DARPA’s Adaptable Sensor System (ADAPT) program aims to transform how unattended sensors are developed for the military by using a manufacturing process similar to that of the commercial smartphone industry.
The goal is to develop low-cost, rapidly updatable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors in less than a year, a marked improvement to the current three-to-eight year development process.
The unattended ground… read more
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has begun delivery of germanium-76 detectors to an underground laboratory in South Dakota in a team research effort that might explain the puzzling imbalance between matter and antimatter generated by the Big Bang.
“It might explain why we’re here at all,” said David Radford, who oversees specific ORNL activities in the Majorana Demonstrator research effort. “It could… read more
Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have designed tiny spherical particles to float easily through the bloodstream after injection, then assemble into a durable scaffold within diseased tissue.
An enzyme produced by a specific type of tumor can trigger the transformation of the spheres into netlike structures that accumulate at the site of a cancer, the team reports in the journal Advanced Materials… read more
Speaking at the D11 Conference on Tuesday night in the opening tête-à-tête, Apple CEO Tim Cook offered muted praise for Google Glass but dismissed its mainstream appeal while calling wearable computing on your wrist “interesting” and “natural,” Jason Hiner writes on ZDNet.
Cook also predicted that the next generation of wearable computing will do more than just one thing such as activity tracking.
That kind… read more
Researchers from MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a new reinforcement-learning algorithm that allows computer systems to find solutions much more efficiently than previous algorithms did and for a wide range of problems.
With a recently released programming framework, the researchers show that a new machine-learning algorithm outperforms its predecessors.… read more
Scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a new type of lens that bends and focuses ultraviolet (UV) light in such an unusual way that it can create ghostly, 3D images of objects that float in free space.
The easy-to-build lens could lead to improved photolithography, nanoscale manipulation and manufacturing, and even high-resolution three-dimensional imaging, as well as a… read more
In a study that evaluated some of the latest in automatic facial recognition technology, researchers at Michigan State University were able to quickly identify one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects from a law enforcement video.
The researchers tested three different facial-recognition systems in the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing laboratory.
By using the law-enforcement video from the bombing, they found that one of… read more
A single injection of human neural stem cells produced neuronal regeneration and improvement of function and mobility in rats impaired by an acute spinal cord injury (SCI), an international team led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine reports
Grafting neural stem cells derived from a human fetal spinal cord to the rats’ spinal injury site produced an array of… read more
Encouraging interim data from the world’s first clinical trial examining the safety of neural stem cell treatment in ischemic stroke patients has been reported by researchers ahead of an application for Phase II trials.
Professor Keith Muir of the University of Glasgow, who is heading the trial of ReNeuron Group plc’s ReN001 stem cell therapy at the Southern General Hospital, Glasgow reported that… read more
This Friday, an asteroid nearly three kilometers wide is going to pass by the Earth-Moon system.
To mark the event, on Friday, May 31st at 2pm EDT, the White House will host the second in a series of “We the Geeks” Google+ Hangouts to talk asteroids with experts, according to a White House annoncement.
The President’s new budget calls for increased efforts by NASA to detect and… read more
New revelations that China used cyberattacks to access data from nearly 40 Pentagon weapons programs and almost 30 other defense technologies have increased pressure on U.S. leaders to take more strident action against Beijing to stem the persistent breaches, The Washington Post reports.
The disclosure, which was included in a Defense Science Board report released earlier this year, but is only now being discussed publicly, comes as… read more
A computer two millimeters square that contains almost all the components of a tiny functioning computer is the start of an effort to make chips that can put computer power just about anywhere for the vaunted “Internet of Things,” MIT Technology Review reports.
The KL02 chip, made by Freescale, is shorter on each side than most ants are long and crams in memory,… read more
Berkeley Lab researchers and their colleagues have created a new way to model biological molecules using x-rays.
Existing methods for solving structure largely depend on crystallized molecules, and the shapes of more than 80,000 proteins in a static state have been solved this way.
Most of the two million proteins in the human body can’t be crystallized, however, so even their low-resolution structures are… read more
Northwestern University researchers have developed a graphene-based ink that is highly conductive and tolerant to bending, and they have used it to inkjet-print graphene patterns that could be used for extremely detailed, conductive electrodes.
The resulting patterns are 250 times more conductive than previous attempts to print graphene-based electronic patterns and could be a step toward low-cost, foldable electronics.
“Graphene has a unique combination… read more
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for creating high-quality semiconductor thin films at the atomic scale — meaning the films are only one atom thick.
The technique can be used to create these thin films on a large scale, sufficient to coat wafers that are two inches wide, or larger.
“This could be used to scale current semiconductor technologies… read more