Technology
We've long been fascinated by but it has been fictional. Now a team of researchers has created a perceptual illusion of having an invisible body. You won't just 'feel' invisible like no one notices you in a crowd, you can actually feel invisible.
The history of literature features many well-known narrations of invisibility and its effect on the human mind, such as the myth of Gyges' ring in Plato's dialogue The Republic and the science fiction novel The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.
Recent advances in materials science have shown that invisibility cloaking real world objects might soon be…
A genetic test that can prevent 'killer' bees from spreading around the world has been created in a new research effort.
Africanized honeybees are highly aggressive and very difficult to manage relative to European honeybees used by Canadian and Australian beekeepers. The international trade in honeybees is restricted, due in part to bans on import of queens from countries such as the United States, where Africanized honeybees are present.
"Having a tool that can identify desirable and undesirable bee subspecies will be of value to breeding and conservation programs throughout the world…
Forget vibrating joysticks on your Xbox, Rice University engineers have invented a glove that allows a user to feel what they're touching while gaming.
The Hands Omni provides a way for gamers and others to feel the environments they inhabit through the likes of three-dimensional heads-ups displays. The prototype glove,
developed with Houston sponsor Virtuix and introduced at the George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase, is intended to provide next-generation force feedback to the fingertips as players touch, press or grip objects in the virtual world. The project won…
While growing new organs from a patient's own stem cells is the future much of science is working toward, there are people who need replacements right now. Lots of people are signed up for organ donations in the case of death but willing donors is not the biggest obstacle.
It's time.
Typically, donor organs have to kept in preservation solution at a static temperature of 4 °C and the clock begins ticking immediately. They have short preservation times; about 6 hours for hearts and lungs, 12 hours for livers, and 20 hours for kidneys.
Using a 3-D organ-perfusion system that supplies…
In the private sector, pitching a research idea is a relatively straight-forward proposition. Drug companies, for example, know that only 1 out of 5,000 research programs is going to make it to market. Have a good idea and it will get approved.
In government-funded academia, it is a little trickier. Good ideas don't always win. Even getting started can be daunting for a young researcher who was steeped in science and not bureaucracy and paperwork. A recent Accounting and Finance article offers a simple new research tool that can act as a template designed for pitching research ideas.
The…
Nearly anyone touched by ovarian cancer will tell you that almost 80 percent of patients reach advanced stages before diagnosis and that most patients are expected to die within five years. One quarter of women diagnosed have no warning that they are resistant to platinum-based chemotherapy, the main line of defense and they probably have less than 18 months to live.
Diagnosis, prognosis, and even treatment of ovarian cancer have remained largely unchanged for 30 years - the best indicator for how a woman will fare, and how her cancer should be treated, has been the tumor's stage at…
A new wearable device turns the user’s thumbnail into a miniature wireless track pad, which could let users control wireless devices when their hands are full or enable subtle communication in circumstances that require it, such as sending a quick text to a child while attending an important meeting.
Next week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Computer-Human Interaction conference in Seoul, MIT researchers will describe the prototype of NailO.
The researchers envision that a commercial version of their device would have a detachable membrane on its surface, so that users could…
A research team has created a prototype video camera that is fully self-powered.
Solar panels and digital cameras obviously have different purposes - one converts light to power while the other simply measures it - but both are constructed from essentially the same components. At the heart of any digital camera is an image sensor, a chip with millions of pixels. The key enabling device in a pixel is the photodiode, which produces an electric current when exposed to light. This mechanism enables each pixel to measure the intensity of light falling on it. The same photodiode is also used in…
A newly developed assay may help investigators identify novel drug candidates to protect kidney cells and prevent or treat chronic kidney disease (CKD).
CKD affects more than 13% of adults in the United States, with diabetes, hypertension and atherosclerosis being common risk factors. Most patients rely on antihypertensive medications for treatment, and there are no therapies available that directly and specifically target the kidney.
A team led by Vineet Gupta, PhD and Jochen Reiser, MD, PhD (Rush University Medical Center) has now developed a system that can be used to identify novel drug…
I used to work with a programming language called Business Basic. It was descended through several generations from the original Dartmouth BASIC. Like all primitive 3rd generation languages early Business Basic languished in the era of line numbered source code, shared data spaces, and loose typing. Modern Business Basic languages now offer object-oriented programming features. And after much grousing and arguing among the aging user base we finally got rid of the line numbers in the late 1990s or early 2000s, although I joined the early adopters who simply coded…