Insulin 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...
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Say Hello to Robonaut2, NASA’s Android Space Explorer of the Future
With the news that the White House has canceled the Constellation Program, NASA seems to be moving out of the human space flight business. However, the unveiling of a next-generation robot astronaut...
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 ArticlePhysicists Prove Teleportation of Energy Is Possible
Over five years ago, scientists succeeded in teleporting information. Unfortunately, the advance failed to bring us any closer to the Star Trek future we all dream of. Now, researchers in Japan have...
View ArticleVideo: What Would You See As You Plummet Into a Black Hole?
By definition, one can’t see a black hole itself, only its effect on the light of intervening stars. And without some serious equipment, even that’s a tall order. Luckily for all us amateur...
View ArticleMeat the iPhone Sausage Stylus
It’s easy to see how Apple might have overlooked this, what with their headquarters located in a place with 60 degree days in February, but anyone from colder climates knows that you can’t operate an...
View ArticleIran Loads Up On High-Tech Chinese Riot-Control Trucks
Today marks the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. And in anticipation of Green Movement protests today, Iran has a new fleet of scary, high-tech riot-control trucks. Made in China,...
View ArticleWindows Phone Series 7 Takes Aim at iPhone, Android
Gadget lovers are nothing if not fickle, always ditching their older tech for pretty young things. And recently, all the attention on the iPhone and Google’s Android OS has made Microsoft seem a bit...
View ArticleRobots To Clear Baltic Seabed Of WWII Mines
In a dangerous legacy of the world’s deadliest conflict, 150,000 World War Two-era sea mines litter the Baltic Sea. The danger these bombs pose to a proposed gas pipeline has prompted Russia to hire...
View ArticleMathematician Cracks The Code for Making Hollywood Blockbusters
Howard Hawks famously said that all a good movie needs is three great scenes and no bad ones. Well, according to James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, they also need...
View ArticleTexas Secretly Gave The Blood of 800 Newborns to DNA Database
Parents across the Lone Star State are in an uproar after the Texas Tribune found that the Department of State Health Services covered up the donation of blood samples from 800 newborn babies to a...
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Video: In Attempt at True VTOL, F-35 Makes Shortest, Slowest Landing Yet
To perfect the vertical and short takeoff and landing ability of the F-35 Lightning II, test pilots have been taking off and landing at progressively shorter distances and slower speeds, building up...
View ArticleAntarctic Collision Snaps Rhode-Island-Sized Iceberg Off Glacier
This month, an iceberg roughly the size of Luxembourg slammed into an Antarctic glacier known as the Mertz Ice Tongue. Then, last week, a Rhode Island-sized section of the Mertz Ice Tongue finally...
View ArticleA New Breed of Medical Screws Dissolve In Body and Promote Bone Growth
The screws used by doctors to repair broken bones and torn ligaments enable recovery from a wide range of injuries. Unfortunately, they also leave holes in bones, require secondary surgery for...
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With Artificial Photosynthesis, A Bottle of Water Could Produce Enough Energy...
One of the interesting side effects of last year’s stimulus bill was $400 million in funding for ARPA-E, the civilian, energy-focused cousin of DARPA. And in this week’s first ever ARPA-E conference,...
View ArticleGold Nanoparticles and Lasers Kill the Brain Parasite That Causes “Crazy Cat...
Toxoplasmosis, a common food- and pet-borne illness linked to hallucinations, personality alteration, and, since it’s often carried by house pets, the stereotype of the crazy cat lady, infects around...
View ArticleThe Undersea Hunt for Intraterrestrial Life
Despite the impact of mankind, the size of trees, and the sheer numbers of bugs, multicellular terrestrial life only makes up a small portion of the planet’s biomass. The majority of life on Earth...
View ArticleMetal Nano-Particles Suspend Human Cells In Magnetic Scaffolding For Easy...
While scientists have become rather adept at transforming generic skin cells into specialized organ cells, crafting the organs themselves has proven far more difficult. Since the 3-D architecture of...
View ArticleFastest Binary Stars Ever Discovered Orbit Each Other at 310 Miles Per Second
Despite moving at 18 miles per second, it still takes the Earth a year to make it around the Sun. For HM Cancri, an orbit takes a little bit less time: around five minutes. At that speed, HM Cancri is...
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