Animoto users simply upload photos from their computer, Facebook or the iPhone to the Animoto Web site and select background music. (Starting in August, users will be able to incorporate video clips, too.) Animoto’s patent-pending software, which the company calls “cinematic artificial intelligence,” acts as a virtual director and editor, analyzing the photos and the music and automatically rendering a video that moves to the beat of the music.

Videos are ready in minutes and can be uploaded to YouTube, Facebook and MySpace.

http://animoto.com

This is a great article by Jennifer Van Grove on Mashable.com
which takes an in depth look at one of the coolest, newest
LBS (location-based-social) networking phenomenons out there today.

I’ve been using Foursquare on my iPhone since early March
and I gotta say it’s super fun and it really grows on you!

They’re currently working on an app for the BlackBerry as well!

Check out the article here:

http://mashable.com/2009/07/25/foursquare-app/

If you feel the ultrasound photo printouts aren’t quite enough for you, and you’d prefer something a little more tangible, a new scanning technique allows expectant mothers to hold a life-size model of their unborn child.

Personally I think its creepy, but “We can build him, we have the technology!”

Instead of violently shoving a giant needle into the brain a la “The Matrix,” Utah scientists are reading thoughts by carpeting the brain with microelectrodes.

This “modest advance,” as the scientists describe it, could enable more precise control of prosthetic limbs or advance research in epilepsy and other diseases of the brain.

“This was originally developed for epilepsy,” said Bradley Greger, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Utah and co-author of a paper that recently appeared in journal Neurosurgical Focus.

“But this could be really good for neurological control of prosthetic devices.”

There are now three methods to turn brain thought into prosthetic action. Each has positives and negatives. Some devices can be slipped on as easily as hats, but they aren’t specific. The most detailed readings, from even a single neuron, come from threading tiny electrodes deep into the brain, but such operations are risky and very invasive.

While still invasive (the skull must be sawed off), placing electrodes on the surface of the brain instead of inside the brain gives more precise readings while decreasing the risk to patients.

The Utah scientists have so far only placed the microelectrodes in a handful of patients, all of whom suffer from epilepsy. The patients were already scheduled to have a craniotomy to help treat their condition, so they volunteered to have the electrodes placed on their brain during the procedure.

Traditional electrodes are several millimeters in size. The new microelectrodes developed by the Utah scientist are much smaller, so small, in fact, that the 16 microelectrodes were spaced only one millimeter apart from each other on the first patient.

One millimeter was too close however. Each electrode picked up overlapping and confusing signals.

In the second patient, the scientists placed the 32 electrodes two millimeters apart, far enough to more easily detect the electrical signals from the area of the brain that controls arm and hand movements.

“The initial impetus of this development was an even more precise determination of the epileptic focus position and size,” said Kevin Otto, a professor at Purdue University familiar with the research.

“However, as demonstrated by the Utah group, these electrodes can also be used for inputs to brain-machine interface devices.”

The patients, just by thinking about moving their right or left hands and arms, were able to move a computer cursor around a screen. For patients who are paralyzed or suffer from being “locked-in,” or having a functional brain but with no means to move the muscles, it could be a new, albeit intrusive, way to communicate or move.

“If we can give them the ability to communicate at all, that would be great,” said Greger.

Via Discovery.

Strangely Orwellian or just really cool?

We’ve been hearing about Google Voice for a while now, watching and waiting for the bugs to be ironed out and the super slow rollout to unfold. Now that it’s here, the diehard iPhoners among us (of which I’m one), have to watch curiously from the sidelines as the rest of the world ventures into what just may be the coolest phone related technology release we have seen since cell phones themselves.

That said, I’ve always been a big proponent of waiting a year or so before jumping on board with something like this, so I’m not too bummed about Apple and AT&T now blocking the iPhone version of the Google Voice app.

Decide for yourself here: http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

Top stealth-plane experts have re-created a radical, nearly forgotten Nazi aircraft: the Horten 2-29, a retro-futuristic fighter that arrived too late in World War II to make it into mass production. (See Hitler’s stealth fighter in pictures.)

The engineers’ goal was to determine whether the so-called stealth fighter was truly radar resistant. In the process, they’ve uncovered new clues to just how close Nazi engineers were to unleashing a jet that some say could have changed the course of the war.

To replicate the Ho 2-29 late last year for a documentary premiering Sunday, a team from the Northrop Grumman defense-contracting corporation used original Nazi blueprints (see re-created blueprints of Hitler’s stealth fighter) and the only surviving Ho 2-29, which has been stored in a U.S. government facility for more than 50 years.

The all-wing Ho 2-29 looked more like today’s U.S. B-2 bomber (B-2 bomber picture)—or something from a Star Wars prequel—than like any other World War II aircraft. Made primarily of wood and powered by jet engines, the plane was designed for speeds of up to 600 miles an hour (970 kilometers an hour).

Armed with four 30mm cannons and two 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) bombs, the planned production model was also meant to pack a punch.

A Ho 2-29 prototype made a successful test flight just before Christmas 1944. But by then time was running out for the Nazis, and they were never able to perfect the design or produce more than a handful of prototype planes.

Determining the Horten’s stealth capabilities could help reveal what might have happened if the Ho 2-29 had been unleashed in force.

From Wired.com:

The same blue food dye that gives your Gatorade its turquoise tint and turns your tongue a peculiar shade of purple might also protect your nerves in the case of spinal cord injury.

By lucky accident, researchers discovered that the commonly used food additive FD&C blue dye No. 1 is remarkably similar to a lab compound that blocks a key step in nerve inflammation. When rats with spinal cord injury were given an infusion of blue dye, they recovered much faster than rats that didn’t get the treatment. And researchers reported only one adverse effect: The rats turned blue.

“One of the reasons no one had done this before is that food science is very separate from neuroscience,” said neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center, who co-authored the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. “Those two fields don’t interact at all.”

Approximately 12,000 people suffer spinal cord injuries each year in the United States, mostly in car accidents or catastrophic falls. After an initial blow to the spine or neck, swelling around the spinal cord can cut off blood supply to the cord and kill additional nerve cells. A small number of patients benefit from steroids given immediately after the injury, Nedergaard said, but most continue to get worse because of secondary swelling.

“We have no treatment at all right now for most patients with spinal cord injury,” she said. “Right now we’re just observing patients get worse.”

In 2004, Nedergaard and colleagues discovered that swelling around the cord is caused by the rapid release of ATP, the molecule that normally provides energy for the cell. Excessive amounts of ATP overstimulate nerve cells and cause them to die of metabolic stress. The researchers found that blocking an ATP receptor called P2X7 prevented much of the inflammation associated with spinal cord injury. But until now, they hadn’t identified a clinically useful drug that could block the receptor.

“We just had proof of principle,” Nedergaard said. “We didn’t have anything we could give to patients.” Then, while searching for chemicals with structures similar to the P2X7 receptor, the scientists came across FD&C blue dye No. 1, completely non-toxic and approved by the FDA in 1928.

“Each of us in United States eats about 14 milligrams of blue dye per day,” Nedergaard said. “It’s in anything blue, in M&Ms, in Gatorade, in Jell-O. We eat 100 million pounds a year in the U.S., so we already know that there’s no toxicity.”

Another benefit of blue food dye is it crosses the blood-brain barrier. So instead of injecting the medicine into the spine, which would be dangerous in an injured patient, blue food dye can be delivered into a vein.

To test whether the compound could improve recovery after spinal cord injury, rats were given an intravenous infusion of Brilliant Blue G, which is nearly identical to blue food dye, 15 minutes after a 10-gram weight was dropped on their spinal cords (under anesthesia). Animals who received the blue dye recovered much faster than animals who didn’t: By six weeks, the treatment group could walk with a limp, while the no-treatment group never recovered the ability to walk.

“The paper presents novel findings, in a convincing manner,” wrote neurosurgeon Michael Fehlings of the University of Toronto, who specializes in spinal cord injury but was not involved in the research. When given 15 minutes after injury, the food dye appears to improve recovery and reduce inflammation, Fehlings said. But he pointed out several issues that need to be addressed before assuming the treatment could work in people.

“The time window of 15 minutes post-injury is not clinically relevant,” Fehlings wrote in an e-mail. Most patients don’t make it to the emergency room within 15 minutes of getting hurt, so for the treatment to work, he said, it would have to be effective at least two hours after an injury. In addition, the rats experienced injury to their middle back, while most spinal cord injuries in humans are caused by damage to the neck and upper back.

Nedergaard agrees that more research is necessary, and her group hopes to pursue a phase I clinical trial as soon they can get funding. Unfortunately, because blue food dye is so cheap, they’re not likely to find a drug company to sponsor the trials. “There’s no commercial interest because you can buy it by the pound,” Nedergaard said. “We’re planning a clinical trial here in Rochester, but we’ll have to wait for funding from the government.”