Two bunnies were recently born glowing green. They’re not radioactive—they carry jellyfish genes. If you’ve never read about animals genetically modified to glow, this may sound bizarre, edgy, sci-fi. It’s not. Scientists have been genetically programming animals to glow for years. The story here is that genetically modified glowing organisms aren’t news. That’s amazing.
A network of connected brains is the Holy Grail of Internet communications: Rather than type out an email, one user simply sends his or her thoughts directly to another. Researchers at the University of Washington recently moved one step closer to that goal with an experiment in which a researcher in one building controlled the hand movements of a colleague in another building.
If you were worth a million dollars, you might buy a fine watch. Rolex, Breitling, Seiko, this watch might run a couple thousand dollars. If you’re Jeff Bezos, you fund a 200-foot clock inside a mountain, engineered to withstand Armageddon and tick for 10,000 years. Bezos, the man behind Amazon and the new owner of the Washington Post, is worth a cool $25.2 billion, and he’s contributed $42 million to the Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 Year Clock project. That sounds like a lot of money, but to scale, it’s akin to our millionaire buying a single Rolex. No big deal for a Bezos.
As the prices for various types of sensors have fallen in recent years, businesses have found all sorts of uses for them. And anyone who’s watched even one of Hollywood’s forays into science fiction knows that one main use for sensors will be to confirm identities using biometric traits. But here’s a plot twist: Developing countries like Brazil and India are leading the way to biometric forms of identity confirmation, in which sensors limit access to secure systems such as banking or governmental assistance programs, to users who possess anatomical traits, deemed unique to each person, that have previously been entered into a database.
Adults lose teeth due to poor hygiene, aging, disease or accidents. Traditionally, prosthetics are used to replace part or all of a lost tooth. But wouldn’t it be better if we could simply regrow lost or damaged teeth? Approaches using stem cells, while still in their infancy, may eventually do exactly that. Researchers led by Dr. Duanqing Pei, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, have reported a potential method for growing teeth from stem cells obtained in urine.
Singularity University produced a series of "101" videos for the Graduate Studies Program to help acclimate the participants of the 2013 class to the...
Electric vehicles still have limited range, expensive batteries, and few charging stations. While mainstream manufacturers seek to improve battery tech, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has a different idea. Who needs big batteries and stations when the road itself can charge vehicles? In July, two new buses began public service in the South Korean city, Gumi. The buses, or online electric vehicles (OLEVs), travel a road like a wireless cellphone charging mat—only, this particular mat is 7.5 miles long and cost $4 million to build.
As far back at the late 1980s, the U.S. Patent Office issued its first patent for iris recognition scans. (Retinal scans, though widely referenced, at not as widely used as iris scans.) The Canadian Border Services offer an opt-in expedited security program that relies on an iris scan. But some researchers who have studied iris-scanning technology have found too much variety in the scans generated over time by a single person.
Researchers from the University of Rochester have pursued an increasingly common hypothesis that copper consumption may play a role in triggering Alzheimer’s disease. In findings published August 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, they showed that exposing the brain to copper not only spurs the production of the amyloid beta protein that characterizes the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers, but also slows the brain’s efforts to clear out the plaque.
A growing number of researchers are looking to build hearts, like other organs, from biological tissue. Such hearts have the added benefit of using the patient’s own tissue, reducing the chance of rejection. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh medical school made a significant breakthrough: They created a heart that beat on its own.
Printed in bold, no-nonsense lettering across the cover, a recent issue of National Geographic proclaimed, “This Baby Will Live to Be 120.” No question mark. The notion that impending medical discoveries may add years to our lives, with wits and vitality largely intact, is gaining credence and mainstream attention. But if research delivers radical life extension, would humans undergo medical treatments to attain it? In a Pew Research poll, 56% of those surveyed said no. For a culture obsessed with youth, that's an interesting result.
To be a multi-planetary species, Musk believes we have to develop fully reusable rockets. If every rocket launched 1,000 times, instead of just once, capital costs would plummet from $50 million to $50,000 per launch (not counting operational expenses) and could drive per pound launch costs down 100-fold.
At any given moment, the sun bathes the earth in enough solar energy to power the world 10,000 times over. Capturing and converting that energy into usable electricity presents major technical challenges. And, for the time being, an international tangle of politics and prices complicates matters further.
Singularity University produces a series of "101" videos for the Graduate Studies Program to help acclimate the participants of the 2013 class to the...
The words robot and drone may conjure up images of a sleek, austere future, but some of the most compelling use cases for the machines involve situations that are too dangerous, or just plain messy, for a human to handle. To wit, two recent grads of the U.S. Air Force Academy have patented a drone that climbs into a building via the water or sewage pipes. The inventors, Kyle Fitle and David Carte, described the vehicle to the Washington Post as a way to facilitate communication between first responders and people trapped inside a compromised building.
The number of bottlenose dolphins beaching themselves along the Mid-Atlantic coast skyrocketed in July and early August, leading the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare on August 8 an “unusual mortality event” and launch an investigation into what might be causing the deaths.
Elon Musk has long been hinting about a high-speed form of transportation enigmatically named the Hyperloop. Earlier this summer, he promised to reveal his Hyperloop plans in August. After a round of media hype and an all-nighter, Musk recently posted the 57-page Hyperloop Alpha plan online.
Engineering is often inspired by nature—the hooks in velcro or dermal denticles in sharkskin swimsuits. Then there’s Darpa’s SyNAPSE, a collaboration of researchers at IBM, XX, and XX universities. Not content with current computer architecture, SyNAPSE takes its cues from the human brain.
As Americans use digital methods for more of their interpersonal communications, law enforcement agencies have seized the opportunity to scoop up more information for cheaper than they could before, hoping to ferret out criminal activity. But violent crime still takes place in the physical world, with fragile human bodies on the line. A growing number of U.S. police departments are using a system of sound-detecting software to locate and respond to gunfire in hopes of catching more shooters and saving more victims. The dominant system they use is ShotSpotter, a network of acoustic sensors whose data filters through an algorithm to isolate gunshots. If shots are fired anywhere in the coverage area, the software triangulates their location to within about 10 feet and reports the activity to the police dispatcher. The system claims to be more accurate and more reliable than would-be 911 callers.
Over the last year, the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset, has flown from duct-taped prototype to massively anticipated gaming system. The firm has raised $2.4 million in a Kickstarter, oversubscribed ten to one, and $16 million in venture capital. They've got the funds, a working prototype—and if they didn't have enough talent before, they most certainly do now. The firm recently announced John Carmack will join up as Chief Technology Officer. For those who’ve followed Carmack’s career and are itching to get their hands on a consumer-ready Rift—that’s huge news.
Georgia Tech researchers recently unveiled a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa that would likely make the Renaissance master’s jaw drop. At just 30 microns across, the image is 100,000 times smaller than the real thing—or roughly 1/3rd the width of a human hair.
“If you were a hotdog, would ya eat yourself?” That’s Will Ferrell as Harry Caray contemplating some of life’s deeper ethical questions. Here’s another more realistic one, “If your ballpark burger were grown in a petri dish, would you eat it?” A food writer, a food researcher, and a scientist attempted to answer that question Monday when they tasted a lab-made burger at a press event in London. The burger itself was grown in about three months, but the technology behind it took $XX and about five years to develop.
There’s a new perk in high-end apartment buildings—fully robotic parking lots. No more careless valet dinging the Rolls at 1706 Rittenhouse, Philadelphia. Tenants pull their car onto a lift and the system takes it from there. When a tenant wants to leave, they swipe a special fob, and the system locates and retrieves their car.
As six-legged robots go, other than its nifty red and yellow paint job, the Crabster robot has a pretty standard look, not unlike the impressive two-ton Mantis. While the Crabster isn’t two tons and lacks a cockpit for a human operator, it will boldly go where no other six-legged robot has gone before—the seafloor.
Remember watching Tony Stark design his Iron Man suit with a few flicks of his hands, rearranging digital parts and pieces projected in midair? It’ll be like that. Or even better, it’ll be like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. The air was thick with pop sci-fi references as folks awaited the touchless Leap controller over the last year, and we were (are) right there in the thick of it. (And I suppose we just added another one. Shoot.) After a few delays, the Leap was finally released in July, and you can almost feel the air being let out of the balloon. It was probably inevitable. The bar was set pretty high by the press and Leap alike. But we might add, a little deflation doesn’t invalidate the surge of interest the concept kicked up. People love this idea.
The smell of urine is not usually associated with having life-saving properties. But a new UK device called the ‘Odoreader’ can analyze urine odors and determine if bladder cancer (BC) is present. Although this is a pilot study, it has positive implications for early BC diagnosis and improved patient survival.
As a tech memes go, the Internet of Things is getting a bit long in tooth. The idea of internet-connected smart stuff has been heralded for years now. But where exactly are we in the quest to connect all things? Networking titan Cisco decided to put a number on it.
What if we could reverse degenerative forms of blindness with but an injection of new cells? Stem cell therapies—still promising, if not particularly speedy—may someday do just that. A recent paper in the journal Nature Biotechnology documents the successful implantation of photoreceptor cells, grown from embryonic stem cells, into the retinas of night-blind mice. The cells not only took root, but they remained present six weeks after implantation and formed the necessary neural connections to communicate visual data to the brain.
Researchers led by Takanori Takebe, MD and Hideki Taniguchi, MD, of Yokohama City University in Japan recently reported the first 3D vascularized organ derived from stem cells in the journal Nature. Though it is still years away from clinical trials in humans, the approach, used to generate human liver cell buds in mice, has implications for future transplantations of liver and potentially other organs in humans.
If there were a Turing test for artificial creativity (AC)—e-David might well be on its way to passing. The robotic system, created by researchers at the University of Konstantz in Germany, employs a variety of styles to produce paintings remarkably similar to their human counterparts.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed the health impacts of coal pollution by taking advantage of a de facto control group created by a Chinese government policy that provided free heating coal to homes and offices in northern China but not to those in southern China. The findings were dramatic.
The US Department of Defense has a good reason to fund research in advanced bionic limbs—in fact, it has a couple thousand good reasons. In the last thirteen years, 2,000 men and women have lost a limb in military service. And of course, military amputees aren’t the only amputees. Far from it.
Researchers led by Eric Tremblay from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EDFL) in Switzerland and Joseph Ford from UC San Diego have developed a new ‘Superman-style contact lens that can magnify the wearer’s vision by 2.8 times when worn with a modified pair of 3D glasses. These contacts may one day empower those suffering from macular degeneration or even augmenting the eyes of those with perfectly healthy vision.
Connor Levy is proof of concept. Barely two months old, Connor is the first child born from an embryo screened with next-generation DNA sequencing techniques to ensure that doctors provided his mother, Marybeth Scheidts, 36, with a genetically viable fertilized egg. The new process is dramatically cheaper and has initially proven at least as effective as the genetic methods fertility clinics use now.
Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul behind PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, the entrepreneur who wants to colonize Mars with a vertically landing, reusable rocket—that guy—recently announced he’s been busy thinking about a pneumatic tube for people called the Hyperloop. In a recent post on Twitter, Musk said he’ll publish the “Hyperloop alpha design by Aug 12."
The Navy’s newest fighter is a high-tech batwing the size of an F/A 18 Super Hornet. The stealthy X-47B can carry 4,500 pounds of weapons at half mach speed, up to 40,000 feet, and over 2,400 miles. The aircraft lacks but one thing. A cockpit. The X-47B is a next-generation military drone. Unlike previous military drones, the X-47B is completely autonomous. And we’re not just talking the ability to fly simple missions from one airstrip to another. Recently, the X-47B landed on an aircraft carrier by algorithm alone. That’s something only elite fighter pilots have been able to do until now.
In June, at the 2013 International AIDS Society conference, medical researchers made an extraordinary announcement. Two HIV positive cancer patients are HIV-free after undergoing bone marrow transplants. The patients have been off anti-retroviral drugs for seven weeks and fifteen weeks respectively, but doctors are, as yet, hesitant to call them cured. The virus may yet reemerge at a later date.
A better understanding of the brain may help us better understand thought, behavior and neurological disorders. An improved tool to facilitate this—a new 3D map of the human brain—has recently been released. It’s hoped the map might reveal novel insights into brain function and perhaps help find cures for related diseases.
Last year at the second annual Bay Area Art & Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions (BAASICS), I was invited to give a brief presentation on...
A manned solar-powered plane, dubbed Solar Impulse, recently touched down at New York’s JFK after flying the final leg of its journey across the US. The trip, a decade in the making, was itself but another step on the Solar Impulse team’s quest to fly around the world on solar power alone.
Is there anything humans can do that robots can't? First it was factory jobs, then chess, call centers, Jeopardy--and now, golf. In an ad for the European PGA Tour, professional golfer, Rory McIlroy, goes head to head with a golf robot to see who can chip more balls into washing machines down range. The bot shows off an flawlessly repeating swing, effortlessly knocks balls into machines, and talks trash like a pro. (Of course, McIlroy doesn't do too shabby himself. This is an ad for humans after all.)
Philip Rosedale is an entrepreneur best known for creating the virtual world Second Life that has a virtual economy and a thriving population. Currently,...
NASA recently concluded a successful six-week test of a prototype polar rover near the highest point in Greenland, where the robotic vehicle traversed icy terrain in temperatures of minus 30 Celsius to help scientists learn more about how ice sheets are faring in the changing climate — without having to break for hot cocoa.
NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft famously carry a pair of golden records encoded with images and sounds from Earth. Now, a new project hopes to similarly send discs to space. Only these discs are slightly more advanced. In fact, they’re spacecraft in their own right; thousands will fit into a CubeSat; and each one carries "computing power comparable to that of the Voyager spacecraft and Apollo flight computers."
