To address the risks that self-designing machines could quickly become unable to communicate with people, researchers have designed a visual interface that would give autonomous machines the equivalent of body language.
In a world where sensor networking and location tracking technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated and prevalent, preserving privacy is an increasingly difficult challenge. Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder have addressed the problem with a way to set up networks of tiny sensors that allows users to gain useful traffic statistics but preserves privacy by cloaking location information for any given individual.
The Internet was designed to be so decentralized that it could survive a nuclear attack. But economic considerations are driving today's commercial Net toward a hub-and-spoke configuration, making it more vulnerable to catastrophic failures. A study lays out just how the chips would fall.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have shown they can take advantage of these viral strong points by harnessing billions of the phages to build useful materials molecule-by-molecule.
Computers fall far short of being able to read our minds but Brown University researchers have shown that, with the right filters, computers can interpret the electrical signals brain cells send to move limbs.
A group of Boston researchers have taken advantage of the human genome project, which is mapping the exact sequence of base pairs in human DNA, to form a new strategy for finding invading bacteria and viruses.
The miniaturization trend that has produced computers, televisions and telephones that fit in shirt pockets is coming to satellites. A smaller satellite is, after all, easier and cheaper to get into orbit.