When a soldier is shot on the battlefield, the emergency treatment can seem as brutal as the injury itself. A medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity, sometimes as deep as 5 inches into the body, to stop bleeding from an artery. It’s an agonizing process that doesn’t always work–if bleeding hasn’t stopped after three minutes of applying direct pressure, the medic must pull out all the gauze and … Read More → "How a simple new invention seals a gunshot wound in 15 seconds"

Artist Li Hongo produces gorgeous sculptures made from meticulously cut sheets of fan-folded paper, stacked tightly so that the pieces appear to be made of solid composite or stone. But when Li pulls at them, they stretch and slide most gloriously, turning into slinkoid paper-chains that are pure visual hilarity.
via Boing Boing

Read More → "Stretchy, slinkoid sculptures made from fan-folded cut paper"

Researchers at Scotland’s Abertay University are getting a brand new look at the seemingly nondescript world hidden in plain sight—the soil beneath our feet.

Using computed tomography—an imaging technique that takes virtual slices of a subject … Read More → "Using ?a 3D scanner to explore the labyrinths of soil beneath our feet"

DNA can do many things — build organisms, implicate criminals, store Shakespearean sonnets. Now, it can illuminate the complex biomolecular architecture of a cell.

By attaching colored, fluorescent tags to short stretches of DNA, a team at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has developed an imaging system that can resolve structures less than 10 nanometers apart.
via Read More → "Ultra-sharp images of cells, made using fluorescent DNA"

Linda Liukas wrote her first lines of computer code when she was 13 years old. She was inspired by the man who was then the vice president of the United States. “I was madly in love with Al Gore,” she says, “so I decided to make a website about him.”

This was before online services like WordPress and Tumblr let … Read More → "Book that teaches kids to code raises $250K on Kickstarter"

… Read More → "White House to announce its first-ever Maker Faire"

When a fire breaks out at an industrial location, first responders need information fast: What chemicals are on site, and are they explosive? How close is the fire to those chemicals? Last week, hundreds of people were evacuated from the area surrounding the pink granite Stone Creek Quarry in Connecticut when old blast mats–heavy rubber sheets placed over holes to … Read More → "Connecticut fire department gets help from a drone"

… Read More → "How much of your brain you actually use; debunking the 10% myth"

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, sponsors a lot of technology through grants to universities and private labs, with projects running the gamut from robots to electroencephalography caps, to software and new programming languages. A lot of that knowledge is open source, but it hasn’t always been easy to access. Today, DARPA has responded … Read More → "DARPA publishes all its open source code in one place"

The healthcare industry is already making use of 3D printing technologies to print casts, tracheal splints, ears, prostheses, and even cells. Now, a New York-based company wants to print the insoles in your shoes to reduce foot pain and improve posture. Sols Systems has raised US$1.75 million of seed financing from Lux Capita to bring its custom orthotics to … Read More → "Sols scans your feet and creates 3D-printed custom insoles"