31/01/2010
The ultra-high-strength composite metal foam created by Afsaneh Rabiei is a highlight of a well-traveled career during which the researcher has tried to learn everything she can about advanced materials. The result: a brand new material that can save energy and lives.
http://www.livescience.com/technology/081017-bts-metal-foams.html28/12/2009
molecular transistors could escalate the next step of developing nanomachines that would take just a few atoms to perform complex calculations, enabling massive parallel computers to be built.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/functional-molecular-transistor/28/12/2009
No matter how many glasses they had, they would remain in that pleasant state of mild inebriation and at the end of an evening out, revellers could pop a sober-up pill that would let them drive home.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6874884/Alcohol-substitute-that-avoids-drunkenness-and-hangovers-in-development.html17/12/2009
Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html16/12/2009
Users can touch the screen to activate controls on the display but as soon as they lift their finger off the screen, the system can interpret their gestures in the third dimension, too. In effect, it turns the whole display into a giant sensor capable of telling where your hands are and how far away from the screen they are.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/gestural-computing-system/02/12/2009
An extraordinary project from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency promises to make it happen. Darpas $100 million Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 Program aims to create a thought-controlled functional arm within this decade. The project is a collaborative effort with more than 30 organizations including labs, universities and private companies.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/bionic-arms-gallery/24/11/2009
The process for dealing with this sounds like magic: the device assembles itself. Although they look like a fine white powder, each of the individual components sensors, antennae, semiconductor circuits and LEDs is a particular shape. They are floated over the polymer substrate, which is etched with tiny holes corresponding to the shape of each component. The components fall into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and are then locked into position.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/11/could-self-assembling-contact-lenses-become-head-up-displays/09/11/2009
For this electronic system of magnification, inexpensive light-emitting diodes added to the basic cellphone shine their light on a sample slide placed over the phones camera chip. Some of the light waves hit the cells suspended in the sample, scattering off the cells and interfering with the other light waves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html02/11/2009
...Igor Lisov, a Moscow-based expert on Russian space program, said the prospective ship would use a nuclear reactor to run an electric rocket engine...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091029/ap_on_sc/eu_russia_nuclear_spaceship30/10/2009
Secretive inventor Roger Shawyer claims to have invented electropropulsion device. He made a presentation at the CEAS 2009 European Air & Space Conference but answered little questions. Previous thrusters generated relatively modest forces; the latest version now being built is based on a cooled superconductor and should generate more than 300 pounds of thrust for a 6-kilowatt input, Shawyer promises. If correct the resulting vehicle could have flying saucer-like abilities like silently hovering.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/impossible-drive-designers-dream-flying-cars-stealth-missiles/27/10/2009
http://gizmodo.com/5390392/petman-walkingbalancing-robot-is-like-bigdogs-human-master
20/10/2009
A team of scientists from Italy and Sweden has developed what is believed to be the first artificial hand that has feeling.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8313037.stm15/10/2009
The desktop black hole, described in a paper submitted to arXiv on Monday, is made from 60 concentrically arranged layers of circuit board. Each layer is coated in copper and printed with patterns that alternately vibrate or dont vibrate in response to electromagnetic waves.
Together, the patterns completely absorbed microwave radiation coming from any direction, and converted their energy to heat.
14/10/2009
In the early 1980s, Levitin singled out a quantum elementary operation, the most basic task a quantum computer could carry out. In a paper published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, Levitin and Toffoli present an equation for the minimum sliver of time it takes for this elementary operation to occur. This establishes the speed limit for all possible computers.
Using their equation, Levitin and Toffoli calculated that, for every unit of energy, a perfect quantum computer spits out ten quadrillion more operations each second than today's fastest processors.
08/10/2009
http://gizmodo.com/5377021/video-toshibas-latest-fuel-cell-prototype-gadgets-charge-in-seconds
02/10/2009
Researchers from Australia and Singapore are developing a wireless ad-hoc mesh networking technology that uses mobile handsets to share and carry information including high quality video.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/10/01/202210/A-Mobile-Phone-Mesh-That-Can-Survive-Carrier-Network-Failure?art_pos=930/09/2009
The Power Loader "dual-arm power amplification robot" uses 18 electromagnetic motors that let the wearer lift 220lbs without blinking. It gets its name from the exoskeleton from Aliens (get away from her you bitch!), and even has force-feedback.
http://gizmodo.com/5370907/power-loader-exoskeleton-gives-superhuman-strength30/09/2009
In reality, EBF3 works in a vacuum chamber, where an electron beam is focused on a constantly feeding source of metal, which is melted and then applied as called for by a drawing—one layer at a time—on top of a rotating surface until the part is complete.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/electron_beam.html29/09/2009
The principle isn't new - the team previously developed tools which can create 3D models from a collection of photos, which subsequently evolved into Microsoft's Photosynth. But while that technology was good at using snapshots of single tourist attractions, it was unsuited to tackling larger projects, such as recreating cities. "Using the existing system it would have taken years to recreate a whole city," says Agarwal.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327275.300-entire-cities-recreated-from-flickr-photos.html29/09/2009
At the heart of Abancens teams detector, which is called a scintillating bolometer and resembles a prop from The Golden Compass, is a crystal so pure it can conduct the energy ostensibly generated when a particle of dark matter strikes the nucleus of one of its atoms. To prevent interference by cosmic rays, the bolometer is sheathed in lead and kept underground, under half a mile of rock. Its also frozen to near-absolute zero, the temperature at which all motion stops. At the edge of absolute zero, its possible to measure expected changes of a few millionths of a degree Fahrenheit. But in order for the bolometer to work reliably, it needs to become even more sensitive, and maintain that sensitivity as its scaled up from the 46-gram prototype to a half-ton working model, said Rick Gaitskell, a Brown University physicist who was not involved in the research.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/dark-matter-detector/25/09/2009
Lead researcher Dr Paul Chapman said: "We've seen responses in patients who didn't respond to chemotherapy before. So far 70 per cent of patients have responded. So that is unprecedented for us."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8268719.stm24/09/2009
A chip inside the eye that can help blind people see again is moving closer to reality as researchers at MIT work on a retinal implant that can bypass damaged cells and directly offer visual input to the brain.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/microchip-in-the-eye/24/09/2009
The moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, but the water is said to exist on the moon in very small quantities. One ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water, researchers said.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html18/09/2009
By using ultrasonic waves, the scientists have developed software that creates pressure when a user's hand "touches" a hologram that is projected.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE58F1KP2009091610/09/2009
The company has $4 billion in contracts and can make money selling its products for $1 per watt of a panels capacity. Thats cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels in markets across the world.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/nanosolar/10/09/2009
via gizmodo
03/09/2009
Physicists proposed the idea of laser cooling 30 years ago, but until now, experiments had been largely unsuccessful and only worked with low-pressure gases. Now, German researchers have shown that bombarding high-pressure gas with a laser can produce dramatic cooling, dropping the temperature as much as 66 degrees Celsius (about 119 degrees Fahrenheit) in a matter of seconds.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/lasercooling/02/09/2009
They're trialing mockups of the lenses—which are sorta like older gas permeable lenses except with independently fabricated microcomponents like, biosensors and circuits—in bunnies' eyeballs right now, using lens with integrated metal circuits, with no problems for up to 20 minutes of wear. They're up to one LED for display now that's powered wirelessly by RF, but eventually, what's embedded in the lenses will include hundreds of LEDs to form images, and semi-transparent optoelectronics like antennas.
http://gizmodo.com/5350458/reality+augmenting-terminator-vision-contact-lenses-nearly-here-theyre-in-this-bunnys-eye01/09/2009
Handcrafted by myself Using Car and Airplane parts. I spent 15 years as a mechanic. Can Use for 2 High Jumps 10 feet in the air with a safe landing before overheating, takes about an hour to cool down after that.
http://www.usedvictoria.com/classified-ad/998455026/08/2009
We are a collection of augmented reality (AR) enthusiasts and professionals (from business and academia), who have been working on a multitude of AR apps for the iPhone. These apps are poised to change the way people interact with the real world.
http://gamesalfresco.com/2009/07/02/open-letter-to-apple-let-us-augment-reality-with-the-iphone/20/08/2009
The video-enhancement will appear in the September issue of Entertainment Weekly, but only in what sounds like a relatively small subset of the circulation: The promo itself will be in every copy, but the video portion only in some subscriptions delivered to New York and Los Angeles. It was released Tuesday to media outlets.
18/08/2009
Researchers at IBM have made a significant breakthrough in their quest to combine DNA strands with conventional lithographic techniques to create tiny circuit boards. The breakthrough, which allows for the DNA structures to be positioned precisely on substrates, could help shrink computer chips to about a 6-nanometer scale. Intel’s latest chips, by comparison, are on a 32-nanometer scale.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/dna-chips/02/08/2009
http://gizmodo.com/5328227/toyota-humanoid-robot-gives-asimo-a-run-for-its-money
29/07/2009
The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city. A short pulse from the FLASH laser knocked out a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metals crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation. Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.
http://www.physorg.com/news167925273.html/28/07/2009
By lucky accident, researchers discovered that the commonly used food additive FD&C blue dye No. 1 is remarkably similar to a lab compound that blocks a key step in nerve inflammation. When rats with spinal cord injury were given an infusion of blue dye, they recovered much faster than rats that didn’t get the treatment. And researchers reported only one adverse effect: The rats turned blue.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/bluerats/16/06/2009
If everything goes well, soon we will be able to reach the center of the Earth using 7200ºF flame jets that can go into any kind of material at 100 feet an hour.
09/06/2009
One team from Harvard is working on a kind of "generalized Rubik's Cube" that can fold into all kinds of shapes. Another is trying to order large strands of synthetic DNA to bind together in a "molecular Velcro." An MIT group is building "self-folding origami" machines that "use specialized sheets of material with built-in actuators and data. These machines use cutting-edge mathematical theorems to fold themselves into virtually any three-dimensional object."
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/universal-rubiks-cube-could-become-pentagon-shapeshifter02/06/2009
Essentially, the plastic substrate is glued to a piece of glass while they process it, and then it's carefully peeled off. What you end up with is an OLED implemented directly on plastic.
http://gizmodo.com/5273364/flexible-oled-screens-are-really-coming-now02/06/2009
The device has an iron nanoparticle positioned inside a hollow carbon nanotube. Carbon nanotubes are molecular-scale tubes usually made of a carbon allotrope. For data storage, a small electrical signal is applied across the nanotube causing the iron nanoparticle shuttle to move back and forth. The movement of the nanoparticles from one end to the other of the tube creates the binary ‘1′ or ‘0′ state.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/billion-year-data-storage/31/05/2009
University of Illinois professor Nicholas Fang is taking steps to create a similar material, only for sound, that could, for example, make ships invisible to SONAR.
http://gizmodo.com/5273167/scientists-nearing-creation-of-sound-cloak-breaking-laws-of-physics29/05/2009
“What we’ve done is to impose some of the controls we’ve imposed in electrical engineering onto the biological cell,” said synthetic biologist Timothy Lu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We hope to be able to control the cell more reliably, and have it perform more defined functions. This forms the fundamental basis for building more complicated circuits.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/cellcounters/13/05/2009
The problem is, as data accumulates, doing creative things with it gets harder. At a certain point, volume overwhelms understanding. As Schmidt explains, their program solves this problem by “exploiting the computing power that’s available right now” — using the technological advances that created the problem to solve it.
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_were_not_obsolete/02/05/2009
still in betta though... sorry.
27/04/2009
Thought Experiments: When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil
by Cory Doctorow
Singularity 101 with Vernor Vinge
by Doug Wolens
23/04/2009
Ferroelectric materials provide low-power, high-efficiency electronic memory and are already used in smart cards for subways and ATMs, among other things. Integrating ferroelectrics with silicon-based circuits like those in modern electronics would enable instant-on capability, and it could also provide higher speed and lower power consumption overall, making the ferroelectric circuits an attractive alternative to flash and other memory technologies. But integrating the two materials in a transistor has eluded researchers for more than half a century.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/04/instant-on-comp.html22/04/2009
A controversial fertility doctor claimed yesterday to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women who had been prepared to give birth to cloned babies.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fertility-expert-i-can-clone-a-human-being-1672095.html22/04/2009
The Fonera 2.0 made by FON, (the Spanish WiFi sharing people) is released today (barring the occasional retail glitch) for 45 euros. It comes complete with OLPC's mesh-networking system. You can plug it into Ethernet or a 3G dongle. Share your bandwidth with any other router in range that implements OLPC's mesh-networking standard. The Open WRT software is designed to run on just about any hardware so you do not actually have to buy a Fonera to join the fun. The software is based on Open WRT, which in turn is based on the Linksys WRTG54G firmware which the community forced Cisco to open-source (since it made use of Busybox + Linux Kernel). As a result of this we now have a router far more featured than the most expensive access point you can get in the shops, costing a fraction of the price and based on entirely free firmware.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/21/fon-releases-open-me.html21/04/2009
At the IBN, scientists have been able to make carbon dioxide react with a stable organocatalyst called N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) under mild conditions in dry air. NHCs have shown tremendous potential for activating and fixing carbon dioxide,"says Siti Nurhanna Riduan, senior lab officer at IBN. "Our work can contribute towards transforming excess carbon dioxide in the environment into useful products, such as methanol.
http://www.gizmag.com/research-carbon-dioxide-methanol/11483/15/04/2009
http://i.gizmodo.com/5212161/how-it-feels-to-walk-with-hondas-cyborg-legs?skyline=true&s=x
15/04/2009
Researchers in Canada have unveiled plans for a factory that will use nanotechnology to extract cellulose from wood and use it to form composite materials for airplanes. Company President Jim Dangerfield says the process allows the extraction of cellulose particles just 20 nanometers long and 20 nanometers wide, and the factory will be able to produce as much as a ton of them each day. Combined with other materials, the fibers are tough enough to form a new generation of composite materials.
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2009/04/wood-planes-mak.html10/04/2009
Its ability to grant its wearer tenfold strength increases during specific actions could change the lives of people with degenerative muscle diseases, or accident victims who would otherwise need long, difficult rehabilitative therapy to regain basic mobility. And with a five-hour battery life, it could be quite practical for day to day use. It's also great news for extreme hobbyists, certain factory workers and the children of the rich, who can enjoy near-full robotization for about $4200 when these things start rolling off the line.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5206539/mass-production-planned-for-hal-exoskeleton-your-personal-iron-man-conversion-to-cost-420009/04/2009
Able to thrive on nutrients in animal waste, duckweed produces far more starch per acre than corn, say researchers. It could be an alternative to corn-based ethanol biofuel, which is disfavored by environmentalists because of waste generated in farming it.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/doubleduckweed.html26/03/2009
The hardware itself is just a camera that sits in front of the eyewear, and feeds a signal back to your eyes. The magic happens when an app is programmed to recognize certain objects, and know to augment what your seeing with 3D visuals on top.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5184665/vuzixs-camar-augmented-reality-headset-provides-a-glimpse-into-future-computing13/03/2009
The brain's center of memory and navigation, once considered too disorganized to decode, may soon be unlocked. Using a brain scanner, researchers were able to determine the location of people standing in a virtual room from the activity in their brains.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/brainspace.html10/03/2009
A strange and confused chapter in the history of American medical research ended Monday morning, when President Obama signed an executive order ending a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell lines that were developed after August 9, 2001.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/obamastemcells.html06/03/2009
ARGONNE, Illinois — In the basement of a nondescript building here at Argonne National Laboratory, nickel particles in a beaker are building themselves into magnetic snakes that may one day give clues about how life originally organized itself.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/snakes.html05/03/2009
A 73-year-old man was recently given vision again after being outfitted with a "bionic eye." After 30 years of darkness, he now can see enough to follow white lines on the road and sort socks.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5164677/elderly-man-sees-for-first-time-in-30-years-with-bionic-eye16/02/2009
DefconAR was originally just gonna be a cool little toy for us to use in the office to wow people who came to see us. Who'd have to hide the Defcon screen from your boss when playing Office mode, if there isn't even a window open for it? Have a small tile on your desk, wearing some AR goggles, and no one would know. Obviously there isn't much to it at the moment, I still need to spice up the world rendering, and then add in some actual content, but just imagine how this would look with nukes flying over the globe in realistic arcs, and maybe even 3D mushroom clouds.
http://www.offworld.com/2009/02/introversions-defconar-mutuall.html16/02/2009
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=theo+jansen&aq=0&oq=theo+ja
15/02/2009
The boundaries of previously distinct geographies with their own distinct forms of life have been blurred by invasive organisms hitching rides on shipping vessels. The world's bodies of water are getting more homogeneous, leading some biologists to refer to the current era of global biological flatness as "the homogecene."
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/homogecene.html15/02/2009
In December, plastic surgeon Maria Siemionow, after years of extensive research on mice and cadavers, transplanted almost 83 square inches of skin, with the muscles, bone, upper lip and nose still attached from an anonymous donor onto a young woman who the doctor said "did not have a midface" after she sustained traumatic injury.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/facetransplant.html13/02/2009
This "Bionic Body Armor" would continuously scan the area for incoming projectiles. If one is detected, the system would deliver a shock to the muscles causing a swift, reflexive action away from the bullet.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5152676/ibm-patents-bionic-armor-that-gives-humans-ability-to-dodge-bullets12/02/2009
The volume of data is too great to be completely transmitted, but users will be able to define at least sixty-five independent video windows within the image and zoom in or out at will. The windows can be set to automatically track items of interest such as moving vehicles. In fact, the resolution is good enough for it to offer "dismount tracking" or following individual people on foot.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/02/gigapixel-flyin.html12/02/2009
Using magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography, he captures thousands of images of a body, from head to toe. A computer then assembles the pieces—layer upon layer of tissue and bone—into a stunning 3-D postmortem portrait in which structures are differentiated by hue and opacity: Bones appear white and opaque; organs, a translucent red.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-02/st_insidebody06/02/2009
Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they're done.
http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-digital-six.html04/02/2009
The procedure is simple: Take some healthy T-cells out of an HIV patient, clip out their CCR5 genes, grow more of these clipped T-cells in a dish, and then put them back in the patient.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/hivtreatment.html03/02/2009
Lanza's team inserted human cell nuclei into hollowed-out egg cells from both humans and animals, then stimulated them into development, a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), or more informally, cloning. When compared to a normal human embryo produced through in vitro fertilization, the animal-human hybrids didn't develop normally, but the human-human cloned embryos displayed many of the genetic characteristics of healthy development.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/human-clones-ap.html29/01/2009
The clear winners, cost aside, are strategies that would block out some solar radiation. Perhaps the most currently workable version of this technique is injecting millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/georank.html29/01/2009
Researchers at the university controlled the movement of beetle wings and some other parts using radio signals sent to the six electrodes on its brain and muscles.The university has so far succeeded in several experiments of electrically controlling insects, but it used a radio control system this time.
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20090128/164717/28/01/2009
All the robots are told is where products are located and where they need to go. From there, the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, figure out the rest. They locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every hour.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/retailrobots.html25/01/2009
No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter about a yard.
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090123-teleportation-atoms.html20/01/2009
Bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett has been testing out a revolutionary helmet which is claimed to slow down or even reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.
‘He was assessed by a computer-based system at the outset. Sir Terry used the helmet for about three months. Over that period there was a small improvement. Not significant, which was a bit disappointing, but it didn’t get any worse.’
20/01/2009
The merit of nru itself aside, it's clear that the addition of a compass to the G1 is its superlative feature. It's this year's accelerometer. I'd expect to see one in the next iPhone revision. By next year they'll be in digital picture frames and blenders, a nickel's worth of "Why not?" silicon telemetry.
16/01/2009
The key to battling drug-tolerant superbugs could be keeping them awake. New research into how bacteria go dormant, allowing them to evade drugs, could lead to a method to keep them from hiding.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/bacterial-infec.html24/12/2008
So Jeffrey Olsen at the University of Colorado Hospital has come up with another method entirely – amplifying the light that reaches the retina using the eye's still functioning light-sensitive cells. (via gizmodo)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16315-invention-vision-amplifier.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=invention19/12/2008
Many skin cancers are currently treated by a combo of light and drugs (called photodynamic therapy), but current light sources are large and the therapy requires lengthy hospital visits. Lumicure Ltd. Is looking to use OLEDs in the treatment instead.
http://gizmodo.com/5113954/oleds-to-be-used-to-treat-skin-cancer-acne17/12/2008
There's an order of magnitude more coal than oil. So, whether there is a little more oil or a little less oil will change the details in, say, when we reach two degrees warming, but it doesn't change the overall picture.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/oil-not-the-cli.html13/12/2008
Doctors were able to fuse a titanium alloy rod to her bone and the skin healed naturally around it—creating a protective seal. "The technique, intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthesis, or Itap, is based on reindeer antlers, which naturally grow through the skin without any problems."
http://gizmodo.com/5108928/bomb-victim-fitted-with-cyborg-arm-that-fuses-with-her-own-skin-and-bone11/12/2008
Using a so-called femtosecond laser, the device emits ultrafast light pulses that don't have enough time to damage surrounding tissue. While femtosecond lasers themselves aren't exactly new—they're standard gear for laser eye surgery—Ben-Yakar is the first to figure out how to make one small enough to be used inside a person.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-12/st_microscalpel02/12/2008
"The original purpose [was] to make a solar cell more efficient," says Chen. "However, during the research we found the solar cell phenomenon [had] disappeared." Instead, the test material showed high gain photoconductivity, indicating potential use as a photo sensor.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/12/gallery_photodetector01/12/2008
ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.
28/11/2008
The molecule, called glycolaldehyde, was spotted in a large star-forming area of space around 26,000 light-years from Earth in the less-chaotic outer regions of the Milky Way. This suggests the sugar could be common across the universe, which is good news for extraterrestrial-life seekers.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/sugar-molecule.html28/11/2008
"In principle, we now could have a way of reversing the effects of aging," said David Sinclair, a Harvard University gerontologist and co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a company best-known for its development of an experimental drug called resveratrol.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/mitochondria-dr.html21/11/2008
Raytheon system uses an electronically-scanned radar array to detect an incoming anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade, then vertically launches a countermeasure missile that blows the round to smithereens in mid-flight.
20/11/2008
Physicists have announced they've spotted electrons with just about the amount of energy they would have expected to be made by a particular kind of weak interacting massive particle (dark matter)entering the visible world.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/darkmatter.html15/11/2008
The first, taken by the much beloved Hubble Telescope, shows a planet orbiting the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis. The second picture, snapped by upstaging Hawaiian observatories Gemini and Keck, shows two young planets orbiting a completely different star located 130 light-years from us!
http://gizmodo.com/5086678/astronomers-take-first-ever-pics-of-other-planetary-systems15/11/2008
DARPA is developing now a portable blood farming system that could infinitely produce universal donor red cells from umbilical cord blood, right there in the battlefield. It uses a nano-fiber structure that replicates bone marrow, which is where red cells are manufactured.
http://gizmodo.com/5086886/military-developing-blood-farming-machine-zombie-apocalypse-coming-soon15/11/2008
Both kinds of device need small-scale light-carrying "wires" that pipe photons to where they are needed. Now Bo Albinsson and his colleagues at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have worked out how to make them. The wires build themselves from a mixture of DNA and molecules called chromophores that can absorb and pass on light.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16029-dna-strands-become-fibre-optic-cables.html?DCMP=ts15/11/2008
the researchers employed a titanium shell, ultra-thin copper wire for the windings and a mysterious top-secret iron that is "previously unused for machines."
http://gizmodo.com/5087710/matchbook+sized-motor-sets-1-million-rpm-record15/11/2008
The FIRESTRIKE(tm) laser is a line replaceable system that allows for scaling a laser weapon to desired power levels for specific warfighting applications and platforms. Northrop Grumman believes that FIRESTRIKE(tm) laser will form the backbone of future laser weapon systems.
http://gizmodo.com/5088023/firestrike-is-the-worlds-first-solid+state-battlefield-laser12/11/2008
As Huetter - who is a hematologist, not an HIV specialist - prepared to treat the patient's leukemia with a bone marrow transplant, he recalled that some people carry a genetic mutation that seems to make them resistant to HIV infection. If the mutation, called Delta 32, is inherited from both parents, it prevents HIV from attaching itself to cells by blocking CCR5, a receptor that acts as a kind of gateway.
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/E/EU_MED_AIDS_TREATMENT?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-11-12-15-18-4912/11/2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8
12/11/2008
They have already begun construction on the first 4,000 units I have no doubt that they will make their 2013 deadline as well. Hyperion's reactors can reliably power up to 20,000 homes each—reducing the price of energy to about 10 cents per watt.
http://gizmodo.com/5083522/backyard-nuclear-reactors-now-in-production-cost-25-million-each11/11/2008
Researchers at Hanyang University in South Korea have developed new Lithium batteries that can last a whopping eight times longer than today's models. They've achieved this by using cathode materials in the batteries, replacing less-efficient graphite with more-efficient silicon.
http://gizmodo.com/5083113/new-laptop-batteries-to-last-8-times-longer-than-current-crop04/11/2008
A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/rainforest-fung.html23/10/2008
They have constructed a machine that generates x-rays by peeling up Scotch tape in a vacuum at the rate of 3 centimeters per second. As you can see in the recent demo they did for the journal Nature, their device was able to successfully generate an x-ray of a finger.
http://gizmodo.com/5067362/researchers-build-x+ray-machine-with-scotch-tape23/10/2008
This fourth state could help improve transistors, allowing for greater density on a single microchip.
http://gizmodo.com/5067499/scientists-discover-fourth-state-of-matter-could-be-used-to-upgrade-microchips20/10/2008
it looks like the first device to market sporting a colored e-paper display will be an MP3 player from Freestyle Audio. Qualcomm have come up with the paper, and it works by having multiple layers in the display: light is partially reflected at each layer, and due to wavelength filtering and interference between the light the colors are generated. Choice of color is achieved by varying the distance between the layers electrostatically.
http://gizmodo.com/5065814/color-e+paper-debuts-on-waterproof-mp3-player20/10/2008
He said “Our laboratory tests show that CO2, CH4, or N2O was dissociated by low energy. We also confirmed that hydrogen (H2) and vapor(H2O) was dissociated with similar efficiency (90% or more). Traditionally hydrogen is made by electrolysis. The electrolytic method uses 4-4.5 kwh energy for getting 1 cubic meter of hydrogen. Our method uses 0.1 kwh for the same volume of hydrogen. As known the high cost of electrolytic H2 does not allow to use it as a fuel.
http://www.newswire.co.kr/?job=news&no=36603914/10/2008
DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month, according to documents unearthed by a German radio network.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/darkmarket-post.html13/10/2008
Repetition is more than just a mechanical representation of the 1971 undertaking. The artist removes the experiment from its scientific context and the conditions of the time and places it in today's world, to transform it into a "universal manifestation of weakness and moral failure." Besides the 7 inmates and 9 guards (all of them unemployed people without), participants included psychologists responsible of stopping everything if it turned dangerous, a former prison inmate, and a sociologist involved in prison system reforms. The experiment collapsed after only few days as the participants collectively decided to leave the prison.
http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/203913/10/2008
...It allows recording engineers to isolate and manipulate individual notes (as opposed to an entire chord) from a performance (no matter how lame) and turn it into a flawless piece of music...
http://gizmodo.com/5061762/direct-note-access-music-software-now-even-more-revolutionary13/10/2008
The sheets owe their luminance to compounds known as organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. While there are plenty of problems to be worked out with the technology, it's not the dream of a wild-eyed startup.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/10/10/sheets.of.light.oleds.ap/index.html13/10/2008
Early indications show black silicon is 100 to 500 times more sensitive to light than a traditional silicon wafer.
http://gizmodo.com/5062412/black-silicon-discovery-could-change-digital-photography-night-vision-forever08/10/2008
Researchers at the University of Arizona said they had made the first updatable 3D displays with memory, a prerequisite for getting any holographic image to move.
http://gizmodo.com/5059847/breakthrough-in-holographic-tech-makes-3d-sets-5-to-10-years-away04/10/2008
Sony worked with researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany to create the design. They say it is flexible and transparent, and has an extremely low energy requirement, allowing laptop and phone batteries to last longer.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1067889/Pictured-The-amazing-bendy-TV-screen-folds-fit-pocket.html03/10/2008
In an effort to salvage currently infertile land, scientists have tried to understand the basic mechanisms of aluminum toxicity, and to find resistant food crops, but with little success. Larsen's research, published Thursday in Current Biology, could change that
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/plant-tweak-cou.html03/10/2008
Unlike its conventional counterpart, free-piston engines don't have a mechanical connect between the piston and a crankshaft. Instead, magnets at the center of the piston's rod move past metal coils to create an electrical current. The engine's configuration allows it to combust fuel quicker, improving efficiency, emissions and easily optimized for different fuels.
http://gizmodo.com/5058453/free+piston-engines-are-ultra+efficient-could-replace-gas-and-diesel03/10/2008
I think that perhaps Cory Doctorow is right. The first true artificial intelligences will come not from some lab, but from spammers trying to past automated Turing tests.
http://agha.st/2008/10/xrumer-50a---google-captcha-cracked.php01/10/2008
A high-fidelity 3D force field on the air that allows you to actually touch virtual objects with your bare hands. Initially, this technology could find its way into virtual keyboards, but in the future—as the size and resolution increases—there are endless possibilities. And with "endless possibilities" I really mean "virtual sex."
http://gizmodo.com/5057312/3d-force-field-opens-door-for-holodeck-virtual-touchable-leia01/10/2008
...Invisibility cloaks that are able to steer light around two dimensional objects have become reality in the last few years. But the first real-world application of the theories that made them possible could be in hiding vulnerable coastlines and offshore platforms from destructive tsunamis...
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14829-invisibility-cloaks-could-take-sting-out-of-tsunamis.html01/10/2008
...Toshiba's Super Charge Ion Batteries (SCiBs) have been floating around in various industrial applications for a while now, prompting some serious envy in the consumer space with their ridiculously fast charge time and remarkable lifespan (5000-6000 charge cycles to a normal lithium ion's 500)...
http://gizmodo.com/5056820/toshiba-super-charge-laptop-batteries-hit-90-in-10-minutes-age-well01/10/2008
...commercial-scale production of sheets of carbon nanotube "textile" is possible at up to seven meters per minute. And these are no ordinary textiles either: they're transparent and way stronger than a sheet of steel. The team's technique involves chemically-growing "forests" of nanotubes that self-assemble, and is reported in Science currently...
http://gizmodo.com/5056733/carbon-nanotube-manufacturing-breakthrough-could-mean-bye+bye-steel01/10/2008
...scientists at the University of California have created what is, in effect, a Tricorder. They're calling it a much more modest name (Universal Detector), but the facts of the matter are clear: You'll be able to point this thing at other things and figure out what they're made of....
http://gizmodo.com/5055962/california-scientists-design-working-tricorder01/10/2008
...They turned adult cells into versatile, embryonic-like cells without causing permanent damage -- potentially solving the central problem of a promising but uncertain field of stem cell science...
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/stem-cell-alche.html01/10/2008
...The thrust produced is small, but significant. Shawyer compares a C-Band Emdrive with the existing NSTAR ion thruster used by NASA. The Emdrive produces 85 mN of thrust compared to 92 for the NSTAR (that's about one-third of an ounce), but the Emdrive only consumes a quarter of the amount of power and weighs less than 7 kilos, compared to over 30 kilos. The biggest difference is in propellant: NSTAR uses 10 grams per hour; the Emdrive uses none. As long as it has an electricity supply, the Emdrive will keep going. ...
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/09/chinese-buildin.html