Ronald Mallett, a physics professor at the University of Connecticut, says he is building a time machine that will transport things to the future or the past. He says his machine could transport anything from an atom to a person
A needle which mimics the mosquito’s unique stinger
, making injections painless, has been developed by Seiji Aoyagi at Kansai University in Osaka and his colleagues, a team of Japanese microengineers
Bioengineer Morris Benjaminson is figuring out how to create fish on demand, to develop a device that would grow fresh flesh aboard a space ship to feed astronauts. One day, this hyper-bioengineered food could even reach your dinner table
Custom-tailored molecules and spray-on plastic could someday create the next generation of solar cells — more flexible, more efficient and much less expensive than existing sources of solar power. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created a partly organic, partly inorganic solar cell that spits out a tiny bit of electricity but has the potential to be made far more powerful — via Slashdot
It may look like an overgrown ornamental bamboo, but elephant grass is seen by Britain’s government and agricultural bodies as a key to helping embattled farmers and generating green power
In any rogues’ gallery of astronomical evildoers, black holes would have to be the number 1 nightmare. But are the nightmares real? A few doubters are beginning to emerge. If they’re right, then black holes may be just the latest grand illusion of cosmology
Laws are made to be broken. Or so the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seems to think. After an almost two-year wait, the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, is poised to take delivery of a machine that proponents hope will counteract the laws of gravity
A recent study suggests that the domestication of dogs mutually led to profound changes in the biological and behavioural evolution of both species
Use of hand-held technologies, such as mobile phones, GameBoys and computers, has caused a physical mutation in the under-25s, according to new research. The study, carried out in nine cities around the world, shows that the thumbs of the younger generation have overtaken their fingers as the hand’s most muscled and dexterous digit
A single glass of wine will impair your driving more than smoking a joint. And under certain test conditions, the complex way alcohol and cannabis combine to affect driving behaviour suggests that someone who has taken both may drive less recklessly than a person who is simply drunk
Scientists warn the melting Arctic ice cap could lead to polar bears becoming extinct. Studies show the decline in the thickness and extent of the ice cap is causing hundreds of bears to die each year. Many of the estimated 25,000 bears spend long periods trapped on land rather than ice, where they find it hard to feed
An American scientist says he can improve people’s sight by stitching artificial muscle to the eyeball and squeezing it. The smart eye band could be turned on when needed by a switch hidden on a tiny power source behind the ear. It works as a cinema screen would if it was moved back and forth until the projector image came into focus
Science minister Peter McGauran — another of Howard’s morons-in-residence — dismissed a plea by scientists that Australia spend money searching for potentially threatening asteroids that could only be spotted from the Southern Hemisphere, calling it a fruitless, unnecessary, self-indulgent exercise
Our solar system may have had a fifth terrestrial planet, one that was swallowed up by the Sun. But before it was destroyed, the now missing-in-action world made a mess of things
According to a BBC report, it is possible that a secret CIA project to investigate methods of sending anthrax through the mail might have been responsible for the anthrax attacks in the United States last year
It’s the stuff of science fantasy, but Dr Joe Rosen, from the acclaimed Dartmouth Medical Centre, says that, within five years, he will be able to graft wings and tails on to human beings
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to create anime-based military uniforms that can block out biological weapons and even heal their wearers as part of a five-year contract to develop nanotechnology applications for soldiers
Speed kills. But it is not only the speed at which people drive that is the problem: the speed of the music they are listening to also has a hand in their fate. An Israeli researcher says drivers who listen to fast music in their cars may have more than twice as many accidents as those listening to slower tracks
Former NASA engineer Homer Hickam — one of the legendary Rocket Boys — advocates that the US revive its nuclear rocket program of the 50s and 60s, arguing that nuclear-powered rockets are the only realistic way of opening up the rest of the solar system — particularly Mars — to human exploration
A new tabletop device said to generate a long-sought laboratory version of nuclear fusion has been called into question even before it was formally announced
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