As many as one third of the nearly 6,000 known amphibian species — frogs, toads, salamanders, even wormlike caecilians — are threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. And no one knows why
Sometimes the greenest technology improvement is going back to the old low-tech option. Amazon.com announced Monday it’s working with retailers to cut back on the packaging you’ll need to open to get to your goods. The Seattle-based company plans to start shipping items in plain brown cardboard boxes, instead of putting a pre-boxed or plastically sealed item inside another Amazon box. The cardboard box will have Amazon, and in some cases the retailer’s name, on the front
A tree fungus could provide green fuel that can be pumped directly into vehicle tanks, US scientists say. The organism, found in the Patagonian rainforest, naturally produces a mixture of chemicals that is remarkably similar to diesel
Last week, physicists announced that the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, has produced particles that they are unable to explain. Could it be a sign of new physics?
During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn’t believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page. It’s called a flux transfer event or ‘FTE’,
says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Centre. Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible
Internal bleeding can cause irreversible haemorrhagic shock within 30 seconds or progressive shock within eight hours, either way, it’s not good and the military wants a portable, noninvasive way to detect and stop it right on the battlefield. To that end, the Defence Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has contracted with Siemens Healthcare, the University of Washington’s Centre for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound and Texas A&M to develop something called the Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation cuff. The cuff is a semi-automated, ultrasound device designed to cut blood loss and shock resulting from combat limb injuries, one that can be operated by any GI with minimal training
An Australian and a Swedish researcher say they have proved honey bees are more intelligent than previously thought. Professor Mandyam Srinivasan from Queensland University and Dr Marie Dacke trained honey bees to count by placing food at different markers. Professor Srinivasan says he has also found bees can learn colours and smells and be trained to fly through complicated mazes
Research chemists at Johns Hopkins University have developed a water-soluble, organic, self-assembling electronic wire suitable for use inside the human body. Derived from carbon materials, the lightweight, flexible wires can power pacemakers, reconnect damaged nerve tissues, while also interacting with real electronic device that could augment or stimulate organic function. But do not worry, for this is only step one of the long process of turning us all into Borg-like drones
The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. They are looking for contractors to provide a Multi-Robot Pursuit System
that will let packs of robots search for and detect a non-cooperative human
McGill University researchers have discovered a new state of matter, a quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal, in a material very much like those used in the fabrication of modern transistors. This discovery could have momentous implications for the development of new electronic devices. Currently, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively crammed onto a single computer chip increases exponentially, doubling approximately every two years, a trend known as Moore’s Law. But there are limits, experts say. As chips get smaller and smaller, scientists expect that the bizarre laws and behaviours of quantum physics will take over, making ever-smaller chips impossible
UCLA physicists demonstrated that if you pull off a piece of Scotch tape inside a vacuum chamber, the tape releases enough X-rays to image bones through skin. Grad student Juan Escobar and his colleagues managed to make an X-ray of a thumb using the technique. Apparently, Russian scientists reported fifty years ago that the act of peeling sticking tape can emit X-rays, but the new research confirms the early results
The Bernard O’Brien Institute announced a significant advance in tissue engineering when it revealed how scientists had created living heart muscle cells from human fat
Flying in a plane made of a material called buckypaper may not seem too appealing at first, but this new type of carbon nanotube may be the future of lightweight, high strength composite. Discovered accidentally while trying to create the same conditions that exist in a star, buckypaper is far from reaching its potential, but what a potential it is
A pair of paralysed monkeys regained the ability to move their arms after researchers wired individual neurons to the monkeys’ arm muscles. A team of researchers at the University of Washington temporarily paralysed each monkey’s arm, then rerouted brain signals from a single neuron in the motor cortex around the blocked nerve pathway via a computer. When the neuron fired above a certain rate, the computer translated the signal into a jolt of electricity to the arm muscle, causing it to contract. The monkeys practiced moving their arms by playing a video game — via Slashdot
A project to develop small solar panels that can be woven into people’s clothing to generate electricity is among the research initiatives to have won funding from the federal government
It started with a Harvard physicist acting on a hunch. It ended up producing a new material, called black silicon, that could have a broad impact on technologies ranging from ultrasensitive sensors to photovoltaic cells. Black silicon was discovered because Dr Mazur started thinking outside the boundaries of the research he was doing in the late 1990s. His research group had been financed by the Army Research Organisation to explore catalytic reactions on metallic surfaces
Instant Access Networks (IAN) has developed a patent-pending shielding technology that encloses a room or similar structure and protects it from EMP events. IAN’s shielding, which includes electrically isolated layers of steel and aluminium, is up to 70 percent lighter than materials traditionally used by the military and other sources for EMP protection. This enables EMP-safe rooms to be portable. IAN’s shielded rooms can protect mission-critical fibre optic network nodes and data or communication centres. They can also house generators, which, when several are connected, create a micro power grid, or microgrid, that can provide power to a campus or entire communities
Scientists at the University of Dayton have created a peel-on, peel-off glue which mimics the wall-climbing abilities of Spiderman. The substance, based on the feet of the Gecko lizard, is three times stickier than existing adhesives. The material is so strong that a 4?4mm pad would be enough to hold a 1.5kg object such as a hardback book. However, it’s likely too expensive for consumer use: one British scientist calculates that a single Post-it note using the glue would cost around a thousand dollars
Solyndra has developed a novel type of solar panel that’s cheaper to install and produces more power than conventional panels. Unlike conventional solar panels, which are made of flat solar cells, the new panels comprise rows of cylindrical solar cells made of a thin film of semiconductor material. The material is made of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium. The new shape allows the system to absorb more light over the course of a day than conventional solar panels do, and therefore generate more power. What’s more, arrays of these tubes offer less wind resistance than conventional flat solar panels, which makes them easier and cheaper to mount on roofs
A computer is as good as a second pair of eyes for helping a radiologist spot breast cancer on a mammogram, one of the largest and most rigorous tests of computer-aided detection found. Like spell-checkers looking for mistakes, the computers flag suspicious areas on X-rays for a closer look by a radiologist. Mammograms are used to screen women for early signs of breast cancer but the tests aren’t perfect. In the US, the X-rays are read by a single radiologist and cancers are sometimes missed
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