Usain Bolt recently made history again when he dominated both the 100m and 200m sprints in spectacular style at the Olympic Games, reconfirming his status as the fastest man alive. Fastest man. Boston Dynamic’s Cheetah just crushed Bolt’s all-time top speed of 44,72 kph and in doing so marked the commencement of the slow, but inevitable, robopocalypse.
Unless you’re currently in some kind of deep space training program, or you have some diabolical plan that no one knows about, the chances are pretty slim that you’ll ever actually get to set foot on Mars. Thankfully, we’ve got the next best thing for you, a fully interactive 360° panorama from the surface of the Red Planet. Enjoy.
This is just plain unbelievable. A group of researchers at Harvard, in a study towards building the first artificial human heart, have created their own creature. Similar to a jellyfish, they’ve created a Medusoid – a hybrid “pseudo-organism” made from the cells of a rat’s heart and a special polymer film.
For most 15-year olds, the last thing they want to do after school is head to a lab and work on their biology. Jack Andraka however, is not most 15-year olds and after school he heads over to Johns Hopkins University where he’s working on a test for cancer that is leaps and bounds ahead of what’s ahead now.
A mourning ritual that is rarely seen, and even more rarely captured on camera, will raise further questions about whether dolphins understand the concept of death.
After months and months of image collection, NASA has released what is the best image of Mars yet. If you can’t get there this week, this is the next best thing. Described by Nasa as the ‘Greeley Panorama’ from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, the first image documents the fifth Martian Winter of the mission.
This ‘God Particle’ vibe doesn’t seem to be going away. That’s why we scoured the net to find the shortest, clearest, simplest educational video to bring you up to speed, so you can wow your friends. Check it out.
A Japanese parliamentary panel has said in a report that the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant was “a profoundly man-made disaster”, and that the disaster “could and should have been foreseen and prevented”. The report also blamed cultural conventions and a reluctance to question authority.
The seaside town of Pringle Bay in the Western Cape is outraged at a National Geographic documentary that used food to lure baboons to a specially modified and fully furnished cottage in the area. The cottage is part of the Cape Hangklip Hotel, and the television series, Big Baboon House, raises ethical questions.
More worrying news from the climate change front. Scientists have said that even if deep emissions cuts lower global average temperatures, sea levels will continue to rise over the next couple of hundred years.
In more news to terrify you, the US Army has released photographs depicting their new laser-guided lightning gun blowing up a car. They’re calling it the Laser-Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC) because it’s important to make the ability to call down lightning with a laser pointer sound safe.
Liu Yang, China’s first-ever female astronaut, had a night shift on Shenzhou 9 a couple of days ago – which is apparently sort of dull in space too, because she entertained herself by going through some Tai Chi exercises. In space. And since the spacecraft returned to earth today, we get to see what that looks like.
So hey, we’ve had a pretty cool look at the future thanks to Google’s I/O Keynote yesterday – where they covered the new Nexus 7 tablet, the Nexus Q media orb, and the awesome, skydiving-filled Project Glass demonstration that you’re really, really going to want to watch, after the jump.
In my opinion this is a far more exciting countdown than the Olympics; in 40 days, NASA’s nuclear powered Curiosity rover will enter the Martian atmosphere, and the landing is the most nerve-racking part for the engineers.
The Department of Environmental Affairs (read: the South African government) has welcomed (obviously?) the Council of the Global Environment Facility’s approval of R25 million worth of funding aimed at strengthening the current wildlife forensic capabilities in South Africa. The donation will help combat wildlife crimes like rhino poaching.
I don’t really care how fast it is, I just want to own something that uses an infinite-capacity wireless vortex beam. Though it sounds like a death-ray, it describes what American and Israeli researchers have used to create the fastest ever wireless network: twisted beams of light that transfer data at 2,56 terabits per second.
The internet is obsessed with cats. Completely and utterly obsessed. In Google’s secretive X labratory, scientists have developed one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors. What did it do? Watched Youtube, and worked out what a cat is.
The European Commission is drawing pretty widespread condemnation for releasing a video — ostensibly aimed at getting girls into science — which pretty much depicts female scientists as sexy models in short skirts who hang around bunsen burners, giggling. Take a look at what lady scientists apparently look like in Europe after the jump.
Chad’s father passed away last year. He had suffered from Alzheimer’s, and his deterioration into dementia was quick and incredibly painful. Chad’s father spent the last six weeks of his life in hospital, and Chad spent every one of those days at his side. In the end, he suffered more than any person deserved. Chad’s […]
In recent years we have seen reality television sink from the lows of Big Brother down through teen pregnancy, to the dregs of Jersey Shore. Earth, it would seem has little left to offer in terms of reality TV. Enter Dutch team, Mars One, who are looking to raise an initial $6 billion to send a team to mars by 2023, and make a reality show out of it.
By definition, lucid dreaming refers to any occasion when a sleeping person is aware that they are dreaming. But, it’s also used to describe the idea of being able to control those dreams. Think: Inception. Today, lucid dreaming has evolved into an industry worthy of a discussion.
Vodacom announced a short while ago that their Century City office would from August boast the largest array of solar panels on a single building in Africa. Nearly 2 000 mono crystalline solar panels will cover the 3 600m² roof of the building, it said.
It’s taken months of research and some of America’s brightest minds to figure it out, but now it seems the end of tomato sauce frustration is nigh. A new bottle coating developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) doctoral candidate Dave Smith, together with a team of mechanical engineers and nanotechnology researchers, has ketchup flowing like milk.
This will surprise you. On Friday and Saturday, German solar power plants produced a record 22 gigawatts of energy – the equivalent output of 20 nuclear plants running at full capacity. The country is already a world-leader in solar power, and hopes to be free of nuclear energy by 2022. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, Germany decided to abandon nuclear power, and immediately closed eight plants.
Fat people take up a lot of space on the plane. I mean, how many times have you had to fold your arms so they can merely fit into their space, and yours. For a long time, we’ve all wanted them to have their own fat seats when they fly. Finally! This is a reality. Thank you, Airbus.
Science! Technology! In a worldwide medical first, researchers have successfully implanted a computer-mind interface into the motor cortex of a 58-year-old, quadriplegic woman which allowed her to control a robotic limb using only the power of her mind. The future is now.
NASA will start training a team astronauts to land on an asteroid in the next month, in preparation for a mission that will take humans farther from Earth than ever before. They’ll be collecting mineral samples and determining how to destroy an asteroid in the event that it might collide with the Earth. Seriously.
Hey there, science fiction. Defence contractor, Pegasus Global Holdings is building a replica of Rock Hill, a South Carolina city, in the middle of the New Mexico desert as a testing ground for futuristic infrastructures – self-driving cars, green buildings and next-generation Wi-Fi. It’ll be an uninhabited laboratory – they’re calling it “an amusement park for scientists.”
People over at MIT have developed a piece of open-source software that lets you drag files from your phone to your computer or tablet or whatever with a swipe of a finger. It’s simple and clever and looks like the future – and it works. They’re calling it Swÿp. Take a look at the demo after the jump.
Late yesterday afternoon, you may have been alerted to the fact that we had found out that Salome the cheetah from the Hoedpsruit Endangered Species Centre was due to give birth to her first litter of cubs at some point during the following 24 hours. Her first cub was born at approximately 19h20 last night. Click through for more.