No Hands Video

Now, a St. Louis-area teenage boy and a computer game have gone hands-off, thanks to a unique experiment conducted by a team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis.

The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements.

Getting subjects to move objects using only their brains has implications toward someday building biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, for instance, enabling the disabled to move a prosthetic arm or leg by thinking about it.

A number of gamers think fondly of Atari's Space Invaders, one of the most popular breakthrough video games of the late '70s. The player controls the motions of a movable laser cannon that moves back and forth across the bottom of the video screen. Row upon row of video aliens march back and forth across the screen, slowly coming down from the top to the bottom of the screen. The objective is to prevent any one of the aliens from landing on the bottom of the screen, which ends the game. The player has an unlimited ammunition supply.

The aliens can shoot back at the player, who has to evade, moving left and right. There are lots of levels of play, reflecting the speed at which the aliens descend. The Washington University subject mastered the first two levels of play, using just his imagination.........

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Solio Universal Hybrid Charger

Solio, the Universal "Hybrid" Charger , can charge all of your handheld electronic products, even if you've been relocated to Antarctica. It works by absorbing power from the sun and storing the energy within the Solio's own internal battery (charging Solio's internal battery takes 8-10 hours of direct sunlight). If your igloo comes with a wall socket, you can also plug it in to charge it.

Not only can it charge your cell phone, but also your PDA, digital camera, and game player.

(It includes seven tips and cables, so it's compatibile with most devices.) To give you an idea, one hour of sun will give you enough juice to play your iPod for about an hour. When fully charged it can charge your cell phone twice over.

At the Clinton Global Initiative (which brings together a community of global leaders to 'devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges') soiree in NY, they gave Solio as one of the gifts for its 1,500 participating members. Movers and shakers such as Richard Branson, Tony Blair, The King of Jordan, Bill Gates, George Bush and many more received their own energy sources.........

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Software To Calculate Heart Attack Risk

Pioneering computer software is helping doctors to decide how best to treat patients admitted to hospital with suspected heart attacks.

An international consortium of researchers, led by the University of Edinburgh, has developed a programme that enables doctors to swiftly assess the severity of a patient's condition. The new 'risk calculator' is already being used in British hospitals.

Doctors using the new system take key data from patients at their bedside, and input it into the specially-devised programme. Key facts - such as a patient's age, medical history and blood pressure - are recorded by doctors, as well as information derived from on-the-spot blood samples and kidney tests.

The new patient's statistical profile is then input into a computer and matched with data derived from thousands of other coronary cases. Using the outcomes of these prior cases as a guide, the computer will not only give an accurate assessment of the new patient's conditions, but also recommend possible therapy. Significantly, it will be able to predict the likelihood the patient suffering a heart attack, and even their chances of dying in the next months.

Chest pain accounts for more than a quarter of all emergency medical admissions in the United Kingdom. Spotting high risk heart patients quickly can be difficult, but Professor Keith Fox, of the University of Edinburgh, says the new tool will help: "Identifying those with threatened heart attack from the very a number of patients with chest pain is a real clinical challenge, but critically important in guiding emergency and subsequent patient care. Higher risk patients need more intensive medical and interventional therapy".........

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Automated System Installs Pavement Markers

GTRI researcher Colin Usher uses a touch-screen monitor mounted in the cab of the truck.
Credit: Photo by Gary Mee

On rainy nights in Georgia and across the nation, drivers greatly benefit from small, reflective markers that make roadway lanes more visible. A new automated system for installing the markers is expected to improve safety for workers and drivers.

There are more than three million of these safety devices, called raised pavement markers (RPMs), in service on Georgia highways. They are installed and then need to be replaced about every two years by road crews who consider the task one of the riskiest they face. Workers typically ride on a seat cantilevered off the side of a trailer just inches from highway traffic.

Manual RPM placement is not only risky for personnel, but it is also expensive and time-consuming. A typical RPM placement operation includes four vehicles and a six-person crew. All the vehicles must stop at each marker location, so there is tremendous wear on the equipment and increased fuel use.

The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) believed there was a better way to do it and funded the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to develop a first-of-its-kind system capable of automatically placing RPMs along the lane stripes while in motion. After almost three years of research and development, GTRI expects to deliver a prototype system early this year. Because of widespread interest in the system, researchers will present a report on their project on Jan. 23 at the National Research Council's Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.........

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Developing Ultrathin Digital Camera

Engineers at UC San Diego have built a powerful yet ultrathin digital camera by folding up the telephoto lens. This technology may yield lightweight, ultrathin, high resolution miniature cameras for unmanned surveillance aircraft, cell phones and infrared night vision applications.

"Our imager is about seven times more powerful than a conventional lens of the same depth," said Eric Tremblay, the first author on an Applied Optics paper published February 1, 2007, and an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. candidate at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. Eric is working with Joseph Ford, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Jacobs School who leads the camera project within UCSD's Photonic Systems Integration Lab. Ford is also affiliated with the UCSD division of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, Calit2.

"This type of miniature camera is very promising for applications where you want high resolution images and a short exposure time. This describes what cell phone cameras want to be when they grow up," said Ford. "Today's cell phone cameras are pretty good for wide angle shots, but because space constraints require short focal length lenses, when you zoom them in, they're terrible. They're blurry, dark, and low contrast".........

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Hydrogen-Powered Lawnmowers?

Princeton student Claire Woo, a recipient of the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates award, at work in the laboratory of Jay Benziger.
Credit: Princeton University

In a breakthrough that could make fuel cells practical for such small machines as lawnmowers and chainsaws, scientists have developed a new mechanism to efficiently control hydrogen fuel cell power.

A number of standard fuel cell designs use electronics to control power output, but such designs require complex systems to manage humidity and fuel recovery and recycling systems to achieve acceptable efficiency.

The new process controls the hydrogen feed to match the mandatory power output, just as one controls the feed of gasoline into an internal combustion engine. The system functions as a closed system that uses the waste water to regulate the size of the reaction chamber, the site where the gasses combine to form water, heat and electricity.

National Science Foundation (NSF) awardee Jay Benziger of Princeton University developed the new technique with his student Claire Woo, a recipient of an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates award and now a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Woo and Benziger published their findings in the February 2007 Chemical Engineering Science, now available online.

The scientists believe the first applications for their technology will be in smaller engines. Fuel cells are currently inefficient on such scales due to the need for fuel recycling and excess hydrogen in standard designs. The researchers' new design is closed, so 100 percent of the fuel is used and there is no need for a costly fuel recycling system.........

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Top Gear Looking For Viewer Feedback

Jeremy Clarkson is looking for your input. And by "your", I mean of course, you who's out there surfing YouTube's vast array of video clips for all episodes Top Gear. For those rest of you who don't know, Top Gear is the world's best automotive TV program that airs in the UK and online.

Mr. Clarkson has again put into question the BBC's promise that Top Gear will appear for a tenth season. "Not unless someone from the Greenwich Observatory suddenly decides that we need a new month between May and June," JC said.

But right now Top Gear is looking for suggestions on what content viewers want to see in its next season - if and when that next season arrives.

Throw in your twclicking here.

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