Technology

IBM takes data seriously, as seriously as they took Business Machines back in their early days. They want to be the resource for the blanket concept of The Internet Of Things. Someone will have to do it, because the amount of information available today is overwhelming. When you can produce 250 gigabytes of data an hour, you have too much data. Or you are onto something big. This idea of being able to parse big data and make meaningful sense of it was one of the cornerstones of the Science 2.0 concept back when I started creating this in 2006, but it was unrealistic as an endeavor then. But…

Today, scientists from the University of Leicester are driving the streets in electric vehicles (EV’s) fitted with specialized air monitoring sensors, with the intention of measuring the extent of air pollution in city environments.  Where do electric vehicles get their electricity? From fossil-fuels that create pollution, using resources less efficiently than gasoline-powered engines.  Like with the head of the American EPA flying all over the country during Earth Week, the irony is not lost on the group, who instead weighed the issues and unsurprisingly decided what they wanted to…

The level of recorded music just keeps on increasing. This is what the music press and concerned fans refer to as the “loudness war”. Since digital audio has an absolute upper level limit, it is therefore unavoidable that the dynamic range suffers. This has been going on since the early 90's, resulting in the small differences between the weak and the loud parts which is so common in today’s music.   But does that mean that the music actually sounds worse? This is what Danish researchers at Copenhagen University Hospital, the Technical University of Denmark, and Aalborg University…

Facebook is under fire again, this time not over privacy, but for finding that a news feed can affect users’ subsequent posts (and presumably, emotions).  Unfortunately, the indignant outrage threatens to harm the public more than Facebook’s original study.  Facebook, like every company ever, will continue to experiment to optimize its service.  The only thing this backlash will teach it is not to publish its findings, and that will be a huge loss to social science. First, what did Facebook actually do?  For a brief period, it altered its algorithm to increase or decrease…

Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a class of walking "bio-bots" powered by muscle cells and controlled with electrical pulses, giving researchers unprecedented command over their function.  The new bio-bots are powered by a strip of skeletal muscle cells that can be triggered by an electric pulse. This gives the researchers a simple way to control the bio-bots and opens the possibilities for other forward design principles, so engineers can customize bio-bots for specific applications. Tiny walking 'bio-bots' are powered by muscle cells and…

A world food crisis brewing and we face a horrific future unless something can be done. No it is not the lack of food that means more people die of hunger around the world than from malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV-AIDS combined—that is old news. Push aside that every day about one billion people go to bed hungry because they cannot afford to buy 1800 calories worth of food. No it is not that one billion people have no access to electricity for refrigeration to store food and prevent spoilage. And, no it is not the people are, gasp, eating non-organic GMO food and living longer. Many should…

A new data analysis technique in the journal PLoS Computational Biology improves monitoring of kidney patients and could lead to changes in the way we understand our health. The research uses the Science 2.0 approach to make sense out of the huge number of clues about a kidney transplant patient's prognosis contained in their blood. Using big data analysis of the samples, scientists were able to crunch hundreds of thousands of variables into a single parameter indicating how a kidney transplant was faring. That allowed the team of physicists, chemists and clinicians to predict poor function…

Kids with glasses were once stereotypically considered smarter - expensive prescription specs did not lend themselves to sports so it made some sense they would focus on books due to the biological hand that was dealt them But it may be that needing glasses is an indicator of knowledge if other ways - glasses may be created by learning. A recent paper found hat attaining a higher level of education and spending more years in school were associated with a greater prevalence and severity of myopia - nearsightedness. The authors say they are the first population-based study to demonstrate that…

You see advertisements for fitness apps on smartphones all of the time. Apple prides itself on convincing you that you will be a better dancer and healthier if you buy their phone. The problem is that the people most likely to use a fitness app for more than a week are least likely to need it. Or maybe they do, according to recent Scare Journalism. In the health fad culture perpetuated by mainstream media, there is now a War On Sitting. Once some crazy claim appears in the New York Times, studies are going to crop up affirming exactly what popular media claims say.  In America, we have…

Want to teach a robot to tend the garden? It will go faster if you let the crowd help. University of Washington computer scientists at the 2014 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Hong Kong showed that crowdsourcing can be a quick and effective way to teach a robot how to complete tasks Learning by imitating a human is a proven approach to teach a robot to perform tasks, but it can take a lot of time. Imagine having to teach a robot how to load the dishwasher – it might take many repetitious lessons for the robot to…