Science and research

A video game that uses audio cues and computer-generated building layouts has proven to be better at improving a blind person's spatial awareness of that place than does actually walking them through it, according to new research out of Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

The findings could have implications for how visually impaired people -- and possibly those without impairments -- best learn to navigate unknown territory.

"It is a tool to build a map of a place you have never been to before," Lotfi Merabet, the neuroscientist whose team developed the software used in the study (which appears in the Journal of Visualized Experiments), told Reuters. "The video game not only allows you to build a map in your mind, it allows you to interact with it mentally in a way that you wouldn't be able to if you were taught explicitly by walking through it."… Read more

Scientists cite as a major driver of climate change the large amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere that's created by the burning of fossil fuels. They spend day after day trying to figure out a way to generate power for the world's populations, but at the same time leave a smaller carbon footprint.

Now, researchers at the University of Georgia say they've hit upon a way to take the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and turn it into useable industrial products. The impact of such a discovery is potentially huge.

The goal is to remove the CO2 directly from the air and turn it into biofuel -- not only helping power the world, but hopefully taking down global temperatures at the same time.

The researchers essentially have created a microorganism that acts like a plant that removes the carbon dioxide from the air and turns it into something we can use. During photosynthesis, plants utilize sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide from the air to create their food source. This would behave in a similar fashion. … Read more

Researchers have been exploring breath tests for all sorts of uses -- from sniffing out everything from lung cancer to heart disease to diabetes. But testing for obesity? Could that really be possible?

According to a new study in the April issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, the bacterial overgrowth that can be caught by a standard breath test may also reveal one's body fat percentage.

Apparently when one's microbiome (the complex infrastructure of good and bad bacteria that live in and on us) gets out of balance, with the bad bacteria outperforming the good, … Read more

Some 65 million years ago, a big rock -- a very big rock -- slammed into the southwest portion of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, creating a 110- to 180-mile crater and triggering a biological catastrophe that wiped out more than half the Earth's species, including the dinosaurs.

In 2010, an international panel of scientists ruled out alternative explanations as they coalesced around the theory that the space rock impact was responsible for this cataclysmic event. However, they debated whether the crater was produced by a comet or an asteroid.

New research now points to a comet as the … Read more

Turning to robots for speech and physical therapy may not be everyone's idea of high-quality, personalized health care. But for stroke patients -- particularly those in rural, isolated areas -- therapists can be difficult and expensive to come by, and rehabilitation can be elusive.

So a speech language pathologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is studying the interactions of stroke patients with the uBot-5, a child-size humanoid robot with arms and a computer screen through which therapists can interact with people. And for at least one stroke patient, the bot appears to be doing a stand-up job.… Read more

IBM has come up with a new technique for making the tiny switches and memory cells at the heart of computer chips: a drop of ionic liquid.

The technique converts a metal oxide on a computer chip from a conducting to an insulating state and back again, a transition that, using a different approach, is at the heart of conventional semiconductor chips today. Insulators don't conduct electricity and conductors do, so changing a material's state is instrumental to how it performs the logical operations of computer processing.

Today's semiconductor chips work by applying electrical voltage to a &… Read more

With the arrival of in-car GPS units, and then Siri and its clones, products that give and receive voice commands and answers have become more common. But one problem, according to the University of Cambridge, is that disembodied digital voices can just be so darn impersonal.

So Toshiba's Cambridge Research Lab and the University of Cambridge's Department of Engineering set about putting a face to the voice.

What the team ended up with looks like something straight out of the British comedy franchise "Red Dwarf" -- perhaps the ancestor to the AI with the 6000 IQ, … Read more

If researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have their way, their new heart disease study won't suffer from a small sample size. Using online and mobile phone tools, they hope to get 1 million people from around the world to participate.

Launched this week, their Health eHeart Study (yes, very cute) enables participants to use their smartphones to frequently monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and pulse rate, and submit the resulting data via a secure online portal. The researchers, in turn, will use fancy algorithms to crunch that massive volume of data.

The goal? To use the super sample size to better understand -- and thus predict and prevent -- heart disease.… Read more

Our body tissue, not to mention diseases, each have their own unique "fingerprint," which can in turn be examined to diagnose various health issues at very early stages.

Now, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland say that after a decade of work they've developed a new MRI (magnetic resonance imagining) technique that can scan for those diseases very quickly. In just 12 seconds, for instance, it may be possible to differentiate white from gray matter in cerebrospinal fluid in the brain; in a matter of minutes, a full-body scan would provide far more data, making diagnostics considerably easier and less expensive than today's scans.… Read more