There are plenty of robot arms out there, but what about robot skin to cover them in? A new kind of piezotronic transistor mesh could make for robotic skin that's as soft supple sensitive as your own is, covered in thousands of tiny mechanical hairs...
Researchers at the University of Wyoming have discovered a new lithium reserve that could radically alter where the US sources a key component of the li-ion batteries used in consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and other technology. Currently the United States imports a vast majority of its lithium, but the newly-unearthed reserve — located at Rock Springs, Wyoming — could transform the US from "a significant lithium importer to an independent lithium producer" according to experts at the university's Carbon Management Institute...
Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says:
“Blue is the richest color for me I can see all of blue.”
Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions.
After all, the visual sense is the strongest developed one in most human beings. It’s only natural that 90% of an assessment for trying out a product is made by color alone...
We previously looked at the logic behind and general impediments to the use of energy weapons on the battlefield. Beam weapons have developed slowly, as much due to understandable public skepticism as technological limitations. We’ve seen that range is a continuing issue for beam weapons (as is traveling through a gas) and that satellites that kill other satellites are quite possible, while satellites that fire through ozone and several kilometers of air to kill tanks on the Earth’s surface are less likely. Similarly, while the technology needed to create killer energy weapons — like particle beams — exists and seems feasible, it’s just as impractical as lasers for miniaturization and personal deployment.
Last week, at the meeting of the American Chemical Society, researcher Joesph Wang and his lab presented some new concepts for microrockets that can operate inside the body. These self-propelled devices are able to fuel themselves using the products of the natural surroundings. In the stomach, for example, a micromotor would make use of the acid environment to generate hydrogen bubbles for thrust. By using hollow tubules made from polyanaline and coated on the inside with zinc catalyst, these bio-rockets could cruise at speeds up to 100 body lengths per second. At a length of 10um, that translates to around 0.3 meters per hour. The real power of the device is brought to bear after it is coated with additional layers of nickel and titanium — at that point, it becomes responsive to external control by magnetic fields.
As complex ecosystems, cities are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the massive resource requirements and outflow of cities, there are signs that a deeper current of biology is working its way into the urban framework.
Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions. Construction itself may be handled by bacterial printers and swarms of mechanical assemblers.
Mexico-based designer Alan Betacourt has created some wonderful logotypes for legendary scientists, including Newton, Feynman, Darwin, Galileo, and Einstein.
Thinking of redesigning your website or changing things around? Welcome to the club!
I spent last weekend redoing this blog and my official page and doing some research on design.
Here is an interesting infographic I came across in the process. What I like the most about it is that it does not just focus on marketing. It also offers an insight into politics and audiences’ emotions and expectations.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a new lithium-ion battery technology that is 2,000 times more powerful than comparable batteries. According to the researchers, this is not simply an evolutionary step in battery tech, “It’s a new enabling technology… it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It’s allowing us to do different, new things.”
Currently, energy storage is all about trade-offs. You can have lots of power (watts), or lots of energy (watt-hours), but you can’t generally have both. Supercapacitors can release a massive amount of power, but only for a few seconds; fuel cells can store a vast amount of energy, but are limited in their peak power output. This a problem because most modern applications of bleeding-edge tech — smartphones, wearable computers, electric vehicles — require large amounts of power and energy. Lithium-ion batteries are currently the best solution for high-power-and-energy applications, but even the best li-ion battery designs demand that industrial designers and electronic engineers make serious trade-offs when creating a new device.
Russia is celebrating its Day of Cosmonautics in grand fashion today. President Vladimir Putin has announced a new multi-year plan to develop the country's spacefaring efforts, which will be funded to the tune of some 1.6 trillion roubles (just over $50 billion) between now and 2020. Underlining Russia's proud heritage of space exploration and engineering, Putin describes this new drive as being instrumental to Russia's economic competitiveness as well as maintaining its position as a leading space power...
In case you couldn’t tell, the Web and social media are changing us. Even though this might seem obvious, we don’t spend much time thinking about the actual repercussions of our constant connectivity are affecting our day-to-day physical interactions, but scientists say the Internet is definitely leaving its mark on us. The connected generation is quicker on their feet, able to find and analyze information faster than their parents, but there’s also a downside to this evolution.
Take for example a study by UCLA professor Gary Small in 2007. Three regular Internet users and three neophytes were asked to browse websites, in an attempt to point out the cognitive differences between “heavy” and “light” multitaskers...
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has the best view in the galaxy. Orbiting 230 miles above Earth, the International Space Station is home to Hadfield until May.
While he spends most of his day doing typical astronaut things, Hadfield does get one or two hours of free time, during which he snaps amazing photos to share with the Twitterverse.
NASA unveiled a $17.7 billion spending plan for 2014 today that continues major ongoing space exploration projects, while including funds to kick-start an audacious new mission to capture a small asteroid and park it near the moon so astronauts can explore it by 2025.
The proposed NASA budget is part of President Barack Obama's 2014 federal budget request and would restore the U.S. space agency's funding back near its 2013 levels. The request is about $50 million less than NASA's 2013 budget but would restore deep cuts from sequestration, leaving the agency with a roughly $1 billion increase from the $16.6 billion budget actually received for 2013.
NASA's plan to send a robotic spacecraft to lasso an asteroid and tow it to the moon is a stand-out item in the 2014 budget request. The goal is to capture an asteroid and bring it closer to Earth so that a manned mission can explore the space rock by 2025 — a major U.S. spaceflight goal set by Obama in 2010...
3D laser-scanning is nothing new, but a group of physicists at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland have just announced some notable improvements to the technology. The researchers have developed a new time-of-flight (ToF) 3D camera system that can capture laser pulses from so-called "uncooperative" objects — objects made of up surfaces that don't properly reflect laser light, like fabrics...
British artist, physicist, and all-around science enthusiast Paul Friedlander produces kinetic light sculptures that provide a colorful feast for the eyes. Each piece in his body of work offers a visual medley of light and motion by rapidly rotating a piece of string through white light. The vibrating rope becomes invisible to the human eye, but colors from the light (which would normally be invisible to the naked eye) are revealed in rapid succession.
Researchers at Virginia Tech have successfully extracted large amounts of hydrogen from plants, a promising discovery that could help bring hydrogen closer to the environmentally-friendly fuel source many are hoping it can be. Y.H. Percival Zhang and his team accomplished this through the use of xylose, the second most prevalent sugar in plants. "Our new process could help end our dependence on fossil fuels," Zhang said of the finding. Hydrogen energy has the potential to become a booming industry, but as Forbes points out, logistical challenges have hindered its progression into a low-cost, widely available power source.
NASA is taking a plan to send an unmanned spacecraft to capture an asteroid and bring it into orbit around the Moon seriously. Aviation Week reports that NASA's budget request for fiscal 2014 will include $100 million to help fund the asteroid retrieval mission. A feasibility study looking into the project was prepared last April year by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and it proposed that capturing a 1.1-million pound, 7-meter wide asteroid using an automated spacecraft would cost $2.6 billion.
Optical microscopes are limited by a phenomenon known as the diffraction barrier, wherein the microscope can't differentiate two objects separated by less than half the wavelength of light used—roughly 200 nm on average for the visible spectrum. But by combining powerful optics and cutting-edge rendering algorithms, GE's new DeltaVision OMX Blaze is bringing this hidden realm's drama to light.
GE launched the $1.2 million OMX back in 2011. To sidestep the diffraction barrier, once thought to be the set physical limit of optical microscopy, the OMX uses a technique known as 3D structured illumination microscopy (SIM). This system projects a pattern of light onto the sample, which illuminates fluorescent probes embedded in the sample and create interference patterns. These patterns are then reconstructed by the rendering algrithms to generate these hi-res images. The OMX can examine samples down to a mere 100 nm—a tenth the size of the average bacteria—and generate images with double the resolution of existing optical microscopes.
Technology has the potential to enhance our health and even help us live longer.
There's a slew of apps out there aiming to revitalize the health care industry, like ZocDoc for helping find doctors and making appointments, and Runkeeper for tracking your fitness.
But more importantly, there have been major breakthroughs in cancer treatment, health information collection, and medicine all thanks to technology.
What's the secret formula behind why the Harlem Shake and Gangnam Style went viral? How do you land a spot on the New York Times' "Most-Emailed" articles list?
Wharton Marketing Professor Jonah Berger set out to answer these questions in his new book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
"It's not luck, it's not random, it's not cats," he says. "There's a science behind it. We have to understand the psychology and the social transmission process."
