Colleges see the future: Video games

Academics envision uses beyond Grand Theft Auto.
By Tom Avril

With an odd-looking strip of black foam fastened to his forehead, the young man stared intently at an image of a manhole cover on his computer screen.

Suddenly, without touching the mouse or keyboard, he made the manhole cover rise into the virtual air.

A magic trick?

No, a video game - one that Hasan Ayaz, a Drexel University engineering student, was able to manipulate directly with his brain.

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Improving anxiety treatment with brain imaging

In a new article published in Biological Psychiatry on May 1st, researchers report their findings on the potential use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to match treatments for patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

Subjects diagnosed with GAD underwent brain scans both before and after treatment with venlafaxine. As hypothesized, the fMRI data predicted who would do well on the drug and who would not.

They found that the larger the prefrontal cortex reaction, and the smaller the amygdala reaction, the more likely it was that the patient had a positive response to the venlafaxine.

There are no current biomarkers for predicting how well a patient will respond to anti-anxiety medicines. Patients often have to go through multiple medications and dosages to find one that works.

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Microsoft Worldwide Telescope

Microsoft Research has released the Spring Beta version of a new powerful web-based application called Worldwide Telescope for exploring the universe.

A researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, Roy Gould gave the first public demo of the World Wide Telescope developed by Curtis Wong and his team at Microsoft.

"While watching the demo, I realized the way I look at the world was about to change."
-Robert Scoble

Here's the demo presentation at TEDTalk:



Related story at nytimes.com

Memristor - Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element

In 1971, a University of California, Berkeley, engineer predicted that there should be a fourth element: a memory resistor, or memristor. But no one knew how to build one. Now, 37 years later, electronics have finally gotten small enough to reveal the secrets of that fourth element. The memristor, Hewlett-Packard researchers revealed on April 30, 2008 in the journal Nature, had been hiding in plain sight all along—within the electrical characteristics of certain nanoscale devices. They think the new element could pave the way for applications both near- and far-term, from nonvolatile RAM to realistic neural networks.

HP Labs has made a nano-scale device which stores data, explains previous anomalies in nano-device characteristics, and may be able to act as a synapse in analogue neural networks. It is also the first physical implementation of the memristor, a theoretical partner to resistors, capacitors and inductors invented in 1971.

[ more ] [ Memristor Theory ]