New technology saves lives

New technology will hopefully improve safety on the roads during dangerous pursuits. The technology, known as Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, allows police officers to slow down stolen OnStar-equipped vehicles, reports KTEN.

During the high-speed chase of a stolen vehicle, police officers can connect to the OnStar command centre and once conditions are safe, they can authorise the vehicle to be safely slowed down.

Apple has unveiled an online directory of more than 200 Web applications built to run in the iPhone`s Safari browser, says TechWeb.

The applications are organised in categories such as the most recent viewed, most popular, alphabetical and staff picks.

The featured Web software at the launch was a Facebook application that connects the iPhone to the popular social network in order to visit friends` pages, upload and share photos, or send and receive messages.

The future of radio could be on mobile phones with track and artist details, news headlines, weather and competitions sent to the handset, according to a demonstration at the commercial radio industry`s national conference in Melbourne, reports Smart House News.

The prototype handset used in the demonstration is called the Lobster and was built by Cambridge-based The Technology Partnership. It features software developed by All In Media and various Australian broadcasters, allowing users to gain rich content services on the handset streamed directly from the radio station of their choice.

Users would also be able to navigate and store visual content supplied by radio stations using the new Visual DAB/DAB+ mobile application.

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $4.9 million, 18-month programme to use brain-inspired technologies to develop a system that will speed an image analyst`s job by 100 times, says CNN Money.

Called Object Recognition via Brain-Inspired Technology (Orbit), the system will use electro-optical (EO) light detection and ranging (Lidar), and brain-inspired technologies to automatically recognise objects in urban environments from ground and aerial surveillance.

Orbit will fuse commercial airborne EO and Lidar sensor data into a 3D, photo-realistic model of the landscape. Its brain-inspired object-recognition technology will automatically generate lists of recognisable imagery, like mailboxes and dumpsters.