The report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that eating insects could help boost nutrition and reduce pollution, BBC News reports.
It notes than over 2 billion people worldwide already supplement their diet with insects.
Wasps, beetles and other insects are currently “underutilized” as food for people and livestock, the report says.
The authors point out that insects are nutritious, with… read more
Researchers of the robotics lab at ETH Zurich have developed what ETH calls a “microrobot” (actually, a coated magnetic particle with no onboard intelligence) that can be used to measure the retina’s oxygen supply.
An insufficient supply of oxygen can cause blindness. Glaucoma is only one of several diseases that can decrease the oxygen supply to the retina, sometimes within mere hours.
To make… read more
University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods.
The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.
Separating… read more
How do people and other organisms evolve into individuals that are distinguished from others by their own personal brain structure and behavior?
Why do identical twins not resemble each other perfectly even when they grew up together?
To shed light on these questions, the scientists observed 40 genetically identical mice that were kept in an enclosure that offered a rich shared environment with a large variety of activity… read more
Chinese cloud services provider 3Tcloud is deploying the country’s biggest education cloud project to optimize resource allocation and cut maintenance cost, ZDNET reports.
According to a report last week on Chinese tech site CCIDNet.com, the city of Zhuji in Zhejiang — one of China’s most developed provinces — has installed more than 6,000 3Tcloud computing terminal devices in 118 schools.
The project,… read more
Samsung Electronics Co. said Sunday that it has successfully developed fifth-generation network (5G) core technology for the first time, allowing users to access faster data services expected to be available by 2020, Yonhap News Agency reports.
Under the new platform, users will be able to download and upload data at speeds of up to tens of gigabits per second (Gbps), compared to 75 megabits per second (Mbps)… read more
The mining speed of the bitcoin network on bitcoinwatch.com passed 1 exaFLOPS (1,000 petaFLOPS) this week — more than 8 times the combined speed of the Top 500 supercomputers, The Genesis Block reports.
(FLOPS stands for FLoating-point Operations Per Second, and is frequently used as a standard to measure computer speed. Bitcoin mining uses an integer calculation and almost no floating-point operations, so… read more
Scientists have made tremendous advances toward building lifelike prosthetic limbs that move and function like the real thing.
But what’s missing is a sense of touch, so a patient knows how hard he or she is actually squeezing something, or exactly where the object is positioned relative to his or her hand.
“If you lose your somatosensory [body senses] system, it almost looks like your motor system is… read more
If you create and modify your own virtual reality avatars, could what happens to these alter egos influence how you perceive virtual environments?
Penn State researchers found this question relevant to designing more realistic and immersive virtual reality exercises and games. They assigned random avatars to one group of participants, but allowed another group to customize their own avatars.
When placed in a virtual environment with three hills… read more
Amazon.com Inc. is developing a high-end smartphone featuring a screen that allows for three-dimensional images without glasses, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Using retina-tracking technology, images on the smartphone would seem to float above the screen like a hologram and appear three-dimensional at all angles, and users may be able to navigate through content using just their eyes, according to sources,
With smartphones, Amazon could collect new… read more
Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have found a radioactive iron isotope in bacteria microfossils.that they trace back to a supernova in our cosmic neighborhood.
This is the first proven biological signature of a starburst on our earth. The age determination of the deep-drill core from the Pacific Ocean showed that the supernova explosion must have occurred about 2.2 million years ago, roughly around the… read more
The U.S. State Department has demanded designs by Defense Distributed for a 3D-printed gun be taken offline because publishing them online may breach arms-control regulations, Forbes reports.
The order to remove the blueprints for the plastic gun comes after they were downloaded more than 100,000 times.
However, the files were actually being served by Mega, the New Zealand-based storage service created by ex-hacker entrepreneur Kim… read more
People provided with a real-time readout of activity in specific regions of their brains can learn to control that activity and lessen their anxiety, say Yale researchers.
They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to display the activity of the orbitofrontal cortex (a brain region just above the eyes) to subjects while they lay in a brain scanner.
Through a process of trial and… read more
Mars One says it has received applications from more than 78,000 people in more than 120 countries for the Mars One astronaut selection program, in hopes of becoming a Mars settler in 2023.
Most applications come from the U.S. (17324), followed by China (10241), United Kingdom (3581), Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Argentina and India.
The most popular candidate (for site visitors) so far is Anders… read more
For safety reasons, robot makers have avoided contact between the robot’s arm and the world.
Now Georgia Tech and Meka Robotics researchers have developed a control method that enables a robot’s arm to make contact with objects, people, and the rest of the robot while keeping forces low.
The method works with compliant robotic joints and whole-arm tactile sensing, and keeps the robot’s arm flexible,… read more