BumpTop Prototype Keepin’ it Real: Pushing the Desktop Metaphor with Physics, Piles and the Pen

Hey…Into generative art and graphical programming environments?  Checkout vvvv, it's like Processing and MAX/MSP had a kid.

Tactile 3D is a user interface made to browse and organize all your existing files in 3D using shapes and sounds to identify folders and files on your hard drive. [free trial]

CPUShare aims to translate your free CPU time to supercomputing credits on the same network at a later time or real hard cash (soon).

New software developed by Purdue University’s Wen Jiang enables scientists to observe viruses at an unprecedented level of detail.

“While before we could only see virus parts that were symmetric, we can now see those that have non-symmetric structures, such as portions of the one our paper focuses on, the Epsilon 15 virus that attacks salmonella. . .This software will enable a substantial expansion of what we can see and study. We remain limited to observing those viruses that are identical from one individual viral particle to the next — which, sadly, is still only a small portion of the viral species that are out there. But it is a major step forward toward our goal of seeing them all.”

[press release]

via Medgadget

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have set a new world’s record by performing the first million-atom computer simulation in biology. Using the “Q Machine� supercomputer, Los Alamos computer scientists have created a molecular simulation of the cell’s protein-making structure, the ribosome. The project, simulating 2.64 million atoms in motion, is more than six times larger than any biological simulations performed to date. [press release]

via Biology News Net

Researchers at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs and Germany-based BASF Future Systems and Printed Systems unveiled the worlds first working circuit made using regular printing methods. Their method, unlike others experimenting with organic circuitry printing, doesn’t involve any lithographic steps. The conductive ink is simply printed and evaporates, leaving a crystalline semiconducting material.

via Sci-Tech Today

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI), like the one developed at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, places electrodes in key locations on the user’s scalp to detect nerve activity which is then translated to walking or movement of the virtual character’s hands. The team at the Graz University of Technology have incorporated a fully immersive Virtual Cave for a mind bending walk by thinking. [nature article]

via KurzweilAI

IBVA

BCI info

Jan Cepek BCI

NASA’s Ames Research Center has a team working on two processor systems that are proprietary variations of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which use an evolutionary algorithm to reconstruct damaged layouts to its proper configuration. Andy Tyrell at the UK’s University of York is working on immunotronics, a digital immune system that can detect corrupt strings of data that need attention to be fixed on the fly.

via Wired