Technology Innovation Today – Technological Advances Worldwide

Virtual Reality In Healthcare: Where’s the Innovation?

April 24, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

Virtual reality is no longer just about video gaming; it holds promise as nothing short of revolutionary for just about every other industry, as well. Since 2012, there has been an incredible explosion of interest and hype around mass market virtual reality (VR) thanks to head mounted display (HMD) products in development like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Gear VR and Google Cardboard. The technology has advanced to the point where very high-quality VR experiences are possible at reasonable price points, and should be widely available to consumers within a year. There are a few industries that have been making use of VR…

Transport Tech

So Digital Billboard Ads Change With the Speed of Traffic Now

April 22, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

You hate creeping through traffic. But advertisers love it, because you’re a captured audience with plenty of time to consume sophisticated messages. If you’re zipping along, they have just a moment to pitch you burgers, or tires, or cloud services. In the days of yore—like, last year—that meant Mad Men had to choose between big visuals targeting leadfoots and text-heavy spots for the rush hour warrior. Digital billboards supplied with data from Internet services company Inrix lets them deliver both. For five weeks this summer, eight digital billboards along highways…

Internet 3.0: How we take back control from the giants

April 22, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

By Hal Hodson AT THE heart of the internet are monsters with voracious appetites. In bunkers and warehouses around the world, vast arrays of computers run the show, serving up the web – and gorging on our data. These server farms are the engine rooms of the internet. Operated by some of the world’s most powerful companies, they process photos of our children, emails to our bosses and lovers, and our late-night searches. Such digital shards reveal far more of ourselves than we might like, and they are worth a lot…

Chinese Medical (CM) Plants

April 20, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

China is developing a library of authenticated traditional Chinese Medical (CM) plants for systematic biological evaluation –Rationale, methods and preliminary results from a Sino-American collaboration Traditional Chinese Medicine is a type of herbal, natural health care system that ascends back at least 2,000 years to the year 200 B.C. TCM is “herbal” and “natural” because it stimulates the body’s own healing mechanisms and takes into account all aspects of a patient’s life, rather than just several obvious signs or symptoms. Over the past several decades, Eastern alternative medicine practices have continued…

New diagnostic instrument sees deeper into the ear

April 19, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

A new device developed by researchers at MIT and a physician at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center could greatly improve doctors’ ability to accurately diagnose ear infections. That could drastically reduce the estimated 2 million cases per year in the United States where such infections are incorrectly diagnosed and unnecessary antibiotics are prescribed. Such overprescriptions are considered a major cause of antibiotic resistance. The new device, whose design is still being refined by the team, is expected ultimately to look and function very much like existing otoscopes, the devices most…

Medical Tech

Novocure’s Second Generation Optune System for Glioblastoma Now FDA Approved

April 18, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

Novocure, a company now headquartered on the Jersey Isle, has announced FDA approval of the second generation of its groundbreaking Optune system. The Optune delivers so-called Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) that interfere with cell division, in a sense pausing the development of tumors that are otherwise extremely difficult to treat. When cells divide they create mitotic spindles, tiny strings that pull on chromosomes to pry them apart for duplication. These spindles are susceptible to electric fields due to a natural charge, so finely tuning the field can prevent their activity and, if accurately directed, stop tumors from growing.…

Why the Virtual-Reality Hype is About to Come Crashing Down

April 18, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

Makers of virtual-reality headsets think 2016 will be the year of VR. The experience “is radically different than any computing experience you’ve had before,” says Marc Metis, a vice president atHTC Corp., maker of the Vive headset. Content creators, however, tell a different story. VR isn’t ready for prime time. This gap between expectations and reality means the VR hype train is about to crash into a wall. In my experience, VR demos can be very impressive. The problem is that most are just that—demos.As new, highly touted headsets arrive this year, how much…

Medical Tech

Gentle cancer treatment using nanoparticles works

April 16, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

Cancer treatments based on laser irridation of tiny nanoparticles that are injected directly into the cancer tumor are working and can destroy the cancer from within. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute and the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Copenhagen have developed a method that kills cancer cells using nanoparticles and lasers. The treatment has been tested on mice and it has been demonstrated that the cancer tumors are considerably damaged. The results are published in the scientific journal, Scientific Reports. Traditional cancer treatments like radiation…

Medical Tech

Microfluidic Device to Test Electric Fields on Cancer Cells

April 16, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

At the post-grad research collaboration called Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), a team has developed a microfluidic device for testing how electric fields influence living cells. The main goal for the technology is to identify the nature of the electric fields that best disrupt the activity of cancer cells, the growth and multiplication of which has been shown in the past to be influenced by external electric fields. Potentially, there’s a chance that electrodes could be used in the future to simply stop and even kill cancer cells completely from outside the…

Quantum Computing May Be Moving Out of Science Fiction

April 13, 2024February 20, 2024 admin

Quantum computing may still sound like the stuff of science fiction, but in another five or 10 years, it could be part of our reality. “It’s still mostly sci-fi for now,” said Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT. “Systems are still pretty rudimentary. Though they perform some specific kinds of calculations faster than traditional computers, they are defined by their limitations. When true, fully operable quantum systems come online, they will force the IT industry, public and private sector organizations and individuals to fundamentally rethink certain kinds of problems and…