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A implant that trains your brain to stop tinnitus July 25, 2014 at 1:29 pm
Is that ringing ears bad enough that you would implant a simulator in your neck just to be free of it? For thousands of Americans, the answer seems to be yes. A series of clinical trials for an implant made by company called Microtransponder has demonstrated that their new nerve cuff electrode device is up to the job. The question that remains is how does it work, exactly?
Where are all the clean, infinite-range nuclear-powered cars, ships, and planes? July 25, 2014 at 12:14 pm
This morning I found myself pondering a particularly interesting question: Where are all the nuclear-powered cars, ships, and planes? Nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuel power, it generates more power than fossil power (i.e. it goes faster) while weighing significantly less, and you can go years without ever having to refuel a nuclear vehicle. Imagine if you could buy a nuclear-powered Tesla Model S or Ford Escape, and never had to refuel it for the entirety of its operational life. So, where are all the nuclear vehicles? Were they kiboshed by the ecologists? Is it yet another conspiracy hatched by Big Oil to maintain their juicy fossil fuel profits?
Japan will face the robotic jobocalypse head-on, by mastering robots before they master us July 25, 2014 at 9:45 am
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has announced that he wants to triple the size of the Japanese robotics industry. Is this how you prepare for an uncertain future?
The liquid hard drive that could store a terabyte of data in a tablespoon of fluid July 24, 2014 at 1:45 pm
New research on nanoparticles shows that they could be used to encode information when suspended in a liquid. This could one day allow us to store vast amounts of data in a very small volume of “digital colloid.”
The smartshoe: A much more sensible approach to wearable computing than Glass or a smartwatch July 24, 2014 at 12:47 pm
You know how wearable computers have always sounded cool, but in practice strapping a big computer to your face always seemed a little bit impractical? Well, here’s a slightly more sensible alternative that you can wear without fear of reprisal or feeling self-conscious: The smartshoe. Developed by Ducere Technologies, and available for just $100-150, the Lechal smartshoe is surprisingly comparable to Google Glass — though, of course, it’s not quite as good as capturing point-of-view videos of your loved ones or extreme sports.
US military’s ‘air optical fiber’ increases the power of laser weapons, networks, science July 24, 2014 at 10:43 am
Researchers in the US, funded by the US military and the National Science Foundation, have managed to turn air into an “optical fiber.” This breakthrough allows the scientists to turn thin air into an optical waveguide, allowing for much better transmission of lasers through free space — much in the same way that glass and plastic waveguides allow for efficient transmission of laser light over long stretches of optical fiber. As you might have guessed from the US military’s involvement, this could be big news for laser weapons — but there are repercussions for laser-based communications and scientific research as well.
The solar storm of 2012 that almost sent us back to a post-apocalyptic Stone Age July 24, 2014 at 8:25 am
While you didn’t see it, feel it, or even read about it in the newspapers, Earth was almost knocked back to the Stone Age on July 23, 2012. It wasn’t some crazed dictator with his finger on the thermonuclear button or a giant asteroid that came close to wiping out civilization as we know it, though — no, what nearly ended us was a massive solar storm. ‘If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,’ says Daniel Baker, who led the research into the massive solar storm.
The polariton laser: With 250x lower power consumption, could this be the answer to on-chip optical interconnects? July 23, 2014 at 2:34 pm
Engineers at the University of Michigan and Intel have succeeded in creating the first practical, room-temperature polariton laser. The polariton laser is of extreme interest because it requires just 0.004% of the current required by normal lasers, making it a prime candidate for use with on-chip optical interconnects. It is also believed that the polariton laser is the first new practical method of producing coherent laser light since the laser diode debuted more than 50 years ago in 1962.
Falcon 9 performs another perfect soft landing – SpaceX now confident it can land back at the launch pad (video) July 23, 2014 at 12:38 pm
Following the tenth launch of a Falcon 9 rocket last week, SpaceX is reporting that the rocket’s first stage carried out a perfect soft landing back here on Earth. This is the second time that SpaceX has successfully soft-landed a Falcon 9 rocket launch, and now Musk’s commercial space exploration company is confident enough that it can take the next, most important step: soft landing the Falcon 9 on a solid surface, so that it can be reused in future launches, instantly cutting down the cost of a space launch by tens of millions of dollars. If all goes to plan, SpaceX will attempt a soft landing on a solid surface in October, and then again in December.
New biotech wheat gives fungi the finger without adding new genes July 22, 2014 at 5:04 pm
Wheat is hard to modify in the lab, but a team of Chinese researchers have successfully changed its DNA to make it resistant to fungal infection. They did it without using outside genes, too.
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