Science – Page 4 – rgbFilter

Too Good to be True or too True to be Good? Brainwave computing

July 29, 2010July 29, 2010 Pete Chapman Emotiv, mind machine, mind reading, TED, video1 Comment

Courtesy of TED, Tan Le demonstrates her take on the old Mind/Machine Interface trope. The Emotiv Systems’ EPOC headset uses 16 sensors to scan the brain and some very fancy algorithms to identify neural activity and translate this into control signals. Here are ten questions to keep in mind to the degree that the mind can keep anything. 1. Funny how this one seems to be as advanced as it is when speech recognition is still pretty clumsy. Will we jump into full mind/machine connectivity and bypass language altogether? (Just…

NASA captures solar flares, confirms human insignificance, all in glorious HD

April 22, 2010April 22, 2010 Danny X NASA, solar flare, video5 Comments

What you’re looking at above is awe-inspiring for two reasons; one, it’s a Gizmodo story that has nothing to do with a leaked iPhone, and two, it’s some of the first imagery and data sent back from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). In it, NASA was able to capture a full solar flare (or “prominence eruption”) in action, as well as several views of the Sun’s temperature variances and magnetic fields through several different wavebands. The purpose goes far beyond snapping pictures of the impossible, too: SDO is designed to…

District 9 Director Neill Blomkamp’s TEDxVancouver video

February 5, 2010February 5, 2010 drsquid District 9, Film, Neill Blomkamp, Oscars, TED, TEDx, VFS16 Comments

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a foundation known for its conferences devoted to what it calls ‘ideas worth spreading’. Along with the regular TED event, held in Long Beach CA, and the TED Global conferences (held in different cities each year), there are now independently organized TEDx events happening around the globe. In November 2009 TEDxVancouver took place at the Electronic Arts Burnaby campus. The event’s theme was ‘Forever Young’, and one of the invited speakers was Neill Blomkamp, South African born Canadian, and Vancouver Film School trained, director of…

Dolphins test contingencies, Learn, Play, Make Art

January 30, 2009July 25, 2009 Paul L 2 Comments

Scientific American has posted an article about the day when Diana Reiss discovered that a dolphin had learned to use her own disciplinary tactics in reverse, against her, giving her a very human-like ‘timeout’. Even more interesting was the information that dolphins shape and play with bubble rings, in a process that very much resembles, let’s just say it: making art. Embedded from here is the 2007 video of a dolphin doing just that. With accompanying text from the article: Notoriously playful, dolphins have also caught scientists’ attention by creating…

Perceiving the Holographic Universe

January 19, 2009July 25, 2009 Paul L 2 Comments

A physicist known as Craig Hogan, at a particle physics labratory in Illinois, has unearthed new evidence that all of the information in the cosmos — including you and me — might be encoded on a farflung surface or ‘event horizon’, that encloses Life, the Universe, and Everything. The theory that the universe is ‘encoded’ is meant to address a conundrum that has puzzled quantum theorists for decades: the amount of information a three-dimensional space can mathematically contain appears not to be dependent on its volume, but rather unexpectedly…

Your Dream Images Can Be!

December 12, 2008July 25, 2009 Doug Groves mind reading1 Comment

What you see above are captured images from someones brain. That’s right. Scientists at Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto showed a group of test subjects a series of still images to get a basic reading of their brain activity. They were then shown each of the letters that spell the word ‘neuron’. By using a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging device (or fMRI) to monitor changes in blood flow in the visual cortex, they were able to view the images from the brain on a computer display. The team…

Lost Tool Bag Filmed In Earth Orbit

November 26, 2008November 4, 2009 Doug Groves tool bag20 Comments

A week after Heidi Stefanyshyn-Piper lost the $100,000 bag of tools while performing maintenance on the International Space Station, Kevin Fetter captured the orbiting kit from his backyard observatory. This video is converted from a WMV link found at spaceweather.com and is used with the express permission of Kevin.

Video Enhancement Using Photographs

September 2, 2008July 25, 2009 Doug Groves video2 Comments

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo. Photographic manipulation seems to be all the rage these days, especially with the recent release of the initial version of Photosynth, the 3D environment building photo software from Microsoft. Some of the most useful techniques seem to come out of universities though. A few years back, the University of Manchester’s Advanced Interfaces Group released Icarus, which was an amazing piece of move matching software that allowed the user to remove objects from video, generate 3D camera positions…

World’s Earliest Known Audio Recording

March 28, 2008July 25, 2009 Doug Groves audio, creepy0 comment

Researchers have found what very well could be the first known audio recording, a 10 clip of “Au clair de la lune” made on April 9th, 1860 by French inventor douard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph. The phonautograph records sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by soot from an oil lamp. This recording precedes Thomas Edison’s first known recording by 17 years. Firstsounds.com has links to the recording in mp3 format, plus other phonautograph recordings.