Marijuana Research Offers New Hope For Male Birth Control Pill
The male birth control pill has lingered for years tantalizingly just out of reach, in the realm where rumor meets science. Recently developed hormonal and mechanical contraceptives never found an...
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 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 ArticleChanging the Language of DNA: Altered Cells Taught To Read 4-Base-Pair Codons
Much like your four-year-old nephew, RNA can only read three-letter combinations. Called codons, these three DNA-base-pair groups form the phrases that RNA translates into the 21 amino acids that...
View ArticleBreakthrough Danish Enzymes to Lower Biofuel Price Point To Petroleum Levels
Producing a biofuel cheap enough to compete at the pump with oil has remained as elusive as a ghost on the walls of Elsinore castle. But this week, two Danish companies announced they had developed...
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...
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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...
View ArticleVideo: Half-Kilometer-Long Explosive Whip Clears IEDs The Explode-y Way
Clearing battlefield obstacles has pitted trapper against sapper since Roman times. But whereas the minefields and dragon teeth of previous conflicts merely slowed advancing armies, the IEDs favored...
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 ArticleCampbell’s Uses Neuromarketing To Design New Soup Can Labels
For over a hundred years, Campbell’s Soup cans have sported the iconic label inspired by Cornell’s football uniform and made famous by Andy Warhol. Now, thanks to market research that measured...
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...
View ArticleNext for NASA: Inflatable Space Stations, In-Orbit Refueling, Space UAVs and...
As we’ve been hearing for months, 2010 is going to be a year of belt-tightening for NASA. But now, with the release of the new NASA budget, we can see that even with substantially less money, NASA...
View ArticleNASA Tests Handy-Man Space Robots For Orbital Repairs
With cuts in the manned space program and the impending retirement of the Space Shuttle, NASA will soon face the need to repair satellites without the ability to send any astronauts to do it....
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MIT Stumbles on a Way to Print Flexible Coatings Made of Micromachines
Microelectromechanical devices (MEMS) have the potential to enable a wide range of nanomachines. Unfortunately, MEMS suffer from the critical drawbacks of an expensive manufacturing process, a high...
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...
View ArticleGoogle Teams Up With Dish Network For Android-Powered TV Experiment
No longer simply content to rule the world of computers, the Google juggernaut has teamed up with Dish Network to bring its targeted ads and search power to the world of television. The project,...
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 ArticleFirst-Ever Full Sequencing of Unhealthy Genomes Illuminates Disease Roots
Despite coming from a range of different backgrounds, everyone whose genome has been fully sequenced has had one thing in common: they were all healthy. But now, two teams have decoded the first...
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