A high-tech virtual training package is being used by the British military to help train military personnel being deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Joint Combat Operation Virtual Environment (JCOVE) contains entire virtual towns modelled in detail on their real-life counterparts in Iraq, as well as insurgents with AK47s, roadside bombs, suicide bombers and civilians. The software also incorporates much of the latest British military hardware including Challenger and Warrior Armoured vehicles, WMIK Land Rovers, Logistic Trucks and Mastiffs. Weapon systems include the SA80 rifle, Minimi machine guns and grenades; and air assets including Apaches, Chinbooks and Predator Unmanned Aerial vehicles.

The package can be used for teaching procedures and tactics for numerous combat scenarios, but at present it is primarily being used to teach soldiers in the Royal Logistic Corps (RLC) the procedures for driving in convoys.

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Researchers from Harvard Medical School have developed Little b, a new computer language that can ‘think’ in the same way as cells and molecular mechanisms, offering the potential for researchers to discover particulars of, for example, drug interactions on the computer desktop.

Most computational methods of modelling biological systems are not unlike writing a document with a pen and paper. Each new project starts from scratch; there are no facilities for cutting and pasting, for linking to other texts, for including images, etc – things that come so ‘naturally’ to electronic documents.

Harvard Medical School researcher Jeremy Gunawardena, a trained mathematician, teamed up with cell biologist and computer scientist Aneil Mallavarapu to eliminate these limitations.

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Blind and visually impaired people will soon be able to surf the web on the go using WebAnywhere, a tool developed by the University of Washington that turns screen-reading into an Internet service that reads aloud web text on any computer with speakers or a headphone connection.

Free screen readers already exist, as so sophisticated commercial programs, however, these must all be installed on a machine before being used. WebAnywhere is the first accessibility tool hosted on the Internet – eliminating the need for it to be installed or downloaded onto a computer. It processes the text on an external server and then sends the audio file to play in the user’s web browser.

See a demonstration of how WebAnywhere works below:-

Visualisation specialist See3D, has been commissioned to develop computer-generated models designed to help doctors improve the diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer.

The development of prostate cancer at an early stage is often difficult to diagnose, depending on where the cancer is located. See3D’s visualisation project, commissioned by Oncomorph Analysis, will over the next two years, identify smaller cancerous regions of the prostate that are currently undetectable to doctors, by the rapid processing of numerical data. Doctors can then use this information to aid diagnosis and subsequently treatment.

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Dubbed the ultimate energy-saving platform, the Wind Board, developed by Micro-Star International (MSI) is an ultra-low power platform designed for a mix of performance, low power usage, suitable for DIY users, mobile applications and those who leave their computers on 24-hours-a-day.

The Wind Board is based on the Intel Atom 230 processor, and has a 1.6GHz core clock, 512KB L2 cache, and supports hyper-threading technology.

Full speed operation of the Wind Board is 35W. Compared to the 200~25W power consumption of a general desktop computer, it can save up to 82 per cent electricity, even when the computer has been left on the 24-hours. The idle power consumption of the Wind Board is less than 10 per cent of a general desktop computer.

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Devices known as brain-machine interfaces could someday be used routinely to help paralysed patients and amputees control prosthetic limbs with just their thoughts. Researchers at the University of Florida have taken the concept a step further, developing a way for computerised devices to not only translate brain signals into movement, but also to evolve with the brain as it learns.

Instead of interpreting brain signals and routing them to a robotic hand or leg, this type of brain-machine interface would adapt to a person’s behavior over time and use the knowledge to help complete a task more efficiently.

Until now, brain-machine interfaces have been designed as one-way conversations between the brain and a computer, with the brain doing all the talking and the computer following commands. The system UF engineers created, allows the computer to have a say in that conversation.

Justin Sanchez, a UF assistant professor of pediatric neurology, and the study’s senior author, said: “In the grand scheme of brain-machine interfaces, this is a complete paradigm change.

“This idea opens up all kinds of possibilities for how we interact with devices. It’s not just about giving instructions but about those devices assisting us in a common goal. You know the goal, the computer knows the goal and you work together to solve the task.”

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Here is the first known photograph of the great grandfather of modern digital computers. The black and white image, which has been unearthed in the archives at The University of Manchester, shows a development version of ‘The Baby’ taking up a whole room with its towering Post Office racks and jumble of wiring.

The Small Scale Experimental Machine successfully executed its first program on 21 June 1948 and paved the way for the modern computer.

Built and designed by Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams at The University of Manchester, it was the first electronic digital computer capable of storing a program.

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Buses could be used as mobile sensing platforms, sending out live information that can be used to control traffic and detect road hazards, according to European researchers.

In a test, researchers with the Moryne project equipped city buses with environmental sensors and cameras, allowing the vehicles to become transmitters of measurements, warnings and live or recorded videos to anyone allowed to access the data.

The researchers developed a range of technologies for mobile sensing, data acquisition, analyses and telecommunications that could be placed in public buses as a part of a larger effort to improve road safety and traffic management.

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