We are not at war with an alien race from the center of the Milky Way, but if we were, this is exactly what we would want it to look like. Snapped at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory --
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A group of Swedish researchers are looking beyond plants for living models upon which to base their solar harvesting tech, turning instead to the photovoltaic prowess of the jellyfish. Tapping a protein in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria known as green fluorescent
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We don't mean to alarm you, but your home could be infested with effective, life-saving antibiotics. Research coming out of the University of Nottingham over the weekend suggests that brain tissues extracted from certain insects like cockroaches
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An unmanned aerial surveillance drone is only as good as its power source, and as such many technologies are being considered that could drastically extend the duration of drone missions - for instance, DARPA's Vulture program has helped develop a giant solar plane
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Most of us keep our music on our computers and our computers are increasingly mobile, but there's a disconnect between the ability to store large amounts of music on a laptop and the portability of said laptop: laptop speakers aren't worth playing music on. But a clever
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An accidental chemistry discovery could lead to a new method for making antifreeze, moisturizer and plastic bottles out of biomass rather than petroleum, according to researchers at Iowa
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Never mind that twisty compact fluorescent. The new energy-efficient way to light your home is with LEDs. An upcoming crop of bulbs draw 12 watts or less, edging out a typical fluorescent, and they have a more conventional shape, contain no mercury, and last at least
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In a mission to learn more about the sun's inner workings, NASA is planning to launch a specially shielded spacecraft in 2018 that will plunge into the solar atmosphere. The car-sized Solar Probe Plus will explore an area just 4 million miles from the star's surface,
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An artificial kidney powered by the circulatory system could be the first implantable device to replace kidney donation and dialysis, scientists say.
Led by a University of
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Plants are extremely efficient converters of light into energy, more or less setting the bar for researchers creating photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity. As such, researchers are constantly trying to mimic the tricks that millions of years of
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For those out there that simply cannot wait to get their hands on the latest version of Apple’s iPhone and have been champing at the bit to get any indication of when it will be released, the good news is the end is nigh. According to a recent Apple press release published in full at
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Anthony Le, 25, has been a fan of Iron Man since he was a kid, but when he heard that the comic-book superhero was hitting the big screen in 2008, he was inspired to build his own Iron Man suit. That version was more of a costume, but his new one, finished just in time for
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Shoes change the human foot strike and may lead to more running injuries...
All
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Using homemade software and a standard computer port, a team of scientists has figured out exactly how easy it is to hack into a modern car -- scary news for motorists already wary of faulty brake and accelerator systems.
The research team wrote code that allows
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Per Segerbäck lives in a modest cottage in a nature reserve some 120km northeast of Stockholm. Wolves, moose and brown bears roam freely past his front door. He keeps limited human company, because human technology makes him physically ill. How ill? On a walk last summer, he ran into one of
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Virgin Galactic just released some nice video of its latest SpaceShipTwo (aka VSS Enterprise) test flight, the first with the spacecraft's two-pilot flight crew aboard.
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Taking cues from slime molds, ants, and living biological cells, a team of University of Pittsburgh researchers has designed a system of artificial cells that can communicate with one another and cooperate to carry out tasks. The computer models they've devised could
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Build an Atomic Clock
Time: 2 Hours
Difficulty: Hard
Buy or build a clock enclosure.
Follow the schematic to build the circuitry (download it from here), and attach the
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We're putting things that used to be on paper on video devices, things usually associated with large video screens onto pocket-sized devices, and now Sony is putting video on a flexible
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Videocalling has been a sci-fi staple for decades. From 2001 to Back to the Future people chatting face-to-face from great distances was a way of saying "Hey, look, it's the future!" So does FaceTime mean we're in the future?
FaceTime is
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In 1975, French philosopher Michel Foucault coined the term ‘panopticism’ in his book, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The term itself is derived from the panopticon, which is a rather ingenious prison design. The panopticon is circular, with prisoners housed on the outer
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It wasn’t so long ago that I was querying the logic behind the surge of interest in the newly released iPad. Since then, my desire to purchase Apple’s latest iGadget hasn’t increased in the
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While scouring the PopSci front page for inspiration I came across this story about the impending test-drive of a modified Ford Escape for blind drivers. While
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Today I’m going to explore the ins and outs of a question that I’m sure many of us have encountered in some form or another, be it through TV shows, movies or morbidly curious minds. The question is simple: if you could know when you were going to die, would you want to know? Personally,
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As far as self-explanatory blog titles go, this one certainly takes the cake in terms of removing the mystery of my point of view. For those who wish the point hammered home, I’m not a fan of Twitter. For me, Twitter is the bumper sticker of the online realm: a rather hit-or-miss attempt
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One of my most favourite pastimes is losing myself in an engaging film. Although I enjoy a mindless Hollywood blockbuster as much as the next 18-35 year old male target demographic member, it’s the films that drag me away to a whole other world that stick with me. And that’s because my
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It wasn’t so long ago that there was rather serious talk of the end of an era: we were going to see the decline of paperback and hardcover books, and enjoy the rise of the e-book. The only problem was that it didn’t play out like that. E-books arrived in a big way, with a multitude of onscreen
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The term ‘geek’ is in dire need of an upgrade. What used to be a word that described a stereotypical pasty, overweight and agoraphobic middle-aged man no longer refers to the same thing. Nowadays, pastimes and interests that relate to typical geek culture—love of movies, TV show obsession
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As I’m sure many of you are more than well aware, parts of Australia are currently suffering through some of the coldest days we’ve had in years (coldest day since 1949 here in Sydney town). While this can certainly prove difficult to motivate oneself to do much of anything during the day
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Not so long ago I received an email whose intent was to garner some sort of appreciation for my parent’s generation. It contained a list of various activities that we ‘kids these days’ don’t have an appreciation for: having to post letters by way of snail mail, playing outside due to
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