MIT 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 ArticleBreakthrough Low-Power Desalination and Purification Technology Brings Clean...
High costs, in money and energy, limit the usefulness of desalination as a way to provide drinkable water in disaster areas. However, a new method could lead to portable desalination devices simple...
View ArticleNintendo’s 3DS Will Take the DS Experience into Three Dimensions, Somehow
With Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all time, and the World Cup, the most-watched TV broadcast, both in 3-D, it was only a matter of time until Nintendo, the most popular video game maker in...
View ArticleIn First Successful Human Trial, Nanotech Robots Deploy Cancer-Fighting RNA
RNAi, also known as “gene silencing,” is a cellular mechanism that blocks the production of proteins, and has tantalized doctors as a potential medicine for a number of years now. However, by placing...
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Insanely Hi-Res Z-Contrast Photos Can Determine Which Atoms Are Which
And you thought the macros on your camera was good because you got a sweet close up of a flower? Well, the scientists over at Oak Ridge National Laboratory zoom in so tight they can distinguish atoms...
View ArticleUS District Court Says No To Patenting Human Genes
In a move that could significantly alter the future of genetic medicine and the industry around it, a US District Court judge invalidated seven patents for human genes linked to breast and ovarian...
View ArticleDARPA Chief Testifies That US May Soon Face Critical Nerd Shortage
In last week’s testimony before Congress, Dr. Regina Dugan, director of DARPA, warned the House Armed Services Committee that the US was facing a lack of a critical resource — a lack so severe that it...
View ArticleNational Institute of Standards and Technology Tests Spray-On Transistors,...
In a discovery sure to help the development of solar panel and display technology, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have engineered transistors that they can...
View ArticleNYPD And NYFD Super Boats To Replace Half-Century-Old Clunkers Patrolling New...
After years of patrolling New York City’s water ways in antiquated, decades-old boats, the New York Fire and Police Departments are upgrading to some of the most technologically advanced vessels this...
View ArticlePyroelectric Crystals Could Enable the First Truly Portable X-Ray Machine
Like many pieces of modern medical equipment, X-ray machines are as bulky and energy dependent as they are vital. Even “portable” X-ray machines remain too heavy to carry across rough terrain, and too...
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Happy 50th Birthday to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence!
Fifty years ago today, on April 8th, 1960, a Cornell astronomy professor named Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at the star Tau Ceti in the hope of hearing broadcasts from extraterrestrial...
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...
View ArticleTiny Titanium Origami Highlights New Method Of Micro-Construction
While three-dimensional printing has come a long way, engineers still struggle with fabricating objects smaller than a quarter. In those small structures, the upper layers crush and distort the weak...
View ArticleWhat the Defense Department Wants For Christmas
When you control a budget that exceeds a trillion dollars, you don’t have to wait until after Thanksgiving to start writing your holiday present wish list. The Department of Defense (DoD) has just...
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 ArticleUS Troops In Afghanistan to Get Sensors That See Through Walls
As if aerial robots and bionic limbs didn’t make the Army seem futuristic enough, it looks like another hallmark of sci-fi, X-ray vision, will ship off to Afghanistan later this year. The device in...
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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 ArticleIon Engines Will Make Little CubeSats Steerable
The DIY miniature satellites known as CubeSats have a lot going for them. They’re cheap, they’re easy to program, and they’re small. That last benefit also adds a downside, in that the CubeSats are...
View ArticleMiniature Sensor Perpetually Charges Self Using Environmental Energy
Scientistsu, engineers, and doctors yearn for tiny sensors to record a vast array of events in the world’s many hard-to-reach places. And so far, the tradeoff between battery life and size has...
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...
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