Tag Archives: Germany
Mind-controlled robot gives paralyzed man mobility
Similar experiments have taken place in the United States and Germany, but they involved either able-bodied patients or invasive brain implants.
On Tuesday, a team at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne used only a simple head cap to record the brain signals of Mark-Andre Duc, who was at a hospital in the southern Swiss town of Sion 100 kilometers (62 miles) away.
Duc’s thoughts — or rather, the electrical signals emitted by his brain when he imagined lifting his paralyzed fingers — were decoded almost instantly by a laptop at the hospital. The resulting instructions — left or right — were then transmitted to a foot-tall robot scooting around the Lausanne lab.
Duc lost control of his legs and fingers in a fall and is now considered partially quadriplegic. He said controlling the robot wasn’t hard on a good day.
Gadgets make spring cleaning less of a chore
Scooba 390
In time for spring cleaning, the latest refresh of iRobot’s Scooba line, a sibling to the popular Roomba vacuum robots, was unveiled mid-March. The Scooba 390 sports 30 percent longer battery life and a four-stage cleaning process that picks up debris, dispels water, scrubs and squeegees.
The mopping robot includes two reservoir tanks: one to discharge clean water and another to collect dirty water. A full tank can clean 425 square feet before needing a refill.
Cliff detection helps the Scooba avoid falling down stairs and off other edges while virtual wall technology confines the machine to a set space.
Robot chore masters don’t come cheap though. The iRobot Scooba 390 retails for $499.99.
Neato
The Neato XV-21 can tackle different types of flooring.
Neato XV-21
Also in March, Neato Robotics offered a peek into its latest
Article source: http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/usatoday-TechTopStories/~3/25zT9qSfhKc/1
Original Einstein manuscripts posted online
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which owns the German Jewish physicist’s papers, is pulling never-before seen items from its climate-controlled safe, photographing them in high resolution and posting them on the Internet — offering the public a nuanced and fuller portrait of the man behind the scientific genius.
Only 900 manuscript images, and an incomplete catalog listing just half of the archive’s contents, had been posted online since 2003. Now, with a grant from the Polonsky Foundation UK, which previously helped digitize Isaac Newton‘s papers, all 80,000 items from the Einstein collection have been cataloged and enhanced with cross referencing technology.
The updated web portal, unveiled Monday, features the full inventory of the Einstein archives, publicizing for the first time the entirety of what’s inside the collection and giving scholars a
Article source: http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/usatoday-TechTopStories/~3/WgOxy6MW4Us/1
ACTA ignites concerns about threat to Internet freedom
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is designed to put in place international standards to protect intellectual property rights. But some lawyers say it forces private companies to police cybertraffic — and across the globe the treaty is being seen as a serious threat to Internet freedom.
“It’s becoming an issue of citizens’ power,” said David Hammerstein, senior adviser on intellectual property for Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue, an umbrella consumer rights organization in Brussels. “The front lines of the defense of civil rights today is the defense of an open, free Internet and that (is what ACTA threatens.)”
Critics say that the details of ACTA have been decided behind closed doors, a deliberate move to slip the highly controversial agreement through without proper public scrutiny. They add that once they have signed up countries have no say in any subsequent changes to the treaty.
When
Article source: http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/usatoday-TechTopStories/~3/GuV_8aiPP7Q/1
Apple, Motorola in German patent struggle
Mark Lennihan, AP Apple has temporarily halted Motorola’s attempt to have it stop selling certain products in Germany.
Article source: http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/usatoday-TechTopStories/~3/V0rQ8hKtenw/1
