Get ready for four-legged bots of all shapes and sizes — and for all sorts of uses — that learn how to maneuver through landscapes with the grace of a cheetah, Fast Company reports.
The most nightmare-inducing characteristic of Big Dog, DARPA’s robotic military mule, might be the way it moves so stiffly, yet unrelentingly, over treacherous battleground. Turns out the repetitive mechanical gait that… read more
Mice can recover from physically debilitating strokes that damage the primary motor cortex, the region of the brain that controls most movement in the body if the mice are quickly subjected to physical conditioning that rapidly “rewires” a different part of the brain to take over lost function, Johns Hopkins researchers have found. The research uses precise, intense and early treatment.… read more
Engineers and physicists are developing acoustic versions of metamaterials that steer sound, which could be used to steer seismic waves around high-value buildings such as nuclear power stations or airports.
The Institut Fresnel in Marseille and the ground improvement specialist company, Menard, both in France, say they’ve built and tested a seismic invisibility cloak in an alluvial basin in southern France, MIT Technology Review reports.
The… read more
Six percent of red-dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-sized planets, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have found.
Red dwarfs are the most common stars in our galaxy; about 75 percent of the closest stars are red dwarfs. The closest Earth-like planet could be just 13 light-years away, Harvard astronomer and lead author Courtney Dressing calculated.
“We thought we would have to search… read more
Drones are no longer the sole domain of the military, and just as with many new technologies, they can easily fall into the wrong hands, global security advisor, writer and consultant Marc Goodman reports in Time.
Criminal organizations are early adopters of technology, and some have already used UAVs and other forms of robotics to violate the law… read more
For the past few months, some of the world’s leading cryptographers have been keeping a closely guarded secret about a pioneering new invention. Today, they’ve decided it’s time to tell all, Slate Future Tense reports.
Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments’ feathers with a “surveillance-proof” smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts… read more
Using lasers, a research team at the Vienna University of Technology is developing microstructures for embedding living cells.
The process allows living cells to be incorporated into intricate custom structures, similar to biological tissue, in which cells are surrounded by the cell’s normal extracellular matrix.
This technology is particularly important for artificially growing biotissue, for finding new drugs, or for stem cell research.… read more
A new 3D printing process using human stem cells could pave the way to custom replacement organs for patients, eliminating the need for organ donation and immune suppression, and solving the problem of transplant rejection.
The process, developed at Edinburgh-based Heriot-Watt University, in partnership with Roslin Cellab, could also speed up and improve the process of reliable, animal-free drug testing by growing three-dimensional human tissues and structures… read more
UC Irvine neuroscientists have developed a way to stop epileptic seizures with fiber-optic light signals, heralding a novel opportunity to treat the most severe manifestations of the brain disorder.
Using a mouse model of temporal lobe epilepsy, Ivan Soltesz, Chancellor’s Professor and chair of anatomy & neurobiology, and colleagues created an EEG-based brain-waves-sensing) computer system that lights up hair-thin fiber optic… read more
Salk Institute for Biological Studies researchers have shared a how-to secret for biologists: code for Amazon Cloud that significantly reduces the time necessary to process data-intensive microscopic images.
The method promises to speed research into the underlying causes of disease by making single-molecule microscopy of practical use for more laboratories.
“This is an extremely cost-effective way for labs to process super-resolution images,” says … read more
A team led by Oxford University scientists has overcome a key problem of growing graphene — a one atom-thick layer of carbon — without the defects that weaken it and prevent electrons from flowing freely within it when using chemical vapor deposition.
With the previous methods, tiny flakes of graphene form with random orientations, leaving defects or seams between flakes that grow together.… read more
An MIT research team has developed a major new process for producing quantum dots with four important qualities:
A tiny remote-control helicopter is being used for surveillance on the front line to detect enemy threats to British troops.
British troops are using a nano drone just 10cm long and weighing 16 grams on the front line in Afghanistan to provide vital information on the ground, Sky News reports.
They are the first to use the state-of-the-art handheld tiny surveillance helicopters, which relay reliable full… read more
Researchers at Stanford recently investigated the subject by giving people the ability of Superman-like flight in the university’s Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory (VHIL).
While several studies have shown that playing violent videogames can encourage aggressive behavior, the new research suggests that games could be designed to train people to be more empathetic in the real world.
To test this hypothesis, the group — which… read more
Researchers are discovering that they get better results in some tasks by combining the signals from multiple brain-computer interface (BCI) users.
Until now, this “collaborative BCI” technique has been used in simple pattern-recognition tasks, but a team at the University of Essex in the UK wanted to test it more rigorously, New Scientist reports.
So they developed a simulator in which pairs of BCI… read more