Market trends and business perspectives
Professor Audrey van der Meer at NTNU believes that national guidelines should be put into place to ensure that children receive at least a minimum of handwriting training.
Results from several studies have shown that both children and adults learn more and remember better when writing by hand.
Now another study confirms the same: choosing handwriting over keyboard use yields the best learning and memory. [Read more…] about Why writing by hand makes kids smarter
Have you ever wondered whether the brains of right-handed people work differently from those of left-handers? Is it possible to distinguish between them by observing their brain activity in response to stimuli or tasks?
These are important questions from the perspectives of both basic sciences and application-based fields such as brain-computer interfaces, rehabilitation robotics, and augmented reality.
Since the past few years, a team of scientists at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Korea, has been actively conducting fundamental research to answer these questions. [Read more…] about Touch-and-know: Brain activity during tactile stimuli reveals hand preferences in people
In rodents with type 2 diabetes, a single surgical injection of a protein called fibroblast growth factor 1 can restore blood sugar levels to normal for weeks or months. Yet how this growth factor acts in the brain to generate this lasting benefit has been poorly understood.
Clarifying how this occurs might lead to more effective diabetes treatments that tap into the brain’s inherent potential to ameliorate the condition.
“Until recently, the brain’s ability to normalize elevated blood sugar levels in diabetic animals was unrecognized,” said Dr. Michael Schwartz, professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine and co-director of the UW Medicine Diabetes Institute. [Read more…] about The brain can induce diabetes remission in rodents, but how?
Cloud robotics are enabling robots to access large amounts of computing power that their bodies do not have the physical space to accommodate. Hundreds if not tens of thousands of servers are potentially at the service of small robots which can be in remote locations well away from the nearest supercomputer or data centre, only being connected by, for example, Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
This allows robots to call on powerful, cloud-based applications, such as speech recognition and language, when they are interacting with their users.
At the moment, most cloud robotics systems are linked to specific robots. So, for example, SoftBank’s Pepper robot is linked to the cloud robotics artificial intelligence system developed by Cocoro, another SoftBank company.
Pepper has about 25 onboard sensors to collect a wide range of information – sight, sound, touch and movement. That covers three of the five senses that human beings generally use, the two missing are taste and smell.
Pepper can be connected to the internet through Wi-Fi or Ethernet, both of which are incorporated into the robot. [Read more…] about Cloud robotics: Talking cloud and saying nothing
