Technology

Research and Markets has released its "Life Science Research Tools Market Size, Growth and Trends 2006-2016" report.   The report provides an overview of the life sciences research tools market from 2006 to 2016. Life sciences research tools companies offer instruments, reagents and services to scientists in academic, BioPharma and applied market laboratories. Top vendors include Agilent, Bio-Rad, EMD Millipore, Life Technologies (Invitrogen / Applied Biosystems), Roche, Sigma-Aldrich and Thermo Fisher; smaller emerging companies are highlighted as well, e.g., genomics firms such as…

How is a 3-year-old better than a computer?  A pre-school child can look at a cartoon of a chicken and know that's a chicken but a computer cannot.  But things are getting better. In the International Journal of Applied Pattern Recognition, a computer recognition system has been shown to be 99% accurate when identifying different fruits and vegetables, even the particular strain of apples or plums. The automated imaging system developed by Shiv Ram Dubey and Anand Singh Jalal of GLA University in Mathura, India, is trained with a set of images of known fruit and vegetables…

Operator storefronts and portals now account for just 6% of content downloads worldwide, with Google Play and Apple's App Store now comprising nearly 70% between them. The increasing popularity of OTT (Over The Top) stores had led to many operators closing their own mobile storefronts. There may be a silver lining.  A report "Mobile Content Business Models: OTT&Operator Strategy&Forecasts 2013-2017" from Juniper says that by offering carrier billing to third-party storefronts, operators could more than offset the continued decline in portal revenues. According to the report…

Researchers have electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats, enabling them to communicate directly to solve simple behavioral puzzles - even thousands of miles apart, one in Durham, N.C., and one in Natal, Brazil. The results of these projects suggest the future potential for linking multiple brains to form what the research team is calling an "organic computer," which could allow sharing of motor and sensory information among groups of animals.  The researchers first trained pairs of rats to solve a simple problem: to press the correct lever when an indicator light above the…

International publisher Elsevier has announced the launch of InOrder, a cloud-based order sets solution that enables clinicians to author, review and publish orders in a collaborative environment that quickly translates evidence-based knowledge into better patient care.  The tool has evidence-based content and the capability to make updates rapidly as regulations and medications change, so Elsevier says InOrder can help hospitals and clinicians increase patient safety and prevent medical errors.  Without integrated systems in place to support efficient order set creation and review…

SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) discuss new augmented reality applications which trigger information by eye gaze. Eye tracking technology by SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) was used by researchers from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) to develop a vision of new augmented reality applications in mobile environments. These applications use eye tracking data from SMI's mobile eye tracking glasses to analyze a user's eye gaze on objects, buildings or persons. A special DFKI information processing…

With the Surface Pro Microsoft has made a statement on what a PC should be for the next five to ten years.   Rather than fading away the PC will become thin, lite, and easy to use while retaining the flexibility that has always been the hallmark of the personal computer.   That said, Surface Pro is not perfect for all uses.  These are my impressions after spending a week with the Microsoft Surface Pro 64 GB.    I have been an avid Linux user since 1997.  M$ has been part of my life only because I like to play games and they have the best platforms for…

There are now many affordable and even out right cheap tablets - computers with touch screens - available, useful computers for even less than the famous $100 laptops were supposed to be. These are sold with various versions of the android system, with a linux kernel inside. They are basically small unix-like computers, only with operating system somewhat destroyed by the manufacturers or the various dealers. There is process called "rooting" when one is using procedures which are based on an error of this manufacturer's "extra features" to disable all these protections of the…

Not long ago, we acquired a range of inexpensive storage vessels, ideal for keeping leftovers in the fridge before they go into yours truly, the family dustbin.  Here is an example: the steel dish is covered by a tight-fitting plastic (presumably polyethylene) lid.  Or it was tight-fitting when we bought it, but some of these lids are now so tight-fitting that they won’t even go on at all, and one or two have split in the attempt to force them on.  First instinct might be to blame the country of manufacture.  However, I think the problem lies in a lack of…

The strong, flapping flight of bats looks fun but mimicking the function of ligaments, the elasticity of skin, the structural support of musculature, skeletal flexibility, upstrokes and downstrokes robotically also offers great possibilities for the design of small aircraft. In a flapping animal, positive lift is generated by the downstroke, but some of that lift is undone by the subsequent upstroke, which generates negative lift. By running trials with and without wing folding, the robot showed that folding the wing on the upstroke dramatically decreases that negative lift,…