science wire

Aug.

Computer-generated imagery usually relies on recorded sound to complete the illusion. Recordings can, however, limit the range of sounds you can produce, especially in future virtual reality environments where you can't always know ahead of time what the action will be.

In a two-page commentary titled " Search needs a shake-up ,” published in the Aug. 4 issue of the journal Nature , UW professor of computer science and engineering Oren Etzioni calls on experts to, literally, think outside the search box. The piece is being published on the 20-year anniversary of Tim Berners Lee unveiling his World Wide Web project.

A new planning tool helps direct traffic on aircraft carriers. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. ' On the deck of an aircraft carrier, where up to 60 aircraft are crammed into 4.5 acres, keeping track of all the pieces - and keeping everyone safe ' can seem like a game of high-stakes chess.

Personal photos occupy an ever-expanding amount of hard drive space. Baby, family and vacation photos can now number in the thousands.

Professor Muffy Calder of the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science has been appointed as a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (07/28/2011) —University of Minnesota researchers are part of an international collaboration launched this week by Oxford University and the Egypt Exploration Soci

From citizen science projects on butterflies, pollen outbreaks and light pollution to mountain goats, loons, spring blooming and much more, Cornell's Citizen Science Central is an online clearinghous

Researchers aim for direct brain control of prosthetic arms ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Engineering researchers at four U.S. universities are embarking on a four-year project to design a pro

If you read online reviews before purchasing a product or service, you may not always be reading the truth. Review sites are becoming targets for "opinion spam" - phony positive reviews created by sellers to help sell their products, or negative reviews meant to downgrade competitors. The bad news: Human beings are lousy at identifying deceptive reviews.

AUSTIN, Texas — A partnership among the National Science Foundation (NSF) and 17 institutions, including the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), today announced the debut of the Extreme Sci

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The results of a study on candidates' use of Twitter in the 2010 midterm elections suggest that Republicans and Tea Party members used the social medium more effectively than their Democratic rivals. The University of Michigan study, among the first to examine the Tea Party's social media strategies, also showed that analyzing Twitter activity can lead to good predictions of election winners.

AUSTIN, Texas — UT Austin Villa , a team of programmers led by University of Texas at Austin computer scientists Peter Stone and Patrick MacAlpine, has won the 2011 RoboCupSoccer championships in the 3-D simulation division.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CONTACT: Robin Verges, 212-843-8075 Rubenstein Associates, Inc.

By Melissa Beattie-Moss Research/Penn State Remember when watches had springs you would wind' When mail meant letters delivered by a mailman, and the only kind of files came in manila folders' If so, you're a dying breed.

Professor Bill Roscoe, Head of Oxford University's Department of Computer Science, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE).

By basing its strategies on the text of a manual, a computer infers the meanings of words without human supervision.

Using high-performance computing techniques and more than 600,000 bird checklists from citizen-science participants, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and partners have produced the nation's first assessment of birds on public lands.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering School have demonstrated that light can travel on an artificial material without leaving a trace under certain conditions, technology that would have many applications from the military to telecommunications. In this illustration, light hits Kocaman's and Wong's specially engineered material without leaving a trace.

If you have a computer and an Internet connection, you can volunteer to be part of a new network that is going to be the world's largest high-density array of seismic sensors devoted to the study of earthquakes.

CERN launches Open Hardware initiative Geneva, 7 July 2011. Four months after launching the alpha version, CERN 1 has today issued version 1.1 of the Open Hardware Licence (OHL), a legal framework to facilitate knowledge exchange across the electronic design community.

Science Jonathan Wood | 05 Jul 11 A set of glasses packed with technology normally seen in smartphones and games consoles is the main draw at one of the featured stands at this year's Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Engineering researchers at the University of Michigan have found a way to mass-produce antennas so small that they approach the fundamental minimum size limit for their bandwidth, or data rate, of operation.

  Mung Chiang, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Princeton, has constructed a laboratory that simulates the global infrastructure, including the Internet and mobile networks.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology QuickTime Virtual Reality panoramas (QuickTime required) Luxor Temple Entry at Night Luxor Temple Courtyard at Night Luxor Temple Chapel Karnak Obel

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/28/2011) —A new database of plants' traits will help scientists around the world learn more about how climate change is affecting ecosystems.

A European research program is studying the feasibility of a new kind of individual transport that avoids traffic jams by taking to the skies.

Five projects at the University of Glasgow have been selected as being among the most important research projects taking place in universities today.

A new system lets you transfer open applications between a computer and a cellphone simply by pointing the phone's camera at the computer's screen.

New CLUMEQ High Performance Computing Consortium huge step forward for research and innovation McGill University today announced an $8.3-million CDN contract with IBM in Canada to acquire a su

The University of Edinburgh is very concerned about recent reports relating to the activities of postgraduate student Tom MacMaster.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Millions of Americans have implantable medical devices, from pacemakers and defibrillators to brain stimulators and drug pumps; worldwide, 300,000 more people receive them every year.

McGill researcher develops speedier technique for predicting vital process Protein folding has nothing to do with laundry.

A University of California, San Diego faculty-student team is about to demonstrate a first-of-its kind, phase-change memory solid state storage device that provides performance thousands of times fas

Global collaboration provides explicit database of reservoirs and dams for sustainable river-flow management Humans have been building reservoirs and dams for thousands of years.

Not every child can dream up a smartphone application and see it come to life. But that's what happened when 8-year-old William Belhumeur suggested his father make an app that identifies plants using visual recognition technology.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Imagine a robot able to retrieve a pile of laundry from the back of a cluttered closet, deliver it to a washing machine, start the cycle and then zip off to the kitchen to start preparing dinner.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Next time you go on vacation, you may want to think twice before shooting hundreds of photos of that scenic mountain or lake. A new study from MIT neuroscientists shows that the most memorable photos are those that contain people, followed by static indoor scenes and human-scale objects.

Researchers at the Stanford Security Laboratory create a computer program to defeat audio captchas on website account registration forms, revealing a design flaw that leaves them vulnerable to automated attacks. BY MELISSAE FELLET Stanford researchers have found an audible security weakness on the Internet.