Topic

Researchers have made T-rays into a much stronger directional beam than was previously thought possible — and have done so at room-temperature conditions. This is a breakthrough that should allow future T-ray systems to be smaller, more portable, easier to operate, and much cheaper than...

Senate and House leaders announced last week that they are postponing work on two controversial anti-piracy bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the (PIPA) Protect IP Act, in the wake of large online protests that spurred some...

The process of monitoring blood glucose levels through finger pricking is an inconvenience at best for the estimated 26 million diabetics in the U.S. It's no mystery why researchers have continued to set their sights on developing more convenient and less invasive methods of monitoring glucose...

MIT researchers have found a way to increase the speed of one of the most important algorithms in the information sciences: the Fourier Transform. It’s a method for representing an irregular signal as a combination of pure frequencies. It’s universal in signal processing, but it can also be used to compress...

Scientists at the University of Greenwich (UK) have released the next generation of buildingEXODUS evacuation and crowd simulation software, already one of the world’s leading design tools for simulating evacuations of people from buildings in both normal and emergency...

No matter how high the energy, electrons won't break apart. But that doesn't mean they are indestructible. Using several massive supercomputers, a team of physicists has split a simulated electron perfectly in half. In the simulations, physicists from Duke University, the University of Zurich, and the...

Today, nearly 80% of all combat injuries to U.S. service personnel are the result of explosive weapon blasts (such as those created by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs), and one-quarter of those injuries involve head trauma. In particular, IED exposure has led to a large increase in...

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have developed a new laboratory test that can rapidly identify the bacterium responsible for staph infections. This new test takes advantage of unique isotopic labeling...

Scientists from IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) have built the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit. It uses twelve atoms per bit, the basic unit of information, and squeezes a byte (8 bit) into as few as 96 atoms.For the first time, the...

Physi­cists at the Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM) have managed to detect sound waves at minuscule length scales. Their nanoear is a single gold nanoparticle that is kept in a state of levitation by a laser beam. Upon weak acoustic excitation the particle oscillates parallel to the direction of sound...

From delivering care to the developing world, to remote echocardiography, to hearing assessment, telemedicine has opened doors to new and potentially improved forms of diagnosis and treatment. Dermatology is one area in particular that stands to benefit greatly from this technology.

MIT engineers have developed a nanoscale biological coating that can halt bleeding nearly instantaneously, an advance that could dramatically improve survival rates for soldiers injured in battle. The researchers, led by Paula Hammond and funded by MIT’s Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies and a...

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are exploring ways to design batteries that heal themselves when damaged.The idea is to station tiny microspheres, each smaller than a single red blood...

Despite uncertainty, automakers are still making a big push for electric vehicles in 2012. Ford, for example, will have five such cars by the end the year, including the 2013 Ford Fusion hybrid and 2013 Ford Fusion Energi plug-in electric, which were both shown at last...