From early designs, it seems people sure wanted to live in wheel- and ring-shaped space habitats. While that hasn’t quite come to be yet — Mir, Skylab, the International Space Station and China’s forthcoming Tiangong space station are all capsule-based — it’s still interesting to see what space habitation looked like when engineers and artists only had their imaginations, hopes and dreams to guide them.

< … Read More → "11 space station concepts that eventually led to the ISS"

Remember when Stanford offered those college-level Computer Science courses for free? Now the professor who ran them is leaving Stanford to start a project that will offer nothing but free CS online classes.
via Gizmodo

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… Read More → "Ex-Stanford professor starts a totally free online school"

Ah, lasers. Those wonderful, super intense beams of light that we’ve seen used in headlights, projectors, and naturally, death rays. Like us, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen figure there’s nothing lasers can’t do, and have figured out a way to use them to cool a bit of semiconducting material. This bit of black magic works using a membrane made of gallium arsenide and is based upon principles of quantum physics and optomechanics.
</ … Read More → "Laser-cooled semiconductors"

For as long as people have been envisioning the house of the future, it almost always features control initiated with the briefest of gestures. Now, in the name of conserving energy that vision could come true with a solar house designed to use an Xbox Kinect to switch off energy consuming devices with simple movements.

Enter the Compact, Hyper-Insulated Prototype Solar House. Affectionately … Read More → "Solar powered house saves energy with Kinect"

There’s a solar Coronal Mass Ejection travelling towards us at 1,400 miles per second, the largest solar storm since 2005. It will hit Earth around 9am Eastern Time, causing fluctuations on the power grid and disruptions to the Global Positioning System.
via Gizmodo

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A new assessment system has been developed by a team of researchers to more reliably predict whether surgeons are ready to operate on patients using the da Vinci robotic surgical system. The new technology, called MScore, provides more precise analysis of actual surgical performance, which has been shown to be difficult to accomplish using common training approaches.

Prior to the introduction of da Vinci simulation training, … Read More → "New scoring system can tell surgeons how they perform on da Vinci robots"

Call Anant Agarwal’s work crazy, and you’ve made him a happy man.

Agarwal directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s vaunted Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. The lab is housed in the university’s Stata Center, a Dr. Seussian hodgepodge of forms and angles that nicely reflects the unhindered-by-reality visionary research that goes on inside.

Agarwal and his colleagues are figuring out how to build the computer chips of the future, looking a decade or two down the road. The aim is to do … Read More → "MIT genius stuffs 100 processors into single chip"

Two months before the start of the 2012 Formula 1 season, Williams F1 has unveiled a rather unorthodox element of its campaign for the coming year: It has hired onetime track and field superstar Michael Johnson to train its pit crew.

It seems somehow fitting, given that Williams and the Olympic gold medalist were phenomenal performers during the 1990s, and both have a history of jaw-dropping speed. And lord knows Williams needs the help. … Read More → "How an Olympic runner is making an F1 team faster"

Very cool. via Gizmodo 

… Read More → "Helicopter drone flies HD camera through a snowstorm"

One of the most exciting contemporary artists of our time, Korean Do Ho Suh, created this large sculptural installation that doesn’t look like much until you come closer. Glass plates rest on thousands of multicolored miniature plastic figures who are crowded together with their heads and arms turned skyward. Together, they are holding the weight of the individual visitor who steps onto the floor.
via My Modern Metropolis 

Read More → "Thousands of plastic figures hold up the floor"