Finnish company MyOrigo has unveiled what it describes as “the first motion-controlled smartphone”, launching ‘mydevice’, a device enabling consumers to make calls, search the web, schedule meetings, take pictures, send emails and view and edit documents in a “completely intuitive way.”
MyOrigo claims ‘mydevice’ will stand out through a number of usability factors. ‘Motion Control’, [...]

The idea that women are hunting for rich husbands while men choose wives for their beauty is a long way from the truth, suggests a new study.
While some celebrity marriages may fit this pattern, most men and women are seeking a mate who is similar to them in qualities such as income, beauty, and desire [...]

Stem cells may be present in the amniotic fluid that cushions a baby in its mother’s womb, suggests a new study.
If these cells prove to have the power to differentiate into different tissue types, they may provide a solution to the ethical dilemma associated with using human embryonic stem cells (ESCs), say reproductive scientists.
Markus Henstschläger [...]

The signs of a travel uptick are tentative but promising. Lufthansa registered a slight rise in passengers in May from the year before. Thomas Cook, Europe’s second-largest tourism company, based in the Frankfurt suburb of Oberursel, says bookings are up 8% since major fighting ended in Iraq. And Paris-based Club Med eked out a first-half [...]

Marijuana does not substantially harm thinking skills of long-term recreational users, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego.
They analyzed 15 previously published research studies, and the only side effect found was a minimal reduction in learning and memory.
UCSD researchers evaluated the neurocognitive abilities of 704 cannabis users and 484 nonusers. [...]

AIDS research could shift into a higher gear thanks to an advance that for the first time allows HIV to fully replicate inside mouse cells.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco added a human protein called hp32 to mouse cells to help HIV properly assemble its genome into viral particles. The team is [...]

The Helios Prototype crashed Thursday near the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands about 30 minutes after taking off. The investigators will spend the next week on Kauai trying to figure out what went wrong.
The remotely piloted, $15 million aircraft was traveling at a speed of about 21 mph at 3,000 feet [...]

A Swedish company, PrintDreams, the developer of Random Movement Printing Technology (RMPT), today has announced the release of PrintBrush, the world’s smallest and only fully format-independent printer.
The printer has the length of a normal ball-point pen while its width and height are more or less equivalent to the width of a modern mobile phone. [...]

Smartbox.com: Years ago, letter carriers used to knock or ring people’s doorbells to deliver the mail. But in 1916, efficiency experts determined that they were losing almost two hours daily waiting for patrons to come to the door; so the Post Office required that every household have a mailbox or letter slot.
What about [...]

It’s not just women who have biological clocks, British researchers reported on Wednesday.
As men get older, it takes them longer to father a child, the team at the University of Hull reported.
Doctors have long known that the older a woman is, the more trouble she will have conceiving. Men can, at least theoretically, father children [...]

Villagers were baffled when they awoke to find their homes invaded by garden gnomes.
The fourteen home-owners couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw there lawns covered with the statuettes
Dopey pranksters have been blamed for the incident, which left residents mystified as to who brought them into Brattleby, Lincolnshire.
The gnomes – normally a target for burglars [...]

A scanner the government is testing for airport screening reveals much more than meets the eye to be comfortable for most passengers.
Susan Hallowell, director of the Transportation Security Administration’s security laboratory, sacrificed a large measure of her own modesty Wednesday to demonstrate the problem.
She stepped into a metal booth that bounced X-rays off her [...]

One of the most ambitious efforts to re-engineer the mouse is taking place in a sprawling, Starship Enterprise-themed facility set in a bucolic enclave outside Houston. It’s the headquarters of Lexicon Genetics, a biotech company dedicated to developing new, genetically offbeat strains of mice; it is, in effect, a designer-mouse factory. The company’s goal: to [...]

Liver-transplant operations are almost routine these days. Finding suitable donors remains the hard part. Each year thousands of patients suffering from cirrhosis, hepatitis and other severe liver ailments die while on waiting lists. Artificial livers aren’t likely to fill the gap, either. The liver is almost as complex as the brain: it handles some 400 [...]

If the synthesizer business has a household name, it’s Robert Moog – even if most people don’t know how to pronounce it. In the mid-’60s, Moog (rhymes with rogue) built the first keyboardcontrolled synthesizers, huge switchboard panels that generated the R2-D2-style bleeps and faux orchestral sounds of the space age. In the early ’70s, his [...]

Comic book writer Peter Milligan explains why the Princess of Wales is perfect mutant material
The comic book’s characters have crazy mutant powers, but these powers are really vehicles for exploring our celebrity and fame-obsessed society.
The New York Times called it “a witty blast of media criticism disguised as a garish spin-off of the [...]

Japanese researchers said on Wednesday they have proved mice act strangely after being exposed to electromagnetism similar to that often monitored ahead of a big earthquake.
In their experiments, researchers exposed mice to low levels of electromagnetism which people cannot feel, said Takeshi Yagi, professor at Osaka University in western Japan.
“The mice then became [...]

The counselling routinely offered to people in the immediate aftermath of a disaster seldom protects them from developing post-traumatic stress – and it could even delay their recovery.
This is the conclusion of a comprehensive review of the “single-session debriefings” offered to victims straight after an incident. In single-session debriefings, a counsellor talks to a victim [...]

HUMAN embryonic stem cells have been grown in mice in a development which scientists claim could be a turning point for future drug trials.
Researchers in South Korea said the breakthrough offered the prospect of potentially dangerous clinical studies of new medicines being carried out in mice rather than humans.
The Maria BioTech institute in [...]

Rafe Needleman: At an auto show a few years ago, I saw an exhibit that featured a custom-painted Mustang on a rotating turntable. As the light played across it, the car changed color in front of my eyes, from green to purple and back again. I was transfixed.
Nowadays you see flip-flop paint schemes [...]

Solar power is being harnessed at public toilets on Portobello’s promenade, perhaps lighting the way forward across the city.
The loos and washrooms have been fitted with a giant rooftop solar panel which catches what sunshine there is and uses it to heat water for the sinks.
The sun-powered loos – believed to be the [...]

Girls in Canada’s high schools are less confident on computers and the Internet than boys and use them less, says a study that describes a new kind of digital divide in Canadian society.
The new digital divide, says the study released yesterday by Statistics Canada, is not about access to computers and the Internet — that [...]

E-mail service will be available on all domestic flights in North America before the end of next year, although services elsewhere in the world will take two to three years to become widespread, according to the chief executive officer of Tenzing Communications Inc., which provides technology and services for in-flight messaging.
United Air Lines Inc. announced [...]

Talking on a mobile phone while driving your car is just as dangerous when using hands-free equipment as when holding the phone in your hand, according to a Swedish study published on Monday.
The National Road Administration (SNRA) tested 48 people in driving simulators, dividing them into two groups — one with and the one [...]

Little packets that can make water in the developing world safer to drink for a few cents a day were unveiled on Thursday, as they undergo field tests in the Philippines, Guatemala and Iraq.
Procter and Gamble, better known for Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste, said its PuR Water Purifier had the potential to save [...]