A space rock several hundred meters across is heading towards our planet and the last-ditch attempt to avert a disaster — an untested mission to deflect it — fails.
This fictional scene of films and novels could well be a reality one day. So the European Space Agency (ESA) is appealing for research ideas to help guide the development of a U.S.-European asteroid deflection mission… read more
University of South Carolina’s Chuanbing Tang is out to turn the microelectronics industry upside down.
Currently, modern electronics are primarily fabricated by etching the smooth surface of a starting material — say, a wafer of silicon, using micro- or nanolithography to establish a pattern on it. This top-down method might involve a prefabricated template, such as a photomask, to establish the pattern.
But the approach… read more
In the days since the tragedy of Aaron Swartz’s suicide, many academics have been posting open-access PDFs of their research as an act of solidarity with Swartz’s crusade to liberate (in most cases publicly funded) knowledge for all to read.
While this has been a noteworthy gesture, the problem of open access isn’t just about the ethics of freeing and sharing scholarly information. It’s as much —… read more
Synthetic self-moving gels can “act alive” and mimic primitive biological communication, University of Pittsburgh researchers have found.
The synthetic system can reconfigure itself through a combination of chemical communication and interaction with light.
“This is the closest system to the ultimate self- recombining material, which can be divided into separated parts and the parts move autonomously to assemble into a structure resembling the original,… read more
Two robots equipped with instruments designed to “listen” for the calls of baleen whales detected nine endangered North Atlantic right whales in the Gulf of Maine last month.
The team of researchers, led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists Mark Baumgartner and Dave Fratantoni, reported their sightings to NOAA, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
NOAA Fisheries Service,… read more
Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and who later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment, The New York Times reports.
At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He… read more
Research scientists Stephen Bedell and Davood Shahrjerdi at IBM’s Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York think that flexible nanoscale circuits can do just that, IBM Research reports.
The flexible nanoelectronic circuit Bedell and Shahrjedri designed is 10,000 times thinner than a piece of paper, and was peeled off of a silicon wafer and put onto plastic — an industry first.
These circuits… read more
An MIT researcher has developed a technique that provides a new way of manipulating heat, allowing it to be controlled much as light waves can be manipulated by lenses and mirrors.
The approach relies on engineered materials consisting of nanostructured semiconductor alloy crystals.
Heat is a vibration of matter — technically, a vibration of the atomic lattice of a material — just as sound… read more
Physicians may soon have a new way to screen patients for Barrett’s esophagus, a precancerous condition usually caused by chronic exposure to stomach acid. Researchers at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have developed an imaging system enclosed in a capsule about the size of a multivitamin pill that creates detailed, microscopic images of the esophageal wall.
The system… read more
Repression of a single protein in ordinary fibroblasts (connective tissue) is sufficient to directly convert them into functional neurons, scientists in the U.S. and China have discovered.
The findings could have far-reaching implications for the development of new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington’s, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
In recent years, scientists have dramatically advanced the ability to induce pluripotent stem cells to become almost any type of… read more
Astronomers have crowned the spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 the largest-known spiral galaxy in the known universe, based on archival data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission, on loan to the California Institute of Technology.
Measuring tip-to-tip across its two outsized spiral arms, NGC 6872 spans more than 522,000 light-years, making it more than five times the size of our Milky Way galaxy. It was formed at least… read more
Astronomers have found tentative traces of a precursor chemical to the building blocks of life near a star-forming region about 1,000 light-years from Earth, Space.com reports.
The signal from the molecule, hydroxylamine, which is made up of atoms of nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, still needs to be verified. But, if confirmed, it would mean scientists had found a chemical that could potentially seed life on other worlds,… read more
An international team has used biological self-assembly to build nanodiamond arrays, MIT Technology Review reports.
One of the most promising ways to capture, generate and manipulate photons for quantum computing is with tiny diamonds. The secret is to create nanodiamonds with a defect in their structure where a nitrogen atom has taken the place of a carbon.
The researchers plan to bind nanodiamonds together with the… read more
Products that could make it common to control a computer, TV, or something else using eye gaze, gesture, voice, and even facial expression were launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, MIT Technology Review reports.
The technology promises to make computers and other devices easier to use, let devices do new things, and perhaps boost the prospects of companies reliant on PC sales.… read more
An international team of scientists has taken the next step in creating nanoscale machines by designing a multi-component molecular motor that can be moved clockwise and counterclockwise.
Although researchers can rotate or switch individual molecules on and off, the new study is the first to create a stand-alone molecular motor that has multiple parts, said Saw-Wai Hla, an Ohio University professor of physics and astronomy,… read more