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07/25/2008
Scientist Builds Visual Circuits to Harness Your Brain's GPU
Wired News
A cognitive scientist wants to employ M.C. Escher's bag of optical tricks to get your eyes to solve logic problems. More specifically,
Mark Changizi, a former Caltech fellow and current cognitive science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute suggests that human beings can use their brain's visual-processing abilities to solve LSAT-style logic puzzles, simply by staring at images designed to get their eyes to compute. . . . 'Autistic people can't be any smarter than us, but probably what they have is the ability to harness parts of their brains that we can't,' Changizi said. 'What their amazing powers show is that we have these amazing powers. We totally under-appreciate the powers of computation that we use all the time.'
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07/16/2008
Region wins in $1.6B IBM pact
Times Union
Although it's unclear where the new packaging center will be located, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy will play an important role at the facility as a research partner. Kelly said that IBM's $100 million supercomputer at the Rensselaer Technology Park in North Greenbush will be "very synergistic" with the packaging facility. . . . Kelly, an RPI graduate, said Robert Hull, an RPI professor and head of the school's materials science and engineering department, will play a role at the packaging center. . . . Hull released a statement saying the "breadth of our faculty's expertise in materials science, semiconductors and electronic packaging, is a natural fit" for the center. "We look forward to exploring opportunities for further collaboration with our valued partner," Hull said.
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07/15/2008
Wireless Device Helps Illuminate the Role of Light on Human Health
Scientific American
In an effort to gauge exactly how light affects our body clocks,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lighting Research Center (LRC) in Troy, N.Y., has developed a device called a Daysimeter. . . . 'We envision the Daysimeter, along with other biological markers [such as hormones] will allow us to get a more detailed circadian profile of a particular person,' says
LRC director Mark Rea, a Rensselaer professor of cognitive science. Researchers can measure the effect of circadian light exposure on hormone levels through blood samples collected from subjects. 'We're fully expecting that we'll see variation among the population,' he notes.
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07/07/2008
Hot rods make boiling better
Nature News
For a faster, more bubbly boil, try adding a layer of copper nanorods to the inside of your kettle. Researchers led by
Nikhil Koratkar at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have discovered that lining a copper pot with copper nanorods makes water boil much more quickly. . . . “Classical theories for boiling predict that bubbles should not nucleate from nanopores due to the very high surface tension forces at that scale,” says Koratkar. The team's experiments used a copper surface covered in nanorods up to 50 nanometres in diameter and placed this in a liquid chamber. The rods had a dramatic effect on bubble formation: Koratkar saw 30 times more bubbles forming on his copper nanorod-lined surface than on a surface made from just copper.
Read the story, which was also covered by the BBC World Service’s Science in Action, Scientific American, Computerworld, and the Times Union.
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