It’s the beginning of a brave new world. An autonomous robot at Duke took a bioposy (using a turkey breast and a grape) using real-time 3D ultrasound scans.

Wow, Google is making a big move into the social gaming space with it’s investment in Zynga. One wonders if Zynga might consider broadening it’s horizons beyond Facebook? Of course, Google has yet to get it’s facebook competitor off the ground.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/google-secretly-invested-100-million-in-zynga-preparing-to-launch-google-games/?goback=.gde_138591_member_24632691

A professor at University of Essex compared physical ability of gamers with atheletes. I agree with much of the article feedback, the researcher picked an extreme example (10 hour/day gamer) to conclude they have the fitness level of a 60 year old smoker.  The good news, his extreme gamer candidates are happy and have great reaction times.

Here is the the Telegraph article.

As a way to promote the Steam platform for the Mac, Valve is giving away the popular 3D puzzle game, Portal, until May 24.

So hop over to the Steam web site and download without delay.  I never played it before.  It has an interesting game mechanic with nice graphics for the era in which it was developed.

Discovery News reports that an Israeli company (eXaudios) has released software (Magnify) which detects a user’s emotional state in real time. Its primarily use is in call centers, but might prove an interesting input for a game system. Since it would require the player be involved in a multi-user chat session, the game scenarios would be limited. The game mechanics could tweak game play or narrative branching based upon the player’s stress level to amp up the excitement.

The software is only accurate 76-83% of the time. While investigating the failure cases, they discovered that certain diseases exhibit detectable speech patterns. So you may be diagnosed with Parkinson’s the next time you call your bank!

eXaudios presented at Demo 2010 and won the $1M prize.

Dr. Taekman was interviewed for an article in the March edition of Airtran’s Go magazine. Given it’s high circulation, hopefully this will give serious game development some more visibility.

Slashdot reports that George Mason University’s game development BS degree enrollment is going gang busters. They expected 30 enrollees and got 200! The school’s new bachelor’s degree in video game design is the only 4 year program in the DC area.

From Slashdot, Apple has patented remote keyless entry using an iPhone.  Your phone will use Near Field Communications to unlock a car door, office door, house door, etc.

So now your house has to be Mac compatible as well! Can the iDoor be far behind?

This New York Times article hints at the future of powering portable devices using body motion. Watches have mechanical winding mechanisms based upon body movement, but scientist at Princeton can generate electricity from body movement by “printing piezoelectric crystals onto flexible, biocompatible rubberlike material”.

Between this and RCA’s WiFi charger introduced at CES 2010, will charge cables go the way of the buggy whip?

Macworld reports that Kaweah Delta Health Care District is initiating a trial of 100 iPad for health care workers. They are accessing hospital computer systems via Citrix which eliminates a lot of the HIPAA concerns, but they make no mention of how well the iPad’s touch interface works on systems designed for keyboard and mouse.

http://www.macworld.com/article/150742/2010/04/ipad_hospitals.html?lsrc=rss_main