October 2010
86 posts
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"Gene-whiz" science strikes again: Researchers... →
Homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. Or so religious conservatives would have us believe. But liberalism is in our genes. Or so researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University would have us believe.
Yes, the inevitable has happened. Just before Election Day—surely not a coincidence—scientists report an association between liberal political views and DRD4, a gene...
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Advance could change modern electronics →
Researchers at Oregon State University have solved a quest in fundamental material science that has eluded scientists since the 1960s, and could form the basis of a new approach to electronics.
The discovery, just reported online in the professional journal Advanced Materials, outlines the creation for the first time of a high-performance “metal-insulator-metal” diode.
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DNA barcoding aims to protect species, food →
Every species, from extinct to thriving, is set to get its own DNA barcode in an attempt to better track the ones that are endangered, as well as those being shipped across international borders as food or consumer products.
Researchers hope handheld mobile devices will be able to one day read these digital strips of rainbow-colored barcodes — much like supermarket scanners — to...
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Blue light taps directly into your emotions →
WE’RE all happier on sunny days, but why? It seems that light taps directly into brain areas that process emotion - good and bad.
Although light is used to treat mood disorders, we don’t understand how this works. While rods and cones in the eye process visible light, a third type of photoreceptor, particularly sensitive to blue light, mediates non-visual responses such as sleep...
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Miniature human livers created in the lab →
Researchers at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center have reached an early, but important, milestone in the quest to grow replacement livers in the lab. They are the first to use human liver cells to successfully engineer miniature livers that function — at least in a laboratory setting — like human livers. The next step is to see if...
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‘Wireless’ humans could form backbone of new... →
Members of the public could form the backbone of powerful new mobile Internet networks by carrying wearable sensors, according to researchers from Queen’s University Belfast.
The novel sensors could create new ultra-high-bandwidth mobile Internet infrastructures and reduce the density of mobile phone base stations. The engineers from Queen’s Institute of Electronics, Communications and...
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Steep Slope Transistors Provide Benefit of Longer... →
On Wednesday I covered the announcement from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and IBM that they along with host of other European research institutes were intending to develop better transistors that would eliminate the wasted current that drips through transistor gates.
The project has been dubbed Steeper based on its intentions to create steep slope transistors that exhibit an...
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Steven Johnson, Robert Krulwich, and Kevin Kelly... →
Is the Singularity Near? Depends on who you ask. The New York Public Library and FORA.tv recently sponsored a discussion on accelerating technologies and whether they will benefit or harm our society. On hand were Kevin Kelly, Steven Johnson, and Robert Krulwich, all popular commentators on science and innovation. The three speakers generally took a ‘middle of the road’ view of our developing...
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Are Biometric Time Clocks Legal? →
Employee timecards are gradually disappearing from the workplace, along with factory whistles and other relics of a bygone labor era.
Many hospitals, schools and businesses are converting from punch cards for non-salaried workers to biometric time clocks that eliminate paper trails and prevent employees from goosing their hours.
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How to Build Your Own UAV for 300 USD →
A decade ago the term Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was synonymous for expensive equipment, complex aerodynamics, and cruise-missile-type control algorithms. But since then, a rapid price decay in IMUs caused by the rise of mobile computing has slashed equipment costs. Today, open-source software like the Arduino environment and open-source hardware like the ArduPilot allow you and me to build our...
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Darpa: Fuse Nerves With Robot Limbs, Make... →
Controlling robotic limbs with your brain is just step one. The Pentagon eventually wants artificial arms and legs to feel and perform just the same as naturally grown ones. Which means step two is hooking up those prosthetics directly into severed nerves. That’ll allow the wearer to detect subtle sensations, respond to the brain’s neural signals, move with unprecedented agility, and...
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Superhero suit to strengthen astronauts' bones →
WITH its stitching clearly visible and reference lines drawn in marker pen, the stretchy superhero-blue suit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Man Vehicle Laboratory doesn’t look like much. But if it works as planned it could offer orbiting astronauts a replacement for something they are sorely missing: gravity.
The microgravity of orbital flight is tough on the bones....
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WatchIt looks like a cross between a Dalek’s suction pad and a rubber ball on a stick. But this simple robot gripper can pick up unfamiliar and even delicate objects, and could rival robotic fingered hands for grasp and dexterity.
Read more…
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Google Lunar X PRIZE Update →
The past few weeks have been a flurry of activity for the Google Lunar X PRIZE. After helping our colleagues celebrate the awarding of the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE, we hit the road to attend the 61st International Astronautical Congress in Prague, and then to host the 4th annual Google Lunar X PRIZE Team Summit on the Isle of Man. With all of the recent activity, and...
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Huge 'biobank' for research into major diseases to... →
A “biobank” of samples and clinical measurements from tens of thousands of people is to be established in Qatar to help scientists understand the causes of major diseases and develop new treatments, it is announced today.
The Qatar Biobank is being established by Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development (QF) and Qatar’s Supreme Council of Health, with...
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Wireless Electricity – No More Cables, Never Plug... →
Remember how you used to have to plug in the internet cord to get online? And then one day, you didn’t need to anymore because your laptop started magically connecting to the internet through the ether. That same thing is about to happen to electricity.
More than a hundred years ago Nikola Tesla embarked on a quest for wireless electricity, and these days (or should I say currently), researchers...
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$230,000 And You Can Buy Your Own Robot Legs →
If you’re like me you grew up on cartoons and scifi books with heroes that fought evil in robotic walking battle suits. You probably imagined that one day in the future you’d be riding around in one of those exoskeletons kicking butt and taking names. Well, that day is half way here, but even a reduced version of your dream isn’t going to come cheap. Active Link, an offshoot of Panasonic, has...
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Northrop Arms Its Robot Pack Mule With Big Gun →
Jon Anderson has seen a lot of gawkers pause at his Northrop Grumman booth in the Association of the U.S. Army’s Washington conference. Not that he’s odd-looking or off-putting: He’s a gregarious guy. The stares he’s getting are about the .50-caliber M2 machine gun he’s got mounted on a treaded robot — something Northrop isn’t even selling right now.
“Quite frankly,” explains Anderson, a Northrop...
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Three-dimensional maps of brain wiring →
A team of researchers at the Eindhoven University of Technology has developed a software tool that physicians can use to easily study the wiring of the brains of their patients. The tool converts MRI scans using special techniques to three-dimensional images. This now makes it possible to view a total picture of the winding roads and their contacts without having to operate. Researcher Vesna...
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Researchers find 'Goldilocks' of DNA self-assembly →
Researchers from North Carolina State University have found a way to optimize the development of DNA self-assembling materials, which hold promise for technologies ranging from drug delivery to molecular sensors. The key to the advance is the discovery of the “Goldilocks” length for DNA strands used in self-assembly – not too long, not too short, but just right.
DNA strands contain...
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China Unveils 2.507-Petaflop Supercomputer, the... →
Earlier this week China unveiled the world’s fastest bullet train, and today it boasts the world’s fastest supercomputer. Unveiled earlier today, the Tianhe-1A supercomputer has set a new performance record at 2.507 petaflops via 7,168 NVIDIA GPUs and 14,336 CPUs, unseating the Cray XT5 Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Labs as the world record holder.
Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University...
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Hairbrush Reads Your Mind →
No, this brush is not a mind-reader in the psychic, ESP sense. What it does is take precise measurements of the levels of neurological activity in a brain.
Technology already exists to track of your mental activity. It’s called functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which images blood flowing through the brain and measures the difference of levels of oxygen in the blood in order to...
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Genome project releases variation map →
An international team has published in the journal Nature the most comprehensive map of genetic differences between individuals, called variations.
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Brain link lets people choose images by thought... →
Imagine being able to manipulate images on a screen by thought alone. That’s the tantalising prospect raised by a brain-machine interface that lets you control which of two competing images you can see on a screen.
Moran Cerf at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and colleagues recruited 12 volunteers who had electrodes implanted in their brains to record epileptic seizures....
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Chatterbot Fools Judge Into Thinking It’s Human at... →
The next time you’re on IM, you better watch out, computers are getting better and better at pretending to be human. At the recent Loebner Prize competition in LA, a chatterbot named Suzette won first place after convincing a judge that it was a real person. To make matters even more impressive, the judge was none other than the competition’s organizer, Professor Russ Abbot of Cal State. Not bad,...
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World’s first vertigo-stopping implant →
A patient at the University of Washington Medical Center become the world’s first recipient of a device that quells the disabling vertigo associated with Meniere’s disease.
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10 Robots You Can Actually Date →
With robots doing everything from military work to practicing medicine, what does the future hold in store? Although many of them can already do impressive tasks, will they one day take the ultimate place of the human role of companionship? It’s looking more and more like the answer is “yes.”
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Without driver or map, vans go from Italy to China... →
Across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert — it certainly was a long way to go without getting lost.
Four driverless electric vans successfully ended an 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometer) test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo’s journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday.
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Is the Army Overhyping its ‘Breakthrough’ Brain... →
Army brass last week declared a triumph over diagnosing traumatic brain injuries, hyping a simple new blood test they say can detect mild forms of the injury — catching the trauma before it becomes more severe; before telltale symptoms manifest; or before troops sustain a second concussion.
But with one small study and a history of expensive, hyped-up brain injury “breakthroughs” that have fallen...
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Gene activity in the brain depends on genetic... →
Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have found that the same genes have different activity patterns in the brain in individuals with different genetic backgrounds. These findings may help to explain individual differences in the effectiveness and side-effect profiles of therapeutic drugs and thus have implications for personalized medicine. The study is available in this...
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Intricate, curving 3-D nanostructures created... →
Twisting spires, concentric rings, and gracefully bending petals are a few of the new three-dimensional shapes that University of Michigan engineers can make from carbon nanotubes using a new manufacturing process.
The process is called “capillary forming,” and it takes advantage of capillary action, the phenomenon at work when liquids seem to defy gravity and travel up a drinking...
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Research team identifies new mechanism with... →
If women had no prolactin receptors on cells in their mammary glands, they would not produce milk when they were nursing. Prolactin receptors are also found in other organs including the lung and the colon. The only problem is that these receptors are sort of like cellular wiring, and when the wrong conditions bring them together, the resulting short circuit can produce cancer.
In new research...
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'Virtual satellite dish' thanks to lots of simple... →
Satellite TV without having to set up a receiver dish. Digital radio on your mobile phone without your batteries quickly running flat. The advanced calculations needed for these future applications are made possible by a microchip with relatively simple processors that can interact and communicate flexibly. These are among the findings of research at the Centre for Telematics and Information...
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Lastest graphene research could lead to... →
Researchers at the UC Riverside Bourns College of Engineering have built and successfully tested an amplifier made from graphene that could lead to more efficient circuits in electronic chips, such as those used in Bluetooth headsets and toll collection devices in cars.
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Humanoid Rights →
A few months ago I watched Moon, a 2009 indie science-fiction film, with a friend who works on public relations for the American Civil Liberties Union. The movie centers on Sam Bell, a solitary laborer who spends his days extracting helium from moon rocks and drawing comfort from correspondence with his pregnant wife on Earth. That is, until he discovers he’s actually one of a series of...
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SolarPrint Develops Ready-To-Print Solar Cells →
Irish company SolarPrint has developed a new type of printable solar cells that can be produced quickly and easily and can even generate energy from fading sunlight. Since the dye-sensitized cells use less raw materials than traditional solar cells, costs can be kept down, and it is hoped that the simple-to-produce solar cells will transform how the world uses energy.
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WatchA new projector allows floating 3D objects – from a model of the heart to a talking human head – to be viewed from any angle. The RayModeler prototype, developed by Sony, is on display for the first time in the UK at an exhibit at the British Library, London, called Growing Knowledge. The device creates 3D images that viewers can see from all angles without stereoscopic glasses. Sensors that...
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Battling the force that wastes 1 out of every 10... →
Engine friction — the force that wastes almost 1.4 million barrels of oil per day in cars and trucks in the United States alone — could become less of a problem for fuel-conscious consumers thanks to promising new oils and other materials that scientists are developing. That’s the topic of the cover story in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS’ weekly...
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Triple-Mode Single-Transistor Graphene Amplifier... →
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a triple-mode single-transistor graphene amplifier utilizing a three-terminal back-gated single-layer graphene transistor. The ambipolar nature of electronic transport in graphene transistors leads to increased amplifier functionality as compared to amplifiers built with unipolar semiconductor devices. The ambipolar graphene transistors can be configured...
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Nano-Miniaturization Technique Developed for... →
Space technology is about to make your visit to the dentist a little more comfortable. The same production technology that made the world’s tiniest rocket motor will be used to shrink those unwieldy plastic squares the dentist sticks in your mouth during an X-ray.
The technique uses a tiny scintillator to convert X-ray energy into visible light, which provides much more detail and higher...
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Autonomous Satellite Chasers Can Use Robotic... →
Spanish robotics engineers have devised a new weapon in the battle against zombie-sats and space junk: an automated robotics system that employs computer vision technology and algorithmic wizardry to allow unmanned space vehicles to autonomously chase down, capture, and even repair satellites in orbit. Scientists at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) created the system to allow for the...
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Robot arm punches human to obey Asimov's rules →
ISAAC ASIMOV would probably have been horrified at the experiments under way in a robotics lab in Slovenia. There, a powerful robot has been hitting people over and over again in a bid to induce anything from mild to unbearable pain - in apparent defiance of the late sci-fi sage’s famed first law of robotics, which states that “a robot may not injure a human being”.
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High Speed Water Sterilization Using... →
The removal of bacteria and other organisms from water is an extremely important process, not only for drinking and sanitation but also industrially as biofouling is a commonplace and serious problem. We here present a textile based multiscale device for the high speed electrical sterilization of water using silver nanowires, carbon nanotubes, and cotton. This approach, which combines several...
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The Brain--from Womb to Tomb →
It was on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. And the cover of Time Magazine. Suddenly, the obscure science of “fetal origins” is getting popular, in the pages of a new book called “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”
Written by science journalist Annie Murphy Paul, “Origins” explores the still-murky but growing research into how the...
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Contour Energy Systems Designing Batteries That... →
Lithium ion batteries may be the battery of choice for electric vehicles such as the Prius, but they’e still severely limited, with some batteries needing a recharge after 100 miles. As such, Contour Energy Systems, a self-described portable power company, has stated that it is trying to produce batteries that last 10x longer than the best batteries on the market at the moment. According to the...
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Geeky Gamers Build Working Computers out of... →
Ben Craddock has been busy gathering Redstone. He collects blocks of the virtual material from deep within the game world of Minecraft, then pulverizes it into a powder and sets to work.
For most Minecraft players, Redstone might wind up in a virtual torch that will light their way when the sun goes down or open doors to underground traps in the game. But Craddock, 21, who goes by the handle...
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The future of electric cars? Running fuel cells on... →
smart diesel reformer and a tolerant fuel cell are the core components of a new type of electric power supply unit. Environmentally friendly and flexible, the unit could be a serious contender in the market for generators in electric vehicles and other applications.
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