Feature Channels: Technology

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Multithreaded Cray XMT supercomputer seeks advanced software for data-intensive computing.

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For a generation of surgeons who have grown up playing video games, they are now learning temporal bone surgery of the skull in a similar way. Physicians and researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital are using state-of-the-art computer animation to help train the next generation of surgeons.

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A newly published study that found wireless systems that track hospital medical equipment can cause potentially hazardous incidents involving lifesaving devices may have needlessly alarmed patients, their families and hospital administrators.

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Star of Arkansas, a supercomputer operated by the University of Arkansas, has been listed as one of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers. Each year, the global high-performance computing community announces the TOP500, a list of the world's most powerful computers. At this year's International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, Star of Arkansas was ranked at No. 339. The university is one of only 33 entries from U.S. academic institutions to make the list.

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Computer scientists at the University of Michigan developed open-source software that cuts the time to find symmetries in complicated equations from days to seconds in some cases.

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Steffen Schmidt and Michael McCoy -- both researchers in Iowa State University's Center for Information Protection -- provide information on how identity theft may be perpetrated and protection tips in a new book, "The Silent Crime: What You Need to Know About Identity Theft" (Twin Lakes Press, 2008).

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Research and innovation is being funded at an unprecedented pace around the world, yet U.S. research and innovation funding faces budget cuts. Ways to increase efficiencies and increase competitiveness will be on the agenda as research park executives gather June 16 at BioParks 2008. Key pacesetters from the public and private sectors will examine emerging efforts to increase the speed of discovery and the process of bringing new discoveries into the marketplace to create new jobs and increased prosperity.

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A Kansas State University youth expert says parents need to keep their status as technology immigrants in mind when helping their children -- the technology natives -- deal with issues like cyberbullying.

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Georgia Tech researchers have created a new, single-exposure imaging tool that could significantly improve point-of-care medical and forensic imaging by empowering front line clinicians with no specialized training to detect and assess, in real-time, the severity of bruises and erythema, regardless of patient skin pigmentation or available lighting.

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If you're waiting to upload your consciousness into a computer, don't hold your breath; the rapture of the geeks could be a long time in coming.

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Even before Weixiao Huang received his doctorate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his new transistor captured the attention of some of the biggest American and Japanese automobile companies. The 2008 graduate's invention could replace one of the most common pieces of technology in the world"”the silicon transistor for high-power and high-temperature electronics.

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A new book, Cyber Security: Economic Strategies and Public Policy Alternatives, provides the first systematic analysis of the economics of protecting cyberspace.

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Researchers have designed a system capable of simultaneously measuring hundreds of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and rapidly testing new RFID tag prototypes. This testbed allows researchers to measure the signal strength of tags hidden behind other tags and to rapidly test unique antenna configurations and multiple antennas without actually constructing new tags for each experiment.

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Microscopic X-ray computed tomography is expected to help scientists testing gene function across species. A report on the new technique is in the May issue of The Anatomical Record. Authors are from San Antonio, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Washington, D.C.

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One of the first large-scale analyses of how people share knowledge on Yahoo Answers has found that participants use the site to exchange advice and opinions, in addition to technical expertise.

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The first android candidates for 2048 President of the United States invite everyone to visit their new campaign booths on the University of Arkansas island in the virtual world of Second Life.

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Researchers at NIST have demonstrated a new imaging system that detects naturally occurring terahertz radiation with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.

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In the 10 April issue of Nature, a new artificial material is revealed that marks the beginning of a revolution in the development of materials for electronic applications. The new material, a superlattice, which has a multilayer structure composed of alternating atomically thin layers of two different oxides (PbTiO3 and SrTiO3), possesses properties radically different to either of the two materials by themselves.

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University of Utah engineers took an early step toward building superfast computers that run on far-infrared light instead of electricity: They made waveguides -- the equivalent of wires -- that carried and bent this form of light, also known as terahertz radiation, which is the last unexploited portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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NIST engineers have created a software program to help avoid the network timing glitches called 'cyclic jitters' that can cause real jitters, making production line machines jump or shake, damaging products, even shutting down assembly lines.

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Tufts University researchers have literally expanded the visualization concept with a new 14-foot by 8-foot visualization wall that translates the most abstract, complex scientific concepts into eye-popping 3-dimensional images that are clearer and more precise than what most conventional systems can produce.

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Obsolete electronic parts are the hidden scourge of aging systems, potentially leading to budget-busting expenses or even the loss of life.

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With innovative measurement techniques and new ways to position the molecules, NIST researchers are reporting at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society how they have improved manipulation of so-called block copolymers"”polymers made of a mixture of two or more different molecule building blocks that are tethered at a junction point"”which can form arrays of tiny dots that could be used as the basis for electronic components that pack terabytes (1000 gigabytes) of memory in something as small as a pack of gum.

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Hardware piracy, or making knock-off microchips based on stolen blueprints, is a burgeoning problem in the electronics industry.

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Georgia Tech researchers have designed a sensor necklace that records the date and time a specially designed pill is swallowed, which they hope will increase drug compliance and decrease unnecessary healthcare costs. The device could be used to ensure that the elderly and subjects in clinical drug trials take their medications as directed by a physician.

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Scientists hope that research being conducted in Binghamton University's Department of Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy will create lasers that work at wavelengths currently inaccessible.

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A new electron microscope recently installed in Cornell's Duffield Hall is enabling scientists for the first time to form images that uniquely identify individual atoms in a crystal and see how those atoms bond to one another. And in living color. "The current generation of electron microscopes can be thought of as expensive black and white cameras where different atoms appear as different shades of gray," explained David Muller, Cornell associate professor of applied and engineering physics. "This microscope takes color pictures -- where each colored atom represents a uniquely identified chemical species."

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A new type of scanning transmission electron microscope recently installed at Cornell is enabling scientists for the first time to form images that uniquely identify individual atoms and see how those atoms bond to one another. And in living color.

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New technology can make three-dimensional imaging quicker, easier, less expensive and more accurate.

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A next-generation atomic clock that tops previous records for accuracy in clocks based on neutral atoms has been demonstrated by physicists at JILA, a joint institute of the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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As computers become more complex, the demand increases for more connections between computer chips and external circuitry and better connections that operate at higher frequencies with less loss. Georgia Tech researchers are developing new methods to improve these two types of connections to increase the amount and speed of information that can be sent throughout a computer.

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National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers are working to improve the performance of some heat exchangers even further by providing engineers with computer-based tools for optimizing their designs.

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Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Minnesota have demonstrated a video method that eventually may be able to make in vivo measurements of mechanical properties in fluid-solid interfaces such as blood vessels that are important in biology and industry.

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Is your gizmo obsession taking over your life and hurting your relationships? John O'Neill, director of addictions services for The Menninger Clinic in Houston, offers warning signs that may indicate whether you need to reevaluate your use of technological devices.

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Yong Guan, Iowa State's Litton Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has filed a patent on a technology that protects Internet advertisers from "click fraud" -- falsely driving up hits to ads on Web pages. The extra clicks drive up costs for pay-per-click advertising. Guan is also developing other technologies to improve computer security.

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Last year security researchers saw the creation of the world's largest "botnet", or collection of personal computers being controlled by hackers," said Gary Warner, director of Research in Computer Forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). "This botnet, called "the Storm Botnet," has at various times included more than 3 million infected computers," Warner said. "One of the primary ways machines became infected was by users clicking on e-mails that were often associated with holidays, including Valentine's Day, Labor Day, Fourth of July and others.

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Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed and tested a laser-based ranging system to assess the performance of automobile collision warning systems.

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Computer scientist Edward Fox is using a variety of digital technologies to allow people to store and retrieve visual information in new, ever more accessible ways.

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A 1957 classic sits in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) clean room. It's not a Chevy, but a Veeco vacuum evaporator more than six feet tall and five feet wide. The evaporator, still in use today, deposits thin films necessary for microfabrication processes.

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A team of researchers led by Pavan Balaji of Argonne National Laboratory and Wu Feng of Virginia Tech won an international competition for the most effective approach in using large-scale storage for high-performance computing.

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According to new research, the swarm intelligence of honeybees can be adapted to improve the efficiency of Internet servers faced with similar challenges. A bee dance-inspired communications system developed by Georgia Tech helps Internet servers that would normally be devoted solely to one task move between tasks as needed, reducing the chances that a Web site could be overwhelmed with requests and lock out potential users and customers.

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In any one day, homeland security and law enforcement agencies might sift through thousands of complex and often contradictory clues about potential terrorist threats. To thwart another September 11, analysts must meld the encyclopedic eye of Google-age technology with Sherlock Holmes's inductive genius.

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Three grid computing experts at Binghamton University, State University of New York, say they now have the hardware and resources to take on questions that might never be answered without massively powerful computers.

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Fixing design bugs and wrong wire connections in computer chips after they've been fabricated in silicon is a tedious, trial-and-error process that often costs companies millions of dollars and months of time-to-market.

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A new program developed in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Haifa enables computers to "know" if an artwork is a Leonardo da Vinci original or the work of a less well known artist. Using computer vision the computer is able identify the artworks of different artists after turning the works into a series of mathematical symbols, sines and cosines.

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Find out how a Michigan geek tamed the online masses.

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Innovations like Google, TiVo, iTunes and GPS-equipped phones can be handy, but they also force users to forfeit some privacy, a University of Iowa professor warns in his new book, "iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era."

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Tufts researchers are developing techniques that could allow computers to respond to users' thoughts of frustration or boredom by applying functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology, which uses light to monitor brain blood flow as a proxy for user workload stress. The researchers hope to gain real-time insight into the brain's emotional cues.

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New research led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory physicist Matthias Bode provides a more thorough understanding of new mechanisms, which makes it possible to switch a magnetic nanoparticle without any magnetic field and may enable computers to more accurately write and store information.

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A URI physics department staff member has done what many experts said was impossible -- he dramatically reduced the size of a DLM antenna while maintaining its efficiency and bandwidth. The technology recently received a patent and is being licensed by Lear Corp. for automotive uses.