Sometimes, headlines just write themselves. And in this particular case, there’s so much cool stuff going on with this NASA-funded robotic project that we couldn’t even stuff it all in to a single line. It’s a concept for a soft robotic eel designed to explore the oceans of Europa (a moon of Jupiter), which is able to scavenge electrical energy from magnetic fields, use it to generate oxygen and hydrogen, and then … Read More → "NASA funds electricity-harvesting robotic space eel with explosive jet thrusters and electroluminescent skin"

How often have you had a great photo-op ruined by there being a window in-between you and your subject resulting in reflections in your shot? So far there’s just no easy way to fix that in post-production, but researchers at MIT, led by YiChang Shih, have developed an algorithm that can extract and automatically remove reflections in an image.

There is a catch, … Read More → "MIT finally figured out how to remove your reflection from window photos"

Using a matrix of nano-sized memristors, researchers working at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the University of California, Santa Barbara claim to have constructed the world’s first electronic memory cell that effectively mimics the analog process of the human brain. By storing memories as multiple threads of varying information, rather than a collection of ones and zeroes, scientists believe that this device may prove to be the first step towards creating a completely artificial, bionic brain.< … Read More → "Electronic memory may bring bionic brain one step closer"

Most debates about pop music may be entirely subjective, but Matthias Mauch, an engineer at Queen Mary University of London, decided to take a more scientific approach to the subject. He and a team of colleagues put 17,000 songs spanning 50 years of the Billboard 100 list through data-mining software to generate a quantitative data set about the evolution of what’s topping the charts.

The computer took songs (the label of “pop” … Read More → "‘80s music is boring, according to science"

Back in November, SolaRoad launched a test bike path that generates energy through solar cells embedded in the concrete. It sounds like an outlandish idea, but it’s apparently paying off very quickly. The company has revealed that its road has generated much more energy than expected — it produced 3,000kWh of electricity in the space of just six months, or enough to power a single person’s home for a year. That doesn’t sound like much, but … Read More → "The first solar bike path is producing more energy than expected"

While in London, an 8 year old Mozart proved a huge sensation. But with his child prodigy status came questions from a skeptical few. Was he really so young? Was he really that talented? One person eager to test the truth of these doubts was Daines Barrington, a lawyer, antiquary, naturalist and Friend of the Royal Society. In a few visits to the Mozart family lodgings in London Barrington was committed to testing “scientifically” whether this young Mozart was the real deal or not. Barrington’s findings are laid out in the above report … Read More → "Young Mozart reviewed in 1769"

Have you ever unwrapped a piece of chocolate only to discover that it looked a little old? That white substance that appears on the delicious confection is known as a fat bloom. As the fats in the chocolate crystallize, they form the rather unattractive white stuff. Fret not, though, a group of scientists from Nestlé, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) and the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) are using extremely powerful X-rays to examine exactly what … Read More → "Scientists are using powerful X-rays to make better chocolate"

Underwater explorers in Madagascar say they have discovered treasure belonging to the notorious 17th-Century Scottish pirate William Kidd.

A 50kg (7st 9lb) silver bar was brought to shore on Thursday on the island of Sainte Marie, from what is thought to be the wreck of the Adventure Galley.

The bar was presented to Madagascar’s president at a special ceremony.

US explorer Barry Clifford says he believes there are many more such … Read More → "Pirate Captain Kidd’s ‘treasure’ found in Madagascar"

Facial recognition technology has many use cases, but none nearly as significant as this next one might be. A group of students at Birmingham City University are developing a smart cane, dubbed XploR, which uses a combination of hardware and software to help the visually impaired easily identity family and friends. The device is powered by a smartphone’s face recognition features, GPS and Bluetooth, allowing blind people who use it to detect faces up … Read More → "Students design a facial recognition cane for blind people"

In the Terminator franchise, Skynet is an evil military computer system that launches war on humanity. And at some point, someone in the National Security Agency sat down and thought, “Damn, that’s a sick thing to name a secret system!”

Malevolent undertones of aspirations to unchecked aggression be damned, I guess, … Read More → "The NSA actually named a program Skynet"