Hod Lipson, an associate professor and the director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell, said “3D printing is worming its way into almost every industry, from entertainment, to food, to bio- and medical-applications,” The New York Times reports.
Dr. Lipson, the co-author of “Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing,” said… read more
A new therapy could help suppress tremors in people with Parkinson’s disease, an Oxford University study suggests.
The technique — called transcranial alternating current stimulation (TACS) — cancels out the brain signal causing the tremors by applying a small, safe electric current across electrodes on the outside of a patient’s head.
In a preliminary study, conducted with 15 people with Parkinson’s disease at Oxford‘s John Radcliffe… read more
The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics, The New York Times reports.
The project, which the administration has been looking to… read more
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have completed the first-ever demonstration of using quantum cryptography to make control data for electric grids secure .
Controllers for the electric distribution grid tend to be vulnerable to intrusion.
The electric grid also needs to accommodate new renewable energy sources, such as solar panels and wind generators, because their availability can fluctuate on short time scales.
Control… read more
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University‘s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) have used a new combination of neural imaging methods to discover exactly how the human brain adapts to injury.
When one brain area loses functionality, a “back-up” team of secondary brain areas immediately activates, replacing not only the unavailable area but also its confederates (connected areas), the research shows.
For the study,… read more
Gershon Dublon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has devised the Tongueduino — a small pad containing electrodes in a 5 × 5 grid, New Scientist reports.
When hooked up to an electronic sensor, the pad converts signals from the sensor into small pulses of electric current across the grid, which the tongue “reads” as a pattern of tingles.
If Tongueduino (tongue + Arduino) is attached… read more
Reality is a mathematical structure, says MIT physicist Max Tegmark — his “mathematical universe hypothesis,” reports Science Now.
“If the mathematical universe hypothesis is false, that means that the future of physics is ultimately doomed,” says Tegmark. However, “if the mathematical universe hypothesis is true, we can actually learn things about the parts of our universe we can’t see or visit. … The road ahead… read more
When asteroid 2012 DA14 flies by Earth today, we could be watching a fortune fly over our heads and disappear into the void.
DA14 could be worth up to $195 billion in metals and propellant, Deep Space Industries (DSI) said in a statement — if it were in a different orbit … and if we had a space-based asteroid mining operation.
Which we don’t. Problem is, explains… read more
Last week, Google hosted its 2013 Solve for X event, where they gathered 50 experienced entrepreneurs, innovators and scientists from around the world who are taking on moonshots — proposals that address a huge problem, suggest a radical solution that could work, and use some form of breakthrough technology to make it happen, Megan Smith and Astro Teller, co-hosts/creators of… read more
New brain imaging research from Carnegie Mellon University finds that the brain regions responsible for making decisions continue to be active even when the conscious brain is distracted with a different task.
The research provides some of the first evidence showing how the brain unconsciously processes decision information in ways that lead to improved decision-making.
“This research begins to chip away at the mystery… read more
A Kinect game controller and Microsoft software could cut the U.S. healthcare bill by up to $30 billion by allowing physicians and other medics to interact with patients remotely, reducing the number of hospital visits and the associated risk of infection.
It could also bring medical services to underserved areas around the world.
Janet Bailey of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Bradley Jensen of… read more
In an historic move, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted market approval to an artificial retina technology, the first bionic eye to be approved for patients in the U.S.
The device, called the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, from Second Sight Medical Products, transmits images from a small, eye-glass-mounted camera wirelessly to a microelectrode array implanted on a patient’s damaged retina. The… read more
A supernova remnant called W49B 26,000 light-years away may contain the most recent black hole formed in the Milky Way galaxy, new data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory suggests.
The remnant, about a thousand years old as seen from Earth, appears to be the product of a rare explosion in which matter is ejected at high speeds along the poles of a rotating star.
Researchers at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) have succeeded in completely curing type 1 diabetes in dogs with a single session of gene therapy by introducing a “glucose sensor” into muscle.
This is the first time the disease has been cured in large animals, a fundamental step towards applying the therapy in humans. The dogs recovered their health and no longer show symptoms of the… read more
Researchers from University of California, Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program that can rapidly reconstruct “proto-languages” — the linguistic ancestors from which all modern languages have evolved.
These earliest-known languages include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic and, in this case, Proto-Austronesian, which gave rise to languages spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia and the Pacific.
Ancient languages hold… read more