Science and research

Scientists have developed a way to look inside a whole cell that doesn't involve the usual method of slicing and staining in the lab. Instead, you might say they're employing X-ray vision.

By using soft X-ray tomography (SXT), researchers can take images of a cell every 100 milliseconds and then re-create a whole picture of it from about 90 to 200 images in just a few minutes. The news was presented Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, according to Science Now. (The AAAS publishes Science Now.)

In the image of … Read more

Researchers are getting down to the atomic level in the pursuit of smaller and more powerful computers.

The University of New South Wales in Australia today announced it has made a single-atom transistor using a repeatable method, a development that could lead to computing devices that use these tiny building blocks.

About two years ago, a team of researchers from the Helsinki University of Technology, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Melbourne in Australia announced the creation of a single-atom transistor designed around a single phosphorus atom in silicon.

Now a new paper published in the … Read more

Could soldiers of the future fight battles in robot bodies controlled from afar? DARPA apparently thinks so, and the agency wants to create an army of surrogate fighting droids.

The U.S. military's research wing apparently is planning surrogates like in the film "Avatar" but with robots instead of giant Na'vi. It has a $7 million program code-named "Avatar" in its 2013 budget, according to Wired.

The robots would reduce risk to human fighters, just as thousands of aerial drones are already keeping pilots out of harm's way. … Read more

Earth started as a violent place, its surface churned by continuous volcanic eruptions and cloaked in an atmosphere that would have been poisonous to today's life-forms. Furthermore, the thin primeval atmosphere may have provided only scant protection from the young sun's harsh ultraviolet glare. Given these inhospitable conditions, scientists have long wondered: How did the first cells come to be nearly 4 billion years ago?

Conventional scientific wisdom holds that life arose in the sea. But a new study suggests that the first cells--or at least the ones that left descendants still extant--got their start in geothermal pools, … Read more

Crucial structures such as power plants and dams could be protected from earthquakes by surrounding them with specially designed rubber cylinders, according to researchers.

A team from the University of Manchester's School of Mathematics yesterday proposed creating barriers that would "cloak" buildings from the seismic waves of earthquakes. The researchers applied the same techniques that others have on scattering waves of light to render objects invisible.

In a paper published last week, the researchers say that artificially engineered materials, called metamaterials, have the potential to safeguard critical buildings and other structures such as airport terminals and bridges … Read more

Sony is looking to revolutionize the inefficient way in which we consume power.

A new concept video from the electronics giant shows how we could use power more efficiently in the year 2030 by switching to smart outlets with authentication and wireless charging on a broad scale, assuming we survive the zombie Mayan apocalypse.

The prototype power outlet, integrated with a short-range wireless FeliCa transmitter (and a new RFID over power line technology), allows the user to swipe a pay card across the faceplate and pay for energy on the spot. What makes it truly interesting is if humankind keeps progressing towards alternative energies (such as wind, solar, and biomass), then our outlets could give us options as to what source from which we obtain our power. The video description notes that with this outlet, "the user can actively control and manage power consumption on a user basis as well as on a device basis." … Read more

Does your coif suffer from orientational disorder? Have you checked the gravitational effects on your locks lately? Can you solve the differential equation in your beehive?

Well, scientists now can. Pioneering British researchers have succeeded in formulating an equation that unravels the deep physics mysteries of that great frontier of science, human ponytails.

In a study that screams Ig Nobel Prize, the researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Warwick, and Unilever published a hirsute equation that for the first time describes how hairs hang together and predicts the form of a ponytail.

"We identify the balance of forces in various regions of the ponytail, extract a remarkably simple equation of state from laboratory measurements of human ponytails, and relate the pressure to the measured random curvatures of individual hairs," Raymond Goldstein, Robin Ball, and Patrick Warren write in Physical Review Letters.

You'd think these boffins went a-hunting for ponytails in the wild and examined specimens back in the lab. That was probably too hairy a prospect. … Read more

It sounds like a particularly suspicious late-night infomercial: Spray your way to a better wireless signal! Improve your range! Save battery! Transmit over great distances under water!

But Chamtech's spray-on antenna is a real product with some impressive claims. It can be sprayed on almost any surface, even trees and orange barrels. It doesn't suck up power. It works in a mysterious nanotech way.

Here's how I imagine the antenna process goes:… Read more

Google has big plans for Googleplex.

The company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters will soon welcome a 120,000-square-foot "Google Experience Center" that will serve as a combination private museum and meeting area, according to a San Jose Mercury News report. The $120 million expansion will also reportedly house labs to test secret projects such as the company's "@home" project--rumored to be a home entertainment device.

The Google Experience Center would allow the Web giant "to share visionary ideas, and explore new ways of working" with up to 900 guests at a time, … Read more