One day, you might not have to spend ages waiting for broken bones to heal. Researchers have developed a 3D-printed, dough-like biomaterial that could fill large bone fractures while aiding the recovery process. The porous chemical blend can withstand the same abuse as the spongy parts of your longer bones while still letting cells and proteins through — it even could release its own proteins to speed up your treatment.

The paste has yet to … Read More → "3D-printed ‘dough’ helps fix your fractured bones"

The stand for the region of Liguria at the Milan 2015 Expo features a project as bizarre-sounding as it is intriguing: an attempt to grow crops underwater, inside air-filled biospheres. It’s part of an effort that could prove a low-cost, low-energy solution to grow food in parts of the world where this was not previously possible…

As bizarre as this solution may sound, there is method to this madness. A few feet below the surface, plenty of sunlight … Read More → "“Nemo’s Garden” grows terrestrial crops underwater"

Solar Impulse, the aeroplane that is powered only by the sun, has landed in Hawaii after making a historic 7,200km flight across the Pacific from Japan.

Pilot Andre Borschberg brought the vehicle gently down on to the runway of Kalaeloa Airport at 05:55 local time (15:55 GMT; 16:55 BST).

The distance covered and the time spent in the air – 118 hours – are records for manned, solar-powered flight.

< … Read More → "Solar Impulse plane lands in Hawaii"

Forget TouchID. The next smartphone security code could come from your ear. Amazon has patented an ear recognition technology that can identify a user based just on ear shape, as seen through a phone’s front-facing camera. 

The device, according to the patent, could “determine whether the user is holding the device near the user’s … Read More → "Amazon could be building a phone that unlocks with your ear"

It happened through what’s called an evolutionary arms race, explains Chris Pires, a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Missouri and one of the lead authors of the study. This works a lot like a military arms race — repeated escalations to have better weapons or … Read More → "Why you should thank a caterpillar for your mustard and wasabi"

Take this run made over the weekend by Terry Grant, seen above, for example. The stunt driver made the entire hill climb run — more than a mile long — on two wheels. More impressively, he completed it in a Guinness World Record-setting 2 minutes and 10 seconds, which — considering he had to balance the one-and-a-half-ton car the whole way uphill — doesn’t seem that much slower than the hill climb record of 41.6 seconds set by … Read More → "Watch a stunt driver break the record for fastest mile on two wheels"

A 2011 study led by Holger Hennig, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, looked at the differences between man-made music and computer-generated tunes. First, they found that people prefer man-made music, with all its inherent imperfections, to computer-generated, technically-perfect beats. However, they also determined that when songs were digitally altered to include imperfections, listeners still preferred the organically “flawed” songs.

The … Read More → "What differentiates human drummers from machines? Fractals."

433 Hz. Now you know.
via Boing Boing

… Read More → "What is the resonant frequency of googly eyes?"

And you thought that regular pill bottles were hard to open … a new overdose-proof medication dispenser developed by a team of mechanical engineering students at Johns Hopkins University can’t be opened even with the help of a hammer or drill. It does, however, deliver the proper dosage at the proper time, as long as the patient uses its built-in fingerprint scanner.

The prototype device was designed mainly with painkillers in mind. Many people exceed the recommended dosage … Read More → "Student-designed pill dispenser uses fingerprint scanner to avoid overdosing"

The better the appetizer, the worse a main course will seem, according to a recent study by a culinary scientist and a psychologist. Participants who ate better quality bruschetta didn’t like the subsequent pasta dish as much as those who ate a worse appetizer.

The study, published in the journal Food and Quality Preference, analyzed the reactions of 64 subjects who ate the same main course of pasta with olive oil and garlic but … Read More → "A great appetizer can make your dinner taste worse, study says"