Technology
Research lab and hospital equipment are two areas where competition drives costs up - if Lab A has a need for a new piece of equipment, Lab B has to get it and that same goes for hospitals. Companies have no reason to undercut each other because the actual market is not that big.
Help may be on the way for a commonly used piece of equipment: the syringe pump. A team led by an engineer at Michigan Technological University has published an open-source library of designs that will let scientists slash its cost. Syringe pumps are used to dispatch precise amounts of liquid, as for drug…
Northwestern Medicine researchers say they have developed the first blood test to diagnose major depression in adults, by measuring the levels of nine RNA blood markers.
RNA molecules are the messengers that interpret the DNA genetic code and carry out its instructions.
The blood test also predicts who will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy based on the behavior of some of the markers. This will provide the opportunity for more effective, individualized therapy for people with depression. In addition, the test showed the biological effects of cognitive behavioral therapy, the…
An older, mechanical car is a closed system - the only way to hack it is to be physically present. But as automobiles become increasingly chip-oriented, any way to update software remotely means the potential to be hacked. You won't be carjacked, you'll be carhackedThe car of the future will be safer, smarter and offer greater high-tech gadgets, but be warned without improved security the risk of car hacking is real, according to a QUT road safety expert.
Professor Andry Rakotonirainy, from
Queensland University of Technology's Centre for Accident Research&Road Safety - Queensland…
I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories. Yes, sometimes there are conspiracies, but the Internet seems to magnify discordant cynicism on an unbelievable scale. I begin with this disclaimer because the conspiracy theorists have come out to explain why Google would do something completely absurd. I don't have an explanation for it, other than that I think they are reacting to the Edward Snowden scandal (which has supposedly hurt their business prospects outside the US).In a nutshell, Google wants all Websites to publish their content via HTTPS protocol. This is the "…
Wearable electronic activity monitors are a popular fad. They constantly monitor activities and bodily responses and the information is organized into computer programs and mobile apps.
Given the large and quickly growing market for these devices, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston analyzed 13 of these activity monitors - names like Fitbit, Jawbone or Nike - to try and see if the devices and their companion apps work to motivate the wearer or if they are only used after the novelty phase who were interested in fitness anyway.
"Despite their rising…
Facial recognition software works pretty well. It measures various parameters, such as the distance between the person's eyes, the height from lip to top of their nose and various other metrics and then compares it with photos of people in a database.
Why not create emotion recognition software that can use its own custom parameters?
Dev Drume Agrawal, Shiv Ram Dubey and Anand Singh Jalal of the GLA University, in Mathura suggest in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics
has taken a three-phase approach to a software emotion detector.
The first involves…
You lookin’ at me?Gareth Fuller/PA
By Tom Foulsham, University of Essex
Are you being recorded? Thanks to the ubiquity of CCTV and camera phones, the answer is more than ever before likely to be “Yes”. Add to this the growth of wearable technology such as Google Glass and people are increasingly exposed to devices that can monitor and record them, whether they realize it or not.
The privacy implications are obvious, but also interesting to psychologists such as myself, are how such invasions of privacy – real or perceived – change the way people behave in everyday life.
My colleagues and I…
Hank |
As most culturally astute people of a certain age know, 2015 is "The Future" of "Back To The Future II." "Back To The Future" was, of course, a seminal comedy in 1985 - a time when terrorists were from the Mid-East and you could do a time-travel experiment on your dog without getting protests outside the theater.
The sequel had funny bits, though nothing could top the original. Yet we aren't going back to 1955 so the future is what we have to look forward to, and in "Back To The Future II" Marty's eponymous skateboard, which he created in 1955 (along with rock music and, errr, himself) has…
A third of the inherited risk of prostate cancer is closer to being identifiable with 23 new genetic variants associated with increased risk of the disease.
But there are a lot of factors. The total number of common genetic variants linked to prostate cancer is about 100, and testing for them can identify men with risk almost six times as high as the population average - but that is still just 1%.
The new search used almost 90,000 men, combining populations with European, African, Japanese and Latino ancestry. Researchers found that assessing the top 100 variants identified 10% of men with a…
Agriculture has one hell of a footprint, occupying 37.6 percent of earth’s land area, or about 0.7 hectares (1.7 acres) per person
to feed our world's current population. “There is no activity that
humankind engages in that has a bigger impact on the planet than
agriculture,” Jack Bobo, Chief of Biotechnology and Textile Trade in the
Department of State's Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs wrote. “This is true in terms of impacts on land and water resources [agriculture accounts for some 70% of our freshwater use (PDF)] as well as in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.” Dr. Pamela…