theeconomist: Self driving cars are just around the corner. They promise to reduce road accidents, ease congestion and revolutionise transport. But how do they work?

theeconomist:

Self driving cars are just around the corner. They promise to reduce road accidents, ease congestion and revolutionise transport. But how do they work?

Magical heart rate monitor iPhone app

jkottke:

Using just the camera on your iPhone, the Cardiio app can accurately measure your heart rate. Here’s how it works:

Every time your heart beats, more blood is pumped into your face. This slight increase in blood volume causes more light to be absorbed, and hence less light is reflected from your face. Using sophisticated software, your iPhone’s front camera can track these tiny changes in reflected light that are not visible to the human eye and calculate your heart beat!

This video shows this process in action (with a short explanatory intro of the mathematical technique):

That is flat-out amazing. (via @delfuego)

DIY Subtitle Glasses Translate Foreign Languages in Real Time via @DIY

DIY Subtitle Glasses Translate Foreign Languages in Real Time via @DIY

Smart Headlight System Will Have Drivers Seeing Through the Rain

http://news.cs.cmu.edu/article.php?a=3174

Disney researchers put gesture recognition in door knobs, chairs, fish tanks

Wouldn’t it be nice if your body sent you a text message reminding you to take your daily medication? These brand new microchip-implanted pills do just that, and more. Read on for the full story via brit

Wouldn’t it be nice if your body sent you a text message reminding you to take your daily medication? These brand new microchip-implanted pills do just that, and more. Read on for the full story via brit

2020: Tongue Drive uses a dental retainer and tongue piercing to allow people with high-level spinal injuries to manoeuvre an electric wheelchair

2020:

Tongue Drive uses a dental retainer and tongue piercing to allow people with high-level spinal injuries to manoeuvre an electric wheelchair

smarterplanet: First wirelessly controlled drug-delivery chip successfully tested | KurzweilAI Researchers from MIT and MicroCHIPS Inc. have developed and tested a programmable, wirelessly controlled  chip to administer daily doses of an osteoporosis drug normally given by injection. This is the first successful test of such a device and could help usher in a new era of telemedicine — delivering health care over a distance, say MIT professors Robert Langer and Michael Cima, who had the idea 15 years ago. Pharmacy on the chip “You could literally have a pharmacy on a chip,” says Langer. “You can do remote control delivery, you can do pulsatile drug delivery, and you can deliver multiple drugs.”

smarterplanet:

First wirelessly controlled drug-delivery chip successfully tested | KurzweilAI

Researchers from MIT and MicroCHIPS Inc. have developed and tested a programmable, wirelessly controlled  chip to administer daily doses of an osteoporosis drug normally given by injection.

This is the first successful test of such a device and could help usher in a new era of telemedicine — delivering health care over a distance, say MIT professors Robert Langer and Michael Cima, who had the idea 15 years ago.

Pharmacy on the chip

“You could literally have a pharmacy on a chip,” says Langer. “You can do remote control delivery, you can do pulsatile drug delivery, and you can deliver multiple drugs.”

2020:USB stick can sequence DNA in seconds

2020:USB stick can sequence DNA in seconds

jayparkinsonmd: Philips just released a new iPad 2 app called Vital Signs Camera that uses the camera to measure your heart and breathing rate. It detects subtle beat-to-beat changes in the color of your face to measure your heart rate. We’re slowly living in the future.

jayparkinsonmd:

Philips just released a new iPad 2 app called Vital Signs Camera that uses the camera to measure your heart and breathing rate. It detects subtle beat-to-beat changes in the color of your face to measure your heart rate.

We’re slowly living in the future.

Mind-goggling

IF YOU think the art of mind-reading is a conjuring trick, think again. Over the past few years, the ability to connect first monkeys and then men to machines in ways that allow brain signals to tell those machines what to do has improved by leaps and bounds. In the latest demonstration of this, just published in the Public Library of Science, Bin He and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota report that their volunteers can successfully fly a helicopter (admittedly a virtual one, on a computer screen) through a three-dimensional digital sky, merely by thinking about it. Signals from electrodes taped to the scalp of such pilots provide enough information for a computer to work out exactly what the pilot wants to do.

Japanese engineers develop flying robotic orb [Video] - latimes.com via Davers

Japanese engineers develop flying robotic orb [Video] - latimes.com via Davers

Real World Demo of Siri Personal Assistant on an Apple iPhone 4S

The computer that predicts the future

stoweboyd:

Charlie Brooker of the Guardian writes about Naulitus, a Uinversity of Illinois supercomputer that reads the news and predicts the outcomes of what it’s reading… except it’s keepers have been finding out it’s been right about the Arab Spring and Bin Laden’s location only retrospectively.

Maybe they should stop analyzing Nautilus output, and hook him up to Tumblr, and we could just follow his stream?

The Martin jetpack will be available in 2012 for $100,000

The Martin jetpack will be available in 2012 for $100,000