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Viewers watching commercials fast-forwarded with DVRs are still able to recall commercials that contained many frames featuring the brand’s name or logo in the center of the screen.

Source: By ALEX MINDLIN

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A nine-person team at Microsoft Research India assesses whether quirky ideas can make technology useful to those who have heretofore lived without it.

Source: By ASHLEE VANCE

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Call us devilish, but we just can’t help but love these types of stories. Here we have yet another overly confident group of researchers grossly underestimating the collective power of the hacking underground, as gurus from all across Europe have joined together to announce “the first commercial communication network using unbreakable encryption based on quantum cryptography.” Interestingly enough, quantum cryptography has already been cracked in a kinda-sorta way, but that’s not stopping these folks from pushing this claim hard to government agencies, financial institutions and companies with distributed subsidiaries. We’ve no doubt this stuff is pretty secure, but the last time we heard someone utter a claim similar to this, we saw him uncomfortably chowing down on those very words merely months later.

[Via Physorg]

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Source: Darren Murph

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Microsoft described the move as a vote of confidence in the European economy and in the company’s ability to close the gap with Google.

Source: By ERIC PFANNER

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Paging Dr. Google can lead patients to miss a rich lode of online resources that may not yield to a simple search.

Source: By JOHN SCHWARTZ

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Filed under: Transportation

Oh MIT, do the wonders that come from your halls ever cease? Yet another remarkable development is emerging from the fabled institution, and this time it’s an autonomous wheelchair that can remember important places in a given building (read: the hospital ward, your house, the local arcade, etc.) and then take you there on command. In other words, the voice recognizing chair could understand phrases of direction, such as “head to the kitchen,” and it would take on the burden of navigating the halls while letting the rider chill. The researchers are implementing a system that can learn and adapt to the individual user, and in the future, they’d like to add in a collision-avoidance system and mechanical arms to help patients lift and move objects. Say, can regular joes / janes buy these? We’re totally feeling this over the Segway.

[Via medGadget]

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Source: Darren Murph

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The University Small Business Patent Procedures Act is under increasing scrutiny by swelling ranks of critics, who charge that it has distorted the fundamental mission of universities.

Source: By JANET RAE-DUPREE

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Filed under: Digital Cameras, Misc. Gadgets

As the military industrial complex surges forward, so do advances in technology for the public sector. At least that’s how the cold-war wisdom goes. Case in point: QinetiQ is developing a lens-less, mirror-less, battlefield imaging system with some help from your DARPA’s deep pockets. The LACOSTE project (Large Area Coverage Optical Search while Track and Engage) aims to set aloft high-altitude (about 20km) drones and air-ships fitted with a special, thousand-strong microscopic sensor array (a “first of their kind,” according to QinetiQ), a “mask,” and image processor to decode the scene and extract an image of the quickly changing conditions on the battlefield or, you guessed it, city streets. The resulting lightweight and highly-durable system should feature a “super resolution” mode with the ability to “detect and simultaneously track large numbers of moving vehicles in dense urban areas with a high degree of accuracy, 24-hours a day.” And here you thought CCTV was intrusive.

[Via BBC]

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Source: Thomas Ricker

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