As many as 200,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical mistakes and hospital infections, according to a report from the Hearst Corporation.
Scientists at the University of Tokyo have developed a holographic projector capable of rendering tangible, three-dimensional objects. The system comprises a holographic display device, two "tracking" Wii motes and a tactile feedback ultrasound unit.
In Aesop's fable The Crow and the Pitcher a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher so it can reach it. In a study from the University of Cambridge, researchers demonstrate that rooks, which belong to the crow family, can do exactly that.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is to have another shot at getting some useful information out of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Software developers at Tel Aviv University have produced an application, Clearcall, that they say improves speech recognition for the hard-of-hearing by up to 50 percent.
Two New Zealanders are hoping to prove the existence of a giant Mongolian worm said to kill people by spitting acid or shooting lightning from its rectum.
Scientists working for the Weizmann Institute’s Biological Chemistry,
and Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Departments have found a
way to make these DNA based computers a bit more user friendly.
Brain researchers have built a flight simulator for flies. While it may be great fun for the little blighters (who knows?), the real aim is to improve the image processing capabilities of robots.
Americans spend a third as much on complementary and alternative medicine as they do on prescription drugs, racking up out-of-pocket expenses of $33.9 billion.
A team of physicists from the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham have shown that electrons are not indivisible - in narrow wires they can divide into two new particles called spinons and holons.
Italian researchers claim that levels of sexual desire were higher in women who had drunk a couple of glasses of red wine than those who preferred other beverages.
The long-awaited restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been postponed until the winter of 2009. CERN attributed the delay to a number of technical difficulties, including vacuum leaks in two sectors of the LHC that had been cooled down to 80 K.
The UK Health Protection Agency said that 55,000 people caught swine
flu here last week, and there's been a total of 29 deaths from the
viral infection so far.
