May 2012
126 posts
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Jewel-like Nanowires Pretty As Well As Efficient →
Engineers at Stanford University have found a way to add these delicate, bulbous decorations to nanowires that are about 1/1000th the width of a human hair. The decorations are could be important to creating more efficient batteries, solar cells and other nanotechnology-enabled inventions in the future. Several research groups have come up with different ways to add tiny hairs, branches, bumps...
April 2012
192 posts
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'Brake gene' turned off in pancreatic cancer →
Aggressive pancreatic tumours may be treatable with a new class of drugs, according to Cancer Research UK
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Scar tissue gets new life as heart muscle →
A new process that turns scar tissue that forms after a heart attack into heart muscle cells could eliminate the need for stem cell transplant.
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Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed... →
“Please don’t put me in the closet,” cries the robot.
Last week, we wrote about a study that looked at whether humans attribute moral accountability and emotions to robots. This week, we’ve got a study from the same group, the Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab (HINTS) at the University of Washington, that takes a look at what kind of...
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To Predict or to Build the Future? Reflections on... →
A pioneer from the French school of la prospective discusses the development of futures-studies methodologies and the imperative of making methods accessible to all.
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WatchHow the internet can read your mind
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Scientists discover enzyme that could slow part of... →
New research published online in the FASEB Journal suggests that a specific enzyme, called 5-lipoxygenase, plays a key role in cell death induced by microgravity environments, and that inhibiting this enzyme will likely help prevent or lessen the severity of immune problems in astronauts caused by spaceflight. Additionally, since space conditions initiate health problems that mimic the aging...
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Transparent graphene-based material could... →
GraphExeter, the most transparent, lightweight and flexible material ever for conducting electricity, has been invented by a team from the University of Exeter.
It could revolutionize the creation of wearable electronic devices, such as clothing containing computers, phones, and MP3 players, and smart mirrors or windows, adding computerized interactive features. Since this material is also...
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Wind Farms Warming Texas →
New research finds that wind farms actually warm up the surface of the land underneath them during the night, a phenomena that could put a damper on efforts to expand wind energy as a green energy solution.
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WatchTechnicolour jelly lets you cook up an edible piano
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Metamaterials Step Into the Light →
Scientists in England and Valencia, Spain, have constructed what may be the first practical metamaterial that manipulates visible light. The researchers, who predict it could be used for subpicosecond optical switches and finely controlled laser pulses, reported the results at the March meeting of the American Physical Society. The layered structure of the Valencia team’s material, in contrast...
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Swiss scientists create mind-controlled robot for... →
A team of scientists at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have developed a robot that can be controlled using only your mind. The new technology was demonstrated earlier this week, and involved a quadriplegic man wearing a cap to record his brain signals, which were then transferred to a small wheeled robot that he could move left and right simply by thinking it.
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The Robotic Future is Fast, Cheap and Out of... →
The robotic future is here, and it looks nothing like we thought it would. Instead of humanoid, highly-intelligent robots that do our bidding, the future is increasingly one of robotic swarms, robotic quadrotors, and tiny robots no larger than insects that perform surgery. The robotics revolution, in short, is fast, cheap and out of control. Just as the computer revolution started with massive...
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Hey, Silicon Valley: Wake Up and Smell the Robots →
Investors and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area pride themselves on being the first to identify and exploit new technologies with huge commercial potential. And they’ve earned the right to be a little cocky. Since 1960, Silicon Valley companies have been the pacesetters in four consecutive infotech revolutions (semiconductors, personal computers, the Internet, and mobile).
It’s strange, then, that...
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Gigabit WiFi? 802.11ac router makes it possible,... →
Netgear is poised to be the first networking company with a next-generation router on the market—one that has been shown to reach speeds of up to 1.3Gbps in the 5GHz band. The company’s new router is based on the as-yet-unratified 802.11ac standard, which is theoretically three times faster than the preceding 802.11n standard.
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Build Your Own Civilization With The Global... →
You have no idea how any of the stuff around you gets made. To be truly empowered, should you be able to construct all your possessions from scratch? That’s the vision of the man behind this “open-source capitalism.”
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An analog quantum computer made of cold atoms used... →
Many of the most exciting properties of materials arise due to interactions between electrons. Correlations between electrons’ spins are involved in magnetism and may be responsible for high-temperature superconductivity—yet it’s tough to get theory to match our experimental results. The major reason for the difficulty lies in how quickly they scale: the more interactions between...
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World's First Seafloor Mine Signs First Customer →
Canada-based mining firm Nautilus Minerals said Tuesday it had signed China’s Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group as the first customer of its pioneering Papua New Guinean seafloor mine.
Nautilus, which is listed on the Canadian and London stock exchanges and has offices in Australia, said Tongling had agreed to buy 1.1 million tonnes of sulphides per annum from its Solwara 1 undersea mine...
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Researchers Develop A Path To Liquid Solar Cells... →
Scientists at USC have developed a potential pathway to cheap, stable solar cells made from nanocrystals so small they can exist as a liquid ink and be painted or printed onto clear surfaces. The solar nanocrystals are about four nanometers in size — meaning you could fit more than 250,000,000,000 on the head of a pin — and float them in a liquid solution, so “like you print a newspaper, you...
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WatchPBS NewsHour Visits Singularity University
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Optical trap catches atoms swinging in time to... →
It’s bizarre to feel awestruck and disappointed at the same time. Yet this is often how I feel when I read articles about ultracold atoms and Bose Einstein condensates. I’ll get to the awesome and awestruck parts later, but let me explain my disappointment. These experiments sit right at the boundary between classical and quantum physics. When we play with ultracold atoms, we make...
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Graphene found to emit infrared light →
Ever since its discovery in 2004, graphene, the honey-comb arranged sheet of one atom thick carbon atoms, has continued to make waves in both the physics and engineering worlds. Now comes news from yet another research team heralding a new found property of the fascinating material. This time, as the group describe in their paper published in Physical Review Letters, it’s been found to have...
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Mini cargo transporters on a rat run: New insight... →
Kinesins assume a vital function in our cells: The tiny cargo transporters move important substances along lengthy protein fibers and ensure an effective transportation infrastructure. Biophysicists of the Technische Universitaet Muenchen and the Ludwig Maximillians Universitaet Muenchen have now discovered how some of these transporters can, like cars on a multi-lane motorway, change lanes. The...
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App Tracks Your Teenager's Driving Habits →
By merging data from cars’ onboard computers and drivers’ smart phones, AT&T researchers have created a system that reports on drivers’ real-time behavior and long-term driving trends—and reveals whether a particular mistake might have been caused by phone use.
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A Trash-Powered Plane Takes To The Skies →
A modern day Lindbergh is attempting to show us the power of a new kind of fuel by flying the length of England using only garbage to power his flight.
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Ex-Flight Director Urges NASA to Kill Next Rocket... →
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is a bit of a mixed bag. Promising a return to Saturn V-type strength, the rocket is a congressional camel reflecting the self interested agendas of the congressmen responsible for its funding.
Former flight director Chris Kraft is adding his to the growing number of dissenting voices decrying SLS as deeply flawed. It’s destroying jobs and killing...
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DARPA seeks non-thermal approaches to thin-film... →
When the Department of Defense (DoD) wants to build a jet engine, it doesn’t put a team of engineers in a hangar with a block of metal and some chisels. Jet engines are made up of individual components that are carefully assembled into a finished product that possesses the desired performance capabilities. In the case of thin-film deposition—a process in which coatings with special properties...
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Penn researchers create first custom designed... →
Protein design is technique that is increasingly valuable to a variety of fields, from biochemistry to therapeutics to materials engineering. University of Pennsylvania chemists have taken this kind of design a step further; using computational methods, they have created the first custom-designed protein crystal.
Picking an ambitious design target with challenging features, the...
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Science Fiction or Fact: Humanlike Intelligent... →
In many futuristic tales, our heroic protagonists are often helped — and sometimes harmed — by intelligent machines far more clever than an iPhone. These computers sometimes walk and talk among us. Quick-witted machines serve on spaceships like Lieutenant Commander Data on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” or in our homes like the wisecracking housemaid Rosie the Robot on “The...
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Will Organic Food Fail to Feed the World? →
Food for hungry mouths, feed for animals headed to the slaughterhouse, fiber for clothing and even, in some cases, fuel for vehicles—all derive from global agriculture. As a result, in the world’s temperate climes human agriculture has supplanted 70 percent of grasslands, 50 percent of savannas and 45 percent of temperate forests. Farming is also the leading cause of deforestation in the...
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Just a few cell clones can make heart muscle →
Just a handful of cells in the embryo are all that’s needed to form the outer layer of pumping heart muscle in an adult zebrafish.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center used zebrafish embryos and careful employment of a new technique that allows for up to 90 color labels on different cells to track individual cells and cell lines as the heart formed.
The scientists were surprised...
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Bangalore India slum kids use open-source software... →
When kids from the slum neighborhood of Bengaluru in Bangalore, South India learn to use free computer ‘open-source’ software, they also learn important lessons in freedom and gender equality.
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Making human textiles: Research team ups the ante... →
A lot of people were skeptical when two young California-based researchers set out more than a decade ago to create a completely human-derived alternative to the synthetic blood vessels commonly used in dialysis patients. Since then, they’ve done that and more.
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Should Robots Be Blamed for Battlefield Mistakes? →
If a robot in combat accidentally kills a civilian, who is to blame?
This isn’t as straightforward of a question as it sounds. A team of scientists presented a study at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction and found that although robots don’t have free will, people sometimes treat them as if they do.
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Open Source Medicine Puts Health Above Profits →
Open source is powering a revolution in medicine and health care in multiple ways. Open source software and methods make large-scale collaborative research projects feasible, multiplying the brainpower applied to a project, expanding the data pool, and creating transparency and accountability. This is a huge win for the advancement of new treatments and cures, and cutting the costs of research....
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'Junk DNA' can sense viral infection →
Once considered unimportant “junk DNA,” scientists have learned that non-coding RNA (ncRNA) — RNA molecules that do not translate into proteins — play a crucial role in cellular function. Mutations in ncRNA are associated with a number of conditions, such as cancer, autism, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Now, through the use of “deep sequencing,” a technology used to...
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Nietzche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism →
Abstract
Bostrom rejects Nietzsche as an ancestor of the transhumanist movement, as he claims that there were merely some “surface-level similarities with the Nietzschean vision” (Bostrom 2005a, 4). In contrast to Bostrom, I think that significant similarities between the posthuman and the overhuman can be found on a fundamental level. In addition, it seems to me that Nietzsche explained the...
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Why Asteroid Mining Makes Huge Dollars and Sense →
Science fiction dreams of mining riches from asteroids only make sense if humans can make it worth their time and effort. The new Planetary Resources group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires and Hollywood moguls is now betting on the fact that there is big money in mining space rocks.
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Scientists seek new conductors for metamaterials →
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have designed a method to evaluate different conductors for use in metamaterial structures, which are engineered to exhibit properties not possible in natural materials. The work was reported this month in Nature Photonics.
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WatchRobotic manipulators that can provide high gripping force in hazardous environments still need delicate control - and what better way to provide that control than directly from a human hand? That’s the thinking behind ExoHand, a prosthetic developed by Festo of Germany - a veteran maker of robots - and modelled by turns on the herring gull, penguin or even the elephant’s trunk. (via...
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In digital future, the tablet and cloud storage... →
A paradigm shift may be coming to the digital lifestyle. Instead of the PC being the center of the personal computing universe, consumers will be opting for tablets as their primary computing device and relying on cloud storage to access their content across their devices, according to a new report.
“This burgeoning market is set to disrupt the personal computing device and OS...
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Drones to soar over US and Canada sooner than... →
Non-military agencies have been gearing up to get unmanned drones in the sky across America, and now it looks like those controversial aircraft will soon be heading north, as well.
Not only are surveillance drones expected to soar in droves across American airspace in the not-so-distant future, but now it has been confirmed that authorities in Canada have successfully followed through with test...
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Sex-for-Hire Robots Predicted by 2050 →
The research, published in the May issue of the journal Futures, sits incongruously among more staid titles about new spatial planning methods and urban sprawl. The paper is meant to be a “futuristic scenario” that “pushes plausibility to the limit,” write its authors, Michelle Mars and tourism professor Ian Yeoman, both of the Victoria University of Wellington in New...
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SpaceX Has Lofty Goal: Help Save Humanity from... →
SpaceX plans to launch a historic demonstration mission to the International Space Station next week, but the company’s ambitions extend far beyond low-Earth orbit.
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Power solution: India opens world's largest solar... →
The world’s largest solar power field has been switched on in India’s western state of Gujarat. Accounting for 214 megawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity, it becomes larger than China’s 200 MW Golmud Solar Park, which previously held the record.
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Ferrari-Inspired Italo High-Speed Train Will Hit... →
That flash of red whizzing by you in Italy now may not necessarily be a Ferrari sports car – it could be a new high-speed train inspired by the car company’s reputation for top performance. Ferrari’s president, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, has partnered with luxury goods company Tod’s and French rail firm SNCF to launch Nuovo Transporto Viaggiatori, a new private high speed rail network. What...
