The fear of heights experienced by acrophobics is no small matter; tall buildings, airplane rides, bridges, even stepladders may present a paralyzing challenge. A new therapeutic approach, however, can help to lessen the anxiety experienced by acrophobics.
Ralph Lamsen, of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, uses virtual reality to desensitize acrophobes to their fear. The virtual world experienced through the helmet, glove, and handgrip presents a series of challenges relevant to the phobic situation. For example, clients are presented with a plank they must cross, an experience that usually produces elevated heart rate and blood pressure. Clients are encouraged to progress at a comfortable pace, staying at the edge of the plank until read ...
Want to reconstruct your face in 3D from a single 2D image? Now you can.
According to its creators, this technology does not require accurate alignment nor establishes dense correspondence between images; it works for arbitrary facial poses and expressions, and can be used to reconstruct the whole 3D facial geometry (including the non-visible parts of the face) bypassing the construction and fitting of a 3D Morphable Model. This is achieved via a simple convolutional neural network architecture that performs direct regression of a volumetric representation of the 3D facial geometry from a single 2D image.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has just awarded Virginal Galactic their first operating license, allowing them to start using their SpaceShipTwo craft for commercial use - as soon as certain guidelines are met. This means that the company - owned by billionaire Richard Branson - will soon be able to shuttle paying passengers into space.
Other than making the flights legal, the license dictates the conditions required before Virgin Galactic can actually let any passengers on board SpaceShipTwo, which will be carried by White Knight Two (below) roughly 99 kilometres (62 miles) into the sky.
Once everything is squared away with the FAA, SpaceShipTwo - a spacecraft designed to hold two pilots and six passengers - will hitch a ride w ...
Stan Larkin (pictured on the right), who's now 25, was diagnosed with familial cardiomyopathy. This form of disease results in the heart having difficulty pumping enough blood through the body. Faced with a lack of compatible heart donors, Stan underwent an operation in 2014 to remove his failing heart and replace it with an external total artificial heart, dubbed the Freedom portable driver.
This battery-powered device uses compressed air to pump blood around the body in the same way a heart does, and as the name suggests, it is portable and only weighs 6 kilograms (13 pounds). The device does an incredible job at keeping the patient in a healthy condition while a donor heart becomes available, but it isn’t considered a long-term option. ...
A Turing machine is a hypothetical machine thought of by the mathematician Alan Turing in 1936. Despite its simplicity, the machine can simulate ANY computer algorithm, no matter how complicated it is.
Put simply, the Turing machine isn't a physical machine, but you can imagine it as an never-ending line of tape, broken down into squares. On each of those squares is a 1, a 0, or nothing at all. The machine reads one square at a time, and depending on what it reads, it performs an action - it either erases the number and writes a new one before moving on, or simply moves on to a different square.
Each of those actions, which mathematicians call a 'state', are determined by the mathematical algorithm or problem the Turing machine has been desi ...
Oven a century ago, people were using technology to help them solve math problems. This 100-year-old calculator still works today, and it can calculate into the billions. While the machine may be mathematically accurate, it weighs approximately 70 pounds, significantly more than modern day calculators. That doesn’t sound very convenient. But then again, imagine how strong you would get carrying a 70-pound calculator around school
Anyone who used a PC in the 1990's most likely used one with the most popular operating system of its time, Windows 95. Although it reached EOL (end-of-life) status in 2003, Windows 95 doesn't appear to want to die. It has made appearances on smartphones, handheld devices, and tablets for quite some time now, and people don't seem to be getting enough of it. Thanks to a young programmer, we can now have Windows 95 running in almost any web browser using emscripten, an emulator that converts C++ code to JavaScript in real-time. It requires no downloads, plugins, or any special software.
The emulator takes a minute to load up, but once you’re inside it, it’s surprisingly snappy. It provides you with a full Windows 95 operating system and e ...
Li-Fi is a wireless technology that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication and will be available in the coming months. With scientists achieving speeds of 224 gigabits per second in the lab using Li-Fi earlier this year (that's equivalent to 18 movies of 1.5 GB each being downloaded every single second), the potential for this technology to change everything about the way we use the Internet is huge.
Scientists have now taken Li-Fi out of the lab for the first time, trialing it in offices and industrial environments in Tallinn, Estonia, reporting that they can achieve data transmission at 1 GB per second - that's 100 times faster than current average Wi-Fi speeds.
The technology uses Visible Light Communication, a medium ...
The 1977 HP-01 digital calculator was arguably the very first smart-watch to hit the market nearly 38 years before the Apple Watch. The watch was a marvel for its time. Not only could it perform basic calculations, the watch could do dynamic time and date calculations, algebra, and even function as a stopwatch and alarm clock. The watch in perfect condition can be found on eBay from time-to-time, for a price ranging up to $14 500 on eBay.
What can we learn from chimps swinging their hips? In this Nature Video, the walking style of our primate cousins are investigated, and we see what they can teach us about our ambling ancestors.
Watch the Nikon Coolpix p900 camera zoom into the moon. This is the first bridge camera on the market with an 83x optical zoom, and it sure is something. It also includes a digital zoom, which reaches to 166x, or 4,000 mm.
What is the difference between optical and digital zoom?
An optical zoom is a true zoom lens, like the zoom lens you’d use on a film camera. They produce much better-quality images. Some cameras offer a digital zoom, which is simply some in-camera image processing. When you use a digital zoom, the camera enlarges the image area at the center of the frame and trims away the outside edges of the picture. The result is the same as when you open an image in your photo-editing program, crop away the edges of the picture, and t ...
