A team of researchers at MIT have recently come up with a different invention known as ‘Catra’ which uses a smartphone and a cheap plastic eyepiece to detect cataract. Cataract is a disease which makes the lens of the eye cloudy. This cloud that develops on the envelope of the eye varies in intensity in the different parts of the eye.

CATRA is an invention of MIT’s Media Lab which uses a cellphone and a cheap plastic eyepiece to detect cataracts. Not only is it cheaper and easier to use than existing solutions, it actually provides much better results. And you know what? We knew Smartphones could change the world!

How to Use Smartphone to Detect Cataract at Home

In this smartphone a beam of light from the smartphone is used to detect cataract. This device directs beams of light to the different parts of the eye. For the patient, each beam of light being emitted from the smartphone appears to the patient as a stationary beam of light.

Thus, as per the definition of cataract, if the patient’s lens has some cloudiness in its specific portions, then the patient will feel a blurred effect in seeing the beam of light falling in that part of the lens of the eye. Thus, the patient will actually feel the difference in the intensity of beam of light falling on the different parts of the lens of the eye.

To eliminate this difference, the patient then uses the arrow keys on the smartphone to adjust the intensity of light falling on different parts of lens. With the patient pressing the arrow keys to adjust intensities in different areas of the eye, the smartphone creates a map of the eye. It actually figures out which area of eye requires light beam with more intensities to reach the retina.

Thus, cataract gets detected easily and the doctor can figure out the stage this disease. With regular testing, they can even figure out at what rate this disease is growing. Thus, it is one of the important advantages of this technology, that it can detect cataract at a very early stage.

Also, with today’s technology for detecting cataract, it is not possible to find out what the patient is actually feeling. The patient would have to describe his internal condition by words. But, with this new technology the patient’s internal state can be more accurately understood.

This smarphone would be a new ray of hope for many people, especially, those who are in the early stage of cataract. Also, detection of cataract in this manner would be far cheaper than the current ongoing ways of detection, as this technology uses only a smartphone and a plastic eye piece.

Guest Author: This is a guest article by Amanda Kidd who is a writer who is all into machines and gadgets. She blogs for health, parenting and beauty as well, but technology band gadgets tops the list of her favorites. Mobile reviews and 3d mobile has recently caught her interest.

Two security consultant (ethical hackers) have used text messages to unlock the doors and start the engine of a brand new Subaru Outback. This event was conducted by two security researchers from iSec Partners named Don Bailey and Matthew Solnik. Don and Matthew got an Android phone and used a technique they referred to as “war texting” wherein they used two unnamed remote control products that are for locking and unlocking.

The men set up a GSM network and, after just a couple of hours, hacked the password and authentication messages sent between the server and the car.

With this information, they were able to send text messages that opened the doors and brought the car engine to life, effectively allowing them to steal the Outback off the conference floor. And we thought, controlling the 1969 Pontiac GTO via an iPod Touch was a cool hack!

Black Hat is an annual gathering of hackers and security professionals in Las Vegas. Researchers hope that by showing off how to hack certain systems, the computer industry will take steps to make infrastructure and consumers safer.

Don Bailey says he can unlock thousands of cars across the United States simply by sending a few texts from his Android phone. And that’s not even the scary part.

“I could care less if I could unlock a car door,” Bailey told during the conference at Caesar’s Palace. “It’s cool. It’s sexy. But the same system is used to control phone, power, traffic systems. I think that’s the real threat,” he stated.

The hack affects many kinds of devices that connect to cellular GSM networks, like the one used by AT&T. As cars and plenty of other stuff — from pill bottles to trees — start connecting to cell grids and the Internet, they become more vulnerable.

It’s indeed worrisome that this technique could be used on traffic control systems, security cameras, SCADA sensors, which are employed in industrial systems like the power grid and water supply.

Thankfully, the research hackers said they would not reveal information about their hacking technology or any other vulnerable cars until manufacturers had the opportunity to make design changes. Keeps in mind that similar remote-control apps are used by General Motors, BMW and Mercedes.

Also check out – How to Send a Text Message (SMS) Using Email? At any rate, isn’t it concerning that modern cars like Subaru Outback can be hacked by something as simple as an SMS? What do you think?

It has now emerged that the company’s domain name and website were only recently set up and staff images were lifted from a legitimate French business in Paris. Thumbnail images of the firm’s staff on the website also matched those on the site of French research company Central Test, although many of the names had been changed.

Two days after the study was widely circulated in media across the world, a computer programmer named Tarandeep Gill, the person behind the hoax wrote on www.aptiquant.com, “There is no company called AptiQuant, and no such survey was ever done“.

He further added, “The main purpose behind this hoax was to create awareness about the incompatibilities of IE6, and not to insult or hurt anyone.“

Earlier, AptiQuant had claimed that it surveyed over 1 lakh Web users and found that Opera users were smartest while IE users “have a below than average IQ score.“

“So, frustrated with Internet Explorer, I went on to create a meme that would result in some awareness and hopefully convince a few Web users to stop using IE 6,” Gill wrote on AptiQuant. “But what’s really funny is that everybody took the report so seriously, with comments like ‘Oh did we need such a study, we already knew that,” wrote Gill.

You may want to call the person behind the ‘fake survey‘ a liar, but I don’t see it being as much about lying as it is about being a case of very good viral marketing combined with the media’s eagerness to pick up shocking and popular stories without fact checking them first.

But perhaps it was a test after all. If you follow any publications that wrote this story up last week and haven’t yet corrected it, you might ask them where they send their journalists for training.

In short, you may not want to believe anything this study claimed… still the stereotype of backward IE users continues to proliferate and Microsoft will certainly hope to reverse the trends once they release IE 9.

And if you haven’t heard about it lately, White LED technology revolution is flaring up rapidly and this could very well be the first radical change since Thomas Edison!

When White Isn’t White

Unfortunately, nothing is quite that simple. Newer LEDs provide a new problem of their own: coloration. To understand this problem, it is important to understand how white LEDs work. Most white LEDs are actually blue LEDs. A phosphor is then added to the outside, which changes the color of the emitted light from blue to white.

Problems With Phosphors

The problem is fairly straightforward. The quality of these phosphors is wildly different, and LEDs are effectively made by trial-and-error. Depending on the cost of the LED, you can expect up to fifty diodes to be made for every one useable white diode. Aside from the obvious environmental consequences of this, it creates some substantial issues with coloration.

In effect, you’ll get what you pay for. The more diodes a company is willing to dispose of, the whiter your diodes will be. There currently aren’t any clear standards for calling a diode “white”, so it is important to be a wary consumer.

Tips

There are two ways around this problem. The first is to be find out the standard your company uses for sorting its LEDs. The wider the range of color temperatures your company uses for sorting, the less even your lighting will be. You should look for a range within about 200 degrees Kelvin. For environmental reasons, you may also want to check what happens to the unused LEDs, and whether they are discarded (bad) or find their way into lower-cost items like flashlights (good).

The second solution is to simply not use blue LEDs at all, and instead switch to the newer RGB LEDs. These create the illusion of white light by mixing three colors together, and is not dependent on mixed-quality phosphors. On the downside, RGB LEDs are more expesnsive than phosphorous ones.

Guest Author: This is a guest article by Daniel Bader, Ph.D., who is the webmaster and lead writer for the website Home Lighting Design, a site that helps non-specialists learn the basics of lighting design. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two children.

Actually, this laptop disassembly can take as few as 45 seconds, said Engel-Hall, who was a member of the design team. “This laptop represents a new class of electronic products,” he said. “You can disassemble this on your couch. In 10 steps. With no tools.“

Engel-Hall talked about the project last week at Autodesk’s Sustainability Summit in San Francisco, where the company showcased the latest additions to its lines of design software and prominent applications of its tools — such as the design of the NASA Ames Sustainability Base that’s scheduled to open in May, the electric bike PiCycle that’s getting a lot of buzz, and the recyclable laptop.

The team had nine months to research, design and prototype their project and used Autodesk Inventor 3D mechanical design software and Autodesk Inventor Publisher to do it. The tools were invaluable in creating 3D prototypes and animated displays as the team explored ideas, considered materials, worked through various design problems and iterations, and created presentations of their project, Engel-Hall said.

Stanford Students Design Recyclable Laptop with Autodesk Inventor Software

The team calls its creation the Bloom Laptop, a name that reflects some of the group’s early ideas for a product. They included a hand-held device embedded with a bamboo seed (watering the device would make the seed grow and the growth process would break apart the gadget, readying it for recycling) and another hand-held product, whose parts could be fanned out like the petals of a flower for dismantling, Engel-Hall said.

While the team members loved the concepts, their research showed that no one else seemed to, so they discarded those ideas. “But we retained the name,” said Engel-Hall.

For their efforts, the team received the award for Autodesk Inventor of the Month. The laptop is still in prototype, or “proof-of-concept,” form and has not been picked up by any laptop manufacturers, although Engel-Hall said the team “might be interested” in developing this laptop technology further at some point.

AMD claimed that Fusion has the capability to handle multi-core processors and ultimate graphics on a single chip. Fusion platform has a graphics card (GPU) and microprocessor (CPU) incorporated on it. Fusion platform uses multi-core CPU (x86) technology with a powerful DirectX 11-capable graphics.

“AMD Fusion marks third era of computing and can be considered as a biggest shift in PC technology after the launch of x86 processors,” said Ravi Swaminathan, managing director and regional vice-president, Sales and Marketing, AMD India.

One of the key features of the new chipset is its “AllDay Power” capability, which enables usage of computers for more than 10 hours on a single charge. Thus the new processor’s power-saving feature would be a boon for users who were increasingly seeking richer graphic content on the Internet.

The APUs also include a dedicated high-definition video acceleration block and a high-speed bus that transmits data across differing types of processor cores within the same design.

“The concept of synergizing the CPU and GPU has been intriguing right from the start. APU designs enable an amazing experience in any form factor, and are designed to provide significant advantages in power and design simplicity over competing multi-chip solutions,” said, Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Fusion Experience Research Program.

The first arrivals include the E and C series APUs, codenamed Zacate and Ontario respectively.

- E-Series (Zacate): 18W TDP, Core speeds of about 1.6GHz, for notebooks and compact desktops

- C-Series (Ontario): 9W TDP, Core speeds of about 1.2GHz, for netbooks.

AMD Fusion is aimed at eliminating the need for consumers to choose between power and performance… This will also allow AMD’s partners to offer exciting new form factors on a robust computing platform. The AMD fusion software partners include Adobe, Arcsoft, Microsoft, Nero, Corel, Divx, Motion PSP etc.

The learning algorithm, called ARCHER (Augmented Reward Chained Regression) algorithm, was developed and optimized specifically for problems like the archery training, which have a smooth solution space and prior knowledge about the goal to be achieved. In the case of archery, we know that hitting the center corresponds to the maximum reward we can get. Using this prior information about the task, we can view the position of the arrow’s tip as an augmented reward.

ARCHER uses a chained local regression process that iteratively estimates new policy parameters which have a greater probability of leading to the achievement of the goal of the task, based on the experience so far. An advantage of ARCHER over other learning algorithms is that it makes use of richer feedback information about the result of a rollout.

RobotCub is a 5 years long project funded by the European Commission through Unit E5 “Cognitive Systems, Interaction & Robotics“. iCub Robot also looks pretty cute in a head dress.

The iCub archery project will be presented at the Humanoids 2010 conference in December. If you can’t make the conference, but want a better idea of the algorithm behind this intriguing robotics project, check out the paper (pdf).

With a Proterra EcoRide BE35 (dubbed the ‘Ecoliner’ and paid for by stimulus funds) in the fleet, Foothill Transit is becoming the first transit agency in the United States to use the world’s first rapid-charge electric bus.

“The first commercial deployment of Proterra’s battery-electric buses by a major transit agency like Foothill Transit is a significant milestone for Proterra and a bold step by the nation in our collective effort to decrease dependence on fossil fuel,” Proterra President and CEO Jeffery Granato said.

The Proterra bus features lithium titanate batteries from Altairnano. Lithium titanate batteries don’t expand and contract during recharging, so they’re very resilient and can hold up to frequent partial recharges. The Ecoliner’s lithium titanate batteries can propel the bus for three hours after a ten minute rapid charge. That won’t be any problem for line 291, as the Ecoliner will be able to recharge every half hour at a drive-in docking station installed at the Pomona Transit Center.

We look forward to additional communities throughout the U.S. and globally benefiting from the highly efficient, cost effective, clean alternative transit solution now available with the introduction of the EcoRide BE35,” said Granato.

The BE35 bus, which comes with a $1 million price tag, was paid for by stimulus funds. But according to Proterra, despite its high purchase price the $1 million BE35 can save transit authorities $300,000 in total lifetime operating expenses, not to mention a 400 percent improvement in fuel economy.

L.A. Gets World’s First Rapid-Charge Electric Bus

Foothill Transit has an even more ambitious goal, aiming for a 100 percent clean-fuel fleet by 2011. That means while the Ecoliner is the transit authority’s first green bus, it’s hardly the last.

This new feature, called “Google Instant,” is the closest the 12-year-old company has come yet to realizing its founders’ ambition to build a search engine that reads its users’ minds. “I think it’s a little bit of a new dawn in computing,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

With the new instant feature, Google expects to reduce the time spent on search by two to five seconds per request, collectively saving its more than 1 billion weekly users about 350 million hours annually. So here are 3 immediate benefits that can be distinguished with Google Instant Search – Faster Searches,  Smarter Predictions and as the name suggests, Instant Results!

Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8. Please note, users on domains other than Google.com can only access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google Account. We will continue to add new domains and languages over the next several months. So if you were wondering why you did not see Google Instant Search in action, this is why!

And if you are wondering if this change is going to impact the ranking of search results, then the answer is NO! This change does not impact the ranking of search results.

The instant results only will be displayed on Google’s standard website, which features little more than its logo and a search box. They won’t be shown to users making requests on individually designed “iGoogle” pages that are usually already covered with different decorations and programs plugged into other online services.

It is no wonder why, Google search executive Marissa Mayer hailed the instant search breakthrough as a quantum leap akin to Bob Dylan’s switch from an acoustic to electric guitar in 1965. “It’s a fundamental shift to search and how people think of search,” she said. Google Instant is not yet available on mobile, but Google is planing to release it soon.

So do you want a look at Google’s instant search results? Google has given us all the ability to try out its instant search results. Instead of having to hit enter or to click search at the end of your query, Google is providing instant results to search via this site.

These bright orange vehicles, equipped with laser scanners and cameras that work in concert to detect and help avoid obstacles, are to brave the traffic of Moscow, the summer heat of Siberia and the bitter cold of the Gobi desert before the planned arrival in Shanghai at the end of October.

So, if you happen to be driving on route from Italy to China between now and October then don’t be freaked out if you happen to come across two bright orange vans with no drivers at the wheel, it’s just a VisLab project in action. The VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge began in front of the Milan Cathedral this Tuesday with a goal of traveling 8,000 miles to Shanghai by the end of October (follow the trek at the VIAC blog here).

“What we are trying to do is stress our systems and see if this amazing vehicle technology can work in a real environment, with real weather, real traffic and crazy people who cross the road in front of you and a vehicle that cuts you off,” said project leader Alberto Broggi.

The lead vehicle will send out GPS locations via radio that will be picked up by the follower van, which also uses its cameras and laser scanners to aid navigation and avoid obstacles like cars and people. Drivers will take control in emergency situations. The vans are topped with solar panels that power the computer processors, sensors, and driving actuators, but not the vans themselves, which retain their original electric power systems.

The road trip consists of two pairs of robotic vehicles, each with a driven lead van followed by a driverless vehicle occupied by two technicians, whose job is to fix glitches and take over the wheel in case of an emergency. The driverless vehicle takes cues from the lead van, but will have to respond to any ordinary obstacles or dangers. The two pairs alternate stretches along the route to China.

“We will definitely need some help by humans. It is not possible to have 100 percent driverless. This is why I call it a test, not a demonstration,” Broggi said.

The engines will use petrol generators if a power outlet cannot be found in remote regions, and a truck carrying alternative vans is traveling in convoy in case one of the vehicles breaks down.

The vans have a top speed of 37 mph and are expected to drive only four hours a day due to recharging needs; the engineers will use gasoline generators if they can’t find a power outlet in remote regions. A truck carrying alternate vans is part of the convoy.

The expedition, which is funded by a $2.3 million (£1.5m) grant from the European Research Council, is expected to collect about 100 terabytes of data on the way autonomous vehicles perform in diverse driving conditions. The researchers hope the data will help to develop self-driving mining and farming vehicles.

Self drive vehicles are nowhere near ready to be introduced into the mainstream market but the vehicle technology is being perfected all the time and if this trip is successful, that day won’t be too far away.

If you want to follow these robot-controlled vehicles on their route you can do so on the Intercontinental Challenge website where live streaming will be available throughout the whole trip which is scheduled to end on 10th October.