Researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University has given Harry Potter a run for its money as they successfully created an invisibility cloak. While we can't wear them yet, colloidal particles are having their fun with it. Read on to find out more about this amazing discovery.

What used to be a fine art confined to mind reading stalls in carnivals, such practices may soon move to more practical uses in society with much more credibility.

German scientists have conducted a study using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) devices to help determine specific brain patterns and eventually read a person's thoughts and intentions from them. Check out the full article for more details!

Interrupted sleep makes for grumpy parents in the morning, and pretty much a bad way to start any day as far as the kids are concerned. But John Zimmerman, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, may have just the thing for moms and dads with the perennial eyebags. Believe it or not, it's an alarm clock that's made specifically to make kids stay IN bed rather than get them out of it.

The Reverse Alarm Clock works like this: instead of numbers, it uses a simple-to-understand Sky Display', made up of sun, star and moon images that light up to tell the time. When the moon is lit, that means children should stay in bed - if it's not, then the young'uns are free to get up if they want, but they have to be careful not to disturb the grownups.

If the sun and and the wakeup music (that parents can set, as well as 'sleeptime' music) plays, then it's time to get out of bed.

This not only teaches the kids good sleeping habits, but it gives the tired parents a full night's rest. Which is a good thing, considering today's dual-income families experience the stress-filled morning rush each and every day, and more so when young children are concerned (as proven by a study of Zimmerman's team of experts).  And with the effects of a healthy dose of forty winks not only obvious the moment you get up from bed, but in the workplace as well - it's not hard to imagine the Reverse Alarm clock giving hardworking mommies and daddies a better, if not drastically-improved state of health and well-being.

Let's hope more of these innovations show up - for the kids' sake and ours!

This next one may sound useless but we're telling you now, it will prove to be useful and significant in the future. It seems that New York-based Yeshiva University researchers just cracked the code for the perfect head on a glass of beer using Mathematics. The new derived formula allows the prediction of beer foam evolution.

What now? Well, in case you haven't realized, this is also connected to the long sought equation for the growth and shrinkage of individual bubbles in foam as well as crystalline grains in metals, semiconductors and semiconductors. The study was partially started by renowned mathematician John von Neumann back in 1952.

If the equation turns out to be accurate, it will lead to more significant developments in the field of Materials Engineering. David Kinderlehrer of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh commented that this development is actually universal and is going to touch everything from airplane wings to nuclear reactors and even microprocessors.

Beer foams, much like metals and multi-cellular organisms, are composed of microscopic spaces or domains. These domains, furthermore, are always in contact with each other because of surface tension - caving in, bulging out, shrinking, growing, and whatnot.

Kinderlehrer said that this exact problem has already been solved in two dimensions but clearly, the problem lies with 3D cases as these materials have more domains which in turn have more edges that affect neighboring spaces. Now that the equation has been figured out, Kinderlehrer said that the task now lies in knowing how these networks behave.

In case you are interested, the equation was derived by applying the math concept of mean width. Therefore, the change in volume in these type of materials can be computed as "the sum of the lengths of the domain's edges minus six times the mean width of the domain, all multiplied by a constant that is particular to the material.

We don't know much about math, but we will certainly drink to that!

Who said you can't learn anything from comedic showtunes and Broadway musicals? Apparently, "The Producers" had it right all along. The secret to health is found in songs, with the main chorus line, going: "Keep it happy, keep it snappy, keep it gay!" Ok, that last word's got a different connotation now, but you get the point.

Studies show that people who exhibit positive emotions are less likely to catch a cold or other minor illnesses. And this isn't even determined by genetics, age, gender, race, education, social status, or even basic personality traits (e.g. extroversion, confidence, etc.)

Led by Stephen Cohen of the Carnegie Mellon University, the team interviewed 193 subjects, aged 21 to 55, to observe their moods and emotions. Then, they were subjected under tests to deliberately infect them with the rhinovirus (common cold inducer) or influenza virus (flu inducer). After being quarantined, those that showed positive emotions were found to have upped their health against the malaise.

Those that showed negative emotions, however, were just as resilient to the bugs as were those who showed normal levels of emotion. This led the researchers to believe that the converse wasn't necessarily true.

So, just to be safe, you know what to do. Yes, the key to health is being gay. Umm, happy. Whatever.

To those familiar with Douglas Adams' novel, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (great book, go read it if you haven't already), one would recall that one of the main and most important things or creatures that the characters of the novel ever encountered was the Babel Fish. As explained by the author himself,

[This galactic species of fish] feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

Now, we're not about to start sticking fish in our ears, but American researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh may have something up their sleeves - something which Adams himself would be delighted to know. Instead of fish, they are attaching electrodes to the face and neck of a person. The electrodes can then detect the movements which occur when a person mouths a word in his own language, and the movements are then processed, associated with a word, then translated and spoken out in a different language by a synthesized voice. Cool, huh?

At the moment, the team has already developed two prototypes, one of which can translate Chinese into English, and another which can translate English to Spanish or German. The translator is working at 80% accuracy while using a vocabulary of about 100 to 200 words. It may not seem much, but if you're a tourist in a foreign country, 200 words can do wonders to make your life easier.

However, it has been noted that since the mouth movements will obviously not match the sound being made, the effect of this translator may come off as rather strange and may take some getting used to. That is, unless you're already used to watching dubbed Mexican soap operas.

Let us sum up the problems with voice recognition in this day and age with a quick quote. Chris Tucker said it best in the movie Rush Hour when he asked Jackie Chan, "DO YOU SPEAK-A ANY ENGLISH?"

Voice recognition technology has always been hampered by the chips that use them. In this case, there still hasn't been a hardware development that allows for all the necessary software to take the technology forward. This is especially true for mobile phones and PDAs, which have a lot less physical space to put voice recognition software on as opposed to computers.

Luckily for us, there's a team at Carnegie Mellon University that's trying to solve these problems. Their solution: putting all the necessary software on a new chip, in much the same way we have graphics cards on computers. At the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, they presented the results of their In Silico Vox project: a working prototype chip that can already recognize 1000 words. They expect to put a lot more in by next year.

What does this mean for the future? A lot more accessibility for people who don't have the means to type, for one thing, as well as greater ease of use for people on cellphones. Instead of the distracting and potentially deadly habit of scrolling through your phone while driving, this should allow for people to tell their phones what to do. 

More importantly for the world, once we find a way to transform normal people's clothing into spandex suits that increase its wearer's natural abilities and serve as protective armor, we can combine the technology with the result of the In Silico Vox project to let this new technology be accessed by some kind of special morphing technology. This mighty technology will allow those men and women to morph into people of great power, and it would be best if we got some Army Rangers to use it for the good of mankind! Go Go Army Rangers!