… Read More → "“Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played on a special wine glass using a fingertip"

The procedure itself sounds simple enough, if you sort of ignore the fact that scientists are digging around inside of a rat’s skull. Oxford’s Edman Tang and his team first coated magnetic nanoparticles with antibodies that have a tendency to bond with a type of protein found on neural stem cells. After about six hours, the researchers used a magnet to pull the nanoparticles together, and then extracted them from the brain using a syringe. Amazingly, none of this appears to have damaged the rat’s brain, and the neural stem cells grew freely in a … Read More → "Scientists can now extract stem cells from brains using magnets"

Imagine if an army of completely flat-faced cubes could roll around and even jump on their own, joining with one another to form a variety of large-scale structures. Well, that’s exactly what a team of robotics researchers at MIT are trying to turn into a reality – and they’ve already developed the cubes that could do it.

Known as M-Blocks, the devices were created by MIT’s John Romanishin, Daniela Rus … Read More → "Self-propelled robotic cubes can form into structures"

My Modern Metropolis has posted a delightful photo gallery of animals in amazingly large herds, flocks, and other congregations.
via Laughing Squid

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Image: Stingrays by  … Read More → "Photos of huge congregations of animals"

What do the arts mean to our lives? To at least some researchers, they’re a way that we learn how the people around us think. Previous studies have concluded that reading fiction is correlated with various measures of empathy — as you learn how characters interact, you can transfer that to the real world. But for David Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the … Read More → "Could reading ‘Crime and Punishment’ make you better at reading people?"

Beachgoers in the Spanish community of Cantabria were astonished Tuesday when they stumbled onto the carcass of a giant squid that had washed ashore almost fully intact.

The deep-sea denizen—the fabled and mysterious Architeuthis Dux—measured 30 feet and weighed nearly 400 pounds.

It was delivered to the Maritime Museum of Cantabria, where it was cleaned … Read More → "Beachgoers in Spain discover 30-foot giant squid"

Nothing keeps the mosquitoes away quite as well as DEET, but it’s not the most innocuous of substances – besides stinking, it also melts plastic and synthetic fabrics, plus it’s even been linked to problems in users’ central nervous systems. It can also be prohibitively expensive for use in developing nations. Thanks to research being conducted at the University of California, Riverside, however, a new generation of non-toxic but highly-effective … Read More → "Scientists find key to more effective DEET alternatives"

If you’ve ever wondered what the go-to web page was around the rest of planet, wonder no longer. This map shows the most visited websites around the world, broken down country-by-country.

Assembled by Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata for Information Geographies, the map—based on Alexa data—depicts … Read More → "The most popular websites in the world, country-by-country"

To the east of Hull’s city center lies a new footbridge connecting the English city’s Old Town conservation area to an industrial space currently undergoing redevelopment. While most footbridges probably wouldn’t warrant mention on Gizmag’s pages, this particular footbridge, designed by architects McDowell+Benedetti, features a novel mechanical system that enables people to “ride” across the River Hull as the bridge slowly rotates to make way … Read More → "River Hull Footbridge turns pedestrians into passengers"

Large jellyfish swarms have been drastically increasing over the past decades and have become a problem in many parts of the world, Hyun Myung, a robotics professor at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), tells IEEE Spectrum. And they aren’t affecting just marine life and infrastructure. “The number of beachgoers who have been stung by poisonous jellyfish, which can lead to death in extreme … Read More → "These robots will stop the jellyfish invasion"