How would you like to be able to wash your car by just hosing it off – no soap, scrubbing or drying? You may be able to in the not-too-distant future, thanks to research being led by a team at University College London. Drawing on earlier research, they’ve developed an ultra-hydrophobic (water-repelling) paint that can be applied to a variety of surfaces, and that stays on once applied.

The active ingredient in … Read More → "New self-cleaning paint stands up to wear and tear"

Elon Musk and Tesla like to make magic happen via firmware updates. The billionaire entrepreneur teased on Twitter today that the company is “about to end range anxiety” via an over-the-air software update for all Model S vehicles.
via The Verge

Read More → "Elon Musk teases that Tesla software update will ‘end range anxiety’"

The challenge of being a futurist pioneer is being Patient Zero for the future’s headaches.

In 2009, Raul Rojas, a computer science professor at the Free University of Berlin (and a robot soccer team coach), built one of Germany’s first “smart homes.” Everything in the house was connected to the Internet so that lights, music, television, heating and cooling could all be turned on and off from afar. Even the … Read More → "This guy’s light bulb performed a DoS attack on his entire smart house"

The largest moon in our solar system is hiding an ocean under its surface, according to observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope. Aurorae spotted by the telescope, confirmed the long-standing theory, and the findings were announced during a NASA teleconference this morning. The news comes just a day after we found out that Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, likely has hydrothermal activity in& … Read More → "NASA confirms there’s an ocean on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede"

Amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide – composed of some 36 to 43 amino acids – has been the plaque associated with the development and progression of Alzheimer’s disease for some time now. As such, some research into removing this toxic substance from human brains has been conducted, but almost invariably requires invasive pharmaceutical intervention which is far from completely effective.

The University of Queensland research, on the other hand, purports to offer a … Read More → "Non-invasive Alzheimer’s treatment restores memory using ultrasound"

15. Austrian President Heinz Fischer (2007)

Confidence: 7/10

Style: 2/10

Likelihood of starting the robot uprising: 5/10

Austrian President Heinz Fischer shakes hands with … Read More → "Politicians shaking hands with robots, ranked"

A dancer’s moving form is digitally rendered in a frenetic cloud of moving points and lines in the captivating experimental project as·phyx·i·a. The dancer’s movements were captured by a Kinect motion controller and the data was then visualized through 3D software (the process is documented in this making-of video).as& … Read More → "‘as·phyx·i·a’, a dance performance captured with a kinect sensor and visualized with 3D software"

via xkcd

… Read More → "‘Symmetry’, a dance and opera film recorded inside the CERN Large Hadron Collider"

If you are an automaker testing out a new driverless car, the place to test them (or at least take photos) is in California apparently. A new Mercedes autonomous car has been seen cruising the streets of San Francisco and it looks like something out of Blade Runner that might take to the skies any second. The car is called the Mercedes F015 Luxury In Motion and was seen in San Francisco on … Read More → "Autonomous Mercedes car spotted cruising San Francisco streets"