A new interactive system called Myndplay launches today, a development in media technology that allows the viewer to control key plot points in a film via brain wave activity. A headset equipped with electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors translates the brain’s electrical activity patterns into basic emotional responses, then uses these readings to control the options available […]
After more than 30 years of experimenting, the US navy has fired a laser gun from a ship. In a test off the coast of California, the ray gun successfully ignited the engines of an inflatable boat. It’s the first time a High Energy laser has been used on a Naval ship and fired at […]
This is pretty cool, even though the song kinds of suck. Check it out: [Via]
A homopolar motor has a magnetic field along the axis of rotation and an electric current that at some point is not parallel to the magnetic field. The name homopolar refers to the absence of polarity change. Homopolar motors necessarily have a single-turn coil, which limits them to very low voltages. This has restricted the […]
A full 15 minutes of the most beautiful Wonders of the Universe visual effects you’ll see today. [Vimeo]
On April 7, 1969, RFC 1 was distributed on the spankin’-new ARPANET by Steve Crocker of UCLA. Today, the RFC is the official publication channel for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the global community of computer network researchers. ARPANET would later be incorporated with other networks to giveth life […]
Can Twitter predict the stock market? So one PhD student believes. The BBC reports that Timm Sprenger of the Technical University of Munich found that buying and selling in response to an analysis of 250,000 tweets over six months would have produced a 15% return. Sprenger looked at comments that had been marked with the […]
Currently in the process of completing his PhD at the University of Surrey, UK, Zdenek Kalal is working on a self-improving real-time vision algorithm that can track, learn, and detect objects in a real-time video stream. [Via Wired]
The current practical use of antibiotics to treat infection has created drug-resistant mutations in common bacteria. Amoxicillin and other types of commonly-used antibiotics–which work by affecting the DNA of microorganisms, thereby blocking their ability to multiply–have grown increasingly less effective in the last few decades as their use has become more widespread. In a recent […]
Kinected Conference is a cool MS Kinect-Based Video-Conferencing System that is currently being developed at MIT. What we can do if the screen in videoconference rooms can turn into an interactive display? With Kinect camera and sound calibration system, we can easily access the spatially calibrated depth and audio information. [Vimeo]