Brain Implant Detects, Responds to Epilepsy

Next year, medical researchers will test in patients a one-of-a-kind brain implant that can sense electrical activity in the brain while simultaneously emitting electric pulses, says device developer Medtronic.

Deep-brain stimulators are mainly used to regulate the movement problems associated with Parkinson's and other diseases, but they are also used in Europe and Canada to treat epilepsy and are being used experimentally to treat severe depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But doctors must use trial and error to determine the best parameters for the electrical stimulation programmed into each patient's chip.

The smarter brain stimulator is an improved version of Medtronic's existing deep-brain stimulator device, which has already been implanted in more than 80,000 people around the world. Medtronic has added an extra chip so that it can detect electrical activity and respond automatically to changes in the brain. 

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An Operating System for the Cyber War Era

Kaspersky thinks it can protect the control systems for power plants and other critical infrastructure. Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the Russian company Kaspersky, which has led discovery and analysis of state-backed malware such as Stuxnet, wrote in a blog post today that the project was needed to protect “defenseless” industrial control software.

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Software Detects Motion that the Human Eye Can't See

A new set of software algorithms can amplify aspects of a video and reveal what is normally undetectable to human eyesight, making it possible to, for example, measure someone's pulse by shooting a video of him and capturing the way blood is flowing across his face.

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Diagnosing Parkinson's in a phone call with a computer

Parkinson's affects some 6 million people worldwide. Although surgery and drugs can hold back its progression, there is no cure. Diagnosing it and tracking its course usually relies on an assessment of someone's symptoms using the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale, which involves tests of motor skills, for example. The process is time-consuming, expensive and requires people to attend a clinic for the tests to be carried out. It is partly because of this that it is thought that around a fifth of cases of Parkinson's are never diagnosed. A speech-processing algorithm could use the sound of your voice to diagnose a range of diseases, and spell the end of invasive physical exams.

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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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Yazgac - A tool for typing Turkish...

There are special Turkish characters that are not part of standard US keyboard: (ç,ı,ş,ğ,ü,ö). For those living abroad and using a non-Turkish keyboard, usually dot-less versions of these characters are used (c,i,s,g,u,o) which is not correct or proper Turkish. Yazgac is intended to fix this problem.

Yazgac is a free desktop application, that allows you to type special Turkish characters without changing your keyboard layout or correct your text by automatically placing these characters. See its website for a presentation and video of its features and how it works.

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Netflix Prize

In October 2006, Netflix announced a grand prize of one million dollars for a better movie-recommending algorithm that is at least 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal. But what started out looking simple suddenly got hard. The contest is expected to continue until 2011.

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