Ever feel like your phone is taking an awfully long time to register that swipe to unlock? Well, scientists from Imperial College London and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology are developing a solution that could mean faster response times. By combining polymer semiconductors and small molecules into a composite material to make organic thin-film transistors — a process known as composite collaboration — they found a way to increase the speed of the electrical charge moving through a device’s components.
via … Read More → "Scientists develop composite material to enhance device response time"

Cochlear implants, which help 220,000 deaf people around the world hear, come with a few unfortunate side effects.

Because the implants also consist of external parts (the mic, a speech processor, and a radio transmitter coil) worn rather conspicuously behind the ear, users are often unable to swim or wear helmets comfortably, must fully rely on a microphone exposed to the elements, and have … Read More → "Tiny mic could improve cochlear implants"

Life ain’t easy down under. In addition to particularly strict laws regarding violence in gaming, Australians can also expect to pay a pretty penny for their software. For reasons mostly unknown, software tends to be more expensive in Australia than it is in the U.S., sometimes reaching near twice the price of copies licensed to U.S. citizens. While inexplicable, it’s something of a standard practice, as … Read More → "Australia finally investigating its absurdly high software prices"

This room may look unfamiliar, but it is one of the most ?important places in your life. Without it, you could not count on your house being warm and bright, your food staying safe in the fridge, or your ability to charge your iPad or cell phone. Behind the modern world is a vast wired network transmitting electricity to consumers. We call it the grid, but it is not as neat … Read More → "Where electricity comes from"

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku this week has discussed in a short video why Moore’s Law will collapse “in about 10 years or so.” In this video presented by Big Think, the law created by Gordon E. Moore is not debunked, but is instead explained as having a limit – you can’t keep getting smaller forever. Moore’s Law says, for those of you unfamiliar, that the number of transistors placed (inexpensively) on an integrated circuit will double every two years. Since Moore’s law was first established, it’s … Read More → "Collapse of Moore’s Law ‘in about 10 years’?"

We’re less than a week away from the scheduled launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and today the company will fire the engines at the Kennedy Space Center with the rocket firmly anchored to the ground. The static test is somewhat unusual for a rocket 7 days before launch, but the test is part of a full dress rehearsal for the SpaceX team. Last … Read More → "SpaceX prepares for launch with test firing of rocket today"

Carnegie Mellon University’s Auditory Lab has a huge collection of high-quality audio recordings of random sounds—from a marble dropped onto sheet metal, to bubble wrap being popped, to crumpling newspaper, to the sound of a sponge being squeezed out over empty tupperware.
via Boing Boing

Go to sound library

From “A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity” (by Poh, M.Z., Swenson, N.C., Picard, R.W. in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol.57, no.5), a chart showing a single student’s electrodermal activity over the course of a week. Note the neural flatlining during classtime. As Joi Ito notes, “Note that the activity is higher during sleep than during class.” He … Read More → "Student’s brain flatlined during classes"

Eight years after landing on Mars for what was planned as a three-month mission, NASA’s enduring Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is working on what essentially became a new mission five months ago.

Opportunity reached a multi-year driving destination, Endeavour Crater, in August 2011. At Endeavour’s rim, it has gained access to geological deposits from an … Read More → "Durable NASA Rover beginning ninth year of Mars work"

Researchers at Harvard and Children’s Hospital Boston have teamed up to create a microfluidic device that harvests and cultures circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood samples.

Such cells are shed by primary tumors and circulate in the bloodstream. They sometimes cause metastases, or new recurrences of cancer distant from the original tumor. As such, these cells can shed important light on how far a given cancer has progressed, how that particular patient might respond to drugs and other treatments, and more.

Reporting in the journal Lab on a Chip, … Read More → "A new gadget can capture and culture circulating cancer cells shed by a tumor, providing important data about cancer progression and how patients respond to treatment"