Technology
By Marsha Lewis, Inside Science
(Inside Science TV) – Everything from food, to air to water runs the risk of becoming contaminated. Now, chemists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have developed a technology that can detect and track dangerous particles in food and in the air.
“The DNA in the material can be used to identify those particles," said George Farquar, a chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
With the technology, called DNA Trax, researchers create tiny sugar-based particles and label them with a unique DNA signature. The particles can be…
Donate data like blood and we can look for answers in the patterns we find. nomadFra/Shutterstock
By Anya Skatova,University of Nottingham and James Goulding, University of Nottingham
In the future it will be possible to donate our personal data to charitable causes. All sorts of data is recorded about us as we go about our daily lives – what we buy, where we go, who we call on the phone and our use of the internet. The time is approaching when we could liberate that data in support of good causes. Given many people already donate precious resources such as money or even blood for the benefit…
Air Asia Black Box LocatedDetik News reports that divers operating from the vessel KN Jadayat have located the black box from Air Asia flight 8501.
Sunday, 01/11/2015 19:26 pm Divers from KN Jadayat Discover Aircraft Black Box In Crushed Wreckage M Iqbal - detikNews
Divers from KN Jadayat found the black box in the crushed fuselage at these coordinates (Photo: via Google Maps)
Jakarta - Finally, a team of divers from KN Jadayat found the black box. But the black box was crushed into plane debris so it is difficult to remove.
"The black box has been located in the crushed…
The first Kinematics dress, now acquired by the MoMA. Nervous System
By Martijn Gommeren, Cardiff Metropolitan University
Have you considered buying a 3D printer? A major spectacle at the Consumer Entertainment Show in Las Vegas for the last two years, they’re now available for as little as £300 – around the same price as the latest Xbox One or Playstation 4.
But why would you want one? There are as many reasons as you can imagine, from the intricate, flowing, 3-D-printed dress on display at the CES, to printing your own electronics.
Working with 3-D printers every day there isn’t much that…
It won't exactly set off a Blu-ray versus HD-DVD cultural firestorm, but there is an alternative to 3-D printing. And it's better in many ways.
Pop-up assembly relies on compression buckling. If that sounds like one of children's books, with the little structures that fold out when opened, that's because those are a good analog. Pop-up fabrication starts as a flat two-dimensional structure and 'pops up' into a more complex 3-D structure. Using a variety of advanced materials, including silicon, the researchers behind it have produced more than 40 different geometric designs, including…
Air Asia 8501 - Tail To Be Raised
The recently located tail of Air Asia flight 8501 is to be raised according to reports by Detik News.
The Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) are mounted to the rear of the bulkhead which can be seen in the image below. It makes more sense to retrieve these 'black boxes' after raising this tail section for at least three reasons. Firstly, the tail is embedded in silt, making their location and retrieval very difficult by divers who have been working in conditions of poor visibility and very strong currents. …
You may feel safe working at the coffee house because you are not using their public Wi-Fi connection. Think again.
And that smartphone is even more vulnerable to snooping.
The new breed of coffee shop hackers can see what you're doing by analyzing the low-power electronic signals your laptop or smartphone emits - even when it's not connected to the Internet.
The race is on to plug these information 'leaks' but the first challenge is finding out where they originate. To help, Georgia Institute of Technology engineers have developed a metric for measuring the strength of the leaks…
Is artificial super-intelligence lurking nearby, under wraps? eugenia_loli, CC BYBy Tony Prescott, University of Sheffield
The possibility that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) might one day turn against its human creators has been repeatedly raised of late. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, for instance, surprised by the ability of his newly-upgraded speech synthesis system to anticipate what he was trying to say, has suggested that, in the future, AI could surpass human intelligence and ultimately bring about the end of humankind.
Hawking is not alone in worrying about super-…
Automated cameras make it possible to broadcast sporting events but the choices lack the creativity of a human camera operator or director. The camera just goes back and forth following the ball.
Disney Research engineers have now made it possible for robotic cameras to learn from human operators how to better frame shots of a basketball game. Instead of tracking a key object, as legacy systems do, the new work is designed to mimic a human camera operator who cananticipate action and can adjust the camera's pan, tilt and zoom controls to allow more space, or "lead room," in the direction…
Don't mobile payments make more sense? US Navy
By Ethan Zuckerman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Apple’s product launches are covered with breathless enthusiasm usually reserved for royal weddings and vaccines for dread diseases.
The recent launch of the iPhone6 featured an exciting new technology - ApplePay - which, if widely adopted, will allow Apple’s discerning customers to make electronic payments from their phones in situations where they would have used credit cards or cash.
In other words, if all goes well, Americans will soon be able to do something that Kenyans have done…