Technology
Facial transplantation has ushered in a new era of craniofacial surgery but already surgeons are pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved.
Most candidates for facial transplant have loss of soft tissues only, like skin, muscle, blood vessels, and nerves. Although still a rare and relatively new procedure, facial transplantation now offers a reconstructive option for patients with severe facial deficits and so doctors are creating a roadmap for work on patients with extensive facial defects, including loss of the normal bone and soft tissue landmarks. 'Reverse craniofacial…
Just because you can buy something doesn't mean it works. You can buy a home gym, for example, but it won't make you thin. However, there are some things you can buy that won't work even if you actually try to achieve a result.
You buy devices that control pests using ultrasonic frequencies - they are purported to work for mosquitoes, cockroaches, ants and now there are new versions targeting bed bugs, since those were in the news a lot.
A new paper reports the results of tests of four commercially available electronic pest repellent devices designed to repel insect and mammalian pests by…
40 years after the last Apollo spacecraft launched, readings from the Apollo 14 and 15 dust detectors have been restored by scientists with the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The newly available data will make long-term analysis of the Apollo dust readings possible. Digital data from these two experiments had not been archived before, and it's believed that roughly the last year-and-a-half of the data have never been studied. The recovery of these data sets is part of the Lunar Data Project, an ongoing NSSDC effort, drawing on…
Electronic cigarettes are booming. Germans love to smoke, but love dying not so much, and so an estimated two million people in Germany have already turned to the vapor cigarette, which many view as a healthy alternative to conventional smoking.
Some are warning of possible health risks, claiming that the long-term consequences cannot yet be foreseen, the old 'you cannot prove it it safe' impossibility, and studies to-date have been mixed.
Partof the issue is that smoking remains a hot-button issue, and so there is a general lack of substantiated facts. Researchers at the Fraunhofer…
In the US, we could soon have the government monitoring everything we do. So we might as well be happier about more effective ways to be fingerprinted.
Integrated Biometrics, LLC has gotten FBI certification of its newest finger print technology, patented Light Emitting Sensor technology along with a thin film transistor. LES technology utilizes a charged polymer film interacting with the specific properties of human skin to luminesce fingerprint images, then the TFT captures the image at the FBI's standard 500 PPI requirement. The combination of LES and the thin film transistor…
Gaming researcher Jonas Linderoth of the University of Gothenburg followed a group of players in the world's largest online role-play game World of Warcraft for a period of ten months. He observed the players almost daily in their fictional online lives and also filmed and interviewed them.
Why? He contends immersion also implies a potential for improved learning, since it enables them to 'experience' new places and historical eras, which is really the best possible spin you can put on getting paid to watch people play video games for a year. One point everyone will agree on: immersion in…
Apple's Siri sounds like she cares about your needs, but she is faking it. But some research by a team of engineers shown at the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology describes a new computer program that gauges human feelings through speech with substantially greater accuracy than existing approaches.
Some day you may have a smart phone that identifies your mood.
Their approach doesn't look at the meaning of the words -
the program analyzes 12 features of speech, such as pitch and volume, to identify one of six emotions from a sound recording. And it achieves 81…
An online calculator says it can predict at birth a baby's likelihood of becoming obese in childhood, according to a paper in PLOS ONE.
They estimate the child's obesity risk based on its birth weight, the body mass index of the parents, the number of people in the household, the mother's professional status and whether she smoked during pregnancy.
Yes, that determines if your child is going to be fat. But it's PLoS One and the credit card cleared.
The researchers think their prediction method will be used to identify infants at high risk and help families take steps to prevent their…
The winners of the 2012 Semantic Web Challenge (SWC), determined by a jury from both academia and industry, were announced at the International Semantic Web Conference held in Boston. The challenge and allocated prizes were sponsored by Elsevier.
In 2003, the SWC was set up to showcase the very latest in semantic web technology and every year the final rounds of this competition take place at the annual International Semantic Web Conference. Semantic Web Challenge contestants competed in any of two challenge categories: 'Open Track' and 'Billion Triples Track'.
Open…
There are lots of diagnostic tests available outside of the conventional medical system and those include tests for food intolerance, like vega testing, kinesiology, hair "body field analysis" testing, cytotoxic and live blood testing.
Doctors and medical practitioners can be justified in assuming the worst and dismissing test results that originate from services such as 'mail order laboratory testing services', as there is no way for them to distinguish between those results which have an evidence basis with clinical data and those that claim results without any real evidence. …