Technology

In the last few days, there has been a spate of reports that the incandescent bulb is on its way back.  This relates to work by a group of authors at MIT plus one at Purdue University in Indiana, featured in a news report from MIT: A nanophotonic comeback for incandescent bulbs? Many of us might look forward to this, having found compact fluorescent lamps troublesome, and LED lights a bit weird. It relates to this very recent publication,: Tailoring high-temperature radiation and the resurrection of the incandescent source Not being able to access the full paper, I have at least dug…

An app that blocks third parties from identifying an individual's location based on what they search for online received a "best paper" award at the recent Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) GLOBECOM Conference, Symposium on Communication&Information System Security, in San Diego.   A research team led by Linke Guo, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Binghamton University, says, "This is really attached to daily life. The trend of people using searches and social networks on smartphones which aren't well-protected is going up.…

Sperm that don't swim well rank high among the main causes of infertility but these cells may get a boost from motorized "spermbots" that can deliver poor swimmers -- that are otherwise healthy -- to an egg.   Artificial insemination is a relatively inexpensive and simple technique that involves introducing sperm to a woman's uterus with a medical instrument. Overall, the success rate is on average under 30 percent, according to the Human Fertilisation&Embryology Authority of the United Kingdom. In vitro fertilization can be more effective, but it's a complicated and expensive…

Despite not actually having a car in production, the firm Faraday Future has headline-writers gushing about its “Tesla-killing supercar” – an all-electric car that looks like the Batmobile. There is no doubting that the FFZero1 concept car just unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week is eye-catching, but it’s one of a number of new and transformed car brands. For example, the Detroit Electric SP:01 or the recently announced Fisker Force 1 and London Taxi Company’s TX5. What these companies have in common is a part- or fully-electric powertrain, a willingness to…

While expanding a reservoir in Snowmass Village, Colorado, construction workers stumbled upon a big bone. And then another, and another, and another.  Realizing they had found something special, the workers called in the Denver Museum of Nature&Science and the scientists quickly agreed that this was no ordinary boneyard. Work on the reservoir halted as dozens of volunteers from around the country helped excavate the site. In a few weeks of excavating, the scientists and volunteers of the Snowmastodon Project uncovered an entire Pleistocene ecosystem, including fossils of giant ground…

Nadine, a friendly human-like robot at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore will greet you back and shake your hand. Unlike conventional robots, the inventors say Nadine has her own personality, mood and emotions, and the next time you meet her, she will remember your name and your previous conversation with her. She looks almost like a human being, with soft skin and flowing brunette hair. She smiles when greeting you, looks at you in the eye when talking, and can also shake hands with you. She can be happy or sad, depending on the conversation. Nadine is the doppelganger of…

Almost 10 years ago, we created the Science 2.0 movement, which was geared toward modernizing science collaboration, publication, communication and participation. And then...not much changed. Science is, at its heart, competitive and there is no benefit for most scientists in collaborating. The person who puts something all together at the end will win a Nobel Prize and everyone else will get nothing. On the smaller scale, everyone who wants government funding is competing for it, so collaboration will only help another lab avoid expensive mistakes or get to a result sooner. Science 2.0 was…

Two newly-developed driverless cars systems can identify a user's location and orientation in places where GPS does not function, and identify the various components of a road scene in real time on a regular camera or smartphone, performing the same job as sensors costing tens of thousands of dollars.  Although the systems cannot currently control a driverless car, the ability to make a machine 'see' and accurately identify where it is and what it's looking at is a vital part of developing autonomous vehicles and robotics.  The first system, called SegNet, can take an image of a…

If you are in science, the genome editing method called CRISPR  is not new, it has been all the rage since 2012 because of its superior ability of CRISPR to deliver a gene to the right spot compared to its genome editing competitors. But 2015 is the year everyone began talking about it and for that reason the subscription magazine Science gave it their nod as the 2015 Breakthrough of the Year, after already appearing twice in previous years as runner-ups. It isn't that they were determined to keep nominating it until an editor agreed (though such political pressure is not…

A pair of socks embedded with miniaturized microbial fuel cells and fueled with urine pumped by the wearer's footsteps has powered a wireless transmitter to send a signal to a PC., the first self-sufficient system powered by a wearable energy generator based on microbial fuel cell technology.   Microbial fuel cells use bacteria to generate electricity from waste fluids. They tap into the biochemical energy used for microbial growth and convert it directly into electricity. This technology can use any form of organic waste and turn it into useful energy without relying on fossil…