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This is a close-up shot of the insect-driven robot, presented in Bioinspirtation and Biomimetics. Credit: Dr Noriyasu Ando A small, two-wheeled robot has been driven by a male silkmoth to track down the sex pheromone usually given off by a female mate. The robot has been used to characterise the silkmoth's tracking behaviours and it is hoped that these can be applied to other autonomous robots so they can track down smells, and the subsequent sources, of environmental spills and leaks when fitted with highly sensitive sensors.
Insect drives robot to track down smells (w/ video)
A Russian mogul wants to make sure the answer is yes, and soon Bottled Consciousness? Gaetan Lee via Wikimedia When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around--not that there was anything particularly funny about it--that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn’t really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous.
Will People Alive Today Have the Opportunity to Upload Their Consciousness to a New Robotic Body?
A controllable transistor engineered from a single phosphorus atom has been developed by researchers at the University of New South Wales, Purdue University and the University of Melbourne. The atom, shown here in the center of an image from a computer model, sits in a channel in a silicon crystal. The atomic-sized transistor and wires might allow researchers to control gated qubits of information in future quantum computers. (Purdue University image) Download image WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The smallest transistor ever built - in fact, the smallest transistor that can be built - has been created using a single phosphorous atom by an international team of researchers at the University of New South Wales, Purdue University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney.
Newsroom - One and done: Single-atom transistor is end of Moore's Law; may be beginning of quantum computing
Photograph courtesy B. Anasori, M. Naguib, Y. Gogotsi, and M.
Best Science Pictures of 2011 Announced
British student designs bamboo smartphone | Digg Technology
A student from Middlesex University has designed a smartphone made from bamboo, which he plans to release in the UK and Europe later this year. 23-year-old Kieron-Scott Woodhouse, from Shepherds Bush, designed the mobile phone in his spare time after getting frustrated with the lack of variety in the mobile phone market. The smartphone – called ADzero – is made from four-year-old organically grown bamboo, specially treated for durability. The ADzero phone is roughly half the weight of an Apple iPhone and runs on the Android operating system.First quantum jiggles detected in solid object - physics-math - 28 January 2012
NOTHING sits still. Even at absolute zero, when the thermal jiggling of matter is frozen, all things must still buzz to the tune of quantum mechanics. Now this subtle jittering has been detected in a small silicon bar, the first solid object ever to reveal its quantum vibrations.
The Pirate Bay has announced what it is calling the "next step" for the sharing society -- a category called 'physibles' where people can share schematics for 3D-printable objects . In a blog post , the organisation writes in its own inimitable way: "…after the internets evolutionised data to go from analogue to digital, it's time for the next step. Today most data is born digitally.
The Pirate Bay adds 'physibles' 3D-printing category
Smallest magnetic memory uses just 12 atoms - physics-math - 12 January 2012
Video: Data storage on an atomic level Talk about doing more with less. A dozen atoms have been made to store a bit of data magnetically – a feat normally performed by a million atoms.
Being a serial killer of house plants doesn't involve elaborate plots or a high I.Q., but it still seems to be a favorite (albeit unintentional) pastime for many geeks. Now a Twitter-enabled solution exists that may help save the lives of millions of innocent plants. The Botanicall is a kit that allows you to give your plant the power to tweet or send you a text message on your phone when it is in need of watering. The device uses an Arduino microcontroller, an Ethernet module and two probes that you insert into the soil to monitor moisture level.
Wireless kit lets your house plant use Twitter to demand feeding | Digg Topnews
Public release date: 8-Jan-2012 [ Print | E-mail | Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: John Easton john.easton@uchospitals.edu 773-795-5225 University of Chicago Medical Center Much of what living cells do is carried out by "molecular machines" – physical complexes of specialized proteins working together to carry out some biological function. How the minute steps of evolution produced these constructions has long puzzled scientists, and provided a favorite target for creationists.
Evolution of complexity recreated using 'molecular time travel'
World’s Smallest Steam Engine Is Size of Fog Droplet | Wired Science
<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-89291" title="microscopic-stirling-engine-max-planck-fritz-hoeffeler-art-for-science" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/12/microscopic-stirling-engine-max-planck-fritz-hoeffeler-art-for-science.jpg" alt="" width="660" height="505" /> Engineers have made a tiny engine a few micrometers wide, or roughly the size of a water droplet found in fog. The device is both confined and powered by a “trap” of laser light, and it sputters a bit. The fact that it works at all, however, may push the boundary of what’s possible in engineering microscopic machines. “The machine is so small that its motion is hindered by microscopic processes which are of no consequence in the macroworld,” said physicist Clemens Bechinger of the University of Stuttgart in a press release .The tiny hairs on the abdomen of a cricket have inspired researchers at the University of Twente, to make a new type of sensor which is ultra sensitive to air flows. These synthetic cricket hairs can now also be tuned very precisely for a certain range of frequencies: the hairs are 10 times more sensitive in this range. The researchers of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology are presenting these new results in the scientific journal Applied Physics Letters . Just as you always hear your own name if it is spoken at a busy gathering, these synthetic cricket hairs also suddenly become more sensitive to a specific frequency of air flow . The hair itself does not have to be modified for this, the enhanced sensitivity is achieved by adjusting its spring stiffness electronically.
Synthetic cricket pricks up its 'ears' | Digg Science
Thigh bone discovered in permafrost soil of Siberia Contains elusive undamaged genes essential for nucleus transplantation Nuclei of elephant's egg cells will be replaced with mammoth's marrow DNA Embryo will then be planted into elephant womb for gestation By Simon Tomlinson UPDATED: 19:45 GMT, 3 December 2011 Scientists believe it may be possible to clone a woolly mammoth within five years after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil in Siberia. Teams from Russia's Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University will launch fully-fledged joint research next year aiming to recreate the giant mammal, Japan's Kyodo News reported from Yakutsk, Russia.
Woolly mammoth to be brought back to life from cloned bone marrow 'within five years' | Digg Science
18 November 2011 Last updated at 08:23 ET Engineers say the material is less dense than aerogels and metallic foams A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material.
World's 'lightest material' unveiled by US engineers
Following September's spectacular announcement, Professor John Ellis , a leading particle physicist told Channel 4 News that if true, the research would really "revolutionise" physics but that it was too early to start talking about time travel: "I'm sorry but I just don't think this is going to lead to realistic time travel. It's a very subtle phenomenon in extreme circumstances," he said. That first finding was recorded when 15,000 neutrino beams were pumped over three years from Cern to Gran Sasso, an underground Italian laboratory near Rome. Physicists on the experiment said they had checked and rechecked over many months anything that could have produced a misreading before announcing what they had found. Jacques Martino, director of the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, who worked on the second experiment, said that while this test was not a full confirmation, it did remove some of the potential systematic errors that may have occurred in the first one.