Technology

In an extraordinary feat of ingenuity,  a team of Swedish researchers have converted an all too common commercial DVD drive into a fully working laser scanner microscope capable of performing blood sample analysis and cellular imaging. They achieved this simply by replacing a few hardware pieces in the drive and developing a software that perform the analysis tasks. [...]

Since it was first described sometime in the 1960s, the ionic thruster has remained confined to hobbyists basements, shadowed by the century old jet engine. Recent research at MIT, however, shows that in some respects the ionic thruster overwhelms the jet engine in terms of efficiency, suggesting that it definitely worth of more attention. “Ionic wind” [...]

Driven by technological demand to breach the gigahertz (10^9 hertz) switching speed limit of today’s magnetic memory and logic devices, a team of researchers have devised a novel technique of switching magnetism that is at least 1000 times faster than that currently employed opening up the terahertz age (10^12 hertz). Hard drives, magnetic random access memory (RAM) and other computing [...]

When you think of robots, the first thing you might think of are anthropological-looking tin cans that beep around and perform various tasks (you have SciFi shows to thank for that) or familiar modern day industrial robots that toil away day and night producing goods. As such, a puck-sized robot that doesn’t look like much might [...]

After scientists have devised materials that rend objects optically invisible, researchers in Spain have developed a method that allowed them to cloak 3-D objects from sound waves for the first time. While sound cloaking has been demonstrated before, this was the first time that a full 3-D object was concealed. The findings might help engineers [...]

At the advent of the transistor during the middle of the last century, computers simply boomed as a new era of technology was ushered in. Though it may not have the same humongous impact the traditional transistor had during its introduction, the all biological transistor recently unveiled by scientists at Stanford University will surely change [...]

For some years now, scientists have been exploring the use of quantum dots as the basis for a novel type of solar cell. The advantages over conventional solar photovoltaic cells are numerous, minus one aspect: efficiency, which is actually the most important one. A new technique developed at MIT labs that uses quantum dots in [...]

It’s rather difficult to imagine a video game for the blind, seeing they can’t actually see, but what people should loose sight of is that the other four senses are still there, and they’re quite sharper. A group of researchers at the  Department of Ophthalmology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School have [...]

One of the biggest hurdles the solar energy industry currently faces is efficiently transforming the incoming energy from the sun’s rays. Vast fields of solar panels are a common sight, but truth of the matter is their energy output is quite low, which puts them at a technical and economic disadvantage from other renewable solutions [...]

Trekkies have a reason to rejoice one again after Japanese researchers have successfully devised the first working phaser – a laser that shoots sound particles instead of light. It will take a while though until you’ll be able to zap your neighbors around with a sound canon, as the scientists still need to work around [...]