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A newly developed self-assembling polymer film that bends and stretches when hit by light is pointing the way to a new family of functional materials. This flexing film is the first material to have been made by coaxing complex molecules to form large-scale, highly ordered 3D arrays...

Scientists at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) are working to bring three-dimensional video feeds into the operating room by leveraging the use of autostereoscopic displays. Their hope...

This week's question addresses a robot and one of America's most well-known game shows. A supercomputer named Watson, designed by IBM and consisting of 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers, is set to face two human contestants on the US quiz show Jeopardy this...

This week's question looks at an announcement from scientists operating NASA's Kepler satellite, who reported this week that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially three times the previously recorded number. Although no Earth-like planet has been...

A method has been developed for unambiguously measuring the exact magnetic field experienced by trapped mercury ions contained within an atomic clock intended for space applications. In general, atomic clocks are insensitive to external perturbations that would change...

The SpaceCube 2.0 is a compact, high-performance, low-power onboard processing system that takes advantage of cutting-edge hybrid (CPU/FPGA/DSP) processing elements. The SpaceCube 2.0 design concept includes two commercial Virtex-5 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) parts protected by...

This week's Question of the Week focuses on Web 2.0 interaction. A recent report from the University of Texas, Austin, says that networking sites like Facebook make users more sociable and "afford opportunities for new expressions of friendship, intimacy and community." A recent book by Sherry Turkle, "Alone...