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ByronScott writes:
Doctors at a British hospital have just carried out the world’s first surgery using a remote controlled robot! The procedure fixed a patient’s irregular heart rhythm, and although the doctor was in the same hospital as the patient — just through the wall in another room — developers of the RC surgery technology believe this is the first step towards long-distance operations. Imagine a doctor in London performing surgery on your heart in New York!
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ByronScott writes:
A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. The team engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus to assemble the components needed to crack apart a molecule of water, yielding a fourfold boost in efficiency over similar processes.
11256018
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ByronScott writes:
Could the next solar panels be in the shapes of origami cranes? They could be if MIT power engineering professor Jeffrey Grossman has his say. Standard flat solar panels are only optimized to capture sunlight at one point of the sun’s trajectory — otherwise they need automated tracking systems to follow the sun. But Grossman found that folded solar cell systems could produce constant power throughout the day sans tracking and his new designs are up to two and a half times more efficient per comparative length and width than traditional flat arrays.
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ByronScott writes:
What if you could light your entire building using no electricity, or artificial lights – but just the natural light from our favorite star, the Sun? Enter the http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/04/02/sundolier-robot-pumps-sunlight-indoors-for-powerful-daylighting/">Sundolier, a powerful sunlight transport system that’s like putting a solar robot on your roof to pump sunlight indoors! The manufacturer claims a single Sundolier unit can provide enough light to illuminate a 1000-2500 sq. ft. area without any other sources.
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ByronScott writes:
Early this morning NASA kicked off Operation LENS, an ambitious plan to concentrate and collect solar power using a giant magnifying glass in outer space. Long speculated to be a rumor, the 7,000,000 ft. wide lens was fabricated over the course of the past 3 years and launched from Cape Canaveral much to the dismay of almost every scientist in the world. While the first phase went exactly as planned, the plan hit a major snag when the magnifying glass began to work a bit too well and ended up scorching large regions in the western hemisphere.
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ByronScott writes:
In today’s “gross news” category, some female insects just might be getting lucky. As an alternative to toxic pesticides, scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have created “super-sexed” sterilized male leafhoppers to knock bug boots with females in the wild, resulting in decreased populations. Yes, that means that the female bugs will miss out on the joys of motherhood, but the idea that the insects will be having some fun instead of being gassed to death by poisons is pretty cool.
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ByronScott writes:
Want eyesight that could put your neighborhood cyborg to shame? Well, University of Washington professor Babak Amir Parviz and his students are working on solar powered contact lenses embedded with hundreds of semitransparent LEDs, letting wearers experience augmented reality right through their eyes. If their research proves successful, the applications — from health monitoring to gameplay to just plain bionic sight -could be endless.
