Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE

Bricks – the red rectangles that buildings were made from a hundred years ago – could someday be the battery that powers your house. At Washington University, researchers were looking for energy storage materials that could replace lithium, which is temperamental and can be expensive. The group was testing rust, which gives bricks their signature...

Brain cells, or neurons, communicate by exchanging biochemicals and electrical signals across a synapse – a tiny gap between neurons. Now Stanford University scientists have built their own synapses that can communicate with living neurons, using the same molecules as the human brain. The manmade version uses two soft polymer electrodes separated by a trough...

by Bennett Daviss The rubber is hitting the road. Engineers at Australia’s RMIT University have developed a paving material made from ground-up tires and crumbled building materials. The project stems from concerns about the billions of old tires trashed annually and the mountains of useless rubble left over from constructing and demolishing buildings. Building waste...

by Bennett Daviss Scientists have known for a decade that if a mouse’s heart is damaged during the first seven days after its born, the heart will regenerate new tissue to replace the damaged portion. Now researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center think they’ve found a way to help people regenerate heart...

by Bennett Daviss If you’re a skilled and careful driver, your electric vehicle’s battery bank might go 300,000 or even 400,000 miles before you need to part with $5,000 or more to replace it. But now car companies and battery makers are about to keep that money in your bank account for another 600,000 miles...

Life is a byproduct of proteins interacting. Now scientists have figured out how to add brand new proteins into those processes. Biologists at the University of Chicago showed an artificial intelligence system the genomes of thousands of organisms, from yeast to humans. From those, the AI program deduced the rules by which proteins are assembled...

Powerco, New Zealand’s second-largest electric utility, has teamed with start-up Emrod to test a commercial power system that scientists have fantasized about for a century: transmitting electric power wirelessly, safely, and without major losses en route. A prototype, able to transmit only a few kilowatts, will be built by October. The companies then will spend...

Amazon has filed a patent on a blockchain-based technology that would allow it collect vast amounts of data not only about its sellers, but also about the sellers’ supply chain, down to where raw materials are sourced. Amazon says it would then use this data to create a virtual inspection system, allowing the retail giant...

Computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Intel, and MIT have created software that could ultimately enable computers to write their own programs. Initially, though, its purpose is to save human computer programmers frustrating hours, or sometimes days, of work finding and fixing bugs among thousands or millions of lines of code in software...

Literally working night and day, a robot at the University of Liverpool performed 688 experiments over eight days to find the best way to extract hydrogen gas from water. Hydrogen gas is a potential vehicle fuel and has hundreds of industrial applications. Rather than designing a specialized robot, a pair of human chemists at the...