For his 158th birthday, Nikola Tesla got a day named in his honor and a new science museum with $1 million in funding from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk, the CEO of electric car company Tesla Motors and rocket company SpaceX, pledged the money in support of a new Tesla museum to be built on... Continue Reading →

An international collaboration of scientists led by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has taken detailed “snapshots” of the four photon-step cycle for water oxidation in photosystem II, a large protein complex in green plants. The researchers were working at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS),... Continue Reading →

Subtle interactions of electrons and light make them so valuable for technology: ultra-thin systems of semiconductor layers can turn electrical voltage into light. But they can also be used the other way around and serve as light detectors. Until now, it has been hard to couple light into these layered semiconductor systems. Scientists at Vienna... Continue Reading →

Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers including teachers, council workers and firefighters staged a 24-hour pay strike on Thursday in a stoppage that has prompted Prime Minister David Cameron to pledge a crackdown on union powers. Protesters marched through the streets of many of Britain's main cities in one of the biggest co-ordinated labour... Continue Reading →

Engineers have revamped billboards to produce drinking water and eat pollution. Now a design firm in Slovakia is converting the advertising structures into apartments for the country’s vagrant population. Architects at Design Develop came up with the ingenious idea to take advantage of Slovakia’s typical two-sided billboard, which is low to the ground and already... Continue Reading →

For many people who lack access to electricity, the day ends when the sun goes down. But Philips aims to slowly change that through their Gift of Light program. Through it, employees first nominate communities around the world that are desperately in need of light and vote for the most deserving. Once these communities have... Continue Reading →

A future computer might be a lot slimier than the solid silicon devices we have today. In a study published in the journal Materials Today, European researchers reveal details of logic units built using living slime molds, which might act as the building blocks for computing devices and sensors. Andrew Adamatzky (University of the West... Continue Reading →

In a recent publication in Nature Communications researchers from Ghent University report on a new technique for optical information processing on chips using techniques inspired by the way our brain works. Although neural networks have been used in the past to solve pattern recognition problems such as speech and image recognition, it was usually in... Continue Reading →

A free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that exposes the role money plays in Congress. Displays on any web page detailed campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including total amount received and breakdown by industry and by size of donation. Puts vital data where it’s most relevant so you can discover... Continue Reading →

California truck drivers at three major transportation companies went on strike Monday morning, demanding an end to purported labor law violations such as misclassification and intimidation. This is the fourth strike initiated by the drivers with the backing of the Teamsters union, but it’s the first without a definitive end date; whereas previous strikes have... Continue Reading →