Some war injuries are obvious at first glance, like missing limbs or facial burn scars. Others remain invisible to the casual eye -- post-traumatic stress disorder, brain injuries, broken hearts.

Yes, broken hearts. The recent Army Suicide Report revealed that in 2007, 50 percent of suicides among active duty personnel occurred just after their partners broke up with them, and cites "failed intimate relationships" as the most common reason for suicide attempts even after soldiers return home.

The military does not have a fabulous track record for making sex and relationships a priority, other than promoting heterosexual marriage and families as the foundation of stability and an ideal worth defending. Yet how can you simultaneously encourage marriage while ignoring the emotional toll of deployment and combat on a relationship?

But finally, even the military is beginning to acknowledge the importance of sexuality as a crucial component of overall health. And as mental health professionals and policymakers gathered in Washington, D.C., last month for the Wounded Troops and Partners: Supporting Intimate Relationships conference, it became clear that technology is the key.

"Technology is allowing us to provide more services and to make services available to more people," says psychologist Barbara V. Romberg, Ph.D., founder of Give an Hour, which matches soldiers and their partners with volunteer mental health professionals. "We can do so many wonderful things we couldn't have done a decade ago. Think of the veterans who came back from Vietnam; they were isolated and alone. Maybe they were lucky to find someone who could help them, but it was so much harder."

One application in the works is eHART, an extensive online assessment tool developed by Sexual Health Network founder Dr. Mitchell Tepper and Chief Operations Officer Kelly J. Ace, Ph.D., J.D. The tool asks extensive and detailed questions about sexual functions, romantic relationships and general health history, then returns information tailored to you and a summary you can take to a health care provider -- if you want. None of the information is shared with anyone else unless you want to share it.

"People are more comfortable revealing sensitive information about sexuality to a computer than to a person," Tepper says. Especially when military approaches to sexual health are often delivered by people without any training in addressing sexual issues.

Tepper cites an example of a servicewoman hospitalized with a spinal injury who had lost her interest in sex. She was asked as part of a routine screening after deployment whether she had experienced sexual trauma during her tour. She said no, even though she had been raped, because she was asked in an impersonal manner in front of other men and women who could overhear her answer. She also did not mention the rape to her doctor -- nor did she receive any counseling or education about sex.

She eventually did tell a psychiatrist about the experience, who then helped her talk to her husband. But her reluctance to report the rape or to ask for sexual information after her injury is common.

Many service members worry that admitting to mental or sexual health issues will negatively affect their military careers. It's especially difficult for young people to publicly address sex, as you don't have a lot of practice in your early 20s talking about relationship and sexual issues with partners, much less with doctors.

Advances in prosthetics and other hardware (like Darpa's mind-controlled robotic arm or the iBot wheelchair) can provide more mobility and independence for those who acquire a disability during their service (assuming the government will fund this level of care), but no matter how sophisticated the devices, they cannot address the psychological issues that accompany the permanent injuries.

"These young men and women have formed their identities around being brave, strong, courageous, hard-bodied, brilliant," Romberg says. "Then, if they receive an injury or a brain injury or PTSD, how do you help them cope with this loss of identity? It's added on top of the normal discomfort of dating, of asking, 'Do you like me? Do I have something of value to offer? Am I attractive enough?' and wondering whether someone will love them."

Romberg sees a number of ways in which technology is helping troops and their partners cope as they return home. She is talking with one organization that might partner with Give an Hour to create online communities where people affected by the wars can share their experiences and ask questions of others who have gone through similar events.

She also sees great potential in virtual worlds, which are already being used to treat PTSD in veterans, not just of Iraq and Afghanistan, but of Vietnam as well.

The Army has begun offering telepsychiatry, which offers soldiers therapy over a private web videoconference. In addition to obvious privacy factors, it also enables them to receive therapy over long distances -- even in the field.

"One thing we're all calling for is more training up front, before deployment, to help people deal with this and build up emotional resilience," Tepper says. "I'd like to see sexual health services become more comprehensive, not just offered when someone has an STD or a pregnancy. It should include how people feel about themselves -- the touchy-feely aspects. That's quite important when people start thinking they're no longer capable to be in their role as (partner)."

I'm living proof that virtual spaces can be highly effective in treating sexual trauma, as it was cybersex that healed me from the effects of sexual abuse. They're also an excellent "practice ground" for transitioning back into life as a single civilian and for meeting potential partners who understand what you've gone through.

I asked Tepper whether soldiers were making the best use of technology to stay intimate while they are apart, and he laughed. "People do know they can use the internet to stay in touch, and I don't think we need to teach them how to talk on the phone in a sexual way," he says. "Not that cybersex isn't a good way to stay connected, but we want something beyond that."

See you in a fortnight,

Regina Lynn

Regina Lynn offers a number of strategies for using tech to enhance your sexual relationships in her latest book, Sexier Sex.

1933: The world's first drive-in movie theater opens in Camden, New Jersey.

The concept was developed by Richard Hollingshead Jr., who experimented with various projection and sound techniques in the driveway of his house. Using a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car and aimed at a screen pinned to some trees, Hollingshead worked out the spacing logistics to make sure that all cars had an unobstructed view of the screen.

He received a patent for his idea in May 1933 and opened his first drive-in theater only three weeks later. They quickly fanned out across the country.

Their popularity soared after World War II, when Americans started having kids in droves. (Can you say "Boom"?) The drive-in offered cheap family entertainment, a place where parents could take the kids without having to shell out for a baby sitter, or worry about them bothering other patrons.

In fact, that was Hollingshead's original hook: "The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are."

Drive-in theaters tended toward B movies -- Muscle Beach Party, Tarzan, Creature From the Black Lagoon and stuff like that -- and always included a snack stand and a play area where the kids could go when they got bored. Which is what kids do.

Another feature of the early drive-in theater was the tinny sound, delivered to the car through a single, monaural speaker. As the technology improved over time -- the car's FM radio became the receiver in some cases -- so did the sound.

The drive-in's heyday lasted from the late 1950s until the mid-'60s, when nearly 5,000 theaters were operating in the United States. No cultural survey of the period would be complete without including the iconic drive-in movie theater.

Since drive-ins offered a certain amount of privacy, making out in the back seat of the car was a rite of passage for Teenus americanus, circa 1963. You could get it on in the front seat, too, if you had a column shift, or even a bench seat with four on the floor. But bucket seats? Forget it.

The rising cost of real estate was one of the factors that led to the decline of the drive-in. Especially for those theaters located in urban areas or heavily populated suburbs, the cost of doing business was becoming prohibitive. The popularity of walk-in theaters and video rentals didn't help, either.

Nevertheless, drive-ins endure. Although fewer than 500 remain today, the industry appears to have stabilized. Those that survive often rely on additional sources of income to pay the rent, hence the popularity of drive-in-theater parking lots as flea markets, swap meets, motorcycle schools and even outdoor churches.

Source: Drive-ins.com, DriveinMovie.com, Wikipedia

TOKYO -- Steve Jobs' new iPhone, expected to be unveiled Monday, is headed to Japan by the end of the year. But the device's famed ease of use may actually be a turnoff in Japan, where consumers want features, not simplicity.



Indeed, Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master.

"There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,'" says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo.

Experimenting with different key combinations in search of new features is "good for killing time during a long commute," Aoki says, "but it's definitely not elegant."

Japan has long been famous for its advanced cellphones with sci-fi features like location tracking, mobile credit card payment and live TV. These handsets have been the envy of consumers in the United States, where cell technology has trailed an estimated five years or more. But while many phones would do Captain Kirk proud, most of the features are hard to use or not used at all.

"Some people care about quality, but first and foremost it's about the features," says Nobi Hayashi, a journalist and author of Steve Jobs: The Greatest Creative Director. He estimates that the average person only uses 5 to 10 percent of the functions available on their handsets.

Japan is a culture of spec sheets. When consumers go to electronics stores to buy a cellphone, they frequently line up the specifications side by side to compare them before deciding which one to buy.

Hayashi owns a Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a miniature but crisp 3-inch TV. In addition to 3G and GPS, the device has a 5.1-megapixel camera and motion sensors that enable Wii-style games to be played sitting on the train.

"When I show this to visitors from the U.S, they're amazed," Hayashi says. "They think there's no way anybody would want an iPhone in Japan. But that's only because I'm setting it up for them so that they can see the cool features."

In actuality, Hayashi says, the P905i is fatally flawed. The motion sensors are painfully slow, and the novelty of using them is quickly replaced with frustration. And while being able to watch TV anywhere is a spectacular idea, there's no signal in the subways, and even above ground, the sound cuts out every few seconds.

"There's nothing more annoying than choppy TV noises," Hayashi says.

Aoki, who carries two phones, a Sony W44S and an iPhone for accessing the web, has only a vague idea of all the things the Sony cellphone is capable of doing. "Every once in a while, you find an incredible function via the complicated menu," he says.

The manufacturers, who realize the absurdity of piling on features that don't work well, are caught in a vicious cycle of materialistic consumers who always want the newest high-tech handsets, and carriers that have complete control over what products and services are provided to their customers.

"The most important thing for us is to provide our end users with a unique user experience through our products," says Toshi Kawamura, a spokesman for Sony Ericsson Japan.

They're also at the mercy of the all-powerful carriers, like NTT DoCoMo -- the company that created the localized 3G network that makes Japanese handsets virtually obsolete in the rest of the world -- who get to decide what applications and functions are compatible with their networks.

"The flashy little functions are cool, but they're carrier-specific," Hayashi says. "Once you take this out of Japan, it's just a piece of metal." Japanese companies only make 5 percent of global mobile phone sales, and all of those sales are domestic.

Neat-looking gadgets are also a core aspect of one's identity. Daiji Hirata, chief financial officer of News2u Corporation and creator of Japan's first wireless LAN, admits to changing handsets more often than is probably necessary.

"Cellphones are always part of any conversation," he says. "People are always using them and holding them, even in the middle of a meal, so they might not think you're hip if you're carrying an old one."

However, it's unclear whether Japanese consumers will ditch their complicated cellphones for Apple's easy-to-use iPhone, which will be sold in Japan by SoftBank by the end of the year.

A survey conducted by Japan Railways showed that just more than half of those polled were interested in buying the iPhone, but that less than one-fifth really knew what the iPhone was.

"It doesn't have 3G, the camera is only 2 megapixels, and it lacks fun little features like mobile wallet functions and an LED flashlight," Hayashi says. "It may sell modestly as a smart phone or as an upgraded iPod, but it's not quite cutting it as a competitor in our mobile-based culture."

To celebrate the Drive-In's 75th birthday, we asked readers to submit their favorite drive-in photos from around the country. The now-dwindling venues have come to represent an American era of coveted cars and mesmerizing movies. Click through to see our favorite reader-submitted drive-in photos, from California to New Jersey.

Left:

Starlite Drive-In, El Monte, California
Submitted by MJ Seitz Vega

Photographer's comment:

"Starlite Drive-In is just outside of Los Angeles. Taken March 2008. Nikon FM-10 with Kodak film. The Starlite has been closed for some time. The space now hosts a swap meet several days a week."

Winchester Drive-In
Submitted by Anthony Ross

Photographer's comment:

"This drive-in is located in Oklahoma City. Since I am not from there, I'm not sure if it is still standing."

Apache Drive-In Theater
Submitted by R. Svirskas

Photographer's comment:

"The Apache Drive-In Theater in Globe, Arizona. It's the last single-screen in the state."

Ford-Wyoming Drive-In, Detroit
Submitted by Jim Rees

Photographer's comment:

"The main theater is five screens; this annex is four. By some measures, this is the largest drive-in theater in the United States. To get this shot, I waited until the end of the movie (note the credits) when they turn on the poacher lights."

Delsea Drive-In, Vineland, New Jersey
Submitted by Maggie Stewart

Photographer's comment:

"Camden was Jersey's first drive-in and this is the state's last. The Delsea Drive-In is one screen at the edge of Pine Barrens, out mostly in the middle of nowhere. Cars park on a sandy unpaved lot and tune in to movie soundtracks via their radios. Every night is at least a double feature."

Downhill Racer
Submitted by Calum Davidson

Photographer's comment:

"Each year, the little Scottish Highland town of Cromarty hosts the world's smallest film festival, and the parking lot of the local shop is transformed into a drive-in theatre, for four cars ... This shot shows the haunting documentary Downhill Racer about the famous Highland Fairground -- aka shows -- family the Herchers. Shown projected onto the wall of Ferro Cottage as part of the Cromarty Film Festival."

Haar's Drive-In (and Flea Market)
Submitted by Phinehas

Photographer's comment:

"Located in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, Haar's has nearly gone out of business more than once in the past couple of years thanks to its being built on a coveted piece of land. But for the time being, one can still drive by and smell the popcorn from the concessions or go whole-hog and grab a double feature."

Movie Manor Inn, Monte Vista, Colorado
Submitted by Aaron

Photographer's comment:

"The Kelloff's Best Western Movie Manor is an American treasure in Monte Vista, Colorado. Snug up against the Sangre de Cristos Mountains, the Movie Manor is a motel, restaurant and drive-in. There are big picture-windows in the motel rooms, which are piped for sound, so you can enjoy the feature from your room!"

Valley Drive-In, McAllen, Texas
Submitted by Kevin Trotman

Photographer's comment:

"Taken in 1997 in McAllen, Texas. I hear it was torn down and a truck dealership stands there now."

Waiting for the Sun to Go Down
Submitted by Danh Hoang

Photographer's comment:

"This drive-in is located in Amarillo, Texas, along the Dumas Highway (U.S. Highway 287). Before the double feature begins, people gather around the park as a social event. Kids are playing on the playground that is set up in front of the screen. The smell of popcorn in the air and the sound of laughter is a timeless event in West Texas."

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Huffington Post.com, the political blog community, is considering raising more money and has seen traffic triple since last year, but the big question now is how popular the site will be when the 2008 presidential campaign is over.

Founded in 2005 by author Arianna Huffington, the site was intended to provide a left-of-center audience with political commentary and analysis in the form of constantly updated blogs, penned by various talking heads and celebrities, and other members of Huffington's extensive social network.

In recent months the site has reaped the benefits of its strong partisan political tone and content, as a nail-biter of an election season nudged traffic from half a million visitors per month last August to a high of over 3 million in March (back down to 2 million by April), according to Compete.com, an internet analytics website.

In a common new-media discrepancy, the site's internal numbers, obtained via Google analytics, are even more impressive. "We're averaging 11 million to 12 million uniques a month and 100 million pageviews," says Betsy Morgan, HuffPo's C.E.O.

But a rising tide lifts all boats, and Huffington Post isn't the only website with a political bent to enjoy increased traffic in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Sites such as Slate.com, Politico.com, and, to a lesser extent, TalkingPointsMemo.com and DailyKos.com, have all enjoyed steady increases in traffic between last April and this, the most recent period for which Compete.com has data.

While Huffington Post's growth has certainly been dramatic, detractors wonder if the site's political focus might become a liability next fall when the election is over and the nation settles back into business as usual.

Morgan doesn’t think so.

"We believe that there's no longer a historical political cycle. People are interested in politics 365 days of the year," she says.

Nevertheless, Huffington Post is making a conspicuous effort to expand its reach beyond the confines of Washington D.C. Last summer it rolled out several new vertical sites, including non-political topics such as media, business, and entertainment. Just last week the site introduced another new channel, green, which will focus on eco-news and trends. And Morgan says there are more on the way.

Also new? The site's tagline, "the internet newspaper," introduced in 2008. The line de-emphasizes politics in favor of a more neutral, newsy tone. According to Morgan, over half of the site's traffic is now for non-political stories.

Barry Parr, a media analyst at JupiterResearch, says Huffington Post is better positioned than most political websites to weather the transition to a post-election U.S., although he adds that a slight drop-off in the site's traffic after election fever subsides wouldn't be surprising.

A bigger concern, especially as the site navigates the wider waters of general news coverage—placing itself in the same category as newspapers and news sites that already exist—is the vulnerability of its advertising-driven business model.

"The challenge for anybody in the news business is that a general news audience is not a very desirable one to advertisers," says Parr. That's because news audiences, unlike those for beauty or sports sites, don't come packaged into convenient demographic bundles—18-to-34-year-old males, for example. And for Huffington Post, which isn't attracting the volume of visitors that sites like Yahoo or AOL do, the appeal for advertisers may be limited.

The answer to sustainability might lie in the site’s staking out more niche areas of credible coverage, as it has so successfully done with politics.

Parr thinks an obvious place to start is media, where HuffingtonPost has published relatively strong, although less prominent, content. "That's an area their audience is going to be interested in," he says. And with a dearth of mainstream publications focusing explicitly on the media business, and Huffington Post's roster of plugged-in contributors, the site stands a good shot of owning this area.

For now, however, the Huffington Post homepage is dominated by half-inch-tall red block letters, "…152 Days And Counting…" until November 4, 2008. That's the day of the U.S. presidential election, and quite possibly, the day the game changes for HuffingtonPost.

1833: Ada Byron meets Charles Babbage. He designed an early computer, and she would write the first computer program.

Ada's father was the poet Lord Byron, but her parents separated when she was a month old. Her famous -- and poetically wild -- father went to Greece, and she never knew him.

Ada was 15 when she met the Cambridge mathematics professor Babbage 175 years ago today. Babbage had already received funding from Parliament to build a "difference engine" that could do mathematical calculations. While that project was still unfinished, he conceived in 1834 a new and broader idea: an "analytical engine" that "could not only foresee but could act on that foresight."

In 1835, Ada married William King, who inherited the title Earl of Lovelace in 1838, making her Countess of Lovelace. They had three children, but Ada's family and social responsibilities did not keep her from continuing her study of advanced mathematics.

Babbage, meanwhile, gave a seminar on the analytic engine in Turin, Italy, in 1841. Countess Ada translated an article about the presentation and showed it to Babbage. He was apparently better at conceiving things than explaining them (unheard of in a mathematician, eh?) and suggested that Ada expand the article with her own notes.

When published in 1843, those notes ran three times as long as the original article. Ada predicted that a computing machine could compose music, draw graphics and find application, so to speak, in business and science.

She also wrote a plan for the analytical engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. It's now considered the first computer program. The countess originated the idea of a loop in a program, which she likened to a "snake biting its tail."

Ada was also a friend to novelist Charles Dickens, scientist Michael Faraday, inventor Charles Wheatstone and David Brewster, creator of the kaleidoscope. She was an opium addict who had numerous affairs and gambled away a lot of her family fortune. She died of cancer in 1852, two weeks shy of her 37th birthday.

The Countess of Lovelace has attained recent fame through Betty Toole's 1992 edition of her correspondence, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers and Lynn Hershman-Leeson's 1997 film Conceiving Ada, starring Tilda Swinton.

The U.S. Department of Defense named a computer language "Ada" in her honor.

Source: Betty Toole

LOS ANGELES -- UCLA scientists have developed a process for targeting cancer cells that could eliminate some of the worst side effects of chemotherapy. The new technique deploys nanoscale, light-activated containers filled with cancer-fighting drugs throughout the body. These containers release the drugs only when targeted by a special laser, allowing scientists to confine treatment only to desired areas of the body.

Normally in chemotherapy, the drugs are delivered to the whole body and attack healthy cells as well as the cancerous ones, which can be devastating to cancer patients. In a couple of years, these new nanomachines, called nanoimpellers, could help eliminate cancer in specific areas of a patient while the unused drugs pass through the body without affecting healthy tissue.

Click through the gallery to see the labs behind this process and time-lapse images of the nanoimpellers at work in real cancer cells.

Left: A sample of cancer cells infused with the nanoimpellers fills the bottom of a test tube in Dr. Fuyuhiko Tamanoi's lab in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at UCLA.

Left: The nanoimpellers are created through a series of chemical reactions, using this lab equipment. No mechanical nanofabrication is required.

The nanoimpellers are contained in nanosize, sand-like particles which are covered with tiny holes. These holes are coated with a substance called azobenzene. When a very specific wavelength of light hits the azobenzene, it flexes and flaps tiny molecular arms. This motion pushes the cancer drugs out of the nanoimpeller and into the surrounding cell. The cancer cell, which unknowingly took the nanoonimpellers in, is then tricked into killing itself. Think of them as light-activated Trojan horses.

Here, the activating laser sits on an optic bench. If you look closely, you can see a blue light bouncing off a mirror in the center left of the photo. This is a laser with a wavelength of 413 nanometers, the exact wavelength needed to activate the nanoimpellers. Under the laser, the nanoimpellers flex and release the cancer-fighting medication directly inside the target area.

The UCLA researchers claim that the laser would be able to reach most skin cancer without surgery, but deeper tumors would require surgery in order to expose the cancerous tissue. Most cancer cells infused with the nanoimpellers die within a few minutes of exposure to the laser.

The nanoimpellers are too small to observe directly without an electron microscope (see slides 9 and 10) so this optical microscope is used observe the effects the nanoimpellers have on the cancer cells (see next slide).

Figure A shows how cancer cells quickly die after absorbing the nanoimpellers and being exposed to the precisely calibrated laser (413 nm). Figure B shows how cells that are exposed to the light without the nanoimpellers, or with nanoimpellers but with no anti-cancer drug, end up living a happy cancerous life. Figure C shows untreated cells and cells infused with unactivated nanoimpellers in the dark.

Dr. Jefferey Zink stands in the chemistry laboratory where the nanoimpellers are created.

A member of the California Nanosystems Institute, Zink is one of the authors of a recent paper on nanoimpellers. Zink has worked in the chemistry department of UCLA for almost 40 years and he is a widely recognized authority on nanomachines.

This ventilated workbench is used to prepare living tissue samples for testing with the nanoimpellers. The samples containing the cancer cells and the nanoimpellers are then taken back to Zink's lab for blue-laser zapping.

Vials filled with solutions containing billions of nanoimpellers cover a lab bench in the UCLA Zink Group laboratory.

A scanning electron microscope is used to image the nanoscale features of the nanoimpellers (see next slide).

Using a transmission electron microscope, we can see the sponge-like pores on the outside of the silica that contain the nanoimpellers (figure B and enlarged view on right). In figure A, a scanning electron microscope shows a zoomed-out view of three silica particles. Note that the actual nanoimpellers are too small to be imaged with either of these instruments.

This X-ray diffraction scanner is used to image nanoscale crystalline structures like the ones that make up the nanoimpellers. The machine sends X-rays through a rotating sample and depending on the way they bend and scatter, the sample's structure can be determined. While the scanner does not produce an image, the physical configuration of the crystal can be reconstructed in software.