Category: Science

Education Science

Harvard University’s robotic insect takes its first controlled flight (video)

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As reported on Engadget. By Sean Buckley There’s hardly a shortage of animal inspired robots, but few are as tiny as Harvard’sautonomous RoboBee. The robotic insect has been around for a while, but researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering only recently managed a minor breakthrough: controlled flight. Using new manufacturing and design processes, the team has managed to keep the coin-sized bug aloft by independently manipulating the robot’s wings with piezoelectric actuators and a delicate control system. “This…

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Science

Dances with atoms: IBM researchers create a short film using only microscopic particles

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As reported on The Verge. By Jacob Kastrenakes A group of IBM researchers took a break from studying atomic data storage to work on something a bit more lighthearted: a stop motion movie made entirely out of atoms. The film, aptly named A Boy and His Atom, was created by arranging atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope and then capturing the arrangement as an image, magnified to over 100 million times its actual size. The final result…

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Science Space

Forever alone? How NASA’s Kepler craft is finding another Earth

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As reported on The Verge. By Carl Franzen Discovery of new planets in habitable zones is most promising yet in four-year quest Late last week, NASA announced that scientists using its Kepler space observatory had discovered two new planetary systems thousands of light years away from our own. Within these, seven new planets were found, and three of them are located in the sweet spot around their stars that makes it not too hot, nor too cold, for liquid water…

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Education Science

3 Awesome And Inspiring Inventions From The White House Science Fair

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As reported on TechCrunch. by GREGORY FERENSTEIN Some of the nation’s young brainiacs were honored today at the annual White House Science Fair. Every spring, the White House invites children to show off life-changing innovations that have mostly been constructed in MacGyver-like fashion from commercially available materials. Even though I cover this story every year, it’s hard not to be inspired by brilliant young kids motivated to tackle the world’s problems. “Let me just say in my official…

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Art Science

The Art of Physics: Winning Photos of Giant Particle Colliders

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As reported on Wired. BY ADAM MANN View as gallery The KLOE detector at Frascati National Laboratory in Italy looks for a special asymmetry in the behavior of strange particles called kaons. The experiment could help explain why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter. This was the Jury’s Choice first place image. Credit: Joseph Paul Boccio Looking like something from the set of Transformers, the Canadian TIGRESS detector photographs the gamma rays coming from exotic isotopes of…

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Science

The deadly bean: why ricin is used for bioterror

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As reported on The Verge. By Carl Franzen It’s easy to make, but it’s also not very effective as a biological weapon, scientists say There was scarcely time to process the fatal Boston Marathon bombings on Monday when the news broke late yesterday afternoon that a letter mailed to Republican Senator Roger Wicker had tested positive for ricin, one of the most potentially toxic and easily-synthesized poison substances in the world, which is extracted from beans of the commonly available castor…

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Application Hardware Dev Science Tech

Heavy weather: why we need supercomputers to teach us how clouds and climate change work

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As reported on The Verge. By Carl Franzen There’s still no clear forecast for Earth’s temperature rise, but scientists are looking to the sky for answers There’s a dark cloud hanging over the science of climate change, quite literally. Scientists today have access to supercomputers capable of running advanced simulations of Earth’s climate hundreds of years into the future, accounting for millions of tiny variables. But even with all that equipment and training, they still can’t…

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Mobile Science

BlackBerry On The Defensive, Says BB10 And PlayBook Getting Approved By The DoD In April

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As reported on TechCrunch. by INGRID LUNDEN BlackBerry has now issued a statement confirming that its relationship is still on with the Department of Defense — for its sake hopefully closing the loop on the story that started withreports that the DoD would be dumping its deal with the troubled Canadian handset maker, once a mainstay of business users, who are now migrating to Apple and Android devices. BlackBerry says that its devices and services are in the…

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Science Space

European Space Agency wants you and your drone to help it dock spaceships

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As reported on The Verge. By Jeff Blagdon Wondering what to do with that Parrot.AR Drone collecting dust on your shelf? Why not help scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) work on automated spaceship docking methods? The agency recently released an augmented reality app for iOS called Astro Drone (video below) that lets users simulate docking their Parrot.ARs with a virtual ISS. The (hopefully) millions of hours of resulting sensor data will go toward ESA’s early work on creating…

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Science

‘Parallel Universe’ of Life Described Far Beneath the Bottom of the Sea

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As reported on Wired. BY BRANDON KEIM A sample of oceanic crust basalt (left) and a microscopic cross-section (right) denoting changes of concentration in sulfur, an element used by microbes there. Image: Spencer et al./Science   Deep beneath the ocean floor off the Pacific Northwest coast, scientists have described the existence of a potentially vast realm of life, one almost completely disconnected from the world above. Persisting in microscopic cracks in the basalt rocks of Earth’s oceanic…

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