation," said corresponding author Michael Davidson, a doctoral student in political science at UC San Diego, "is to construct a network of ties between different U.S. health regions based on…

When Twitter began, they wanted to limit to 140 characters to conserve bandwidth. So users ironically (because it led to more bandwidth usage) began circumventing that by using images. Those are worth 1,000 words, according to now=popular wisdom from Frederick R. Barnard in an article in Printer's Ink from 1921. But how many emotions is that?  Researchers at Adobe Research and  the University of Rochester have come up with a more accurate way than currently possible to train computers to be able to digest data that comes in the form of images. In a paper presented last week at the…

A prototype of a social robot has been developed with an eye toward supporting independent living for the elderly, in partnership with their relatives or carers. It's based on the art service platform called Care-O-bot® 3 and works within a smart-home environment. Dr. Farshid Amirabdollahian, a senior lecturer in Adaptive Systems at the University of Hertfordshire, led a team of nine partner institutions from across five European countries as part of the ACCOMPANY (Acceptable Robotics Companions for Ageing Years) project. Over the past three years the project team successfully carried out a…

An app called Alicia, which has been adapted to iPhone, iPad and Android, is able to help patients over 65 years with multiple pathologies to administer their own medication at home. The Alicia app has been tested on 99 patients from Alicante and was able to reduce medication mistakes in up to 41, 2% of cases. The most frequent causes of mishaps in drug self-administration, according to the team’s data are: 36% forgetfulness, 21% lack of medicines at home, 20% natural products are used without informing the doctor and 16% choose to drop medication without telling the doctor. During the…

Cell cultures are good for broad biology and medical research, they can help eliminate a lot of broad concerns, but they are not a faithful mimic of real tissue. For the foreseeable future, though the public thinks animal testing is unnecessary, it really is. A new study finds that laboratory-grown cells experience altered cell states within three days as they adapt to their new environment, and studies of human disease, including cancer, rely on the use of cell cultures that have often been grown for decades.  Scientists typically use models to study the basics of human biology and the…

The effectiveness of brain-training games depends on what outcome you're hoping to achieve. Shutterstock By Jared Cooney Horvath, University of Melbourne Over the last decade, an ever-growing number of brain-training programs claiming to enhance learning, memory and general well-being have been developed and marketed for use in the classroom. Unfortunately, despite many years of laboratory research and classroom scrutiny, the effect of these programs on real-world learning and health remains uncertain. To address this issue, the Stanford Center for Longevity recently released a statement…