NASA is mulling over a plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit, according to researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California.
The mission would cost about $2.6 billion and could be completed by the 2020s, New Scientist reports.
The Obama administration has said it also wants to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. One… read more
Researchers used electricity on certain regions in the brain of a patient with chronic, severe facial pain to release an opiate-like substance that’s considered one of the body’s most powerful painkillers.
The findings help explain what happens in the brain that decreases pain during the brief sessions of electricity, says Alexandre DaSilva, the senior researcher in the study from the University of Michigan School of… read more
Attention seniors: French scientists have developed a process that permanently dyes white hair without harmful chemicals.
Philippe Walter and colleagues soaked white hairs in a solution containing fluorescent gold nanoparticles.
The hairs turned pale yellow and then darkened to a deep brown. The color remained even after repeated washings.
Using an electron microscope, the scientists confirmed that the particles were forming inside the hairs’ central core cortex.… read more
New research from the University of Glasgow suggests that lifespan is affected by the rate at which bodies grow early in life: manipulating growth rates in stickleback fish can extend their lifespan by nearly a third or reduce it by 15 percent.
A team from the University’s Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine altered the growth rate of 240 fish by exposing… read more
Are you still printing things out? Really?
Amazingly, the average office worker still uses about 10,000 sheets of paper per year, the EPA says.
To make a new push for a really paperless office, the “Paperless Coalition,” which includes Google Drive, HelloFax, Manilla, HelloSign, Expensify, Xero and Fujitsu ScanSnap, has launched a… read more
Using two successive pairs of specialized CT scans, a team of Johns Hopkins and Dutch radiologists has produced real-time images of liver tumors dying from direct injection of anticancer drugs into the tumors and their surrounding blood vessels.
Within a minute, the images showed whether the targeted chemotherapy did or did not choke off the tumors’ blood supply and saved patients a month of worry… read more
Stanford researchers in collaboration with NASA JPL and MIT have designed a robotic platform that involves a mother spacecraft deploying one or several spiked, roughly spherical rovers to the Martian moon Phobos.
Measuring about half a meter wide, each rover would hop, tumble and bound across the cratered, lopsided moon, relaying information about its origins, as well as its soil and other surface materials.
Developed by… read more
It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that — in slow motion — is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century, says Wired maverick Kevin Kelley.
Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent… read more
Summary of an IEEE Spectrum report
In the next few weeks, Google will start shipping its Google Glass to developers. More-polished consumer models are expected in 2014.
Details about Glass are still sketchy but here’s what we know:
Cosmic radiation — which would bombard astronauts on deep space missions to places like Mars — could accelerate the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study in the open-access journal PLOS ONE shows.
“Galactic cosmic radiation poses a significant threat to future astronauts,” said M. Kerry O’Banion, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Department of Neurobiology and… read more
Researchers have created a reversible rotor that sits atop a ball bearing — a single ruthenium atom, Ars Technica reports.
The base of the system involves a boron atom that coordinates three ringed structures that are chemically similar to the bases of DNA. Nitrogens at a corner of these ringed structures coordinate the ruthenium atom, placing it at the peak of a three-sided pyramid.
The ruthenium atom acts… read more
Six medical innovations are poised to transform the way we fight disease, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Adafruit, the kit-based electronics retailer and promoter of hobbyist engineering, is aiming to teach electronics to a younger demographic, using puppets, says Wired.
Their new online show, titled Circuit Playground, will teach the essentials of electronics and circuitry to children through kid-friendly dolls.
As a learning companion, Adafruit has also recently produced the coloring book E is for Electronics, and will carry … read more
Global growth from the current industrial revolution (computers, the web, mobile phones) is slowing — especially in advanced-technology economies, and long-term economic growth may grind to a halt, Robert J. Gordon, Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, has argued.
Now economist Paul Krugman counters in The New York Times that we are moving toward a… read more
What does 2013 hold in store for the world of social media? CNET predicts:
1. MySpace relaunches; no one cares (no-brainer)
2. Twitter-Instagram photo rivalry continues to develop
3. Tout (video-sharing service) breaks out
4. Bigger bucks for Twitter (ads possible)
5. Facebook buys RockMelt? (its own browser)