Playing computer-based physical therapy games can help people with Parkinson's disease improve their gait and balance, according to a new pilot study led by the UCSF School of Nursing and Red Hill Studios, a California serious games developer.
More than half the subjects in the three-month research project showed small improvements in walking speed, balance and stride length.
HIV infection is commonly associated with other sexual infections, such as herpes simplex virus (HSV). Infection with HSV facilitates the risk of HIV infection and negatively impacts the clinical course of HIV disease. Therefore, it would be highly beneficial to identify multi-faceted microbicide compounds that are efficient against HIV-1 and other sexually transmitted infections.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Nearly one in six pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth, but parents' losses are frequently minimized or not acknowledged by friends, family or the community.
"Women who have not gone through a stillbirth don't want to hear about my birth, or what my daughter looked like, or anything about my experience," said one woman, responding in a University of Michigan Health System-led study that explored how Internet communities and message boards increasingly provide a place for women to share feelings about these life-altering experiences.
Constraints on creativity imposed by computer-aided design (CAD) tools are being overcome, thanks to a novel system that incorporates eye-tracking technology.
'Designing with Vision', a system devised by researchers at The Open University and the University of Leeds, is breaking down rigid distinctions between human and machine. This should help designers to recover intuitive elements of the design process that are otherwise suppressed when working with CAD.
Cities release more heat to the atmosphere than the rural vegetated areas around them, but how much influence these urban "heat islands" have on global warming has been a matter of debate. Now a study by Stanford researchers has quantified the contribution of the heat islands for the first time, showing that it is modest compared with what greenhouse gases contribute to global warming.
It's a pattern that no doubt repeats itself daily in hundreds of millions of offices around the world: People sit down, turn on their computers, set their mobile phones on their desks and begin to work. What if a hacker could use that phone to track what the person was typing on the keyboard just inches away?
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The ability to see through walls is no longer the stuff of science fiction, thanks to new radar technology developed at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.
Cyber war, long considered by many experts within the defense establishment to be a significant threat, if not an ongoing one, may never take place according to Dr Thomas Rid of King's College London. A nuclear war never happened, however, and that was due to the preparedness of the Cold War.
Building on earlier work showing how nanowires carved in impurity-laden diamond crystal can efficiently emit individual photons, researchers have developed a scalable manufacturing process to craft arrays of miniature, silver-plated-diamond posts that enable even greater photon control.
The development supports efforts to create robust, room-temperature quantum computers by setting the stage for diamond-based microchips. Additionally, the technology could support new tools capable of measuring magnetic fields at the nanometer scale.
NAIROBI, KENYA (14 October 2011)— On a continent battered by weather extremes, famine and record food prices, new research released today from the World Agroforestry Centre documents an exciting new trend in which hundreds of thousands of poor farmers in Southern Africa are now significantly boosting yields and incomes simply by using fast growing trees and shrubs to naturally fertilize their fields.
Virginia Tech released today results from the first study ever to instrument child football helmets. Youth football helmets are currently designed to the same standards as adult helmets, even though little is known about how child football players impact their heads. This is the first study to investigate the head impact characteristics in youth football, and will greatly enhance the development of improved helmets specifically designed for children.
Berkeley — When engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, outfitted a six-legged robotic bug with wings in an effort to improve its mobility, they unexpectedly shed some light on the evolution of flight.
A six-legged, 25 gram robot has been fitted with flapping wings in order to gain an insight into the evolution of early birds and insects.
Published today, 18 October, in IOP Publishing's journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, the study showed that although flapping wings significantly increased the speed of running robots, the origin of wings may lie in animals that dwelled in trees rather than on the ground.
Electric and hybrid vehicles will be conquering the cities: cars, bicycles, buses and trains. This is why new ideas are in demand for individual and public transportation. In "Fraunhofer's System Research for Electromobility" researchers are coming up with solutions for tomorrow's mobility.
PITTSBURGH—OmniTouch, a wearable projection system developed by researchers at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, enables users to turn pads of paper, walls or even their own hands, arms and legs into graphical, interactive surfaces.