Biomedical engineers are unveiling a new type of fabric that, much like human skin, can turn excess sweat into droplets that simply fall away on their own accord.

"We intentionally did not use any fancy microfabrication techniques so it is compatible with the textile manufacturing process and very easy to scale up," said Siyuan Xing in a school news release. Xing is the lead biomedical engineering student on the project at the University of California, Davis.

An article in the journal Lab on a Chip describes the fabric's microfluidic platform. Multiple woven threads suck droplets of water … Read more

Windows users, rejoice! Leap Motion is coming to a PC near you, and for the first time, you can see what it will be like.

Today, Leap Motion released a video showing what its 3D gesture-control system will be like on a Windows computer. That's important, given that it has struck partnerships with Asus and Hewlett-Packard.

With Leap and Windows, the company said in a blog post, "You'll be able to browse the Web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can … Read more

After researching a device that draws energy from knee movement, some mechanical engineering students at Rice University decided to see if they could get the same result from another, less intrusive wearable item: a shoe.

With help from the Movement Analysis Laboratory at Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston, the resulting PediPower shoes harness energy from the force of the heel hitting the ground. The prototype -- while admittedly big, unattractive, and impractical to wear 100 percent of the time (think sleeping, showering, etc.) -- demonstrates that the simple act of walking may one day power a wide range of … Read more

It's a good thing you weren't standing on the moon's Mare Imbrium crater on March 17. You might have been ground into space dust. A meteoroid "the size of a small boulder" crashed into the lunar surface and exploded with a flash so bright, it was visible to the naked eye from Earth.

NASA has been keeping an eye on the moon for eight years, looking for explosions caused by meteoroids. The space agency has seen hundreds of detectable impacts, but none quite so spectacular as this one. "For about one second, the impact site was glowing like a fourth magnitude star," NASA says.… Read more

NASA announced this week that a key piece of gear on its Kepler space telescope has run into trouble. And though the space agency hasn't given up on a jump-start, the mission may well be at risk.

It's already gone well beyond its planned duration, however, and presented us with many fascinating discoveries.

In this gallery, we take a look back at that mission -- at Kepler's intriguing quest to find Earth-like, life-friendly planets among the Milky Way's many stars.

It has long been understand that right-handed people -- who make up about 90 percent of the population -- have left-hemisphere dominant brains, and left-handed people the reverse. But the division of labor isn't actually that simple. For some 95 percent of righties, the left hemisphere almost exclusively handles language and the right emotion and image processing, while for lefties, only 20 percent experience such strict division.

Now there may be a new way, apart from handedness, to determine one's cerebral dominance: the cell phone.

In a new study out of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, published in JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, … Read more

The technology world was buzzing with news this week. From Google's annual I/O conference to some very tiny robotics, these are the images from the week's tech stories that stood out.

Google CEO Larry Page took the stage at Google I/O this week. He held a Q&A session at the end of the keynote presentation, during which he reinforced the idea of a technology-driven utopia and criticized anything that stood in the way of Google's vision.

Bugs, of the real and robotic kind, also saw a lot of attention. Researchers at Harvard conducted … Read more

Meron Gribetz and Ben Sand just rolled into Silicon Valley from New York, landing at Paul Graham's Y Combinator startup incubator with some angel money in their pockets and the bold conviction that they can deliver the next major technology transformation.

Their startup, Meta, is developing wearable computing eyewear, but unlike Google Glass enters 3D space and uses your hands to interact with the virtual world. The Meta system includes stereoscopic 3D glasses, supplied by Epson, and a 3D camera to track hand movements, similar to the portrayals of gestural control in movies like "Minority Report" and &… Read more

NASA's plan to go poking around on an asteroid, with the ultimate goal of snagging one of the space rocks and towing it closer to Earth, is moving forward, and a specific asteroid has been chosen to visit and sample in the next few years.

NASA has announced that the Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (Osiris-Rex) passed a key confirmation review Wednesday, approving the spacecraft to move into development phase. Translation: we're building a new spaceship, y'all!… Read more