Technology

Media stories say consumers fear 3D-induced nausea, headaches and even AIDS, The Hollywood Reporter said, but President Jim Chabin of the International 3D Society told delegates to the 3D Experience gathering in New York, "There's absolutely no data at all that shows there is any problem with viewing 3D. But if you ask the public, this (AIDS) is one of their concerns."

Chabin said the problem for those demonstrating an array of 3D TVs and other home-entertainment systems at the 3D Experience is the lack of content.

The executive, Stephen McGill, director of Microsoft's Xbox and entertainment division in the United Kingdom, told the fan site Xbox360Achievements that consumers don't need Blu-ray, The Daily Telegraph reported.

He said adding a Blu-ray drive to the Xbox 360 would not help to extend the shelf life of the game console, the report said.

A report by the National Research Council says no single identifying trait has been found that is stable and distinctive across all groups, and that to strengthen the science and improve system effectiveness, additional research is needed at virtually all levels of design and operation, a National Academy of Sciences release said Friday.

"For nearly 50 years, the promise of biometrics has outpaced the application of the technology," study chairman Joseph N. Pato at Hewlett-Packard's HP Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif., said.

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Air Force's 59th Medical Wing say they're not only looking for a better indicator of current or past use, but they'd like to be able to identify people prone to abusing drugs in the first place, a PNNL release said Friday.

Funded by the Department of Defense, the two-year study will lay the foundation for future work to determine who might be susceptible to hydrocodone, the release said.

So-called start-stop systems that turn off a car when it is idling and reignite the engine when the driver releases the brake will be coming to the United States and Canada in the next five years, The Detroit News reported.

The technology is widespread in Europe and will be embraced in North America as a tool to meet increasingly stringent fuel-economy and emissions requirements, auto experts say.

"Engineers kill for one-tenth of a mile per gallon," Joe Phillippi of AutoTrends Consulting Inc. said. "In city driving, it would make a huge impact."

Scientists at Purdue University are taking part in the effort to develop devices that use sound and radio waves to detect the presence of hidden explosives, a university release said Tuesday.

Purdue is part of a $7 million initiative funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

The aim is to use sound and radio waves to penetrate objects, producing a new set of waves that bounce back to identify underlying materials.

Experts say the announcement shows Beijing's intention to take the lead in exploring previously inaccessible parts of the ocean floor rich in oil, minerals and other resources China would like to mine, The New York Times reported.

"They're in it for a penny and a pound," Don Walsh, a deep-ocean diving expert who recently visited the submersible and its builders in China, said. "It's a very deliberate program."

Named after a mythical sea dragon, the Jiaolong was announced publicly last month after eight years of secretive development.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, say the material -- dubbed e-skin -- could overcome a key problem in robotics, determining the amount of force needed to hold and manipulate a wide range of objects, a university release said Monday.

"The idea is to have a material that functions like the human skin, which means incorporating the ability to feel and touch objects," Ali Javey, associate professor of electrical engineering, said.

Cardiff University researchers say human cytomegalovirus, or HCMV, is a major infectious cause of congenital malformations worldwide and is also known to cause life-threatening disease in transplant patients and people with HIV/AIDS.

The development of new treatments has been difficult as scientists have been unable to stably replicate HCMV outside the human body, a university release said.
Successfully cloning HCMV will help researchers develop antivirals and vaccines against the disease-causing virus, scientists say.

The computing power of home computers, offered to astronomers when the owners' machines are idle, is helping to sift through huge amounts of astronomical data in a program called Einstein@Home, a release by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany said Thursday.

The pulsar discovered by three citizen scientists -- a German and an American couple -- is the first deep-space discovery by the program, which used donated computer time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 countries.