Researchers have demonstrated a prototype device that can rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA.
The device works by creating something called a plasma, which produces a cocktail of chemicals in air that kill bacteria but are harmless to skin.
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Friday, November 27, 2009
Nanowires key to future transistors, electronics
Researchers are closer to using tiny devices called semiconducting nanowires to create a new generation of ultrasmall transistors and more powerful computer chips. The researchers have grown the nanowires with sharply defined layers of silicon and germanium, offering better transistor performance.
Robotic surgeon
The robot in question is the da Vinci Surgical System.
A mass of mechanical joints wrapped in transparent sheeting, the da Vinci is a spider-like unit the size of a double fridge, with four overhanging limbs.
CROSSHAIRS to protect vehicles against bullets, RPGs
DARPA has ordered a new system that could make taking a shot at the U.S. military's 38-ton sitting ducks just a little more problematic.
CROSSHAIRS (Counter Rocket-Propelled Grenade and Shooter System with Highly Accurate Immediate Responses) is a modular, vehicle-mounted, threat detection and countermeasure system that locates and engages enemy shooters.
CROSSHAIRS (Counter Rocket-Propelled Grenade and Shooter System with Highly Accurate Immediate Responses) is a modular, vehicle-mounted, threat detection and countermeasure system that locates and engages enemy shooters.
Turning Seaweed into the Fuel of the Future
Seaweed holds promise as more than an ingredient in a purifying face mask or a maki roll.
So say researchers at E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., which alongside Seattle-based Bio Architecture Lab (BAL) has secured $9 million from the Department of Energy to explore seaweed's potential as a feedstock for biobutanol, an advanced biofuel.
So say researchers at E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., which alongside Seattle-based Bio Architecture Lab (BAL) has secured $9 million from the Department of Energy to explore seaweed's potential as a feedstock for biobutanol, an advanced biofuel.
High-Pressure Diamond Anvil Creates a New Solid from Xenon and Hydrogen
Science under pressure can produce marvelous results, such as an entirely new way to store hydrogen fuel. Researchers combined the noble gas xenon with molecular hydrogen (H2) to make a never-before-seen solid that opens the doors to an entire new family of materials for hydrogen storage.
Planetary Society to launch three separate solar sails
The Planetary Society (Washington, DC) has announced LightSail--a plan to sail a spacecraft on sunlight alone by the end of 2010. The new solar-sail project, boosted by a $1 million anonymous donation, was unveiled at an event on Capitol Hill on the 75th anniversary of the birth of Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan.
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Tata and Berkeley Frigid to MDI's Air Cars
Indian carmaker Tata Motors is voicing concerns about the range and durability of the compressed-air powered minicar technology.
Magnetic heat shield test could use Russian launcher
As a capsule re-enters the atmosphere the air heats up around it due to friction and usually a high-temperature-resistant material is needed to absorb that. A magnetic field is able to deflect the hot atmospheric air away from the vehicle's surface, reducing or eliminating the need for a heat-absorbing material.
Jamming Skin Enabled Locomotion
During military operations it can be important to gain covert access to denied or hostile space. Unmanned platforms such as mechanical robots are of limited effectiveness if the only available points of entry are small openings. Under the Chemical Robots (ChemBots) Program, DARPA is creating a new class of soft, flexible, mesoscale mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their dimensions and perform various tasks.
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Russia to deploy more S-400 air-defense battalions in 2010
Russia is to deploy another five air-defense battalions equipped with advanced S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile systems next year, the Air Force commander said on Thursday.
International Space Station Under Threat of Space Junk Collision
At issue is an old rocket that could force the five astronauts on the orbiting station to change their orbit to avoid getting whacked by the debris. It's a Delta 2 rocket that launched a comet-sampling probe called Stardust from the Kennedy Space Center back on Feb. 7, 1999. The rocket is still up there, and ten years later, it has come back to haunt the International Space Station.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
New materials for jet engines
New materials, including alloys based on metals with higher melting points, such as molybdenum (Mo) and niobium (Nb) alloyed with silicon (Si), are now being seriously examined as alternatives by academic and industrial groups.
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'Smart' Armor Learns More With Every Bullet
Smart armor being developed by scientists and engineers at U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in Michigan can not only predict its own failure, but also identify the size of bullets shot at it and even generate electrical power upon impact.
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Switchgrass Looks Like a Dream Field
If you grow it, the cars will run. That's still the idea behind cellulosic ethanol, which is biofuel from tough, reedy, and often discarded plant parts. A recent study indicates that switchgrass could yield the most biomass for this fuel.
Airbus A330 MRTT Demos Simultaneous Refuelling of 2 Fighters
The Airbus Military A330 MRTT (Multi Role Tanker Transport) continues to pass new programme milestones and has now demonstrated simultaneous refuelling of two fighters.
Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime
Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity.
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IBM Reveals the Biggest Artificial Brain of All Time
IBM has revealed the biggest artificial brain of all time, a simulation run by a 147,456-processor supercomputer that requires millions of watts of electricity and over 150,000 gigabytes of memory. The brain simulation is a feat for neuroscience and computer processing—but it's still one-eighty-third the speed of a human brain and is only as large as a cat's.
How to Stop a Hurricane With Cold Water
Intellectual Ventures, a private company funded in part by Bill Gates, is in the business of chasing wild scientific ideas and, through research, finding out how feasible they are. Their latest project: How to stop hurricanes with cold water.
Warm surface water fuels big storms, so Intellectual Ventures proposes to suppress them by dumping cool water from massive floating bowls of unspecified size, deployed by airplane in front of a storm’s path.
New Reactor Uses Sunlight to Turn Water and Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel
Scientists at Sandia National Labs, seeking a means to create cheap and abundant hydrogen to power a hydrogen economy, realized they could use the same technology to "reverse-combust" CO2 back into fuel. Researchers still have to improve the efficiency of the system, but they recently demonstrated a working prototype of their "Sunshine to Petrol" machine that converts waste CO2 to carbon monoxide, and then syngas, consuming nothing but solar energy.
World's First Osmotic Power Plant Goes Live in Norway
The world's first osmotic power plant opened today in Tofte, Norway, utilizing the properties of salty seawater to generate a whopping 4 kilowatts of electricity for the grid, or about enough to power a coffee maker. But the Norwegian company running the project, Statkraft, is a glass-half-full kind of company, claiming that eventually osmotic plants could draw half of Europe's electricity from the saltiness of the sea.
New Mobile X-Ray Scanner for EOD Robots
At Milipol 09 Vidisco is introducing two new portable systems utilizing flat amorphous silicon panels – the Flat foX-17 and foX-Rayzor designed for operation with EOD robots. With these inspection systems a bomb disposal technician can analyze images on-site, identify and differentiate organic materials like explosives or drugs from inorganic substances like metals.
More Testing For New USAF Surveillance Radar
Testing of the U.S. Air Force’s new $1.2-billion developmental ground surveillance radar, which has previously suffered technical setbacks, is continuing and officials are confident that they have surpassed some of the more complex technical challenges with new modes for the system.
Monday, November 23, 2009
CSIRO to launch GPU-based supercomputer
The CSIRO is expected to this week announce the launch of a new supercomputer, which uses a cluster of GPUs (graphical processing units) to gain a processing capacity that competes with supercomputers over twice its size.
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IBM smartphone software translates 11 languages
Researchers at IBM say they have created smart software that that translates text between English and 11 other languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic.
Hosted as an internal IBM service since August 2008, n.Fluent offers a secure real-time translation tool that translates text in web pages, electronic documents, Sametime instant message chats, and provides a BlackBerry mobile translation application.
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Hosted as an internal IBM service since August 2008, n.Fluent offers a secure real-time translation tool that translates text in web pages, electronic documents, Sametime instant message chats, and provides a BlackBerry mobile translation application.
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Burned skin healed with human embryonic stem cells
A French study has shown that human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can be potentially used to produce skin grafts for people with large, serious burns.
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StratCom commander: New nukes needed
The military’s top officer in charge of nuclear weapons issued a warning Thursday about the state of the nation’s nuclear programs, saying that new nuclear weapons need to be developed and lamenting the declining numbers of nuclear experts and scientists.
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Employee Monitoring Software legally promotes productivity
The software provides Internet monitoring, computer activities and employee attendance monitoring without any spying functions, like, recording chats, emails content, screens or keystrokes.
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High-Tech Space Gloves Win NASA's Astronaut Glove Challenge
Glove designers walked away with a total of $400,000 in prize money at NASA's second Astronaut Glove Challenge yesterday. The U.S. space agency awarded the money because the private glove designs beat the in-house version, and NASA may incorporate the designs into the Constellation spacesuit intended for next-gen astronauts returning to the moon.
Rat Brain Modelers Denounce IBM's Cat Brain Simulation as "Shameful and Unethical" Hoax
The Blue Brain project leader says that IBM's simulated brain does not even reach an ant's brain level.
IBM's claim of simulating a cat cortex generated quite a buzz last week, but now the head researcher from the Blue Brain project, a team whoworking to simulate their own animal brain (a rat's), has gone incandescent with fury over the what he calls the "mass deception of the public."
IBM's claim of simulating a cat cortex generated quite a buzz last week, but now the head researcher from the Blue Brain project, a team whoworking to simulate their own animal brain (a rat's), has gone incandescent with fury over the what he calls the "mass deception of the public."
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