Tech

ZURICH – Animatronics aims at creating physical robots that move and look like real humans. Many impressive characters have been created in this spirit, like those in the Hall of Presidents attraction at Walt Disney World. Until now, creating animatronic copies of real human individuals is a difficult and labor-intensive process requiring the manual work of skilled animators, material designers and mechanical engineers.

ZURICH – Researchers at Disney Research, Zürich, ETH Zürich, and Cornell University have invented a system to digitize facial hair and skin. Capturing facial skin and geometry is a fundamental technology for a variety of computer-based special effects for movies. Conventional face capturing is well established and widely utilized in the entertainment industry to capture a three-dimensional model of an actor's face. However, up to now, no method was capable of reconstructing facial hair or even handling it appropriately.

CAMBRDIGE, Mass. — For decades, academic and industry researchers have been working on control algorithms for autonomous helicopters — robotic helicopters that pilot themselves, rather than requiring remote human guidance. Dozens of research teams have competed in a series of autonomous-helicopter challenges posed by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI); progress has been so rapid that the last two challenges have involved indoor navigation without the use of GPS.

Sparse microwave imaging is a novel concept in microwave imaging that is intended to deal with the problems of increasing microwave imaging system complexity caused by the requirements of the system applications. Under the support of the 973 program "Study of theory, system and methodology of sparse microwave imaging", Chinese scientists have conducted considerable research into most aspects of sparse microwave imaging, including its fundamental theories, system design, performance evaluation and applications.

Results from an expedition to far eastern Russia that set out to find the origin of naturally occurring quasicrystals have provided convincing evidence that they arrived on Earth from outer space.

Writing in IOP Publishing's journal Reports on Progress in Physics, Paul J Steinhardt and Luca Bindi reveal that new, naturally occurring quasicrystal samples have been found in an environment that does not have the extreme terrestrial conditions needed to produce them, therefore strengthening the case that they were brought to Earth by a meteorite.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions. Snails and sea cucumbers also use this mechanism, called peristalsis, to get around, and our own gastrointestinal tracts operate by a similar action, squeezing muscles along the esophagus to push food to the stomach.

NASA scientist Tom Hanisco is helping to fill a big gap in scientists' understanding of how much urban pollution -- and more precisely formaldehyde -- ultimately winds up in Earth's upper atmosphere where it can wreak havoc on Earth's protective ozone layer.

Energy storage systems are one of the key technologies for the energy turnaround. With their help, the fluctuating supply of electricity based on photovoltaics and wind power can be stored until the time of consumption. At Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), several pilot plants of solar cells, small wind power plants, lithium-ion batteries, and power electronics are under construction to demonstrate how load peaks in the grid can be balanced and what regenerative power supply by an isolated network may look like in the future.

Lab on a chip (LOC) devices—microchip-size systems that can prepare and analyze tiny fluid samples with volumes ranging from a few microliters (millionth of a liter) to sub-nanoliters (less than a billionth of a liter)—are envisioned to one day revolutionize how laboratory tasks such as diagnosing diseases and investigating forensic evidence are performed. However, a recent paper* from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) argues that before LOC technology can be fully commercialized, testing standards need to be developed and implemented.

The content of alcohol ads placed in magazines is more likely to be in violation of industry guidelines if the ad appears in a magazine with sizable youth readership, according to a new study from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, the study is the first to measure the relationship of problematic content to youth exposure, and the first to examine risky behaviors depicted in alcohol advertising in the past decade.

Active video games, also known as "exergames," are not the perfect solution to the nation's sedentary ways, but they can play a role in getting some people to be more active.

Michigan State University's Wei Peng reviewed published research of studies of these games and says that most of the AVGs provide only "light-to-moderate" intensity physical activity.

And that, she says, is not nearly as good as what she calls "real-life exercise."

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Cities count the number of cars on the road in order to plan everything from the timing of stoplights to road repairs. But the in-road metal detectors that do the counting can make errors – most often by registering that a car is present when one isn't.

One common error is called "splashover" because it usually involves an over-sensitive detector picking up the presence a vehicle in the next lane over – as if the signal from the car "splashed over" into the adjacent lane.

A new advance in X-ray imaging has revealed the dramatic three-dimensional shape of gold nanocrystals, and is likely to shine a light on the structure of other nano-scale materials.

Described today in Nature Communications, the new technique improves the quality of nanomaterial images, made using X-ray diffraction, by accurately correcting distortions in the X-ray light.

rdioverter defibrillators account for one-third of the decrease in cardiac arrests caused by ventricular fibrillation in North-Holland, according to research in Circulation, an American Heart Association journal.

VF is an abnormal heart rhythm that makes the heart quiver so it can't pump blood.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — People living 700 to 900 years ago in Cahokia, a massive settlement near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, ritually used a caffeinated brew made from the leaves of a holly tree that grew hundreds of miles away, researchers report.