While many scientists have some dire warnings against us trying to geoengineer our way out of the climate crisis, others don’t necessarily see it that way and are working on new methods to solve the problem. Researchers are studying the idea of cloud brightening, utilizing ships to shoot salt water high into the atmosphere over…
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity flexed its 7-foot-long robotic arm for the first time since it landed on Mars. The robotics maneuver had the rover checking its motors and joints by unstowing the arm, extending it using all five joints and then stowing it again. NASA noted that weeks of testing and calibrating arm movements will…
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have built a quantum processor that can factor a composite number – in this case the number 15 – into its constituent prime factors, 3 and 5. While the math may not be much of an achievement, performing it successfully is an important step towards factoring much larger numbers, with…
In the latest effort to contend with exploding quantities of digital data, researchers encoded an entire book into the genetic molecules of DNA, the basic building block of life, and then accurately read back the text. The experiment, reported in the journal Science, may point a way toward eventual data-storage devices with vastly more capacity…
DARPA has released information about a new, chameleon-like soft robot that has a range of capabilities and can be produced at a very low cost. DARPA hopes the new “hiding in plain sight” robot will be used by various defense agencies for many types of missions. The robot can walk on its own, glow, carry…
Potentially huge news published today in the journal Cell is the result of two years of collaboration between teams lead by Jay Bradner of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Martin Matzuk Baylor College of Medicine. Bradner, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, explains the origins of this research as…
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is hosting a competition to reinvent the toilet for the 2.5 billion people around the world who don’t have access to modern sanitation. Entries must operate without running water, electricity or a septic system, not discharge pollutants, capture energy or other resources, and operate at a cost of 5…
Scientists at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have managed to produce a solid-state maser — a device similar to a laser which uses microwaves instead of light — capable of operating at room temperature, potentially opening the way for a revolution in deep space communication. Masers are currently used to boost radio signals from…
Scientists taking advantage of the versatility and new capabilities of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, have observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons, from the seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons…
In a major breakthrough, an international team of scientists has proven that addiction to morphine and heroin can be blocked, while at the same time increasing pain relief. The team from the University of Adelaide and University of Colorado has discovered the key mechanism in the body’s immune system that amplifies addiction to opioid drugs….