NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Terry Virts have successfully completed a grueling six hour and 41 minute spacewalk. It saw the Americans route 340 ft (104 m) of cable in order to facilitate the fitting of a future docking system that will allow the next generation of unmanned and manned commercial craft (such as SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 spacecraft), to berth at the station’s harmony docking node. The installation of the new system … Read More → "Astronauts undertake spacewalk to begin reconfiguring ISS"

DARPA’s new initiative, known as the Communicating with Computers (CwC) program, aims to improve the ability of machines to communicate effectively with their human counterparts. The agency has two initial experiments planned, focusing on the somewhat differing fields of improved conversational skills and better cancer detection.

It’s difficult to miss DARPA’s intent to create more technologically advanced war machines, with initiatives such as the Ground X-Vehicles Technologies … Read More → "DARPA wants machines to have better communication skills"

Imagine waking up to Godzilla’s giant eyeball peering into your bedroom. That’s the terrifying opportunity Hotel Gracery in Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood will offer guests, beginning April 24th.

Ballerinas might be some of the world’s most incredible athletes, but now, thanks to a Spanish designer, they’re basically cyborgs as well.

Designer Lesia Trubat‘s fascination with the complexity and intensity of ballet has led her to her latest project, “E-Traces.” Working with Lilypad Arduino, who creates “sewable electronic pieces designed to help you build soft interactive textiles,” Trubat attaches the … Read More → "High-tech pointe shoes make ballerinas into app-trackable cyborg ladies"

The fossil of a previously unknown ichthyosaur species had been mistaken as a plaster model in a museum for more than 30 years, according to findings published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology last week.

These extinct, dolphin-shaped marine reptiles swam the oceans for millions of years during the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Back in 2008, Dean Lomax from the University of Manchester came upon a … Read More → "Museum plaster model was actually the fossil of a new ichthyosaur species"

Flow is a wooden beekeeping box designed by Australian father and son inventors Cedar and Stuart Anderson that features a built-in tap for making the honey extraction process as simple as possible. The box is also designed to make harvesting a stress-free process for the hive, though it does feature a glass wall, so owners can watch the bees as they work and make sure that … Read More → "Flow, a simple beekeeping box with built-in taps for extracting honey directly from the hive"

Researchers at Stanford University and Israel’s defense research group Rafael have created a technique they call PowerSpy, which they say can gather information about an Android phone’s geolocation merely by tracking its power use over time. That data, unlike GPS or Wi-Fi location tracking, is freely available to any installed app without a requirement to ask the user’s permission. That means it could represent a … Read More → "Spies can track you just by watching your phone’s power use"

Proto-Indo-European is the ancestral tongue of 400 languages and dialects, including English, German, Italian, Greek, and Hindi. It appeared in historic records dating back 3,700 years, but researchers have long debated over where and when Proto-Indo-European originated and how it spread. Some say it happened around 9,000 years ago in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and then dispersed along with agriculture; others think that it arose between 6,500 and 5,500 years ago in the grassy steppe lands … Read More → "Indo-European languages originated 6,000 years ago in Russian grasslands"

When a Japanese company wants to sell a product, the normal thing to do is design a robot for it, whether that makes any sense or not. Food manufacturer Kagome wants to sell tomatoes as a healthy refreshing snack. This wearable robot will feed you up to seven regular tomatoes while you run mile after mile, carrying the 17-pound robot. Now wouldn’t it be … Read More → "Robot feeds tomatoes to marathon runners"

Most parents are fairly diligent about making sure that their young children buckle up at the start of car trips. Unfortunately, due to the fact that many cars don’t have rear seatbelt warning systems, they may not realize that their kids have released their belt while en route. Needless to say, the outcome of an accident under such circumstances could be tragic. That’s why an Australian … Read More → "buckle me up lets parents know if kids undo their seatbelts"