The Spill is Capped, but the Oil Remains NASA

From the people that brought you private spaceflight and super-fuel-efficient automobiles comes the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. X-Prize officials announced today a $1 million purse for the team that can demonstrate the most efficient method of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface.

Inspired, of course, by the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico -- which as of this writing appears to still be contained -- the new X Challenge aims to provide impetus for both venture capital and innovative talent gravitate toward next-gen oil cleanup technology. Read more »

Controllers Get Temperature Sensitive Tech Tokyo Metropolitan University

First we got wireless video game controls, then motion sensing controllers, and now even a controller-free video game interface. But the next stage of human-computer interaction could be controllers that add hot and cold sensations to users' simulated experiences. Read more »

Good Froth and Bad Froth The drink on the left was shaken with egg white; the one on the right with gelatin. The two were equally frothy just a moment before the photo was taken. Paul Adams

At a cocktail convention, McGee and other experts unleash a cutting-edge arsenal of handy science

The annual Tales of the Cocktail convention happened again in New Orleans last week, I seem to recall. And somewhere between the sazeracs and the rusty nails, I attended a series of enlightening seminars (each accompanied by appropriate cocktails, of course).

Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking and probably the most famous name in food science, was present at Tales for the first time, to lend his expertise to a deserving cocktail world. He sat on a panel with Audrey Saunders, celebrated owner of New York's Pegu Club, and Tony Conigliaro, who pushes the frontiers of molecular mixology at London's 69 Colebrooke Row. Read more »

Dimitar Sasselov at TED TED

Yesterday, everyone got excited (PopSci included) at the idea, drawn from Kepler scientist Dimitar Sasselov's TED talk, that the Kepler planet-hunting mission had turned up 140 new "Earth-like" planets.

In a blog post today, Sasselov clarifies that that wasn't exactly what he meant. Read more »

Levitated Orbit This graphic depicts a "levitated orbit," which Scottish researchers say is possible using a solar sail. Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory, University of Strathclyde

Space is getting pretty crowded -- there are a couple thousand satellites orbiting Earth, not to mention destroyed-satellite debris and at least one zombiesat. Adding new ones is increasingly difficult, because there's only so much room for satellites to sit in specific, geostationary orbits.

A theory first proposed by a physicist/science fiction writer may provide a solution. In a new study, engineers from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland claim to have worked out a system of displaced orbits, first proposed in 1984 by American physicist Robert Forward. Read more »

Implantable Glucose Sensor

A new, implantable sensor that wirelessly transmits blood-glucose data has the potential to completely change the way most diabetics control their disease.

The round device is just a bit smaller than a Double-Stuf Oreo -- about 1.5 inches wide and half an inch thick -- and would be implanted in a person's torso. It's hermetically sealed, with an integrated antenna that wirelessly transmits data, a long-lived battery, and a pair of sensors. Read more »

GPS Tracking A GPS-IIRM satellite. Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes, you want Big Brother to be watching. In that spirit, South Korean officials are turning to GPS technology to keep their kids safe from criminals, AFP reports.

Starting in October, about 1,200 elementary school children in Anyang City, south of Seoul, will receive matchbox-sized GPS-embedded beepers. The devices can notify authorities of the kids' location and activate surveillance cameras.

The move comes a month after a 44-year-old habitual sex offender was arrested and accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl. That case, as well as other crimes against children, shocked the country and mobilized the government to declare war on child molesters. Read more »

The International Space Station is upgrading its timepiece. An atomic clock constructed by EADS Astrium will arrive at the ISS in 2014, providing the most accurate timekeeping to date in space, better synchronization of clocks on Earth, and the opportunity to learn a few things about time itself.

Cesium clocks, like the one the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses to keep the official time in the U.S., generally rely on the microwave signals that electrons emit when they change energy levels to keep highly precise, consistent measurements of time (it's estimated that the NIST's current clock won't gain or lose a second for more than 60 million years). Read more »

Measuring Electron Delay During photoemission, it was long thought electrons excited by high-energy light were ejected from their atoms instantaneously. New findings suggest there is an extremely short delay between excitation and expulsion, suggesting an unknown interaction between electrons may be at play. Thorsten Naeser / Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics

During an average day of knocking electrons loose from their host atoms with high-energy lasers, a team of European physicists uncovered the shortest time interval ever measured in nature. At about 20 attoseconds, the interval is indeed very short. That's 20 billionths of one billionth of one second. Blink and you've missed it many, many times over again. Read more »

Dimitar Sasselov at TED TED

Some big news dropped quietly during a recent TED talk in the UK: Kepler co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov jumped the gun -- and likely angered a few colleagues -- with one of his presentation slides, letting the audience (and the world) know that Kepler has identified at least 140 "candidate" planets in the Milky Way that are "like Earth." That is, they are small, rocky exoplanets with at least an outside chance of harboring life. Read more »

The Sniff Detector By turning nasal pressure into electrical signals, the sniff detector lets those with "locked-in" syndrome communicate and paraplegics operate an electric wheelchair. PNAS

Israeli researchers have sniffed out what could become a way to give paraplegics and those suffering from "locked-in" syndrome a means to communicate with the outside world and even drive a wheelchair using their noses. Using a device that converts nasal pressure into electrical signals, the team has successfully enabled locked-in patients to write messages independent of stimulus and allowed paraplegics to effectively navigate an electric wheelchair. Read more »

Group Effort Dragons don't exist (as far as we know), but some of their individual characteristics can be found throughout the animal kingdom. iStock (2); Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images; Richard T. Nowitz/Photo Researchers

It would have taken quite a few turns for natural selection to have produced dragons, but if you're willing to stretch a bit, most classic dragon characteristics do exist in other species. They just don't come packaged in one animal.

First up on the dragon checklist: flying. Dragon wings are usually depicted in one of two ways-a third pair of limbs connected to the backbone, or webbed forearms. Jack Conrad, a paleontologist and reptile expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, thinks the latter is more plausible. Read more »

Curiosity Gets in Gear

It may not look like much, but NASA's next candidate to touch down on Mars has taken its first steps toward its larger ambition of exploring the Martian landscape in 2012.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a big week last week, mounting the Remote Sensing Mast and an array of navigation and sensing cameras on their latest Mars rover. Then on Friday Curiosity took its first drive, traveling about three feet back and forth on its brand new 20-inch aluminum wheels. Read more »

Tevatron Fermilab

As particle physicists gather this week for a conference in Paris, they're reporting progress toward finding the elusive Higgs boson, with two groups suggesting a Higgs discovery may not be far off.

Physicists from Fermilab in Illinois announced they combined the results of two experiments to refine their search for the Higgs, sometimes called the "God particle" because it is thought to endow particles with mass.

Calculations of quantum effects that involve the Higgs say it has to be a certain size, between 114 and 185 GeV/c2. That means giga-electron volts divided by the speed of light squared. It's easier to think in terms of relative sizes, so for comparison: 100 GeV/c2 is equivalent to 107 times the mass of a proton. That means the Higgs is a lot more massive than a proton. Read more »

WOWee One The WOWee ONE uses vibrations to turn any flat surface into a speaker for music or calls, but with more-intense bass than similar designs. Its driver is embedded in a synthetic gel, which allows it to pulse more freely and to transfer stronger bass lines through a tabletop or window. $80; woweeone.com

A 13-blade pocketknife, a plastic anchor and more great ideas in gear

Each month we look beyond the shelves of your local big-box store to dig up a dozen of the best new ideas in gear. This is the stuff that is better, faster, stronger, and does more than pretty much anything we've seen before it. Click the gallery thumbnails below to dive in: Read more »

This Week in the Future, July 19-23 2010 Baarbarian

As Bo Diddley once said, "you ain't got to be on dope to be on a bad trip"--you just have to spend a moment contemplating cyborg Dick Cheney without a pulse. But wow, those obscure hallucinogens now being used to successfully treat addiction sure aren't helping either.

These are but two of our favorite stories this week from the future. Read more »

Flip It, Flip It Good The flapjack bot robotic arm proudly displays a metal pancake it learned how to flip. via Make:Online

And after 50 or so tries (and some kinesthetic training), he does

This pancake-flipping robotic arm is definitely one of the more endearing helper ‘bots we've seen. After a hand-held lesson from its programmers, it just tries so hard to flip a pancake. And it fails, again and again.

After about 50 attempts, the arm is finally able to perfect its wrist-flipping technique, so the fake metal flapjack flips and lands in the skillet. You almost want to start clapping. Read more »

The Avenger General Atomics Aeronautical Systems

Future airplane flocks would require a trained corps of pilots who intimately know their aircraft and their partners' flying habits. Drone flocks would be a different task, however. Drones are not as smart as pilots, and cannot tell what other aircraft will do. But the military would like to change that. Read more »

Black Hole Concept Wikimedia Commons

Scientists trying to explain the universe's accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.

But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: We're inside a black hole that exists in another universe. Specifically, a black hole that rebounded, somewhat like a spring.

Some fairly mind-blowing physics is involved here, but the gist is that Nikodem Poplawski of IU-Bloomington used a modified version of Einstein's general relativity equation set that takes particle spin into account. Read more »

The Patriot Missile System Has an App Because you don't want to forget a step when firing this bad boy.

There's an app for everything, Apple says, and apparently that rule does not exclude "the operation ofadvanced missile defenses." Raytheon has developed an app for the Patriot anti-missile system that helps troops stay sharp on the weapons platform even when they are called away from their primary peacetime duties for combat tours. Read more »

Cheng's Underwater 3-D Filming Rig Eric Cheng

Fancy yourself the Steve Zissou of the digital age? Photog Eric Cheng is bringing his underwater footage into the 21st century with a really nice-looking custom dual camcorder setup that lets him shoot Shark Week-worthy video in 3-D. Read more »

Get It Porsche 2011 Cayenne S Hybrid
$67,700; porsche.com Courtesy Porsche

Clever engineering makes Porsche's hybrid genuinely efficient

Few vehicles flaunt their gas-chugging power as proudly as a Porsche Cayenne, so it's natural to be suspicious of the hybrid version. Can this racecar-like SUV really improve gas mileage and still be a Porsche? Read more »

PlanetSolar Christian Charisius

In February, the Swiss company PlanetSolar SA unveiled PlanetSolar, a floating test bed for renewable energy, during a ceremony held in Kiel, Germany. The $15-million catamaran measures 49 feet wide, 25 feet high and 102 feet long and weighs 94 tons. It is equipped with 5,380 square feet of photovoltaic solar panels, and its four motors run entirely on solar power (when it's cloudy out, energy stored in batteries powers the boat).

The designers purposely eschewed fuel-powered engines to emphasize the need to conserve global resources. The company's scientific coordinator and COO, Pascal Goulpié, hopes that its size and visibility-the boat will make a world tour next year-will inspire others to pursue alternative-energy ventures throughout the next decade.

The Cosmic Web of the Universe Nickolay Y. Gnedin, Nature, 435 (2 June 2005)

It took mankind centuries to map the Earth, and even with all of the indexed knowledge in the world behind it Google can't always figure out exactly where the nearest Pinkberry is. So one might imagine how even with the amazing leaps in technology over past decades, mapping the universe is no small undertaking. But a new technique could allow cosmic cartographers to map 500 times as much of the universal landscape as they have thus far at a fraction of the cost. Read more »

Hunting Massive Stars in the Large Magellenic Cloud ESO

When speaking of the cosmos, we like to attach really amazing modifiers to the phenomena we find there, prefixes like "super-" and "extra-" or adjectives like "massive" and "giant." So, having used up most of the good ones, we're not really sure how to describe the gargantuan (oh, that's a good one) star that European researchers just discovered with the ESO's Very Large Telescope; at 265 times the mass of our own sun, it is the largest star ever discovered, by more than 100 solar masses. That is to say: it's really, really big. Read more »

Concept Plane Airbus unveiled this 2030 concept plane at the 2010 Farnborough International Airshow. Airbus

So far, it's just an idea

Of all the aviation tech emerging from the Farnborough International Airshow, Airbus' futurist visions are among the coolest.

The aviation firm unveiled its 2030 Concept Plane earlier this week, which includes dreams of a self-cleaning cabin; extra-long, slim wings; a U-shaped tail; and an intelligent fuselage designed to improve efficiency. Read more »

Bird-Like Landing MIT researchers built a glider that can land like a bird. MIT

Move over, hovercraft. This airplane can perch, bird-style, on a power line.

Using computer algorithms, MIT researchers have designed a foam glider with a single motor on its tail that can perch like a bird. The work has implications for robotic planes, potentially allowing them to recharge their batteries by perching on power lines, according to MIT News.

Watch a bird careening through the trees, and you might wonder how it can suddenly stop and alight on a single branch. There are certainly no flying machines capable of such aerobatics.

It's because birds take advantage of a phenomenon called stall -- not a word you usually want to hear in aviation. Read more »

Trippy Medicine Ibogaine, derived from a plant root, acts on the brain's nicotine receptors to help alleviate cravings for alcohol and drugs like heroin. Courtesy Christopher Hansen/Clare S. Wilkins/Pangea Biomedics

Giving a heroin addict one of the most powerful psychedelic drugs seems like a bad idea. Yet that's exactly what a group of scientists will do this month. Ibogaine, they say, might be the best way to break drug addicts of their habit. Read more »

VSS Enterprise Taking a Spin with Mothership Eve Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic just released some nice video of its latest SpaceShipTwo (aka VSS Enterprise) test flight, the first with the spacecraft's two-pilot flight crew aboard. Read more »

The Sun Sets on Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome

As conflicting visions for NASA's future continue to generate gridlock in Washington D.C., the Russians are investing $800 million in a new spaceport in the country's far eastern region. The spaceport, which will relieve the traffic at the Soviet-built Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan, is aimed at fostering the growth of Russia's commercial space industry, and should be launching unmanned flights by 2015. Read more »

NASA Remains Adrift, Awaiting a Mandate from the Government

Meanwhile, Boeing unveils new renderings of its own CST-100 capsule, contracted to ferry passengers and cargo to the ISS

The U.S. Senate appeared to have cobbled together a compromise with the White House concerning NASA's immediate future as of late last week, but a new House Science Committee bill might undermine those dealings. The House proposal does not include an extra shuttle flight as the Senate compromise did, and it explicitly calls for a renewed commitment to develop the canceled Constellation program for deep space technologies like the Ares I rocket and the Orion crew capsule. Read more »

Quantum Time Travel Explained! Seth Lloyd et. al.

Looking to build a time machine but nervous about the classic grandfather paradox, aka the Marty McFly conundrum, aka the idea that you might unwittingly do something that causes you to never exist in the first place? An MIT professor and a few of his quantum quoting buddies have published a theory that allows for time travel while circumventing the grandfather paradox. All you need is a quantum teleportation device and a precise understanding of the idea of postselection--Flux Capacitor optional. Read more »

iSpace The iSpace smart apartment at the University of Essex, England, is a test bed for emerging smart-home technologies. University of Essex

And the creators are looking for volunteers to spend time in the house

Smart house tech is about to go a step beyond your average energy-efficiency monitoring systems. What about a house that prepares a fresh pot of coffee when you wake up, plays your favorite music without being told to, and sets the thermostat to your ideal setting? Now that's smart.

Smart-home researchers in the UK want to test systems that rely on "ambient intelligence" -- systems that can learn your preferences and behavior and adjust conditions accordingly, according to Greenbang, a London-based sustainability blog. Read more »

Cutting Emissions from Cows Annie Kavanagh via Wikimedia

UK researchers seeking to cut back on greenhouse gases have found a deliciously potent weapon for fighting agricultural methane emissions: curry. It turns out two spices customarily used to season curry dishes -- coriander and turmeric -- have an antibiotic effect in the stomachs of sheep and cows, killing methane-producing bacteria there. By spicing up animal feeds, farmers could reduce methane emissions from farms by up to 40 percent. Read more »

Month at the Museum Museum of Science + Industry

Has anyone ever told you -- maybe because of your Star Trek knowledge, your impressive gadget collection, or your propensity to use phrases like "quark-gluon plasma" -- that you belong in a museum?

Well, now you can, friends. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago would like to add you to its collection. Temporarily, anyway. The museum is sponsoring a contest to win a month's stay inside the museum, where you can spend quality time in the 14-acre site, hanging out in the submarine and in the cockpit of the United Airlines 727. Read more »

In order to create truly autonomous robots that can sustain themselves without human intervention, it's necessary to first create a way for them to fuel themselves. While engineering our 'bots to plug themselves into the wall is one solution, robotics researchers envision the androids of the future consuming waste and biomass to generate power to operate. To that end, researchers at Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK have created the first synthetic gut for use in self-sustaining robots. Read more »

A Rendering of Raytheon's Laser Weapon System A Raytheon-U.S. Navy team is working to add a solid-state laser to the Phalanx Close-in Weapon System. Raytheon

Raytheon revealed its next-gen directed energy weapon at the Farnborough Air Show today, releasing video showing its Laser Weapons System (LaWS) -- a six-laser weapon that focuses on a single target -- engaging and then destroying an unmanned aerial vehicle from the deck of a Navy vessel at sea. Read more »

Toasty iStock

Of all the bodies in our solar system, the sun is probably the one we want to give the widest berth. It gushes radiation, and even though its surface is the coolest part of the star, it burns at about 9,940°F, hot enough to incinerate just about any material. As such, there are no plans to send a manned mission in its direction anytime soon (Mars is much more interesting, anyway), but it can't hurt to figure out at what distance a person would want to turn back. You can get surprisingly close. The sun is about 93 million miles away from Earth, and if we think of that distance as a football field, a person starting at one end zone could get about 95 yards before burning up. Read more »

Good news for BitTorrent users -- a new MIT study says the nation's broadband network is in better shape than Uncle Sam thinks it is.

The Federal Communications Commission released a National Broadband Plan back in March, which included the frustrating and surprising statement that most Americans' broadband speed is half what service providers advertise.

But it might not be that bad after all, MIT researchers say -- most Internet measuring methods underestimate the speed of the access network. That's the part of the Internet ISPs actually control.

Slowness can often be attributed to home networks, users' computers, and ISP servers instead, say MIT scientists Steve Bauer, David Clark and William Lehr. Read more »

Terapixel Night Sky Microsoft's Terapixel project, part of Microsoft Research, stitched together more than 1,700 pairs of photographic plates from two powerful telescopes to create the clearest, largest night sky map yet. Microsoft

First they gave us a high-res tour of Mars -- now Microsoft has made the largest and clearest night-sky map ever. It's a terapixel image: 1,000 000,000,000 pixels.

The software giant's Terapixel project stitched together 1,791 pairs of red-light and blue-light plates from telescopes in California and Australia. The result is the map above, which covers the night sky of the northern and southern hemispheres. Read more »

Point, Click, Rescue This image shows an example mosaic generated by a search-and-rescue drone. The dotted circle shows where a dummy was dropped off in the Utah wilderness. A human operator spotted the "missing person," but the researchers are working on object-detection algorithms that would allow the drone to find the missing person. Brigham Young University

Unmanned drones could make searching for lost hikers much cheaper, faster and safer than using helicopters, according to researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah. They are turning drones, best known for their search-and-destroy capabilities, into search-and-rescue vehicles. Read more »

Atlantis Draws One Last Ride

Bill gives green light for a more ambitious NASA

A Senate committee vote this afternoon should keep the Space Shuttle Program alive for at least one more mission and grant NASA the leeway it wants to continue developing a heavy-lift rocket capable of carrying crews into deep space. The Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee unanimously approved the authorization bill earlier this afternoon, sending it up to the full Senate for review sometime in the near future. Read more »

Superconductors Mai-Linh Doan

The bright green energy future that surely awaits us exists in concept, but as we all know there are key pieces of technology that we still haven't quite figured out, like higher-capacity battery tech or better biofuel processing methods. Similarly, one of the key technology gaps hampering the U.S. energy grid is a lack of understanding regarding superconductors -- materials that can carry electricity with no energy loss. Now, DOE scientists may have cracked a critical part of the superconductor mystery, opening the door to a grid that can carry electrical current over great distances without drastic energy loss. Read more »

Aerial Rendering of Recylced Island Recycled Island Project

It's an ambitious recycling project to be sure, but Dutch visionaries want to turn the Pacific Garbage Patch into a self-sufficient, green island paradise that draws its resources from the ocean and the garbage floating therein. Read more »

Energy Secretary and National Genius Steven Chu Left: Chu considers getting scientific. Middle: Dubious Chu. Right: Chu dropping some serious science. Stand back, son! Stanford University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Secretary of Energy is still publishing

A Nature paper co-authored by Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and Energy Secretary of the United States, describes a big breakthrough in the science of the very small: a method of optical microscopy that can image at resolutions as small as half a nanometer, a full order of magnitude smaller than the previous finest optical resolution. Read more »

The Persistence Of Memory A Polish study showed plants send electrochemical signals in a way that can be likened to an animal nervous system. This image shows chemical reactions in leaves that were not exposed to light; they are reacting to a chemical signal from a leaf that was exposed.
via BBC

In new study, cabbage relative remembers and responds to information

Plants are able to remember information and react to it, thanks to an internal communications system that can be likened to a central nervous system in animals, according to a new study by a Polish plant biologist.

Plants "remember" information about light, and a certain type of cell transmits that information, much like nerves do in animals. Read more »

Brammo Empulse Profile Bramo

Electric motorcycles no longer need be thought of as slow and boring. When the Brammo Empulse, successor to last year's Enertia, goes on sale early next year it'll be capable of reaching speeds in excess of 100 MPH with an average range of up to 100 miles.

Read more »

The Brightest X-ray Burst on Record NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

NASA scientists have figured out what temporarily knocked out the X-ray detector on the agency's Swift space observatory earlier this summer: the strongest blast of X-rays ever recorded from beyond the Milky Way slammed into Swift unexpectedly, overwhelming the detector and puzzling mission handlers for a moment. But good luck sending a bill to the culprit for time lost; the X-rays were spawned 5 billion years ago during the violent explosion of a massive star as it turned into a black hole. Read more »

Chorus of Life A UK choir recently performed a new choral piece based on the singers' individual genetic codes. This photo at right is from a performance in Oxford July 9. Oxford Times

There's no doubt humans are a musical species, although whether there's a genetic basis for our musicality is still up for debate. A UK team put that question into literal terms Tuesday night in London.

Over the weekend, the New London Chamber Choir offered three performances of "Allele," a 20-minute, 40-part choral work in which the members sing their own genetic codes. Read more »

Stealth Paint New Israeli nanotech paint purportedly turns any airplane or missile into a stealth aircraft.

Some innovations in flight are huge; for instance, this week we've already seen concepts for a flying car and caught wind of the first fully-autonomous helicopter flight.

But other aviation innovations are as simple as a fresh coat of paint. An Israeli nanotech company is claiming that it has created a special paint that makes planes, missiles, drones, and other aircraft invisible to radar. Read more »

The Autonomous Boeing Little Bird Sanjiv Singh

An Army-funded research group at Carnegie Mellon University, working with engineers at Piasecki Aircraft Corporation, has made a huge leap forward -- or perhaps skyward -- for the future of autonomous flight. In mid-June, the team launched an unmanned helicopter and watched it land several minutes later, after negotiating an in-flight obstacle course. But unlike previous unmanned helo flights, this one required no human input whatsoever; for the first time ever, a full-sized helicopter made a fully autonomous flight. Read more »

Fermilab's Twitter Response

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory responds via Twitter to rumors that circulated earlier this week claiming its Tevatron accelerator may have discovered the elusive Higgs boson: "Let's settle this: the rumors spread by one fame-seeking blogger are just rumors. That's it."

And the search for the God particle continues.

Not that soldiers on the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone can read this tale of Western decadence, but if they could they would do well to take note: South Korea has deployed two $334,000 robotic sentries armed with automatic weapons and 40-millimeter grenade launchers along the tense border region bisecting the Korean peninsula.

The robots are fitted with surveillance equipment, tracking and voice recognition systems, and heat and motion detectors that can identify threats approaching from the other side. If they prove successful they could be deployed along the entire DMZ, augmenting South Korea's strong military presence already in place. Read more »

Tethys Voyager 1 photographed Saturn and two of its moons, Tethys (shown here) and Dione in November 1980. Shadows from Saturn's three bright rings and Tethys can be seen on the cloud tops on Saturn. NASA/JPL

Next time you're marveling at the fact that Spirit and Opportunity have been roving Mars for over six years now, ponder this: the two Voyager spacecraft have been hurtling through our solar system for nearly 33 years. Today, Voyager 1 hits a mission milestone of operating continuously for 12,000 days. The spacecraft launched on September 5, 1977, while Jimmy Carter was president, and has now traveled 14 billion miles. Read more »

The Terahertz Remote Detector Nature Photonics

If those new airport X-ray scanners offend your modest sensibilities, you may not want to read this. A new terahertz remote sensor may soon be able to see through walls, packaging materials, and even clothing from thousands of feet away, identifying materials contained inside through their unique spectral signatures.

Terahertz waves exist in the part of the spectrum between infrared and microwave light, but they were largely thought to be a dead end for remote sensing tech because they are absorbed and degraded by moisture in the air, making them highly unreliable at distances beyond just a few inches. Read more »

Armored Spacecraft Workers place the special radiation vault for NASA's Juno spacecraft onto the propulsion module. Juno's radiation vault has titanium walls to protect the spacecraft's electronic brain and heart from Jupiter's harsh radiation environment. NASA/Lockheed Martin

A satellite that will help scientists understand the solar system's largest planet is being outfitted with some special interplanetary armor.

The Juno spacecraft will study Jupiter's powerful radiation belt, but it has to be built to survive that radiation. Engineers recently added a special shield around the spacecraft's electronics, turning it into a Jovian armored tank, says its principal investigator, Scott Bolton, based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Read more »

Take a Tour of Mars You can take an interactive tour of Mars with Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope program. NASA

Using Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope program, you can now take an interactive tour of Mars with the highest-resolution images available of the Red Planet -- something even scientists have never been able to see before.

NASA scientists have been crunching data for three years on more than 100 computers to come up with the brand-new Mars map. Its image collection spans the Viking orbiters nearly 40 years ago to the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is still snapping pictures. Read more »

Mind Control A new brain-computer interface allows a user to control a robot's movement by looking at various quadrants on a computer screen. Boston Globe

With this head gear, you could make robots go grab you a beer simply by glancing at the refrigerator.

A team of researchers at Northeastern University in Boston is working on a brain-robot interface that lets you command a robot by looking at specific regions on a computer screen. The system detects brain signals from the user's visual cortex, and commands a robot to move left, right and forward, the Boston Globe reports. Read more »

The much-publicized reception issues regarding the iPhone 4's antenna design, where a finger covering the seam on the bottom-left portion of the phone causes significant reception loss, have been verified under rigorously controlled laboratory conditions by the folks at Consumer Reports. Read more »

Taranis The British Ministry of Defence has unveiled Taranis, an unmanned aerial strike vehicle named for the Celtic god of thunder. BAE Systems/Ministry of Defence

New British war drone has unprecedented levels of autonomy

A British unmanned combat aircraft unveiled Monday could become the first autonomous plane to strike targets at long range, even on another continent. Named Taranis, for the Celtic god of thunder, the prototype aircraft will test the possibility of a long-distance striker controlled by ground crews, the Ministry of Defence says. Read more »

21 Lutetia, with Saturn in the Background ESA 2010 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

The European Space Agency has released the first close-ups of the asteroid Lutetia snapped by the Rosetta mission over the weekend, revealing that the mysterious asteroid has taken quite a beating over the years. And by years, we mean something like 4.5 billion. As suspected, it turns out that Lutetia is probably very, very old.

ESA's Rosetta mission got a quite a view of Lutetia as it passed within 1,965 miles of it while en route to its final destination, the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Read more »

Highways basking in the hot sun are wasted energy. Scott Brusaw's solution? Make them out of solar panels

The road ahead is paved with photovoltaics. That's how Scott Brusaw sees it, anyway. His company, Solar Roadways, is embedding PV cells and LED lights into panels engineered to withstand the forces of traffic. The lights would allow for "smart" roadways and parking lots with changeable signage, while the cells would generate enough energy to power businesses, cities and, eventually, the entire country.

Each 12-by-12-foot Solar Roadway panel would produce about 7,600 watt-hours a day, based on an average of four hours of sunlight. At that rate, a one-mile stretch of four-lane highway could power about 500 homes. "If we could ever replace all the roads in the U.S., then, yeah, we would produce more electricity than we use as a nation," says Brusaw, an electrical engineer who completed his first prototype panel in February with funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Read more »

Asteroid 21 Lutetia ESA

The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission is poised for a flyby of asteroid 21 Lutetia, the largest asteroid to ever be visited by a spacecraft. On Saturday, July 10, Rosetta will skim past Lutetia at a speed of about 33,000 miles per hour, coming to within 1,965 miles of the asteroid. Read more »

Soccer Math This graph shows the Spanish team passes the ball much more frequently than the Dutch team, which a University of London mathematics team predicts will lead the Spanish to victory. University of London

Clairvoyant cephalopod Paul also chooses Spain over the Dutch

We're not endorsing any big bets, of course, but a pair of London mathematicians say they're confident Spain will win the World Cup final Sunday. It's not just a prediction -- it's science.

Queen Mary, University of London professors -- and soccer fans -- Javier López Peña and Hugo Touchette collected ball-passing data from each World Cup team and used graph theory to analyze each team's style of play. Their results reveal "gaping holes" in England's strategy against Germany, which they say explains team England's loss. The results also show that Spain's propensity for passing might help them beat the Dutch this weekend. Read more »

Neurogenesis

Researchers at Texas Southwestern Medical Center have discovered a compound that could potentially render Alzheimer's a thing of the past. After testing 1,000 different molecules on the memory hubs of rats suffering from memory loss, scientists there have come up with a compound that protects memory-forming cells in the hippocampus, which could lead to promising treatments for Alzheimer's and other memory affecting disorders. Read more »

HIV Budding CDC

American researchers are working on three antibodies that may mark a new step on the path toward an HIV vaccine, according to a report published online Thursday in the journal Science.

One of the antibodies suppresses 91 percent of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody ever discovered, according to a report on the findings published in the Wall Street Journal. The antibodies were discovered in the cells of a 60-year-old African-American gay man whose body produced them naturally. One antibody in particular is substantially different from its precursors, the Science study says. Read more »

Willow Garage Robot Fetches Beer

First it learns to shoot pool, now this

The roboticists at Willow Garage, like the rest of us this summer, are thirsty. But they have the quick-learning PR2 bot to help out. Having mastered other handy tasks, like folding laundry and playing pool, the robot has now learned to fetch beer for its masters. Read more »

Blood on the Battlefield Trauma wards in combat zones often run short of blood necessary for transfusions. A DARPA program may soon yield vast amounts of synthetic, universally accepted blood that will provide medics with a perpetual supply.

Perhaps ranking behind only bullets and water, blood is one of those things you really don't want to run out of on the battlefield. But better battlefield medicine -- as well as some of the more malicious combat techniques employed by insurgent guerrilla fighters -- mean more soldiers are surviving their injuries, and that puts military blood banks in a bind. But a DARPA program launched in 2008 is coming to fruition, potentially providing medics an endless stream of universally accepted O-negative blood through a process known as blood pharming. Read more »

Curiosity's Brand New Wheels NASA

The next Mars rover, Curiosity, has been outfitted with a new cutting-edge mobility system that's enough to make off-road enthusiasts drool with envy. The rover, which will carry ten times the payload mass of Spirit and Opportunity, is about the size of an SUV, and too heavy for an airbag landing.

It has a set of six wheels that are 20 inches in diameter -- larger than a car tire. Each wheel has its own motor, giving the rover independent six-wheel drive, and "cleats" that provide grip and help keep the rover from slipping when climbing over rocks or sand hills. The rover can also do swerving maneuvers and turn in place a full 360 degrees. Read more »

Entering the Night After seven years of testing, tweaking, and pushing the technological envelope, Solar Impulse HB-SIA finally hit its most critical milestone to date, completing a 26-hour flight that saw the solar-powered plane fly through the night. The carbon-fiber aircraft's 200-foot wingspan is covered in 10,748 solar cells that - aside from powering the plane - store excess power in batteries that enable the plane to operate even after sunset. The all-night flight is an important proof of concept for Solar Impulse, proving solar flight is viable even when the sun doesn't shine. Solar Impulse

A team of visionary Swiss engineers and at least one test pilot with nerves of steel have pushed solar-powered flight to the next level, completing an overnight flight that proves solar flight is possible even when the plane's fuel source dips behind the horizon. This morning test-pilot André Borschberg successfully put Solar Impulse HB-SIA on the ground safely after 26 hours and nine minutes of flight powered solely by the sun. Read more »

Nematodes Change Direction These nematodes contain nanoparticles that warm up when exposed to a magnetic field. The warmth makes the worms wriggle in a different direction. University of Buffalo

Researchers in Buffalo are bringing us a step closer to being controlled by machines. Or magnetized nanoparticles, at least: Heated magnetic nanoparticles targeted to cell membranes could control your behavior, according to a new paper in Nature Nanotechnology.

The researchers, led by University of Buffalo physics professor Arnd Pralle, used magnetic fields to activate neurons in a cell culture and steer the movement of nematode worms. Read more »

Green Tide Grips China Coast eutrophication&hypoxia

More than 60 ships are being dispatched to ward off a green tide approaching the city of Qingdao, the Guardian reports. Officials in the Chinese coastal city hope an armada can save them from a looming onslaught of green algae. Read more »

Equatorial Megacontinent Witold Fraczek

What would happen if the Earth stopped spinning? We don't have any reason to think it will in the next few million millennia, but Witold Fraczek, an employee of geographic imaging software company ESRI, was curious. He used ArcGIS, the company's flagship software, to build a virtual model of the planet in the absence of centrifugal force. Read more »

Diamond Fusion A team of Chinese researchers proposes firing tiny diamond bullets into a chunk of crystal methane to produce nuclear fusion.

A millimeter-sized diamond bullet fired from a linear accelerator could produce nuclear fusion when it collides with a chunk of solid methane, according to a study by Chinese researchers. Read more »

The Nanoscale Light Mill Motor Ignore the Reich-i-ness of the motor's shape and you'll notice that at a shorter 810-nanometer wavelength the light strikes the outside of the motors arms, turning the motor counterclockwise. A larger 1,700-nanometer wave passes through to strike the elbows, turning the motor the opposite direction. Image courtesy of Zhang group

Whether wielded by Egyptian sun gods, Luke Skywalker, or your run of the mill solar-thermal power plant, light has the potential to do big things. Thanks to a breakthrough by UC Berkeley and the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, we can now make light do very small things as well. Researchers there have created the first nano-sized light mill motor that can be manipulated in both speed and direction by tuning the frequency of the light waves that serve as its power source. Read more »

Lo-Res Lambo United Nude Lo Res Project

This is a Lamborghini Countach. It was created by taking a hyper-accurate 3-D model of an actual Lamborghini (made up of millions of polygons), then gradually decreasing the resolution of the model with 3-D software until the object is lo-resed down to its stealthy essence. United Nude, a shoe company founded by Rem D. Koolhaas (nephew to the Rem Koolhass), is applying this interesting technique (which they've dubbed the "Lo Res Project") to its shoe designs.

Here's one of the first shoes to be designed with the process:

Read more »

Batman and Robin Shaun Wong via Flickr

DARPA is an interesting and innovative agency, not only because it pushes the science and technology envelopes, providing funding, purpose, and goals to R&D houses looking to create next-gen technology, but also because its talents are unparalleled when it comes to acronyms.

Take, for instance, the agency's two newest initiatives: Biochronicity and Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature, and Robustness of Biologically-Inspired Networks. That's right: BaTMAN and RoBIN. Read more »

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is the Department of Energy's green tech incubation lab, so perhaps it's no surprise that the research agency is attempting to lead America to greener pastures by example. The NREL just put the finishing touches on its new Research Support Facility (RSF) in Golden, Colo., -- the largest zero-energy office building in the nation -- hoping other developers will follow its lead. Read more »

Under Pressure WSU chemist Choong-Shik Yoo and students have used super-high pressures to create a compact material capable of storing vast amounts of energy. Washington State University

Material is called "the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear"

With lackluster battery tech one of the biggest hurdles standing between existing energy economies and those of the green, renewable future, there's a lot of pressure on researchers to come up with the next big battery breakthrough. And pressure, it turns out, might be just the ticket. By exerting the kinds of super-high pressures found deep within the Earth on a unique compound, researchers at Washington State University's Pullman campus have created a novel new material with the capacity to store huge amounts of mechanical energy as potential chemical power. Read more »

Sorina 2, the Iranian Robot Man IRNA

In celebration of Iran's Day of Industry and Mine on Saturday, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad unveiled Sorina 2, the nation's second robotic man. Read more »

This Week in the Future, June 28-July 2, 2010 Baarbarian

Geoengineering the Andes, air-monitoring bees, self-assembling paper airplanes and...Shriners? It's the future. Read more »

The Third Demention John Mahoney

With the recent hubbub over 3D TV, I wanted to find out if people could take the technology seriously. So I called all my friends over to watch the World Cup

When I decided to invite some people over to my house last Friday to watch the World Cup on a new 50-inch plasma 3-D TV, a loaner from Panasonic, I made the mistake of emailing out a picture of myself wearing the 3-D glasses. My brother, bless him, replied, "I love the third dimension!" Everyone else seemed a little put off. "If I can extract a promise that no photos of me will appear on Popsci.com, I'm in," emailed one friend.

I can understand the hesitation. 3-D glasses flatter no one, least of all me. I'd feel less conspicuous wearing a clown nose. But that was the half the point of the party. With the recent hubbub over 3-D TV, I wanted to find out if people could take the technology seriously. Can you wear the glasses without feeling as though you're part of the entertainment? Is it possible to enjoy an entire soccer game with such an awkward, uncomfortable accessory strapped to your face, and in the company of others? I figured I'd let my friends be the judge. And judge they would. Read more »

David Keith believes strong-arm strategies could soon be our last resort for reversing record levels of carbon in the atmosphere

In the 1992 film Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood spends most of the movie slowly and methodically avoiding violent confrontation with the bad guys before finally turning things around with a bloody burst of gunslinging. That's something like the approach of Canadian physicist and environmental scientist David Keith. Except that his villain is climate change, and while he's still doing everything he can to avoid a fight, Keith is also stockpiling ammo.

"If we do the job we should be doing on cutting emissions, and we are lucky, we won't need geoengineering," says Keith, a professor at the University of Calgary whose start-up company, Carbon Engineering, is developing commercial-scale devices to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide. That's the slow and methodical. "But if we can't control atmospheric CO₂ well enough, then we might want to do the solar stuff." That's the gunfight. Read more »

Space Shuttle Columbia Launches on STS-1 April 12, 1981, the Space Shuttle Program lifts off. It will wind down this year. NASA

Choking back a tear, NASA has announced the dates of the final missions to be made by the Space Shuttle. Discovery will lift off on November 1, for a 10-day mission carrying parts to the International Space Station. After that, February 26, 2011, will mark the last shuttle flight, as Endeavour takes the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer up to the ISS on a 13-day mission. Read more »

Brick Tamland, James Inhofe, and a Cow Cow: Keven Law/Flickr, BY-SA

Under-the-radar polluters, and the individuals doing their best to hold climate science back

If you're reading PopSci, you probably already know all about the latest efforts to offset carbon dioxide emissions, engineer clean building materials and combat pollution from traditional energy sources like coal and oil.

But you may be less aware of the more insidious climate villains--the quieter ones, which aren't necessarily belching toxic gases or currently destroying the Gulf of Mexico. Their damage is more indirect, but that doesn't make it less harmful. Read more »

Tired of seeing 3-D renderings of objects on your screen and being unable to grab and fondle them? Just slip your fingers into the firm grip of Japanese haptics robot HIRO III. Driven by 15 independent motors, its black phalanges provide real-time force feedback to your hand, precisely simulating the weight and contour of virtual 3-D objects -- a pretty wild paradigmatic leap forward in interface technology! Read more »

The world of quantum mechanics gives us some pretty weird things -- such as matter that exists in all possible places at once, and strange states of matter like supersolids, a phenomenon in which a solid essentially acts like a liquid.

In the supersolid state, which scientists have ben trying to glimpse for years, matter retains the lattice-like structure it possesses as a solid, but it stops being rigid, meaning there is less friction. Instead, it flows like a liquid.

To look for this odd behavioral change, scientists have been studying a type of helium and making it very cold, bringing it to within a fraction of absolute zero.

In 2004, scientists figured out a way to detect supersolid helium by filling a special rotating pendulum and watching how it spun as the helium cooled. They figured the rotation speed would change when the helium became a supersolid rather than a regular solid, because of that loss of friction. It did change, and later experiments replicated the results. Read more »

A Google For Genomes? A Chinese computer scientist has come up with a way to index genomic data that mimics the way search engines index Chinese characters. It could pave the way for a more easily searchable bioinformatics database. Wikimedia Commons/Webridge

As scientists decode more and more genomes, the tree of life gets pretty complicated. It makes tough work for geneticists or other researchers who want to understand which organisms share which genes -- there are just so many comparisons. So there's a growing need for a better, easily searchable bioinformatics database.

A Chinese computer scientist has a suggestion: mimic the way search engines index Chinese characters. Read more »

An Alien World, Photographed for the First Time This infrared-light photo taken by Gemini Observatory's adaptive optics system shows the star 1RSX J160929.1-210524 and its planet, which is about 8 times the size of Jupiter. The exoplanet, the dot at the upper left, is the first one to be directly photographed.
Gemini Observatory

See that little dot in the upper left corner? It is a planet orbiting a sun-like star. We know of a few hundred planets like this, but this one is special -- we now know it's the first one to have its picture properly taken from Earth.

The adaptive optics system at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii snapped this photo in the infrared part of the light spectrum. It shows a hot, large Jupiter-like planet near a smallish sun-like star. It was actually found two years ago, but astronomers couldn't be sure they were really looking at a planetary system and not some lucky alignment of objects. Now they're sure. Read more »

Bobble The Bobble breaks the bottled-water habit by cleaning tap water on the spot. As you drink, water passes through a carbon filter in the neck, which traps chlorine and other contaminants and lasts through 300 refills. $10 Courtesy Water Bobble

A self-filtering water bottle, a solar-powered iPod speaker, and more great ideas in gear

Each month we look beyond the shelves of your local big-box store to dig up a dozen of the best new ideas in gear. This is the stuff that is better, faster, stronger, and does more than pretty much anything we've seen before it. Click the gallery thumbnails below to dive in: Read more »

Art Lebedev Optimus Popularis

Known widely for the ambitious/crazy Optimus Maximus, the first keyboard with OLED screens for keys, Russian design house Art Lebedev has just unveiled its successor, Optimus Popularis. It's a looker. Read more »

Bat Hook Department of Defense

When you think about it, it's ridiculous to spend the effort lugging around spare batteries, hand-cranked chargers, piezoelectric gadgets, and all the other half-baked solutions we depend on to resuscitate a dead phone. There's a potent supply of free power just waiting to be tapped, right above our heads. No, not the sun -- overhead power lines. Read more »

Nano-tooth Scientists used atomic force microscopy to show a hormone gel can stimulate tooth regeneration in rats. ACS Nano

Scientists must really dread the dentist -- they're always coming up with new solutions to help people avoid that cursed drill. The latest: a hormone gel that regenerates tooth cells in as little as a month.

The gel, the first of its kind, could eliminate the need to fill cavities or drill into the root canal of an infected tooth, Discovery News reports. It is reported in the journal ACS Nano. Read more »

Environmental monitoring has come a long way since the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Now we use bees.

Airports in Germany are using honeybees as "biodetectives," regularly testing their honey for a suite of pollutants, the New York Timesreports. This year's first tests were conducted in early June at Düsseldorf International Airport, and the bees got a clean bill of health. That means the air was clean, too. Read more »

A meteor strikes, damaging solar arrays and life support systems, and as you watch the billowing dust cloud move ominously toward your lunar camp, you have to restore critical systems and oxygen flow. Starting July 6, a new NASA video game will let you save the day, in 3-D.

NASA is releasing a multi-player game called Moonbase Alpha, wherein players assume the role of a moon exploration team member living in a lunar settlement. Read more »

Self-Folding Origami "Smart sheets" embedded with shape-changing alloys can fold themselves into almost any shape. MIT

Scientists at MIT and Harvard have invented self-folding smart fiberglass sheets that can crease themselves into origami airplanes and boats.

It's a far cry from previous programmable matter research we've seen, which works at the nanoscale to create scaffolds and gears. Read more »

Brain Scans Predict Your Behavior Activity in the medial prefrontal region helped UCLA researchers predict which study participants would increase their sunscreen use, even better than the participants themselves could predict. UCLA via Singularity Hub

MRI scans are already being used to explain current behavior by mapping blood flow to certain brain regions. Now researchers at UCLA think they can be used to predict your future behavior even better than you can. Read more »

TanDEM-X Madagascar Charting the ups and downs of waves in the Indian Ocean, represented by the pale yellow area, is one example of the TanDEM-X satellite's capabilities. This picture shows northern Madagascar.

The water in Diego Suarez Bay (the blue area) is calmer, so it reflects the TanDEM-X's radar signals more uniformly. DLR

The super-accurate Earth-mapping satellite TanDEM-X has beamed back its first images, and they're detailed enough to show waves breaking in the Indian Ocean.

The German satellite is in excellent health and ready to team up with the TerraSAR-X satellite to create the most precise world maps ever made, BBC reports. Read more »

T.25 Minicar The T.25 Minicar, unveiled Monday, is a new generation of city car designed by a Formula One engineer. Gordon Murray Design

A new tiny car designed by Gordon Murray, the man behind the 240-mph McClaren F1 supercar may top out at one third the speed (80 mph), but it can ride two to a lane, suggesting a new way to reduce congestion on city streets.

The T.25, revealed today, runs on regular gasoline and will cost about $9,000, CNN-UK reports. Its fuel efficiency is about 74 miles per gallon, partly because it's a lightweight 1,200 pounds. Read more »

Titan's Glinting Lake Cassini's infrared vision allowed it to peer through the clouds and catch the sunlight sparkling on one of Titan's lakes. NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/DLR

The pass by Saturn's moon is the most extensively planned maneuver the spacecraft has made

On June 21, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its lowest dip ever into the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon Titan. The spacecraft's 71st flyby of Titan took it to within 547 miles of Titan's surface in an effort to assess whether Titan has its own magnetic field, which is important to understanding the moon's interior and composition. The low-altitude flyby put Cassini in a region almost completely shielded from Saturn's magnetic field, which makes it possible to detect a magnetic signature coming from Titan itself. Read more »

Nephelios Project Sol'r

A year behind schedule, a team of French engineering students is finally preparing to send Nephelios, the solar-powered manned airship they've developed, on its maiden voyage across the English channel. Read more »

EMILY Lifeguards rescued 77,192 people at U.S. beaches in 2009 Courtesy Hydronalix

The hottest, fastest lifeguard on the beach is named EMILY

You're caught by the ocean's riptide, exhausted and barely keeping your head above water. Then your unlikely hero appears: a four-foot-long talking buoy. It's EMILY, the robot lifeguard. Grab on, and it can bring you safely back to shore. Read more »

Oscar the Cat via Irish Times

When Oscar the cat lost both his hind paws in a farming accident, it was feared he'd have to trundle around in one of those wheeled-cat apparatuses. But Noel Fitzpatrick, a neuro-orthopedic veterinary surgeon in Surrey, pioneered a groundbreaking technique instead, installing weight-bearing bone implants to create a bionic kitty. Read more »

Videocalling has been a sci-fi staple for decades. From 2001 to Back to the Future people chatting face-to-face from great distances was a way of saying "Hey, look, it's the future!" So does Facetime mean we're in the future? Read more »

Stem Cell Treatment for Blindness New England Journal of Medicine

A long-term study by Italian researchers shows that stem cells can help restore vision in eyes that have been blinded by burns. Moreover, the restored vision remained stable over 10 years.

Patients whose eyes have suffered heat or chemical burns typically experience severe damage to the cornea -- the thin, transparent front of the eye that refracts light and contributes most of the eye's focusing ability. The Italian technique uses stem cells taken from the limbus, the border between the cornea and the white of the eye, to cultivate a graft of healthy cells in a lab. Read more »

Green Dream: The Specs House: 3,500-square-foot, four-bedroom contemporary Location: Greenwich, N.Y. Project: Install graywater recycling Cost: About $2,600 ($1,400 for the system; $1,200 for plumbing) Time to install: 2 hours Eco-advantage: Uses household runoff for toilets, saving water and work for the septic system Peter Bollinger

A graywater system uses shower and sink runoff to flush the toilets. Plus: four more ways to save water at home

Just because residential water is cheap and plentiful here in upstate New York is no reason to waste it, and the average household does plenty of wasting: A single flush consumes three to seven gallons of water. Inefficient toilets and long showers are two of the biggest water wasters, together accounting for more than 40 percent of the 350 gallons of water used daily in a typical American home. But my eco-home is anything but typical-its graywater recycling system can save at least 110 gallons a day. Read more »

Aquila, 2009 TheWiz83

Scientists who research natural hazards walk a precarious line when it comes to predicting disasters. They're often criticized for over-hyping the situation and disrupting residents' lives. But if they fail to predict a catastrophic event, they're accused of failing to give the public adequate warning. It's a classic case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't."

"Damned if you don't" is the situation that seven of Italy's top seismologists now find themselves in -- the scientists face manslaughter charges for failing to predict the April 2009 earthquake that struck the town of L'Aquila in central Italy. Read more »

"Better, stronger, faster," seems to be the mantra over at DARPA, so why wouldn't the Pentagon's innovative R&D wing demand the baddest, fastest computers in the world? Under the umbrella of its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program, DARPA is looking to develop computers that make the prefix "peta" seem lame by comparison: a platform that can carry out one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. The exaflop era is upon us.

In DARPA's own words: "To meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, system dependability, and security, revolutionary new research, development, and design will be essential to enable new generations of advanced DoD computing system capabilities and new classes of computer applications. Current evolutionary approaches to progress in computer designs are inadequate." Read more »

Motorola Droid X Corinne Iozzio

At first glance the just-announced Verizon Droid X by Motorola looks a ton like Sprint's HTC EVO 4G, and at second glance the two handsets are more or less comparable (save for the EVO's 4G connectivity, which doesn't do most of the country any good, anyway). Read more »

NETRA, the Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment Andy Ryan

Cell phones come with all kinds of applications these days, but researchers at MIT have developed one with the power to change more than just a Facebook status. Using a small plastic lens that clips to a cell phone screen, the software can determine a person's vision prescription on the spot, making quick, inexpensive diagnoses of refractive vision errors a reality, especially in remote areas of the world. Read more »

Need a weekend project around the house? Mark Suppes, web developer by day, has built his own nuclear fusion reactor in a Brooklyn workspace. It kind of makes that project car you've got rusting in the garage seem lame by comparison.

Suppes' reactor - it's about the size of an air conditioning unit with some extra bells and whistles attached - isn't the answer to the world's energy problems, at least not yet. He joins a list of 37 others recognized by the online community Fusor.net as having achieved homemade fusion (among them is a 15-year-old in Michigan). But his reactor is unique in the sense that it sits smack in America's most densely populated city, and one in which the very word "nuclear" causes discomfort. Read more »

It's been a big week for bacteria. Last week, a Canadian geo-scientist proposed using carbon-eating, methane-excreting microbes to turn crude into cleaner natural gas while still in the well. Now, researchers have found similar bacteria rapidly turning a CO2-filled coal mine into a veritable methane factory, blending CO2 and hydrogen atoms in the coal into natural gas, sans environmentally harmful mining. Read more »

It would be easy to dismiss Mitchell Joachim's fantastical vision for ecological supercities, with their flocks of jetpacks and mass-transit blimps that look like flying monster jellyfish, as science fiction-if he wasn't actually building them

Architect Mitchell Joachim points out, frequently and without prompting, that his futuristic proposals are always based on existing technologies. No wonder he feels the need to say it. Consider some of his ideas: jetpacks tethered together in swarms, houses grown from living trees, low-altitude blimps prowling New York City with chairs hanging below them for pedestrians to hop on and off (24/7 ski lifts on Broadway!), and WALL-E-like machines that erect buildings and bridges from recycled waste. Read more »

Quantum Uncertainty Breeds Randomness Slight fluctuations in the way photons are spontaneously spawned in lasers help researchers generate truly random strings of numbers. Jeff Keyzer

The random-number race is on

There's a race brewing between Chinese and American researchers, but this one has no weapons or spheres of influence or even space -- though it does involve lasers. It's a race to generate the most random numbers the fastest, and by tapping the quantum noise in a laser beam the Chinese just took the lead, turning out 300 megabits of random numerals per second to break a U.S. record that stood for only a matter of days.

Randomness can be confusing and often misleading, but it can also be extremely useful. Cryptographers seeking to generate unbreakable codes, for instance, love randomness. Read more »

Bacterial Swarm The visible concentric circles show evidence of bacteria swarm as the colony starts and stops its forward progress. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Spanish researchers have discovered a key component of infectious bacteria's battle plan, identifying a protein that tells bacteria in a colony to halt their forward march when antibiotics are present, waiting until the coast is clear before resuming the infection. The finding shows how bacteria outmaneuver antibiotics in the body to continue infecting an organ even after treatment, but it also pinpoints a vulnerability that researchers may be able to exploit to make antibiotics more effective. Read more »

We often think of our blood as specifically tasked with carrying oxygen to our brains and other organs, but it's also a living fluid, changing up its duties in response to various stimuli. To better understand -- and anticipate -- one aspect of this complicated biology, researchers have trained a neural network computer to model how platelets in the blood react to complicated conditions like those experienced during heart attack or stroke.

The University of Pennsylvania's robotic automated system works by measuring the reaction of platelets to agonists -- chemicals that bind to platelets to initiate a cellular response -- introduced in pairs. The process tags each platelet with 34,000 data points acquired during those evaluations, with each duo of agonists leaving its unique fingerprint. Read more »

Geoneutrino Detector Princeton University scientists and others in the Borexino Collaboration have detected geoneutrinos at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics. The discovery could explain how reactions taking place in the planet's deep interior affect events on the surface. Princeton University

An international team working below an Italian mountain has detected subatomic particles hanging out beneath the Earth's surface, where they may very well be affecting things like earthquakes and volcanoes. Read more »

Mopping Up the BP Oil Spill Ernest Smith, Ph.D. (TIEHH, TTU), uses Fibertect® CS to absorb crude oil from the BP Oil Spill found in the Gulf of Mexico near Orange Beach, AL. First Line Technology

It's easy not to think much about oil spill remediation technology until something like the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster happens, but materials scientists spend a lot of time thinking about how different materials respond to all kinds of offending substances. In the case of one Texas Tech University professor, a cloth wipe he developed to absorb and contain agents of biological warfare for the U.S. military can absorb 15 times its weight in oil while simultaneously detoxifying it. Paging BP. Read more »

An Artist's Rendering of TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X in Formation DLR

A Dnepr rocket lifting off from Kazakhstan has successfully launched the second half of the world's most precise 3-D mapping mission of the globe into orbit today, setting in motion a tandem effort that will see two orbiting spacecraft fly in tight formation that will bring them well within 700 feet of each other as they map the earth's topography over the next three years. Read more »

Deepwater Horizon, April 20, 2010 US Coast Guard

The New York Times today has a long, detailed investigation into the concrete causes of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon disaster. It describes how the well was equipped with only one blind shear ram, not a prudent two, and how the shear ram's hydraulic system failed, preventing it from shutting off the flow. Read more »

More Than Just Vanity Like the Great Communicator himself, the state of California may allow LED license plates to communicate messages like advertisements and PSAs when vehicles are not in motion. Randy

Like an early, static version of Twitter, license plates have long allowed drivers to stamp a statement right onto their bumpers, as long as that statement is of extremely limited length. But lawmakers in California are deliberating a bill that would allow electronic license plates that would display advertisements and other messages when cars are not in motion, turning every car on the road into a moving billboard. Read more »

Preparing the Missal The Rev. Daniel Seward prepares the missal at a service at Oxford Oratory in April. An Italian priest is launching an iPad app that will make the entire Roman missal available in electronic form. via Flickr/ James Bradley

Want to conduct Sunday Mass but don't have your copy of the church missal? There's an app for that.

The Rev. Paolo Padrini, an Italian priest who consults with the Vatican, is launching a free iPad app that will contain the complete Roman missal -- the book containing everything that is said and sung during Catholic Mass throughout the liturgical year.

It will be available in July, meaning iPads could start appearing on altars in the next few weeks. Read more »

This Week in the Future, June 14-18, 2010 Baarbarian

To the unavoidable drone of stadium horns, robots greet each other on a very moist moon. Welcome to the future.

Read more »

Parking Lot, Pago Pago, 2009 USGS

A team of NASA researchers has successfully completed the first demonstration of a prototype tsunami prediction system. Using global and regional real-time data from hundreds of GPS sites, the new system can quickly assess large earthquakes and accurately predict the size of resulting tsunamis.

The new system, developed by Y. Tony Song and his colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, uses GPS data from NASA's Global Differential GPS (GDGPS) and information about continental slope (where the ocean floor descends from the edge of the continent to the ocean bottom) to estimate the energy transferred to the ocean by an undersea earthquake. Read more »

Handy Power A car winch cranked in reverse generates enough electricity
to run this plasma globe. Mike Walker

How the same trick that recovers energy in a hybrid car can help you survive the zombie apocalypse

When you step on your car's gas pedal, you're taking chemical energy stored in gasoline molecules and turning it into the kinetic energy of a moving car. It's not the most efficient process in the world, but much of the energy content of the gas ends up as useful motion. Yet when you step on the brakes, you're just throwing it all away-the kinetic energy is wasted as heat in the brake pads and rotors.

Electric cars can recover that energy by taking advantage of a wonderful property of electric motors: They also work as generators. Read more »

Execution Tweeted via Twitter

Very early this morning, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff authorized the execution by firing squad of convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner. Then he fired up the TwitBird app on his iPhone and announced the solemn news to the world. Read more »

Get Up, Stand Up Microsoft

Microsoft's Kinect, the controller-free, gesture-based gaming platform that finally saw an official unveiling at E3 this week continues to surprise us, but not always necessarily in good ways. For instance, we think it's awesome that the non-peripheral peripheral can tell when a child is playing and adjust gameplay to be easier. However, we're quite nonplussed with the discovery that Kinect apparently doesn't work well at all if you're sitting down. Being a couch potato suddenly became difficult, and we certainly didn't see that coming. Read more »

Rajo Devi Lohan The oldest woman to give birth, at age 70 Barcroft Media

Rajo Devi Lohan became a mother at age 70

Rajo Devi Lohan gave birth to her daughter at age 70. Now, 18 months later, she is dying of old age.

Rajo, a poor villager in northern India, gave birth to daughter Naveen a year and a half ago after undergoing in-vitro fertilization, reports FOX News. She and her husband Balla took out $3,000 in loans for the procedure. Rajo's womb ruptured during the Caesarean birth, however. And now, her child barely walking, she is bedridden. Read more »

As BP sits down for a not-so-friendly back and forth with Congress this morning it seems the oil giant is resigned to let the Gulf oil leak flow until the relief wells are completed in August. But a nuclear physicist from California thinks he's devised a method that could stop the gushing well by pumping steel balls into the riser. It's likely to work, he says, and even if it fails it won't make matters any worse. Naturally, not everyone involved is so optimistic.

Saying things can't get any worse in the Gulf at this point seems like a dubious claim, but Willard Wattenburg's idea has made it all the way to the desk of Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Why? Wattenburg orchestrated the capping of 500 wells in just seven months in Kuwait in the aftermath of Gulf One, a job that was estimated to take 5 years, so he's got the oil industry chops. But naturally there are some who think the idea is a bad gamble that could indeed exacerbate later efforts to stem the flow of oil. Read more »

Hubble and LBT, Side-by-Side A region globular cluster M92 as captured by Hubble (left) and the LBT's adaptive optics system (right). LBT/Hubble

Three times sharper than Hubble

The Large Binocular Telescope just got a new pair of eyes, and while we love our orbiting telescopes we have to admit the LBT looks pretty sharp. The Arizona-based telescope just brought home the clearest pictures of space ever taken from an Earth-based telescope -- images three times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope. Oh, and that's with only one of its two mirrors working. Read more »

Jupiter From Hubble NASA scientists think Jupiter's missing southern belt is hiding out behind ammonia clouds. They also believe the mysterious flash of light spotted earlier this month was a meteor that did not penetrate deep enough into Jupiter's atmosphere for it to explode. NASA

Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope think they've found Jupiter's missing cloud belt, hiding out behind a layer of ammonia clouds.

They also think they can explain the bright flash seen from Earth earlier this month: it was a meteor, though a small one that didn't get very far. Read more »

Willow Garage's Billiards-playing PR2

Proving that robots really do have a place at the pub -- time to change your archaic anti-droid policies, Mos Eisley Cantina -- the team over at Willow Garage has programmed one of its PR2 robots to play a pretty impressive game of pool. More impressively, they did it in just under one week. Read more »

In a sign that President Obama's vision for a private space industry might be gaining some legs, Iridium Communications has penned a nearly $500 million deal with SpaceX to send its next-gen satellites skyward aboard the private space carrier's Falcon 9 rocket starting in 2015.

The two-year deal, valued at $492 million, is the largest single commercial launch agreement ever made and if successful could provide a framework for the future of commercial space flight. The flights will launch Iridium's cargo into low-earth orbit from Vandenberg AFB in California. Read more »

Off to the Races Using the same accelerometers used in smartphones, horse trainers should be able to detect lameness in horses much earlier. Softeis

Diagnosing racing thoroughbreds can be like diagnosing an engine problem in a car; it starts with a vibration that might be imperceptible, but unchecked it can become a serious mechanical problem. It's very hard to tell if a horse has a slight hitch in its gait, but Danish researchers think they've found an objective diagnostic tool in the same small accelerometers developed for smartphones. Read more »

From the Flickr-verse to Detailed Itineraries

You can find just about anything on photo-sharing site Flickr, from page after page of adorable felines to 381,468 photos of the Eiffel Tower (at last count). With so much digital and geographic data up for grabs, algorithms can do some really interesting things with all of Flickr's crowdsourced information. Take this new Yahoo program for example: It mines the millions of tourist photos on Flickr to create detailed, customized travel itineraries based on the photographic experiences of travelers that came before you. Read more »

Even Robots Need a Tender Touch Richard Greenhill and Hugo Elias of the Shadow Robot Company

Sure, you can make a robot walk or cook or even play beer pong, but can you make a robot friendly? Ben-Gurion University of the Negev wants to know, so the Israeli university will host the world's first international competition to build a robot that can shake a human hand. Read more »

GOES-15's Solar X-Ray Imager Captures First Light NASA/NOAA/ Lockheed Martin

After a good deal of hand-wringing and breath-holding, NASA engineers have finally brought the Solar X-Ray Imager (SXI) on the GOES-15 satellite (formerly called GOES-P) online, to return its first detailed images of the sun to Earth.

The Goestationary Operational Environmental Satellite was launched March 4, but when they tried to turn on SXI what appeared to be a short in the instrument's circuitry caused the instrument to receive lower-than-necessary voltages, among other problems. On June 3 engineers finally got the instrument online and it seemed they had fixed the problem, but they weren't completely sure until the first images came back from SXI. Read more »

Eyes on the Ball Fans can match many World Cup matches (and gear like this) on ESPN's new 3-D network. Claire Benoist

This month, more than 700 million people will watch the finals of the FIFA World Cup, the planet's most pop­ular sports event. Soccer is mainly about stamina and coordination, but players rely on cutting-edge gear to help score (or save) more goals. Read more »

A. thaliana cell development A new video animation shows cellular development in Arabidopsis thaliana, shedding light on how plants grow. Nature Methods via Scientific American

Watching grass grow is way more interesting than you think. In an effort to understand cellular development in plants, a team of French scientists made a surprisingly exciting video animation of grass growing at the cellular scale. Read more »

Chatroulette New software might make it easier to block out all the penises on Chatroulette. Then you could spend more quality time with Batman and Barack Obama. via Buzz Feed

There's something exhilarating about meeting someone new, whether it's in a coffee shop or online. That is, until your new pal pulls a Lyndon Johnson and gets really friendly.

That sort of behavior is pretty common on Chatroulette, where users can "meet" and chat with random people with a click of a mouse. But to cut down on the parade of penises, the service is planning to add image-recognition software that will filter out shots of male genitalia, TechCrunch reports. Read more »

Vuvuzela Filter Surfpoeten

Long after the game has ended and the TV has been shut off, the vuvuzela continues to echo in our ears. The plastic stadium horn, blown by World Cup fans to celebrate such moments in a game as -- well, every moment -- has achieved unprecedented fame and rancor this Cup, as its B-flat drone is broadcast around the world.

From German blog Surfpoeten comes a DIY solution for home Cup-watchers driven to distraction by the stadium horns: a software filter that selectively mutes the particular frequency of the vuvuzela. Read more »

Microsoft Kinect

We've been watching Project Natal, Microsoft's controller-less motion detection system for Xbox 360 develop for months, but as the video gaming conference E3 launches this week, Microsoft has unveiled the final hardware and a new name: Kinect.

A few months ago, we took an exclusive look at the hardcore machine learning behind Kinect's unbelievable motion recognition powers. Read more »

TacSat-3 The TacSat-3 satellite, which will start official military operations June 12, includes a sensor that detects spectral signatures across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. AFRL via Register

After a year of tests, a hyperspectral spy satellite is being called into service this weekend as a military reconnaissance tool, the Air Force says.

The Tactical Satellite-3, or TacSat-3, uses hyperspectral imaging to identify objects of interest in the ground and supply coordinates for them. Within 10 minutes of passing overhead, laptop-sized ground terminals can mark points of interest for combat troops, as the Register reports. Read more »

Stealth Metamaterials A B-2 Spirit bomber flying over Guam. A team of researchers from Purdue University and Norfolk State University in Virginia designed a new metamaterial that absorbs almost all the light that hits it, heralding a new wave of stealth technology. Wikimedia commons/US Air Force

A new blacker-than-black metamaterial absorbs almost all the light that hits it, heralding a new breed of stealth technology.

The material's internal structure absorbs almost all the electromagnetic radiation in a particular range, New Scientist reports. Ordinary black objects, by contrast, always reflect a bit of light. The material could be applied to all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning it could be used to make materials invisible to radar. Read more »

Microsoft's Glasses-Free 3-D Lens Microsoft

Everyone's got World Cup Fever this weekend, and for a lucky few that means getting the chance to break in their brand-spankin'-new 3-D TVs as the matches are broadcast from South Africa. For those who haven't taken the 3-D plunge yet -- be it because of prohibitive pricing or not wanting to deal with the dorky glasses -- Microsoft's Applied Sciences group has shared a new glasses-less 3-D display that could herald the adoption of the sets at long last. Read more »

Remember back when 1,000 barrels a day sounded scary? The latest daily estimate of the oil spurting from the Deepwater Horizon leak has doubled to 25,000 to 30,000 barrels a day. That's up to 1.3 million gallons--roughly 10% of Exxon Valdez--every day.

[NY Times] Read more »

Multiple Myeloma By putting aside their competitive interests, two drug makers have discovered a cancer drug combo that was effective in 100 percent of patients during initial testing. KGH

The American Society of Clinical Oncology wrapped its annual conference this week, going through the usual motions of presenting a lot of drugs that offer some added quality or extension of life to those suffering from a variety of as-yet incurable diseases. But buried deep in an AP story are a couple of promising headlines that seems worthy of more thorough review, including one treatment study where 100 percent of patients saw their cancer diminished by half. Read more »

A Real Navy Seal Actually it's a sea lion, trained to carry out surveillance and detect undersea threats.

Call it job creation: this week a handful of sea lions and dolphins trained to locate undersea mines earned their jobs back, jobs that were supposed to be turned over to undersea mine-sweeping robots. And why were these seafaring mammals brought back into service? To find the very robots that were supposed to replace them, four of which have gone AWOL somewhere off the coast of Virginia. You can't make this stuff up. Read more »

The First Cassette Tapes Popular Science, June 1968

Here are PopSci's very first looks at technologies, like the telephone and the Internet, that went on to be rather successful

In PopSci's 138 years of publishing, we've seen some things. For instance, we were around in 1877, when Professor Alexander Graham Bell successfully used his telephone on wires between Boston and Salem. We were there when movies first started to talk. We've been here throughout the audio evolution, from LPs to cassettes to CDs to MP3s. We witnessed the birth of the Internet. We've seen a lot.

For this gallery, we've hit the archive and assembled a few of our often-breathless first looks at these now-ubiquitous, then-revolutionary technologies that went on to reshape our modern lives. Read more »

The MQ-9 Reaper UAV

Further validating the increasing role that unmanned aerial systems (UAS) play in 21st-century defense, the United States Air Force announced yesterday that it will institutionalize the remotely piloted aircraft pilot service field, establishing undergraduate RPA training that will make UAV pilot less a specialization and more a full-fledged operational career.

The first undergraduate UAS class will begin in October of this year, with training taking the candidates from flight training in Pueblo, Colo., to instrument qualification at Randolph AFB in Texas. Read more »

The Surgery Regenocyte cardiologist Zannos Grekos uses a catheter to inject the stem cells into a patient's heart. The procedure takes about two hours. Courtesy Regenocyte

In Popular Science's July issue, we look at the phenomenon of stem-cell tourism: patients who head overseas for experimental medical treatments unavailable in the U.S. For the article, I spent a few days checking out Regenocyte, a Florida-based medical operation that coordinates experimental stem cell treatments in the Dominican Republic.

Now another developing country known for courting overseas patients -- Costa Rica -- has discontinued stem cell procedures at its biggest clinic, the Institute of Cellular Medicine (ICM) in San Jose, which has treated about 400 people since it opened in 2006. Read more »

Hayabusa An artist's concept of the Hayabusa probe returning to Earth. Its sample return capsule will separate from the mothership and land in Australia Sunday. JAXA via BBC

A Japanese meteor-investigator probe will become a meteor itself when it returns to Earth over the weekend. The Hayabusa probe is screaming toward Earth at asteroid speed,
according to scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center. Scientists hope it is carrying samples obtained from a 2005 visit to the small asteroid Itokawa.

The probe's sample-return capsule will separate from the main probe and reenter the atmosphere at 7.58 miles per second early Sunday. Scientists from NASA, the Japanese Space Agency and other organizations are planning to watch its fiery descent to learn more about how objects behave and break up during high-speed reentry. Read more »

Dyesol Cells A panel of Dyesol cells, manufactured by an Australian company that uses a novel method for fabricating solar cells. The cells' inventor, Michael Gratzel, won the Millennium Technology Prize Wednesday. Millennium Prize

A Switzerland-based chemist who invented solar cells that mimic photosynthesis is the winner of a million-dollar technology prize announced Wednesday.

Michael Gratzel invented low-cost solar cells that can be turned into electricity-generating windows, mobile solar panels and other devices. He won the $960,000 (€800,000) Millennium Technology Prize, awarded every other year by Finland's Technology Academy. Read more »

Old Glory 51 bright stars and 13 broad stripes. Slate Magazine and an Emory University math professor have figured out how to preserve Old Glory's symmetry in case a new state is ever admitted to the Union. Slate

If Puerto Rico becomes a state, we'd have to add a 51st star to the flag. An Emory University mathematician has come up with a method to do it without disrupting Old Glory's symmetry.

The Puerto Rico Democracy Act of 2010, currently making its way through Congress, could make it it a necessity. The bill would grant the territory's residents a vote on their status, and options include statehood or independence. Read more »

Robo Guan Yu Bi Heng's 32-foot, four-ton tribute to a Chinese general.

In the U.S., we often complete the run-up to graduation by writing 25 pages of extremely dry thesis that is typically read and appraised by a single person before being relegated to the library stacks forever. Bi Heng, a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China, decided that instead he would create a 4-ton, $43,000 Transformer-inspired sculpture honoring legendary Chinese general Guan Yu. Read more »

Artificial Antibodies Plastic antibodies like the ones clustered here could fight everything from viral infections to allergens in the bloodstream. Kenneth Shea

We use plastics to make everything from our computers to our toothbrushes, but a collaboration of researchers from the University of California at Irvine and the University of Shizuoka in Japan has made a big breakthrough by taking plastics to microscopic levels. Using plastic nanoparticles just 1/50,000th the width of a human hair, the team has created plastic antibodies that successfully function in the bloodstream of living animals to identify and fight a variety of antigens. Read more »

Anti-cheating Software A new system allows for students to take exams remotely while giving administrators the ability to monitor them for academic misconduct, making exam halls a thing of the past for some classes.

It seems like so many technological advances these days are aimed at figuring out how to do absolutely everything -- from attending a staff meeting to hunting for terrorists in foreign lands -- without having to actually be there. Extending that luxury to college students, at least one UK university and a handful of American institutions are experimenting with telecommuting tech armed with anti-cheating software, allowing students to take important exams at home while at the same time keeping them honest. Read more »

DHS's Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance DHS S&T

Big Brother was watching before, but soon he'll bewatching with a whole new set of high-tech eyes. The Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is creating a wide-eyed new camera system that captures video in 360 degrees, stitching together video in real time to provide a sweeping view of a secured area, which technicians can zoom into while still keeping one eye on the big picture. Read more »

It turns out that the astronomical fame achieved by such popular modern artists as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg might not be strictly hyperbolic. An interesting story picked up by USA Today suggests six popular ‘60s artists may have snuck a tiny catalog of their work on board the Apollo 12 lunar lander, which still rests on the surface of the moon. If it's indeed there, it's the first permanent art collection in space; how very avant-garde.

This somewhat bizarre story stems from research conducted by Colombia University historian Gwen Wright, whose PBS show History Detectives unearthed evidence that a tiny, penny-sized ceramic chip etched with six sketches - one each from Warhol, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain and Forrest "Frosty" Myers - landed on the moon with the Apollo 12 mission and is still there today. Read more »

JPL's Dawn, as Rendered by an Artist NASA/JPL

NASA has a fine track record when it comes to winning space races, so it should come as no surprise that the space agency's Dawn spacecraft has set a new record for velocity change produced by spacecraft propulsion somewhere out in the middle of the asteroid belt. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported yesterday that the ion-propelled Dawn has accumulated 9,600 miles per hour of velocity since separating from its final rocket stage, setting a record for engine-powered spacecraft. Read more »

Rhapsody in Black This spectacular image of Saturn, released June 7 by NASA, shows sunlight scattered through the uppermost part of the planet's atmosphere. The sun is eclipsed in this photo, but enough light permeates the atmosphere to reach Cassini's cameras.

The Cassini orbiter snapped this photo Feb. 13, 2010. NASA

Along with its main mission of scientific research, NASA's Cassini orbiter is one heck of a photographer.

NASA just released the striking image above, which shows the upper layers of Saturn's atmosphere illuminated by the eclipsed Sun. And that's far from the the only modernist photo Cassini has snapped over the years.

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