Flexible electronics guru John Rogers has developed a wearable electronic patch that incorporates standard silicon chips. The patch uses a microfluidic construction with wires folded to allow it to bend and flex around the rigid off-the-shelf chips.
As I'm sure you've already read, Facebook recently acquired Oculus Virtual Reality for $2 billion.
This is a huge deal... and here's why:
Brief Company Timeline:
August 2012 -- Oculus...
With the Raspberry Pi, a programmable credit card-sized computer, British computer scientists sought to rekindle garage innovation. What would young students do with the power of computing if they could buy a computer for just $35 and access all of its parts?
A new atlas of study results related to the mouse connectome offers the equivalent of a highway map, with local roads to be filled in later. The atlas, described in a recent paper in Nature, represents more than four years of work undertaken at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. It’s the most detailed information we have on the brain of any animal other than that of the roundworm C. elegans, which has just 302 neurons.
In 2013, the addition of renewable capacity slowed slightly compared to the previous year as a result of shrinking governmental incentives and investment, according to a new report from The Pew Chartiable Trusts. While the survey found that renewable energy still relies on public incentives, it also suggested that at least parts of the industry are not as dependent as they once were on such incentives, thanks to falling prices.
Military uses drones as mobile hotspots; sponge injection helps heal gunshot wounds; calorie-counting device questioned; robotic surgeon designed to operate in space.
A San Francisco startup called Open Garden has a use for mesh networking that has drummed up excitement: a chat app that works even when there's no phone or internet service available.
Air pollution claimed 7 million lives in 2012, according to a report just released by the World Health Organization, with the vast majority of deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries. One out of every eight premature deaths in 2012 was attributable to air pollution, the numbers reveal — a rate double that reported in previous years due to more accurate measures of pollution in both outdoor and indoor environments and in a broader range of rural areas.
Computers' EQ rises; lab-grown muscles get stronger; Texas goes big in wind power; and researchers create real-time video game interface of the human brain.
Those who eat seven or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day cut their risk of death at any age by more than half, compared to those who don’t get a full serving of the foods. The study was able to document the death-defying benefit of each additional daily portion of fruits and vegetables.
The World Health Organization estimates some 90% of the world’s visually impaired folks live in the developing world. Most suffer from correctible but undiagnosed...
A Wi-Fi-connected collar called Silent Herdsman monitors cows' movements to determine, with the help of artificial intelligence software, when they are in heat. It may sound absurd, but the name of the game in milk production is impregnating cows as soon as possible after they’ve had their last calf.
Echoing Google's Project Loon, Facebook is now looking to connect those would-be users. Facebook will use drones, along with satellites and the emerging free-space optical communications protocol, to connect the unconnected.
Most of us aren’t scientists, but every once in awhile, nearly everyone unintentionally runs a science experiment in their refrigerator. If left long enough,...
The term ‘transhuman’ inevitably (for me) summons grotesque visions of humans and machines merging into a Borg-like race bent on eradicating biological imperfection. These...
Nanotechnology is gradually turning its hypothetical promise into real applications. Some see nanotech-based medicines as an entirely new set of tools in a doctor’s medical bag. Among commercial companies, Vecoy Nanomedicines is most bullish on the promise of nanotechnology to combat viruses.
Stanford University physicist Manu Prakash has garnered attention for a microscope made of paper and assembled by folding in the origami style. Each device costs 50 cents and weighs less than 9 grams, even with a battery and LED light source built in.
Three months ago, a 22-year-old woman, suffering from a rare bone ailment, underwent brain surgery in Holland. Her skull, which had grown some three...
Researchers at the University of Michigan, led by electrical engineer Zhaohui Zhong, have devised a way to capture the infrared spectrum that is no longer dependent on the cooling that makes infrared goggles so cumbersome. The method uses the nanomaterial graphene and works on a device smaller than a pinky nail.
Brain stimulation leads to faster learning; TED marks 30th anniversary with giant digital art display; flying wind turbine poised for test run in Alaska.
It's difficult to make a flexible antenna to power a wearable computer because they have to transmit at a fixed bandwidth. But North Carolina State engineers Yong Zhu and Jacob Adams recently managed to build such an antenna using silver nanowires set in a flexible polymer.
Will Burrard-Lucas is a wildlife photographer. Sometimes that means documenting dangerous animals, and of course, to do this, he needs a good zoom lens...
U. Penn researchers have published promising results from what they claim is the first clinical trial of a genetic approach to fighting HIV/AIDS. Doctors removed HIV-positive patients’ T cells and genetically modified a portion of them to include a rare HIV-resistant genetic mutation before reintroducing the cells.
The FDA recently approved an external device that uses nerve stimulation to decrease the frequency of debilitating migraine headaches. The Cefaly headband, which connects to a stick-on electrode to stimulate the endings of the trigeminal nerve, is the first non-pharmaceutical migraine treatment to get the agency’s okay.
MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has made a significant step in achieving both safety and agility in the same device with a soft robot fish, made of soft silicone, that can perform sophisticated, agile movements and is safe for operation near humans.
If artificial intelligence is sophisticated enough to handle a car on a Bay Area freeway, surely it can pilot a ship safely from port to port. That’s the premise of a European Union-funded project called MUNIN tasked with designing largely automated cargo ships by the beginning of 2015.
Stephen Power, a 29-year-old Welsh man who was badly injured in a 2012 motorcycle crash, underwent major reconstructive surgery on his face and now wears custom-made 3D-printed structural implants that were devised and installed using 3D-printed models of his facial bones.
Humans aren’t just being replaced by robots, particularly as job descriptions adapt to new divisions of labor: A growing number will find themselves working alongside the droids. The situation raises some thorny legal issues.
In March 2008, on a remote Norwegian island in the Arctic circle the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, or “doomsday vault,” took its first deposits. The vault’s builders had spent the prior year blasting a tunnel and three chambers into the mountainside’s permafrost. To be stored within each chamber? Treasure. The doomsday vault was constructed to store the world’s agriculture heritage in deep freeze, should the worst happen. Six years on, and following a recent deposit of 20,000 species, the vault now houses over 800,000 plant species, and with an average 500 seeds per sample, some 400 million seeds.
Chiron Global’s martial arts armor has been described as Iron Man-like, but we’d call it a cross between the Dark Knight and Darth Vader. But hey, splitting hairs. You get the point. Technology, superheroes, ninjas—dark forces shrouded in mystery.
There’s a rule of thumb in surgery—the less invasive the procedure, the better. Less invasive surgeries reduce patient discomfort, foster faster recoveries, and limit...
Swedish researchers created an augmented reality system in which myoelectric electrodes on an amputee patient's stump indicated his attempted muscle movements for the missing arm, and an arm image on screen reflected those movements back to him. The patient reported that his chronic phantom limb pain diminished dramatically.
Ditto, a Boston-based social analytics company, is using emerging computer vision technologies to give corporations insight into what users are saying about them in photos shared online.
Figuring out how to cheaply, efficiently remove salt from Earth’s ocean water would provide an nearly inexhaustible source of our most precious resource, and wouldn’t you know it? Graphene may present a solution to the problem.
