NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has successfully executed its daring dive through the 1,500-mile-wide gap between Saturn and its rings, the first time a man-made object has navigated through the icy halo that hugs the gas giant. Controllers operating the Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, California confirmed data collected during its passage was being received from…
Category: Technology
Science in America – Neil deGrasse Tyson – March For Science – 22nd April
We offer this 4min video on “Science in America”, containing what may be the most important words Neil deGrasse Tyson has ever spoken. Get involved in March For Science 22nd April. We, as citizens of this planet, have the right to preserve what is the truth, to let climate change deniers know that we have…
Quadriplegic man’s arm and hand brought back to life by thought-control tech
A quadriplegic man has had his right arm and hand brought back to life with the help of thought-control technology. Bill Kochevar, 56, was paralysed below his shoulders in a cycling accident eight years ago but can now grasp and lift objects after having two pill-sized electrodes implanted in his brain. The electrodes record the…
Electrons disappearing and reappearing between atomic layers
Scientist have spotted a strange type of quantum movement occurring in electrons travelling between the atomic layers of a material. Instead of travelling from the top to the bottom layer through the middle, the electrons were caught disappearing from the top layer and reappearing in the bottom layer a fraction of a second later – with…
The Trees Have Ears
Environmentalists are bugging rainforests with discarded smartphones to catch poachers and illegal loggers. When a tree falls to illegal loggers in the forest of the Kalaweit Supayang Nature Conservation Reserve for gibbons in West Sumatra, Indonesia, it most definitely makes a sound—and generates a text message to alert reserve managers. Last summer a tiny, nonprofit…
A robot stingray
Here’s a critter that would be a showstopper in your aquarium: By layering rat heart cells over a gold skeleton, scientists have built tiny swimming artificial stingrays that can be driven and guided by light. These little ray-bots, described in the journal Science, may offer insight into building soft robotics, studying the human heart — and…
Building James Webb
For months, inside the towering Building 29 here at Goddard Space Flight Center, the four scientific instruments at the heart of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, or Webb) have been sealed in what looks like a house-sized pressure cooker. A rhythmic chirp-chirp-chirp sounds as vacuum pumps keep the interior at a spacelike ten-billionth of…
Building an archive on the Moon
Is there a business case that would support a private, unmanned mission to the moon? The people at Lunar Mission One certainly think so. If they’re right, an unmanned lander will touch down on a crater rim near the Moon’s south pole in 2024. Part of the lander will be devoted to scientific exploration, drilling…
Experiment records extreme quantum weirdness
Researchers from the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and the University of Seville in Spain have reported the most extreme ‘entanglement’ between pairs of photons ever seen in the lab. The result was published 30 October 2015 in Physical Review Letters. The achievement is evidence for the validity of…
Facebook’s AI software could give machines more common sense
Will this block of virtual blocks fall over? Facebook has trained up software that knows the answer. Artificial-intelligence researchers at the company took on the project in an effort to explore how computers might learn some basic physical common sense. Understanding that, for example, unsupported objects fall, or that a larger object won’t fit inside…
A quantum virus for efficient energy transport
When MIT phenoms Seth Lloyd and Angela Belcher put their heads together to create the perfect peanut butter cup, you know we are going to be there to take a bite. Lloyd, of quantum computer fame, realized that certain features of the kinds of viruses which Belcher builds are ideally dimensioned for trying increase the…
Graphene spirals could challenge macro solenoids
In the drive to miniaturize electronics, solenoids have become way too big, say Rice University scientists who discovered the essential component can be scaled down to nano-size with macro-scale performance. The secret is in a spiral form of atom-thin graphene that, remarkably, can be found in nature, according to Rice theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and…
