Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR)

The technologists’ dream of remaking the planet to live with our carbon emissions is here. How do we stop one panicked country from deciding it’s time to press the button? Here’s a scenario that seems plausible if we continue down our current path of only vaguely paying attention to climate change: There’s a drought in

“This is about the safe design of nanomaterials” A collaboration of biologists, engineers, and material scientists at Brown University has found that jagged edges of graphene can easily pierce cell membranes, allowing graphene to enter the cell and disrupt normal function. Understanding the mechanical forces of nanotoxicity should help engineers design safer materials at the

Low-power design will allow devices as small as a honeybee to determine their location while flying. Researchers at MIT, who last year designed a tiny computer chip tailored to help honeybee-sized drones navigate, have now shrunk their chip design even further, in both size and power consumption. The team, co-led by Vivienne Sze, associate professor in MIT’s

Image via Wikipedia by Paul Krugman Is America on its way to becoming a boiled frog? I’m referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it’s in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the

We’ve all worried about the charge on our smartphone or laptop running down when we have no access to an electrical outlet. But new technology developed by researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science could finally help solve the problem. The UCLA engineers have created a novel concept for harvesting

“We are creating an early warning system for scientific breakthroughs,”   The National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded Action Science Explorer (ASE) allows users to simultaneously search through thousands of academic papers, using a visualization method that determines how papers are connected, for instance, by topic, date, authors, etc.   The goal is to use these connections

The optics advancement may solve an approaching data bottleneck by helping to boost computing power and information transfer rates tenfold Like a whirlpool, a new light-based communication tool carries data in a swift, circular motion. Described in a study published today (July 28, 2016) by the journal Science, the optics advancement could become a central

The silent, lightweight aircraft doesn’t depend on fossil fuels or batteries Since the first airplane took flight over 100 years ago, virtually every aircraft in the sky has flown with the help of moving parts such as propellers, turbine blades, and fans, which are powered by the combustion of fossil fuels or by battery packs

An international team of Seoul National University and Harvard researchers looked to water strider insects to develop robots that jump off water’s surface The concept of walking on water might sound supernatural, but in fact it is a quite natural phenomenon. Many small living creatures leverage water’s surface tension to maneuver themselves around. One of

UCLA research could lead to a simple saliva test capable of diagnosing — at an early stage — diabetes and cancer, and perhaps neurological disorders and autoimmune diseases. The study, the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted of RNA molecules in human saliva, reveals that saliva contains many of the same disease-revealing molecules that are contained