Science

Milk gone sour? There's an app for that

We all know the feeling of opening up the fridge and grabbing the milk, only to discover that the white liquid has a horrible sour smell indicating it's gone bad. Wouldn't it be great to be alerted about that while at the office so you can stop at the store on the way home?

Now there's an app for that, along with what the developers of a new technology are calling the "milk jug of the future": the Milkmaid. … Read more

Science-y love blooms into 250-tulip proposal

John Gottula is a patient man. His proposal to girlfriend Kelly Voll took more than six months. No, this wasn't the slowest knee-lowering in history. It was a carefully hatched horticultural plot.

When it comes to geek love, we've come across proposals involving Super Mario, iPhone apps, "Back to the Future," and Twitter. Gottula, a graduate research assistant in plant pathology and plant-microbe biology at Cornell University, turned to his science background in horticulture for inspiration.

"I've heard of men proposing by hiring a pilot and popping the question with a banner. That's expensive; plus I don't have a flair for aeronautics," Gottula tells Crave. "Planting flowers to spell out a proposal seemed more like a horticultural way of doing it." … Read more

After 35 years, SETI celebrates its most-famous alien hunter

For anyone who's seen the film "Contact," the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a very noble cause. And over the last 35 years, Jill Tarter, who was the inspiration for Jodie Foster's character, has become known as the world's most famous alien hunter.

For years, Tarter has been the director of the Center for SETI Research, and in that position, she has worked harder than almost anyone on the planet to try to find new friends in the skies. So far, her work, and that of her many colleagues around the world, has been unrewarded. Yet, in spite of constant battles for funding and the skepticism of those who believe we're alone in the universe, Tarter has persevered, and SETI has continued. … Read more

Stein of Science: Liquid nitrogen-grade booze container

Meet Funranium Labs founder Phil Broughton.

He's a radiation safety specialist at the University of California at Berkeley. He was once a cryogenics technician for the Amundsen-Scott South Pole scientific research station. He's really into coffee and beer and finding the best way to deliver those products into his system, and he has boldly offered himself up as a guinea pig for science by personally testing and developing products for discerning geek customers.

Let's start with the Stein of Science. Each stein is crafted from a bench top liquid nitrogen dewar flask. That means it will keep your beer frosty cold for quite a long time. That also means it's not cheap. A 655-milliliter Stein of Science costs $230. Your fellow lab rats will be insanely jealous when you show up to the next party with one of these bad boys.… Read more

For Silicon Valley VC, a Leap from great advice to big rewards

SAN FRANCISCO--Sitting in the windowless basement level of a nondescript building in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, Andy Miller is doing one of his most essential -- and rewarding -- jobs: helping smart and talented, but young and inexperienced, entrepreneurs navigate the crucial steps needed to move their new company forward. After all, great technology can only get you so far. It takes great business strategy and decisions to build a truly successful company.

Miller, a general partner at Highland Capital Partners who once reported directly to Steve Jobs as Apple's vice president of mobile advertising, is seated … Read more

Leap Motion: 3D hands-free motion control, unbound

Hands-free motion control, a technology pioneered by Nintendo's Wii and later improved upon by Microsoft's Kinect, just took a very big leap forward. Industries from gaming to surgery to architecture, engineering, and design may never be the same.

With the unveiling today of its Leap 3D motion control system, a San Francisco startup called Leap Motion has, well, leapfrogged the state of the art in this young field, giving users the ability to control what's on their computers with hundredth of a millimeter accuracy and introducing touch-free gestures like pinch-to-zoom.

Leap, which comprises both a small USB … Read more

Researchers build robot bird that can land on your hand

With all the James Bond theme song-playing and tower-building quadrocopters these days, it's a little hard to get excited about new personal-size automated aerial projects. But how can you not get worked up by a bird robot that can cross a room and land gracefully on someone's hand?

Aerospace engineering researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have "duplicated the control functions that allow birds to successfully perform a soft landing--in this case, perching on a human hand."

The above video's a bit scientific for the average layman (read: me) but suffice it to say, the researchers -- Soon Jo Chung, Aditya Paranjape, and Joseph Kim -- have created a micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) that can fly nimbly across a room and then pull up at just the right moment for a soft landing at a specific place, or on someone's hand. … Read more

Humans and their brains: A complicated history

Woody Allen famously said, "My brain. It's my second favorite organ."

Even if the brain falls below second on your own favorite-organ hierarchy (personally, I really like my spleen), it's hard not to be struck by its mystery and complexity.

An exhibit running at the Wellcome Collection in London through June 17, "Brains: The mind as matter," takes a unique approach to the subject.

Rather than focusing on the hard science of neurons, lobes, and dura, the exhibit explores how humans have related to the brain over time -- how it's been studied … Read more

Pixel art as 'resolutionary' as iPad -- in own, low-def way

The latest iPad and its "resolutionary" display have made ever-smaller pixels all the rage, but here's a sculpture that boldly and beautifully goes in the opposite direction.

"Patterned by Nature" (see video below) is made up of 3,600 tiles of LCD glass -- each roughly the size of a laptop screen -- and is 90 feet long and 10 feet wide. The giant sculpture hangs in the several-story atrium of the just-opened Nature Research Center in North Carolina, a new wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Each LCD can display various levels of blue-gray transparency, from clear all the way to opaque. And the matrix as a whole is used as a giant screen of sorts to show 20 different animations of different natural phenomena -- a flock of geese swooping through the atrium, say, or the pattern of rain splashing into a pond.… Read more