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'Thinking cap' controls prosthetic arm with thoughts, not surgery
The ability to control prosthetics with only the power of your mind has been around for a while, but it typically requires control electronics implanted directly into the patient. With this new, non-invasive method developed at the University of Houston, however, amputees can command their robotic limbs without surgery. Instead of implants, the UH system uses a wearable "thinking cap" (aka an EEG) that monitors brain activity externally through the scalp. A brain-machine interface (BMI) then interprets these brain waves and converts that intention into mechanical motion. Basically, the patient thinks about picking up an object, the BMI recognizes the intention and then tells an attached prosthetic to do so. Even at this early stage of development, University of Houston researchers have gotten the system to work properly 80 percent of the time.
AT&T's U-verse coming to University of Houston residence hall
Just in case a free iPod touch / iPhone isn't enough to convince you to attend a certain university, how's about dorm-installed U-verse? Hailed as the first planned deployment of AT&T's fiber-based services into student housing on a college campus, the University of Houston has teamed up with the aforementioned carrier in order to bring TV and broadband internet to "every room of a 547,000-square-foot residence hall under construction for graduate and professional students." When complete, The Calhoun Lofts will be home to some 1,000 U-verse connections, and while there's nothing specific said about the availability of HD channels, we can't imagine any upstanding Cougar settling for less.
