ZDNet.co.uk reveals that a state-of-the-art computer system installed in a public swimming pool in Wales detected the motionless girl at the bottom of a extremely deep swimming pool and informed the life guard of her whereabouts and how long she had been there for. The computer managed to alert the lifeguard after 30 seconds of her being in the water. The local council installed the system after lifeguards were having problems seeing to the bottom of the pool in the deep end and cost around £65,000 to install. The computer detects whether someone is in distress by calculating swimmer’s...

The first (unmanned) mission to Pluto is planned for Januari 2006. NASA will then launch the New Horizons spacecraft which will arrive at the planet about nine years later. The primary objectives are to characterize the global geology and morphology of Pluto and Charon, map the surface composition of Pluto and Charon, and characterize the neutral atmosphere of Pluto and its escape rate. Other objectives include studying time variability of Pluto’s surface and atmosphere, imaging and mapping areas of Pluto and Charon at high-resolution, characterizing Pluto’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere,...

Intelligence: Behold the All-Seeing, Self-Parking, Safety-Enforcing, Networked Automobile Radar, lasers, wireless radio networks and other embedded tech will enable our cars to sense faraway traffic and stop accidents before they happen. But who will be in the driver’s seat? Well again we seem to have heard it all, films that are based in the future like Minority report and iRobot seem to focus on such things as the future of the car. In iRobot you see that Will Smith has to put the car in ovveride to take control of it himself, and that the speed is amazingly enhanced then...

Cough, what can I say…it is simply the next step   Digital Immortality – Download the Mind by 2050 The wealthy will be able to download their consciousness into computers by 2050 – the not so well off by "2075 or 2080", claims futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson, head of the Futurology unit at BT. While it sounds like science fiction, Pearson is serious about his claim.  He believes that humans will achieve a kind of virtual immortality by saving their consciousnesses into computers within the next 45 years. "If you draw the timelines, realistically by...

I wouldn’t say I found this hard to believe. Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science. Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We’re all essentially mind readers, they say. The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting. Read on… Related Links: Yahoo! News [ article cont. ]

Talking on a cell phone makes you drive like a retiree â€â€? even if you’re only a teen, a new study shows. A report from the University of Utah says when motorists between 18 and 25 talk on cell phones, they drive like elderly people â€â€? moving and reacting more slowly and increasing their risk of accidents. “If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, his reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver,” said David Strayer, a University of Utah psychology professor and principal author of the study. “It’s like...

By R. Douglas Fields In the movie thriller Memento, the principal character, Leonard, can remember everything that happened before his head injury on the night his wife was attacked, but anyone he meets or anything he has done since that fateful night simply vanishes. He has lost the ability to convert short-term memory into long-term memory. Leonard is driven to find his wife’s killer and avenge her death, but trapped permanently in the present, he must resort to tattooing the clues of his investigation all over his body. That disturbing story was inspired by the real case history of a patient...

Excessive text messaging may be bad for you, or at least for your fingers. That’s what some Italian doctors think. They are telling people, particularly the young, that furious typing on mobile phones could lead to acute tendonitis. Italian newspapers La Repubblica and Il Messaggero dedicated about half a page each to the problem Monday. A 13-year-old girl in the northern Italian city of Savona needed treatment from an orthopedic specialist after typing at least 100 short message services (SMSs) a day. She was prescribed anti-inflammatory medicine and ordered to rest her hands. According...