Editor Uno

This past winter, the warm waters of El Niño hit the coral reefs in the Maldives hard. But assessing their destruction is tough when the primary tool for sizing up corals is a measuring tape wielded by a scuba-diving scientist. “It's crazy how behind the times we are,” says Sly Lee, a former biological science technician for the US National Park Service and founder of the Hydrous, a science communication non-profit. “We can decode coral genomes, but we can't accurately track how fast the corals…

Tests could lead to design changes, better fuel efficiency

A technology called active flow control, being tested on the ecoDemonstrator 757 aircraft (shown here), could lead to a smaller vertical tail. The white attachments on the tail are cones with a tassel-like extension, which let researchers see how smooth the flow of air is around the tail.

An airplane’s tail is unmistakable: elegant, large and often hulking. But what if reducing its size could lead to more efficient air travel?

A series…

Angetreten als deutsches Regierungsflugzeug hat ein ganz besonderer Airbus A310 jetzt Hamburg in völlig neuer Rolle verlassen. Die Lufthansa Technik AG übergab an Novespace nach umfangreichen Modifikationen das neue Zero-G Flugzeug des französischen Unternehmens.

Mit der Kennung F-WNOV wird die ehemalige 10+21 "Konrad Adenauer" ganz im Sinne der deutsch-französischen Freundschaft künftig als Parabelflugzeug im Dienst von Weltraumforschung und Technologie stehen.

Allein 1.300 Teilmodifikationen…

You expect a certain sort of magic from a car like Toyota's Mirai, the world's first mass-market, hydrogen-powered all-electric named after the Japanese word for "future." It maxes out at 300 miles, refuels in five minutes and spits out zero emissions except for water, all for tens of thousands of dollars less than Tesla's electric Model S.

But behind the wheel of the four-door Mirai, which California drivers can buy in October for around $50,000, what you get is something much more, well, bo…

Vastly more Americans will be exposed to dangerous heat waves in future decades because of a combination of rising temperatures and rapid population growth in the South and West, scientists warned in a study published Monday.

Cracks show in the dry bed of the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertin. Calif.

The risk of exposure to extreme heat could be as much as six times higher for the average U.S. citizens by the year 2070, compared with levels experienced in the last century, researchers at the…

Dr Daniel Chew and his team at GSK are developing bioelectronics devices that could change the way we treat asthma and diabetes forever

Bioelectronic man: the team are working on devices to target specific circuits within the nervous system

If Dr Daniel Chew’s work goes to plan, diabetics and sufferers from a host of other diseases may one day no longer need to inject themselves or take pills. He’s working to develop a tiny implant that could read and alter electrical signals that pass along n…

Medicine has never been more exciting and dramatic, with doctors and scientists on the brink of a new dawn in which the genetic secrets of life and death will be revealed

Genetic revolution: as scientists continue to fix genetic faults by altering DNA, they will face questions about whether it is ethical to tinker with human life

Few professions give graduates the chance to change the world for so many in such a fundamental way. And crucially, Britain is leading the field in science and medi…

Zucker und Hefe: Die Zutaten könnten bald reichen, um Schmerzmittel wie Morphium günstig herzustellen. Für Pharmafirmen wäre es ein Durchbruch - die Technik könnte aber auch missbraucht werden.

Morphium-Hefe im Labor: Gentechnisch veränderte Zellen (r.) stellen Vorstufen des Betäubungsmittels her

Wenn nichts mehr geht, helfen oft nur noch starke Betäubungsmittel. Das Opiat Morphium etwa kann die Schmerzen todkranker Menschen lindern. Doch es gibt eine Kehrseite, den illegalen Drogenkonsum: Etw…

Wer feine Speisen zubereiten will, ohne sich einen Tennisarm zu rühren, kann auch den Rührroboter Stirio beschäftigen.

Ob Milchreis, Vanillecreme oder ein Risotto – so manches Rezept erfordert vom Koch kleine Rührorgien. Warum nicht diese stumpfsinnige Arbeit automatisieren?

Der iPhone-Konzern versucht, was anderen nicht gelungen ist: Die breite Etablierung eines mobilen Zahlungssystems.

Seit Apple Pay am 20. Oktober in den USA gestartet ist, können iPhone-Besitzer ihr Sandwich bei Subway oder das Suppenhuhn bei Whole Foods Market ganz einfach bezahlen: Sie müssen ihr Handy nur an ein sogenanntes Drahtlos-Lesegerät halten und ihren Daumen auf den Home-Button des iPhones legen. Ein NFC-Chip im Handy überträgt die Bezahlinfos verschlüsselt. NFC steht für die Funktech…

Engineers in Sweden have developed a virtual sphere interface they believe is the key to popularising touchfree computing.

Örs-Barna Blénessy and Holger Andersson met at Lund University, where the idea for the sphere first came to fruition. The pair had been looking at popular culture depictions of our touchfree future, where sweeping gestures and complex instructions need to be learned in order to operate computing systems. It looked, to them, like a lot of needless hardwork and awkward gestic…

Google Glass has been on the market for a while now, but it has yet to sway consumers en masse. Out to challenge it, Sony is developing a device you can attach to any piece of eyewear.

Sony's "Single-Lens Display Module" shares many of Google Glass' features. The detachable module comes equipped with a high-resolution colour OLED microdisplay, a micro-optical unit that brings out the display's image quality, as well as a processor similar to those found in smartphones.

The novelty is that you…

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: Salomé Galjaard of engineering firm Arup says 3D-printed building components will result in more efficient and diverse architectural forms

Salome Galjaard, senior designer at Arup. Copyright: Dezeen

The use of metal 3D-printed structural components will "have a big impact on the visual appearance of the world we live in," Galjaard says in the movie, which was filmed in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2014.

3D-printed node for a tensegrity structure

The use …

 Scientists are starting to open their DNA databases online, creating a network that could pave the way for gene analysis at a new scale.

WHY IT MATTERS: To understand human genes, researchers will need data on millions of people.

A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet. The researchers hope their work could be as important to medical science as…

Die VR-Brille Oculus Rift soll das Trainingsprogramm von Runtastic in eine einladende Szenerie einbetten. Die Ausbildung in einer virtuellen Umgebung könnte somit ein Stück näher rücken.

Virtual Reality soll nicht nur den Aspekt der Unterhaltung bereichern, sondern auch im Fitnessbereich neue Möglichkeiten eröffnen. Davon gehen zumindest die Macher der Fitness-Tracking-App Runtastic aus. In einer Machbarkeitsstudie hat sich der Hersteller aus Österreich mit der VR-Brille Oculus Rift beschäft…

Wissenschaftler am Internationalen Institut für Nanotechnologie der Northwestern University wollen mittels sogenannter Nanoflares im Blutkreislauf befindliches Tumorgewebe ausfindig machen, berichtet Technology Review in seiner Online-Ausgabe.

Mit Hilfe von Nanopartikeln lassen sich Krebszellen aus dem Blut holen. Das haben US-Forscher an Proben gezeigt.

Die kleinen Partikel setzen sich an einzelne Krebszellen und beginnen dann zu fluoreszieren – feines Tumorgewebe lässt sich mit Hilfe eines…

Severe droughts are forcing researchers to rethink how technology can increase the supply of fresh water.

Even in drought-stricken California, San Diego stands out. It gets less rain than parched Los Angeles or Fresno. The region has less groundwater than many other parts of the state. And more than 80 percent of water for homes and businesses is imported from sources that are increasingly stressed.

The Colorado River is so overtaxed that it rarely reaches the sea; water originating in the S…

University of Pittsburgh, Posted by Anita Srikameswaran-Pittsburgh on December 12, 2014

To treat a potentially blinding scar on the cornea, it might be possible to grow stem cells from a tiny biopsy of the patient’s undamaged eye and then place them on the injury site.

"Using the patient's own cells from the uninjured eye for this process could let us bypass rejection concerns," says Sayan Basu. "That could be very helpful, particularly in places that don't have corneal tissue banks for trans…

Rice University, Posted by Jade Boyd-Rice on December 12, 2014

Scientists have assembled the first high-resolution, 3D maps of entire folded genomes and found a structural basis for gene regulation—a kind of “genomic origami” that allows the same genome to produce different types of cells

"Our maps of looping have revealed thousands of hidden switches that scientists didn't know about before. In the case of genes that can cause cancer or other diseases, knowing where these switches are is vit…

In ländlichen Regionen der USA gibt es der Legende nach eine unter nächtlich-übermütigen und nicht an Tierschutz interessierten Jugendlichen verbreitete Freizeitbeschäftigung, die cow tipping genannt wird. Es geht dabei darum, ein auf der Weide stehendes Rind zu mehreren so zu schubsen, dass es auf die Seite fällt.

Warten, aufpassen, im Dunkeln herumstehen: Der Job von Wachpersonal ist oft langweilig. Ein US-Unternehmen hat für solche Zwecke Roboter entwickelt. Das wäre billiger - aber funktion…