… Read More → "Watch robot shove heavy stuff around like a human"University of Tokyo researchers demonstrated how a robot could do “whole-body pushing manipulation with contact posture planning.” In less technical terms, shoving.
via Boing Boing
In what could be a major step forward for personalized medicine, researchers have perfected a technique for growing miniature balls of cortical tissue—the key working tissue in the human brain—in a dish.
And much, like our brains, these simplified, petri dish brains are abuzz with neuronal activity.
As off-the-wall insane as this sounds, it isn’t just … Read More → "Scientists are growing tiny cerebral cortexes in petri dishes"
It is a solution to the eternal shopper’s dilemma: do you want to buy a table or a skirt? Hussein Chalayan offers Afterwords, a series of furniture designs that you can wear. It’s an expression of the experience of refugees who fled their homes quickly and thus carried essential household objects with them. The wooden rings cascade out to form a shapely hoop skirt.
via Read More → "You can wear this table as a skirt"
We’ve seen gadgets and wearable that let us control devices and computers, but what if it was the other way around? What if there was a wearable that could change the way we think or, at the very least, the way we feel? Or maybe change the way we spell words. That is, more or less, the promise behind Thync, a new type of wearable that claims it … Read More → "Thync wearable claims it can change the way you think"
Boyan Slat wants to rid the Pacific Ocean of half of its plastic waste by 2025. To do so, the 20-year-old and his nonprofit company Ocean Cleanup have designed a simple yet effective floating barrier that will allow the ocean to clean itself. Unlike nets—which sea life can become entangled in—the barriers will skim the surface of the water as ocean currents pass below it, capturing plastic debris in its large V-shaped structure for easy … Read More → "A structure for ocean self-cleaning"
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have made a dazzling discovery, published this week in Nature: the brain is directly connected to the immune system by previously unknown vessels.
Standing up for civility is sometimes as hard as standing up for science.
When you try and do both at once, you might have to take the law into your own hands.
Some might, therefore, experience a tinge of twisted sympathy for Dean Liptak. He’s a science teacher at Fivay High School in Hudson, Florida.
For five days, he won’t be a science teacher. He’s been suspended because he got … Read More → "Science teacher suspended for using jammer to shut up students’ cell phones"
Much of our furniture is made from timber. The wood to make that furniture has to be harvested from a felled tree which is then milled, sawed, planed, sanded, put back together with glue and screws, and finished. Wouldn’t it be easier to avoid most of these steps and simply coax a tree to grow into a piece of furniture? That way, it would be one-piece, inherently strong, and could potentially last many years longer than assembled … Read More → "Trees trained to grow into furniture"
DOPPLER LABS JUST moved into a new office in San Francisco, and it’s a mess. The fridge is empty, and there are half-unpacked boxes everywhere.
But the team has bigger things to worry about. Doppler’s new product, a set of earbuds called Herethat let you adjust the world’s sounds to your exact liking, is launching in two weeks. CEO Noah Kraft … Read More → "These sci-fy earbuds put a volume knob on the real world"
An unknown woman dropped off boxes of electronics at a Silicon Valley recycler apparently not realizing that inside was an original Apple I computer. The recycling company, Clean Bay Area, sold the machine for $200,000 to a private collector and is offering half the cash to the woman if she shows up.
via Boing Boing
Read More → "Unidentified woman dropped off rare Apple I at electronics recycler"
