BBC - Future - Why animals can’t resist touchscreen technology
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140903-why-animals-love-touchscreens#
BBC - Future - Why animals can’t resist touchscreen technology
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140903-why-animals-love-touchscreens#
Brain stimulation: The military’s mind-zapping project
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140603-brain-zapping-the-future-of-war
An unusual trial is underway at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. An airman sits at a monitor in a laboratory, wired up with electrodes, his jacket slung over the back of his chair. Plane-shaped icons keep entering his airspace. He has to decide whether each incoming plane is a friend or a foe. If it’s a foe, he must send a warning. If it flies off, fine. If it doesn’t, he must bring it down. The lab is silent, apart from the bleeps as he hits the buttons, and the smash as a software missile destroys an uncooperative plane.
(...)
Trans-cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been investigated as a possible treatment in healthcare for decades. In the 1980s, for example, it became clear that applying mild electrical currents to the brain could help patients with severe depression for whom the drugs did nothing.
Yet it wasn’t until the 2000s that neuroscientists realised tDCS could change the brain functioning of healthy people – a discovery that got the military interested.
“We began noticing a lot of the medical literature suggesting that cognitive functioning could be enhanced,” says Andy McKinley, the US military’s principal in-house tDCS researcher, who is now conducting trials. “We began thinking: if it could help with those healthy participants, it could potentially be an intervention tool we could use here in the military to help advance cognitive function.”
(...)
That’s why airmen are being tested today, watching for planes on a screen. The task obviously involves decision making, but it also has a physical ‘motor’ component: you must press the buttons in the correct sequence, and you must do this quickly, to get a good score. After a while, this kind of task becomes pretty automatic. “If you imagine learning to ride a bike or a manual vehicle, your process is very conscious at first because you’re thinking about all the steps. But as you do it more often, it becomes more and more unconscious,” McKinley says. “We wanted to see if we could accelerate that transition with tDCS.”
Brain imaging suggested that the best way to do this would be to stimulate the motor cortex while the volunteer was doing the task. But McKinley and his team added a twist: after the stimulation, they use tDCS in reverse to inhibit the volunteers’ prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conscious thinking. The day after the stimulation, the volunteers are brought back for re-testing. “The results we’re getting are fantastic,” McKinley says. People getting a hit of both mid-test and inhibitory stimulation did 250% better in their retests, far outperforming those who had received neither. Used in this way, it seems that tDCS can turbo-boost the time it takes for someone to go from being a novice at a task to being an expert.
(...)
In other studies, McKinley’s team have also used tDCS to supercharge attention, which could help the image analysts too. Volunteers were asked to engage in a rudimentary simulation of air-traffic monitoring. Performance at this type of task usually declines over time. “It’s a pretty linear decrement,” McKinley says. But when they stimulated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of volunteers’ brains, an area they had found to be crucial for attention, they found absolutely no reduction in performance for the entire 40-minute duration of the test. “That had never been shown before,” he says enthusiastically. “We’ve never been able to find anything else that creates that kind of preservation of performance.”
Que deviennent les prothèses après la mort ?
BBC - Future - What happens to prosthetics and implants after you die?
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140311-body-parts-that-live-after-death?ocid=FR_outbrain_future
Inert devices such as breast implants and replacement hips tend not to be removed after death, largely because there’s no compelling reason to do so, and they pose little threat to the environment. So it’s likely that the archaeologists of future centuries will uncover peculiar objects in the graves of the millennial dead: silicone bags, plastic teeth and sculpted metal bones.
(…)
Dutch company Orthometals, for example, collects 250 tonnes of metal every year from hundreds of crematoriums around Europe. At their facility in Steenbergen, it is sorted and melted down into ingots before being sold to the automobile and aeronautical industries. A similar US company, Implant Recycling, sells the melted and recast metals back into the medical industry. After you die, a little piece of you may one day end up in an aeroplane, a wind turbine, or even another person.
(…)
Once removed, implants are typically discarded – both the European Union and the US, among others, have rules that forbid the reuse of implanted medical devices. However, there is a growing trend to recover them for use in the developing world.
At $4,000 for a pacemaker and $20,000 for an ICD, a second-hand implant is the only way that millions of people will be able to afford this life-saving equipment. In the UK, charity Pace4Life collects functioning pacemakers from funeral parlours for use in India. In a similar effort, the journal Annals of Internal Medicine recently published the results of a US programme called Project My Heart Your Heart, which found that 75 patients who received second-hand ICDs showed no evidence of infection or malfunction. The group are now applying for FDA approval to send recycled heart devices overseas.
(…)
Back in Nashville, Standing With Hope has adopted a similar approach by shipping prosthetic limbs to Ghana. The charity’s co-founder, Gracie Rosenberger, was badly injured in a traffic accident at 17, an incident which cost her both legs. Like many amputees, Gracie acquired a stockpile of prosthetics over the years, which made her wonder whether they could be put to better use. As limbs are replaced or outgrown, the old ones gather dust in the backs of closets. When an amputee passes away, the family are often left with a cache of working limbs but no one to take them.
“The private insurers do not want it back, I don’t even think Medicare wants it back,” explains Rosenberger’s husband Peter, who is president of Standing With Hope. “There are all kinds of liabilities. So a lot of this stuff is discarded, unfortunately.”
Now amputees and their families can send old limbs in the mail to the Rosenbergers. When asking for donations, Standing With Hope’s website reads: “We’re not asking for an arm and a leg... just a leg”.
The goal is to beat last year’s total of 500 replacement limbs delivered to Ghana. “Last year I had a thing I called Operation Footloose, and on my radio show I would play the theme from Footloose and say ‘turn that foot loose so we can recycle it’,” Peter laughs.
Just like organ donors, those that bequeath their medical implants can bid farewell to the world with the knowledge they offer a stranger a second chance at life, be it a man with a heart defect in India, a woman undergoing a hip replacement in America, or a child with a missing limb in Ghana.
Petite revue de la vie en conditions extrêmes (peu de photos, malheureusement…)
BBC - Future - The last place on Earth… without life
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140303-last-place-on-earth-without-life?ocid=FR_outbrain_future
Weird and wonderful creatures can thrive in the most hostile parts on the planet, but there are a few places too harsh for even the hardiest, discovers Rachel Nuwer.
Du désert salé de l’Atacama, au fin fond de l’océan en passant par les sources chaudes du Kamtchatka et les profondeurs du lac Vostok sous 3,5 km de glace de l’Antarctique.
L’occasion d’adhérer à l’ISE International Society for Extremophiles
▻http://extremophiles.org
BBC - Future - Is pee-power really possible ?
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140312-is-pee-power-really-possible
UK researchers have shown they can power a mobile phone with human urine (Bristol Robotics Laboratory)
me fait irrésistiblement penser aux tombereaux de pisse qu’on se mit à récolter à partir de 1669, date de la découverte du phosphore par l’achimiste Hennig Brand — on extrayait alors la précieuse substance brillante en faisant bouillir l’urine ; l’histoire (explosive !) est racontée dans l’excellentissime Quicksilver
▻http://www.chemicool.com/elements/phosphorus.html
Comment réparer une #voiture sans rien connaître à la mécanique ? - BBC
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140120-fix-a-car-without-a-mechanic
La mécanique automobile ne cesse de se complexifier... D’où l’idée, émise par BMW ou Volkswagen d’utiliser des lunettes de réalité augmenté pour faciliter le travail de ses techniciens... ▻http://www.bmw.com/com/en/owners/service/augmented_reality_workshop_1.html et ▻https://www.volkswagen-media-services.com/en/detailpage/-/detail/MARTA%E2%80%94innovative-service-support-for-the-XL1/view/531006/7a5bbec13158edd433c6630f5ac445da?p_p_auth=6jUIcWy4 Tags : fing internetactu internetactu2net #realiteaugmentee (...)
BBC - Future - Science & Environment - Timeline of the far future
►http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140105-timeline-of-the-far-future
Via Giulio Frigieri à Londres et mes excuses à BooZ pour le doublon
BBC - Future - Science & Environment - Timeline of the far future
►http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140105-timeline-of-the-far-future
20 000 Chernobyl finally safe
Infographie : le service de bus vraiment intelligent - BBC
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130327-building-bus-stops-via-smartphone
La BBC imagine le service de bus via mobile qui calcule son itinéraire à la demande... Tags : internetactu internetactu2net fing #villelegere #citelabo #transport
ARCHÉOLOGIE 2.0 – On a retrouvé la première photo postée sur le Web | Big Browser
►http://bigbrowser.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/07/11/archeologie-2-0-on-a-retrouve-la-premiere-photo-postee-sur-l
Comme le raconte dans le détail le site Motherboard, le 18 juillet 1992, Silvano de Gennaro assiste en backstage au Hardronic Music Festival, un évènement annuel organisé par les équipes du CERN. Peu avant que les Horribles Cernettes n’entrent sur scène, il les mitraille avec son Canon Eos 650 pour faire la pochette de leur prochain disque. Berners-Lee, fan du groupe, et membre lui aussi de cette joyeuse troupe, vient justement de parvenir à mettre au point le système qui permet de poster des photographies sur le Web et demande un cliché des Cernettes à Gennaro.
#web
@fil Ah non non non, j’aime bien. Ça permet de redescendre à un niveau anecdotique (et donc atteignable par l’humain lambda) des avancées faramineuses de l’humanité (qui risqueraient de mettre des gens en haut d’un panthéon plein de marbre).
Pff, plus rien de sacré…
Voici donc la naissance du style pictural technocratique qui s’est imposé comme modèle ! En effet, très très loin de Vinci.
Les techniciens ont souvent produits des images laides à chier, leur part artistique contenant certainement trop d’émotions refoulées… on peut pas être bons partout, c’est ça les spécialistes. J’ai vu des images de mariés tournicotants clignotants sur des grosses bécanes 4:2:2, les techos développeurs étaient vachement fiers de leurs prouesses techniques. Je les soupçonne d’avoir eu des velléités de se débarrasser des artistes, vachement plus sexy qu’un informaticien.
Anecdote, il y a 25 ans le conseil d’administration des Beaux Arts de Paris refusait aux étudiants l’accès aux nouvelles technologies : l’usage de la photo, film, vidéo ou ordinateur fut prohibé ou ridiculisé « retournez au burin et à la gravure ici c’est une école d’art qui forme des artistes ».
Quelque part, ça explique bien des choses : les gifs animés, le traîneau du Père Noël qui suit la souris, les couleurs criardes ...Finalement le « peuple » suit le style des maîtres.
;)
Une discussion sur cette imagerie de geeks avec Thierry Eraud qui signale ►http://videos.arte.tv/fr/videos/la_revanche_des_geeks_bande_annonce-6620418.html
@touti je sais pas comment ils font sur arte, avec 2Mb ça saccade affreusement.
une enquête sur les cernettes
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160224-the-unlikely-photo-that-kickstarted-the-social-internet