Editor Uno

In Schweden steuern Lotsen kleinere Flughäfen künftig fern. Virtuelle Realität macht es möglich.

Örnsköldsvik, von Schweden einfach nur "Ö-vik" genannt, liegt ziemlich weitab vom Schuss. Doch gerade deshalb soll der kleine Flughafen an der nordschwedischen Ostseeküste mit der IATA-Kennung "OER" zum ersten ferngesteuerten Flughafen der Welt werden.

South Korean and U.S. researchers have developed a stretchable material that senses touch, pressure, and moisture, and could be used to give artificial limbs feeling.

Some high-tech prosthetic limbs can be controlled by their owners, using nerves, muscles, or even the brain. However, there’s no way for the wearer to tell if an object is scalding hot, or about to slip out of the appendage’s grasp.

This electronics-laden glove is made up of layers of materials with stretchable gold and silicon s…

A microfluidic cell copies some basic functions of life.

WHY IT MATTERS

The combination of semiconductors and synthetic biology could lead to artificial cells.

A simple artificial cell has circular chambers etched into silicon. These contain DNA, and are connected by microfluidic channels to a bath of cellular enzymes. In a step toward sophisticated artificial cells, scientists have engineered a silicon chip that can produce proteins from DNA, the most basic function of life.

The system, thou…

The first commercial power plant to use carbon capture and sequestration shows the potential of a crucial technology.

Boundary dam, a power plant in Estevan, Saskatchewan, is the first commercial coal-fired plant to capture carbon dioxide from its emissions, compress the gas, and bury it underground. The plant demonstrates that so-called carbon capture and storage (CCS) can work at a large scale—a crucial achievement given that CCS could play a significant role worldwide in reducing the greenho…

The design studio Nervous System has created a novel process that allows a 3-D printed dress to move and sway like real fabric. The bespoke software behind it, called Kinematics, combines origami techniques with novel approaches to 3-D printing, pushing the technology's limits.

Instead of pinning fabric to a dress form, a Kinematics garment starts as a 3-D model in a CAD program. Kinematics breaks the model down into tessellated, triangular segments of varying sizes. Designers can control the s…

Austria-based Livin Studio has created a process to cultivate edible fungi that digests plastic as it grows.

The aim of Livin Studio's project is to use commonly uneaten parts of fungi to break down plastic while simultaneously producing a novelty food product.

University of Rochester

Posted by Monique Patenaude-U. Rochester on December 11, 2014

Scientists used a new imaging technique to learn how the human brain heals itself in just a few weeks after a tumor was removed. People with pituitary tumors suffer vision loss as the tumor grows. When the tumor is removed, they sometimes regain vision. The images showed the integrity of myelin in the optic nerves can predict vision recovery.

This image shows a large pituitary tumor (in red) that compressed …

Die US-Raumfahrtbehörde erforscht nicht nur das Universum, sondern arbeitet auch intensiv an der Entwicklung der zivilen Luftfahrt – sie soll sicherer, schneller und effizienter werden. Hier siehst du die neusten und coolsten Konzepte der Nasa.

1. Zusammen mit dem US-Rüstungshersteller Lockheed Martin arbeitet die Nasa an einem Hyperschall-Passagierflugzeug,...

2. ...dessen Lautstärke so stark gedämpft werden soll, dass auch Flugreisen über Land möglich werden. Die Concorde durfte aufgrund…

At MAKR SHAKR we are on a mission: Building accessible and user friendly robotic experiences to empower individual and social creativity.

Launched in 2014, the Makr Shakr Company aims to empower people with new robotic interactions, especially in the food and beverage sector. The company is dedicated to three core values: creativity, simplicity, enjoyment. The Makr Shakr bar system was designed by award-winning practice

Carlo Ratti Associati, combining future robotics with Italian design root…

Less than a year after commencing technology development of a new airborne jamming system for the U.S. Navy, Raytheon RTN +0.4% has proven the potential of its design in flights above California’s Mojave Desert. In a series of October flights at the Navy’s China Lake test range, the jammer performed flawlessly against threats mimicking the features of advanced Russian and Chinese radars.

This was the first time a fully integrated version of the jammer has been tested in airborne configuration, …

A computer mouse that wraps around your finger is nice for a while, but it’s much too awkward.

When I first heard about the Mycestro, a little computer mouse you wear on your index finger and control by wagging your digits like a symphony conductor, I laughed. It seemed very awkward.

Then I started thinking about how much time I spend using a traditional computer mouse each day, and got to thinking that it might not be such a bad idea to mix up my mouse routine. Maybe it would make some tasks…

A computer mouse that wraps around your finger is nice for a while, but it’s much too awkward.

Transparent films containing carbon nanobuds—molecular tubes of carbon with ball-like appendages—could turn just about any surface, regardless of its shape, into a touch sensor.

The films were developed by a Finnish startup, Canatu, and could be used to add touch controls to curved automobile consoles and dashboards, for example. The films are rugged and can be repeatedly bent around something as thin…

People shop mostly on their desktop computers—but they live on their smartphones. For marketers, effectively reaching their target audiences requires making a connection between those two worlds.

Marketers want to know how effective their ads are on mobile devices. They would also love to be able to retarget a mobile shopper who began making a purchase on that device, and then gave up before providing payment information and a delivery address.

Cross-device tracking is challenging, but technolo…

Capetonian Sam Laing sounds like a brand ambassador when she talks about her favourite local mobile payments application. But she isn't. Instead, she's one of a growing number of people in South Africa's Mother City who are leaving their wallets at home in favour of digital money apps.

Even street sellers of The Big Issue magazine can now accept payment by mobile in South Africa

"I use SnapScan," she says. "I love it. If I find someone using SnapScan I will buy something even if I wasn't…

A set-top TV box that can help people with colour blindness better differentiate shades has been developed by a Cambridge firm.

Eyeteq, from University of East Anglia-based company Spectral Edge, alters colours frame-by-frame - without spoiling them for the non-colour-blind.

The tech works by enhancing certain colours in an image. This picture is unaltered...

...but this image shows Eyeteq in action. For colour-blind people, the peppers are more distinct.

The technology could also be used …

Four cities have been chosen by Innovate UK to run formal trials to see how driverless cars could be integrated into everyday life across the country.

Following high quality applications to our GBP 10m driverless cars competition, in the Autumn Statement today government has provided an additional GBP 9m to back the four cities (two working together in one project) which have now been given the green light to start their exciting and innovative work from January 2015.

The chosen cities are:

G…

Millions of batteries discarded with computers have more than enough life to power home lighting for one year, researchers in India say.

Many of the estimated 50 million lithium-ion laptop batteries discarded every year could provide electricity storage sufficient to light homes in poor countries, researchers at IBM say.

A street vendor in India uses a light powered by refurbished battery cells.

In work being aired this week at a conference in San Jose, researchers at IBM Research India in Ba…

Using a new algorithm, Stanford engineers can design and build a prism-like silicon structure that can bend light at right angles. The goal is to transmit data faster and more efficiently via optical rather than electrical signals.

"Light can carry more data than a wire, and it takes less energy to transmit photons than electrons," says Jelena Vuckovic.

Stanford engineers have designed and built a prism-like device that can split a beam of light into different colors and bend the light at …

Google engineers have trained a machine learning algorithm to write picture captions using the same techniques it developed for language translation.

Translating one language into another has always been a difficult task. But in recent years, Google has transformed this process by developing machine translation algorithms that change the nature of cross cultural communications through Google Translate.

Now that company is using the same machine learning technique to translate pictures into wor…

Sentiment analysis is booming for blogs and tweets but more or less ignored when it comes to pictures. That looks set to change.

Sentiment analysis is revolutionizing the study of communication with a numerous companies now offering it as a service. The idea is to study the patterns of words in messages such as tweets and blogs to determine to what extent they are positive or negative. That allows companies, organizations, and political parties to automatically track opinions about their brands…