General Electric’s Global Research division has taken its latest technologies and applied them to Santa’s sleigh. GE researchers have taken out the old sled/reindeer/magic-based system and added OLEDs, carbon-fiber composites and ceramic materials, RFID, medical sensors, sodium batteries, and a 500 GB holographic CD.
Seems like a big investment considering he’s been getting it done without it. Click the interactive feature above to check out the upgrades.
By Julie Donnelly
The Boston Public Health Commission plans to use microblogging site Twitter to give residents real-time information about two H1N1 vaccine clinics scheduled for this weekend.
The two clinics — one in Hyde Park on Saturday, and one in West Roxbury on Sunday — are expected to attract large numbers of individuals seeking the vaccine. The Twitter updates will let residents know how long the lines are, along with other pertinent information.
“We are pleased that, because of the increased availability of vaccine, we can offer vaccination to a large number of high-risk Boston residents,” Dr. Barbara Ferrer, BPHC’s executive director, said in a statement. “However, we want to limit the time that people spend waiting in line and Twitter will help us push out information on how the clinics are proceeding.”
People can follow the clinic updates by visiting the Commission’s Web site, bphc.org, and clicking on the Twitter button or the Flu Alert link, or they can sign up for a free Twitter account and follow the Commission at twitter.com/healthyboston.
Clinics will take place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Hyde Park High School, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at the Ohrenberger School in West Roxbury.
The free clinics are only for Boston residents who fall into any of the high-risk groups, including pregnant women, children and young people ages 36 months through 24 years, people who live with or provide care for infants younger than 6 months, including parents, siblings and day care providers, health care and emergency medical workers who have direct patient contact. Vaccine will also be made available to residents ages 25 through 64 with chronic health problems.
Fake newspaper The Onion reports MIT’s Mad Science Research Center’s previous estimates on the debut of its corpse-reanimation technology were about 10 years off.
More New England technology news from the Onion:
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is marked by the degeneration of motor neurons in the brain and spine. Beyond the sure signs of the disease that took the former New York Yankees player now also known as the namesake of ALS, however, little is known about its cause.
Now, a report in MIT Tech Review points to the possibility of treatment on the horizon. A drug made by French biotech Trophos aims to keep neurons in survival mode and away from degeneration mode.
Currently in clinical trials, the drug compound focuses specifically on nerve cell mitochondria and preventing any unhealthiness, dying off, or degeneration associated with it.
By Jim Connolly
There are those people who walk into a room and enter into a discussion and you know right away, there’s something special about them. They are bright, well-informed, focused and energetic. They’re leaders. Put 10 of them in the room, and you have something dynamic.
That’s the way it was with the 2009 MHT Women to Watch event last spring.
You had a room full of people like Cambridge Nanocomp’s Jill Becker who has been building and then selling “atomic layer deposition” systems, sort of like an oven used to develop nanoscale thin films, such as coatings for drillbits. But she often did it one-handed, with a baby in the other arm.
Intel’s Mondira Pant has a batch of microprocessor-related patent applications in the pipeline and has authored some 30 technical papers. She also has focused on developing her skills as a public speaker, being honored as the best speaker at an Intel technical conference, while reaching out to the community to teach dance.
Then, there was Anna Mracek Dietrich, one of the MIT rocket team alums that are building a roadable aircraft, what the rest of us might call a flying car. But Dietrich isn’t just a techie, she’s the business person behind the business at Terafugia. In addition, to show the wisdom of youth, as one of the youngest Women to Watch, she observed that she awaits the day when there will be no need for an event that focuses just on the achievements of women.
For now, though, it’s important to continue to recognize the accomplishments of the women who are driving forward the New England technology sector. So, for the seventh year, Mass High Tech will recognize the women who have contributed to the tech community, but also are poised to be industry leaders of the future.
Time is running out. We need you and your peers to nominate great candidates for the 2010 Women to Watch awards. As members of the tech community you know best who they are.
Nominations close on December 4, with honorees being celebrated on March 18. Please submit your nominations here.
Getting a jump on the year end-lists for 2009, Time has declared its Best Inventions of the Year. Some are impressive, some are scary, and many are things whose inclusion requires an inventive stretch of the definition of the word “invention.”
Before we get to that, only two of the inventions listed have local connections — an electric eye developed at MIT, and an electric microbe developed at UMass Amherst. Does Time know how many things get invented around here? I don’t either, but it’s a lot. I’m not sure how many would make the top 50 for a given year, but I’d imagine more than two. Have these people not seen the Happiness Hat? I was at MIT earlier this year and a robot made me ice cream in 30 seconds. That doesn’t rate?
Meanwhile, among the winners were: a paper airplane, a high-school football offense, and a method to Tweet by thought. All impressive, and they round out a 50-click editorial feature nicely, but cooler than SixthSense? One is a decision not to do something, one is a paper airplane, and one is the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
On the downside, the gas mask bra that won at the Ig Nobel awards a few months back was chosen as one of the five worst inventions of the year.
Tech Review takes a look at a robotic rehabilitation device developed by Northeastern’s Biomedical Mechatronics Laboratory. The NASA-inspired device — video here — is intended to help stroke victims regain muscle movement.
MIT spinout Myomo has developed similar technology, but ran into financial problems earlier this year. Earlier this year, MHT reported on similar technology being developed at MIT for people with cerebral palsy.
Technology Review takes a look at Charlestown-based Cogito Health, who has developed software to determine whether people are depressed or not based on an analysis of their voices.
The MIT Media Lab spinout is based on the research of Sandy Pentland.
Jeffry Picower, the philanthropist behind the foundation that fundedPicower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, has died of a heart attack.
Picower’s name came up as an investor with Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, but he may have made more money than Madoff himself from the scheme. He’d been sued by the lawyer who is liquidating Madoff’s assets, who says Picower himself may have made more than $5 billion in fake profits.
In 2002, the Picower Foundation gave MIT $50 million to establish the Picower Center, which focuses on brain and cognitive research. After Madoff’s arrest in December 2009, the foundation shut down, saying it had run out of money.
Harvard Medical School has developed a H1N1-tracking iPhone app. The app is a project of HMS Mobile, which sounds like a British Navy ship, but says it’s a Harvard Medical group dedicated to helping people deal with day-to-day health emergencies.
Also — that’ll be two bucks. Just around the corner, those anti-capitalist hippies at Children’s Hospital, working with the MIT Media Lab, released their own, free H1N1 tracking app last month.
That’s two H1N1 apps sprouting from about one city block — If things keep up like this, pretty soon you should be able to use your mobile phone to track H1N1 germs chasing you down the street in real-time, or see the normally invisible H1N1 crawling over people’s faces in an augmented reality app, exposing them as the feverish, congested zombies they are.
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