A new commercial U.S. rocket soared into the Virginia sky Sunday (April 21) on a debut flight that paves the way for eventual cargo flights to the International Space Station for NASA, Space.com reports.
The private Antares rocket, built by Orbital Sciences, is a two-stage booster designed to launch tons of supplies to the International Space Station aboard a new unmanned cargo ship called Cygnus.… read more
Major academic medical centers in New York and around the country are spending and recruiting heavily in what has become an arms race within the war on cancer.
The investments are based on the belief that the medical establishment is moving toward the routine sequencing of every patient’s genome in the quest for “precision medicine,” a course for prevention and treatment based on the special, even unique characteristics of… read more
Osaka University researchers have developed a text-display algorithm that places the current message on the darkest region in view at any given moment and in a readable color, making wearable displays like Google Glass more usable, New Scientist reports.
This is done using the headset’s camera, which plots a constantly changing heat map of viable on-screen reading locations. The algorithm can also split up a message into two… read more
Bigelow Aerospace and NASA say they’ve agreed to look at ways for private ventures to contribute to human exploration missions, perhaps including construction of a moon base, but not asteroids and Mars, NBC News Cosmic Log reports.
The Moon ranks high among the targets that Bigelow Aerospace has in mind. The Nevada-based company has been working on moonbase concepts for years, including a… read more
The future of health care could be found in a tiny, paper-thin skin patch that collects vital information.
The Bio-patch sensor developed by KTH Royal Institute of Technology researchers is inexpensive, versatile, and comfortable to wear. It measures bioelectrical signals through the skin when applied to different parts of the body.
“On the chest it provides electrocardiography (ECG), on the skull it measures brainwaves… read more
The Google Fiber team is in Provo, Utah, where Mayor John Curtis announced that Google intends to make Provo its third Google Fiber City (after Kansas City and Austin), Google Fiber Blog reports.
Google has signed an agreement to purchase iProvo, an existing fiber-optic network owned by the city, upgrade the network to gigabit technology, and finish network construction so that every home along the existing… read more
At a robotics industry event organized by business blog Xconomy in Menlo Park last week, people working on better industrial robots claimed their robotics technology will actually boost the U.S. economy and create more jobs, even if some jobs do disappear forever, MIT Technology Review reports.
“We’re replacing jobs that people don’t want to do and really shouldn’t be doing,” said Aldo Zini, whose company… read more
Researchers from Florida International University (FIU)’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine have developed a revolutionary technique that can deliver and fully release the anti-HIV drug AZTTP into the brain.
Madhavan Nair, professor and chair, and Sakhrat Khizroev, professor and vice chair of the HWCOM’s Department of Immunology, used magneto-electric nanoparticles (MENs) to cross the blood-brain barrier and send a significantly increased level… read more
New microbatteries developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, out-power even the best supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.
“This is a whole new way to think about batteries,” said William P. King, the Bliss Professor of mechanical science and engineering. “A battery can [now] deliver far more power than anybody ever thought.… read more
Astronomers using a world-wide collection of telescopes have discovered the most prolific star factory in the Universe, surprisingly in a galaxy so distant that they see as it was when the Universe was only six percent of its current age.
The galaxy, dubbed HFLS3, 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is producing the equivalent of nearly 3,000 Suns per year, a rate more than 2,000 times that of… read more
Australian engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have demonstrated a quantum bit based on the nucleus of a single atom in silicon, promising dramatic improvements for data processing in ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future.
Quantum bits, or qubits, are the building blocks of quantum computers, which will offer enormous advantages for searching expansive databases, cracking modern encryption, and modelling atomic-scale systems… read more
New research shows that babies display glimmers of consciousness and memory as early as 5 months old, Science Now reports.
Studies on adults show a particular pattern of brain activity: When your senses detect something, such as a moving object, the vision center of your brain activates, even if the object goes by too fast for you to notice. But if the object remains in your visual… read more
Experts say the FBI may be able to use other images from the scene of Monday’s bomb attacks in Boston.— together with facial recognition software — to search through identity databases.
The approach is likely to become more common in the future as new technology makes using facial recognition on surveillance and bystander imagery more reliable, MIT Technology Review reports.
Deploying facial recognition software in the… read more
Samsung is researching how to bring mind control to its mobile devices with the hope of developing ways for people with mobility impairments to connect to the world, MIT Technology Review reports.
In collaboration with Roozbeh Jafari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, Samsung researchers are testing how people can use their thoughts to launch an application, select a… read more
Neuroscientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) have reversed memory loss in sea-snail nerve cells by by retraining them on optimized training schedules.
This may be a major step in helping people with memory loss tied to brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers suggest.
“Although much works remains to be done, we have demonstrated the feasibility of… read more