Patients in therapy to overcome addictions have a new arena to test their coping skills — the virtual world. A new study by University of Houston Associate Professor Patrick Bordnick says that a virtual reality (VR) environment can provide the climate necessary to spark an alcohol craving so that patients can practice how to say “no” in a realistic and safe setting.

Bordnick, of the UH Graduate College of Social Work, investigates VR as a tool for assessing and treating addictions. He studied 40 alcohol-dependent people who were not receiving treatment (32 men and eight women). Wearing a VR helmet, each was guided through 18 minutes of virtual social environments that included drinking. The participant’s drink of choice was included in each scene.

In 2001, religious fundamentalists destroyed two colossal, ancient Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan. Behind those statues, there are caves decorated with artwork dating from the 5th to 9th centuries A.D and those also suffered from the destruction of the Taliban along with their natural environment, but recently they became the source of a major discovery.

Scientists at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) have shown that the paintings were made of oil, hundreds of years before the technique was “invented” in Europe. The results were presented at a scientific conference in Japan last January and are just now published in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry.

Using a multidisciplinary mix of geometry, biological research and techniques developed to solve problems on supercomputers, scientists at the University of California, San Diego have shown for the first time how a genome is organized in three-dimensional space.

Researchers led by Cornelis Murre, a professor of biology at UC San Diego, and Steve Cutchin, senior scientist for visualization services at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), used the gene encoding the immunoglobulin heavy chain locus — responsible for generating diverse kinds of antibodies — to demonstrate the structure of the genome.

The observations, the researchers say, permit an insight into the structure of the human genome, which until now has remained elusive.

The National Health Service (NHS), the British government-run hospital system, has begun adopting a reminder service they say helps reduce missed patient appointments and resulting losses in hospital revenue. Called the Managed Appointment Reminder Service (MARS), the system aims to help NHS Trusts slash an estimated £614 million out of their operating costs each year due to patient no-shows.

The MARS service was developed by Island Communications in association with the NHS and mobile messaging partner Mediaburst, and has been successfully piloted at Hull and East Yorkshire Woman and Children's Hospital(1).

The hospital’s Paediatric Outpatients Unit was the first to test the system.

The electric solar wind sail developed at the Finnish Meteorological Institute has moved rapidly from invention towards implementation. Electric sail propulsion might have a large impact on space research and moving in space in general.

The electric solar wind sail developed by Dr. Pekka Janhunen at the Finnish Meteorological Institute might revolutionise travelling in deep space. The electric sail is a Finnish invention which uses the solar wind as its thrust source and therefore needs no fuel or propellant. The solar wind is a continuous plasma stream emanating from the Sun. Changes in the properties of the solar wind cause auroral brightening and magnetic storms, among other things.

The Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre(IMEC), an independent research center focusing on next generations chips and systems and enabling technologies for ambient intelligence, has developed a battery-free, wireless, 2-channel electroencephalography(EEG) system.

The interesting hook is that its hybrid power supply uses body heat and ambient light. It combines a thermoelectric generator that uses the heat dissipated from a person’s temples and silicon photovoltaic cells.

The entire system is wearable and integrated into a device resembling headphones. The system can provide more than 1mW on average indoors, which is more than enough for this application.

In January, Skyhook Wireless Inc. announced that Apple would use Skyhook’s WiFi Positioning System (WPS) for its popular Map applications. The WPS database contains information on access points throughout the world. Skyhook itself provides most of the data in the database, with users contributing via direct entries to the database, and requests for localization.

ETH Zurich Professor Srdjan Capkun of the Department of Computer Science and his team of researchers analysed the security of Skyhook’s positioning system. The team’s results demonstrate the vulnerability of Skyhook’s and similar public WLAN positioning systems to location spoofing attacks.

Robot soccer is an ambitious high-tech competition for universities, research institutes and industry. Several major tournaments are planned for 2008, the biggest of which is the ‘RoboCup German Open.’

From April 21-25, over 80 teams of researchers from more than 15 countries are expected to face off in Hall 25 at the Hannover Messe. In a series of soccer matches in several leagues, they will be putting the latest technologies on display. The tournament is being organized and carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS in Sankt Augustin.

Cycling is great fun and and modern bicycles give riders a lot of options. Perhaps too many. For example, novice riders getting onto a cycle with 27 gears change gears too infrequently and too late, get out of breath and don’t enjoy themselves.

Some new research may soon help; recently on display was a bicycle with adaptronic components which report inappropriate biomechanical stress and an intelligent pedal crank that helps the biker to direct his strength.

Fraunhofer researchers recently displayed a concept. There are two piezo-sensors integrated in one of the pedal cranks of the bicycle. One function of the sensors is to measure the forces that propel the rider forward and show him how ‘evenly’ he is pedaling.

The National Grid Service in the UK and the TeraGrid in the U.S. have joined forces to help University College London (UCL) scientists shed light on how life on Earth may have originated.

Deep ocean hydrothermal vents have long been suggested as possible sources of biological molecules, such as RNA and DNA, but it was unclear how they could survive the high temperatures and pressures that occur round these vents.

Peter Coveney and colleagues at the UCL Centre for Computational Science have used computer simulation to provide insight into the structure and stability of DNA while inserted into layered minerals.