Antonio Criminsi of the Machine Learning and Perception group - the team which in effect invented the visual recognition system of Kinect - demonstrated how Kinect's underlying technology can be adapted for medical diagnosis.

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The Darpa-supported team instead moved their machine by using an "artificial muscle" made out of nickel and titanium wire designed to stretch and contract with heat.

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"The best advice they could follow is to build the team into being an effective, money-making machine again, " said Andrew Zimbalist, a noted sports economist and Smith College professor.

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To study the neurology of tickling, Dr Blakemore and her team stuck volunteers into a magnetic-resonance-imaging machine (which monitors oxygen flow to the brain, and thus indicates the amount of activity in that organ's various parts).

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When those efforts failed to deter the approaching vessel, the security team on the Rappahannock fired rounds from a .50-caliber machine gun.

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The machine the team has built uses much the same technology as found in commercial microwaves - but with some important differences, according to Mr Stull.

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On any given weeknight, there might be young boys practicing with cones and tennis balls, or teenagers from the Rising Stars team bowling to each other and fine-tuning their swings with a pitching machine.

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The machine does not allow modifications to its ROM (because it has an O in the middle), but the team was able to use a technique called return-oriented programming to modify how the machine executes existing code, taking the bits they want and, ultimately, devising a way to re-program its behavior by simply inserting a cartridge into a slot -- presumably after blowing on it for good luck.

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