February 2012
162 posts
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Scientists decode brain waves to eavesdrop on what... →
Neuroscientists may one day be able to hear the imagined speech of a patient unable to speak due to stroke or paralysis, according to University of California, Berkeley researchers.
These scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in the brain’s temporal lobe — the seat of the auditory system — as a person listens to normal conversation. Based on this correlation between sound...
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Military Masks Could 'Give Injured Soldiers Their... →
This is how the military might treat burned faces in 2017: A mask, worn for several months, that’s layered with sensors, actuators and a regenerative elixir — including stem cells — to regrow missing facial tissue.
An estimated 85 percent of recent wartime injuries caused damage to the extremities or face. Already, the Pentagon’s made swift progress in using regenerative medicine to more...
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What If The Apollo Program Never Happened? →
In a recent debate Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingerich said that he would like to beat the Chinese back to the moon. He has even been so bold as to propose setting up a manned base by 2020, driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative. It’s ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972. Between then and now,...
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Flexible LED Strip Lights →
The strips are about 1 cm wide and 2 mm thick. The strips come on a spool with a sticky tape side. You press the sticky side to the bottom of the cabinet (or the sides inside) and the strip gives a very diffuse effective and efficient light. They are so thin, you can’t really see the light strip itself, only the glow. The strip is a circuit of LEDs in a row. They have marked...
January 2012
163 posts
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Sandia’s self-guided bullet prototype can hit... →
Take two Sandia National Laboratories engineers who are hunters, get them talking about the sport and it shouldn’t be surprising when the conversation leads to a patented design for a self-guided bullet that could help war fighters. (Click here for a video showing the prototype’s flight.)
Sandia researchers Red Jones and Brian Kast and their colleagues have invented a dart-like, self-guided...
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Private Spaceflight: Up, Up, and Away →
The 20th of February, 2012, will be the 50th anniversary of the first U.S. orbital manned spaceflight. To mark the occasion, retired pilot Craig Russell had an over-the-top idea: Reenact astronaut John Glenn’s mission, but do it with private funding and off-the-shelf technologies.
Ultimately, a lack of funding killed Russell’s dream, but don’t lose heart. Truth is, if...
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Phase-change materials can fix machine memory... →
WE WALK about with thousands of songs, photos and videos in our pockets, but we won’t be able to keep cramming more and more onto our memory cards forever. While last week’s news that a single bit of digital information has been stored on just 12 atoms was remarkable, at some point we are going to reach a limit. What happens when we can store a single bit on an atom, for example?
...
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Is the Keyboard Going the Way of the Typewriter? →
Legend has it that the standard distance between the rails in a railroad, the gauge that is, is 4 feet, 8 and a half inches because that’s what it was in England, and it was that distance in England because that was the gap between the ruts in the roads that the Romans built, and the ruts are that far apart because that’s the width between the wheels of a Roman war chariot.
It’s not true, of...
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Does Newt Gingrich want to make Neuromancer come... →
U.S. Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich calls himself a futurist, and never tires of prognosticating. Beloved of Future Shock author Alvin Toffler, who coined the term “futurist,” Gingrich co-authored a “conservative futurist” book in 2006 called The Art of Transformation (available in paperback for $70.00 on Amazon). He’s also a fan of alternate history, and has...
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UT researchers' innovation addresses major... →
A new physical form of proteins developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin could drastically improve treatments for cancer and other diseases, as well as overcome some of the largest challenges in therapeutics: delivering drugs to patients safely, easily and more effectively.
The protein formulation strategy, developed by faculty and students in the Cockrell School of...
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Harnessing the predictive power of virtual... →
Scientists have created a new algorithm to detect virtual communities, designed to match the needs of real-life social, biological or information networks detection better than with current attempts. The results of this study by Lovro Šubelj and his colleague Marko Bajec from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia have just been published in EPJ B¹.
Communities are defined as systems of nodes...
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Ultrasound male contraceptive, overlooked for... →
Imagine a contraceptive that could, with one or two painless 15-minute non-surgical treatments, provide months of protection from pregnancy. And imagine that the equipment needed were already in physical therapists’ offices around the world.
Sound too good to be true? For years, scientists thought so too. But new research headed by Dr. James Tsuruta in the Department of Pediatrics at the...
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Scientists rediscover self-healing silicone... →
Research in self-healing organic polymers has grown recently, but one simple self-healing mechanism from more than 60 years ago has been nearly forgotten until now. Using this mechanism, which is called “siloxane equilibration,” scientists have demonstrated that silicone rubber that has been cut in half with a razor blade can completely repair itself through heat-activated reversible bonding....
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Nanotube growth theory experimentally confirmed →
The Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, has experimentally confirmed a theory by Rice University Professor Boris Yakobson that foretold a pair of interesting properties about nanotube growth: That the chirality of a nanotube controls the speed of its growth, and that armchair nanotubes should grow the fastest.
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Quantum physicists shed new light on relation... →
New research from the University of Bristol may disprove a long-standing conjecture made by one of the founders of quantum information science: that quantum states featuring ‘positive partial transpose’, a particular symmetry under time-reversal, can never lead to nonlocality.
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Printed Stickers Could Monitor Food and Vaccines →
A plastic temperature-recording sticker that could provide detailed histories of crates of food or bottles of vaccine would be the first to use all-printed electronics components—including memory, logic, and even the battery. The cost per sticker could be only 30 cents or less.
Thin Film Electronics, based in Oslo, Norway, aims to marry the company’s printed memory with printed...
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What It’ll Take to Go Exascale →
The next generation of powerful supercomputers will be used to design high-efficiency engines tailored to burn biofuels, reveal the causes of supernova explosions, track the atomic workings of catalysts in real time, and study how persistent radiation damage might affect the metal casing surrounding nuclear weapons.
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WatchScience chat on the science of anti-aging
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Surgeons Implant Synthetic Trachea in Baltimore... →
Surgeons in Sweden have replaced the cancerous windpipe of a Maryland man with one made in a laboratory and seeded with the man’s cells.
The windpipe, or trachea, made from minuscule plastic fibers and covered in stem cells taken from the man’s bone marrow, was implanted in November. The patient, Christopher Lyles, 30, whose tracheal cancer had progressed to the point where it was considered...
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Watch
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Birth of the Bionic Eye →
When light hits Barbara Campbell’s eyes, it triggers no response in her retinas, and no signals flash up her optic nerves to her brain. A genetic disease killed off her retinas’ photoreceptor cells, leaving her completely blind by her 30s. But where her body failed her, technology rescued her. In 2009, at the age of 56, Campbell had an array of electrodes implanted in each eye, and...
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Carbon membranes excel at separating liquids →
Two independent teams have made ultrathin, cabon-based membranes with extraordinary properties that could be used in a range of applications, from water filtration to petroleum processing. One team, based at the University of Manchester in the UK, has made membrane from graphene oxided that appears to be highly permeable to water while being impermeable to all other liquids and gases. The other...
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Immune suppressants may curb diabetes →
A new study has uncovered how targeted suppression of the immune system may prevent type 1 diabetes or induce sustained remission.
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New Hanover County, N.C., First in Nation to... →
What’s been marked as a first-in-the-nation launch, New Hanover County, N.C., will begin a phased deployment later this month of a “super Wi-Fi” network in the TV white space spectrum. “We will be using this new technology to extend our networks outdoors into our parks and gardens to provide enhanced services to our citizens,” said county Board of Commissioners Vice Chairman Jason Thompson, in a...
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Robot warplane passes midair-refueling test →
A robotic warplane that can take off and land from U.S. Navy carriers by itself won’t do much good if it runs out of fuel in midair. That’s why the Navy recently completed flight tests to see how well the unmanned military drone could belly up to a flying fuel tanker.
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Cell’s mechanical changes nudge cancer →
Mechanical property changes in cells may be responsible for the progression of cancer—a discovery that could pave the way for new ways to predict, treat, and prevent the disease.
How Disposable, Networked Satellites Will... →
In 1999, professors Robert Twiggs of Stanford University and Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University began to standardize the satellite business. They designed a small orbital unit-–a four-inch cube with little metal feet–-that was wide enough for solar cells, basing their design on a plastic display box for Beanie Babies. Their “CubeSat” had enough room for a...
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Pentagon: Fewer Soldiers, More Drones Will Save... →
That buzz you hear above your head is the sound of the Pentagon cutting its budget.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta detailed today how the Obama administration plans to achieve $487 billion in cuts over the next decade, in part by reducing the number of ships, planes and troops, but continuing to fund elite special forces — and support technologies like unmanned drones.
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Better crops from the roots up →
By altering root growth, scientists believe they are a step closer to breeding hardier crops that are more adaptable to environmental conditions and better able to fend off parasites.
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Airport Laser Lets You Keep Your Liquids →
So, you’re standing in the security line at the airport when you realize that bottle of duty-free Jameson is still in your bag. Also, you just cracked the seal on some not-so-easily-chuggable Kombucha. And that priced-gouged bottle of sunscreen you bought in Tulum? It was almost $10 and it’s still nearly full.
Normally, these liquid-filled bottles would need to be surrendered to the...
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Nanomaterials’ Effects on Health and Environment... →
Tiny substances called nanomaterials have moved into the marketplace over the last decade, in products as varied as cosmetics, clothing and paint. But not enough is known about their potential health and environmental risks, which should be studied further, an expert panel of the National Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday.
Nanoscale forms of substances like silver, carbon, zinc and aluminum...
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Battery drain may influence app design →
The first systematic power profiles of microprocessors could help lower the energy consumption of small and large devices, say researchers.
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Commercial version of MIT Media Lab CityCar... →
A full-scale version of the stackable, electric CityCar, created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab and commercialized by a consortium of automotive suppliers in the Basque region of Spain, was unveiled at the European Union Commission headquarters on January 24.
Branded “Hiriko,” the two-passenger EV vehicle incorporates all of the essential concepts of the MIT Media Lab CityCar: a folding...
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Water sees right through graphene →
A new study by scientists at Rice University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has determined that gold, copper and silicon get just as wet when clad by a single continuous layer of graphene as they would without.
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World's Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Super-Heats... →
In two separate studies, the world’s most powerful X-ray laser has been used to build the first atomic X-ray laser pulse, as well as to superheat and control a clump of 2-million-degree matter. The atomic laser could be used to watch biological molecules at work, while the creation of hot dense matter could be used to understand the processes of nuclear fusion.
Researchers at the SLAC National...
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Probing the Brain's Mysteries →
Researchers for the first time are documenting the basic wiring of the brain, the complex relationships among billions of neurons that are responsible for reason, memory and emotion. The work eventually could lead to better understanding of schizophrenia, autism, multiple sclerosis and other disorders.
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Could lab-grown meat soon be the solution to the... →
In the 1932 essay called “Fifty Years Hence”, in which he offered his notions of how the world might look in 1982, Winston Churchill wrote: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
It might have taken longer than 50 years, but Churchill was certainly on to...
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Police Are Making A Scanner To Detect Concealed... →
The New York Police Department is working with the Department of Defense to develop a scanning device that would allow them to detect concealed firearms on a person 80 feet away. The scanner detects electromagnetic waves with a frequency in the terahertz range. Terahertz waves sit at the higher frequency end of infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum, just before the microwave range. The device...
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DARPA Has a Simple Solution to Authentication:... →
Having contributed in large part to the Internet’s very existence, DARPA is now setting out to make its secure networks more secure. But rather than relying upon the conventional notion of a password—a complex string of letters and numerals that an individual must remember—the agency is looking to create a “cognitive fingerprint” for individuals that constantly authenticates that...
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String Theory is the Only Show in Town →
Every Wednesday, Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it.
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Study supports role of quantum effects in... →
Until a few years ago, photosynthesis seemed to be a straightforward and well-understood process in which plants and other organisms use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars, with oxygen as a waste product. But recent research showing that the light energy entering these organisms’ light-absorbing chromophore molecules may exist in two places at once – as a quantum...
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SARTRE autonomous road-train enters final phase... →
This time last year, the Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE) program hit a milestone. Using a specially equipped Volvo S60 with a big-rig taking the lead, the EU-funded researchers managed to create the world’s first fully-functional road train, allowing the driver in the sedan to sit back and enjoy the ride without touching the controls.
Today, Volvo – the program’s only...
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DNA motor programmed to navigate a network of... →
Expanding on previous work with engines traveling on straight tracks, a team of researchers at Kyoto University and the University of Oxford have successfully used DNA building blocks to construct a motor capable of navigating a programmable network of tracks with multiple switches. The findings, published in the January 22 online edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology, are expected to...
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Embryonic Stem Cells Appear Safe, May Help Eye... →
In the first published results from a clinical trial using human embryonic stem cells, two legally blind patients who received an injection of hESC-derived cells in one eye have experienced no harmful side effects and appear to have slightly better vision. Although the result is preliminary, it is an important milestone for the struggling hESC field.
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Transcriptional barcoding of retinal cells... →
By developing a large scale gene expression map for retinal cell types, FMI Neurobiologists have been able to identify the cells in the retina, where the genes causing retinal diseases specifically act. This narrows down the search for a better understanding of the diseases and opens up new avenues for therapeutic approaches.
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Could stem cells save snow leopards? →
Scientists have produced embryonic stem-like cells from the tissue of an adult snow leopard for the first time.
