Archive August 2009
An electronic nose that uses nanoparticles could detect lung cancer through breathalyzer tests
Patients of the future may take a deep breath, and then huff a sigh of relief -- no lung cancer detected.
Such a cancer breathalyzer test could come from the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where scientists have ...
While Hollywood focuses on robots several times taller than humans, some researchers are building tiny robots that could fit on your fingernail. These microbots would work in swarms to collect data for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, and medicine.
The researchers, from institutes in Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, ...
A new website lets you figure out how you might die, by sorting death data by cause of death, sex, and age. For American males ages 20-29, the most common cause of death is accidents (40.2 percent of deaths), followed by homicide (17.5 percent), and suicide (11.7 percent). Urinary tract ...
A Silicon Valley school backed by NASA and Google unveils grand plans to help humanity
University grads everywhere may feel pressure to succeed, but the stakes ramp up when your school's co-founders include AI visionary Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation. Now recent grads of Singularity U ...
Three new ways math can help you stay awake, clear clogged drains, and solve ancient mysteries
Red-Eye Flight Relief
If you drag after a transcontinental flight, imagine yourself after a trip to Mars. To aid frequent flyers and future Marstronauts, researchers at the University of Michigan and Harvard Medical School wrote software ...
In a paper published last week, MIT physicist Lorenzo Maccone hypothesizes that, yes, quantum physics is messing with our minds. The laws of physics work just as well if time is running forwards or backwards. But we all seem to experience time running in only one direction, and in the ...
The Department of Energy just gave $100,000 to upstart company Solar Roadways, to develop 12-by-12-foot solar panels, dubbed "Solar Roads," that can be embedded into roads, pumping power into the grid. The panels may also feature LED road warnings and built-in heating elements that could prevent roads from freezing.
Each Solar ...
As part of a greater effort to someday build computing elements at an atomic scale, IBM scientists in Zurich have taken the highest-resolution image ever of an individual molecule using non-contact atomic force microscopy. Performed in an ultrahigh vacuum at 5 degrees Kelvin, scientists were able to "to look through ...
Now that looks like fun. Of course we intuitively know it's completely fake, and involves the usual videographic sleight of hand, but let's apply some basic physics to the situation to check our intuition.
First of all, the "diver," after being launched off the ramp, travels a horizontal distance ...
Remember when, as a kid, you would pen secret messages with "disappearing ink" by writing on paper with lemon juice? A team of researchers at Northwestern have taken the idea just a little bit further, engineering a nanoparticle ink that fades away at a predetermined time, keeping maps or messages ...
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