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 ArticleVideo: Improvising Jazzbot Jams With Humans, Really Swings
Advances in robotics have lead to automatons that can do everything from ski to open doors to help the elderly. Now, thanks to the Takanishi Laboratory at Waseda University in Japan, robots have...
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 ArticlePaper-Thin Batteries To Juice Self-Powered OLEDs
Organig LEDs hold large promise for efficient, thin and flexible lighting elements (as well as razor-thin TVs), but low-tech power sources continue to constrain more creative uses of the lights. After...
View ArticleDarpa’s Cyborg Insect Spies, Now Nuclear-Powered
When you write for Popular Science, it’s easy to become desensitized to wild and crazy future tech. To wit: When I first heard that Darpa wanted to develop cyborg insects to carry surveillance...
View ArticleInsurgents Hack Predator Video Feed With $26 Software
The use of drone aircraft for surveillance and bombing has transformed how the US wages war — a fact not lost on our cunning adversaries. Rather than just sit around, waiting for the next Predator...
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...
View ArticleGoogle Earth Images Confirm Mythological Meteor Impact
Australian Aborigine mythology begins in a period known as the “dream time”, before the emergence of humanity. Many stories about the dream time include legends about stars, gods, or rocks falling...
View Article2,400-Foot-Tall Solar Turbines To Power Arizona
Today’s solar power plants work either through photovoltaics or heated steam. If Enviromission gets its way, tomorrow’s plants will combine wind and solar, with acre-sized mirrors and...
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 ArticleBulletin of Atomic Scientists Turns Back Doomsday Clock, Gives Us An Extra...
Good news everyone! Armageddon has been postponed by another 60 seconds. This morning, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock back to six minutes before...
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...
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 ArticleNIF Moves 5.9 Million Degrees Closer To Fusion Power
With the need for a cheap and abundant alternative to fossils fuels more important than ever before, the field of fusion energy is getting hotter. Really, really hot. 6 million degrees hot. Yes, the...
View ArticleSuperinsulating Aerogels Arrive on Home Insulation Market At Last
Over 70 years ago, scientists invented aerogel, the least dense solid known to man, and an insulator four times more efficient than fiberglass or foam. Famously, according to Dr. Peter Tsou of NASA’s...
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 ArticleGoogle 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...
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 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...
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