Droplet 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...
View ArticleUK Report On Future Jobs Predicts More Space Pilots and Organ Manufacturers,...
With the US unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent, and the UK unemployment rate stuck at about 8 percent, most people are worrying about what job they’ll have 20 days from now, not 20 years in...
View ArticleSiftables, the Amazing Computerized Toy Blocks, Are Coming To a Store Near...
Sifteo, makers of Siftables, the ingenious cookie-sized computer blocks that play together in infinitely interesting ways, has today officially gone from MIT Media Lab research project to actual...
View ArticleMoscow’s Stray Dogs Evolving Greater Intelligence, Including a Mastery of the...
For every 300 Muscovites, there’s a stray dog wandering the streets of Russia’s capital. And according to Andrei Poyarkov, a researcher at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, the...
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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 ArticleNew Computer Program Studies Trees on TV to Simulate Their Movement
The same subtle, random movements, bouncing shadows, and immense complexity that make plants fascinating to observe in life also make them hell to animate. Like water and fire, a rustling tree is one...
View ArticleCompound LJ001 Acts Like Antibiotic Against Viruses
Unlike antibiotics, which kill many different types of bacteria, antiviral drugs for the most part need to target individual, specific viruses. A drug that attacks a multitude of viruses — an...
View ArticleMarine Corps’ Unmanned Programmable Copter Passes First Major Test
The difficulty of supplying remote outposts across rugged terrain has contributed to many of the deadliest moments in the Afghan War, by preventing the delivery of weapons and ammo to engaged...
View ArticleNanofiber Lamps Are More Efficient Than Incandescent Bulbs, Eco-Friendlier...
For those who want to start saving the planet at home, lighting presents a vexing paradox. While incandescent bulbs are wildly inefficient, compact fluorescent bulbs contain hazardous chemicals. With...
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Video: Easy Russian DIY Car-to-Tank Conversion Kit
As the Northeast and South brace for yet another day of record snow fall, thousands of Americans are struggling with ways to deal with treacherous road conditions. Thankfully, some intrepid Russian...
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Google Goggles Could Add Optical Character Recognition and Real-Time...
The Google Goggles Android app can already copy business cards directly into the address book and provide augmented reality overlays for restaurants. But now, Google has unveiled a prototype of a...
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Video: A Silent Rotor Blade Paves the Way for Super-Stealth Choppers
For all the government conspiracy militia nuts out there, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there is no such thing as silent, stealth black helicopters. The bad news is...
View ArticleNew Brain Scan Quantifies The Formerly Subjective Feeling of Pain
The seemingly subjective nature of pain always proves problematic for doctors, who have to use a woefully imprecise chart to gauge a patient’s suffering. But by using a new interpretation of fMRI...
View ArticleRussia Will End Space Tourism Flights When Shuttle Retires
Well, it looks like Charles Simonyi might have to wait a while for a third trip, because space tourism is going on hiatus. With the shuttle’s cancellation leaving Russia as the only country able to...
View ArticleDrug Treatment Could Sharpen Adult Brains
Anyone who’s tried to learn a second language knows that the earlier in life you start, the easier it is to learn. Now, a scientist at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center (SUNY)...
View ArticleTED Talk: Mark Roth Says Suspended Animation Could Soon Be a Reality
It used to be that suspended animation was only for people heading to Planet LV-426, and former Red Sox players. But Mark Roth, a researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle,...
View ArticleMIT Student Invention Deployed in Haiti to Save Lives
While many MIT students busily build break-dancing robots or websites that let your pets network better at doggie daycare, PhD candidate Danielle Zurovcik has designed a $3 pump to drastically speed...
View ArticleAutonomous Submarinebot Heads Down on Deepest-Ever Undersea Search For...
While some scientists resort to undersea drilling to find undiscovered forms of life, a new group of researchers has decided that piloting a robotic submarine into a submerged volcano was the way to...
View ArticleNew Evidence that Mysterious Dark Force From Outside Tugs at Our Universe
First came dark matter, the gravitational source from within our galaxy that astronomers couldn’t see. Then came dark energy, the undetectable force pushing the expansion of the universe. Now, NASA...
View ArticleHewlett-Packard Unveils Real-World Memristor, Chip of the Future
In 1971, electrical engineering professor Leon Chua proposed a theoretical basic electronics component called a memristor. In 2008, Hewlett Packard brought the memristor out of theory and into the...
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