via Doghouse Diaries

For more than a century, scientists have been saying the same thing: It’s impossible to create a water-free disordered magnesium carbonate. It’s too difficult. You’ll never amount to anything! Well, suck it, haters: Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden have unveiled a super-absorbent version of magnesium carbonate that breaks the world record for surface area and water absorption.

…</ … Read More → "Scientists created an impossible supermaterial totally by accident"

Aside from tick-slaying robots, what we all need for summer is mosquito-slaying robots.

That could happen in the future, but for now there’s Kite Patch, a square you stick on your clothing to make you practically invisible to mosquitoes for up to 48 hours.

The patch uses non-toxic compounds that disrupt mosquitoes’ ability to find people through CO2, according to its fundraising campaign on Indiegogo.

The technology … Read More → "Kite Patch makes you invisible to mosquitoes"

Soon, when you’re looking up at the moon at night, people could very well be looking back down at you. A partnership between two private companies plans to install a long-range telescope there as early as 2016, perching it atop the rim of a crater three miles above the surface near the moon’s south pole. The … Read More → "Private companies plan to put telescope on the moon"

… Read More → "Watch these drops of liquid dance and split to the beat of a magnetic pulse (video)"

LEGO parts are plastic. 3D printers make parts out of plastic. So the transitive property tells us that a LEGO 3D printer should be able to recreate itself. This one’s not quite there yet, mostly because it doesn’t use plastic filament as a printing medium. Look close and you’ll probably recognize that extruder as the tip of a hot glue gun. If all else fails you can … Read More → "Is a LEGO 3D printer by definition self-replicating? (video)"

Like with the country’s first space explorers, NASA is once again turning to primates with its surprisingly capable RoboSimian.

Designed to mimic the posture and movements of a primate, the bot would primarily be used for search and rescue operations. And if you’ve ever seen footage of a chimpanzee or ape clambering … Read More → "Robosimian: NASA’s new monkey robot designed for search & rescue"

Two Australian businessmen backed by a university research project have launched what they claim to be the first shark-repellent wetsuits.

Their blue and white Elude suit is said to make divers much less visible to sharks by drawing on research into the way they see their prey.

A separate design – the Diverter – has black and white stripes to signal … Read More → "Australian firm develops ‘shark-proof’ wetsuits"

“Roads, where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” Doc Emmet Brown famously said to Marty McFly in Back to the Future — and when you build your own Lego Back to the Future Time Machine ($35), you won’t need roads either. 
via uncrate

< … Read More → "Lego Back to the Future time machine"

After decades of waiting, physicists at Trinity College have for the first time captured a rare scientific event on camera.

70 years after the experiment was set up, the scientists have videoed pitch dripping from a funnel.

The experiment was begun by a colleague of Nobel Prize winner Ernest Walton in the physics department of Trinity in 1944.

Its aim was to prove that the black carbonic substance pitch is a viscous … Read More → "The pitch dropped! Trinity College experiment succeeds after 69 years"