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Holograms of Holocaust survivors let crucial stories live on

Pinchas Gutter has told his story many times. Of the horrors of childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto. Of being ripped away from his parents and 10-year-old twin sister the day the family arrived at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, never to see them again. Of barely surviving a brutal Nazi prisoner "death march" away from front lines and allied forces. Of his liberation in 1945.

The story never loses its power, its agony, or its moments of hope. Only this time it's not the 80-year-old Gutter who's telling his tale, but a Princess Leia-like full-body hologram of him. Gutter's digital representation is a product of New Dimensions in Testimony, a high-tech initiative to record survivors' first-person accounts for interactive 3D exhibits that live on long after the storytellers have passed. … Read more

Virtual reality vs. PTSD: Helping combat vets heal

LOS ANGELES--I'm sitting across from a soldier named Garza, trying to get him to open up about why he got caught drinking and driving.

This is a serious offense in the military, and Garza could lose his rank, if not get kicked out of the Army altogether. And it's my job as his superior officer to try to understand that Garza -- who used to be among the best in his unit -- may be struggling with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

This, of course, is a simulation. I'm not in the military, and Garza doesn'… Read more

Breakthrough material is barely more than air

Call them a bunch of intellectual lightweights.

Researchers at HRL Laboratories, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Irvine have created what they say is the lowest-density material, a lattice of hollow tubes of the metal nickel.

Its volume is 99.99 percent air, and its density is 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter--not including the air in or between its tubes. That density is less than one-thousandth that of water.

The metallic microlattice, as the researchers call it, could be useful for absorbing sound, vibration, and shock. Other possibilities, according to HRL: electrodes that could … Read more

Parents to kids: No Internet for you

Today's parents are trying another form of punishment for their misbehaving kids: no Internet.

A new report from the folks at the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future found that three in five American households restrict their kids' access to TV as punishment, a figure that's been virtually the same the past 10 years.

But in a sign of our digital age, restricting access to the Internet has become much more common, with 57 percent of the households surveyed employing that as a form of punishment for their kids under 18.

A majority (69 percent) of the … Read more

Ranking the top game-design colleges

In the early 1980s, each arcade video game kept a list of that game's top players. Three decades later, thanks to a prestigious college-prep service, we now have a list of the top academic players in video game design.

The Princeton Review recently surveyed 50 game design programs at U.S. colleges in order to handpick the eight top schools to attend if you're interested in game development. It based its selections on a variety of criteria including: curriculum quality, school staff and infrastructure, scholarships and financial aid, and career opportunities.

The top eight undergraduate game design programs: … Read more

Digitizing Holocaust memories

Dr. Josef Mengele calmly greets a trainload of prisoners to Auschwitz as human ashes fall from the sky. This scene, from the Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List, is unforgettable, but a dramatic rendering is nowhere near as powerful as hearing from someone who once stood before the real-life Todesengel, or "Angel of Death," as the brutal Nazi came to be known.

Itka Zygmuntowicz, a Holocaust survivor, recounts in a 1996 interview seeing Mengele dressed in his SS uniform and white gloves as he calmly sent people to a concentration camp or to die in a gas chamber. … Read more

Imagining the tech world in 2050

At a kickoff event for collaboration between IBM and the University of Southern California to explore the intersection of creative arts and science and technology, five IBM scientists offered their best guesses on how life would be different in 2050.

In keeping with the Hollywood theme, the moderator of the panel, Bill Pulleyblank, noted that the Mini Cooper automobile has more computing power than Apollo 13--the space capsule that "almost got Tom Hanks killed," he said, referring to the 1995 movie of that name.

Pulleybank led the development of IBM's Blue Gene systems, which account for 4 … Read more

Why did colleges stay mum on MPAA stats?

Correction: This blog initially mischaracterized the statistics that Heidemann commented on. He was referring to claims made about overall P2P use and not specifically about the MPAA's allegations.

John Heidemann was skeptical about what the movie industry was saying about campus piracy.

A researcher in the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, Heidemann had heard the film studios' claim that college students downloading movies on campus were responsible for 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses to piracy.

That added up to about $572 million. So, working with a team of researchers last summer--the famous … Read more