Scientists at UC Berkeley have developed a foldable, incredibly thin invisibility cloak that can wrap around microscopic objects of any shape and make them undetectable in the visible spectrum. In its current form, the technology could be useful in optical computing or in shrouding secret microelectronic components from prying eyes, but according to the researchers involved, it could also be scaled up in size with relative ease.

Objects are visible to us because a small portion of … Read More → "New invisibility cloak hides tiny three-dimensional objects of any shape"

Americans could one day soon cruise between two major cities in the western US on a mega-fast train at 150 mph, thanks to a new agreement between a private US venture and a consortium led by China Railway Group.

It’ll be called XpressWest, and it’ll link the 230 miles separating Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The … Read More → "The US and China just made a deal to build high-speed rail between LA and Vegas"

The far-northern European group of indigenous Sami languages is dying. Some, like Ter Sami from the eastern Kola Peninsula, only have two remaining speakers in the world. Sami youth are not learning their language, and if they know it, aren’t engaging with others in it. Aili Keskitalo, president of the Sami Parliament in Norway, wanted to find a modern way to solve this problem—so in 2013, she took to social media in an effort to revitalize the … Read More → "How social media is helping to save endangered languages"

If you treat the Earth as a marble, what would an accurate, to-scale model of the Solar System actually look like? Something much larger and expansive than a textbook illustration would suggest. To explain the sheer scale of our planetary system, Wylie Overstreet, Alex Gorosh and some friends decided to build their own model at a dry lakebed in Nevada. Using a reported scale of 1 astronomical unit … Read More → "To scale Solar System model built across seven miles of Nevada desert"

The Japanese humanoid robot Pepper, which sold out of its first 1,000 units in one minute in Japan this June, will get a personality makeover for the US market: it’ll go from cute and bubbly to snarky and sarcastic, MIT Technology Review reports.

Editor Will Knight met a Pepper unit in Boston this week, … Read More → "Japan’s friendly robot is getting a snarky attitude adjustment for Americans"

3-D printing has turned prototyping from something that takes days or weeks into something that takes hours. This is great, if the prototype that you end up with does what you want it to do, which it probably won’t, if you’re concerned with interactivity. You can certainly take a dremel to whatever you’ve just printed and try and stuff some sensors into it, but that sounds like a lot of work, which is why … Read More → "PrintPut integrates touch sensors into 3-D printed objects"

A recent downlink from the New Horizons mission revealed a stunning backlit panorama of the dwarf planet Pluto. The image was taken just 15 minutes after the probe’s historic flyby of the Pluto system. The image gives a beautiful and detailed view of Pluto’s features.
via Laughing Squid

Read More → "New horizons mission sends back a stunning backlit panorama of Pluto"

Salk Institute scientists have found a way to control the brain cells of a tiny nematode worm through ultrasound. All they need to do to trigger activity is add a membrane ion channel to a neuron cell and blast it with ultrasonic waves — in this experiment, the researchers changed the worm’s direction through sound bursts. The approach is not only relatively unintrusive, but can reach deep into the body. You could trigger neural activity without ever … Read More → "Scientists control a worm’s brain cells using sound waves"

A team of Japanese scientists has developed a new laser which has the shortest wavelengths ever recorded. The advance could help see microscopic objects like molecules with more clarity than ever.

The team, based at the University of Electro-Communications in Toyko, has created a new atomic X-ray laser which has a wavelength of just 0.15 nanometers — ten times shorter than the … Read More → "Scientists have built the world’s shortest wavelength laser"

Currently, when scientists want to know if bacteria are present in water, they have two main choices. They can take a sample to the lab, where they’ll try growing the suspected bacteria in it, and then count the number of resulting colonies to determine the concentration. Or, they can analyze it using expensive lab-based gas chromatography or mass spectrometry equipment. Now, however, researchers from Seoul National University have developed a “bioelectronic nose” that could be … Read More → "Bioelectronic nose sniffs out bacteria in water"