By charting the brain’s genetic activity from before birth to old age, studies reveal that the brain continually remodels itself in predictable ways throughout life. In addition to uncovering details of how the brain grows and ages, the results may help scientists better understand what goes awry in brain disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. What’s more, the differences in …Continue Reading
Earlier this week I spoke at the Pivot Conference in New York. It was an engaging and enlightening event and I enjoyed speaking with others about the trends we are seeing. Pivot is the only conference focused purely on how major brands, agencies, marketers and content creators can succeed by understanding, accessing and influencing the emerging Social Consumer. You can …Continue Reading
India introduced a cheap tablet computer Wednesday, saying it would deliver modern technology to the countryside to help lift villagers out of poverty. The computer, called Aakash, or “sky” in Hindi, is the latest in a series of “world’s cheapest” innovations in India. Developer Datawind is selling the tablets to the government for about $45 each, and subsidies will reduce …Continue Reading
Researchers at the University of Washington have successfully leveraged the power of gamers to solve a biochemical puzzle: the structure of a complex protein related to the development of AIDS. By playing an online game called Foldit, teams of average citizens were able to make a breakthrough discovery in how this protein was shaped even though scientists had stumbled over …Continue Reading
Simply speak into your phone, flip the phone over, and Vocre will speak for you in any of six languages (with more on the way). Using the accelerometer in the iPhone allows Vocre to theoretically give you a ‘touchless’ and more natural way of having a conversation in a foreign tongue. According to the maker’s website: “Vocre is a new …Continue Reading
A team at Stanford University in California used computer learning software to sort through data generated by brain scans and detect when people were in pain. Currently, doctors rely on patients to tell them whether or not they are in pain. And that is still the gold standard for assessing pain, Mackey said. But some patients — the very young, …Continue Reading
For the first time, an electric motor has been made from a single molecule. At 1 nanometre long, that makes the organic compound the smallest electric motor ever. Its creators plan to submit their design to Guinness World Records, but the teeny motor could also have practical applications, such as pushing fluid through narrow pipes in “lab-on-a-chip” devices. Read full …Continue Reading
Driverless “pod cars” already exist in London’s Heathrow Airport. The small, four-seater automated cars, manufactured by the company ULTra PRT, move along a track like a rollercoaster, and are environmentally friendly in two key ways: they’re electric, and they run on demand. The pods ferry 800 people along 2.4 miles of track daily. The company has proposed systems similar to …Continue Reading
University of Manchester scientists, working with colleagues in Edinburgh and Australia, have provided the first direct biological evidence for a genetic contribution to people’s intelligence. The team studied two types of intelligence in more than 3,500 people from Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Newcastle and Manchester. The paper, by Dr Neil Pendleton and colleagues, found that 40% to 50% of people’s differences in these …Continue Reading
In what appears to be seriously big news from a team of NASA-funded researchers, scientists have found evidence that some building blocks of DNA–including two of the four nucleobases that make up our genetic code–found in meteorites were created in space, lending credence to the idea that life is not homegrown but was seeded here by asteroids, meteorites, or comets …Continue Reading