Japan’s legendary vending machines dispense everything from batteries and hot ramen to alcohol, cigarettes, porn, and panties purportedly worn by school girls. But these instant gratification sin machines aren’t selling their wares ad libitum—well, at least not all of them.
Millions of cell phone users have adopted text messaging as a regular form of communication, to the point where the informal lexicon of “text speak” is infiltrating the school system. But all those “LOL”s and “C U l8er”s may be costing consumers a hefty price. Dr. Nigel Bannister, a space expert at the University of Leicester, compared the cost of sending a text message with the cost of obtaining a megabyte (MB) of data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Sure enough, the text messages were far more expensive.
And here your parents thought all those Mortal Kombat skills would never amount to anything useful: A research team at the University of Washington has created a video game called Foldit, which challenges dexterous gamers to fold protein strands according to the actual laws of physics—thereby helping to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins that could mean cures for diseases from Alzheimer’s to HIV.
In the midst of controversy proclaiming WiFi as the harbinger of brain tumors, it’s nice to hear that wireless might actually be doing us some good. The same technology that lets you jabber into your Bluetooth earpiece can also let your doctor know you’re having a heart attack.
Every year, 935 million packs of gum are chewed by 28 million Britons, leaving millions of sticky, inconvenient lumps in their wake. The globs can only be removed with high pressure steam hoses, expensive freezing machines, or corrosive, environmentally unfriendly chemicals, costing taxpayers £150 ($300) million per year. The desperate state of affairs has attracted millions of dollars of research into non-stick chewing gum, but the country wants a quicker solution.
Robots may not only be cleaning your house and providing you with love and companionship in the coming years—they may also be performing your surgery. A team of engineers at Duke University have completed a set of feasibility tests that they call the “first concrete steps” toward making robot surgery a fully, er, operational process.
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No, it’s not the second coming of the Flying Spaghetti Monster—but it’s just as awesome. AirJelly, a remote-controlled helium balloon, was built by engineers at the Swiss Materials Science & Technology Development (EMPA) in Dübendorf, who were inspired by the jellyfish’s endurance through evolutionary time.
Researchers at the department of Applied Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem can smell a lie from a mile away. Or, at least, they can detect changes in levels of perspiration from about 10 inches away, using millions of tiny antennae that cover our bodies—sweat glands.
Sweat glands, it turns out, are shaped like tiny coils. Physicist Yuri Feldman had been spending a bit too much time in the applied physics lab, and when he saw the shape he thought of helical antennae in wireless communication systems. This gave them an interesting idea: The ducts might be able to send out an electromagnetic signal, enabling remote sweat detection.
There are some things that most people think should never be made out of wood—things that produce extreme heat through a combustion process, say, or things that could collide with an oncoming semi at 190 mph while carrying human cargo. But you never know unless you try—so a group of industrial design grad students at North Carolina State are taking on the absurdly ambitious, and very cool, task of building a high-powered, high-speed automobile out of wood, held together mostly by glue.
The specs are impressive—over 600 hp, top speed of 190 mph, zero to 60 in just over three seconds, 2,500 pounds, and 20 mpg—but it’s all pretty hypothetical at the moment (as are, I assume, the Lambo-style doors). But the aptly named “Splinter” isn’t just a bunch of two-by-fours nailed together. The students are using the project to explore the potential of wood as a building material, so pretty much every part contains wood composites, like plywood. The car also contains a fair amount of glass and metal—including the shocks and a Cadillac Northstar sourced V-8 combustion engine.
