Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)

Rice shows reusable, carbon nanotube-reinforced filters clean toxins from water Carbon nanotubes immobilized in a tuft of quartz fiber have the power to remove toxic heavy metals from water, according to researchers at Rice University. Prize-winning filters produced in the lab of Rice chemist Andrew Barron by then-high school student and lead author Perry Alagappan absorb more

The 1K House concept was initiated by Tony Ciochetti Launched in 2009, MIT’s “1K House” project challenges designers to come up with affordable, sustainable housing solutions that can improve conditions for the billions of people in the world living on less that $1 per day. The “Pinwheel House” designed by MIT graduate student Ying chee

Marriage, kids and scientific fields chosen explain gap, study finds One year after they graduate, women with Ph.D.s in science and engineering fields earn 31 percent less than do men, according to a new study using previously unavailable data. The pay gap dropped to 11 percent when researchers took into account that women tended to

New algorithm could enable household robots to better identify objects in cluttered environments. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory believe that household robots should take advantage of their mobility and their relatively static environments to make object recognition easier, by imaging objects from multiple perspectives before making judgments about their identity. Matching

Image by Getty Images via Daylife After Fox News misrepresents a military robot’s dietary habits, the world muses over what ethical behavior means for intelligent programs and machines. Ever since news broke earlier this month about the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, or EATR, news outlets have been racing each other to weigh in on the

Stanford University scientists have created the thinnest, most efficient absorber of visible light on record. The nanosized structure, thousands of times thinner than an ordinary sheet of paper, could lower the cost and improve the efficiency of solar cells, according to the scientists. Their results are published in the current online edition of the journal Nano Letters. “Achieving complete

If coding really is the new literacy, you’re going to want to start your kid early. The learn-to-code movement is aiming younger. MIT, for example, recently released a free iPad app with its visual programming language ScratchJr., so kindergartners could use it to code stories and games even before knowing how to read. Vikas Gupta,

One team has already made a cat ‘disappear’ with a device that has huge military potential Mainland scientists are increasingly confident of developing the world’s first invisibility cloak, using technology to hide objects from view and make them “disappear”. The central government has funded at least 40 research teams over the past three years to

Plant scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), in their search for solutions to global food production challenges, have doubled the amount of grains that a sorghum plant can yield. Sorghum, one of the world’s most important sources of food, animal feed, and biofuel, is considered a model crop