Humans and insects have been fighting over whose turn it is to eat the plants (and, in the case of mosquitoes, over whose blood is it, anyway?) for a very long time–but recent research may be about to give us two-legs a leg up over the six-legs. More than 3,000 years ago, the Chinese used …
In the first ever human-versus-machine arm-wrestling competition, a 17-year-old girl beat three robotic wrestling arms in a matter of seconds. Artificial muscles still can’t measure up to the real thing, it appears.
Craig Benter is siphoning off some New York City air every day and amplifying the DNA of the fungi, bacteria and viruses it contains, in an effort to find out just what is in the air of a major city–a project that could aid efforts against bioterrorism, and will almost certainly turn up some fascinating …
A former U.S. Navy Captain, Joseph A. D’Emidio, has invented a unique pour-through water filter called Disket that can treat microbial contaminated surface water for a family of five for around $6 U.S. per year–something that has the potential to save millions of lives.
Here’s an interesting article from Architecture Week about the world’s tallest building (for the moment), the new Taipei 101 Tower. It’s built just a couple of hundred metres from a fault line, so the engineering challenge was, well, immense.
I was just thinking I hadn’t heard anything about the new installment of Doctor Who recently, when lo and behold, here’s a story. Most exciting news? CBC will carry the new series, beginning in April!
And while we’re on the subject of weird-looking robots, check out what NASA’s been up to.
Robit scale models of Dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus rex and Parasaurolophys will stroll the grounds of the upcoming World Expo in Japan.
As a long-time Car and Driver addict (though I went cold turkey a few years ago and have recovered nicely since), I found this list of what magazine road-test evaluation terms really mean amusing.
Ever watch a movie and wonder how on Earth it ever got made? Be thankful it’s no worse. After all, they could have made some of these.
I just got my copies of my latest non-fiction children’s book, The Basics of Quantum Physics: Understanding the Photoelectric Effect and Line Spectra, from Rosen Publishing. On the extremely unlikely chance that someone reading this blog has been looking for a book just like this one–a 48-page intro to the very very basics of quantum …
Israeli soldiers are experimenting with wrist-mounted video screens that can instantly feed them images from unmanned aerial drones. “We are fulfilling the science fiction movies that we see,” said Itzhak Beni, chief executive of the Elisra Group’s Tadiran Electronic Systems and Tadiran Spectralink companies.
