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Submission + - New class of "hypervelocity stars" discovered escaping the galaxy (vanderbilt.edu)

Submitted by Science_afficionado
Science_afficionado writes: Astronomers have discovered a surprising new class of “hypervelocity stars” that are moving at more than a million miles per hour, fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. The 20 hyper stars are about the same size as the sun and, other than their extreme speed, have the same composition as the stars in the galactic disk. The big surprise is that they don't seem to come from the galaxy's center. The generally accepted mechanism for producing hypervelocity stars relies on the extreme gravitational field of the supermassive black hole that resides in the galaxy's core. So the discovery means that astrophysicists must come up with an entirely new method for speeding stars to hypervelocities.

Submission + - Super-Flexible Circuits Could Boost Smartphones, Bionic Limbs (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: The microelectronic sensors and mechanical systems built into smartphone cameras and other tiny electronic devices may soon evolve into microscopic, custom-printed versions designed as bionic body parts rather than smartphone components. Engineering researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a micro-printing process that can build microscopic microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) onto a flexible, non-toxic organic polymer designed for implantation in the human body. Current-generation MEMS are typically found in the accelerometers in smartphones, or the tiny actuator motors that focus cell-phone camera lenses. Most are made from substrates based on silicon, and built using techniques common to semiconductor fabrication. The new process, as described in the journal Microelectronic Engineering , relies on an organic polymer that is hundreds of times more flexible than conventional materials used for similar purposes. That flexibility not only makes the units easier to fit into the oddly shaped parts of a human body, it allows them to be made more sensitive to motion and energy-efficient. That alone would give a boost to the miniaturization of electronics, but the stretch and flex of the new materials could also serve as more comfortable and efficient replacements for current prosthetics that sense stimuli from an amputee’s nervous system to power a prosthetic arm, for example, or operate a synthetic bladder.

Comment Re:we're back to traffic jams (Score 2) 91

by KieranC (#44442009) Attached to: Full-Size Remote Control Cars
If a truck is moving at 100km/hour, that equates to 27.8 m/second. So a half second latency will mean about 13m error. I hope the big, safe, remote controlled truck wasn't coming into a turn then. If may cause it to cross the lane divider and squish someone. This is a much worse scenario than merely stopping and blocking traffic.

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