A clever new building technique inspired by pop-up books for children could lead to the mass production of teeny tiny robots with, usually, are much too hard to build in large quantities. That means that building a robotic dragonfly can now be done cheaply and easily.
The technique is functionally similar to how they make plywood. Laser cutters burn away a sheets of plastic, metal and paper as needed, cutting out different shapes. Then those layers are stacked and laminated together, so that they are a single, unified whole. The finished product is a hexagonal chunk of...
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Nanotechnology promises to make the future much more interesting, quite possibly more amazing, too. But it seems like there might be one serious flaw to the tech: that smaller particles means bigger booms.
Dust blows up more than more solid objects do. This is why a fuel air bomb is so effective: because they make the gas molecules as small as possible. The reason this works is all down to surface area. If you have a big chunk of explosive material, only part of it can combust at any given time. If you break if up,...
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The human genome was first mapped in 2003 for the low, low sum of $3 billion. It took 15 years to complete. Now, 9 years later we’re able to stick the technology into a USB stick. Granted, sequencing a human genome would take many hours, but the device is more than capable of handling simple genomes. And it is a harbinger of the future to come.
Built by UK firm Nanopore, the small device--called the minION--can sequence the genomes of viruses and bacteria in seconds. The data is relayed directly to your computer, since it is,...
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China is on a space warpath, having managed to go from not having any space-faring capability to having a space station in mere years. Now the nation has announced that it will launching 3 astronauts to their newly minted space laboratory by August.
China has dreams of conquering space, and they haven’t been shy about it. They’ve been throwing money at the problem for years, but recently things have really been picking up. In the span of a year, China has demonstrated space docking and long-term atmospheric stability. They are moving at the pace we did during...
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Who says Avatar wasn’t good scifi? DARPA, of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the government group dedicated to strange, far fetched science ideas that have a spooky record of becoming realized, wants robotic surrogates.
Proposed in DARPA’s 2013 budget is $7 million for what they refer to as the “Avatar” project, a program that would aim to "develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate." Basically, think terminator robots controlled by humans. Scared yet?
As out there as this may seem,...
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Google’s undying desire is to make the web easier to build. The more site and services are out there, after all, the more useful Google is. Its to this end that Google released the Dart programming language last year. Meant to simplify web coding into something slightly easier to deal with, Dart had one fundamental flaw: in order to use it, you had to compile your code back into Javascript.
Until now. Google has decided to make the move of embedding a Dart virtual machine, running natively instead of through Javascript, into its Chrome browser. This...
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Good news for the space buffs in the audience: the human race is continuing its march toward the stars. Now a small, private company has successfully demonstrated a rocket-powered lander in Earth’s gravity field, meaning that the craft would be more than capable of handling the gravity on Mars or the moon.
Built by Masten Aerospace Systems, the rocket demonstrated, during a test for NASA, that it is capable of launching off the ground and navigating. It successfully managed to take off, fly up 164 feet, move just about as far horizontally, before settling back down after a 67...
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