gear Push settings
The future is here - scientists at a Polish company have developed a liquid body armor. Technically speaking, it's a non-Newtonian shear-thickening fluid (STF) that is lighter than current body armor materials, and might resists the impact better than Kevlar.
Tomorrow's bridges, tunnels and other engineering structures might be built with a different type of "smart" concrete: Belgian researchers at the University of Ghent have created a self-repairing type of concrete.
With the advancements in 3D printing, it only seems like a matter of time until it starts to actively affect our lives. Especially prosthetics may be revolutionized by 3D printing, as we've already seen time and time again. Now, a group of dentists believe they can 3D print teeth using a simple and cheap technique, only taking a few minutes for it.
What do fires and deep sounds have in common? Not much right now, but they might have a lot in the future.Two George Mason University students have designed a device that uses sound waves to put out fires, thus potentially eliminating the need for carrying around huge quantities of water and costly cleaning operations. Here's how it works:
Tesla Motors are out to change the world - and they're doing it fast, and in style. Like many other of their projects, this one seemed to pop up out of nowhere: Tesla have designed a battery that can power your home and even larger utility buildings. In other words - it could take your house out of the grid.
China is the largest polluter in the world at the moment, and they’re also reaping what they sew. But you can’t accuse the Chinese for not trying to right their ways – at least some of them; in an effort to mitigate the ridiculous amounts of smog that clouds some of China’s cities, scientists have […]
Boeing, a major aircraft and military manufacturer, just secured a patent that describes a Star Trek-like force shield, meant to protect vehicles operating in war zones. I love it when engineers are inspired by science fiction - it means that the authors really did a great job, not only at foreseeing the future, but also in offering the incentive to bring these sort of contraptions to real life.
While in South American during his 1830 expedition with the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin came across the fossils of two peculiar hoofed species which he was unable to classify properly. One was Macrauchenia, which looked like a camel with the head of an ant eater, and the other was Toxodon which had the body of rhino, the head of a hippo and the teeth of a rodent. So, was the Macrauchenia related to the camel or the ant eater? Who was Toxodon's closet cousin, the hippo or the rhino? Darwin was puzzled and to no avail concluded these were “perhaps one of the strangest animals ever discovered”. But Darwin didn't have the tools we have today. Now, using a ground breaking technique researchers have sequenced the collagen of a myriad of South American mammals, including Darwin's 'strangest animals' and finally found their real taxonomy.
Long before T-rex claimed the top dog spot among terrestrial predators, a vicious crocodile ancestor that walked on its hind legs was at the top of the food chain during the Triassic. The fossils of the Carnufex carolinensis, also known as the the “Carolina Butcher,” were discovered decades ago in the Pekin Formation, a geological formation in North Carolina's Chatham County. It was only recently that researchers reanalyzed the fossils and concluded they were dealing with an all new predator that roamed the Earth several million years before dinosaurs were even around.
This is it - the pinnacle of technological development, the result of countless research hours; yes, it's a tree.
A rather surprising study found that graphene's imperfections can actually be used to improve fuel cell efficiency. Researchers from Northwestern University worked together with scientists of five other institutes to show that defective graphene actually works as the world's thinnest proton channel—only one atom thick.
In a rather intriguing tweet, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that he will end 'range anxiety' by the end of the week for the entire S series. The electric Tesla Model S is already able to travel up to 265 miles before its battery runs out of power – one of the longest driving ranges of any electric car currently on the market. Now, it seems they are preparing to take things even further.
Half cockroach, half machine, these peculiar insects were hijacked by researchers at Texas A&M University for science. Electrodes implanted in their tiny brains send electrical signals that stir the roaches left, right or makes them halt. Effectively, the researchers are controlling their bodies. This may sound despicable - it actually is in many ways - but the benefits to humanity are far reaching. The cyborgs would be our eyes and ears in places otherwise inaccessible, like disasters sites in the wake of earthquakes or other environmental calamities. Picking the cockroach brain might also help us learn more about how our own brain works. This in turn could spur the development of brain-computer interfaces or a new generation of prostheses that faithfully mimic real limbs.
A new company called Carbon3D, founded by a team of physicists and chemists, were inspired by the iconic Terminator villein, the self-morphing T-1000, to build a machine that 3D prints objects from a puddle of raisin. Unlike conventional 3D printers which add material layer by layer, the latest innovation works fundamentally different. The models it prints are extremely sophisticated and detailed, making it a valuable tool for consumer products, not just prototyping as is the norm today.
About two dozen University of Texas students gathered on Saturday at the entrance to the SXSW tech and entertainment festival to voice their concerns about the risks artificial intelligence might pose to humanity. Though largely ignored by hipster pedestrians nearby, the protest does raise some legitimate concerns even though technology is still far off from any Skynet scenario. Thankfully, we might never cross this SciFi threshold.
Researchers at Brown University have found a cheaper and easier way to create hybrid perovskites, enabling engineers to develop more affordable and efficient solar cells. Perovskite is a calcium titanium oxide mineral composed of calcium titanate (CaTiO3). The mineral has received much attention in recent years as artificial perovskite crystals have increasingly been used in solar cells. Perovskite films in solar cells are excellent light absorbers, but they until now, they were more expensive to fabric and only created small crystals.
NASA has announced its plans to implement smart glasses in their future missions. The space agency will work together with Osterhout Design Group (ODG) in order to develop the technology which will be used for virtual reality and augmented reality applications during human spaceflight, including repairs and other technical tasks.
It's awesome when engineers can take inspiration from nature and design something truly spectacular - now, a Berkeley team has managed to create a material that can shift colors as easy as a chameleon's skin when pulled or twisted. The material could be used for camouflage or for the next generation of display technologies.
The technology of 3D printing has reached an interesting point in its trajectory. It's been around for years, lots of people know it exists and it has even reached the high street. However, there's still something of a gap between its promise and the reality, and it looks like the general public are yet to be convinced. So perhaps now is a good time to take stock of 3D printing: its history and its future.
A team at Caltech has devised a new film coating that facilitates catalysis and electron transfer in a solar powered system that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used as fuels. Such a system is also called an artificial leaf or solar-fuel generator because in many ways it mimics the process which plants use to convert sunlight and CO2 into oxygen and fuel (sugars, carbohydrates). The researchers make note, however, that they're still a long way from making it commercial viable, but these sort of updates are inspiring.
Switching massively to electric cars could save UK drivers up to £1,000 a year on fuel costs, reducing oil imports by almost half by 2030; a similar trend could be replicated in other countries in Western Europe or in the US.
Some people waste hours each day driving their car, time they could have otherwise spent better. You'll still be trapped on the road in a self-driven car, but the added benefit is that you'll be free to do other stuff - anything but stare into your windshield non-stop. According to a study made by McKinsey & Company, self-driving cars could generate billions of dollars a year in revenue from mobile internet services and products, even in situations where occupants only save a couple of minutes. Of course, we had it coming. What did you thought people would do with their spare driving time? Surf the internet, of course.
A private company in Hong Kong known as the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (HKND) has been given the green light to start the $50 billion work on a canal that will connect the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean through Nicaragua. The project, which will be significantly longer than the Panama canal could bring huge economic benefits, saving a lot of time and resources, but it also raises major environmental concerns.
Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Google reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature that they are one step closer to developing a true quantum computer - they have developed a quantum device the art of checking and correcting its own errors.
A crowd gathered for the New America Foundation’s first annual Future of War conference was told by DARPA's director that a woman was able to control F-35 flight simulator without touching the joystick. The woman controlled the simulation only with her thoughts, which were relayed and processed to the simulator by a neural implant embedded in her left cortex.
If you've ever wondered what happens inside an egg, then science has you covered - researchers have developed transparent artificial eggshells; but they didn't do this just out of curiosity - they want to create a controlled environment for bird embryo growth and development to aid stem cell studies.
Scientists at the University of Sydney in Australia have achieved 5G speeds of 1Tbps, far exceeding existing the speeds of existing technologies. At 1 Terrabyte per second, you could download 10 movies per second.
A complex artificial intelligence program developed by DeepMind, a London-based company which was acquired by Google last year for $400 million, mastered classic ATARI video games, like Breakout, Video Pinball, and Space Invaders. It was so effective that it outperformed professional game testers in 29 of the 49 games it tried out. As is the case with such demonstrations, there's more to it than just humiliating humans. The same algorithms could be used to develop and improve autonomous robots or self-driving cars.
Bionic hands - artificial limbs controlled through thought power - they're as awesome as they sound, and they're now a reality. Three Austrian men have become real-life cyborgs after having losing their hands to injury and then undergoing innovative surgery.
A company called nanoFlowcell has revealed a concept sports car which gets its energy from salt water and can run up to 621 miles on this electricity alone - wow!
In an attempt to make programming more attractive, MIT has developed a stunning “robot garden”, dozens of fast-changing LED lights and more than 100 origami robots that can crawl, swim, and blossom like flowers. I’ll tell you, if this doesn’t make kids want to code… nothing will! The “garden” was created by a team from MIT’s Computer […]
Beekeeping can be quite difficult, but thanks to a new invention – it just got a lot easier. Stuart and Cedar Anderson, a father-and-son developed a tap system which allows the honey to be harvested without actually disturbing the bees. The Flow Hive not only reduces bee stress, but also eliminates one of the most laborious […]
Languages like English, Greek or Hindu, all Indo-European tongues, stem from a common ancestral language family which originated 5,500 - 6,500 years ago, on the Pontic-Caspian steppe stretching from Moldova and Ukraine to Russia and western Kazakhstan. The findings were reported by a group of linguists at University of California, Berkeley after data from more than 150 languages were analyzed. Today, some 3 billion people speak the more than 400 languages and dialects that belong to the Indo-European family.
Many scholars who still seek to explain why more women leave the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pipeline than men are stuck in old times. If in the 1970s, men were 1.6 to 1.7 times as likely as women to later earn a STEM Ph.D., by the 1990s the gender gap had closed and both sexes are as likely to complete their education. Efforts to bridge the gap and promote gender diversity have thus been fruitful. There's still gender gap in STEM among those who first enroll in college, with roughly three times as many men than women.
British researchers have demonstrated three ways gold nanotubes can be used against cancer: 1) high resolution in-vivo imaging; 2) drug delivery vehicles; 3) agents that destroy cancer itself. Their work shouldn't be viewed as yet "another" hack that seeks to eradicate cancer. We need to be more realistic than this. Instead, the findings have the potential to be a great measure that both diagnoses and treats cancer at the same time, complementing conventional surgery and, hopefully, avoiding the need for chemotherapy.
According to a new study, limpet teeth may be the strongest material known to man, stronger than spider silk or kevlar. Scientists from Portsmouth University made the surprising discovery after analyzing limpets with a technique called atomic force microscopy.
At this years' Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Symposium, NASA's Glenn COMPASS Team discussed at large the possibility of exploring Titan, Saturn's largest moon, with a robotic submarine that would dive deep inside the oceans of liquefied natural gas. Such a mission, if ever funded, could help answer some important questions like what are the defining chemical building blocks required to birth and sustain life. Titan is very similar to Earth in terms of cycling systems, elemental composition and terrestrial geography, so there's much insight to be gained.
A rare Neolithic-era burial site was discovered by the northern entrance of the Alepotrypa (“Foxhole”) Cave in southern Greece. The skeleton remains show how a couple was laid to rest in embrace, close to a burial of another male and female who were found in fetal position - the most common burial position during the Neolithic. The embracing couple’s skeletons were dated with the C14 method to 3800 BC while their DNA analysis confirmed the remains were those of a male and female.
Although mammals surfaced only 20 million years after the first dinosaurs evolved, there's a general consensus that mammals were shadowed and reclusive in the face of dinosaurs, seeing how they were the dominant animals on the planet back then. As such, early mammals are thought to have been mostly nocturnal with minimal interaction with dinosaur environments, occupying very limited ecological niches. This conventional thinking might be toppled by recent findings made by Chinese paleontologists who discovered two highly sophisticated early mammals each at least 160 million years old: the first tree-clinging mammal and the first burrowing mammal. These creatures munched on the same plants dinosaurs did, proving they seemingly coexisted in the same ecological framework.
Chinese researchers ran simulations and found that a pentagon-containing version of graphene is theoretically stable. The 2D allotrope of carbon is made up of atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a repeating pentagon pattern, while graphene is made up of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagon pattern, like a chicken wire. Graphene is the strongest material in the […]
When he was a teenager, Keahi Seymour set out to devise a pair of boots that might help him run as fast an ostrich, one of the fastest land animals on Earth, able to reach top speeds of up to 45 mph. We've all had out teenage fantasies, but while most people quit after their first half-baked paper airplanes, Seymour pressed on and I couldn't be more happy for him. Many years later, he finally got to a working prototype called the Bionic Boot - the "transportation / fitness device for the 21st century," by Seymour's account. The video below offers a glimpse of what the boots can do.
Researchers have theoretized for some time that our languages are skewed towards happy words - with some more skewed than others. A new study conducted on 10 different languages confirmed this idea, and also found that Spanish is the happiest language, while Chinese is the most balanced.
Using only energy from the sun, a pioneering artificial leaf system splits water to generate hydrogen - a highly energy dense fuel. When Daniel Nocera, then a professor at MIT, announced his device for the first time four years ago, people were really hyped about it but it soon became clear that making hydrogen was only part of the solution. "The problem with the artificial leaf," Nocera says, is that "it makes hydrogen. You guys don't have an infrastructure to use hydrogen."
The most efficient solar cells are those that convert incoming concentrated solar power via lenses, the sort you see on the International Space Station or in the sun-soaked Middle East where Shams 1, a 100 MW CSP plant – the largest in the world – operates, powering 20,000 United Arab Emirates homes. Because of their complex nature, […]
A PhD student from Netherlands has demonstrated a technique which could massively cut down the production costs of graphene. With this technique, producing the “wonder material” could be 1,000 times cheaper. For his thesis, Shou-En Zhu from the Delft University of Technology described a way to create an “endless sheet” of graphene. The way he does it […]
What is it like to see for the first time? Most of us can't even imagine that, because it happened when we were babies and we can't recall our first visual memories. But Kathy Bleitz, a Canadian woman, certainly will - for the first time, she was able to see using a new technology called eSight. The first thing she saw was her baby.
In the video above, you can see PhD student Mason Bretan from the Robot Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech in the US jam with some of the robots he helped create. The robots got rhythm, and they got the skills. Just look at that amazing marimba solo at the middle of the video – that was completely […]
Divers off the coast of Norfolk have discovered a submerged prehistoric forest, hidden underwater for 10,000 years. The forest was part of Doggerland – a land area which connected Germany and Great Britain up to 8000 years ago. This is a forgotten part of Europe, hidden under 200 meters of water. Divers discovered it after […]
A team of researchers has managed to make metallic glasses from pure, monoatomic metals. These metals are amorphous like glass, but they retain some of the properties of metals - like ultrafast cooling and solid state reaction.
SpaceX, the company responsible for shipping cargo on and off the International Space Station, which wants to implement global access to the internet with a swarm of satellites, has confirmed a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity.
