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You searched for "2011 02 with robotic cargo ferry launch europe will become an official supplier to the iss this month" and found 255 matches.
Location:  // // Technology // Robots // A Heated Robotic Mother Hen Improves Quail Chicks' Spatial Learning Abilities
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We love when live animals follow a robot's lead, from Robofish leading schools of real fish away from harm, to babies fooled into thinking a friendly robot is human. But studies have not yet shown how these robotic surrogates can affect animal development. Now a new study suggests they can have a positive effect - at least for a while.

Location: // // Technology // Robots // At Last, The First Humanoid Robot Astronaut Powers Up Aboard the ISS
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Our favorite Twitter ‘bot--no, like an actual robot that tweets--is out of the box and live-tweeting its new life on the International Space Station. Robonaut 2 was actually unboxed several months ago (it was delivered by the final Discovery mission in February) but has been sitting idly, waiting for the crew to get around to firing it up. Now R2 is plugged in, and man is it ever chatty.

Location:  // // Technology // Robots // Bug-Like Robotic Drones Becoming More Bug-Like, With Bulging Eyes and Tiny, Sensing Hairs
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Micro air vehicles, or MAVs, make for a tantalising option for intelligence and surveillance agencies looking to surreptitiously gather information or deliver surveillance devices without being seen. But MAVs--usually modeled after small birds or insects-- are notoriously unstable in flight and difficult to manoeuvre in cluttered environments. So the Pentagon is handing out research contracts to make the DoD's little robotic bugs more stable by making them more bug-like. Specifically, the DoD wants big bulging bug eyes and hairy wings for its MAVs.

Location: // // Science // Energy // Fermilab Sets End-of-Month Deadline to Establish Whether or Not the Higgs Boson Exists
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Fermilab's Tevatron collider runs out of money and time at the end of this month, but physicists there say that they are on track to establish whether the Higgs can exist within the most likely predicted mass range before their September 30 deadline. That's not the same as actually finding the Higgs boson of course, but physicists say they'll either rule out the possibility of its existence or not by month's end.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // Iran Indefinitely Suspends Plans to Launch a Monkey into Space
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Iran's ambitious 1960s-styled plans to send a live monkey into space aboard one of the Islamic Republic's Kavoshgar-5 rockets have been suspended indefinitely, a top space official told Iranian state television today, which pretty much dashes any hopes that we might see a primate hurled into suborbital space before year's end. 

Location: // // Technology // Robots // Killer Drones: When Will Our Weaponised Robots Become Autonomous?
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America's drone fleet has become an increasingly relied-upon wing of its counter-insurgency strategy and plays a key role in its geopolitical policy, particularly in Pakistan where unmanned aircraft routinely venture into sovereign territory and deliver lethal payloads to targets on the ground. But the Washington Post asks: just exactly how far away are we from real "killer robots." The answer, in this morning's piece of recommended reading, is: we're already there.

Location:  // // Galleries // PopSci Archive: Mail Order DIY // Kit-a-Month Program: November 1969
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While most of our DIY kits catered to home construction and car modification, we certainly indulged readers with a penchant for science projects. For just a $1.00 enrollment fee, and $4.95 per kit, you could make your own analog computer, light transmitter-receiver, weather station, atomic energy lab, and more. Members could either receive the kit on a monthly basis, or they could order all the projects at once for $49.50.

Location: // // Technology // Space // Russia Postpones Mission to the ISS, Could Leave Station Unoccupied for the First Time in a Decade
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Following the crash of a Russian cargo spacecraft a few days ago, the country has postponed its next mission to the International Space Station, originally scheduled for September 22nd. Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, hopes to complete that mission by late October or early November--but if it gets delayed again, the ISS may be left unmanned for the first time in over a decade.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // SpaceX Will Launch Dragon Capsule In November, Bound for the International Space Station
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A little less than six months after the final space shuttle launch, a private space company will launch a rocket carrying a cargo capsule bound for the International Space Station. SpaceX said this week that it plans a Nov. 30 launch date for its first rendezvous with the ISS - an encounter that will mark a major milestone in private space exploration.

Location: // // Science // Future Of The Environment // To Fight Warming, Brits Plan to Launch a Huge Balloon and Really Long Pipe
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When most people think of simulating a volcano, they think of baking soda, vinegar, and third grade science fair projects. A team of British researchers are thinking more along the lines of a giant balloon the size of a soccer stadium and a 12-mile garden hose that can pipe chemicals into the stratosphere to slow global warming. And they're planning to test their hypothesis soon, sending a scaled down version of their sky-hose-balloon-thing skyward in the next few months.

Location:  // // Science // Tune In Here from 9:30am for the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, Live
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UPDATE: It's all over, folks. Having said that, you can watch the entire unedited showcase beneath the fold. Or, you can read about the Australian scientists who were IgNobel-ly awarded here.

Location: // // Science // Astronomy // Video: Timelapse of Earth from the ISS
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Short of actually getting a ticket on a shuttle headed to space, this just might be the best view you're ever likely to get of our little corner of the universe.

Location:  // // DIY // Tools // IFTTT Launches, Letting Normal People Program "If This, Then That" Tools
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IFTTT, a very simple web tool that might end up becoming indispensable, has just opened to the public, with some new features in tow. IFTTT stands for "if this, then that," a common developer's phrase that indicates a relationship between two events. IFTTT takes that phrase and makes it simple to use for everyone. Want to automatically send your starred Google Reader items to Instapaper? Or get an SMS alert when your favorite comedian tweets that he's coming to your hometown? All easily done, with no development savvy required.

Location: // // Technology // Space // NASA Will Pay $1.6 Billion to Build Commercial Space Taxis
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Likely prompted in no small part by last month's Progress cargo ship crash in Russia, NASA has announced a US$1.6 billion contract running through 2014 to develop complete end-to-end cargo and crew transportation between Earth and the International Space Station. In other words, NASA is getting really serious about developing commercial space taxis that can do what the shuttle no longer can: get people and supplies to and from the space station without relying solely on Russian technology.

Location:  // // Science // Future Of The Environment // What Green Jobs Crisis? Environmental Groups Take a Fresh Look at the Numbers
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Last week, we told you about a New York Times analysis of the green jobs sector, painting a disappointingly dismal picture given all the hope surrounding economic growth via clean-energy technology. But now, a new piece from the watchdogs at Grist has taken strong issue with the Times's dreary conclusion.

Location: // // Technology // Space // European Space Agency Plans to Team Up with Russia for the First Manned Mission to Mars
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If it's a space race the Russians want, a space race they shall have. But et tu, Europe? Russian news outlet Ria Novosti is reporting that the European Space Agency (ESA), long the ally of Cold War champion NASA, is teaming with Russia on a joint manned mission to Mars, and that their crew will be the first to set foot on the Red Planet.

Location:  // // Gadgets // National Security Agency Is Building a Top-Secret Secure Smartphone
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For all the amazing technology developed by and for American defense and intelligence agencies, the government's spooks are apparently lagging way behind in one key area: Smartphones. That means no mobile email or Angry Birds for the US spy corps. One NSA agent is trying to change that.

Location: // // Technology // Engineering // New Theory on World Trade Center Collapse Blames Explosive Chemical Reaction
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More than ten years after the fact, a scientist based at the Norwegian research institute SINTEF is proposing that a well-documented chemical reaction spelled the ultimate demise of the Twin Towers after the attacks of September 11, 2020. This isn't another conspiracy theory, nor is it proven fact. But Christian Simensen theorises that a mix of molten aluminium from the aircraft bodies mixed with water from the sprinkler systems could have catalysed secondary blasts that brought the World Trade Center towers to the ground.

Location:  // // Gadgets // Dear Nike: Here's How You Make a Self-Tying Shoe From the Future
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Nike just announced that it's bringing the famed self-tying, light-up sneakers from Back to the Future II to market as a limited edition, under the name Nike Air Mag. They're not tech-free, boasting some flashy LED lighting, but everyone knows the main draw of the movie's shoes was the self-tying--and these shoes could have been so much more futuristic. It may not be 2015, the year depicted in the movie, just yet, but that doesn't mean we don't deserve self-tying shoes right now, dammit. Here are some possible routes to the true self-tying shoe.

Location: // // Science // Doctors Who Work With X-Rays May Be Adapting at the Cellular Level to Withstand Radiation
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Doctors whose bodies are regularly exposed to x-rays may be adapting at the cellular level to protect themselves against radiation, according to a new study. The research hints that humans could adapt to withstand radiation exposure.

Location:  // // Science // In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Becomes a Drone Pilot for a Day
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The offer came simply via the subject line of an email: "Want to fly a drone?" It was from Todd Backus of DATRON, a maker of--among other things--military grade radio communication systems and tactical data networking setups based in Vista, Calif. It was a question that didn't require a whole lot of consideration on my part--if there were drones to fly at AUVSI's massive unmanned systems show in Washington D.C. last week, I was going to fly them.

And that's how I end up on a soccer pitch far from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center piloting a small quadcopter drone and quietly praying that we won't be arrested. Not that we're up to anything criminal, but I have no idea how close or far we are from D.C.'s numerous "high-value" locations and the restricted airspace that surrounds them. What I do know is that if I'm jailed on suspicion of terrorism, my editors likely won't cover my expenses.

Location: // // Science // Japanese Researchers Develop a Way to Turn Biological Tissue Transparent
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All the new breakthroughs in microscopy we've seen recently are designed to help scientists see deeper, inside individual cells and into the depths of the brain. Of course, this would be easier to do if there wasn't a bunch of other tissue blocking the cells you want to see. Japanese researchers have a new solution: Make it all transparent.

Location:  // // Technology // New Mexico Building a 20-Square-Mile Empty City in Which to Test Renewable Energy
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In the old American West, ghost towns often formed from catastrophe, when natural or economic disasters led occupants to abandon their homes and buildings in search of better options. But in the new West, one purposefully-built ghost town will be a centre, or in this case The Center, of opportunity.

Location: // // Technology // Robots // Robot Culture Machine Efficiently Grows Biological Cells Without Human Intervention
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The tedious, carpal-tunnel-inducing pipette work of cell biologists may soon be relegated to robots, thanks to a new cell factory developed in Germany. This could free humans to perform new studies and ask new questions, as automated equipment takes over the time-consuming task of growing, feeding and observing cells in the lab.

Location:  // // Technology // Video: Nanorockets Could Deliver Drugs Within the Body
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The idea of nanorockets zipping around your body delivering drugs sounds a little Osmosis Jonesy, but German researchers have developed a less toxic fuel that might make that possible.

Location: // // Technology // Robots // A New Generation of Throwbots is Ready to Be Flung Into Battle
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Throwbot. Small, rugged, easy to deploy. "One time we dropped it out of a helicopter from more than 30 metres," one of the designers tells me. "The worst that happened was that one wheel was slightly damaged so it wanted to drive a little wobbly. But it still rolled."

Location:  // // Technology // Robots // BullDog: A Bigger, Scarier Version of BigDog Gets Closer to the Battlefield
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That fun video of the BigDog robot we shared last week may have been impressive, but apparently the robot is about to be eclipsed by another member of its own family.

Location: // // Technology // Military // By Encoding Messages in Glowing Proteins, Scientists Turn E. Coli Into Invisible Ink
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It's an innovation fit for a Cold War spy novel: a means to transmit secret messages via microbe. Dubbed steganography by printed arrays of microbes (yup: SPAM), the technique involves encoding messages in the colours of glowing bacteria, which can be later unlocked with antibiotics.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // China Launches Its First Space Station Module Into Orbit
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At 9:16 p.m. local time--that was at 9:16 a.m. eastern time here in the U.S.--China successfully lofted its first inhabitable space station module into orbit on the back of a Long March 2F launch vehicle, marking a milestone for both the People's space program and for the Party's geopolitical ambitions. China--the third nation (behind the U.S.A. and Russia) to independently launch manned missions into space aboard homegrown technology--now joins the old Cold War powers as the third nation to put a space station into orbit.

Location: // // Technology // Aviation // DARPA Fills Us In On HTV-2's Semi-Successful Flight and Very Successful Crash
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Last week, DARPA's HTV-2 (Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2) Falcon vehicle launched to near-orbital speeds aboard a Minotaur rocket before beginning what was designed to be a Mach 20 glide back to earth, demonstrating the kind of hypersonic capability needed to deliver a payload anywhere in the world in an hour. Then, a few minutes into its flight, HTV-2's data transmitters went silent and so did the DARPA news stream feeding us the play-by-play.

Location:  // // Science // Disarming HIV Could Protect the Immune System and Potentially Lead to a Vaccine, New Study Shows
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News from the field of HIV research has been pretty promising of late - this summer, we heard good news that antiretroviral treatment is superbly effective, at least when it's used correctly. And thanks to some video gamers, scientists' understanding of proteins involved in HIV keeps getting better. Now researchers have another tool in their arsenal. They can strip the virus itself of its ability to trick the human immune system.

Location: // // Galleries // 5 Gadgets That Failed to Survive // HP Touchpad
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Now, it's really hard for us to do this, mainly because one of our staffers owns and loves a Touchpad. The truth, though,  is that the Touchpad tanked. There have been many suggestions as to why the first, and in all probability last HP consumer tablet failed - from unoptimised software to outmoded hardware - but the problem is most probably HP. It never really looked like they themselves knew what they wanted from a tablet, and it's since become clear they'd rather pursue the business sector anyway. A shame.

Location:  // // Gadgets // Mice Finally Get That Microscope Hat They've Been Wanting
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Scientists use mice for all kinds of fun things, from injecting old mice with young mouse blood to training them to sniff for bombs, but when doing research, it's often very difficult to see what's actually going on in a mouse's brain. A new microscope actually mounts to a mouse's head like a hat, allowing the mouse to freely move around while the scientists try to figure out how it tastes umami flavour, or whatever.

Location: // // Science // Quantum Dot Thermometers Take the Temperature of Individual Living Cells
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Next time you take your temperature, maybe think twice about its accuracy. Despite what the mercury says, not all of your cells are really at 37 degrees celsius, scientists reported in a new study. Using nanoscale thermometers, researchers have shown for the first time that living cells can exist at different temperatures. Busy sections are warmer, and less-active ones are cooler.

Location:  // // Technology // Military // The US Army Is Ordering Weaponized, Soldier-Launched Kamikaze Suicide Drones
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The idea of small, man portable, soldier-launched aerial drones has been catching on for some time now with military operations commanders, as they bring the unique situational awareness and reconnaissance capabilities of larger drone aircraft down to the platoon--or even the individual--level. Now, the U.S. Army is taking the idea to the next level, ordering its first batch of weaponised drones capable of launching from small, portable tube and suicide bombing a target from above.

Location: // // Technology // Robots // Video: DARPA's AlphaDog Gets Up, Scrambles Over Rocks and Runs
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We just can't resist, so here's one more video from the maker of the military's robotic pack animals. Check out Boston Dynamics' new AlphaDog - which was previously nicknamed BullDog - in a newly released, DARPA-sanctioned video.

Location:  // // Science // All the Gold We've Mined Came From Space, New Study Says
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When our planet was still forming, collisions with other planetesimals - and a Mars-sized object that sheared away the moon - turned the embryonic Earth into a roiling ball of molten rock. Iron and other heavy elements sank toward the core, and other iron-loving elements did, too. As a result, there's plenty of gold at our planet's center. So why, then, is there also gold in the hills? A new study supports the theory that it was all a gift from above.

Location: // // Technology // Single-Molecule Motor Runs on Electricity, Could Be Used for Single-Cell Surgery
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We've seen single-molecule "motors" before, but they're pretty primitive, motors only in the most basic sense of the word. But this new one, made of a single butyl methyl sulfide molecule, is much closer to what images the word "motor" might conjure: when electricity is applied, the molecule is triggered to spin, without affecting any other molecules around it.

Location:  // // Technology // Robots // Video: Watch BigDog, PopSci's Favorite Quadruped Bot, Romp and Grow Through the Years
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The proud roboticists at Boston Dynamics compiled a nice new video featuring the greatest highlights from the life and times of BigDog, the big, playful, and very slightly creepy robotic dog. From robot pup playtime to a beach vacation in Thailand, BigDog has had plenty of adventures.

Location: // // Science // Australians Could All Get Free Lifetime Federally Hosted Inboxes, If Government Quits Snail Mail
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In the future, all your government mail - jury duty slips, election notices, those Social Security earnings statements - may not come in the mail at all. Here in Australia, federal politicians are debating ditching snail mail entirely, giving all citizens a state-sponsored inbox where we would receive all government communications.

Location:  // // Gadgets // Boeing to Outfit New 787s With Android-Based Entertainment
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There may already be iPads in cockpits, but there will soon be Androids among us, the passengers. Boeing has announced that all of its 787 Dreamliner planes currently in production are being outfitted with Android servers and touchscreens.

Location: // // Science // Can Animals Really Be Gay?
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Scientists at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the University of Rhode Island recently reported on the same-sex mating habits of Octopoteuthis deletron, a deep-sea squid that indiscriminately shoots sperm packets onto both male and female squids passing by.

Location:  // // Science // Future Of The Environment // CERN Experiment Finds Possible Link Between Cosmic Rays and Climate Change
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Not content with just stirring the pot in particle physics, CERN has embarked on an experiment aimed at addressing whether or not comic rays from deep space might be seeding clouds in Earth's atmosphere, influencing climate change. The early findings are far from deciding the issue of whether climate change is man made or otherwise, but they have borne some interesting results. It turns out that cosmic rays could be influencing temperatures on Earth. Perhaps even more groundbreaking, it turns out they also might not. Welcome to climate science.

Location: // // DIY // DIY Solution to Annoying TV Celebs Mutes Your TV Whenever Charlie Sheen Is Mentioned
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It's become a refrain in this age of 24-hour news stations, media-starved talking heads, and hundreds of channels of stuff you don't want to watch. "Why won't they just shut up about (insert your least favorite abusive sitcom star, diminutive bepoofed reality star, brain-dead politician, or Kyle Sandilands here). The talking heads may never shut up, but that doesn't mean you have to listen to them--and some enterprising Makers created an Arduino-controlled gadget that'll make that even easier.

Location:  // // Science // Health // DNA Analysis Catches Carcinogens in a Simple Saliva Sample
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Researchers presenting at the 242nd National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society this week in Denver have demonstrated a new DNA test that can measure the amount of potential carcinogens clinging to a person's DNA. But unlike previous tests that required white blood cell or urine samples and fairly intensive lab scrutiny, this one can hunt for carcinogens in a simple saliva swab.

Location: // // Technology // Robots // Enhancing Robots' Senses of Touch
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Researchers at the National University of Singapore are enhancing robots' sense of touch by mimicking the ridged and contoured surfaces of human fingertips. Fingerprints, it turns out, don't just give humans better grip but also carry out a sensitive type of signal processing. By imparting that same kind of signal processing to robots, we could reduce the processing loads to robots' CPUs and help them better identify objects through their shapes.

Location:  // // Science // Glow-In-The-Dark Cats Could Provide Answers About AIDS
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Genetically modified glow-in-the-dark cats not only make stylish, futuristic pets, but now provide insight into feline AIDS as well. The cats were injected with an antiviral gene from a rhesus macaque monkey that helps them resist feline AIDS, along with one that produces the fluorescent protein GFP. The latter gene, which is naturally produced by jellyfish, is regularly used in genetic engineering as a way to mark cells. If the cats aren't glowing, then the AIDS-resisting gene might not have made it into the cell either.

Location: // // Technology // Space // Kepler Analysis Projects One-Third of Sun-Like Stars Have an Earth-Like Planet Orbiting
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One of the fun things about astronomy is that we can only know so much through empirical observation, yet we can "know" so much more through enlightened, mathematical guesswork. Such is the nature of the most interesting new science paper I've come across on the Internet today. In it, Wesley Traub of CalTech crunches some Kepler data and makes a tantalising mathematical prediction: one-third of sun-like stars have at least one earth-like terrestrial planet orbiting in their habitable zones.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // Meet NASA's New Deep Space Rocket
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Today, NASA officially announced the design of its forthcoming Space Launch System--a heavy-lift rocket capable of taking humans into deep space. It will be the primary vehicle to replace the Space Shuttle, but with significantly more power--enough to reach Mars.

Location: // // Technology // Space // NASA's Falling UARS Satellite Found in Remote South Pacific
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NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) has finally returned home after two decades in orbit, and it couldn't have crash-landed in a better place: a 800-km-wide swath of the South Pacific. The falling 5.4-tonne satellite - which had been expected to re-enter the atmosphere for a couple of weeks, causing some degree of worry - plunged into a part of the world that is virtually uninhabited, mere minutes after reports said it might come crashing down in North America, NASA officials said yesterday.

Location:  // // Technology // Robot Journalist Will Snag Pulitzer By 2016, Predicts Robot-Journalist Programmer
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The New York Times took a look at start-up Narrative Science today, a company that has developed what is a pretty cool step forward for artificial intelligence, and a pretty frightening step towards human labor's eventual replacement by machines, a piece of software that takes data (sports statistics, financial reports, etc.) and turns it into news articles. They're pretty confident about their product too, with one of the founders predicting that a computer program will win a Pulitzer within five years (and that it may well be their technology).

Location: // // Science // Scientists Successfully Induce Hibernation in Animals for the First Time
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Scientists at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks have successfully caused a group of arctic ground squirrels, naturally hibernating animals, to wake from and then go back into hibernation. It's the first time anyone has ever managed to induce hibernation, and it could have some pretty amazing medical benefits for humans as well.

Location:  // // Gadgets // Scrunchable Antenna Sewn Into Life Vests Could Help Rescuers Find the Lost
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Adventure-seekers can use all kinds of emergency beacon tech to help themselves get found in case they go missing - but in many cases, this requires sticking something in your pocket, from which it could conceivably fall out. A new antenna could instead be sewn right into your clothes, ensuring rescuers can find you so long as you're wearing something.

Location: // // Technology // Military // The Next Generation of Night-Vision Goggles
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Over at Danger Room, Noah Shachtman got a look at the US military's current and next-gen night-vision goggles (or, more accurately, "goggle," or "monogoggle," since they only cover one eye). Hardly anyone ever gets to look at these, so to actually be able to try them out is pretty amazing. The goggles live up to the hype: they pack incredibly sensitive thermal sensors (enough so that reflections and handprints both glow) as well as embedded LCDs that transmit all kinds of data.

Location:  // // Science // World's Oldest Fossils Show Sulfur-Based Microbes Lived 3.4 Billion Years Ago, Presenting a New Target for Astrobiology
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Clusters of islands poked through hot oceans 3.4 billion years ago, when the world still had no oxygen and the seas churned under a pallid, overcast sky. But life thrived on Earth even then, scientists say - and now they have the world's oldest fossils to prove it.

Location: // // Technology // Military // Apple's New iPhone Assistant is a Voice-Activated DARPA Spinoff
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Apple's iPhone 4S announcement yesterday was somewhat anticlimactic save the incorporation of Siri, a voice-command application that is now integrated deeply into Apple's new iOS 5 and allows users to ask their phones questions and give them commands in natural language. And if that kind of voice recognition and command sounds somewhat familiar to you technophiles, it should. Siri is the indirect spawn of DARPA, Danger Room reports, envisioned to help military commanders organise their data and otherwise make sense of fast-moving situations.

Location:  // // Technology // Engineering // Christchurch is Thinking of Replacing Its Earthquake-Ravaged Church with a Cardboard Cathedral
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The Bible has at least a little to say about how to construct a building, but mostly in Proverbs and mostly not having anything to do with actually building a structure (metaphor!). So without rock solid instructions, officials overseeing the Christchurch Cathedral--the one in Christchurch, New Zealand, that was all but leveled in February's 6.3-magnitude earthquake--plan to build a 700-seat cardboard cathedral as a temporary replacement.

Location: // // Gadgets // Cameras // Custom-Made Camera Sensor Is 60 Times Bigger Than a DSLR's
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This 8x10-inch sensor--about 60 times the size of a full-frame DSLR sensor--is the creation of photographer Mitchell Feinberg, who was sick of spending thousands of dollars on expensive film previews of his work. The sensor (which, he says, cost as much as "a good-sized house--before the housing crash") replaces the Polaroid backs that many photographers use to test exposure. But since these professional-grade Polaroids are so expensive these days due to their huge size and scarcity, he created this sensor (named the Maxback), which lets him see exactly how his shots would look on film, but in only 30 seconds and with no added cost. It's not to be used for regular photography--the resolution is too low for a regular print spread--but to properly simulate how his shots would look on (gigantic) film, a DSLR just wouldn't cut it. You can read more about it at Popular Photography.

Location:  // // Gadgets // Smartphones // Dashboard-Mounted Smartphones Network Together to Watch for Red Light Patterns, Help Drivers Commute Efficiently
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The perceived future of driving tends to revolve around a networked traffic infrastructure in which cars, traffic signals, and other roadway implements talk to each other electronically to optimise traffic flow and make driving more efficient all around. But MIT researchers think we can do many of these things on an existing network: the one that ties all of our smartphones together. A network of camera-equipped mobile devices mounted on dashboards could crowd source information about traffic signals and tell drivers what speed to maintain to avoid waiting at traffic lights.

The idea stems from an already popular smartphone setup in which drivers perch their smartphones in dashboard brackets and use them as navigation devices. The MIT team built their SignalGuru app to take advantage of the camera on the other side of the phone by collecting stoplight data as cars drive around and feeding it back to a central system that then builds a larger picture of a city's traffic flow.

Location: // // Gadgets // Hands On: Amazon's Kindle Fire Tablet and Cheaper, Smaller, Touch-Based Kindles
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Today at an event in New York City, Amazon announced its new family of Kindles, and it's probably the biggest, or at least most visible, update in the line's history. The three new "traditional" Kindles continue Amazon's trend of "cheaper and smaller," including two touch-based Kindles (one Wi-Fi-only and one 3G-enabled) and one ridiculously cheap non-touch version. But the big news: Amazon's first tablet, a 7-inch model called the Kindle Fire that's priced low enough in the tablet marketplace to ride alongside the iTunes cards and chewy in the impulse buys section.

Location:  // // Technology // Aviation // In Boeing Demonstration, Different Autonomous Drones Swarm Together For Recon Missions
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Commanding an army of drones is one thing; letting drones command themselves is something else entirely, especially when they have very little in common. Boeing recently tested a swarm network to help disparate drones work together, sending two types of unmanned aerial vehicles on a reconnaissance mission over eastern Oregon.

Location: // // Galleries // Sunny with a chance of space junk // Just your average day...
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A man in Altai, Siberia, walks past a piece of space junk that landed in middle of the town. Segments from space launches in Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, such as debris and toxic fuel, land here often. Injuries and poisonings have forced Russian Space Agencies to find a new launch pad.

Location:  // // Gadgets // Smartphones // Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5, AKA "Mango," Starts Rolling Out Today
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Windows Phone 7.5, known as Mango, is a massive upgrade to the already impressive Windows Phone platform, including major additions like multitasking, fast app switching (along with threaded conversations, an idea taken from the deceased WebOS), a totally new browser, apps integrated into search, augmented reality, and way more. It's the biggest update since the platform's original release, and we're really looking forward to seeing the next wave of hardware that really takes advantage of it.

Location: // // Science // Health // New Phase-Changing Gel Method Repairs Severed Blood Vessels Better than Stitches
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A new heat-sensitive gel and glue combo is a major step forward for cardiovascular surgery, enabling blood vessels to be reconnected without puncturing them with a needle and thread. It represents the biggest change to vascular suturing in 100 years, according to Stanford University Medical Center researchers.

Location:  // // Science // Health // Researchers Turn Cloned Human Embryo into Working Stem Cell Line
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Potentially big stem cell news out of the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory today in Nature, though in our experience it's always good to temper one's expectations when it comes to these sorts of things. After all, we've thought we cracked the code on embryonic stem cell cloning technology more than once, only to find this kind of biology is much more difficult and complex than originally thought. Nonetheless, researchers have reprogrammed an adult human egg to an embryonic state and used it to create a self-reproducing embryonic stem cell line. And that's a big deal.

Location: // // Gadgets // Smartphones // RIP WebOS, the Best Smartphone Platform Nobody Used
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Today, in an almost insultingly brief statement in the middle of a press release about something else entirely, HP killed off its most recent acquisition, and perhaps its most beloved platform: WebOS, the mobile OS designed by the scrappy gurus at Palm. It's a bitter, inconsequential end for an OS that in its own way paved as much ground as the iPhone, and that even in its current decrepit state is a damn fine platform. WebOS, you deserved better.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // Russian Soyuz Spacecraft Lands Safely in Kazakhstan, Three Astronauts in Tow
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The Russian Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft, carrying three astronauts (Commander Andrei Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyayev, both Russian, and American Ron Garan) safely landed this morning in Kazakhstan, bringing them home after five months on the International Space Station. The landing, about 151 km southeast of the smallish Kazakh city Zhezkazgan, wasn't entirely flawless--mission control lost contact with the capsule briefly--but the landing itself was very smooth.

Location: // // Galleries // Biggest Uncontrolled Reentries // Saturn S-II-13
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Image: NASA / Name: Saturn S-II-13 (Saturn V Stage) / Reentry Date: January 11, 2020 / Reentry Location: Atlantic / Size: 49 tonnes / Type: Uncontrolled reentry

The S-II was the second stage used on the massive Saturn V rocket, famous for launching Apollo to the moon. The S-II was used for the 13 launches of the Saturn V - this 49 tonne stage reentered on January 11, 2020.

Location:  // // Science // Astronomy // Supercomputer Simulation Shows for the First Time How a Milky Way-Like Galaxy Forms
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It took nearly a year of high-powered number crunching on various supercomputers, but researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz campus and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Zurich, Switzerland have finally produced a computer simulation of a galaxy that looks much like our own. That may not sound so huge at face value, but it actually is the first high-resolution simulation of its kind that has turned out a galaxy similar to the Milky Way, and it has rescued the prevailing "cold dark matter" cosmological model of how our disc galaxy formed from a good deal of doubt.

Location: // // Gadgets // Computers // Two Key Advances Bring Quantum Computers Closer to Reality Than Ever
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Researchers on two continents are reporting two big breakthroughs in quantum computing today - a quantum system built on the familiar von Neumann processor-memory architecture, and a working digital quantum simulator built on a quantum-computer platform. Although these developments are still constrained to the lab, they're yet another sign that a quantum leap in computing may be just around the corner.

Location:  // // Technology // Military // Video: Cloaking System Makes Tank Invisible to Infrared Sensors
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BAE Systems's Adaptiv technology enables objects as big as tanks to completely vanish from view--when seen at night with an infrared sensor, admittedly, but that's still a major advantage. An Adaptiv-outfitted tank can change its thermal signature to look like anything from a big rock to a truck to nothing at all, fading into the background and becoming invisible.

Location: // // Technology // Robots // Video: Da Vinci Surgical Robot Deftly Peels a Grape
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Within the confines of the PopSci universe, the Da Vinci surgical robot requires no introduction. But while we've seen Da Vinci do some amazing things--most notably, perform prostate surgery, though lacing the football and making paper planes were pretty cool too--we're always thrilled to see the dexterous machine do something else. And so we bring you this footage of Da Vinci, peeling a grape like peeling grapes is easy.

Location:  // // Technology // Robots // Video: Monkeys Demonstrate Brain-Controlled Arm With a Sense of Touch
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The holy grail of prosthetics research is and has been a kind of "Luke Skywalker hand" interface--prosthetics that respond to stimulus from the brain and function just as the original appendage it is replacing. But ideally the prosthetic wouldn't just respond to stimulus from the brain--it would also provide sensory stimulus to the brain. It would have a sense of touch. And in a paper published today in Nature, we see the groundwork for just such a breed of prostheses.

Location: // // DIY // Tools // Video: Plucky Fish Swims Far Away to Find Proper Tool For Eating Dinner
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We all know takeaway food sometimes requires special utensils to be eaten properly. The same is true for fish. (The food they're eating, not takeaway fish.) Below, behold the first video of a reef fish using a tool - and traveling a great distance to find it.

Location:  // // Technology // Robots // Video: With Semantic Search, PR2 Robot Can Plan Its Own Sandwich-Hunting Mission
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The wonderful PR2 robot can do plenty of things food-wise - bake cookies, fix a sausage breakfast, fetch beer - but it's usually following some set of directions when it does these things. Now, semantic search enables PR2 to figure out how to do things on its own.

Location: // // Science // Energy // 13-Year-Old Designs Super-Efficient Solar Array Based on the Fibonacci Sequence
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Plenty of us head into the woods to find inspiration. Aidan Dwyer, 13, went to the woods and had a eureka moment that could be a major breakthrough in solar panel design.

Location:  // // Gadgets // Cameras // A Camera With the Processing Power of a Computer
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Dual-core processors have been a computing mainstay for more than six years, allowing machines to handle two tasks at once without sacrificing speed in either. This year, dual-core chips have begun popping up in app-hungry phones. The next step: cameras. The Olympus PEN E-P3 is the first digital camera running on a dual-core chip, which lets it capture, retouch, and save shots nearly twice as fast as most competitors.

Location: // // Galleries // Archive Gallery: Steve Jobs in the Pages of Popular Science, Over Three Decades // Apple II: February 1978
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We had only good things to say about the Apple II after acquiring one just after its debut. Writer William J. Hawkins noted that unlike his previous home computers, the Apple II took longer to remove from the box than it took to start working.

The specs were certainly impressive at the time. For just under $1300, you would get 4 kB of Ram, a 1 MHz microprocessor, BASIC programming language capability, and an audio cassette interface for data storage.

Location:  // // Section undetermined // Bacteria in Gut Influence Brains of Mice, Soothed by Probiotic Broth
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Anyone who has ever had a stomach bug knows it can really subdue your spirits as well as your appetite. But other parts of the gut microbiome can have the opposite effect, and make you feel great. Irish researchers have found a type of gut bacteria that seems to have directly interacted with the brains of mice, reducing stress and depression.

Location: // // Science // Bats Have Unique Superfast Squeak Muscles to Make Superfast Echolocation Calls
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The only mammals that can fly are also the only mammals with a larynx that flexes at ludicrous speed, a new study shows. As bats flip and whirl toward their prey, they chirp at an accelerating rate, increasing their echolocating calls to 160-190 chirps per second. This is possible because their laryngeal muscles can contract up to 200 times per second, researchers say.

Location:  // // Science // Chemist Once Accused of 'Quasi-Science' Wins Nobel For Quasicrystal Discovery
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Vindication has to be one of the most satisfying effects of a Nobel Prize win - after years of work, the scientific community has finally recognised the real weight of a discovery someone probably fought a very long time to prove. So Daniel Shechtman must feel really satisfied today. The Israeli chemist is a Nobel laureate for his discovery of quasicrystals, a unique form of solid matter whose discovery cost him his job and reputation.

Location: // // Galleries // PopSci Archive: Mail Order DIY // DIY Sports Cars: October 1982
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Embarrassed by your unsightly Corvair? Try outfitting it with a glamorous bolt-on body. With a little bit of tinkering, you could become the proud owner of a T-Bird, Porsche, or Ferrari, without going into debt over your purchase. Unlike the original sports cars, though, the bodies of kit cars are made of fiberglass coated in polyester resin instead of sheet metal.

Location:  // // Science // Energy // Fermilab Stops Smashing Hadrons, Looks Into Smashing Muons
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Tomorrow American high-energy physics centre Fermilab will power down their Tevatron particle collider for the final time, marking the end of an era. But for some, that era is so over anyhow. Hadrons, like last season's handbag, have had their time in the spotlight. The next hot trend in physics is muons, and all the cool kids know it. That's why Fermilab physicists are already taking a hard look at muon colliding technologies as a possible next move in the game of international physics research.

Location: // // Technology // Fermilab Will Double-Check CERN's Revolutionary Faster-Than-Light Claim
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So far, the only thing moving faster than light is speculation. But in the wake of last week's baffling neutrino news out of CERN, physicists are crunching numbers to test whether these ghostly particles really can move faster than photons. Physicists at Fermilab are re-examining some old data to help answer the question.

Location:  // // Galleries // PopSci Archive: Mail Order DIY // Fireplace: September 1967
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While a DIY fireplace seems like a challenging, even hazardous, home project, The Majestic Company claimed that you could build their wood-burning fireplaces without any expensive tools or masonry. It could fit in any room (except the bathroom, of course) and came in a variety of styles. You could choose from a corner fireplace, a front model, and pick either real brick tops or synthetic brick tops.

Location: // // Science // Five Reasons You Should Care About the New Ozone Hole Over the Arctic
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A prolonged chill in the atmosphere high above the Arctic last winter led to a mobile, morphing hole in the ozone layer, scientists report in a new paper. It's just like the South Pole hole we all studied in school, but potentially more harmful to humans - more of us live at northern latitudes. Here are five things you need to know about it.

Location:  // // Cars // IBM Patents a Mapping Algorithm To Re-Route Drivers Along Retail-Heavy Roads
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With connectivity and smarter planning, intelligent cars promise to cut congestion, make roads safer and generally improve the whole experience of getting behind the wheel. But nobody said it was all altruistic.

Location: // // Technology // Aviation // Introducing the Matternet, A Network of Drones For Deliveries In Remote Locations
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This summer's crippling famine in Somalia, which has killed tens of thousands of people and led half a million more to seek refuge in Kenya, is notable for many reasons - but the theft and sale of life-saving aid is arguably one of the worst. A new project could be one way to prevent such atrocity in the future: Use drones to drop food and drugs right where they're needed, no human intervention required. Enter the Matternet.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // Latest Results from the Large Hadron Collider Do Not Look Good For the Supersymmetry Theory of Everything
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The latest news from the Large Hadron Collider: scientists still cannot explain why we're all here. In the most detailed analysis of strange beauty particles - that's what they're really called - physicists cannot find supersymmetric particles, which are shadow partners for every known particle in the standard model of modern physics. This could mean that they don't exist, which would be very interesting news indeed.

Location: // // Science // Energy // MIT's Tiny Energy-Harvester Makes Electricity From Low-Frequency Vibrations
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The rumbling you feel driving along a bridge may soon serve a purpose beyond just waking you up behind the wheel. Researchers at MIT have developed a tiny energy-harvester that is able to harness low-frequency vibrations like those made by a bridge or pipeline and converting them to electricity for wireless sensors.

Location:  // // Cars // Nissan Developing Mind-Reading Cars
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Barely a day goes by without a new development in smart car technology, from computerised cars to driving directions. Now researchers in Switzerland are developing cars with the ultimate gift of intelligence: The ability to read our minds.
Location: // // Science // Health // Painless Protein Scaffold Lets Cavity-Ridden Teeth Re-Grow From the Inside Out
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A new tooth-regenerating paste could reverse bacterial-induced tooth decay, sweeping dental drills into the dustbin of history. Hopefully.

Location:  // // Technology // Researchers Weave Wearable Memory Out of Copper
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Here at PopSci, we're greatly looking forward to wearing our technology. There's been a lot of work done on this front, from fireproofing to power generation, and now we can add memory storage to the list of things fabric of the future will be able to do.

Location: // // Science // Space Weather Could Delay Manned Mars Missions
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Our sun has been more active lately as it enters a new phase in its 11-year cycle, which is one reason we've seen a bunch of enormous coronal mass ejections and solar explosions in the past few months. But it's actually a pretty weak solar maximum, as solar maximums go, so heliophysicists believe the sun is entering a prolonged hibernation unseen since the 17th century. This has some major implications for climate changes - on Earth and in the heavens, according to one new study.

Location:  // // Gadgets // The Web's Best Tributes to Steve Jobs
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An interesting gauge of a person's overall impact on our culture is now found immediately online, as the world learns together the news of that person's passing. By that measure, Steve Jobs has led a truly extraordinary life. But you didn't need us to tell you that.

Location: // // Gadgets // Why Amazon's Losses On The Fire Are A Smart Idea
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The news today told us what everybody already knew: Amazon is selling its new Fire tablet for a pittance. Actually, even more than a pittance – estimates place the actual profit from hardware sales alone to be.. well, to be nothing at all.

Location:  // // Cars // Electric Cars // "Boozer" the Electric Car Smashes Distance Record, Driving 1,000 Miles on a Single Charge
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A German car nicknamed "heavy drinker" or "boozer" has set a new record for electric vehicle stamina: 1631.5 km on a single charge. The single-seat vehicle's aerodynamic shape, with the motors integrated into the wheel hubs, helped the car accomplish this feat.

Location: // // Technology // "Time Cells" In the Brain Keep Track of Events, Firing As Time Goes By
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Whether we're engrossed in an activity or the alarm clock simply fails to chime, we've all been in situations when we say we've lost track of time. But our brains have not really lost track at all. A specific group of cells in the brain's memory center is encoding for the passage of time, researchers report. These "time cells" are key to our perception of sequences of events.

Location:  // // Science // A Clever New Fishing Method, 'Conching,' is the Latest Trend Spreading Among Australia's Hippest Bottlenose Dolphins
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Attention hipsters and other people seeking hipness: there's a new fad catching on in Western Australia's Shark Bay, and you won't want to be the last to to post pictures of yourself imitating it to your Tumblr feed. "Conching" is a method by which Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins are trapping small fish in conch shells, bringing the shells to the surface, and then shaking them with their rostrums to clear out the water and dump the fish into their mouths. More remarkably, the trend appears to be spreading throughout an entire population of dolphins, and fast.

Location: // // Technology // A Florida School District is Taking Attendance by Scanning Students' Fingers
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Roll call is going high-tech in Washington County, part of the U.S. state of Florida. Rather than the usual name calling and response, students are now checking into class with finger scanning devices. And to keep better track of students from the minute they come under district supervision until they are delivered safely home again, the scanners are now moving from the school building to the school bus.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // A Supernova Fades Gloriously into a Supernova Remnant
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When light from an exploding star in the Large Magellanic Cloud reached Earth in 1987, it was the closest supernova explosion astronomers had witnessed in centuries. Now Supernova 1987a is making history again, this time as the youngest supernova remnant that can be seen from Earth.

Location: // // Technology // Acoustic Cloaking Device Lets Sound Travel Uninterrupted Around Objects
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A new type of acoustic cloak would allow soundwaves to travel around an object unimpeded, and could be used to build better concert halls, quiet spaces and noise-shielding headgear, researchers say.

Location:  // // Technology // After A Magnetic Pulse to the Brain, Study Subjects Cannot Tell a Lie
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The act of deception is probably as old as civilization - not long after humans began communicating, they began communicating lies. Shortly after that, they probably started trying to force others to tell the truth. Modern technology has given us a few options in this arena, from dubious polygraphs to powerful drugs - and now a new study suggests brain interference can work, too.

Location: // // Technology // Robots // Agriculture Continues to Plow Into the Future, Now With Autonomous Robot Tractors
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While the country bumpkin farmer stereotype might suggest otherwise, driving a tractor is difficult, requiring precision skills. Now Flemish engineers have announced a new self-driving tractor with precision that rivals a human driver. This could mean drastically lower operating costs for farmers, and a step towards automated agriculture.

Location:  // // Science // Astronomy // ALMA, the World's Largest Radio Telescope, Grabs Its First Images
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The world's largest astronomical facility has opened its eyes, turning nearly two dozen antennae toward the heavens to study the building blocks of the cosmos. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array consists of 20 radio antennae for now, but will contain 66 by 2013, giving it a higher resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Location: // // Technology // Military // Army Developing Drones That Can Recognise Your Face From a Distance
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It's not enough for the US military to be able to monitor you from afar. The US Army wants its drones to know you through and through, reports Danger Room, and it is imbuing them with the ability to recognise you in a crowd and even to know what you are thinking and feeling. Like a best friend that at any moment might vaporise you with a hellfire missile.

Location:  // // Science // Aussies Win IgNobels with Frisky Bottle Beetle, Urination Complication Studies
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Two Aussie scientists today pulled a couple of prizes from the annual IgNobel Prize awards, one for studying why some beetles mistake beer bottles for their mates, and another for looking into how much the need to urinate impacts our ability to think.

Location: // // Technology // Australian Police Want Aerial Surveillance Drones to Track License Plates and Monitor Cars of Interest
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With hackers, DIYers and the military using them for years, domestic police forces the world over are apparently itching to get some surveillance drones of their own. Now, it seems the ACT Government has been discussing using drones alongside a new license plate recognition system, autonomously tracking vehicles of interest.

Location:  // // Technology // Building Wi-Fi That Works at 800 MPH, Into a Car Designed to Break the Sound Barrier
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Discovered during a dig through the FCC's experimental radio applications by Steven J. Crowley, it has come to light that North American Eagle is trying to install what will presumably be the fastest-moving Wi-Fi network on the ground--because it's being built inside a vehicle designed to break the world land speed record (and the sound barrier) at 1280 kilometres per hour.

Location: // // Technology // Cloo Hopes to Turn Your City Into a Network of Friendly, Open Bathrooms
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Running around a city trying to find a public bathroom/Starbucks/secluded alley is one of those moments that's an urban dweller's nightmare, and one that's guaranteed to happen several dozen times in real life. Cloo (technically, "CLOO'", but, you know, we're not calling it that) is a new app for iOS that tries to solve that problem by connecting those in need with friends or friends of friends that are willing to supply their bathrooms--for a price.

Location:  // // DIY // Projects // DIY Wrist Cuff Equips Blind People With Sonar
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Guide dogs are great, but vision-impaired people sometimes need to find their own way through complex environments. Instead of checking for obstacles with a trademark white stick, inventor Steve Hoefer has another idea: Use wrist-mounted sonar.

Hoefer designed a haptic gauntlet with ultrasonic sensors mounted just over the knuckles. The Tacit, as it's called, is encased in a neoprene cuff and can sense objects from about two and a half centimetres all the way up to 3 metres.

Location: // // Science // Dogs Can Reliably Sniff Out Lung Cancer, German Study Shows
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A dog can accurately detect the early presence of lung cancer by sniffing patients' breath, doctors in Germany say. While researchers have known for some time that dogs can sniff out the telltale signs of other forms of cancer, this is the first study that proves dogs can reliably smell this particular kind.

Location:  // // Cars // Driverless Car Completes Successful Test Run Around Busy Berlin Streets
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Sitting back, chatting with your mates, watching the scenery pass you by - these pastimes are generally enjoyed by the passengers of a vehicle while the driver remains focused on bringing the carload to its destination. But a car designed by researchers from Berlin has successfully completed an 80 kilometre test run around the traffic-filled streets of Germany’s capital - without the driver lifting a finger.

Location: // // Science // Engineers of Laboratory-Grown Muscle Figure Out How to Make It Firm and Strong
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In 2009, we heard the wonderful news that scientists at Holland's Eindhoven University of Technology had successfully grown pork in a petri dish: a giant step toward the dream of eating a pork chop without slaughtering a pig for it. Unfortunately, the lab-grown meat was floppy, "soggy," and structureless, not at all what you'd like to toss on your grill and tuck into.

Location:  // // Cars // First Big U.S. Test of Car-to-Car Communications Planned
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Vehicle-to-vehicle technology is about to get its first major real-world test in the US. The Department of Transportation awarded US$14.9 million to the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute last month, and the university is already moving forward with a plan to put 3,000 short-range radio equipped cars on the road in Ann Arbor over the next couple of years.

Location: // // Technology // Heart Patch Made of Gold Helps Cardiac Tissue Rebuild Itself
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Giving cardiac patients a heart of gold nanowires could ensure engineered tissue works like it should, pulsing in unison to make the heart beat. First growing nanowires and then growing heart cells, engineers from MIT and Harvard University say their new muscle-machine blended heart patch improves on existing cardiac patches, which have trouble reaching a consistent level of conductivity.

Location:  // // Science // Energy // ILL Researchers Trap The Most Neutrons Ever Bottled, Setting a Science Record
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European researchers working at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France, have trapped the largest number of neutrons ever held in place at one time. But while they've smashed the previous record (also held by the ILL), it's still not quite enough, the lead researcher tells BBC. Still, the new approach that got researchers this far may be able to trap far greater numbers of neutrons with a little finessing.

Location: // // Cars // Concepts // Laid-off Shuttle Engineers Build Mad Rocket Trike
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In the shadow of Launchpad 39A--where the Space Shuttle Atlantis once stood ready for orbit--a team of former NASA engineers laid off when the shuttle program ended are building a rocket-inspired street legal tricycle. And it's not just for kicks. Treycycle Gold--as the company building the bikes is now known--aims to employ more than 100 people within the year, breathing new life into the Space Coast's engineering economy.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // Listen to StarTalk Live, Featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugene Mirman, Alan Alda, and More
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On September 15th, StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson's space-and-science-focused radio show, taped its first ever live show at the Bell House, in Brooklyn, New York. I was there to watch, and tweet about it, and drink tall cans of Tecate while tweeting about it. It was great! And now you can listen to the first part, for free.

Location: // // Technology // Space // Luxury Getaways of the Future: Visit Orbital Technologies' Space Hotel
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Until companies start launching private spaceships, Russian-built space capsules will be the only way to get astronauts up to the International Space Station or other orbital outposts. If these images are accurate at all, Russian-built spacecraft might as well stay the only option. Doesn't this look cozy?

Location:  // // Technology // Space // NASA satellite to hit earth this week
Keywords:  NASA, satellite, popular science, SkyLab, UARS, space junk

A five tonne piece of space junk is hurtling out of control towards Earth and is expected to hit the ground sometime this weekend. NASA says that the defunct Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), which was launched in 1991 to study climate change, will make impact somewhere between 57° south latitude and 57° north latitude - basically the entire populated world.

Location: // // Science // New 'Goldilocks' Exoplanet Could be the Most Earth-Like We've Yet Seen
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Scientists have tracked down another goldilocks planet 31 light-years from Earth, and according to astronomers it has some strong points in its favor when it comes to the possibility of harboring the ingredients for life. HD85512b orbits an orange dwarf in the constellation Vela, and it's just the right distance from the sun--and just the right mass--to rank among the most Earth-like planets ever discovered.

Location:  // // Science // New Social Network Connects People Based on Gastrointestinal Bacteria
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A German nonprofit, called MyMicrobes, is hoping you'll want to get your gut bacteria's genomes sequenced. It's expensive, but you'll get access to one of the most exclusive social networks around, where people worldwide can, um, talk about their gastrointestinal difficulties with like-minded people. Two grand seems cheap when we put it like that!

Location: // // Cars // Concepts // Realizing Bondesque Visions, BMW is Mounting Lasers in Its Headlights
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Calling laser headlights "the next logical step" after the LED headlamp, BMW has announced that it will be rolling out laser-based illumination on its next-gen BMW i8 concept and will further develop laser headlight technology for extension across its various models. Why? It saves fuel. And presumably because laser headlights is something we've all secretly wanted on our European sports cars since MI6 tricked out 007's first ride.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // SASSA, the Military's New Satellite Self-Defence System, is Ready to Go to Space
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A new satellite defence technology is about to get its first real-world test in orbit, and while we naturally don't get to know much about it just yet, the US Air Force has confirmed that a classified satellite launching sometime in the near future will carry the awkwardly named Self-Awareness Space Situational Awareness system, or SASSA. Like radar for satellites, the system will alert operators of potential space-borne threat to the satellite and perhaps even take kinetic action should a satellite become threatened.

Location: // // Science // Energy // Scientists Maybe Possibly Find Particle That Moves Faster Than Light
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Scientists at CERN have run an experiment. A very simple time of flight experiment, measuring the time it takes a neutrino to get from A to B. The trick with this particular one is that this particle clocked in at a whole 60 nanoseconds faster than light. That small number is a big deal - if correct, it could overturn Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, the cornerstone of theoretical physics for the last century.

Location:  // // Science // Space Rocks Like This One Probably Helped Deliver Earth's Oceans
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Earth's oceans likely started out as space snowballs born far beyond the orbit of Pluto, a new study says. Water-rich comets collided with the young planet after hurtling through the nascent solar system, and probably delivered a significant amount of the water on this planet.

Location: // // Science // Astronomy // Star Pulling Massive Planet Apart with X-Rays
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Imagine if Earth was being blasted by radiation so strong that it was disappearing at a rate of 5 million tonnes per second. Sounds pretty disastrous, right? 

Well spare a thought for poor old CoRoT-2b, whose companion star is bombarding it with x-rays a hundred thousand times more powerful than rays from our Sun, Science Daily reports.

Location:  // // Science // Health // Study Finds That Injecting Old Mice With Young Mouse Blood Has a Rejuvenating Effect
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Researchers at Stanford University just published a study in Nature that may give new hope to those looking to stop the effects of aging on the brain. The study found that when blood from a young mouse was injected into an older mouse, that older mouse enjoyed what could almost be termed a "rejuvenation effect": it began producing more neurons, firing more activity across synapses, and even suffered less inflammation.

Location: // // Technology // Supercomputer Reads the News to Successfully Forecast World Events
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Nipping at the heels of yesterday's story about the software that automatically writes news articles comes another technological innovation changing the shape of journalism: software that reads news articles.

Kalev Leetaru of the University of Illinois determined that using the Nautilus SGI supercomputer to analyse news stories can help predict major world events. The analysis he used for the experiment was retrospective, feeding the computer millions of articles from which it was able to determine a deteriorating national sentiment towards Libya and Egypt before the revolutions in those countries. The system was also able to narrow down Osama Bin Laden's location to within about 200km before he was found and killed last May.

Location:  // // Science // The Mystery of Wrinkly-When-Wet Fingers, Solved
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Mystery of the century, you guys. No, the millenium. All time. A new paper in the journal Brain, Behavior and Evolution has a new answer to the eternal question: why do our fingers and toes get all wrinkly after bathtime? The answer: traction.

Location: // // Technology // Space // Tomorrow, NASA Heads Back to the Moon, to Uncover Its Origins and to Inspire A New Generation
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NASA is going back to the moon, sending off a pair of spacecraft that will help scientists learn the origins of our closest companion by studying its interior and its gravitational field. But beyond new lunar science, the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, GRAIL, will also help cement NASA's legacy of lunar exploration in the public imagination.

Location:  // // Gadgets // Computers // Use Your Home Computer to Find a Better Semiconductor and Save the Planet
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If you want to be a part of discovering the future of solar power, you can be. You don't need any special knowledge or equipment, just let Alán Aspuru-Guzik borrow your computer when you're not using it.

Location: // // Science // Future Of The Environment // Video: An Augmented Reality "Mirror" That Alters Your Appearance
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Using a webcam hooked up to custom PC software, a pair of researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, have created an augmented reality "mirror" that morphs your facial features at will.

Location:  // // Gadgets // Video: Take to the Road, and the Seas, in an Amphibious Camping Trailer
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The Sealander amphibious trailer is the camping accessory of our 1970s PopSci dreams come to life, except better than we ever imagined. This super-light trailer is tiny enough that it can be towed even by subcompact cars without a special permit, extra mirrors or gear, and serves as a kitchen, a tent and a boat.

Location: // // Technology // Robots // Video: Wall-Climbing, Base-Jumping Robot Hurls Itself From Buildings
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A new base-jumping robot can climb vertical walls, flip open a parachute and jump off, parasailing to the ground while capturing video of the trip. It's the first compact robot that can both climb and fly, two characteristics that will serve it well when the robots take over the world and need to penetrate humanity's defenses.

Location:  // // Technology // Wireless Network Accurately and Inexpensively Monitors Patients' Breathing
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A couple of years ago we saw wireless technology that would allow us to see through walls. Now, the same team of researchers, from the University of Utah, is putting that motion detection technology to work monitoring breathing patterns. So not only can the network see through your bedroom wall, it can hear you breathing. Less sinisterly, the system could help doctors keep better track of patients with sleep apnea, surgery patients or babies at risk for sudden infant death syndrome.

Location: // // Science // A Treasure Trove of Dinosaur Protofeathers, Trapped in Amber
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A cache of feathers preserved in amber, dating from around 70 to 85 million years ago, was just found in Canada, showing that border between winged dinosaurs and the earliest avians. The study indicates that these feathers, relatively modern, were already appearing even before the non-avian dinosaurs were extinct.

Location:  // // Galleries // Archive Gallery: Steve Jobs in the Pages of Popular Science, Over Three Decades // Apple IIC: 1984
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As the company's first effort at building a portable computer, the Apple IIc was designed as an upscale alternative to IBM's PCjr, which become a commercial failure. The Apple IIc, which sold for US$1295, came with 128 KB of memory and a 1.023 MHz microprocessor. It improved on its predecessor by using a text display that could support characters resembling the icons found on machines with a graphical interface. Best of all, the machine was suited to beginners and could be used right out of the box.

Location: // // Section undetermined // Apple Will Be Just Fine, Thanks To Aggressive Jobsian Minimalism
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In 1996, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple after a decade-long exile, the company's products took a dramatic turn. The next 15 years would be a whirlwind of monstrous success after monstrous success--iMac, iPod, iTunes Music Store, Intel-based MacBook, iPhone, MacBook Air, iPad. Jobs's resignation as CEO yesterday has led to some excessive hand-wringing about Apple's future, near and far, but the Jobsian philosophy--in which the consumer is king, in which there is one right way to do things, in which it is always preferable to trim than to add--will hopefully have permeated Apple enough to weather his departure. It's already had an effect on the world at large.

Location:  // // DIY // Projects // Archive Gallery: Offbeat Uses for Common Household Objects
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Venture into any apartment, and you're likely to find an object used for something other than its intended purpose. We've seen ground coffee used to repel ants, curtain fabric used as wallpaper, cardboard boxes used as coffee tables, and to the delight of DIY enthusiasts everywhere, a La-Z-Boy converted into a motorised easy chair. While most of us don't possess the expertise needed to turn chairs into moving vehicles, we've all struggled with the question of whether to dispose of an old household item, or to save it in case it came in handy later. Care to guess what PopSci would tell you to do?

Location: // // Science // Astronomy // Astronomical studies tap into the SkyNet - literally
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We all knew it had to happen eventually, but few expected it this early: Skynet has arrived.

Only, instead of launching nukes, enslaving mankind, and more or less being a total pain, this version has a much more innocent purpose - to use the power of the crowd to keep an eye on space.

Location:  // // Science // Health // Australian Team Helps Find Melanoma Genes
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Here in Australia, a simple sunburn is often the least of our worries. Australia's long hours mean we record some of the highest numbers of melanoma cases in the world, with over 10 000 cases new cases reported annually, according to the Cancer Council Australia. That makes it the fourth most prevalent cancer in this country. So we think it's fitting that an Australian team are part of a new study that has successfully identified four key genetic markers that increase the liklihood of developing the skin cancer reponsible for. over 1000 deaths a year.

Location: // // Technology // Boeing Dreamliner Delivered to First Customer
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After three years of costly setbacks and scary failed test flights, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner finally made its debut on Sunday when it was delivered to its first Japanese customer.

Location:  // // Galleries // Where Does Our Energy Come From? // But We Don't Use Nuclear Power!
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I know, I know. But there's a possibility we could turn to nuclear power in the future. Plus, how could I resist showing such a cool picture! This is Australia's ANSTO facility which hosts the country's only nuclear reactor. The reactor doesn't produce power but is used for research. 

Location: // // Gadgets // Cameras // Canon Introduces the S100, the New Best Point-and-Shoot
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Canon's S90 ushered in a new era of point-and-shoots, where a pocketable camera offered control and quality almost equal to a DSLR. The newest model in this line, the S100, continues the trend: the sensor gets a bump from 10-megapixel to 12.1, it has a new processor (claimed to be faster, more accurate in low light, and with better color reproduction), the ISO and video resolution have improved, and it's got built-in GPS geotagging, so you'll know where your photos were taken. Our friends at Popular Photography call it a "robust update," and considering it's updating just about the best point-and-shoot on the market, that's saying something. Read more at PopPhoto.

Location:  // // Home // Contact Us
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Please contact us with your questions, suggestions, competition entries, letters to the editor or whatever you like using the form below.

If you have an editorial enquiry  |  Anthony Fordham  |  [email protected]  |   +612  9126 9721

If you have an advertising enquiry  |   Jon Van Daal  |  [email protected]  |  +612 9126 9724

Location: // // Science // Crows can play waiting game to get your tasty treats, study finds
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Crows and ravens are often associated with darkness, evil, and Edgar Allan Poe. But few know they are more than just blood-thirsty, black giants - they are actually quite smart. Especially when it comes to food.

Location:  // // Cars // Ford Revives the Three-Cylinder Engine in a Quest for Fuel Efficiency
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Carmakers have spent the past few years aggressively downsizing engines throughout their lineups to meet increasingly tight fuel-economy regulations. But with the sole exception of the three-cylinder Smart Fortwo, four cylinders is as low as carmakers have expected Americans to go. Three-cylinders are common in Europe but have been scorned in the U.S., where they're tainted by association with claptrap cars like the mousy Geo Metro. Now, with fuel-economy standards set to rise as high as 90.4 kph by 2025, Ford is planning to bring the three-cylinder to the American mainstream.

Location: // // Science // Health // Germans Manufacture Artificial Blood Vessels With a 3D Printer
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From intestines to tracheas, tissue engineers are building a handful of new body parts - but progress on larger organs has been slow. This is mainly because tissues need nutrients to stay alive, and they need blood vessels to deliver those nutrients. It's difficult to build those vascular networks, but now a team from Germany may have a solution: Print some capillaries with a 3D printer.

Location:  // // Technology // Military // GPS Data Could Help Track and Monitor Secret Nuclear Tests From Rogue Nations
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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists may have found a new way to track secret nuclear tests from those rogue nations (cough cough North Korea cough cough) who are trying to keep those tests under wraps. Surprisingly enough, that new solution may be possible with analysis of regular old GPS data, along with some clever mathematics.

Location: // // Science // Jurassic Mammal Fossil Hints At Earlier Split Between Placental Mammals and Marsupials
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This pointy-nosed shrew, a new fossil find from China, may be the earliest grandmother of all placental mammals, scientists report in a new study. Or perhaps she is the oldest great-aunt. Either way, it's another big find this week in paleontology.

Location:  // // Science // Jurassic Mammal Fossil Hints At Earlier Split Between Placental Mammals and Marsupials
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This pointy-nosed shrew, a new fossil find from China, may be the earliest grandmother of all placental mammals, scientists report in a new study. Or perhaps she is the oldest great-aunt. Either way, it's another big find this week in paleontology.

Location: // // Technology // Space // Kepler Spots a Planet Orbiting Two Suns, Just Like Star Wars' Tatooine
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A mournful French horn blows. An angsty Luke Skywalker stomps out of his aunt and uncle's sand hut and peers up at Tatooine's double sunset, his hair blowing in the breeze. It's a memorable scene from Star Wars-but now, a precedent for such a sky with two suns has been found in our universe.

Location:  // // Science // New Species of Dolphin Discovered Off the Coast of Australia
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A new species of dolphin was discovered by Australian zoologists off the coast of Melbourne, after they realized the 150 or so porpoises that were previously thought to be bottlenose dolphins actually differed significantly in skull shape and DNA. That, kids, is why you should always double-check your homework. Or, you know, dolphin skull shape. Same thing.

Location: // // Cars // Putting the Ferrari FF Through Its Paces, High in the Italian Alps
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Brunico, Italy - A snowy K-Mart parking lot would have worked fine. But this being Ferrari, and the star its tradition-shredding FF - a $300,000 all-wheel-drive station wagon -- a little high-altitude showboating seemed in order. So with a boost from the Italian army's Chinook helicopters, Ferrari flew a pair of FF's to the windswept peak of Plan de Corones, a popular ski resort in its wondrous Dolomites, and told us to have at it. 

Ridiculous? Why, yes. But no more so than a 208-mph, 651-horsepower Italian pony that can carry four tall adults and cargo while galloping safely over snow, ice, dirt or puddles on the Pomona freeway.

Location:  // // Technology // Robots // Sandia's Gemini-Scout: A Rescue Robot Optimized for Mining Disasters
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At AUVSI's (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International) massive robot conference in Washington D.C., in the U.S. this week there is no shortage of robots designed to seek out--and in some cases destroy--human targets. Sandia National Labs chose to go in the opposite direction with their Gemini-Scout, a remotely controlled rolling robot designed specifically to lead search and rescue efforts in the event of a mining disaster.

Location: // // Technology // Smart CCTV System Would Use Algorithm to Zero in on Crime-Like Behavior
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Last time we looked at the UK's teeming video surveillance technology sector we were writing about facial recognition software that Scotland Yard was trialling during the recent London riots. But facial recognition is both fraught with privacy concerns and difficult to make reliable. So researches at Kingston University are building a CCTV system that uses AI to recognise specific types of criminal behaviours--like someone brandishing a firearm--and use that to alert authorities and build a video profile of the way a crime unfolded.

Location:  // // Technology // Social Media and Biometric Software Could Make Future Undercover Policing Impossible
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Social media can be problematic for professionals who don't want their bosses to see unflattering uni party photos. But it's even worse for people whose livelihood literally depends on anonymity, like undercover cops. What happens if the gang you've infiltrated finds your grinning mug in Facebook photos from the police union annual picnic?

Location: // // Galleries // Where Does Our Energy Come From? // Solar Panels Are Built By Men In Vests
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As this photo will attest. These are, however, very special solar panels. They're heliostats - large, slightly concave mirrors that reflect the sun's rays to a specific point where they can create temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees celsius. As the sun moves throughout the day, these heliostats move also to continually beam the sun's rays towards one point. These particular panels are being installed at the CSIRO's Solar Energy Centre in Newcastle. 

Location:  // // Galleries // Biggest Uncontrolled Reentries // Space Shuttle Columbia
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Image: NASA / Name: Columbia (STS-107) / Reentry Date: February 1, 2020 / Reentry Location: Texas, Louisiana / Size: 106 tonnes / Type: Destructive reentry

During the reentry of STS-107, damage to the shuttle's left wing shielding during launch allowed hot gases to enter the shuttle, leading to the disintegration of the vehicle. All seven crew members were killed, and debris was scattered over northern Texas and eastern Louisiana.

Location: // // Gadgets // Steve Jobs Has Died, Apple Confirms
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Incredibly sad news from Apple today: Steve Jobs has died today at the age of 56.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // The Sunspots That Kicked Off This Week's Solar Storm May be Just Warming Up
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That gigantic solar flare that lashed out toward Earth on Saturday is "the geomagnetic storm that just won't go away," the NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colo., said via its Facebook page today. And that appears to be true. Active Region 1302, pictured above, continues to pummel earth with solar energy and could disrupt satellite communications as it continues turning toward us in the days to come.

Location: // // Science // Unabomber-Inspired Group Sends Bombs to Nanotechnology Researchers
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In Mexico, a group of terrorists (or possibly a lone soul, trying to make it seem as if he's a member of a group) has been mailing bombs to nanotechnology researchers at major universities. The bomber(s) cite the Unabomber, a convicted American bomber, anti-technology activist, and former professor as inspiration for their crimes.

Location:  // // Section undetermined // Video: HTV-2 in Mach-20 Flight, Just Minutes Before Autonomously Aborting its Mission
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Back on August 11th DARPA launched, then lost, its Falcon hypersonic vehicle, also known as HTV-2. Today we found it. Not the actual glider, but a video of it streaking through the sky over the Pacific Ocean as captured by a crew member aboard a tracking ship. And as you can see in this video, it is indeed moving fast.

Location: // // Science // Health // Visible Light Could Keep Hearts Of The Future Ticking
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The heart is a delicate instrument, relying on finely timed signals so it can pump blood in just the right fashion to keep you alive. When this process fails, artificial pacemakers, incorporating electrodes and microelectronics, have to step into the breach. As it turns out, scientists might just have arrived at a possible new alternative, and it's as simple as turning on a light.

Location:  // // Home // What is Popular Science?
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Location: // // Technology // Space // With Two New Space Science Missions, ESA Will Fly to the Sun and Look For Dark Energy
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The European Space Agency announced its next two space science missions yesterday, and given recent events they may not come as a huge surprise. The first will orbit the sun, coming closer to the solar surface than any previous science spacecraft to measure the solar wind and its influence on the planets to an unprecedented degree. The second will explore dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the universe--a characteristic whose discovery won three physicists the Nobel prize in physics yesterday.

Location:  // // Galleries // PopSci Archive: Mail Order DIY // Electronic Organ: March 1960
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While fine organs take years of training to construct, this DIY kit allowed just about anyone to build their own electronic organ for just $18.94. You could also order a 10-inch LP demonstration record for further instruction.

Location: // // Galleries // PopSci Archive: Mail Order DIY // Gyrocopter: November 1968
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Speaking of hazards, how about the Bensen Aircraft Corporation's build-it-yourself gyrocopter? Anyone who bought this would be the envy of his neighborhood. The gyrocopter came with interchangeable wheels and floats, required less landing space than a plane, and would glide gracefully to the ground if the engine broke.

Location:  // // Galleries // Archive Gallery: Steve Jobs in the Pages of Popular Science, Over Three Decades // "Clamshell" iBooks: December 1999
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Not to be confused with the app, iBooks were a line of portable computers sold by Apple between 1999 and 2006. The first line, also known as the "Clamshell," was clearly modeled on the blueberry iMac. The iBook G3 came in five colors: Tangerine (pictured on the left), Blueberry, Key Lime, Indigo, and Graphite. The first basic models were equipped with 32 MB of memory and a 300 MHz processor. As you might recall from the keynote announcing this product, the Clamshell iBook also came with a handle.

Location: // // Science // Energy // Alligator Fat Could Fill Your Gas Tank and Fuel Renewable Resource Investment in the South
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Every year, about 15 million pounds of alligator fat is dumped into landfills as a byproduct of alligator meat processing. It would certainly be better to reuse this gloopy mess for a greater purpose, no? As it turns out, alligator fat is a prime candidate for animal-derived biodiesel, according to researchers in the United States.

Location:  // // Galleries // 5 Gadgets That Failed to Survive // Apple Pippin
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Back in the before time, there was actually such a thing as a failed Apple gadget. It was a gaming console, and its name was the Pippin.To be fair, there was nothing really wrong with the Pippin - designed in partnership with Bandai to be a cheapish networked machine that could play games. It's problem was more to do with timing. At launch, it was already competing with the likes of the Sega Saturn, the original Sony Playstation, and the Nintendo 64, which spelled doom for Apple's brief foray into the games market.

Location: // // Galleries // Australian Dishes And Telescopes
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Telescopes have long allowed us to peer excitedly into the night sky, spotting distant stars and planets. You might have memories of being a child and looking through the eyepiece of a telescope to get a glimpse of Mars. Maybe you're still into telescopes. Either way, here in Australia, our telescopes mean business - they're a lot bigger than your dad's astronomy kit. Check out these space seers from all over the country.

 

Location:  // // Science // Australian Scientist Shares Nobel Prize for Physics
Keywords:  nobel, australian, universe, astronomy, schmidt

A scientist from the Australian National University has, along with two American scientists, been named a Nobel Laureate for his work charting the expansion of the known universe, in particular the discovery that said expansion is happening at an increasingly fast rate.

Location: // // Science // Health // Brain-Scanning "Painometer" Is an Attempt to Measure Pain Objectively
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Pain must be the bane of many a doctor's existence. It's a major symptom and indicator of many illnesses, but doctors have to rely on humans to describe and rate it, and humans are a distinctly unreliable source of information. What's a "7" on the pain scale for someone might be a "4" for another. What's a "pulsing" pain for someone might be a "pounding" for someone else. At Stanford, some doctors are figuring out the first steps to objectively measure pain, finally putting that all to rest.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // Chinese Scientists Plan to Pull an Asteroid into Orbit Around Earth
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Last week Chinese scientists wanted to divert an asteroid away from Earth. This week, they want to pull one into orbit around the Earth. What's possible objections could anyone have to this idea?

Location: // // Galleries // Biggest Uncontrolled Reentries // Cosmos 1402
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Image: MSGT Hiyashi / Name: Cosmos 1402 (nuclear spy satellite) / Reentry Date: January 23, 2020 / Reentry Location: Indian Ocean / Size: 4 tonnes / Type: Uncontrolled reentry

Satellite nuclear reactors were normally jettisoned to a safe "parking orbit" when the satellites reentered, but Cosmos 1402's reactor remained attached. Here, an American orbital analyst monitors the satellite's trajectory from NORAD.

Location:  // // Galleries // PopSci Archive: Mail Order DIY // Erector Set: December 1935
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During the holiday season, we advertised A.C. Gilbert's No. 7 1/2 Motorized Erector set as a last-minute Christmas present. What boy wouldn't uphold "25 pounds of scientific thrills" as the world's greatest toy? As the illustration shows, this kit could actually produce hundreds of different steam shovels, ferries wheels, airships, automobiles, and more. The kit also came with a toy motor for additional realism.

Location: // // Galleries // Australian Dishes And Telescopes // Field Of Vision
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The Murchison Widefield Array is quite different from other devices that see into the night sky. It's a radio telescope with no moving parts, but hundreds of antennas which stretch over a large distance in outback Western Australia. The array has a number of functions - it aims to look at the Epoch of Reionisation (the time in our universe's history where the first luminous sources came into existence), as well as the Sun and coronal mass ejections. It'll also be checking out pulsars below 300MHz. Neat.

Location:  // // Technology // Aviation // For the First Time, Researchers Use an Atom Interferometer to Measure Aircraft Acceleration
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Atom interferometers are neat little devices that exploit the wave characters of atoms to make highly precise measurements of things like distance or the force of gravity. But because they are fickle by nature--even the smallest vibrations distort their results--atom interferometers have been mostly limited to highly controlled experiments that take place in either underground labs or in free-falling zero-g experiments. But a team of French researchers has announced today the first use of an atom interferometer to measure the acceleration of an airplane.

Location: // // Technology // Futuristic Predictions From the Past That Steve Jobs Fulfilled
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Predicting the future of technology is often a shot in the dark. But every once in awhile, the complex evolution of tech gives us something that actually fulfills the starry-eyed dreams of years or decades before. And as we look back at the incredible achievements of Steve Jobs, you quickly see that, more than any other single innovator, he was responsible for so many of today's real-life consummations of past predictions.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // FYI: Can I Buy Land on the Moon?
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For now at least, the moon is like the sea: everyone can use it, but no one can own it. In 1967 the U.S. and the Soviet Union negotiated the Outer Space Treaty, which states that no nation can own a piece of the moon or an asteroid. "You have a right to go up and take the lunar soil, but you don't have any right to draw a square on the surface of the moon and say, 'That square is mine,' " says Stephen E. Doyle, a retired lawyer who served as NASA's Deputy Director of Internal Affairs. If the Space Settlement Institute-which lobbies for private industry to develop land on other planets-has its way, new laws will allow space colonists to stake moon claims and start a colony.

Location: // // Science // Energy // Google Releases its Energy Consumption Numbers, Revealing a 260 Million Watt Continuous Suck
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After years of playing such numbers extremely close to the vest, Google today released figures spelling out exactly how much electricity the company's massive computing resources consume. Its data centres continuously draw 260 million watts - roughly a quarter the output of a nuclear power plant, says the NYT -to keep services like Gmail, search, Google Ads, and YouTube up and running around the clock and around the globe.

Location:  // // Galleries // Where Does Our Energy Come From? // Harnessing the Power of the Sun
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Wind isn't the only natural phenomenon that can be used as a means of energy production. There's also that big bright light in the sky. You're looking at Australia's very first solar power station in White Cliffs, NSW. When it first ran, each of those panels concentrated solar power to a specific point, which boiled water, which produced steam, which drove a steam engine, which intermittently powered a flickering 60 watt light bulb. Kidding. The set-up powered whole buildings until the station was converted to photovoltaic in 1996.

Location: // // Technology // Homeland Security Application Monitors Crowds' Faces, Races, and Eye Movements to Detect Would-Be Criminals
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The American Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to apprehend people before they commit a crime. The Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, is designed to analyse whether a person is likely to commit a crime, using a long list of factors. Some are akin to lie detection, such as breathing and heart rate, but the system also measures body movements, voice pitch changes, blink rate, breathing patterns, eye movements, body heat changes and prosody (changes in speech rhythm and intonation). The "prototype screening facility" is built to "detect cues indicative of mal-intent" using these algorithms. The system also analyses factors like ethnicity, gender, age and profession.

Location:  // // Science // Energy // IBM and 3M Team Up to Make a Semiconductor Adhesive That Will Enable Next-Gen Chips
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IBM and 3M are collaborating on a new kind of semiconductor glue that will bind together future generations of 3-D semiconductor chips. The idea is to create a whole new kind of adhesive that hold things tightly together while also conducting heat and insulating at the same time.

Location: // // Section undetermined // IBM Is Building the Largest Data Storage Array Ever, 120 Petabytes Big
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Researchers at IBM's Almaden, California research lab are building what will be the world's largest data array--a monstrous repository of 200,000 individual hard drives all interlaced. All together, it has a storage capacity of 120 petabytes, or 120 million gigabytes.

Location:  // // Galleries // Australian Dishes And Telescopes // Inside The Dome
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Couldn't resist putting this picture in - I think it's pretty cool. What you're seeing is a vision from inside the Anglo-Australian Telescope to the hardware itself. The telescope is 3.9 metres long and is optical. It was commissioned in 1974 and aimed to give vision of the southern skies at a time when most other telescopes were pointing the other way.

Location: // // Gadgets // It's not the iPhone 5...it's the iPhone 4S
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Today in Cupertino, USA, Apple announced the newest version of its bajillion-selling iPhone, to be named the iPhone 4S. Like the iPhone 3GS, this is a small, mostly internal upgrade over its predecessor - a new dual-core processor here, an improved camera there - though there is a major addition in the form of Siri, a voice-command service Apple bought awhile back that allows you to ask your phone questions, or tell it to do things, in natural language. Lots of things.

Location:  // // Science // Health // Lab Creates Food Printed With Edible Ink
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Your friends may be forgiven in thinking you a little strange when you boldly claim you’ll be printing your dinner tonight. But Cornell Creative Machines Lab have already succeeded in printing foods, and are interested in bringing their 3D printers into your home.

Location: // // Technology // Lightweight Cable Made of Braided Nanotubes Could Replace Copper Wires
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Cables made out of nanowires could be just as efficient as the copper cables we've been using for more than a century, but at a fraction of the weight, according to a new paper. Braiding billions of carbon nanotubes into a nanowire cable can efficiently replace copper in a light bulb circuit.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // Missing: One Giant Satellite. If Found, Call NASA.
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A defunct six tonne NASA satellite has crashed into Earth over the weekend, leaving a mystery as to where the space debris ended up. Last week we reported the satellite was headed for Earth after 20 years in orbit.

Location: // // Science // Astronomy // NASA's Infrared Explorer Spots a Room-Temperature Brown Dwarf, the Coldest Star Ever Found
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Using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope, astronomers have finally spotted a collection of ultra-cool brown dwarfs they have been hunting for more than a decade. These tepid almost-star orbs are nearly impossible to see with a normal telescope, but WISE's infrared vision was able to pick them out.

Location:  // // Technology // Nearly a Century After We Started Drooling Over Them, America Gets Its First Police Auto-Gyro
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Today is a day for fulfilling the dreams of PopSci's past, it would seem. Following the amphibious 70's-esque camping trailer, Jalopnik takes a whirl in the Auto-Gyro MTOsport, America's first police gyroplane, stirring up fond memories of all the fancy fliers we dreamed up in the 20s and 30s.

Location: // // Technology // Engineering // New Computer Chip Modeled on a Living Brain Can Learn and Remember
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A pair of brain-inspired cognitive computer chips unveiled today could be a new leap forward - or at least a major fork in the road - in the world of computer architecture and artificial intelligence.

Location:  // // Science // New dinosaur species uncovered in US
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Scientists have today announced the discovery of a new species of dinosaur in Utah, the Talos Sampsoni. The raptor is the first discovery of its kind in more than 75 years, exciting scientists and palaeontologists alike.

Location: // // Technology // Space // New NASA Photos Show Footprints on the Moon
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In new photographs taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we can see the landing sites of some lunar craft, as well as the tracks left by those who flew in them. What creatures left these prints? A semi-dormant species known as the Earth astronaut; to be precise, Alan Bean and Pete Conrad, the crew of the Apollo 12 mission in 1969.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // New Supercomputer Adds More Grunt To Square Kilometre Array Bid
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In another plus for Australia's bid for the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, Australia now plays home to another big supercomputer, one specially geared for crunching the amounts of data produced by such projects.

Location: // // Home // Page Not Found
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Oh no! It looks like the contents of this page might have been swallowed by a black hole.

 

If you'd like to let the Editor know, you can call Anthony Fordham 24 x 7 on 0400 876 313

 

Location:  // // Galleries // PopSci Archive: Mail Order DIY // Phonograph: June 1919
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Can't afford a phonograph? Try building one yourself. The Modern Phonograph Supply Company offered blueprints, diagrams, and metal parts to customers who were confident enough to construct 1919's hottest gadgets by themselves. The Makafone cost just one-fourth the price of a regular machine of equal quality, came with a bundle of free records, and could be sold for a profit of $50 - $75.

Location: // // Galleries // Biggest Uncontrolled Reentries // Salyut 7
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Image: Don S. Montgomery / Name: Salyut 7 / Reentry Date: February 7, 2020 / Reentry Location: Capitán Bermúdez, Argentina / Size: 40 tonnes /  Type: Large, uncontrolled re-entry

The Soviet space station had been uninhabited for almost 5 years when it returned to Earth, along with the unmanned spacecraft Kosmos 1686, showering a small Argentinian town with debris.

Location:  // // Science // Energy // Scientists extract hydrogen from salt and wastewater
Keywords:  hydrogen, power, clean energy,

In another step toward a cleaner energy future, scientists in the US have found a way to sustainably generate hydrogen using just water and bacteria. Using a process called reverse electro-dialysis, researchers an Penn State university have extracted the gas from water by breaking up its molecules.

Location: // // Science // Health // Smart Cast "Likes" Your Broken Arm
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Breaking your arm is an unpleasant experience - the pain, the weeks of healing, losing the ability to perform everyday tasks quickly and easily. But one invention seeks to ease those pains, breathing new technological life into the traditional plaster cast.

Location:  // // Galleries // Australian Dishes And Telescopes // Solving The Big Questions
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This array of radio telescopes, begun in 2009, is still under construction. When finished, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (which reduces neatly to the acronym ASKAP) aims to solve some of the big questions of the universe - how galaxies form, the evolution and population of galaxies, and the magnetic forces which reside and effect the universe. Physically, it is 36 identical antennas, each 12 metres wide, that will act in unison to view the universe.

Location: // // Gadgets // Cameras // Sony's Binoculars Can Record Full HD and 3-D Video, Perfect for Amateur Nature Films
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Digital recording binoculars aren't really new--there are some cheapie versions available--but Sony's new DEV-3 and DEV-5 binoculars lift that humble tech into some really impressive new places. Instead of taking a regular set of binoculars and cramming a cheap video recording device into them, Sony took its high-end HD camcorders and molded them into the shape of binoculars. That means they can both record in 720p (high-def) and in 3-D--these might be the perfect tools for birdwatchers and other nature-types (as opposed to snipers).

Location:  // // Galleries // Sunny with a chance of space junk // Space junk these days is through the roof!
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75-year-old pensioner Peter Welton got quite a fright when a red-hot piece of space junk crashed through his roof in Hull, England. Welton donned his wife's favourite oven mits to carry the two kilogram, football sized object downstairs. The mass of metal could belong to anything - from a space shuttle to an abandoned satellite.

Location: // // Science // Suntory Creates Mythical Blue (Or, Um, Lavender-ish) Rose
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In literature and folklore (and the occasional video game), the blue rose signifies the impossible, or mystery, or the unquenchable. It's not much of a leap, really; roses are ubiquitous, but due to a genetic barrier, a blue rose is naturally impossible. Of course, there's no particular reason to do what that meddling bully nature wants us to do, so a Japanese company has genetically modified a rose to create...well, it's not quite blue, but it's certainly closer than any previous effort.

Location:  // // Technology // Aviation // The First Manned, Untethered All-Electric Helicopter Flight Takes Off
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It's an aviation story so cool we're kind of upset we didn't hear about it a month ago when it happened. Back on August 12th electrical and aerospace engineer Pascal Chretien, working with the backing of French company Solution F, made the world's first untethered, all-electric manned helicopter flight. And it didn't even show up on our radars--probably because he only reached an altitude of about one metre.

Location: // // Galleries // Australian Dishes And Telescopes // The Most Productive
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This is the Anglo-Australian Telescope, quite the jewel in our nation's telescopic crown. According to Astronomische Nachrichten, the AAT is one of the most scientifically productive telescopes in the world. It's located in northern NSW and is shared among a number of scientists and scientific bodies. It's most notable for producing impressive photographs of space as well as discovering extrasolar planets (planets outside our solar system). 

Location:  // // Science // Health // Tiny Cilia Inside Corpse' Noses Could Be a More Reliable Indicator of Time of Death
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Despite how easy they make it look on TV dramas, determining time of death for a body requires a lot of difficult guesswork (unless someone is there when the person passes, of course). A range of environmental factors and other mitigating circumstances make any declaration of time of death an estimation at best. But a team of Italian scientists think they've found a built-in clock in the human nasal cavity that ticks off the minutes after a body expires, and it could make estimating the time of death a more precise exercise.

Location: // // Galleries // Where Does Our Energy Come From? // Turning On The Waterworks
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This is an image of Clyde Hydro Power Station in New Zealand. The manipulation of water is another way in which we generate energy. Generally, hydroelectric power stations work by storing water in a dam and having it run through turbines to generate electricity. Once they're constructed, hydro power stations are very green, producing almost no waste and negligible carbon emissions. 

Location:  // // Science // Health // UV Rays May Be Even More Dangerous Than Previously Thought
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A new study has shown that the least energetic variety of ultraviolet radiation, UV type A, may be able to cause damage to deep tissue in humans, potentially leading to the development of malignant cancers.

Location: // // Technology // Video: Filmmaker Rob Spence's Implanted Bionic Camera Eyeball Is Up and Running
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Rob Spence, a self-proclaimed "Eyeborg," had his eye, which was damaged in a shotgun accident, replaced with a camera about two years ago. It's not too much of a stretch for Spence, who otherwise works as a filmmaker--and now he's been sponsored by video game maker Square Enix, which commissioned Spence to create a video about prostheses to promote their new game, Deux Ex: Human Revolution.

Location:  // // DIY // Video: PopSci Contributor Builds a Real Life "Up" House, Lifted Into the Air by Balloons
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This week on the US National Geographic Channel, the answer to that eternal question (providing "eternal" means "since 2009 when the movie came out"): Can we really build a house like the one from Pixar's Up, able to float by balloon power alone? On an episode of popular DIY show "How Hard Can It Be?" that aired this week, a team of builders (including frequent contributor to the US version of PopSci Vin Marshall) actually built a house capable of being lifted--with people aboard--by balloons.

Location: // // Technology // Video: The Trailer for "Urbanized," a Documentary About the Design of Cities
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The newest documentary from design doco director Gary Hustwit has just dropped. Titled Urbanized, it's the third movie in Hustwit's "design trilogy," which also includes Helvetica and Objectified. This third film focuses this time on the design of modern cities, and the more interesting question of who actually designs them.

Location:  // // Technology // Military // Video: Watch the JSF's New Cruise Missile Acquire and Engage a Naval Target
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We hear so many negative things about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program these days: cost overruns, missed deadlines, technology failures, etc. So it's nice to see a video of a small piece of the larger JSF initiative moving forward--and moving quickly. It's not part of the plane itself, but a stealthy cruise missile developed by Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, and it's looking for a ship to sink.

Location: // // Gadgets // Voice Control Is for Your Mom
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Voice command has made huge strides in recent years, especially in the mobile space - Google has implemented voice search and some basic commands into Android, and now Apple has integrated Siri, a voice-command app, deeply into the guts of the iPhone.

Location:  // // Science // Health // We Incorporate Genetic Information From Food We Eat
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Research at Nanjing University has found that strands of RNA from vegetables make it into our bloodstream after we eat them, and can regulate the expression of our genes once they're inside us. MicroRNAs, or miRNAs, are little strands of RNA that selectively bind to matching sequences of messenger RNA, resulting in repression of those genes.

Location: // // Science // Weird New Forms of Bacterial Life Found in the Dead Sea
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Deep in the depths of the Dead Sea, new life has been discovered. Thanks to newly found freshwater springs, certain forms of bacteria thrive, bacteria that, unlike other known freshwater and saltwater bacteria, can cope with rapidly changing salinity. It's the intriguing results of the first study of the Dead Sea in years, a rare undertaking partly because "accidentally swallowing Dead Sea salt water would cause the larynx to inflate, resulting in immediate choking and suffocation."

Location:  // // Galleries // Where Does Our Energy Come From?
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In Australia our energy comes from a range of different sources. When it's sunny, our solar panels soak up the rays and convert them into electricity. Weather turning bad? Gale whipping up? Not to worry, that chilling breeze isn't just giving us pneumonia - it's turning the blades of wind turbines across the nation. Just a little too chilly? Maybe the heat from that coal we're burning can keep us warm. And if all else fails, there's always the prospect of nuclear energy in the future.

Location: // // Science // Astronomy // Wide Eyed View of the Universe
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Scientists from around Australia will attempt to shed light on dark energy and dark matter through a new research collective.

Location:  // // Technology // Yale Law Journal Ponders the Wisdom of IBM Robot Watson as a Judge
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The Yale Law Journal's Betsy Cooper wrote an essay examining our favorite Jeopardy! champion robot Watson, but from a new angle: Could Watson help judges make legal decisions?

Location: // // Gadgets // You Will Actually Be Able to Buy Sony's Crazy 3-D Head-Mounted Display
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We caught a preview of Sony's odd, space-agey head-mounted viewer (appealingly named the HMZ-T1) back at CES in January, but we were pretty surprised to learn that not only is it not a mere demo, Sony's actually planning on, like, putting the thing in stores, where you can exchange currency for it and then take it home. Sony claims it offers an incredibly immersive 3-D experience, better than any TV. We've now played with it twice, and in some ways, that's true.

Location:  // // Galleries // 5 Gadgets That Failed to Survive
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These days, tech gets released faster than most people can keep up with. Plenty of gadgets get left by the wayside, either because they simply failed to attract a large enough userbase from the get-go, or because they really were absolute rubbish. We decided to gather five of our favourite spectacular crashes in gadget land.

Location: // // Technology // Military // A Beam With the Power of a Laser Pointer Can Detect IEDs at a Distance
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Improvised explosive devices are far and away the single biggest killer of coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the ability to identify hidden explosive threats is key to keeping soldiers safe. A team of researchers at Michigan State University has developed a tool that could detect roadside bombs from afar, using nothing more than a laser with an energy output of a presentation pointer.

Location:  // // Technology // Americans Suffering From Possibly-Imaginary Sensitivity to Wi-Fi Run for the Hills of Appalachia
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It's safe to say that most of us have come to accept, if not embrace, the abundance of wireless technology in our everyday lives. Not so for certain Americans who believe they suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity, or EHS. According to the BBC, five per cent of Americans think that exposure to electromagnetic fields created by Wi-Fi and mobile phones are causing them to suffer headaches, muscle spasms, burning skin and chronic pain. And some of these people are seeking refuge in the secluded mountains of Appalachia.
Location: // // Galleries // Archive Gallery: Steve Jobs in the Pages of Popular Science, Over Three Decades
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As one of America's greatest innovators, Steve Jobs naturally found his way into the pages of Popular Science with great regularity. From the DIY spirit of Apple's early days, to his exile and evolution at Next and Pixar, all the way into the modern iEra, we've covered Steve and his doings for more than three decades.

Location:  // // Technology // Archive Gallery: The Geodesic Life
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When it comes to practicality, geodesic domes are a contractor's worst nightmare. Where can you get windows that conform to hexagonal panels? Where should you install the pipes? Would a chimney look out of place? In spite of all these questions, we spent a good portion of the 1970s and '80s touting geodesic structures as the next big suburban fad.

Location: // // Science // Florida Funeral Home First to Debut Alternative to Cremation: Liquefaction
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A Florida funeral home has debuted a new alternative to cremation, known as the Resomator, that uses heated alkaline water to dissolve bodies in about three hours. Why do we need an alternative to cremation in the first place? Turns out cremation devices use lots of energy, release a fair amount of carbon emissions, and, in the U.K., are responsible for 16% of mercury emissions.

Location:  // // Science // Found: The Particular Brain Fold That Helps People Distinguish Between Imagination and Reality
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Did you actually open the fridge a few minutes ago, or were you just thinking about it and imagined that you did? If you can remember correctly, you might have an extra fold in your brain.

Location: // // Science // Energy // Future Mars Colonists Will Pack Their Power to Go in a Suitcase Nuclear Reactor
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The term "suitcase nuke" hasn't enjoyed a particularly popular connotation in recent years, but researchers convening at the 242nd National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society this week think such a concept is the future of interplanetary space travel. Scientists supporting a joint NASA/US Department Of Energy project to develop future power plants for space colonists envision the first such power supplies being suitcase-sized fission reactors that future space explorers could deploy quickly and reliably in the harsh environs of another planet like Mars.

Location:  // // Galleries // Australian Dishes And Telescopes // Going The Distance
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This is an image of the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope, run by Sydney University and situated near Canberra. The telescope surveys the southern hemisphere and was key in creating a wide field radio image of the southern sky. The east - west arm of the telescope is 778 metres long. Impressive!

Location: // // Gadgets // Smartphones // Is The Higgs Boson Somewhere Inside Your Smartphone?
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As we all know, the Large Hadron Collider has been grievously behind the times technologically. Sure, its giant array of superconducting magnets, kept cool by almost a hundred tons of liquid helium is pretty neat, and the muon spectrometer is no slouch. But the LHC hasn't put it all in a convenient smartphone app -- until now.

Location:  // // Galleries // Archive Gallery: Steve Jobs in the Pages of Popular Science, Over Three Decades // Jobs and the Greats
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Jobs graced our pages again in January 1997, with other historical greats we've covered over the years. He looks right at home, even cocky, flanked by Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison and Stephen Hawking.

Location: // // Galleries // Sunny with a chance of space junk // Marge, the rains are 'ere!
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Part of the NASA Skylab satellite, which fell onto Western Australia in 1979, sits atop the Esperance museum roof. This particular segment of debris still has the ship's name visible on the side. The satellite, at 68 tonnes, was one of the biggest pieces of space junk to hit Earth.

Location:  // // Science // Health // Mine is Bigger than Yours: Section of the Brain May Hold Key to Disorders
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A variation in a part of the brain may explain why some people have a good memory, and why others are prone to brain disorders. Scientists from Cambridge University say the discovery could advance the understanding of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Location: // // Science // Energy // NASA Awards the Largest Prize in Aviation History to an All-Electric, Super-Efficient Aircraft
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NASA has awarded the single largest prize handed down in aviation history to Team Pipistrel-USA.com for designing and demonstrating its Taurus G4 electric aircraft. Per the rules of the NASA- and Google-sponsored CAFE Green Flight Challenge, Pipistrel's Taurus G4 covered 320 kilometres in less than 2 hours and did so on the electricity equivalent of less than one gallon of fuel per passenger, scoring US$1.35 million for the effort.

Location:  // // Technology // Space // NASA's Laser Communications System Will Enable High-Speed Transmissions From Mars
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NASA is spending roughly US$175 million on three new technology demonstration projects, one of which is aiming to take HD data streaming to Mars. The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) will explore reliable optical communications technologies that could boost data rates between Earth and deep space by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Location: // // Technology // Proton Transistor Could Help Machines and Organisms Communicate
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Human-machine interfaces are constantly improving, but our inability to fully integrate electronics into our bodies stems in part from the very nature of that word - electronics. For the most part, machines relay information using electrons, but living systems use protons and ions. Now a new proton-based transistor built partly from crab shells could open the gates to a new method of communication between machines and biological systems.

Location:  // // Science // Scottish Scientists Are Trying to Create Inorganic Life
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Scientists at Glasgow University are on a mission to create a form of life from inorganic molecules. The team, led by Professor Lee Cronin, has demonstrated a way of creating an inorganic cell, in which internal membranes control the movement of energy and materials, just as in a living cell. These cells can also store electricity and could be used in medicine and chemistry as sensors or to contain chemical reactions.

Location: // // Galleries // Sunny with a chance of space junk // Ship to shore
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A recovery ship tows NASA shuttle Discovery's solid rocket boosters back to shore. The event is met with fanfare - as tugboats shoot water cannons to welcome the arrival. Pieces of NASA's shuttles that separate during takeoff land in a designated 'splash zone' in the Atlantic Ocean.

Location:  // // Science // Astronomy // Simulation Suggests There May Have Been a Fifth Gas Giant in Our Solar System
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A "violent encounter with Jupiter" may have hurled a fifth gas giant out of our solar system billions of years ago. A simulation done by the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado suggests that our solar system may have included another gaseous giant, placed between Saturn and Uranus. The computer models may prove how the planets of our solar system settled in their current position, a long-standing source of mystery to astronomers.

Location: // // Gadgets // Sony's Subtitling Glasses for the Hearing Impaired Show Captions Directly to Your Eyes
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There are a lot of people out there dealing with some degree of hearing disability--one in six, by some estimates--and that audience is typically underserved when it comes to cinematic experience. Some films are screened with subtitles, but often at odd times. But Sony is working up a fix in its UK lab: a pair of glasses that places subtitles right in the user's field of view.

Location:  // // Galleries // Sunny with a chance of space junk
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With the recent crash of NASA's UARS satellite, we thought we'd chronicle the re-entry of space junk over the years. 22,000 pieces of debris are currently being tracked in orbit by NASA, with millions more too small to detect. Hundreds return to Earth, usually undetected, each year. Here are just some of them.

Location: // // Galleries // Archive Gallery: Steve Jobs in the Pages of Popular Science, Over Three Decades // The Dark Ages: February 1994
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Our 10-year retrospective on Macintosh computers was published during Apple's Dark Ages. Despite Jobs' absence during this period, it's clear that Apple's machines came a long way in just a decade. In 1984, there was only one type of Macintosh. By 1994, Apple fans could choose from the Quadra and Performa series, the Powerbook portables, and the compact Macs. Sure, most of these products were commercial failures, but it's interesting to compare Apple's growth between 1984 - 1994 to its growth between 1994 - 2004.

Location:  // // Technology // Robots // The Future of Skin
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Of all our human organs, skin is arguably one of the most abused - yet it's also arguably the most reliable. It protects everything inside us, helping us avoid harm by sensing obstacles in our way, making sure we stay hydrated, and ensuring we keep ourselves at the right temperature. It constantly replenishes itself, sloughing off former layers that we've either burned or dried out or scraped or ignored, while new ones grow in their place.

Location: // // Science // Health // The Incredible Shrinking Shot: Needles Get a Pain-Free Makeover
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The design of the hypodermic needle has changed little since 1853, when French surgeon Charles Gabriel Pravaz first attached a hollow, skinpiercing cylinder to a syringe. today, medical-device designers are using micro-scale materials to make the needles shorter and thinner, which makes for less painful needling.

Location:  // // Galleries // Archive Gallery: Steve Jobs in the Pages of Popular Science, Over Three Decades // The Macintosh: March 1984
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After being removed from the Lisa project, Steve Jobs focused his efforts on the Macintosh, which became the first commercially successful personal computer to use a mouse and GUI.  In 1984, Jobs demonstrated the machine in his first Apple keynote. A commercial directed by Ridley Scott aired during the Super Bowl. Apple bought all 39 advertising pages in Newsweek in November 1984. A year later, Apple gave desktop publishing a push by outfitting Macintoshes with Apple's LaserWriter printer, MacPublisher, and Aldus PageMaker.

Location: // // Galleries // Where Does Our Energy Come From? // The Power of Wind
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These are wind turbines from Cullerin Range Wind Farm. According to Origin Energy they provides 100 per cent renewable and emissions free energy. Sweet! Plus, they don't look too obtrusive amongst the Australian landscape - quite nice among the white clouds. Aesthetically and energetically pleasing. Delightful. 

Location:  // // Galleries // Sunny with a chance of space junk // The sky is falling!
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People gather around a spherical object, which may be a hydrogen containment tank, on a chicken farm in Nacogdoches, Texas, USA in 2003. The object fell from the disintegrating Space Shuttle Columbia.

Location: // // Galleries // Australian Dishes And Telescopes // To The Moon And Back
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Parkes Observatory is quite a historic telescope - it played an important role in the NASA mission which landed the first men on the moon. Completed in 1961, Parkes has the second largest dish in the southern hemisphere and is used primarily for radio tracking of spacecraft. Historically, it's best recognised as one of the three radio telescopes to receive a signal when TV began broadcasting from the cameras of the first moon landing. Such was the receptive quality of Parkes, NASA broadcast the signal they received for the entire moon bulletin.

Location:  // // Technology // Video: The Dead Sea Scrolls are Now Available for Your Online Perusal, Courtesy of Google
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Just as they promised almost a year ago, Google, in partnership with the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, has photographed the Dead Sea Scrolls for the first time since the 1950s, and made them available online for those who can't make the trek to see them in person.

Location: // // Galleries // Australian Dishes And Telescopes // We Get The Message
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The message from outer space, that is. But this isn't communication from an alien source - the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex is a radio receiver for deep space phone calls from fellow humans (as well as robots) we've sent into space. What this means is it helps keeps spacecraft missions communicating with Earth, and allows them to send back important data and information. It's part of the larger Deep Space Network, an international network of dish communicators and receivers spread throughout the world and administrated by NASA.

Location:  // // Home // Where To Buy
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