Alpha Doggs

Charles Kao, whose work in the 1960s laid the foundation for today's long-distance fiber-optic networks, has won a share of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.

Kao photo from Nobel organization via Richard EpworthKao, sometimes referred to as the "father of fiber-optic communications," was formally honored by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"

A Kaiser Permanente Division of Research study has found that an e-mail intervention program ("good spam"?) can encourage people to eat healthier and become more physically active.

The study involved 787 KP employees in Northern California. It involved e-mailing a control group with feedback on their lifestyles at the start of the study and emailing others with tips and goals such as eating fruit for snack or walking during lunch. Sure enough, at the end of the 16-week trial, the intervention group was more physically active and eating better, especially those who at the start of the trail were not very fit or good about their eating. Lasting effects 4 months after the study were also seen, according to the researchers, who have published their findings in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Some might say using your brain to Tweet would ruin Twitter, but University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wadsworth Center (Albany, N.Y.) researchers have good cause for working in this area: They're looking to help improve communications for people whose brains work but are without use of other parts of their bodies typically used to communicate (those with ALS, spinal cord injuries, etc.)

The system translates brain activity into changes on a computer screen that create Tweets.

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has outdone itself: it has created robots that can water plants, which signal their thirst via networked sensors, and pick tomatoes.

MIT computer science professor David Karger's research team has developed software dubbed List.it that's designed to computerize many of the things people currently do through sticky notes: organize email addresses, passwords and the like.

The software, now in public beta, lives in your Firefox browser and can be downloaded here.

The software comes out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), a perennial hotbed for IT inventions, such as CarTel, a GPS-enabled mobile sensor network based on Linux and Wi-Fi designed to address traffic gridlock.

The beta version of List.It enables storage, search and retrieval of everything from email addresses to Web URLs to grocery lists.

"I would never make the claim that we're trying to replace Post-its," says Michael Bernstein, a graduate student (shown here) in Karger's lab, in a statement. "We want to understand the classes of things people do with Post-its and see if we can help users do more of what they wanted to do in the first place."

The research is funded by the Nokia Research Center Cambridge, the National Science Foundation, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Web Science Research Initiative and Quanta Computer.