City University of New York (CUNY)

Many people who are diagnosed with cancer will undergo some type of surgery to treat their disease — almost 95 percent of people with early-diagnosed breast cancer will require surgery and it’s often the first line of treatment for people with brain tumors, for example. But despite improvements in surgical techniques over the past decade,

Toshiba, ADVA Optical Networking and BT have announced a breakthrough in new encryption technology, successfully securing 200GB/s of data over a 100km length of fibre using quantum cryptography. The system, which encodes encryption keys onto single photons, is able to transmit data five times faster than the previous record for quantum-encrypted data of 40GB/s. This

Autonomous robotic devices are certainly capable of some impressive feats, but as is the case with people, sometimes large groups can accomplish what an individual or a small group can’t. Research projects such as BAE Systems’ MAST program recognize this potential, and are investigating ways in which entire swarms of small robots could work together.

  Cheaper metal powders would make 3D printing much easier. ALUMINIUM was once more costly than gold. Napoleon III, emperor of France, reserved cutlery made from it for his most favoured guests, and the Washington monument, in America’s capital, was capped with it not because the builders were cheapskates but because they wanted to show

Data breaches, hacked systems and hostage malware are frequently topics of evening news casts — including stories of department store, hospital, government and bank data leaking into unsavory hands — but now a team of engineers has an encryption key approach that is unclonable and not reverse-engineerable, protecting information even as computers become faster and

A novel power supply: the acoustic energy from bass-heavy riffs of rap music   We’ve been following the evolution of patient-embedded medical sensors for some time – miniature devices that run on batteries, transcutaneous (through-the-skin) induced current, even sugar, and provide constant monitoring of various metabolic parameters. Now, a team from Purdue University’s Birck Nanotechnology

Image via Wikipedia A new study attempts to estimate the effects of climate change on global agriculture–and outline ways to mitigate its most dire consequences The people of East Africa once again face a devastating drought this year: Crops wither and fail from Kenya to Ethiopia, livestock drop dead and famine spreads. Although, historically, such

Good teachers have a surprisingly big impact on their pupils’ future income THERE are few policy questions to which improving the quality of education is not a reasonable answer. Yet assessing teachers is far from straightforward. Pupils’ grades or test scores may reflect any of a host of influences, not just the standard of instruction.