Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE

Scientists have been building synthetic life forms for more than a decade. Now, for the first time, a team from the J. Craig Venter Institute, the National Institute of Standards, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has made one that can reproduce itself. Venter Institute researchers built the first synthetic organism in 2010. In 2016,...

Those 1.3 billion tons of food scraps and waste headed for the garbage each year aren’t trash. They might be tomorrow’s houses and office blocks. Engineers at the University of Tokyo have vacuum-dried banana peels, cabbage leaves, orange peels, onions, pumpkins, seaweed, and other foods, then pulverized them using a technique that turns wood into...

Trains are a common mode of passenger, as well as freight, transport in Europe, where about half of working locomotives still belch smog from diesel fuels.  With Europe largely committed to reaching the emissions-reduction goals of the Paris Climate Accord, the French train-maker Alstom is helping the continent ride there aboard its new fleet of...

In India, solar panels aren’t just making energy. They’re also parasols that are saving water. Throughout much of India, summer temperatures linger in the high 80s or into the 90s. The heat evaporates water from the 80,000 kilometers – about 48,000 miles – of irrigation canals in the province of Gujarat, where crops feeding millions...

At the University of California at Los Angeles, researchers have combined forskolin, a compound extracted from the root of the Indian Coleus plant, and RepSox, a drug-like molecule made in the human body, in a blend that can spark the growth of new muscle tissue. The cocktail ignites the massive, rapid growth of muscle stem...

Hidden in the piles of slag, ash, and debris left behind when coal is mined and burned are rare earth minerals necessary for building electronic necessities from chips for smartphones to motors for electric cars. Now the U.S. energy department is investing $19 million to test new processes through which cobalt, dysprosium, neodymium, and other...

In a first, scientists have shown that a blind person’s vision can be improved through the application of genetic therapy. A 58-year-old man lost his sight 40 years ago to retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited condition that breaks down the retina, the cells lining the eyeball that respond to light, but leaves the eye’s connection to...

Snap Inc., parent company of social media app Snapchat, has beaten rivals Apple and Facebook to introduce the newest generation of augmented reality glasses. The smart glasses, dubbed Spectacles, look like a slightly boxy pair of sunglasses instead of the giant, face-eating goggles used by some previous “mixed reality” technologies.  The lenses are actually transparent...

Concrete is one of the world’s workhorse building materials and also among the most energy-intensive to create. Now researchers at Sweden’s Chalmers Institute of Technology have found a way that concrete can give back some of that fuel. Into a slab of standard concrete, the scientists mixed short carbon fibers that can conduct electricity. The...