universe

You and I are really, really small. And we're even smaller than we thought we were last month, at least when compared with the size of the largest known item in the universe.

Last week, a team of astronomers based in the U.K. discovered the largest object in all of our observable existence: a celestial structure made up of 73 quasars that is up to 4 billion light years long.

How big is that exactly? Well, it would take tens of thousands of our own Milky Ways -- the big, galactic one, not the one that comes in … Read more

Not many people in North Korea get to take a peek at the Internet, but visitor Eric Schmidt did.

Google's executive chairman is on a controversial four-day junket to North Korea at the invitation of former U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson, who has described the trip as a private, humanitarian undertaking that seeks in part to get access to a detained American citizen. The U.S State Department would have preferred that the group skip the visit, or at least not go so soon after the reclusive country's recent missile test.

Today the group from the U.S., … Read more

HBO has locked up the pay-TV rights for films from Universal Pictures, one of the top six Hollywood film studios, the company's said today.

HBO, owned by Time Warner, and Comcast-controlled Universal, said they extended their licensing agreement into the next decade. HBO will continue to own exclusive access to the movies during the pay-TV window -- the period that begins after movies are made available for sale on download and discs.

The deal limits Netflix's ability to land another big licensing agreement similar to the one it entered into with Disney late last year. A month ago, … Read more

What if everything around you had the potential to generate small amounts of energy?

We've seen flexible, even stick-on photovoltaic cells before, but these decal-style solars are compact and fun.

In a recent article in Scientific Reports, Stanford University mechanical engineering assistant professor Xiaolin Zheng and colleagues describe thin-film solar cells that can be peeled and stuck anywhere.

The researchers manufactured them on a reusable silicon and silicon dioxide wafer and then stuck them on paper, plastic, and window glass.

The original cell efficiency of 7.5 percent was maintained, and the manufacturing uses existing processes and materials. That … Read more

Here's a robotics challenge for you: create an advanced humanoid robot in only nine months.

That's what engineers at the University of Zurich's Artificial Intelligence Lab are trying to do with Roboy, a kid-style bot that's designed to help people in everyday environments.

Researchers around the world are trying to create useful humanoids. One interesting aspect of Roboy is its tendon-driven locomotion system.

Like Japan's Kenshiro humanoid, Roboy relies on artificial muscles to move; in the future, it will be covered with a soft skin. … Read more

Jan Scheuermann can't use her limbs to feed herself, but she's pretty good at grabbing a chocolate bar with her robot arm.

She's become the first to demonstrate that people with a long history of quadriplegia can successfully manipulate a mind-controlled robot arm with seven axes of movement. Earlier experiments had shown that robot arms work with brain implants.

Scheuerman was struck by spinocerebellar degeneration in 1996. A study on the brain-computer interface (BCI) linking Scheuermann to her prosthetic was published online in this month's issue of medical journal The Lancet.

Training on the BCI allowed her to move an arm and manipulate objects for the first time in nine years, surprising researchers.

It took her less than a year to be able to seize a chocolate bar with the arm, after which she declared, "One small nibble for a woman, one giant bite for BCI." Check it out in the video below. … Read more

Is a robot with muscles and bones any more freaky than one with servomotors?

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have been building a humanoid robot called Kenshiro that moves around with muscles that work with small pulleys.

Initially developed as a scrawny kid-bot in 2001, Kenshiro has been packing on muscle mass. With a total of 70 degrees of freedom, or axes of motion, it now has 160 muscles, with 22 in its neck, 12 in its shoulders, 76 in its abdomen, and 50 in its legs.

But it's still designed to mimic the body of a 12-year-old Japanese male, standing 5 feet and 2 inches and weighing 110 pounds. It also has a human-like ribcage, pelvis, and spine made of aluminum. … Read more

Let's say you just bought a 6-foot Christmas tree and want to decorate it just so. According to a quick treegonometric calculation, you should use approximately 30 feet of tinsel. (I got that number, incidentally, by multiplying pi by 13, dividing that number by 8, and then multiplying that figure by the tree's height in centimeters.)

Didn't study treegonometry in high school? That's because it just got invented by members of the University of Sheffield's SUMS math society. Two students at the U.K. school set out to calculate the amount of baubles, tinsel, and lights needed to give a tree just the right amount of decorative zing.

Their math might not add up to anything worthy of complex analysis, but it's a festive and amusing idea. "The formulas took us about two hours to complete," 20-year-old student Nicole Wrightham said in a release. "We hope the formulas will play a part in making Christmas that little bit easier for everyone." … Read more

Welcome to the library. Would you rather read the book "50 Shades of Grey" or the article "The production of fibers and films from solubilized hagfish slime thread proteins?" Good choice! Here's your hagfish reading.

For defensive purposes, hagfish produce a slime full of protein threads. Draw it out into a thread, and you have the potential for an incredibly strong fabric that isn't made from petroleum like popular existing synthetics. … Read more