Volumental‘s 3D Scan-to-Print web app will be the world’s first browser-based, 3D-printable model creator. The idea is to scan (and later, print) a 3D object as easily as printing a document, using just a depth camera (such as a Kinect*) and computer browser.
The team just launched a Kickstarter. “We need $20,000 in funding to hire a dedicated developer for this project as well as… read more
Durham University Astronomers have found a new way of measuring the spin in supermassive black holes, which could lead to better understanding about how they drive the growth of galaxies.
The astronomers observed a black hole — with a mass 10 million times that of our Sun — at the center of a spiral galaxy 500 million light years from Earth while it was feeding on the… read more
The University of Nottingham scientists have developed a new technology that would enable all of the world’s crops to take nitrogen from the air, instead of requiring expensive and environmentally damaging fertilizers.
Nitrogen fixation, the process by which nitrogen is converted to ammonia, is vital for plants to survive and grow. However, only a very small number of plants, most notably legumes (such as peas,… read more
AGL Energy, one of the big three power utilities in Australia, says that 9,000MW of fossil-fuel baseload capacity needs to be taken out of the national electricity market (NEM) to bring it back into balance, RenewEconomy reports.
That assessment of 9,000MW equates to nearly one-third of the country’s baseload generation — a sure sign that renewables, and in particularly rooftop solar, are changing the dynamics of the… read more
A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals — its “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the Internet — according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald reported Wednesday.
The latest revelations come as senior intelligence officials… read more
The ability to pay attention to relevant information while ignoring distractions is a core brain function. Without the ability to focus and filter out “noise,” we could not effectively interact with our environment.
But despite much study of attention in the brain, the cellular mechanisms responsible for the effects of attention have remained a mystery.
Researchers from Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and the University of… read more
Online psychotherapy is just as efficient as conventional therapy, University of Zurich clinical researchers have found in a study of online psychotherapy vs. conventional face-to-face therapy.
And three months after the end of the therapy, patients given online treatment even displayed fewer symptoms.
Six therapists treated 62 patients, the majority of whom were suffering from moderate depression. The patients were divided into two equal groups… read more
NASA has begun studying how remotely-operated vehicles may one day help astronauts explore other worlds.
NASA tested the Surface Telerobotics exploration concept, in which an astronaut in an orbiting spacecraft remotely operates a robot on a planetary surface. In the future, astronauts orbiting other planetary bodies, such as Mars, asteroids or the moon, could use this approach to perform work on the surface using robotic avatars.… read more
Seth Lloyd of MIT and his collaborators have developed a quantum version of machine learning — a type of AI in which programs can learn from previous experience to become progressively better at finding patterns in data. It would take advantage of quantum computations to speed up machine-learning tasks exponentially, Nature News reports.
Data can be split into groups — a task that is at the core… read more
The chemical components crucial to the start of life on Earth may have primed and protected each other in never-before-realized ways, according to new research led by University of Washington scientists.
It could mean a simpler scenario for how that first spark of life came about on the planet, according to Sarah Keller, UW professor of chemistry, and Roy Black, UW affiliate professor… read more
A Michigan Technological University researcher is predicting that personal manufacturing, like personal computing before it, is about to enter the consumer mainstream in a big way.
“For the average American consumer, 3D printing is ready for showtime,” said Associate Professor Joshua Pearce.
The reason is financial: the typical family can already save a great deal of money by making things with a 3D printer… read more
Measurements tell us that global average sea level is currently rising by about 1 inch per decade. But in an invisible shadow process, our long-term sea level rise commitment or “lock-in” — the sea level rise we don’t see now, but which carbon emissions and warming have locked in for later years — is growing 10 times faster, and this growth rate is accelerating, writes Ben… read more
Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have devised a method to convert a relatively inexpensive conventional microscope into a billion-pixel imaging system that significantly outperforms the best available standard microscope.
Such a system could greatly improve the efficiency of digital pathology, in which specialists need to review large numbers of tissue samples. By making it possible to produce robust microscopes at low cost,… read more
A new technique for developing more targeted drugs with reduced side effects by using “molecular automata” — a mixture of antibodies and short strands of DNA — has been demonstrated by Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) and Columbia University researchers.
These short DNA strands, aka oligonucleotides, can be manufactured by researchers in a laboratory for any user-specified sequence.
How it works
All cells… read more
Researchers have developed a new method that can look at a specific segment of DNA and pinpoint a single mutation, which could help diagnose and treat diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis.
Modern genomics has shown that just one mutation can be the difference between successfully treating a disease and having it spread rampantly throughout the body.
These small mutations can be the root of a… read more