Category: Uncategorized

Robots that can learn by observation and presage seamless human-machine partnerships everywhere, from factory floors to space stations.

Surging prices at gas pumps, hitting just as the travel season kicks off, is a trigger that will set off economic and equity market ripple effects that will crunch consumer spending, push inflation higher and pressure the Fed to aggressively raise interest rates. Over the past two weeks, the average price per gallon of gas...

With Israel’s five-year drought not abating, the government has said it will add two more desalination plants to the current brace of five along the Mediterranean and build out its water pipeline distribution network. The new plants may be used in part to pump up the rapidly disappearing Sea of Galilee, which is Israel’s main...

  Plastic is indispensable. It’s also expensive and complicated, both to make and to recycle. So, chemists at the University of Colorado have come up with a plastic that mimics all the features we love – durability, strength, and light weight – while solving the “trash factor” that have made waste plastics a scourge of...

The telomerase enzyme has been touted as the body’s anti-aging warrior. It repairs the ends of chromosomes, called “telomeres”, after DNA replication. Telomeres shorten as we age, making them both a cause and a benchmark of aging. Because telomerase thwarts, or at least slows that process, it’s been likened to the plastic tips on shoelaces...

More than 200 scientists working in the worldwide Psychiatric Genomics Consortium have identified a combination of 44 genetic variations that seem to underlie major clinical depression, a malady affecting an estimated 350 million people worldwide. The researchers compared genomes of 135,000 people suffering from the illness, with 344,000 people not having the condition. Of the...

A transformative technological wave is about to hit your home, your business and our everyday life. In 1950, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury penned the prescient short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, about a house whose autonomous appliances go on working long after the human homeowners are obliterated in a nuclear war. Right now,...

As more hybrids and electric cars take to the roads, we’ll need fewer gas stations. But what will become of all those little empty buildings that dot our streets? Reebok, the sport shoe maker and Boston design firm Gensler want to reclaim these abandoned sites as “fitness hubs” where you can take a spin class,...

With honeybees dying and immigrants being turned back at the border, who’s going to pollinate and pick our peppers and tote our tomatoes? No sweat. A research team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel is working on a fleet of robots that won’t need green cards and can’t complain about low-wage farm labor....