Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania engineers have used “plasmonic cloaking” to create a device that can see without being seen.

It is the first example of what the researchers describe as a new class of devices that control the flow of light at the nanoscale to produce both optical and electronic functions.…

A method for repeatedly encoding, storing and erasing digital data within the DNA of living cells, using natural enzymes adapted from bacteria — the genetic equivalent of a bit — has been developed by Stanford University scientists in the Department of Bioengineering, a joint effort of the School of Engineering and the…

AlertMe, the smart home tech company has sealed a deal with British Gas to provide a personalized energy efficiency advice service to UK customers with smart meters.

Smart meters will have a display that shows customers how much energy they are using. The AlertMe service breaks down the… [ The Next Web ]

Apple has finalized the proposed design of its futuristic “spaceship” campus, featuring a rooftop with one of the biggest corporate solar installations in the entire world, to be operational by 2015.

See also: Apple plans new ‘spaceship’-like campus [ Time Techland ]

SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft lifted off Tuesday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 3:44 a.m. EDT, kicking off the second demonstration mission for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program/

“Today marks the beginning of a new era in exploration; a private company has…

Comcast’s plans to do away with its 250 GB data cap and charge users based upon usage marks the end of an era for cable TV providers, and for the online video industry, TechCrunch reports.

Over the weekend, Microsoft quietly launched an experimental social network called So.cl — a mix between Google+ and Storify.

You can search for information about a particular topic, then compile the best results — textual content, images and videos — into a single document.

So.cl is initially targeted to… [ ReadWriteWeb ]

Exercise clears the mind. It gets the blood pumping and more oxygen is delivered to the brain. But Dartmouth’s David Bucci thinks there is much more going on.

“In the last several years there have been data suggesting that neurobiological changes are happening — [there are] very brain-specific mechanisms at work here,” says…

Do you feel guilty when you read a newspaper?

You probably should, according to BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti, who has “a moral issue” with print publishing and its environmental impact. [ The Next Web ]

A Chinese manufacturer has introduced the Model MK802, a $74 USB thumb-drive sized computer, liliputing reports, beating the FXI Cotton Candy PC on a stick to market (it will be available soon for $200).

The MK802 is available from AliExpress for $74, or less if you order in bulk.…

There are roughly 4,700 potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) with diameters larger than 330 feet (about 100 meters). So far, an estimated 20 to 30 percent of these objects have been found, according to observations from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which have led to the best assessment yet of our…

How can we explain “acquired savants” — people with extraordinary talent who’ve miraculously developed artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities as a result of a brain injury, or temporarily from a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) session — since they weren’t born with the talent and didn’t learn it later?

For example, how is it that somebody like Derek… [ The Atlantic ]

Older adults who drank coffee — caffeinated or decaffeinated — had a lower risk of death overall than others who did not drink coffee, according a study by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and AARP.

Coffee drinkers were less likely to die from…

WPT systems work by transmitting magnetic waves on a specific frequency from a transmitter to a receiver. These magnetic waves interact with a coil in the receiver to induce an electric current. If the coil is tuned so that its resonant frequency matches the frequency of the magnetic waves,…

Today ten years have passed since A New Kind of Science (”the NKS book”) was published. But in many ways the development that started with the book is still only just beginning. And over the next several decades I think its effects will inexorably become ever more obvious and important.

Indeed, even at an…

Are you ready for Eye-Bots — flying smarms of intelligent drones that zoom in and track everything going on?

Yo boy, this one’s gonna make them spyder bots in Minority Report and Big-Brother TV sets in 1984 look positively user-friendly.

A flock of flying robots rises slowly into the air with…

Are you a Facebook addict? Take the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale test, developed in Norway, and find out.

Do you (1) Very rarely, (2) Rarely, (3) Sometimes, (4) Often, or (5) Very often:

• Spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook.
• Feel an urge to use Facebook

…

University of Texas at Dallas researchers have designed an imager chip that could one day turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects.

The UT Dallas imager chip technology being explored by UT Dallas researchers is designed for imaging in the terahertz frequency range, specifically from 280 GHz…

A new bill (Senate Bill 1813, known as MAP-21) passed by the U.S. Senate in March calls for “mandatory event data recorders” to be installed in all new passenger motor vehicles sold in the U.S. for recording data before, during, or after a crash.

As stated in Section 31406 of the

…

[Note: according to a knowledgeable intel source, this report from What Does It Mean blog is based on Russian disinformation, with the intention of neutralizing what the Russians see as a Japanese threat.]

According to What Does It Mean, a new report circulating in the Kremlin prepared by the Foreign Ministry on the planned re-opening of talks with…

UPDATE APR 17, 2012: “One, however, has to be cautious because while this experiment from Delft has provided the likely necessary evidence for the existence of the Majorana, the sufficient conditions are more difficult to achieve and may take more time.” — Sankar Das Sarma, University of Maryland (press release). Also see: “Zero bias…

Machine intelligence is improving rapidly, to the point that the scientist of the future may not even be human! In fact, in more and more fields, learning machines are already outperforming humans. As noted in this transcript of a talk at TEDxLausanne on Jan. 20, 2012, artificial intelligence expert Jürgen Schmidhuber isn’t able to predict the…

For 3 days in late February, Russian businessman Dmitry Itskov gathered 500+ futurists in Moscow for a “Global Future 2045 Congress” — the latest manifestation of his “Russia 2045” movement.

The Congress featured an impressive roster of Russian scientists, engineers and visionaries, along with American and West European futurist leaders like Ray…

What we’re missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see…

Dale J. Stephens, age 20, is a Thiel Fellow and leads UnCollege, the social movement changing the notion that college is the only path to success. His first book, Hacking Your Education, will be published by Penguin in 2013.

The idea that the world is constantly changing — and faster than ever before — is nothing…

It occurred to me recently that the world possesses some very powerful intelligent organisms that are directly and clearly opposed to the Singularity — corporations.

Human beings are confused and confusing creatures. We don’t have very clear goal systems, and are quite willing and able to adapt our top-level goals to the circumstances. I…

Got a cool idea for a research project, but need funding? Check out Petridish.org, which has just launched crowdfunded science and research projects. I think this is a really great idea that could open up funding for some amazing research ideas.

On Petridish.org, researchers post materials about themselves and their research, and…

This is the most interesting event at SXSW I’ve heard of so far: “Robot panelists, AI and the future of identity.”

It’s a session Monday at SXSW (3:30PM  – 4:30PM), where Bruce Duncan, Managing Director of the Terasem Movement Foundation, will bring us up to date on Terasem’s amazing LifeNaut project.…

The new iPad, introduced today, has a 264 pixels/inch “retina” display with 2048 x 1536 pixels (3.1 million), compared to 1920 x 1080 with HDTV; 5 megapixels camera with 1080P HD video (and new version of iMovie) with autofocus and face detection in still images; new A5X quad-core processor that is “four…