UD researcher explores player reactions to characters’ exaggerated physiques
College students playing Japanese fighting video games often object to the unrealistic depictions of the characters, drawn with exaggerated and highly sexualized physiques, but they say the mechanics of the game itself are more important to them. (more…)
A team of scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has found evidence of past water movement throughout a Martian meteorite, reviving debate in the scientific community over life on Mars.
In 1996, a group of scientists at Johnson led by David McKay, Everett Gibson and Kathie Thomas-Keprta published an article in Science announcing the discovery of biogenic evidence in the Allan Hills 84001(ALH84001) meteorite. In this new study, Gibson and his colleagues focused on structures deep within a 30-pound (13.7-kilogram) Martian meteorite known as Yamato 000593 (Y000593). The team reports that newly discovered different structures and compositional features within the larger Yamato meteorite suggest biological processes might have been at work on Mars hundreds of millions of years ago. (more…)
UD joins research team teaching robots to respond in disaster emergencies
How do you teach a robot to get into vehicle and drive it? Three University of Delaware professors plan to figure it out by the end of next year.
Christopher Rasmussen, Ioannis Poulakakis and Herbert Tanner are part of a team competing in a new U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Challenge. The team, with members from 10 schools, led by Drexel University, is one of several groups worldwide working to advance robotics technology for disaster relief. (more…)
For women of mixed racial or ethnic backgrounds, a new method for measuring bone health may improve the odds of correctly diagnosing their risk of osteoporosis and bone fractures, according to a UCLA-led study.
Currently, assessing osteoporosis and the risk of fractures from small accidents like falls requires a bone density scan. But because these scans don’t provide other relevant fracture-related information, such as bone size and the amount of force a bone is subjected to during a fall, each patient’s bone density is examined against a national database of people with the same age and race or ethnicity. (more…)
*Milestone lets users explore a re-imagined, no-compromises Windows experience.*
BARCELONA, Spain — Feb. 29, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview — the next milestone of the Windows operating system. This latest preview will be made available for download starting today at https://preview.windows.com. The Windows 8 Consumer Preview offers a more robust experience for testing the world’s most popular operating system and is available to the widest range of people yet following the initial release of the Windows 8 Developer Preview late last year. The Developer Preview received more than 3 million downloads.
“With Windows 8, we reimagined the different ways people interact with their PC and how to make everything feel like a natural extension of the device, whether using a Windows 8 tablet, laptop or all-in-one,” said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft. “The Windows 8 Consumer Preview brings a no-compromises approach to using your PC.” (more…)
*Cloud pioneer now offers its suite of infrastructure web services for the new Tokyo Region and localized Premium Support in Japanese*
*Mitsui & Co., gumi Inc., Zynga and COOKPAD among the companies already using Amazon Web Services from new AWS Tokyo Region*
SEATTLE, Mar 02, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced 
the launch of its new Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, the fifth Region in which the company has deployed its global cloud computing platform. Japan-based businesses and global companies with customers in Japan can now leverage the AWS suite of infrastructure web services to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Starting today, AWS is also offering support in Japanese for any customer with a Japanese language preference. The newly launched Tokyo Region is the second Region in Asia Pacific for AWS, and is now available for any business or software developer to sign up and get started today at https://aws.amazon.com and https://aws.amazon.com/jp. (more…)
*comScore Releases Latest Mobile Industry Insights from its MobiLens Product*
Tokyo, Japan, February 25, 2011 – comScore Japan KK, a wholly owned subsidiary of comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the 
digital world, today released the latest insights into mobile usage in Japan from its comScore MobiLens product. The report found that Japanese users are continuing to adopt smartphone devices, with Apple and Google platforms seeing significant increases in subscribers. (more…)
