NASA is considering plans for a hovering moon base parked in orbit about 60,000 kilometers from the moon’s far side, at Lagrange point 2 (EML-2), New Scientist reports.
There, the combined gravity of Earth and the moon would tug on a spacecraft with exactly the force needed for it to hover near the moon without spending fuel. This might assist human missions to an asteroid or to Mars… read more
Astronomers have identified an object that could be a planet wandering through space without a parent star at a distance of about 100 light-years. Its closeness and the absence of a nearby bright star have allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail.
Free-floating planets are planetary-mass objects that roam through space without any ties to a star. Possible… read more
Newspapers have continued to churn out the same content while watching their advertisers steadily flee for sites like Craigslist, Yahoo, the Huffington Post/AOL, Facebook, and Google, says writer Will Oremus in Slate Future Tense. .
The chart above, from Statista’s Felix Richter, plots Google’s digital advertising revenue against the print advertising revenue of all U.S.… read more
Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) may help protect DNA molecules from damage by oxidation, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have found.
In nature, oxidation is a common chemical process in which a reactive chemical removes electrons from DNA and may increase the chance for mutations in cells.
More studies are needed to see if the in vitro protective effect of… read more
A technique for growing virtually pure samples of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with identical structures has been demonstrated by researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
They liken this process to “cloning” the nanotubes. If it can be suitably scaled up, their approach could solve an important materials problem in nanoelectronics: producing carbon nanotubes… read more
Internet activists are warning that next month’s meeting of the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations body charged with overseeing global communications, may have significant and potentially disastrous consequences for everyday Internet users, Mashable reports.
Called the World Conference on International Telecommunications, the meeting is intended to update some of the aging international law that governs the flow of information online. The meeting is mostly closed to… read more
New artificial muscles made from nanotech yarns and infused with paraffin wax can lift more than 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 times more mechanical power than the same size natural muscle, according to scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas and their international team from Australia, China, South Korea, Canada and Brazil.
The… read more
MIT chemical engineers have designed an injectable gel that responds to the body’s high temperature by forming a reinforcing network that makes the gel much more durable, allowing it to function over a longer period of time.
Gels that can be injected into the body, carrying drugs or cells that regenerate damaged tissue, hold promise for treating… read more
IBM Research – Almaden presented at Supercomputing 2012 last week the next milestone toward fulfilling the ultimate vision of the DARPA’s cognitive computing program, called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE), according to Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha, Manager, Cognitive Computing, IBM Research – Almaden.
Announced in 2008, DARPA’s SyNAPSE program calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales… read more
William ‘Red’ Whittaker often spends his Sundays lowering a robot into a recently blown up coal mine pit near his cattle ranch in Pennsylvania (see video below). By 2015, he hopes that his robot, or something like it, will be rappelling down a much deeper hole, on the Moon, Nature News reports.
“This is authentic exploration, this is the real deal,”… read more
“What is the Niantic Project?” asked a teaser video. Now we know the answer: the Niantic Project is a game called Ingress, CNET reports.
Ingress is a world in which two shadowy sides are vying for dominance: the Enlightened, who are trying to establish portals around the world that will let them control people’s… read more
After months of building a brand new Fiber infrastructure, Google is starting to connect homes in Kansas City, Google Fiber Blog reports, offering some tips on what to expect.
They’re soft, biocompatible, about 7 millimeters long — and, incredibly, able to walk by themselves. Miniature “bio-bots” developed at the University of Illinois are making tracks in synthetic biology.
Designing non-electronic biological machines has been a riddle that scientists at the interface of biology and engineering have struggled to solve. The walking bio-bots demonstrate the Illinois team’s ability to forward-engineer functional machines using only hydrogel,… read more
Researchers in the voice, speech, and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain activity of rappers when they are “freestyling” — spontaneously improvising lyrics in real time.
Published online in the November 15 issue of the journal Scientific Reports (open access), the findings… read more
Google’s ambitious book-scanning program is foundering in the courts. Now a Harvard-led group is launching its own sweeping effort to put our literary heritage online, MIT Technology Review reports.
Robert Darnton. A distinguished historian, prize-winning author, and director of Harvard’s library system, has an ardent desire to see a universal library established online, a library that would, as he puts it, “make all knowledge available… read more