research

If you're looking to attract attention, setting a Guinness World Record is probably a good way to start.

That was the goal -- attracting attention, that is -- for a group of IBM Research scientists who recently set out to make what turned out be the Guinness World Record-certified smallest stop-motion film ever.

Called "A Boy and His Atom," the animated film features a small boy having a good old time as he bounces around, playing catch, and dancing. The twist? The film was shot at the atomic level and features 130 atoms that were painstakingly placed, atom by atom, as the researchers shot 250 individual frames. The images were created at a temperature of negative 268 degrees Celsius and were magnified 100 million times. … Read more

Some people drive high.

They shouldn't, but they're high, so they don't really know what's good for them and what isn't.

Should they get stopped by police, the long nose of the law can sometimes sniff the presence of marijuana in their car.

Should they happen to have nosed their way into some cocaine, there might be traces of white powder around their nostrils.

As yet, though, there hasn't been a machine that can detect the presence of such drugs on one's breath, as there is for alcohol.

Scientists in Sweden, however, believe they have made some progress in creating such a device.… Read more

Have you ever thought how pop-up ads really work on you?

I'm not looking for a rational answer. I am, as usual, trying to explore your feelings.

You see, things can affect us in insidious ways, so much so that we don't realize what we are becoming, until we have irrevocably become it.

Analytics company (1-1 consumer lifestyle predictive analytics company, to be precise) InsightsOne decided they had to know how ads were affecting Americans. In a deeper sense, you understand. So it commissioned Harris Interactive to probe, delve, and elicit.

The results are not an advertisement for … Read more

Me, I'd never buy Birkenstocks.

"I am a prehistoric intellectual" is just not a message I want to send.

Everyone has their peculiar aversions to certain brands, people, and practices. So, in an interesting psychological twist, Raymond James' research arm decided to ask people which cell phones were, to them, the least attractive.

Yes, which cell phones would you rather shave your head bald, pierce both eyebrows and one bottom cheek, and walk through a freezing garden naked than buy?

I am grateful to AllThingsD for not having an aversion to this survey, one which offered severe … Read more

The good thing is that we're a dying species.

This allows us to have a more rounded perspective on life, the world, and every little thing that's coming to replace us.

We know that we are generally incapable of making the right decisions at the right time. So we invented humor to take the edge off it.

We also know that we're increasingly incapable of efficiency and, well, work in general. So we invented robots. Now, we have to decide what we're going to do with them before they do away with us.

In a survey conducted -- with, presumably, entirely straight faces -- by the Huffington Post and YouGov, real human beings offered their more profound thoughts on the robotic future.… Read more

A decent shrink costs at least $100 an hour.

A decent pair of shoes can cost you the same and they last a lot longer. They understand you better too.

Surely, therefore, we shouldn't be surprised that more than half of all Americans admit that if they want to feel better, shopping is their chosen Xanax.

With just a click or two, you can be clicking your heels and forgetting the awful lover who told you that this was surely forever before becoming surly last night.

I have on my screen the results of a survey performed by TNS … Read more

IBM has come up with a new technique for making the tiny switches and memory cells at the heart of computer chips: a drop of ionic liquid.

The technique converts a metal oxide on a computer chip from a conducting to an insulating state and back again, a transition that, using a different approach, is at the heart of conventional semiconductor chips today. Insulators don't conduct electricity and conductors do, so changing a material's state is instrumental to how it performs the logical operations of computer processing.

Today's semiconductor chips work by applying electrical voltage to a &… Read more

If researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have their way, their new heart disease study won't suffer from a small sample size. Using online and mobile phone tools, they hope to get 1 million people from around the world to participate.

Launched this week, their Health eHeart Study (yes, very cute) enables participants to use their smartphones to frequently monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and pulse rate, and submit the resulting data via a secure online portal. The researchers, in turn, will use fancy algorithms to crunch that massive volume of data.

The goal? To use the super sample size to better understand -- and thus predict and prevent -- heart disease.… Read more

The Internet is a valuable tool in today's research for papers and other projects. However, bookmarking endless Web pages is not the most efficient way to keep track of the information you need. Sure, it points you to the source where you found useful information, but you still have to go digging through the Web page to find it again.

Instead of adding to your endless bookmark collection, you should try using a service like Annotary. This service is dedicated to helping you do online research more efficiently, and it's free for individual users. If you want to … Read more