Agricultural egghead Renfu Lu, agricultural engineer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, has, along with a team of engineers, invented a machine that can determine the "sweetness" and "firmness" of apples -- all quickly and without damaging the fruit. The gadget uses a multispectral imaging system to zap apples with four lasers as they roll down a conveyer belt. Computers with artificial neural networks can recognize the absorption and reflection patterns created by the near-infrared rays from which the machine divines apple quality. If the invention is commercialized, it can be used by fruit packers to sort the good from the bad. (I tried the device on a PowerMac G5. The verdict? "Sweet.")
Gamers Make Better Surgeons
If you want junior to grow up to be a famous surgeon, don't restrict his Xbox time! OK, that's not exactly what a new study shows. Researchers did discover that doctors who spend at least three hours per week playing computer games make some 37 percent fewer mistakes in labaroscopic surgery and did the work 27 percent faster that surgeons who didn't play games.
Scientists Weight A Single Bacterium
Scientists have invented a tiny scale capable of measuring the weight of a single cell. They demonstrated on a single-cell bacterium, which weighed in at a portly 665 femtograms (A femtogram is one-thousandth of a picogram, which is one-thousandth of a nanogram, which is a billionth of a gram. Must be the low-carb diet.)
Researcher Says Major Virus Scanners Full of Bugs
Online scanners from Symantec, McAfee and Panda all contain buffer overflows, according to Israeli security researcher Rafel Ivgi. The flaws could be used by hackers to crash the systems they're running on. Physician: Heal thyself!
Companies Unveil Worlds Smallest 512 Megabyte USB Memory Drive
Solid Alliance and Pretec started selling a 512MB USB 2.0 flash memory drive called the iDisk Tiny Luxury today. The device is just 18x40x9mm. Or is Engadget correct in saying that this is the smallest?
New Service Tells You When Friends Are Nearby
A new service called Dodgeball.Social tells you when a friend (you both must be registered and have your cell phones on) gets within 10 blocks of wherever you are. I guess it's called Dodgeball because it helps you avoid your friends.
Monday, April 05, 2004
Subscribers Get a Satellite Photo of Their Own House on Magazine Cover
Reason Magazine, the leading libertarian publication, will deliver to each of its 40,000 readers an issue featuring on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood with a specific house circled in red. The house is the reader's own.
Beware! Those Green Links Are Pop-Up Advertising
Vibrant Media's IntelliTXT system, which rolls out today, places what appear to be links -- though they're green and double-underlined -- in online articles. When readers hover their mouse pointer over the linked words, an ad related to the words linked pops up.
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