The Tokyo Electric Power Company’s decommissioned Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, damaged in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, is still under investigation. Progress has been slow due to lethal radiation preventing workers from accessing the site, and a lack of industrial robots ready to tackle the job. Now Honda and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have unveiled a High-Access Survey robot that began work inside the reactor … Read More → "High-Access Survey Robot begins work at TEPCO nuclear plant (video)"

In 1937, ballooning pioneer Jean Piccard tested his idea of using clusters of balloons to fly by attaching 98 latex weather balloons (thus not quite recreating “99 Luftballons”) to a conventional balloon basket. The idea stuck, with one small adjustment: lawn chairs instead of baskets.

Here’s a look at the few, the proud, the crazy enough to tie balloons to a … Read More → "5 flights of lawn chair balloonists"

It’s 11 pm on a Saturday and you’ve locked yourself out of your house. You’ll have to call a locksmith. Then you’ll wait for him or her to come to your place… and, if you’re a New Yorker, you’ll end up paying about $100 to get back into your house.

But what if you could go a 7-Eleven and … Read More → "Store your housekey in the cloud and cut copies on demand"

Working with a $2.6 million grant from DARPA’s Warrior Web Program, the Harvard researchers have been developing their suit as a way to give soldiers enhanced stamina in the field. Using a series of air bladders and engineered fabrics to strengthen, support, and assist muscles, the 17-pound suit—not including the air pump backpack—can actually make a soldier about three times as strong. However, … Read More → "A real-life Iron Man suit that could be as comfortable as pajamas (video)"

In many parts of the world, people are living longer. As health and physical performance deteriorates, help is needed, but employing a full-time nurse can be costly. New developments in communications technology is providing alternatives, such as GiraffPlus. This is a pan-European, EU-funded project that uses technology to monitor the elderly in their own homes. The system has already been tested in a demo apartment in Örebro, Sweden. Now GiraffPlus is being taken further … Read More → "Homecare telepresence robot undergoes real world testing"

An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Göttingen’s Guillem Anglada-Escudé, claims to have identified a certain type of star that may be circled by significantly more habitable planets than researchers generally expect to find. Such stars are smaller than our Sun, requiring that habitable planets orbit close to them because of their lower mass. That makes planets cluster … Read More → "Habitable planets may be easier to find than previously believed"

… Read More → "Human powered helicopter competition is close (video)"

Say goodbye to water damaged phones and soggy shoes – Rust-Oleum just launched NeverWet, an amazing product that can waterproof nearly any surface or object. The ultra-hydrophobic spray coating was developed by Ross Nanotechnology, and it repels water like nothing you have ever seen. After a long time in development the product is finally available to the public, and you can get it now at Home … Read More → "Incredible spray that makes anything totally waterproof is (finally!) available"

The Tetris board is a 20 x 4 grid of WS2811 based RGB LED strips, controlled by a Digispark dev board. Structurally, the tie is just two bits of card stock with the electronic bits sandwiched in between. and taped to a cheap clip-on. In the video below, the tie doesn’t have any sort of input to control the movement and rotation of blocks. [Bill] plans to update his tie with some rudimentary … Read More → "LED tie plays Tetris (video)"

Last November, an oddball news story caught attention around the world. A research vessel in the Coral Sea, northwest of Australia, discovered that a small island on the map didn’t actually, well,exist. It wasn’t a victim of sea level rise or a David Copperfield illusion—there just wasn’t anything there. A lot of the news coverage at the … Read More → "The story behind the island that wasn’t there"