Shocking new way to get the salt out - MIT. As the availability of clean, potable water becomes an increasingly urgent issue in many parts of the world, researchers are searching for new ways to treat salty, brackish or contaminated water to make it usable.
Now a team at MIT has come up with an innovative approach that, unlike most traditional desalination systems, does not separate ions or water molecules with filters, which can become clogged, or boiling, which consumes great amounts of energy. Instead, the system uses an electrically driven shockwave within a stream of flowing water, which pushes salty water to one side of the flow and fresh water to the other, allowing easy separation of the two streams. The new approach is described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, in a paper by professor of chemical engineering and mathematics Martin Bazant, graduate student Sven Schlumpberger, undergraduate Nancy Lu, and former postdoc Matthew Suss.
Genetically engineered algae kills 90% of cancer cells without harming healthy ones. Algae has been genetically engineered to kill cancer cells without harming healthy cells.
The algae nanoparticles, created by scientists in Australia, were found to kill 90% of cancer cells in cultured human cells. The algae was also successful at killing cancer in mice with tumours. Nico Voelcker, from the University of South Australia, worked with researchers from Dresden in Germany to engineer diatom algae and loaded it with chemotherapeutic drugs. Publishing their study in the journal Nature Communications, the team also found that when they injected the nanoparticles into mice, tumours regressed. The feasibility of a brain-computer interface functional e... Participant screening Ethical approval was obtained from the University of California, Irvine Institutional Review Board (Irvine, CA, USA).
Photo selection study reveals we don't look like we think we look. Be careful when choosing your next passport photo or profile image as a new study suggests we are so poor a picking good likenesses of our face that strangers make better selections.
This is one of the findings of a study by Dr David White and colleagues from the UNSW Australia published today, Wednesday 24 June 2015, in the British Journal of Psychology. The study was supported by an Australian Research Council grants and funding from the Australian Passport Office. Dr White said: “In face-to-face encounters with unfamiliar people, it is often necessary to verify that we are who we claim to be. Physics Simulation Softwares - ShikharEdusoft. Lushprojects.com - www.lushprojects.com - Circuit Simulator. This electronic circuit simulator is highly interactive giving the feeling of playing with real components.
It's very helpful for experimentation and visualization. Experts pledge to rein in AI research. 12 January 2015Last updated at 07:07 ET <div class="warning"><img class="holding" src=" alt="Stephen Hawking" /><p><strong>Please turn on JavaScript.
</strong> Media requires JavaScript to play. </p></div> Stephen Hawking: "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded" Scientists including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have signed a letter pledging to ensure artificial intelligence research benefits mankind. What IQ Tests Miss: The Inability of Rational Thinking. No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions.
The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term “dysrationalia” (analogous to “dyslexia”), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess. Although most people recognize that IQ tests do not measure every important mental faculty, we behave as if they do. Geckos inspire 'Spider-Man' gloves. 19 November 2014Last updated at 11:39 ET The 70kg climber tested the pads hundreds of times on the glass wall without any failures The way geckos climb has inspired a device that allowed a 70kg man to scale a glass wall like Spider-Man.
Much research has gone into trying to unlock the clever way that little geckos climb. But trying to use gecko adhesion to work at larger scales - such as on a human hand - without any loss of performance has proven difficult. The hand-sized silicone pads created by a team at Stanford University keep their adhesive strength at all sizes. Google Genomics. Take two bottles into the shower? Shampoo and conditioner in the same bottle is taken for granted by today's silky-haired population.
Maria Burke discovers the chemistry behind this clever invention In ShortShampoo and conditioner in the same formulation may be widely used, but has only been made possible thanks to chemistsConditioners are oils, whereas surfactants in shampoos are designed to remove oil, making their combination problematicAs conditioners have become the norm, the next challenge is to develop products that do not accumulate on the hair Everyone uses a shampoo, but not everyone realises the clever chemical tricks that go into combining all the ingredients. Early shampoo formulations were only designed to clean hair, not to condition it. The manufacturers thought it was impossible to mix cleansing and conditioning materials in a single bottle.
Smart traffic lights use game theory to ease traffic congestion. Anyone who drives around the downtown area of a large city has experienced the frustration of gridlock, and it always seems that the traffic lights are part of the problem.
However, a new kind of traffic light designed by a University of Toronto graduate could turn this traffic gridlock into a thing of the past. Samah El-Tantawy has dealt with gridlock in two of the worst cities for traffic in the world — Toronto and Cairo — and she's come up with an innovative idea to help. Rather than coordinating through one of the central control systems currently used to direct traffic, El-Tantawy's new traffic lights use artificial intelligence and decision-making strategies from game theory to simply 'talk' to one another. This lets the lights coordinate among themselves, based specifically on what they are all seeing in the traffic flow at any moment, how to best keep things moving. Hugh Herr: The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance. Explainer: how do cyclists reach super fast speeds? Even though spoked wheels and pneumatic tyres were invented in the 1880s, bicycle design hasn’t really changed a great deal in the time since – at least, at face value.
However, look closer and around a hundred years of research or development has taken the humble bicycle from boneshaker to a speed machine. The basics. Manu Prakash: A 50-cent microscope that folds like origami. Three-Dimensional Mid-Air Acoustic Manipulation [Acoustic Levitation] (2013,2014-) 3D Printing: Make anything you want. How to Make Fluorescein from Highlighter Markers. Which of the 11 American nations do you live in? Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.
The Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face. Nine years ago, I was sitting in a college math physics course and my professor spelt out an idea that kind of blew my mind. I think it isn’t a stretch to say that this is one of the most widely applicable mathematical discoveries, with applications ranging from optics to quantum physics, radio astronomy, MP3 and JPEG compression, X-ray crystallography, voice recognition, and PET or MRI scans. This mathematical tool—named the Fourier transform, after 18th-century French physicist and mathematician Joseph Fourier—was even used by James Watson and Francis Crick to decode the double helix structure of DNA from the X-ray patterns produced by Rosalind Franklin.
(Crick was an expert in Fourier transforms, and joked about writing a paper called, “Fourier Transforms for birdwatchers,” to explain the math to Watson, an avid birder.) Blizzident 'six-second toothbrush' created by dentists. 2 October 2013Last updated at 09:46 ET The brush needs to be replaced once a year A team of dentists has created a toothbrush they say can clean teeth thoroughly in less than six seconds. Manufacturer Blizzident uses the same scans dentists use to fit braces and an extremely precise 3D printer to create a brush for each individual customer. Each brush contains about 400 soft bristles and requires the wearer to grind their teeth in order to clean. Its makers say it eliminates brushing errors that people typically make, but experts say more research is needed. Why Traffic Happens. Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, gave a great 20-minute overview on the counterintuitive science of congestion at the Boing Boing: Ingenuity conference in San Francisco last month.
Turns out a lot of the problems we ascribe to poor roads or other drivers are really our own fault. "[T]he individual driver cannot often understand the larger traffic system," says Vanderbilt. Unbreakable cryptography: The devil and the details. If you grow fast you die young. The Future of Design. Stroma Medical Eye Color Change - Permanent Eye Color Change Laser.
Who Made That Sippy Cup? Kite Patch makes you invisible to mosquitoes. How JK Rowling was unmasked. 15 July 2013Last updated at 09:08 ET. Amazing Resonance Experiment! Mammoth find: Preserved Ice Age giant found with flowing blood in Siberia. Coffee vs. beer: which drink makes you more creative? — What I Learned Today. Intelligence linked to ability to ignore distractions. Yitang Zhang Proves 'Landmark' Theorem in Distribution of Prime Numbers. On April 17, a paper arrived in the inbox of Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s preeminent journals. Engineering the $325,000 In-Vitro Burger. Bioteeth From Stemcells Will Regrow Complete Tooth, Superior to Implants : Health & Medicine. First Posted: Mar 12, 2013 01:14 PM EDT. The Invisible Hand Illusion. Being Really, Really, Ridiculously Good Looking. Relationship status statistics. Why Older Minds Make Better Decisions.
Google PageRank algorithm, Markov chains, and cancer. Guy Hoffman: Robots with "soul" A New Kind of Invisibility Cloak Demonstrates Better Cloaking Efficiency. Do We Live in the Matrix? What Can Bees Teach Us About Gang Warfare? Pi with a billion digits. Tetris Dreams. Tread Lightly: Labels That Translate Calories into Walking Distance Could Induce People to Eat Less: Scientific American. A Baffling Balloon Behavior - Smarter Every Day 113. The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video. Pentagon weapons-maker finds method for cheap, clean water. Counting cracks in glass gives speed of projectile. Confused about the NSA’s quantum computing project? This MIT computer scientist can explain.
Study of the Day: Soon, You May Download New Skills to Your Brain - Hans Villarica. Placebo Effect Produces Higher Test Scores - Get that tune out of your head - scientists find how to get rid of earworms. Me, Me, Me: People Who Overuse The First-Person Singular Are More Depressed. Neuron growth in children 'leaves no room for memories' NASA Pod Transports Are Close to Reality—in Tel Aviv. Berkeley creates the first graphene earphones, and (unsurprisingly) they’re awesome. UNL engineers develop new strong, yet tough nanofibers. Physicists Measure Magnetic Moment of Single Antimatter Particle. A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie. Moving Atoms: Making The World's Smallest Movie. How to Resurrect Lost Species. How a Rooster Knows to Crow at Dawn. Behavioural Processes - Classifying dogs’ (Canis familiaris) facial expressions from photographs.
Malaria parasite lures mosquito to human odour. Researchers grow teeth from gum cells. Cell Reports - Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Neural Cells Survive and Mature in the Nonhuman Primate Brain. Science Fiction Comes Alive as Researchers Grow Organs in Lab. How are humans going to become extinct? Injectable Oxygen Keeps People Alive Without Breathing. Bunions - family not footwear to blame. Vitamin C kills drug-resistant TB in lab tests. Biologic response modifiers to decreas... [Paediatr Child Health. 2012.
[Biologics register JuMBO : Long-term safety of ... [Z Rheumatol. 2013.