China Designs Indigenous UAV Stealth Fighter, and Bootlegs Some US Models
When I hear the phrase “knock-off Chinese products”, I usually think of either the bootleg DVDs I get on the subway or the cheap electronics I get in Midtown. But a new report in Defense Professionals...
View ArticleUS Special Forces Field-Testing Plasma Knife
Emergency medical care for soldiers wounded on the battlefield has come a long way since Hawkeye and Hot Lips. But for Special Forces troopers operating deep behind enemy lines, that care often...
View ArticleChinese Scientists Engineer the World’s Smartest Rat
In a development that gives Acme Labs and NIMH a run for their money, scientists in Georgia and China have collaborated to create the world’s smartest rat. The genetically engineered rat, Hobbie-J,...
View ArticleWhen the DoD’s Fantasy Projects Get Real: DARPA Monitors Student Minds, SOCOM...
Three times a year, the Department of Defense (DoD) solicits help from the small business community to transform their high-tech research projects into actual, usable products. While the businesses...
View ArticleDoctors Equip Yorkshire Man With Cyborg Sphincter
Meet Ged Galvin, the Steve Austin of colorectal surgery. After a car crash in which Galvin almost died, surgeons at Royal London Hospital realized they could rebuild his crushed organs. Stronger....
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Revitalized LHC Manages to Collide Protons
After 14 years of work and $5.5 billion, the LHC has survived faulty magnets, avian sabotage, and the threat of malevolent time travelers to finally collided its first particles. Three days after the...
View ArticleNASA Robotic Rocket Plane To Survey Martian Surface
Since budget cuts and the inability to overcome problems like boredom and high radiation doses have ruled out any manned mission to Mars in the foreseeable future, NASA has shifted gears back towards...
View ArticleFind Your Twitter Friends In Real Life With an Augmented Reality iPhone App
Like most Internet applications, Twitter connects you with people who seem to exist in a vast, abstract, cyberspace. Now, a new iPhone app from the French company Presselite uses augmented reality to...
View ArticleFirst Commercial 3-D Bioprinter Fabricates Organs To Order
The problem with organ transplants is that the organ has to come from someone else. Since most people rather fancy their hearts and lungs, getting any organ other than a kidney usually requires the...
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Video: Simulation Renders Entire Known Universe
Everyone loves a good road movie, whether it’s Hope and Crosby or Fonda and Hopper. But the scope of those films pales in comparison to the ground covered by the Hayden Planetarium’s new video, The...
View ArticleSophisticated New Computer Models Predict Details of Insurgent Attacks
Chaos, confusion, and uncertainty have pervaded battle since Homer first described the din of clashing hoplites. But new developments in computer modeling look to pierce the fog of modern war by...
View ArticleCongressional UAV Caucus Courts Robot Voters
The US Congress has well over 100 caucuses, or groups of common interests. They’re like the clubs in a high school that play chess or work on the year book, except they usually focus on a constituency...
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NASA Scientists Classify the Time Before Earth Existed: the Chaotian Era
The geological time scale, with its familiar Cretaceous, Cambrian, and Eocene periods, works great as a calendar for the history of the Earth. Indeed, the different periods only cover the 3.8 billion...
View Article8 Percent of Human Genome Was Inserted By Virus, and May Cause Schizophrenia
The rise of psychopharmacology has led doctors to not only treat mental illnesses like regular diseases, but think of them as such as well. Turns out, schizophrenia may be more than just a disease in...
View ArticleDroplet Of Oil Navigates a Maze As Well As a Lab Rat
Successfully navigating a complex maze is the basic lab test for intelligence. Rats can do it. Cuttlefish can do it. And now, inanimate droplets of oil can do it. By creating a pH gradient, scientists...
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Robots Display Predator-Prey Co-Evolution, Evolve Better Homing Techniques
When we last checked in with the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland, their evolving robots had learned how deceive other robots about the...
View ArticleDARPA Gives $32 Million For A Bigger Big Dog From Boston Dynamics
After years of development and several creepy videos, Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog robot is scheduled to get bigger. Working off a $32 million request from DARPA and the Marine Corps, Boston Dynamics has...
View ArticleInsulin Can Now Be Made Cheaply from Flowers
In 1922, Canadian scientists isolated insulin for the first time. Now, over 80 years later, our neighbors to the north are helping diabetics again by devising the cheapest way yet to produce insulin....
View ArticleCarbon Crystals Harder Than Diamond Found In Finnish Meteorite
Diamond may remain the preferred material for wedding rings, Lil’ Wayne’s birthday gifts, and Damien Hirst sculptures, but it looks like girls’ best friend will have to relinquish its title as the...
View ArticleMarijuana Research Offers New Hope For Male Birth Control Pill
The male birth control pill has lingered for years tantalizingly just out of reach, in the realm where rumor meets science. Recently developed hormonal and mechanical contraceptives never found an...
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