We’ll find out Monday, Nov. 9, when Canadian Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab professor Roel Vertegaal and his students will unleash their “BitDrones” at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Programmable matter
Vertegaal believes his BitDrones invention is the first step towards creating interactive self-levitating programmable matter — materials capable of changing their 3D shape… read more
Scientists have designed an innovative structure containing an intricate microchannel network of simulated blood vessels that solves one of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine: How to deliver oxygen and nutrients to all cells in an artificial organ or tissue implant that takes days or weeks to grow in the lab prior to surgery.
The new study was performed by a research team led by Jordan Miller, assistant professor… read more
The dream to push the operating temperature for superconductors to room temperature — leading to future advances in computing, electronics and power grid technologies — has just become more real.
A team led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has combined powerful magnetic pulses with some of the brightest X-rays on the planet, discovering a surprising 3-D arrangement of a material’s electrons that appears… read more
Drawing inspiration from an insect’s multi-faceted eye, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have created miniature lenses with a vast range of vision. They’ve created the first flexible Fresnel zone plate microlenses with a wide field of view — a development that could allow everything from surgical scopes to security cameras and cell phones to capture a broader perspective at a fraction of the size required by conventional… read more
In the 1987 movie “Predator,” an alien who sees in the far thermal infrared region of the spectrum hunts down Arnold Schwarzenegger and his team — introducing a generation of science-fiction fans to thermal imaging.
The ability of humans (or aliens) to see in the infrared allows military, police, firefighters, and others to do their jobs successfully at night and in smoky conditions. It also helps… read more
Brain–computer interface (BCI) spellers allow a paralyzed patient to spell out words by looking at letters on a screen. Paralyzed patients can communicate by gazing at different letters to spell out a word.
Currently, the most advanced systems for doing this use “steady state visually evoked potential” (SSVEP). This method tags different characters on a screen by flashing each character at a different frequency (from… read more
Chinese and U.S. scientists have developed a 3-D printing method capable of producing embryoid bodies — highly uniform “blocks” of embryonic stem cells. These cells, which are capable of generating all cell types in the body, could be used to build tissue structures and potentially even micro-organs.
The results were published Wednesday Nov. 4 in an open-access paper in the journal Biofabrication. “The embryoid body is… read more
Northeastern University engineers have developed a 3-D printing process that uses magnetic fields to shape composite materials (mixes of plastics and ceramics) into patient-specific biomedical devices, such as catheters.
The devices are intended to be stronger and lighter than current models and the customized design could ensure an appropriate fit, said Randall Erb, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
The magnetic field… read more
Oregon State University (OSU) engineers have developed an innovation in chemical storage of concentrated solar thermal energy that may reduce its cost and make it more practical for wider use.
The new system uses thermochemical storage, in which chemical transformation is used in repeated cycles to hold heat, use it to drive turbines to create electricity, and then be re-heated to continue the cycle. Most commonly, this… read more
MIT engineers have designed magnetic protein nanoparticles that can be used to track cells or to monitor interactions within cells. The particles, described Monday (Nov. 2) in an open-access paper in Nature Communications, are an enhanced version of a naturally occurring, weakly magnetic protein called ferritin.
“We used the tools of protein engineering to try to boost the magnetic… read more
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) launched Monday (Nov. 2) its free Semantic Scholar service, intended to allow scientific researchers to quickly cull through the millions of scientific papers published each year to find those most relevant to their work.
Semantic Scholar leverages AI2’s expertise in data mining, natural-language processing, and computer vision, according to according to Oren Etzioni, PhD, CEO at… read more
The first-ever electron microscope images of the protein complex that unwinds, splits, and copies double-stranded DNA reveal something rather different from the standard textbook view.
The images, created by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory with partners from Stony Brook University and Rockefeller University, offer new insight into how this molecular machinery functions, including new possibilities about its role… read more
Just one high-calorie milkshake was enough to make metabolic syndrome worse for some people. And overindulgence in just a single meal or snack (especially junk food) is enough to trigger the beginnings of metabolic syndrome, which is associated with the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and diabetes (obesity around the waist and trunk is the main sign).
That finding… read more
Chinese scientists are completing plans for the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), a supergiant particle collider. With a circumference of 80 kilometers (50 miles) when built, it will be at least twice the size of the world’s current leading collider, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, outside Geneva, according to the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing. Work on the collider is expect to start in 2020.… read more
The Q Continuum simulation, one of the largest cosmological simulations ever performed, has modeled the evolution of the universe from just 50 million years after the Big Bang to the present day.
DOE’s Argonne National Laborator led the simulation on the Titan supercomputer at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Over the course of 13.8 billion years, the matter in the universe clumped… read more