Category: Visionaries

If Gartner is to be believed, we are nearing the end of the keyboard and mouse age and entering one ruled by touch screens. According to Gartner, 50-percent of all the computers purchased between now and 2015 by children currently 15 and younger will have touchscreens. The study goes on to say that consumers and educational markets will be the first big adopters of the technology, as older workers ...

The folks at Hitachi and Hitachi Kokusai Denki Engineering recently showed off a new brain analyzer that wraps around your noggin. It seems like scientists are always finding new ways to dig deeper into our heads, but this device is unique because it's so compact -- even if it does look like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. According to DVICE, the encephalometer (a fancy word for brain ...

By incorporating boron carbide, the third hardest material on Earth, into cotton t-shirts, scientists may have discovered a new way to create tough, durable and flexible body armor that would change the way soldiers protect themselves on the battlefield. According to Popular Science, the research team, composed of scientists from the U.S., China and Switzerland, soaked some cotton t-shirts in a ...

While it is the stuff of 'Johnny Mnemonic,' 'eXistenZ' and a host of other cyberpunk cyborg films, hacking nerves might actually emerge as one of the next great advances in the study of neuropathy. In a study from 2006, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland gave one unidentified paraplegic patient the ability to move their normally motionless knee at the touch of a button. ...

The man who gave Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen their respective first jobs with computers has died. According to the BBC News, Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, dubbed 'The Father of the PC,' passed away yesterday after a long battle with pneumonia. "Ed was willing to take a chance on us -- two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace -- and we have always been ...

Often, getting a patient to remember to take his or her medication is the most difficult part about treating an illness. Last month, we told you about new pill-bottle caps that glow and beep as a reminder. And now, some researchers at the University of Florida have developed pills that snitch on patients who don't swallow them down. According to CNET News, the pills are printed with a nontoxic ink ...

We've been wondering what Will Wright, creator of 'Sim City,' 'The Sims' and 'Spore,' would do once he left Maxis, the company he helped turn into a gaming powerhouse. Apparently one of the "secret projects" Wright mentioned at GDC earlier this month will have the much-lauded developer shifting to a new medium: television. Wright developed the idea with Albie Hecht, former president of Spike TV ...

A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered a way to blur people's delineations between right and wrong. According to an AFP report on Fox News, the researchers used a magnetic field attached to a person's head to send a current into the brain and successfully disrupt the right temporoparietal junction -- the part of the brain commonly associated with ...

The World Cup of soccer kicks off this summer in South Africa, and even though the globe is ready for the world's most popular sporting event, an impressive hi-tech ball unfortunately won't be. AGENT has designed a technologically incredible soccer ball, capable of changing its color depending on various circumstances on the pitch. The transparent CTRUS ball design, which requires no air ...

Researchers at London's Imperial College recently received a generous grant of $8.1 million to fund the development of an invisibility suit. While various international scientists have been developing invisibility tech and filing patents on camouflaging material since World War II, the Imperial College coalition believes that these decades of work may actually soon come to fruition. The ...

Eternally youthful as we are here at Switched, we try not to spend too much time thinking about the day when we may have to get a hip replacement. But, thanks to a new Bluetooth-enabled 'smart hip,' getting old now seems more cyborg-asmic than ever. With the help of measuring sensors and actuators, the new, high-tech smart hip can not only monitor any potential implant problems, but can also help ...

If you live in Britain and are accustomed to bulky AC plugs (as we in the States are), London-based design student Min-Kyu Choi is about to turn your world upside-down. Or, at least, that's what the judges at the Brit Insurance Design of the Year competition would have you believe. Choi's design beat out the late Alexander McQueen's ravishing, alien-inspired Spring/Summer 2010 collection for the ...

Share In September, we briefly mentioned a new device that could return sight, in limited fashion, to blind patients through the use of an electrode covered "lollipop." The inch-long device is placed on the tongue and is fed electrical signals from a small camera hidden in a pair of sun glasses. These small electrical impulses allow patients who have lost their sight to recognize simple ...

We can't ask George Washington Carver if he prefers crunchy or smooth peanut butter. We can't seek the consultation of the Wright Brothers on how to go about saving the airline industry. We can, though, pick the brain of the very much alive Marty Cooper, the man who invented the cell phone -- which is exactly what C-Span recently did. Over the course of a half hour interview, Cooper revealed that ...

According to an AFP report on Yahoo! News, a team of British scientists claim they can read our memories and thoughts by simply studying patterns in brain scans. Eleanor Maguire, who led the research at University College London, told AFP that her team could differentiate between memories and thoughts by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During the study, the scientists showed ...