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We Can Rebuild You: 8 Ways Science Can Fix Your (or Your Cat’s) Broken Body | Science Not Fiction
01 08 2010 Star Wars, A.I., The Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek and a host of other science-fiction films all share a particular futurist’s dream: a broken body is repaired with an artificial replacements. Reality is finally catching up with our imaginations. Stem cells, mind-controlled arms, osso-integrated prostheses, exoskeletons, and xenotransplants are here. It’s important to [...]
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Today’s Demonstration: How to Hack an ATM—With Video! | Discoblog
01 08 2010 Although money may not grow on trees, it can spew from an ATM–at least if you’re computer security expert Barnaby Jack. He demonstrated recently at a security conference in Las Vegas how to get an ATM to spit money for minutes on end. Jack purchased the ATMs online, and says the tools required to hack [...]
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Are Eyes From Flies the Future of Solar Technology? | Discoblog
30 07 2010 Scientists are eyeing the future of solar technology–specifically, fly eyes. Turns out those bubbly-looking spectators might be just the ticket to more-efficient solar cells, researchers from Penn State University say.Blowflies have peepers that would help solar panels collect light more efficiently, and creating these fly-eye molds was a feat in itself, according to Discovery News. [...]
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Toshiba’s Ultra-Long-Lasting Battery May Be in Cars as Early as Next Year | 80beats
29 07 2010 Is this battery the one? Toshiba’s Super-Charge Ion Batteries, which reportedly lose hardly any capacity after thousands of charges, could be coming to cars next year.As Slashdot noted today, this battery technology has been a long time coming. In 2007 Toshiba announced the creation of the SCiB, and unveiled the prototype the next year. It [...]
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Video: San Francisco’s Buses as the Pulse of the City | Discoblog
29 07 2010 Sure, public transportation is cheaper, better for the environment, and conducive to livable cities. But today we’ll celebrate another of its fabulous features: It can be visually awesome. Case in point: A visualization of the movement of the San Francisco Municipal Railway, also known as Muni. The video is based on June 2010 data harvested [...]
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New Glucose Monitor Keeps Tabs on Diabetics From Inside | 80beats
29 07 2010 A new device may one day save those with diabetes from the frequent finger-pricking and cumbersome external monitors required to check glucose levels–by instead keeping tabs from inside their torsos. In a study published online today in Science Translational Medicine, researchers report that an implantable glucose sensor has worked in pigs. Ultimately, clinical trials and [...]
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Sniff-detector allows paralysed people to write messages, surf the net and drive a wheelchair | Not Exactly Rocket Science
28 07 2010 In Israel’s Loewenstein Rehabilitation Hospital, the patient known as LI1 is a prisoner of her own body. She is a 51-year-old woman who was paralysed by a stroke several months ago. Suffering from “locked-in syndrome”, she is completely aware but unable to move or speak. She cannot even control the blinks of her eyes. And [...]
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Couple Charged With Stealing General Motor’s Hybrid Secrets | 80beats
28 07 2010 A lucrative new car market, a former General Motors employee, and a dumpster with shredded documents. According to a federal court indictment (pdf) released on Thursday, these may be a recipe for hybrid car espionage. A former GM employee and her husband–Shanshan Du and Yu Qin–stand accused of shuttling secrets out of the American automobile [...]
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Why Keep Your Body? Help Yourself to Big Muscles, Cyborg Limbs, and a Big Booty | Science Not Fiction
28 07 2010 Colonel Quaritch and his exoskeleton from AvatarScience fiction is sometimes a playground to explore what it would be like to have a different body. Most recently, in Avatar and Iron Man 2 we saw people joined to exoskeletons, which are being developed in real life for the military and for rehabilitation. The biomechanics of these [...]
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Gvmt Makes It Legal to JailBreak iPhones, Takes Other Steps to Limit Copyrights | 80beats
28 07 2010 Every three years the Librarian of Congress reviews the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and James H. Billington’s review just expanded digital freedom with this year’s ruling of new exemptions to the copyright law.Jailbreak that iPhoneFirst and foremost, Billington ruled that it’s not against the law to jailbreak a phone (the practice of working around [...]
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Boat Made of Recycled Plastic Bottles Completes Its 9,000-Mile Voyage | 80beats
26 07 2010 After floating on plastic for more than 9,000 miles, the crew of the Plastiki arrived in Sydney, Australia today, more than four months after the ship set sail from San Francisco.The boat of 12,500 bottles was the brainchild of David de Rothschild, who sought a way to bring more of the world’s attention to the [...]
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Comic-Con: Iron Man and the Scientists Who Love Him (His Movie, Anyway) | Science Not Fiction
24 07 2010 Sure scientists enjoy the first Iron Man movie. They’re human beings after all, and that was a pretty decent movie. But I would never have expected scientists to love it for…well, for its approach to science.At the NewSpace panel I attended yesterday, Mark Street, from XCOR, said he and a group of colleagues went to [...]
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World’s Coolest Repairman: The Guy Who Services Antarctica’s ATMs | Discoblog
22 07 2010 Researchers at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station may face annual average temperatures of minus .4 degrees Fahrenheit and drifting snow of depths around five feet–but at least they have easy access to cash. Since around 1998, Antarctica has had an operating ATM.The blog NeedCoffeeDotCom interviewed a Wells Fargo representative about the challenges of keeping an Antarctic ATM [...]
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Experimental Glider Flies Like a Plane, Lands Like a Bird | 80beats
22 07 2010 Though the wing-flapping contraptions of early human flight haven’t quite caught on, researchers think birds may still have something to teach us about navigating the air: how to land. MIT researchers have made a system that can bring a modified glider to an elegant bird-like stop, causing it to set down on its tail. Russ Tedrake [...]
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Another Thing BP Can’t Do Right: Photoshop | Discoblog
22 07 2010 Notice anything weird in this picture from a BP website of Gulf relief photos? We’ll give you a hint: Look at the the upper left. That’s right; there’s a control tower in the window of a flying helicopter. As directed by the blog Gizmodo, take a closer look at the high-res version. A screen on [...]
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Online Shoppers Can Play Dress-Up With a Robotic Torso | Discoblog
22 07 2010 Add one more job to the list–along with vacuuming floors and assisting in surgeries, now robots can try on clothes for you. The company Fits.me is developing a robotic torso for online shoppers that can morph to match shoppers’ body dimensions, creating virtual fitting rooms on clothing websites. Men can try a demo version of the [...]
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Hope for the Needle-Phobic: A Painless Vaccine “Patch” | 80beats
22 07 2010 Replacing a traditional needle with a fingernail-sized patch may one day make some immunizations painless and possibly more effective. A study published in Nature earlier this week shows that a patch–a square of “microneedles” that are too short to register a typical shot’s sting and that dissolve in the skin–effectively immunized mice against a strain [...]
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Heart Device Keeps Dick Cheney Alive, but Takes Away His Pulse | 80beats
22 07 2010 Dick Cheney may not have a pulse, but part of his ticker is spinning at 9,000 RPM.The former Vice President provided an instant laugh line for comedians this week when it was revealed that during his latest heart surgery, doctors installed a new implant called left ventricular assist device, or LVAD.The pump runs something like [...]
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Video: Navy’s New Laser Weapon Shoots Down Drones | 80beats
22 07 2010 Unmanned aerial vehicles beware: We’ve got laser weapons.This week defense contractor Raytheon debuted video of a test conducted with the U.S. Navy in California this May, in which the company’s laser weapon shot down four UAVs. The shaky black-and-white footage shows lasers locked on an aircraft until it loses control and plunges into the sea.The [...]
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1 Week and Counting: Zephyr’s Record-Breaking, Solar-Powered Flight | 80beats
22 07 2010 Earlier this month, we described the successful flight of Solar Impulse, a manned solar plane that flew for over 26 hours before a safe landing in Switzerland. Now comes news of another feat of solar-powered derring-do. Currently circling above Arizona, a British-built unmanned solar plane dubbed the Zephyr has now flown for a record-breaking seven [...]
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Steve Jobs: There’s No iPhone “Antenna-Gate,” But Here’s a Free Case | 80beats
22 07 2010 Earlier today on Apple’s Cupertino campus, Steve Jobs held a press conference regarding the iPhone 4 reception saga, which he said is not “antenna-gate.” The overall gist: Jobs says the iPhone 4’s reception isn’t perfect, but not any worse than other phone’s, and Apple will give out a free “bumper” case to iPhone 4 phone buyers.The cases are meant to reduce the [...]
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How to Speak a Language That Your Robot Will Understand | Discoblog
19 07 2010 Biwu English kokafo wapisi? That’s “Will English kick the bucket?” in a new language called ROILA (Robot Interaction Language). Perhaps it’s an apt question of my mother tongue. Under development by a group of researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, ROILA is a language made specifically for human-robot communication.The language hopes to [...]
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BP’s Cap Has Stopped the Oil Leak—for Now | 80beats
19 07 2010 Do you hear that? That’s the sound of oil not gushing uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s leak, for the first time in nearly three months. BP is still running tests on the new cap the company installed this week, but at least for now there’s some for slight optimism.The flow stopped yesterday [...]
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Mona Lisa and Mayan Blue: Art History via X-Rays | Discoblog
16 07 2010 Researchers have decided to get personal with Mona Lisa–by irradiating her face. In a study recently published in Angewandte Chemie, researchers trucked around the Louvre to look at nine faces painted by Leonardo Da Vinci with a portable X-ray machine.Their particular technique, as reported by the BBC, is called X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and is a [...]
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Report: Many of Toyota’s Acceleration Problems Due to Driver Error | 80beats
16 07 2010 The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s full report on Toyotas and their “sudden unintended acceleration” problem has yet to see the light of day, but the first wave of information from it suggests that driver error—not some mysterious mechanical problem in the electronic throttle control—could be to blame in many, if not most, of the [...]
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