Over the last year, we’ve described many opportunities at the intersection of computing and healthcare as well as computing and sustainability — and there are a couple great examples in the press this week. Researchers at the University of Washington have engineered Raven II, a new surgical robot with wing-like arms predicated on an open source platform that can perform surgery on simulated patients — with the aims of speeding up procedures, reducing errors, and improving patient outcomes: The latest version of the Raven has mechanical wrists that hold tiny pincers. Coming soon is a piece that will allow research groups to attach the same tools used by commercial surgical […]

Ahead of an article to be published in tomorrow’s Science, IBM Research today announced the development of the world’s smallest magnetic memory bit by its Almaden research staff. At low temperatures, the magnetic storage approach requires only 12 magnetic atoms — making it at least 100 times denser than today’s hard disk drive and solid state memory chips — and is the result of antiferromagnetism. From the press release: Punctuating 30 years of nanotechnology research, scientists … have successfully demonstrated the ability to store information in as few as 12 magnetic atoms. This is significantly less than today’s disk drives, which use about one million atoms to store a single bit of information. The […]

Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis von Ahn is featured in CNN.com’s TEDTalk Tuesdays this week for his Duolingo project, which seeks to provide a free way to learn languages and translate the World Wide Web. Check out Luis’s write-up for CNN.com below, and video of his TED Talk after the jump. I want to translate the Web into every major language: every webpage, every video, and, yes, even Justin Bieber’s tweets.   With its content split up into hundreds of languages — and with over 50% of it in English — most of the Web is inaccessible to most people in the world. This problem is pressing, now more than ever, with millions of people […]

Last March, we noted that the National Science Foundation (NSF), together with 7 other international funders, was launching the second round of an international grant competition designed to spur cutting-edge research in the humanities and social sciences. Called Digging Into Data, the challenge specifically sought to promote large-scale, international and interdisciplinary analysis of large data sets in these fields. Yesterday, 14 winners representing the U.S., Canada, Netherlands, and U.K., were announced, and together they will receive nearly $5 million in grants “to investigate how data processing, analysis, and transmission techniques can be applied to ‘big data’ to change the nature of humanities and social sciences research.” According to the NSF press […]

Happy New Year, everyone! As we kick off 2012, here’s an interesting story — in the December Communications of the ACM — about how low-cost robots stand to impact science moving forward: A new generation of inexpensive robots could make the machines ubiquitous, opening up robotics to new areas of research, says James McLurkin, assistant professor of computer science and director of the robotics lab at Rice University.   “I wanted to have something the research community could use to do research,” McLurkin says. “In order for this to have an impact, it has to be low cost.”   McLurkin studies multi-robot systems in which swarms of robots work together to perform at ask, like searching a building for […]

…became “the center of your world.” So says technology writer/editor Joshua Topolsky — founding editor-in-chief of The Verge and former editor-in-chief of Engadget — in an year-end technology review for The Washington Post. It’s worth a quick read (emphasis added below): As far as years in technology go, 2011 was one for the record books.   It wasn’t just about big battles like Apple vs. Samsung, Microsoft vs. Google, AT&T vs. the world, or Hewlett-Packard vs. itself. It wasn’t just about the growth of apps and the ever-increasing pervasiveness of the Web in our daily lives, though there were plenty of amazing developments both these realms. It wasn’t just about hardware or […]