Technology

Galaxy Zoo 2: Citizen Scientists Catalogue More Than 300,000 Nearby Galaxies

Galaxy Zoo 2, the second phase of a crowdsourcing effort to categorize galaxies in our universe, has leveraged more than 83,000 citizen scientists to obtain over 16 million galaxy classifications and information on more than 300,000 galaxies. That's ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 23 2013 - 6:08pm

Fiber-Optic Sensors Improve Railway Safety In China

Fiber-optic sensors running along a 36-km stretch of high-speed commuter railroad lines connecting Hong Kong to mainland China have taken more than 10 million measurements over the past few years, a demonstration that the system can help safeguard commute ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 1 2013 - 5:30am

Weekend Science: Let A Mathematical Magic 8-Ball Run Your Life

Internet algorithms have done lots of wonderful things but can they help you live your life? In the past, algorithms helped you find better encyclopedia answers to questions, but that is very 1990s. Google is not a search engine company now, they are an ad ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Oct 4 2013 - 6:30am

Gloves, Gowns In ICU Reduces MRSA 40 Percent

Healthcare workers' use of disposable gowns and gloves upon entering all patient rooms on an intensive care unit, versus only in rooms on standard isolation protocol, helped reduce patient acquisition of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (M ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 6 2013 - 8:08pm

Shape Changing Signal Can Prevent Cellular Overload And Dropped Calls

Phones are terrific today. They can play games and watch videos and check email- they are just terrible at making calls. And during a natural disaster, when too many people take to their mobile phones at once, cellular networks easily overload.   Mai Hass ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 11 2013 - 3:58pm

The Future Of Touch-Sensitive Prosthetic Limbs: Real-Time Sensory Information

New research marks an important step toward new technology that, if implemented successfully, would increase the dexterity and clinical viability of robotic prosthetic limbs- touch-sensitive prosthetics that could convey real-time sensory information to a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 14 2013 - 5:00pm

Eyes-Free Yoga: Yoga Instruction For The Blind Using Microsoft Kinect

If you are new to a yoga class, you are stunned by how flexible and strong its participants are- but if you are blind in a visual exercise world, it takes a little more creativity to feel the burn. Technology to the rescue. Students traditionally watch an ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2013 - 12:53pm

Speaker Diarization Boosts Automatic Speaker Recognition In Audio Recordings

An important goal in spoken-language-systems research is speaker diarization- computationally determining how many speakers feature in a recording and which of them speaks when. To date, the best diarization systems have used supervised machine learning; ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 20 2013 - 12:00pm

This Backpack Could Be A Solution To The Achilles Heel Of The Global Water Crisis

Habitat for Humanity International is getting 100,000 PackH 2 O collapsible water backpacks from the manufacturer, Greif, to use in 8 developing countries. ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Oct 23 2013 - 2:11pm

Will Advanced Open Access Catch On?

"Open access" journal publishing was founded on the principle that corporations should not hold a copyright on research that was becoming increasingly taxpayer-funded. Instead of subscribers paying to read an article, taxpayers incur an addition ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 23 2013 - 11:23am