University of Insubria

A popular theme in the movies is that of an incoming asteroid that could extinguish life on the planet, and our heroes are launched into space to blow it up. But incoming asteroids may be harder to break than scientists previously thought, finds a Johns Hopkins study that used a new understanding of rock fracture

Your chairs, synthetic rugs and plastic bags could one day be made out of cocoa, rice and vegetable waste rather than petroleum, scientists are now reporting. The novel process they developed and their results, which could help the world deal with its agricultural and plastic waste problems, appear in the ACS journal Macromolecules. Athanassia Athanassiou,

Image via Wikipedia You’d think it’d be pretty easy to live within the copyright laws, or at least to understand them: if you want something of value, you pay for it. But two things happened this week that are enough to rattle anyone who thinks it’s that simple. First, I was alerted to a blog

Samsung has filed a patent for a new type of liquid lens that provides not only autofocus capability, but also true optical zoom capability. Liquid lenses, with their small form factor and lack of motors or moving parts, are ideal for use in compact cameras, phones, and other mobile devices. Where a conventional liquid lens

Nanoparticles take a fantastic, magnetic voyage MIT engineers have designed tiny robots that can help drug-delivery nanoparticles push their way out of the bloodstream and into a tumor or another disease site. Like crafts in “Fantastic Voyage” — a 1960s science fiction film in which a submarine crew shrinks in size and roams a body to

A manned Shuttle replacement based on the X-37B robot space plane When the Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down for the final time on July 21, 2011, it looked as if the notion of a manned spacecraft capable of going into orbit and then landing like a conventional airplane had been abandoned. The US government appears

Rice University catalyst holds promise for clean, inexpensive hydrogen production Graphene doped with nitrogen and augmented with cobalt atoms has proven to be an effective, durable catalyst for the production of hydrogen from water, according to scientists at Rice University. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences,

Fertilising the oceans with iron to combat climate change can lock carbon away for centuries, research suggests. Tiny marine plants induced to grow by the iron sink to the ocean floor taking carbon with them, a German-led team reports in Nature journal. Iron fertilisation is one of the oldest ideas for a climate “technical fix“.