UPDATE: 

The Federal Aviation Administration dealt a painful blow to ice fishermen, beer and drone enthusiasts in a single swoop this week.

After Minnesota-based Lakemaid Beer posted a YouTube promotional video of a drone ferrying a case of brew to far-flung winter anglers on a frozen lake, the FAA called Lakemaid president Jack Supple and told him to knock it off.

“I’m on the FAA blacklist for now,” Supple told the New York Daily News. “They’re not too happy with me.”
via Read More → "Lakemaid Beer is testing drone beer delivery, we’re suddenly 100% OK with drones"

Waterloo Labs is at it again, but instead of concocting eyeball-controls for Italian plumbers, it’s futzing with paintball guns. The team has rigged a trio of the paint-filled firearms to make automated art with a little help from a webcam, Labview software, 3D-printed parts and an awful lot of wiring. What winds up on the canvas is pulled from a 50-pixel by 50-pixel image that is fed into the Labview … Read More → "Waterloo Labs uses paintball guns to make automated works of art"

Scientists in China have successfully bred the first monkeys with targeted genetic mutations, which could lead to primates modeling sicknesses found in humans.

The team from Model Animal Research Center of Nanjing University led by geneticist Xingxu Huang first targeted three specific genes in a monkey cell line in the experiment, and were able to … Read More → "First monkeys with custom genetic mutations could revolutionize human disease research"

Researchers have long believed that it would someday be possible to produce artificial materials, or “metamaterials,” and that they would bring about some stunning, otherworldly technologies—the sort that have figured in science fiction tales for years. These innovations include invisibility cloaks that could mask the presence of objects or their electromagnetic signatures, “unfeelability cloaks” that could mechanically mask the tactile feel of an object, superlenses that could resolve … Read More → "How to make a better invisibility cloak—with lasers"

In case you were sleeping well at night, not at all afraid of giant serpents slingshotting through your bedroom window — surprise! There are a whole bunch of snakes that can fly, and we’ve had no idea how. Luckily, these snakes are mostly in Southest Asia, and scientists have just figured out their secret. It’s not Slytherin-related. Probably.
via < … Read More → "Science has figured out the mystery of flying snakes. Oh, also: snakes can fly."

A lot of animals have an amazing sense of smell, so they can often pick up things that even sensitive odor sensing machines might miss. We already know that dogs and even bees have an impressive ability to sniff out diseased cells, but now a group of scientists in Germany have genetically modified fruit flies so their antennae glow if they smell cancer cells.
via Read More → "Cancer-sniffing fruit flies start to glow if they smell sickness"

Last week, NASA announced that the Mars rover Opportunity had stumbled upon a mysterious rock that seemed to appear out of nowhere. While the rock did have quite a unique composition, it was likely knocked into place by the rover as it maneuvered around the area. There is still much to be understood about the rock, but one man is filing a lawsuit against the space administration for failing to identify the … Read More → "Man sues NASA for failing to investigate “alien life” on Mars"

Israeli artist Liat Segal has created a device that uses light to print fading messages onto photosensitive paper. The Confession Machine uses ultraviolet (UV) LEDs that are programmed to switch on and off at certain intervals in order to print people’s confessions onto paper coated with a UV sensitive pigment. Then they disappear.

The work, commissioned by Artists’ Residence Herzelya, uses photochromatic paint developed by the Bloomfield Science Museum in … Read More → "LED printer creates fleeting messages that fade away"

A team from Harvard University and the non-profit military contractor The MITRE Corporation are claiming a miniaturisation breakthrough with what they say is the smallest finite state machine ever built.

Their “nanoFSM” is, the group claims, “the densest nanoelectronic system ever built”. It comprises hundreds of transistors built of non-volatile nanowires that retain their state without power.

This, the researchers say, is the first time such a technology has produced a system that can be described as a complex and programmable nanocomputer.

Working with features sometimes smaller … Read More → "Teeny, tiny state machine could breathe new life into Moore’s Law"

In 2012 Google unveiled an experiment called Build with Chrome, a virtual Lego tool that let you play with tiny plastic bricks in your browser — and two years later the project is finally open to everyone. Originally users had to stake out a plot of land in Australia and publish their creations to that location, but now the tool lets you … Read More → "Google now lets you play with Lego in your browser anywhere in the world"