Smell-O-Vision was a system that released odors during the projection of a film so that the viewer could “smell” what was happening in the movie.
Now the “smelling screen,” invented by Haruka Matsukura at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan and colleagues, makes smells appear to come from the exact spot on any LCD screen that is displaying the image of a cup of coffee,… read more
Obayashi Corp., headquartered in Tokyo, has unveiled a project to build a space elevator by the year 2050 that would transport passengers to a station 36,000 kilometers above the Earth and transmit power to the ground.
A cable, made of carbon nanotubes, would be stretched up to 96,000 kilometers, or about one-fourth of the distance between the Earth and the moon. One end of… read more
Amateur astronomers are puzzling over a seemingly anomalous cloud that has shown up on images of Mars taken over the past few days, MSNBC Cosmic Log reports.
More: Exosky.net.
Traditional American universities are suddenly running scared of YouTube, Xconomy reports, along with Vimeo, 5min, iTunes U, TED and the Internet Archive.
Without YouTube, Sal Khan and Khan Academy could never have reached his 4 million unique viewers a month with their 3,200 videos, viewed 170 million times.
Internet video sharing technology means that talented people from outside the education establishment can make and publish free educational videos that are… read more
Northwestern University researchers may have found an alternative to CMOS (current computer processor chips) that would allow for highly efficient computer logic circuits that generate much less heat: an entirely new logic circuit family based on magnetic semiconductor devices that could lead to logic circuits up to 1 million times more power-efficient than today’s.
Background
Modern-day computers are based on logic circuits using semiconductor transistors.… read more
The next generation of PrimeSense‘s 3D sensor (used inside the Microsoft Kinect), called Capri, will revolutionize vision for very cheap and very expensive robots, IEEE Spectrum reports.
Capri is also small enough that it’ll be able to fit into tablets (and eventually smartphones).
The first engineering samples of Capri are expected to ship in 2-3 months, with consumer kits… read more
Imagine a handheld, battery-powered plasma-producing device that can rid skin of bacteria in an instant — no soap and water required.
It could be used in ambulance emergency calls, natural disaster sites, military combat operations, and wherever treatment is required in remote locations.
It’s called a “plasma flashlight.”
In an experiment, the plasma flashlight effectively inactivated a thick biofilm with 17 different layers of one of the most… read more
The detailed changes in the structure of a virus as it infects an E. coli bacterium have been observed for the first time.
To infect a cell, a virus must be able to first find a suitable cell and then eject its genetic material into its host.
This robot-like process has been observed in a virus called T7 and visualized by Ian… read more
Instead a carrying spare parts, space-constrained U.S. Navy ships in the future might carry 3-D printers and bags of various powdered ingredients, and simply download the design files needed to print items as necessary, according to the Armed Forces Journal,
“Perhaps closer at hand is a distributed global production network in which sailors and Marines send an email with a digital scan or design for a
What factors distinguish the brains of exceptionally smart humans from those of average humans?
Overall brain size matters somewhat, accounting for about 6.7 percent of individual variation in intelligence.
More recent research has pinpointed the brain’s lateral prefrontal cortex, a region just behind the temple, as a critical hub for high-level mental processing, with activity levels there predicting another 5 percent of variation in individual intelligence.… read more
In new research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), researchers have invented self-assembled, multifunctional, near-infrared-light-responsive nanoparticles to treat cancer.
The nanoparticles can deliver a chemotherapy drug specifically targeted to cancer cells and selectively release the drug in response to an external beam of light. They can also create heat for synergistic thermo-chemo-mediated anti-tumor effects.
Excitement around the potential for targeted nanoparticles (NPs) that can be controlled… read more
Linden Lab intends to integrate the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset with Second Life, Wagner James Au reports on New World Notes.
“The Oculus could become Second Life’s killer app, but only if Linden Lab is willing to go all in,” said Au. “Sounds like they are doing just that, in an official capacity.
We’ll get to experience Second… read more
MIT researchers have fabricated a three-dimensional, lightweight metamaterial lens that focuses radio waves with extreme precision.
The concave lens exhibits a property called negative refraction, bending electromagnetic waves — in this case, radio waves — in exactly the opposite sense from which a normal concave lens would work.
Concave lenses typically radiate radio waves… read more
The relativistic motion of clocks on board GPS satellites exactly accounts for the superluminal effect in the OPERA experiment, says physicist Ronald van Elburg at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, The Physics arXiv Blog reports.
“From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter,”… read more
Germany is set to advance a bill Wednesday imposing a spate of new rules on high-frequency trading, escalating Europe’s sweeping response to concerns that speedy traders have brought instability to the markets.
The measure seeks to require traders to register with Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, collect fees from those who use high-speed trading systems excessively, and force stock markets to install circuit breakers that can interrupt trading if… read more