cambridge

If you're the type who looks away when you get stuck with a needle, you may long for the day when "Star Trek"-style medical devices will painlessly flood our veins with every kind of drug imaginable.

For some women undergoing in vitro fertilization, daily intramuscular injections of progesterone in oil (PiO) can be painful and stressful. Infertility is already immensely taxing for some -- researchers have shown it can generate levels of anxiety and depression on a par with those from cancer, heart disease, and HIV.

Progesterone helps carry the pregnancy to term, but sometimes must be injected up to 70 times. PiOna is a concept auto-injector from Cambridge Consultants that not only hides the icky thing from sight, but provides feedback about when the 1.5-inch needle is ready to use and guides the user through the process. … Read more

Some screams come from the gut.

Yes, just like that horrible monster thing in "Alien."

Now scientists with only extreme discovery in their locker of ambition have decided to learn, once and for all, whether a scream in outer space can awaken alien ears.

The Cambridge University Spaceflight team behind this experiment are truly committed explorers.

They have created a video featuring Albert Einstein -- or at least a posh-speaking version of him.

The idea is very simple. They want you to go to YouTube and record your best and most frightening, piercing scream. Indeed, the scientists want you to scream "in a creative way." … Read more

Far beyond the Arctic Circle -- nearing the North Pole, where tundra, snow, and glaciers are commonplace year-round -- is an area called Cambridge Bay in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut. It sits in the Canadian Arctic and is only accessible by plane or boat.

This is the newest location to hit Google Maps Street View.

"Today, we've set out on a mission to build the most comprehensive map of Canada's Arctic region to date," Google Earth Outreach team member Karin Tuxen-Bettman wrote in a blog post today. "This is our first trip to the … Read more

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about AV receiver feature glut. Today's receiver manufacturers put an inordinate amount of time and money into designing feature-laden receivers, and feature glut might be part of the reason why today's receivers don't sound as good as receivers did in the 1980s. I get it, today's consumers rarely compare one receiver's sound with another receiver, but they can count HDMI connections, so that's where the money goes.

It's not that Denon, Onkyo, Pioneer, Sony, and Yamaha aren't trying to make great-sounding receivers, … Read more

Does your coif suffer from orientational disorder? Have you checked the gravitational effects on your locks lately? Can you solve the differential equation in your beehive?

Well, scientists now can. Pioneering British researchers have succeeded in formulating an equation that unravels the deep physics mysteries of that great frontier of science, human ponytails.

In a study that screams Ig Nobel Prize, the researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Warwick, and Unilever published a hirsute equation that for the first time describes how hairs hang together and predicts the form of a ponytail.

"We identify the balance of forces in various regions of the ponytail, extract a remarkably simple equation of state from laboratory measurements of human ponytails, and relate the pressure to the measured random curvatures of individual hairs," Raymond Goldstein, Robin Ball, and Patrick Warren write in Physical Review Letters.

You'd think these boffins went a-hunting for ponytails in the wild and examined specimens back in the lab. That was probably too hairy a prospect. … Read more

The University of Cambridge is allowing outsiders to (figuratively) get into Sir Isaac Newton's head.

The Cambridge University Library today published scanned papers from the famed scientist, including some of the mathematics he developed to arrive at the principles of what are now called "Newtonian physics." The university, where Newton spent many of of his student and working years, plans to publish most of the papers it holds in digital format over time.

The first selection includes hand-written manuscripts on his mathematical work from the 1660s as well as Newton's own first edition of Philosophiae Naturalis … Read more

Technology development firm Cambridge Consultants has created a military targeting system that can track 5-inch shells traveling more than 1,000 mph, allowing gunners to improve their shooting.

The system, which the company calls the first of its kind, is based on a 3D holographic radar known as the Land and Surface Target Scorer (LSTS). It can track highly mobile targets in a cluttered radar field.

In recent trials at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, the radar system was mounted on a tethered pontoon to track projectiles in a 360-degree, 1,000-foot coverage zone.

The LSTS tracked the trajectory and burst points of inert projectiles fired by a naval gun at a rate of one per three seconds. A laptop showed the results in near real time. … Read more

See that kid slouching against the wall? He might be "sensing" through it with his backpack.

Cambridge Consultants has a new through-wall radar that's compact and inconspicuous. The Prism 200c can fit in a backpack and still tell you if there are people on the other side of a wall.

Users simply lean against a wall with the backpack and monitor the room on the other side with any portable electronic device linked to the backpack.

The device has batteries that can last up to eight hours. It can sense through brick as well as concrete walls.

Radar sensing through walls is a technology that's been around for some time (including in handheld formats), and even mobile robots are touting the sensor arrays that can see through concrete walls for military applications.

Targets generally have to move or breathe to be detected. The technology can't discriminate between humans and animals or other moving objects.

Cambridge's latest radar follows the arm-operated Prism 200, which is being used by police and military personnel around the world. There's a video of it here.

The company plans to show off the Prism 200c at Global Security Asia 2011 in Singapore this month. … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--If I learned one thing Thursday, it's that I want a folding car.

You might laugh at that notion, but I'm here to tell you it's not fantasy: the folding car is coming, and if it succeeds, it could change the way urban environments look forever.

That's my take after a visit to the MIT Media Lab here, the 25-year-old hotbed of research and innovation that has produced the underlying technology behind things like Guitar Hero, Lego Mindstorms, E Ink, One Laptop per Child, and much, much more.

Click here for a photo gallery on MIT Media Lab. … Read more