Richard Branson is determined to take paying passengers to space. So determined, in fact, that Virgin Galactic has enlisted an elite group of accredited “space agents” to sell tickets at a starting price of $200,000.

In the Bay Area, Tony Cardoza [pictured, above] and Lynda Turley Garrett are two of three agents licensed to sell space flights, which they offer alongside African safari adventures. They have sold less than … Read More → "Now booking: your flight to space"

After being ordered by a DC circuit court to hold public rulemaking hearings for its Whole Body Imaging scanners more than a year ago, the TSA has finally opened the screening policy for public comment. As of today, the TSA has received more than 600 public comments, and online comments will be accepted through June 24th at 11:59 PM ET — you can file your own comments on the government’s Read More → "Now is your chance to tell the TSA what you think of ‘nude’ full-body scanners"

For every new website that goes up, there are some like these that get lost or forgotten – along with a sense of what online culture used to look like. We may have faster network speeds and better web features now, but – like finding an old mixtape (yes, on actual cassette tape) – finding a webpage dating back to the turn of the century is like unearthing King Tut’s tomb.

And there’ … Read More → "Internet archaeology: behold the most hilarious abandoned websites"

If you look up at a power line in a few years and see something skittering along the wires, it (hopefully) won’t be a mutant crab monster, but a powerline inspection robot costing less than US$1,000. A prototype of such a robot, called SkySweeper, was presented this month at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering’s Research Expo. The robot was built with off-the-shelf electronics and plastic parts … Read More → "Inching SkySweeper robot provides cheap way to inspect powerlines"

Tecnologia Humana 3D has been developing new ways to build three-dimensional computer models using data from sonograms and other imaging techniques after initially setting out to enhance prenatal diagnostic tools.

The work took a new direction when dos Santos realized that printing these models would give visually impaired mothers-to-be a chance to meet their babies in utero.

“We work mainly to help … Read More → "3D printed sonograms for blind parents"

… Read More → "Watch a giant ‘Pong’ game played on the side of a 29-story building (video)"

For creatures with very small brains, ants build strikingly complex societies. How a colony of hundreds or thousands of ants maintains order remains poorly understood, but new high tech research methods might be able to shed some light on the complexity of the colony.

A team of Swiss scientists glued barcodes to hundreds of ants living in six laboratory colonies and recorded all of their movements for more than a month. The video analysis … Read More → "Barcodes let scientists track every ant in a colony"

3D printers have been a hit with consumers for several years now, but designing anything for them still requires some basic knowledge of 3D modeling software. Otherwise, you’re stuck just building whatever designs you can find online. With Doodle3D, you can draw simple 2D sketches on a computer, tablet, or smartphone, and then send them to a 3D printer to turn them into physical objects.
via Read More → "Doodle3D creates 3D-printed objects from your drawings"

When light beams through a Portuguese man-of-war’s gelatinous body, the aquatic creature’s swirling tentacles and effervescent colors turn into glowing, otherworldly terrains. Photographer Aaron Ansarov took pictures of man-of-wars arranged in various groupings on top of a light table, and mirrored the images to turn them into kaleidoscopic shapes that can resemble alien figures, precious gems, and terrifying landscapes.
via Read More → "Under bright light, the Portuguese man-of-war becomes a twisting landscape of neon"

While there are already memory materials that are able to change to a given shape when exposed to certain stimuli, researchers from ETH Zurich have created something a little different. Taking inspiration from the humble pine cone, they’ve developed a process that allows a wider variety of materials to be used, that can in turn attain a wider variety of shapes.

Conducted by a group led by Prof. André Studart, the project … Read More → "Pine cone inspires new development in shape-shifting materials"