It sounds like a great idea: experimentally mutate a rare but deadly virus so that scientists can do a better job of recognizing dangerous emerging strains. But it also sounds like a terrible idea — the studies could create a virus that is easier to transmit and produce findings that are useful to bioterrorists. Last…
As militaries develop autonomous robotic warriors to replace humans on the battlefield, new ethical questions emerge. If a robot in combat has a hardware malfunction or programming glitch that causes it to kill civilians, do we blame the robot, or the humans who created and deployed it? Some argue that robots do not have free…
Swiss scientists have demonstrated how a partially paralyzed person can control a robot using brain signals alone. The team at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne says the experiment takes them a step closer to enabling immobile patients to easily interact with their surroundings through a robot ‘avatar.’ The demonstration involved a partially tetraplegic…
A “miniature honeycomb” – or scaffold – could one day be used to encourage damaged nerves to grow and recover, according to an international group of researchers. The scaffold can channel clusters of nerves through its honeycomb of holes, eventually healing a severed nerve. The findings of their study on mouse nerves are published in…
Think of all the data humans have collected over the long history of astronomy, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Babylon to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If we could express all of that data as a number of bits, our fundamental unit of information, that number would be, well, astronomical. But that’s…
When the sun really acts up, spewing out heaps of charged particles in a burst called a coronal mass ejection, space weather can get menacing—and future storms could be even worse than the ones we’ve experienced. Solar storms can damage power grids, fry communications satellites and disrupt aircraft electronics. A few oft-cited historical examples: a…
The Affective Computing Research Group, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working on computers that can read facial expressions and track basic states like confusion, liking or disliking. Wearable devices, such as electronic bracelets, can detect stress or excitement by measuring minimal changes in the sweat level. The applications of this technology are…
Scores of animal scientists employed by public universities have helped pharmaceutical companies persuade farmers and ranchers to use antibiotics, hormones, and drugs to make their cattle grow bigger ever faster. With the use of these products, the average weight of a fattened steer sold to a packing plant is now roughly 1,300 pounds—up from 1,000…
Researchers at Rice University and Penn State University have discovered that adding a dash of boron to carbon while creating nanotubes turns them into solid, spongy, reusable blocks that have an astounding ability to absorb oil spilled in water. That’s one of a range of potential innovations for the material created in a single step….
Despite government efforts to ban unapproved stem cell treatments, companies around China still offer them openly.