Imagine it: trillions of dollars worth of precious metals, fossil fuels, and fresh water, just lying around waiting to be claimed by anybody with a little know-how and an adventurer's spirit--any lucky person willing to travel a few million miles into the great black unknown, latch on to a big hunk of funny-shaped rock, and... Continue Reading →
The Army’s 3D-Printed Food Will Give Soldiers Personalized Meals
Three-dimensional printing is changing the way the Army treats injuries and builds bombs, and now the technology is poised to revolutionize how soldiers are fed. 3D printing will allow the Army to print food on demand, from pasta to pizza, and tailor its nutritional content to an individual soldier’s needs. Feeding thousands of soldiers in... Continue Reading →
Artificial Wombs Are Coming, but the Controversy is Already Here
Of all the technologies coming in the near future, one stands out that is a social and political minefield. Ectogenesis: growing a fetus outside the body in an artificial womb. It has the possibility to change one of the most fundamental acts that most humans experience: the way people go about having children. It also... Continue Reading →
New World Record For Data Transfer Laughs At Your Gigabytes
A team at the Technical University of Denmark has managed to blast 43 terabits of data down a fiber cable in a single second, setting a new world record for the fastest ever data transfer speed. For reference, that's 1GB of data in just 0.2 milliseconds. These records tend to be broken every few years... Continue Reading →
Perovskite Solar Cells Fabricated Using Spray-Painting Process
Researchers at the University of Sheffield have successfully produced perovskite solar cells using a spray-painting process. Experts from the University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering have previously used the spray-painting method to produce solar cells using organic semiconductors—but using perovskite is a major step forward. Efficient organometal halide... Continue Reading →
‘MacGyver’ Robots Use Their Environment to Solve Problems
MacGyver could make a rocket-powered harpoon gun/zip line out of some moth balls, cleaning fluid, rope, pulley, and an old telescope. Robots can't do that. But hey, neither can you. What you can do is use objects in your environment to help you complete tasks that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do on your... Continue Reading →
Finding Rover app tracks lost dogs using facial recognition
John Polimeno's life has taken a bit of a turn. A few years back, he owned and operated his own construction business. This summer, he's touring the country on a bus promoting Finding Rover, a new smartphone app he's created. Why the 180? Blame it on his love of dogs. Not too long ago, he... Continue Reading →
The World’s Largest Laser Crushed a Diamond to Study Planet Formation
When not being used to study nuclear fusion, the world's largest laser can be found crushing diamonds, to study planetary formation, of course. Well, that's a little bit misleading. The world's largest laser and 175 other lasers combined to exert 50 million times the amount of earth's atmospheric pressure on a single diamond, to be... Continue Reading →
Scientists use light to stitch ‘invisible’ nanoparticles together
At the centre of this new technique are tiny blocks made from ‘metamaterials’ - a special type of artificial material engineered to have properties unlike anything found in nature. These nanoparticle building blocks are just a few billionths of a metre wide, and researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK have figured out... Continue Reading →
Life-Saving Boot Can Detect Active Landmines from 6.5 Feet Away
Bogota-based design firm Lemur Studio has designed a life-saving boot insert which can detect landmines from a distance of 6.5 feet. SaveOneLife was created with soldiers in mind, but civilians and farmers living in areas littered with active mines can also benefit from this groundbreaking technology. The boot sole acts as a metal detector with... Continue Reading →