Today's Fresh Blogs...

• Celltray, First Instrument to Display Living Biological Cells

  Published: July 29, 2007, 2:50 pm

  Tags: Gadgets, 909, 355, 2005, 372, 324, 302

  Nanopoint has come up with a genuine scientific breakthrough that is set to revolutionise research and medical diagnosis in a flash. The hype surrounds Nanopoint's cellTRAY, IDSA's 2007 Gold Winner in the medical category, which allows scientists to image living cells on a slide for the very first time. The technology is a standard microscope

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• Multiple Speech Recognition To Make Sex Dolls More Fun

  Published: July 29, 2007, 11:45 am

  Tags: Robots, 167, 324, 169, 2767

  Kyoto University and the Honda Research Institute Japan have collaborated to form the Robot Audition Project. They are at present making some very impressive ground; they have developed an advanced speech recognition technology that has the capability to understand multiple, unique speech inputs, whilst computing their meaning independently.

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• Laser Printers May Be as Harmful as Cigarettes

  Published: July 31, 2007, 4:22 pm

  Tags: Peripherals, Press, 137, 202, 122, 473, 263, 324

  Bad news, office drones: That laser printer sitting in your cubicle might be doing some serious damage to your health. It turns out that one third of all laser printers emit tiny particles of toner that, when inhaled, have similar effects as secondhand smoke. Awesome! The printers are more dangerous when they're used a lot, especially for graphic

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• Environment law: you break it, you bought it?

  Published: July 31, 2007, 7:44 pm

  Tags: Press, 477, 438, 988, 324

  A PhD student at QUT's Institute for Sustainable Resources, Nicola Durrant, is investigating whether companies and even governments could be held legally liable for adverse climate change. With legal attacks on major greenhouse gas polluters already starting up around the world, Durrant is looking at whether companies should be moving to drop

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• Scientists Figure Out How to Grow Gas From Bacteria

  Published: August 1, 2007, 2:50 pm

  Tags: Random Stuff, 2830, 2831, 1955, 324, 302

  In our current quest to stop giving the kings of Saudi Arabia billions of dollars to build yachts and bombs via our love affair with gasoline, some scientists at a company called LS9 claim to have figured out a way to grow petroleum from bacteria. The exciting prospect could shoot us to energy independence in a matter of years, as LS9 says their

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• Space-age Cockpit Gives You Bug-bot Vision

  Published: August 1, 2007, 11:50 am

  Tags: Gadgets, 146, 827, 2120, 324, 169

  FuRo and Leading Edge Design, the guys who came up with the Halluc II robot have been showing off the little Linux beastie's moves, using their Hull cockpit. Boasting a 150-cm hemispherical screen which displays video from the camera embedded at the front of the robot, the cockpit has another little trick up its sleeve. Check out the two vids

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• Physicists Figure Out How To Cause Levitation; Hoverboards Imminent

  Published: August 6, 2007, 3:45 pm

  Tags: Random Stuff, 1801, 2951, 2950, 324, 302

  If there was a cooler movie prop in my childhood than the hoverboard from Back to the Future, Part II, I don't know what it was. That hoverboard made me really, really want to be living in the year 2015. And while as I got older my pragmatism and cynicism lead me to believe we would definitely not have hoverboards by that time, I might just be

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• DARPA Wants to Engineer "Kill Proof" Soldiers with Hardwired Animal Characteristics

  Published: August 7, 2007, 6:43 pm

  Tags: Random Stuff, 598, 595, 621, 324, 974

  The gang at DARPA — you know, the ones working on invisible, shoot-through, self-healing armor — want to create kill-proof soldiers that have characteristics of animals that can survive in extreme conditions. They're researching things like allowing soldiers to redirect oxygen demand throughout their bodies to allow them to stay

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• Bastard Mobiles to be Taught a Thing or Two About Manners

  Published: August 8, 2007, 9:00 am

  Tags: Press, 2182, 372, 324

  Mobiles are impolite, whiny little bitches lurking in your pocket, lying in wait to interrupt you no matter what you're doing. That's why researchers at Intel Labs Seattle are trying to teach them some manners, creating software that turns the dumbass machines into politenessPhones that can avoid interrupting your real-world conversations with

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• "Baby Einstein" Turns Your Baby Into "Baby Stares at Mirrors for Hours"

  Published: August 8, 2007, 4:20 pm

  Tags: Entertainment, Press, 2621, 2995, 372, 324, 196

  In a serious blow to the convenience model of parenting, a new study found that 8-to-16-month-old infants who are plopped in front of "Baby Einstein" videos understand on average six to eight fewer words per hour watched than kids who didn't watch Einstein. Chalk up another win for real parenting over virtual babysitting—at least until

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• Tiny Ionic Wind Engines may Spell the End of Laptop Penis Burn

  Published: August 15, 2007, 8:10 am

  Tags: Hardware, 1905, 506, 3117, 324, 696

  A team of researchers from Purdue University has invented a way to cool down computer chips using a breeze made up of charged particles. They say it will increase the cooling rate by 250%; we say it could be the end of "penis burn," that uncomfortable sensation you get when your notebook is parked atop your crotch. In tests, a prototype was

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• Jazzmutant Multitouch Tablet PC Demoed

  Published: August 17, 2007, 12:20 pm

  Tags: Computers, 754, 909, 2267, 324, 2915

  Here's a video of the multi-touch tablet PC prototype that Jazzmutant showed off last week at Siggraph. It's got the pinch and spread features that Apple popularized on the iPhone, but this can actually take an unlimited number of contact points. You can use as many fingers (or styluses) as you were born with to move and spread stuff around. We

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• Bluetooth/Facebook Nodes Take Even More Human Interaction Out of Meeting People

  Published: August 20, 2007, 3:00 pm

  Tags: Networks, 310, 2193, 510, 151, 324

  Some scientists at Bath University in the UK have come up with an interesting albeit only marginally useful new way of making friends via Facebook. Rather than having to go through the process of, you know, meeting people and talking to them, it instead basically gathers the info of people who've been in the same place as you and tells you about

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• World Largest Anti-RF Chamber Looks Like Mario Galaxy Level

  Published: August 24, 2007, 7:20 am

  Tags: Random Stuff, 236, 221, 621, 160, 324, 2973

  This is the Benefield Anechoic Facility in Edwards Air Force Base: the largest chamber of its kind in the world —a room in which RF and sound signals don't bounce off the walls, so you can get clean radio frequency testing on all kinds of gear. In this case, electronic warfare systems in huge toys like Hercules, B-1B and B-2 bombers, Raptor

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• Crazy-Assed Idea to Shoot People with Drug-Filled Paintballs

  Published: August 24, 2007, 6:30 pm

  Tags: Random Stuff, 277, 1683, 372, 324, 168, 556

  Our Dear Leaders are always looking for new ways of quelling unrest in nonviolent—at least, notoverly violent—ways. (Let's face it, smacking someone over the head with a truncheon, and causing the blood to flow doesn't look great on news bulletins, does it?) The latest idea emanating from the Pentagon, according to a report by the

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