The moving finger moves on: Researchers find new ways to make touchscreens more responsive

THE only way to operate an increasing number of modern devices, from smartphones to cash machines and cars, is the deft use of a finger on a touchscreen, with a tap for this and a swipe for that. But sometimes such actions do not work all that well. It is easy to miss the required key on a tiny virtual keyboard and produce splling eworrs. Sometimes the screen fails to respond at all. And it can be downright dangerous to take your eyes off the road to flip through myriad air-conditioning options on a vehicle’s control panel. Now help, as it were, is at hand. As touchscreens become ubiquitous on devices, new ways to make and use them are emerging.

Robert Bosch, a German producer of car parts, among other things, recently displayed a touchscreen with “haptic feedback”. Visual effects, sounds and vibrations are already used with touchscreens to confirm when icons or keys are selected. What the Bosch system does is to add different surface textures to the mix. [More]

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Machines that learn like people

Object-recognition systems are beginning to get pretty good — and in the case of Facebook’s face-recognition algorithms, frighteningly good.

But object-recognition systems are typically trained on millions of visual examples, which is a far cry from how humans learn. Show a human two or three pictures of an object, and he or she can usually identify new instances of it.

Four years ago, Tomaso Poggio’s group at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research began developing a new computational model of visual representation, intended to reflect what the brain actually does. And in a forthcoming issue of the journal Theoretical Computer Science, the researchers prove that a machine-learning system based on their model could indeed make highly reliable object discriminations on the basis of just a few examples.

In both that paper and another that appeared in October in PLOS Computational Biology, they also show that aspects of their model accord well with empirical evidence about how the brain works. [More]

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Top 10 (Free) Apps for Scientists

Like so many other scientists out there, I feel guilty when I am not working. Even that minute waiting for the bus or in line for lunch.

I should be reading papers and thinking about science for those precious moments I’m not physically in lab.

When I need my science fix, my iPhone keeps me company. These are the 10 best science-centric apps I have found. They keep me up to date on what papers are coming out, where the public discourse is going, and tickle my general interest in science.

1. Twitter. As app that most of you probably have already, Twitter is a tremendous resource for science. Follow the prolific science tweeters; they will tweet not only their own science and publications, but also general science news and links to cool article that are either scientific themselves or about science. Top twitter recommendations to follow (besides all the relevant journals in your field):  [More]

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Is time travel possible?

Time travel is one of my favorite topics! I wrote some time travel stories in junior high school that used a machine of my own invention to travel backwards in time, and I have continued to study this fascinating concept as the years have gone by.

We all travel in time. During the last year, I've moved forward one year and so have you. Another way to say that is that we travel in time at the rate of 1 hour per hour.

But the question is, can we travel in time faster or slower than "1 hour per hour"? Or can we actually travel backward in time, going back, say 2 hours per hour, or 10 or 100 years per hour?

It is mind-boggling to think about time travel. What if you went back in time and prevented your father and mother from meeting? You would prevent yourself from ever having been born! But then if you hadn't been born, you could not have gone back in time to prevent them from meeting. [More]

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Easter Island people used sharpened stones as tools, not weapons

Sharpened stones previously viewed as spear points wielded by warring Easter Islanders actually served as general-purpose tools, researchers say.

Early European visitors to Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, wrote in the late 1700s that the islanders carried spears topped with sharp, triangular pieces of glassy lava, or obsidian. In the past 20 years, some researchers have suggested that fighting among spear-bearing groups — following the leveling of resource-rich palm forests around 1550 — destroyed Rapa Nui civilization before Europeans arrived.

But the Rapa Nui probably used the alleged spearpoints in a variety of ways that had nothing to do with killing each other, say archaeologist Carl Lipo of Binghamton University in New York and his colleagues. These sharp rocks, known as mata’a, would have been useful for tasks such as scraping and cutting sweet potato plants into pieces suitable for cultivation, cutting bananas off trees, stripping bark for rope and cutting ritual designs into people’s skin, perhaps to create tattoos, the scientists report in the February Antiquity. [More]

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Why Sleep Deprivation Makes You Crabby?

When you're tired, it can seem as if everything is filtered through a negative lens.

That might be because your positive lens is fuzzy when you are sleep-deprived, according to findings of two related studies published last year in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research. Two groups of college students completed a series of tests to assess their emotional responses to negative and positive pictures, similar to those often shown on the nightly news.

Twenty-eight students completed the test at various points throughout a night of simulated shift work after getting five hours of sleep, and 31 students did the same after staying awake for more than 24 hours. The students completed a short survey to indicate how each picture made them feel. [More]

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A new form of frozen water?

Amid the season known for transforming Nebraska into an outdoor ice rink, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln-led research team has predicted a new molecular form of the slippery stuff that even Mother Nature has never borne.

The proposed ice, which the researchers describe in a Feb. 12, 2016 study in the journal Science Advances, would be about 25 percent less dense than a record-low form synthesized by a European team in 2014.

If the ice can be synthesized, it would become the 18th known crystalline form of water -- and the first discovered in the United States since before World War II.

 "We performed a lot of calculations (focused on) whether this is not just a low-density ice, but perhaps the lowest-density ice to date," said Xiao Cheng Zeng, an Ameritas University Professor of chemistry who co-authored the study. "A lot of people are interested in predicting a new ice structure beyond the state of the art." [More]

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