British Crimefighting Drone Collars Its First Perp
Members of the British law enforcement community who think UAVs should be used to help stop crimes just got some new evidence to back up their argument, courtesy of the Merseyside PD. Yesterday, the...
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 ArticleHappy 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 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...
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...
View ArticleLab Rats’ Pampered Lifestyles Found to Skew Research Results
Sure, the maze gets boring every so often. And yeah, there’s not much variety in the food. But compared to the kill or be killed world of the wild, being a lab rat is a pretty good life. So good, in...
View ArticleAre Our Asteroid-Destroying Nukes Big Enough?
Pop quiz. An asteroid the size of Manhattan is hurtling towards Earth, its impact is sure to result in mass extinction and the destruction of humanity as we know it. What do you do? The traditional...
View ArticleObama Puts the EPA to Work
Having spent his first week in office focusing on the global economic crisis and America’s many wars, Obama began his second week by tackling another looming problem: climate change. On Monday,...
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 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 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 ArticleConcept Waterscraper Brings Monumental Architecture Into The Open Sea
For the last five years, eVolo Magazine has hosted a futuristic skyscraper design competition. Usually, the entrants imagine giant buildings taller than anything under construction today. However, the...
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...
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...
View ArticleVideo: 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 ArticleNanoribbons Moved by Light: Could Propel Cell-Sized Submarines, Create...
The ability of matter to move light underpins such common phenomena as transparency, refraction, and reflection. But light moving matter? That’s a bit rarer. So rare, in fact, that University of...
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 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 ArticleNASA Radar Developed for Mars Could Find Water Hiding Deep Beneath Earth Deserts
With 884 million people lacking a reliable source of clean drinking water, droughts throughout Africa and the Middle East exacerbating already tense situations, and global warming only making those...
View ArticleBill Gates’s 2010 TED Talk Now Online
There are plenty of reasons to disagree with President Obama and Bill Gates, but there’s no denying that both men are profoundly smart. And when they start agreeing on something, lesser minds like us...
View Article