March 2012
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Battery innovation is alive and well in the U.S. →
Battery giants in Japan and Korea have long dominated the world’s battery technology, and still do when it comes to small format batteries for laptops and consumer electronics. But at the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E event this week, a dozen or so battery companies and research labs showed off their innovations for batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid, signalling how battery...
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Aubrey de Grey on the Engineering Philosophy of... →
The core point of SENS, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, is explained in this short interview: “Could you elaborate on the idea mentioned on SENS: that it isn’t necessary to know, from an ‘engineering’ perspective, everything about the degenerative processes that occur at the cellular level in order to treat aging in the way you envision? … The...
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Heavy metal pollution causes severe declines in... →
Wild bees are important pollinators and numerous studies dealing with pollination of wild plants and crops underline their vital role in ecosystems functioning. While honey bees can be easily transported to various location when needed, wild bees’ presence is dependent on the availability of high quality semi-natural habitats. Some crops, such as apples and cherries, and many wild flowers...
February 2012
162 posts
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Tongue stud device uses iPod to drive wheelchair →
Engineers are developing a wireless device that enables people with spinal cord injuries to operate a computer and maneuver a wheelchair simply by moving their tongues.
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Schizophrenia patients' ability to monitor reality... →
People with schizophrenia who completed 80 hours of intensive, computerized cognitive training exercises were better able to perform complex tasks that required them to distinguish their internal thoughts from reality.
As described in the journal Neuron (2/22/12), a small clinical study conducted at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) and the University of California, San Francisco...
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Tiny $35 Raspberry Pi computer causes big stir on... →
The tiny $35 Raspberry Pi computer went on sale today, crashing its distributors’ websites on the way to selling out within hours of launch. Looking like little more than a credit card-sized chip of circuit board, the powerful, fully-programmable PC can plug into any TV and can power 3D graphics and Blu-ray video playback.
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Exotic material boosts electromagnetism safely →
Using exotic man-made materials, scientists from Duke University and Boston College believe they can greatly enhance the forces of electromagnetism (EM), one of the four fundamental forces of nature, without harming living beings or damaging electrical equipment.
This theoretical finding could have broad implications for such applications as magnetic levitation trains, which ride inches above...
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How Big Data Is Changing Everything →
There’s a radical transformation happening in information technology today, one that promises to be every bit as significant—and every bit as disruptive to existing business models—as were Web applications in the 1990s and virtualization in the first decade of the 21st century. It’s a foundational change in the way enterprises, their employees, and their customers manage, share, and secure the...
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Future smart phones will project images on the... →
Mobile phones currently on the market are capable of showing high quality images and video, but the phones’ small size sets insurmountable limits on screen size, and thus the viewing experience. VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, EpiCrystals Oy and the Aalto University are developing a better laser light source for projectors that will be integrated into mobile phones, which will...
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Researchers develop world’s first biodegradable... →
Tampere University of Technology (TUT) has been the first in the world to develop biodegradable joint implant, RegJoint™. The implant is used in the treatment of osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. RegJoint™ has recently received CE Mark approval that allows the product to be sold in the Europe
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Our Future in Space: Reasons to Be Optimistic →
Although a lack of a coherent roadmap for the future of manned spaceflight is the end result of a space program in jeopardy, Tyson zeroes in on politics and a lack of resources for NASA as the cause for space agency’s current predicament. How NASA can get itself back on track is the subject of Tyson’s book, “Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.”
NASA is...
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With a bang, Navy begins tests on EM railgun... →
Engineers have fired the Navy’s first industry-built electromagnetic railgun (EM Railgun) prototype launcher at a test facility, commencing an evaluation that is an important intermediate step toward a future tactical weapon for ships, officials announced Feb. 28.
The firing at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) kicks off a two- month-long test series by the Office of...
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WatchNew ‘Robot and Frank’ Movie Looks Like A Realistic Portrayal Of The Not-Too-Distant-Future
Get excited Singularitarians, a new robot movie’s coming out. But don’t expect them to transform into gigantic battle bots and destroy whole city blocks, and don’t expect them to turn on their human keepers and take over the world. Don’t even expect them to do instantaneous mind-numbing calculations so that...
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Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire →
The afternoon of May 6, 2010 was among the strangest in economic history. Starting at 2:42 p.m. EDT, the Dow Jones stock index fell 600 points in just 6 minutes. Its nadir represented the deepest single-day decline in that market’s 114-year history. By 3:07 p.m., the index had rebounded. The “flash crash,” as it came to be known, was big, unexpected and scary — and a new study says flash events...
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Making Solar Power Competitive with Coal →
By the end of the decade, manufacturers in the United States could make solar panels that are less than half as expensive as the ones they make now. That would be cheap enough for solar power to compete with electricity from fossil fuels, according to a new study in Energy & Environmental Science. The cost reductions will come via technology that’s already being demonstrated in...
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Transparency Launches as Linux of Drug Development →
When Tomasz Sablinski was working in pharmaceutical R&D, he was often frustrated by the demand for secrecy in the clinical trials process—a misdirected effort, he says, to keep competitors in the dark about what drug companies were up to. “The price you pay when you hide what you’re doing is you only get feedback from a precious few people,” he says. “There is very little new blood in the...
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Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle →
“INNOVATION is what America has always been about,” President Obama remarked in his recent State of the Union address. It’s hard to disagree, isn’t it? We live in a world dominated by innovative American companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. And even in the face of a recession, Silicon Valley’s relentless entrepreneurs have continued to churn out start-up companies with outsize,...
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RNA interference cancer treatment? Delivering RNA... →
For the past decade, scientists have been pursuing cancer treatments based on RNA interference — a phenomenon that offers a way to shut off malfunctioning genes with short snippets of RNA. However, one huge challenge remains: finding a way to efficiently deliver the RNA.
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Single molecule's electric charges seen in first... →
Researchers have shown off the first images of the “charge distribution” in a single molecule, showing an intricate dance of electrons at tiny scales.
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A battery breakthrough that could bring electric... →
A startup working on battery technology says it’s developed a key breakthrough that could one day lead to an electric car that has a 300-mile range and could cost around $25,000 to $30,000. Envia Systems, backed by venture capitalists, General Motors, and the Department of Energy, plans to announce on Monday at the ARPA-E conference that the company has created a lithium ion battery that has an...
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Scientists score new victory over quantum... →
Most people attempt to reduce the little uncertainties of life by carrying umbrellas on cloudy days, purchasing automobile insurance or hiring inspectors to evaluate homes they might consider purchasing. For scientists, reducing uncertainty is a no less important goal, though in the weird realm of quantum physics, the term has a more specific meaning.
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European collaboration fast-track organic &... →
Europe’s leading organic and large-area electronics (OLAE) organisations have joined forces in the Framework 7 project COLAE, which aims to speed up the commercialisation and adoption of organic and large area electronics by promoting collaboration between industry clusters throughout Europe.
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WatchBritish scientists have produced a series of videos showing microscopic Cytotoxic ‘killer’ T cells destroying cancer cells in the human bloodstream. Their analysis of the T cell’s remarkably efficient, destructive qualities aims to eventually improve the body’s natural immunity against cancer and help overcome autoimmune diseases.
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Conformity linked to the size of a brain region →
Every generation has its James Dean: the rebel who refuses to follow the path beaten by their peers. Now, a new study in ‘Current Biology’ has found a link between the amount of grey matter in one specific brain region and an individual’s likelihood of conforming to social pressures.
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Crowdsourcing improves predictive texting →
SMARTPHONES may soon get a lot better at finishing your sentences for you - with the help of words and phrases gleaned from crowdsourcing.
The software packages in today’s phones often struggle with texts and voice commands if a user attempts words or phrases that aren’t included in the phone’s database.
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Space Elevator, Going Up →
Ever ridden in one of those elevators where a softly feminine, robotic voice alerts you to what floor you’re going to next? Yeah, me neither. But if I had, wouldn’t it be cool if the voice said this instead: Going up. Next floor, outer space.
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Russian scientists revive an ice age flower →
A plant that was frozen in Siberian permafrost for about 30,000 years has been revived by a team of Russian scientists - and borne fruit, to boot.
Using tissue from immature fruits buried in fossil squirrel burrows some 90 feet below the surface, researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Pushchino managed to coax the frozen remains of a Silene stenophylla specimen into full flower,...
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Liquid water diffusion at molecular level →
Researchers at the universities of Granada and Barcelona have described for the first time the diffusion of liquid water through nanochannels in molecular terms; nanochannels are extremely tiny channels with a diameter of 1-100 nanometers that scientists use to study the behavior of molecules (nm. a unit of length in the metric system equal to one billionth of a meter that is used in the field...
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Software Predicts Traffic to Reduce Gridlock →
Making the buses and trains run on time and keeping traffic congestion under control is a challenge in any city. Lately, the city of Zhenjiang, China, has been trying out a system from IBM that will let traffic managers not only see what is happening but react before problems show up.
Using many sources of data — GPS from taxicabs, buses and cell phones, as well as local cameras, sensors...
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Dinosaur Robots Made from 3D Printed Bones →
Three-dimensional printing programs can shrink a blueprint for 100-foot-long skeletons to a more manageable size.
Building a dinosaur based on the smaller model could allow scientists to better study how the animals stood, walked and mated.
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“65% of grade school children will end up at a job that has not been invented...”
– US Dept of Labor
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Aircraft of the future could capture and re-use... →
Tomorrow’s aircraft could contribute to their power needs by harnessing energy from the wheel rotation of their landing gear to generate electricity.
They could use this to power their taxiing to and from airport buildings, reducing the need to use their jet engines. This would save on aviation fuel, cut emissions and reduce noise pollution at airports.
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More video games, more attention trouble? →
Children who focus on video games for long periods—but otherwise have trouble paying attention—may be stuck in a vicious cycle
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Superconductor breaks high-temperature record →
You just can’t keep a good superconductor down. An iron-based crystal has been found to regain the ability to conduct electricity without resistance when placed under pressure, breaking the record for the temperature at which superconductivity can survive in the process. But how it does this remains a mystery.
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Real Fish Get Schooled By Robots →
Fish, I guess, are not the smartest fish in the… Well, they’re not that smart, let’s go with that. Stefano Marras of the University of Montpellier and Maurizio Porfiri of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University have convinced some golden shiners to follow a robotic fish in a schooling pattern.
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Cell phone attachment detects E. coli in food... →
Cell phones have already revolutionized communication, and now they might one day do the same for food safety. A research group working under Aydogan Ozcan at UCLA has created a cell phone attachment that can calculate the concentration of E. coli in a liquid sample. The device works similarly to a fluorescence microscope, pumping the sample into a series of small tubes treated with E. coli...
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Face-Recognizing Billboard Only Displays Ad To... →
Moral ambiguity, thy name is advertising. How are we to parse this advertising campaign in London in which an intelligent bus stop billboard only displays its content to women? You read correctly: the billboard has a camera that scans passersby and if one stops to look, it determines their sex and shows them a 40-second video if they are female. Males only get a link to the advertiser’s website.
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Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year's... →
People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.
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I, Robopsychologist, Part 1: Why Robots Need... →
“My brain is not like a computer.”
The day those words were spoken to me marked a significant milestone for both me and the 6-year-old who uttered them. The words themselves may not seem that profound (and some may actually disagree), but that simple sentence represented months of therapy, hours upon hours of teaching, all for the hope that someday, a phrase like that would be spoken at...
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Creating buildings that repair themselves →
A researcher specialising in architecture and synthetic biology, Rachel Armstrong imagines a future with building materials that function as part of living systems. New Scientist caught up with her to talk about her new TED book, Living Architecture.
What is wrong with today’s architecture?
The issue with modern architecture is that it is imagined through the framework and technology of the...
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Tiny, implantable medical device can propel itself... →
Stanford engineers develop a high-frequency, wirelessly powered device with an antenna small enough to fit in the bloodstream
Someday, your doctor may turn to you and say, “Take two surgeons and call me in the morning.” If that day arrives, you may just have Ada Poon to thank.
Yesterday, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) before an audience of her peers,...
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Scoping the cost of the world's biggest new... →
The world’s most powerful telescope – the new Square Kilometre Array (SKA) – is likely to need the world’s biggest computer to handle the incredible amount of data it will produce − and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) is working out how to do it without breaking the bank.
ICRAR – a joint venture between Curtin University and The University of Western...
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New nanotechnology converts heat into power when... →
Never get stranded with a dead cell phone again. A promising new technology called Power Felt, a thermoelectric device that converts body heat into an electrical current, soon could create enough juice to make another call simply by touching it.
Developed by researchers in the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest University, Power Felt is comprised of tiny carbon...
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