As someone sans womb, I'm not terribly qualified to opine, but my guess would be that a text message is the last thing you want to deal with while giving birth. Not so! At least, according to some doctors. More »
In 2007, some goons looted a casting of Rodin's The Thinker (one of many castings that exist of the iconic piece) from the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands, intending to sell it as scrap metal. I'm not sure why you'd want to sell a multi-million dollar work of art as scrap metal, but hey, that's on them. Though six other works from the museum were destroyed in the looting, The Thinker was recovered, though badly damaged. The museum asked the Belgian 3D printing company Materialise to help them fix it up. More »
This is Evan Emory. This past Monday, he posted a video on YouTube that showed (through some simple editing) him singing a sexually explicit song to a classroom full of elementary school students. He didn't actually sing anything offensive in front of the kids. But he's still facing 20 years in prison, on a felony charge of manufacturing child sexual abusive material. More »
Are your Calendar apps, Post-It notes, and calls from your mother still not helping stay on track? Well, this colorful concept clock might not solve all your procrastination woes, but at least it looks good in the process. More »
Well before Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, IBM's design team grappled with a different challenge - getting beaten to the punch by someone else inventing a trivia-savvy artificial mind. Final Jeopardy discusses Watson's early development and how this Q&A juggernaut overcame the "Basement Baseline." More »
This morning, we decided we think axes are awesome. Beautiful, functionally perfected, and, yes, great for elegantly chopping the crap out of things. Below, a roundup of our favorite old school cutting contraptions. More »
The default iOS lockscreen is little more than a glorified wristwatch; functional, but not very useful for much else than checking the date. Having a jailbroken iOS device opens up a Pandora's box of possibilities, allowing you to add more info and a personal touch to the most basic of your phone's functions: the lockscreen. More »
In the most compelling man versus shadow conflict since Peter Pan, Japanese actor Taichi Saotome does battle with vague clouds, then his own darkspace doppelgänger. It's a light show built around darkness, and it's pretty terrific. [Metafilter via The Daily What] More »
Slide a microSD card into the $95 Mame-Cam from Japanese purveyors-of-USB-craziness Thanko, and be on your way taking sneaky pics and vid on the sly. Video is shot in VGA res at 30fps, and the battery is good for 36 minutes' shooting. [Thanko via CrunchGear] More »
The only thing worse than getting hit by a car is having your desktop littered with crap. Folders filled with porn! Tax documents! Stolen music! Animated GIFs of varying hilarity! It accumulates, and accumulates, and before you know it you're flung into a rage, mowing down people in your car. We don't want that. You don't want that. So, do yourself a favor and bump up your desktop real estate a little. This 1600 x 900, 20-inch HP S2031 LCD monitor ($120 with free shipping) will add another 1,440,000 pixels for you to fill up. And once you fill all THAT desktop space up? Well, then you've really got something to think about, don't you. More »
Stanford researchers have found that adding a single layer of organic molecules to a solar cell can increase its efficiency three-fold and could lead to cheaper, more efficient solar panels.
The new Arizona factory, designated Fab 42, will be the most advanced, high-volume semiconductor manufacturing facility in the world. Construction of the new fab is expected to begin in the middle of this year and is expected to be completed in 2013.
C3Nano, Inc. this week announced that the company has closed a US $3.2 million round of Series-A financing from China and Silicon Valley-based GSR Ventures. A spinout company from Professor Zhenan Bao's chemical engineering lab at Stanford University, C3Nano has developed a sustainable, proprietary hybrid carbon nanotube (CNT) based transparent electrode ink and film for use in devices such as touch screens, OLED devices, photovoltaic solar panels and flexible displays.
The new device, an analytical high-resolution scanning electron microscope, will help researchers see more clearly structures only a few nanometers in size. It also will help them identify what the structures are made of as well as take measurements and make movies of processes that happen at the nanoscale level.
The production of inexpensive hydrogen for automotive or jet fuel may be possible by mimicking photosynthesis, according to a Penn State materials chemist, but a number of problems need to be solved first.
To build the next generation of sensors - with applications ranging from medical devices to robotics to new consumer goods - Chang Liu looks to biology. By creating artificial hair cells using micro- and nanofabrication technology, Liu's group is increasing sensor performance while deepening the understanding of how different creatures use these sensors.
The Mimosa plant, which folds its leaves when they're touched, is inspiring a new class of adaptive structures designed to twist, bend, stiffen and even heal themselves.
Previous research has shown that high performance piezoelectric ceramics PZT (lead zirconate titanate) could be printed as nanoribbons onto biocompatible and flexible substrates for applications such as harvesting energy from human motion like walking or breathing. While some motions, such as walking, only require flexibility, others, such as breathing, require that the materials be not just flexible but also stretchable. However, the PZT ribbons cannot stand stretching operation modes due to their brittle nature, which leads to cracking. The research team therefore has been looking to overcome this difficulty by fashioning the piezoelectric ribbons into wavy shapes, and integrating them with stretchable silicone rubber, such that the composite material can withstand large amounts of elastic strain.
Magnetic nanoparticles could be used to track neural stem cells after a transplant in order to monitor how the cells heal spinal injuries, say University College London (UCL) scientsts.
Researchers have reported on the first combined quasi-hydrostatic, high-pressure, small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) and micro x-ray diffraction (XRD) studies on individual faceted, 3-D supercrystals self-assembled from colloidal 7.0-nm PbS nanocrystals.
