Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN)

A major new survey of the seafloor has found that even in the deepest ocean depths you can find bottles, plastic bags, fishing nets and other types of human litter. The litter was found throughout the Mediterranean, and all the way from the continental shelf of Europe to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge 2,000 kilometres from land.

FINDINGS Neuroscientists at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have discovered precisely where and how to electrically stimulate the human brain to enhance people’s recollection of distinct memories. People with epilepsy who received low-current electrical pulses showed a significant improvement in their ability to recognize specific faces and ignore similar ones. Eight of nine patients’

The ultimate goal for Contour Crafting is to print a house in a day. Contour Crafting is a form of 3D printing that uses robotic arms and nozzles to squeeze out layers of concrete or other materials, moving back and forth over a set path in order to fabricate a large component. It is a

If your house is destroyed in a disaster, you don’t want to live in a tent. The Rapid Deployment Module can be assembled in 20 minutes with no tools and will last at least 10 years. It’s never easy setting up shelter for disaster victims–just look at the lack of safe housing in Haiti years after the

While touchscreen tablets such as the iPad have proven themselves to be extremely popular gaming devices, games that require a directional input suffer from difficult to use and easy to lose track of onscreen touch control pads. The JOYSTICK-IT iPad Arcade Stick is a simple accessory that solves this problem by sticking over the top of the

Synopsis: Technion researchers have demonstrated, for the first time, that laser emissions can be created through the interaction of light and water waves. This “Water-wave laser” could someday be used in tiny sensors that combine light waves, sound and water waves, or as a feature on microfluidic “Lab-on-a-chip” devices used to study cell biology and

The more accurately we can diagnose a disease, the greater the chance that the patient will survive. That is why many researchers are working to improve the quality of the diagnostic process. Researchers at the Nano-Science Center, University of Copenhagen have discovered a method that will make the process faster, cheaper and more accurate. This

The folks at the Georgia Robotics and InTelligent Systems (Grits) Lab at Georgia Tech have been hard at work for some time now researching swarm robots. A portion of said work deals with tasks that require a group of hi-tech gadgets to individually reach a location and a specific time — much like the mobile landing platform that

An electric propulsion technology for miniature satellites aims to give them more mobility — and may eventually allow them to take on deep-space missions. Right now, 10 to 15 Rubik’s Cube-sized satellites are orbiting high above Earth. Known as cube satellites, or “CubeSats,” the devices help researchers conduct simple space observations and measure characteristics of

The bacterial world is rife with unusual talents, among them a knack for producing electricity. In the wild, “electrogenic” bacteria generate current as part of their metabolism, and now researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), have found a way to confer that ability upon non-electrogenic bacteria. This technique could have applications for