Go ahead and buy what you want

When making purchasing decisions, we are frequently forced to choose between practicality and emotional appeal. For example, we may know that one car has better gas mileage but we just enjoy the feeling of driving another car. Or, we may need waterproof winter boots but opt instead for feather-trimmed stilettos. Which is a better criterion in the long run: practical features or emotional response?

While making purchases based on gut reaction instead of objective criteria might seem foolish, results from a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research suggest that emotional choices often lead to greater satisfaction -- not just for the immediate afterglow of a few hours, but even after we've had time to think it over.
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Korea's Second Humanoid Robot to Sing for Fans

18 October, 2006

The world’s first celebrity robot Ever-2 Muse will soon make “her” public debut. Ever-2 will perform a new ballad titled “I’ll close my eyes” at the opening ceremony of Robot World 2006 at COEX on Wednesday, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy said. The robot can be thought of as the little sister of Ever-1, which debuted on May 4 as the first domestic humanoid robot. Ever-2’s skin is produced with silicon. It has some 60 motors in the face (23), neck (three), arms (six each), hands (four each) and lower body (12), allowing a wide range of actions and expressions.
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Robots may force chefs out of the kitchen

18 October, 2006

Chefs may shortly be bidding farewell to the kitchen thanks to the invention of a cooking robot, able to conjure up the tastiest traditional recipes in a couple of minutes.

Named AIC, an abbreviation for Artificial Intelligent Cooking, the robot is the world's first machine that can complete all the cooking skills used by Chinese chefs, producing delicious dishes, said inventor Liu Xinyu.
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Net is terror training tool - US security chief

18 October, 2006

The internet is a dangerous tool of radical ideologies, according to the US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. He said that last summer's attacks on London was an example of a domestic terrorist threat in action.

Speaking to the International Association of the Chiefs of Police, Chertoff said that the internet is a vital tool for people training to make terrorist attacks, according to the Reuters news agency.
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Tech-dependence turns humans into pets

19 October, 2006

Bad news for believers in the "singularity". Instead of accelerating us into a race of cosmic superbeings, our reliance on technology will turn humans into a species of domesticated pets: docile and anti-social.

So says Oliver Curry, a sociobiologist attached to the London School of Economics. A technology-dependent human race of the future will be obese, have weak immune systems, and be incapable of socializing, empathizing or performing team work, suggests Curry [ * ]. A bit like the "Web 2.0 blogger" of today.
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Scientists stitch up cloaking device

19 October, 2006

A transatlantic team of researchers has taken a big step towards their cloak of invisibility by successfully hiding a cylinder from microwaves, according to the journal Science and tabloid, The Sun.

Professor Sir John Pendry, winner of the Institute of Physics's Dirac medal in 1996, and chair in Theoretical Solid State Physics at Imperial College, London, led a team of researchers at Duke's University in North Carolina to develop a prototype device that can make objects undetectable by radar.
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Human species 'may split in two'

17 October, 2006

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.
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Leaked letter warns of open source 'threat to eco-system'

16 October, 2006

A leaked letter to the European Commission has revealed the extent of lobbying by proprietary software groups to prevent the widespread adoption of open-source software.

Sent in response to a recent report on the role of open-source software in the European economy, Microsoft-funded pressure group, the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) warned of potentially dire effects if too much encouragement was given to open source software development.
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'DNA computer' is unbeatable at tic-tac-toe

17 October, 2006

A computer that uses strands of DNA to perform calculations has mastered the game tic-tac-toe.

MAYA-II, developed by researchers at Columbia University and the University of New Mexico in the US, uses a system of DNA logic gates to calculate its moves.

A DNA logic gate consists of a strand of DNA that binds to another specific input sequence. This binding causes a region of the strand to work as an enzyme, modifying yet another short DNA sequence into an output string.
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Assessing pain in infants

October 18, 2006

Even seasoned parents can find it tough to tell the difference between a baby in pain and a baby who is hungry. But now a face-recognition system is being developed that could help lift the veil on infant communication and allow us to know when babies are genuinely experiencing pain.

If it proves successful, this kind of software could be used in neonatal intensive-care units (NICU) to help alert medical staff when an infant becomes seriously distressed, says Sheryl Brahnam, an information scientist at Missouri State University at Springfield. "The problem is, they can't articulate pain verbally," she says. To make matters worse, an infant's repertoire of facial expressions is very limited, so it's not always easy to determine when a baby is actually experiencing pain.
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Piloting a wheelchair with the power of the mind

October 18, 2006

Paralyzed patients dream of the day when they can once again move their limbs. That dream is making its way to becoming a reality, thanks to a neural implant created by John Donoghue and colleagues at Brown University and Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems.

In 2004, Matthew Nagle, who is paralyzed due to a spinal-cord injury, became the first person to test the device, which translated his brain activity into action (see "Implanting Hope," March 2005, and "Brain Chips Give Paralyzed Patients New Powers"). Nagle's experience with the prosthetic was exciting but very preliminary: he could move a cursor on a computer screen and make rough movements with a robotic arm. Now Donoghue and team are pushing ahead with their quest to develop a commercially available product by testing the device in two new patients, one with a neurodegenerative disease and the other suffering the effects of a stroke.
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Filesharing and digital evidence case in Sweden

11 October, 2006

Andreas Bawer was accused in 2005 of sharing a film, called Hip Hip Hora, breaching the Swedish Penal Code. He was found guilty in the Swedish Court of First Instance, (Västmanlands Tingrätt) in December 2005. However, in a recent decision on 2 October 2006 of the Swedish Appeal Court (Svea Hovrätt) he was acquitted, the court identifying several faults in the digital evidences presented.

Bawer, having allegedly shared film files, could, in accordance with the Swedish penal code, be sentenced for criminal liability on condition it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that the IP address used for file sharing was assigned to the computer Bawer owned or used, and that the court could not rule out others had used the said computer at the time of the alleged file sharing. The legal question in issue was whether there was sufficient evidence of probability that Bawer had shared a film file Hip Hip Hora.
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Tracking Information Flow in the Brain

October 12, 2006

Scientists at MIT have engineered a nano-sized calcium sensor that may eventually shed light on the intricate cell-to-cell communications that make up human thought. Alan Jasanoff and his team at the Francis Bitter Magnet Lab and McGovern Institute of Brain Research have found that tracking calcium, a key messenger in the brain, may be a more precise way of measuring neural activity, compared with current imaging techniques, such as traditional functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
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Pig-to-Human Transplants on the Horizon

October 10, 2006

Thousands of patients die every year in the United States waiting for a suitable donor organ. So surgery professor David Sachs has been trying to figure out how to successfully put a pig organ into a primate. The Massachusetts General Hospital researcher and clinician thinks he has almost found the right protocol: a combination of organs from miniaturized, genetically engineered pigs and pig immune tissue that can prime the primate immune system to accept foreign parts.
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Viruses begin to do nanotechnology construction at MIT

From the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards for 2006, MIT’s Angela Belcher and colleagues are using viruses to build at the molecular level:

MIT scientists reached a major nanotech milestone: re-engineering a virus to create a self-assembling product.

THE GOAL OF nanofabrication is to make tiny machines build themselves using molecules they grab from their surroundings. It’s easy to dismiss the concept as science fiction — or hype. Until you hear what’s been going on in the lab of MIT materials scientist Angela Belcher, a star in nanotechnology circles.
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