Octopuses and other cephalopods are masters of disguise — their prey often doesn’t realize the danger until it’s too late. It only makes sense to model active camouflage after that behavior, then, and a team at the University of Illinois has managed just that. Their octopus-like material uses layers of photosensors, actuators and temperature-sensitive pigment to detect ambient light and change colors in response. Individual points on the unversity’s test … Read More → "Octopus-like camouflage can hide you in plain sight"

Something about city life appears to be causing spiders to grow larger than their rural counterparts. And if that’s not enough to give you nightmares, these bigger urban spiders are also multiplying faster.

A new study published today in PLOS One shows that golden orb weaver spidersliving near heavily urbanized areas in  … Read More → "Cities are making spiders grow bigger and multiply faster"

Creating a video game bereft of any actual video might seem like an unusual idea.

But the concept is being adopted by a growing number of games designers, to help make the industry more accessible to blind and visually impaired people.

“Video-less” games use a production technique known as binaural recording, to construct an immersive, audio-only world.

The technique involves fitting a … Read More → "‘Video-less’ 3D games developed for blind players"

If humans successfully colonize Mars in the future, what kind of homes will they inhabit? NASA and MakerBot recently hosted a competition which tasked people with making a 3D-printed model home suitable for the Red Planet. Noah Hornberger won with his Queen B (Bioshielding) concept home, which offers food-for-thought concerning the future of interplanetary architecture.
via Read More → "3D-printed house concept offers blueprint for living on Mars"

There are any number of research teams trying to build alternative power sources for your cellphone. Do you want to put tiny windmills on it? What about plugging it into a solar-powered charging bench or just holding it up to the sun? Now, at the Queen Mary University of London, a group of scientists has created … Read More → "You can charge a phone battery by playing music at it"

A robot sent out to travel across Canada by hitch-hiking has completed its 6,000km (3,728-mile) trip – apparently in one piece.

HitchBOT reached Canada’s Pacific coast at Victoria, British Columbia nearly three weeks after leaving Halifax in Nova Scotia, far away on the Atlantic coast, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports. “I’m on a boat,” one of HitchBOT’s last tweets  … Read More → "Hitch-hiking robot ends 6,000km journey across Canada"

Don’t believe the hype. Insurance companies wanting  information about what you do in your car say that they can’t use it to track your location. But a team of computer engineers at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., have shown that to be untrue. The engineers say they’ve figured out how to … Read More → "How fast you drive reveals where you drive"

You know that incredibly satisfying feeling of seeing a freshly vacuumed carpet with the fibers all perfectly upright and unmarred by footprints? Designer Yuta Sugiura has found a way to take advantage of that effect to print detailed images on a rug or carpeting using a handheld machine he developed and built.

It … Read More → "Clever carpet “printer” brushes pictures onto your rugs"

It’s common for brain surgery patients to stay awake. That’s how surgeons know everything is going smoothly, after all. When concert violinist Roger Frisch started suffering from tremors that are only a problem when he’s playing, however, Mayo Clinic doctors had to resort to some rather unusual technology to find out if they were installing the necessary brain pacemaker correctly. The surgical crew gave Frisch a bow equipped with a motion-tracking … Read More → "Violinist fiddles with a smart bow during his brain surgery"