A Russian engineer Victor Veselago had theorised a lens made out of material with a negative refractive index. In 1999, John Pendry checked whether such a lens could be perfect, expecting the usual answer – that it wasn’t perfect. Pendry didn’t get it; the theory said it was perfect. He was astonished and so was …
The new system, known as CRISPR, allows researchers to permanently and selectively delete genes from a cell’s DNA. In two new papers, the researchers showed that they could study all the genes in the genome by deleting a different gene in each of a huge population of cells, then observing which cells proliferated under different …
Saturn’s largest moon Titan is an eerie world about the size of Mercury. It is the only moon in the solar system with a thick, hazy atmosphere and the only place aside from Earth that has large bodies of liquid on its surface. But there’s also one very big difference: on frigid Titan, the lakes …
US crude oil production is at a level last reached in 1988. The US had end of year crude oil production of 2011 5.851 million barrels per day 2012 6.985 million barrels per day 2013 8.111 million barrels per day The latest weekly oil report is Crude oil and natural gas liquids is 10.8 million …
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed water vapor above the frigid south polar region of Jupiter’s moon Europa, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon’s surface. Previous scientific findings from other sources already point to the existence of an ocean located under Europa’s icy crust. Researchers are not yet fully …
A new system, dubbed “WiTrack”, uses radio signals to track a person through walls and obstructions, pinpointing her 3-D location to within 10 to 20 centimeters — about the width of an adult hand. “Today, if you are playing a game with the Xbox Kinect or Nintendo Wii, you have to stand right in front …
Water covers 71 percent of Earth’s surface — and industrial-scale desalination has operated successfully around the world for many years. Desalination costs are still high, and not everyone lives near a seacoast — so getting the water where it’s needed, when it’s needed, can be prohibitively expensive. Policymakers, farmers, business leaders, and ordinary people around …
Vanadium dioxide is poised to join the pantheon of superstars in the materials world. Already prized for its extraordinary ability to change size, shape and physical identity, vanadium dioxide can now add muscle power to its attributes. A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has …
Researchers here have moved on past myostatin and further down the chain of signals and molecular mechanisms to find a novel place to intervene in order to boost muscle growth in mice and humans. So far results are promising: if this treatment turns out to produce few to no side-effects, it is the sort of …
Multiple airships can be used to transport larger objects as shown here Igor Pasternak wants to be the first to harness helium for multi-ton deliveries. He envisions thousands of 500-foot-long zeppelins capable of traversing the U.S. at speeds of more than 100 miles per hour, ferrying mining equipment to roadless stretches of Alaska and bringing …
The DARPA robotics challenge finals had the following top five finishers 1. SCHAFT from Japan, owned by Google. 2. Atlas-Ian from Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition it developed software for Boston Dynamics’ ATLAS robot. 3. CMU’s Tartan Rescue 4. A team from MIT 5. NASA JPL’s RoboSimian KurzweilAI reports the Finals will occur …