News of Technology

A little brain boost is something we could all use now and then. A new option may be on the horizon. Researchers at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in Bethesda, MD, are studying how applying gentle electrical current to the scalp can improve learning. Previous small-scale studies have suggested that a stream of current can improve motor function, verbal fluency, and even language learning.

If you want to add location information to pictures today, it's a fairly tedious process. Many people manually annotate their pictures after they've uploaded them to a computer. And while some high-end cameras come equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) chip that captures the location information, this extra hardware is slow and can drain battery power. Now Geotate, a U.K.-based spinoff of Philips Research, thinks that it can make GPS faster and more energy efficient in any device.

As more people take pictures on digital cameras, there's a growing interest in making sure that those pictures are geotagged. When pictures contain location information, they could be easier to sort in personal photo software like iPhoto. And if geotagged pictures are uploaded to a photo-sharing site, such as Flickr, then others can benefit from the information when, say, planning a vacation. Right now, only a small fraction of photos contain any information about where they were taken.